Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[The Czar disavows the movement.]

But the incapacity of the leader became evident from the moment when he
began his enterprise. He loitered for a week at Jassy, holding court and
conferring titles, and then, setting out for Bucharest, wasted three weeks
more upon the road. In the meantime the news of the insurrection, and of
the fraudulent use that had been made of his own name, reached the Czar,
who was now engaged at the Congress of Laibach. Alexander was at this
moment abandoning himself heart and soul to Metternich's reactionary
influence, and ordering his generals to make ready a hundred thousand men
to put down the revolution in Piedmont. He received with dismay a letter
from Hypsilanti invoking his aid in a rising which was first described in
the phrases of the Holy Alliance as the result of a divine inspiration, and
then exhibited as a master-work of secret societies and widespread
conspiracy. A stern answer was sent back. Hypsilanti was dismissed from the
Russian service; he was ordered to lay down his arms, and a manifesto was
published by the Russian Consul at Jassy declaring that the Czar repudiated
and condemned the enterprise with which his name had been connected. The
Patriarch of Constantinople, helpless in the presence of Sultan Mahmud, now
issued a ban of excommunication against the leader and all his followers.
Some weeks later the Congress of Laibach officially branded the Greek
revolt as a work of the same anarchical spirit which had produced the
revolutions of Italy and Spain. [363]

[The enterprise fails.]

The disavowal of the Hetaerist enterprise by the Czar was fatal to its
success. Hypsilanti, indeed, put on a bold countenance and pretended that
the public utterances of the Russian Court were a mere blind, and in
contradiction to the private instructions given him by the Czar; but no one
believed him. The Roumanians, when they knew that aid was not coming from
Russia, held aloof, or treated insurgents as enemies. Turkish troops
crossed the Danube, and Hypsilanti fell back from Bucharest towards the
Austrian frontier. Wladimiresco followed him, not however to assist him in
his struggle, but to cut off his retreat and to betray him to the enemy. It
was in vain that the bravest of Hypsilanti's followers, Georgakis, a Greek
from Olympus, sought the Wallachian at his own headquarters, exposed his
treason to the Hetaerist officers who surrounded him, and carried him, a
doomed man, to the Greek camp. Wladimiresco's death was soon avenged. The
Turks advanced. Hypsilanti was defeated in a series of encounters, and fled
ignobly from his followers, to seek a refuge, and to find a prison, in
Austria. Bands of his soldiers, forsaken by their leader, sold their lives
dearly in a hopeless struggle. At Skuleni, on the Pruth, a troop of four
hundred men refused to cross to Russian soil until they had given battle to
the enemy. Standing at bay, they met the onslaught of ten times their
number of pursuers. Georgakis, who had sworn that he would never fall alive
into the enemy's hands, kept his word. Surrounded by Turkish troops in the
tower of a monastery, he threw open the doors for those of his comrades who
could to escape, and then setting fire to a chest of powder, perished in
the explosion, together with his assailants.

[Revolt of Morea, April 2, 1891.]

The Hetaerist invasion of the Principalities had ended in total failure, and
with it there passed away for ever the dream of re-establishing the Eastern
Empire under Greek ascendancy. But while this enterprise, planned in vain
reliance upon foreign aid and in blind assumption of leadership over an
alien race, collapsed through the indifference of a people to whom the
Greeks were known only as oppressors, that genuine uprising of the Greek
nation, which, in spite of the nullity of its leaders, in spite of the
crimes, the disunion, the perversity of a race awaking from centuries of
servitude, was to add one more to the free peoples of Europe, broke out in
the real home of the Hellenes, in the Morea and the islands of the AEgaean.
Soon after Hypsilanti's appearance in Moldavia the Turkish governor of the
Morea, anticipating a general rebellion of the Greeks, had summoned the
Primates of his province to Tripolitza, with the view of seizing them as
hostages. The Primates of the northern district set out, but halted on
their way, debating whether they should raise the standard of insurrection
or wait for events. While they lingered irresolutely at Kalavryta the
decision passed out of their hands, and the people rose throughout the
Morea. The revolt of the Moreot Greeks against their oppressors was from
the first, and with set purpose, a war of extermination. "The Turk," they
sang in their war-songs, "shall live no longer, neither in Morea nor in the
whole earth." This terrible resolution was, during the first weeks of the
revolt, carried into literal effect. The Turks who did not fly from their
country-houses to the towns where there were garrisons or citadels to
defend them, were attacked and murdered with their entire families, men,
women and children. This was the first act of the revolution; and within a
few weeks after the 2nd of April, on which the first outbreaks occurred,
the open country was swept clear of its Ottoman population, which had
numbered about 25,000, and the residue of the lately dominant race was
collected within the walls of Patras, Tripolitza, and other towns, which
the Greeks forthwith began to beleaguer. [364]

[Terrorism at Constantinople.]

[Execution of the Patriarch, April 22.]

The news of the revolt of the Morea and of the massacre of Mohammedans
reached Constantinople, striking terror into the politicians of the Turkish
capital, and rousing the Sultan Mahmud to a vengeance tiger-like in its
ferocity, but deliberate and calculated like every bloody deed of this
resolute and able sovereign. Reprisals had already been made upon the
Greeks at Constantinople for the acts of Hypsilanti, and a number of
innocent persons had been put to death by the executioner, but no general
attack upon the Christians had been suggested, nor had the work of
punishment passed out of the hands of the government itself. Now, however,
the fury of the Mohammedan populace was let loose upon the infidel. The
Sultan called upon his subjects to arm themselves in defence of their
faith. Executions were redoubled; soldiers and mobs devastated Greek
settlements on the Bosphorus; and on the most sacred day of the Greek
Church a blow was struck which sent a thrill over Eastern Europe. The
Patriarch of Constantinople had celebrated the service which ushers in the
dawn of Easter Sunday, when he was summoned by the Dragoman of the Porte to
appear before a Synod hastily assembled. There an order of the Sultan was
read declaring Gregorius IV. a traitor, and degrading him from his office.
The Synod was commanded to elect his successor. It did so. While the new
Archbishop was receiving his investiture, Gregorius was led out, and was
hanged, still wearing his sacred robes, at the gate of his palace. His body
remained during Easter Sunday and the two following days at the place of
execution. It was then given to the Jews to be insulted, dragged through
the streets, and cast into the sea. The Archbishops of Adrianople,
Salonica, and Tirnovo suffered death on the same Easter Sunday. The body of
Gregorius, floating in the waves, was picked up by a Greek ship and carried
to Odessa. Brought, as it was believed, by a miracle to Christian soil, the
relics of the Patriarch received at the hands of the Russian government the
funeral honours of a martyr. Gregorius had no doubt had dealings with the
Hetaerists; but he was put to death untried; and whatever may have been the
real extent of his offence, he was executed not for this but in order to
strike terror into the Sultan's Christian subjects.

[Massacre of Christians, April-October.]

[Effect on Russia.]

[Russian ambassador leaves Constantinople, July 27.]

During the succeeding months, in Asia Minor as well as in Macedonia and at
Constantinople itself, there were wholesale massacres of the Christians,
and the churches of the Greeks were pillaged or destroyed by their enemies,
both Jews and Turks. Smyrna, Adrianople, and Salonica, in so far as these
towns were Greek, were put to the sack; thousands of the inhabitants were
slain by the armed mobs who held command, or were sold into slavery. It was
only the fear of a war with Russia which at length forced Sultan Mahmud to
stop these deeds of outrage and to restore some of the conditions of
civilised life in the part of his dominions which was not in revolt. The
Russian army and nation would have avenged the execution of the Patriarch
by immediate war if popular instincts had governed its ruler. Strogonoff,
the ambassador at Constantinople, at once proposed to the envoys of the
other Powers to unite in calling up war-ships for the protection of the
Christians. Joint action was, however, declined by Lord Strangford, the
representative of England, and the Porte was encouraged by the attitude of
this politician to treat the threats of Strogonoff with indifference. There
was an interval during which the destiny of a great part of Eastern Europe
depended upon the fluctuations of a single infirm will. The Czar had
thoroughly identified himself while at Laibach with the principles and the
policy of European conservatism, and had assented to the declaration in
which Metternich placed the Greek rebellion, together with the Spanish and
Italian insurrections, under the ban of Europe. Returning to St.
Petersburg, Alexander, in spite of the veil that intercepts from every
sovereign the real thoughts and utterances of his people, found himself
within the range of widely different influences. Russian passions were not
roused by what might pass in Italy or Spain. The Russian priest, the
soldier, the peasant understood nothing of theories of federal
intervention, and of the connection between Neapolitan despotism and the
treaties of 1815: but his blood boiled when he heard that the chief priest
of his Church had been murdered by the Sultan, and that a handful of his
brethren were fighting for their faith unhelped. Alexander felt to some
extent the throb of national spirit. There had been a time in his life when
a single hour of strong emotion or of overpowering persuasion had made him
renounce every obligation and unite with Napoleon against his own allies;
and there were those who in 1821 believed that the Czar would as suddenly
break loose from his engagements with Metternich and throw himself, with a
fanatical army and nation, into a crusade against the Turk. Sultan Mahmud
had himself given to the Russian party of action a ground for denouncing
him in the name of Russian honour and interests independently of all that
related to Greece. In order to prevent the escape of suspected persons, the
Porte had ordered Russian vessels to be searched at Constantinople, and it
had forced all corn-ships coming from the Euxine to discharge their cargoes
at the Bosphorus, under the apprehension that the corn-supplies of the
capital would be cut off by Greek vessels in command of the AEgaean.
Further, Russia had by treaty the right to insist that the Danubian
Principalities should be governed by their civil authorities, the
Hospodars, and not by Turkish Pashas, insurrection in Wallachia had been
put down, but the rule of Hospodars had not been restored; Turkish
generals, at the head of their forces, still administered their provinces
under military law. On all these points Russia had at least the semblance
of grievances of its own. The outrages which shocked all Europe were not
the only wrong which Russian pride called upon the Czar to redress. The
influence of Capodistrias revived at St. Petersburg. A despatch was sent to
Constantinople declaring that the Porte had begun a war for life or death
with the Christian religion, and that its continued existence among the
Powers of Europe must depend upon its undertaking to restore the churches
which had been destroyed, to guarantee the inviolability of Christian
worship in the future, and to discriminate in its punishments between the
innocent and the guilty. Presenting ultimatum from his master, Strogonoff,
in accordance with his instructions, demanded a written answer within eight
days. No such answer came. On the 27th of July the ambassador quitted
Constantinople. War seemed to be on the point of breaking out.

[Eastern policy of Austria.]

The capital where these events were watched with the greatest apprehension
was Vienna. The fortunes of the Ottoman Empire have always been most
intimately connected with those of Austria; and although the long struggle
of the House of Hapsburg with Napoleon and its wars in recent times with
Prussia and with Italy have made the western aspect of Austrian policy more
prominent and more familiar than its eastern one, the eastern interests of
the monarchy have always been at least as important in the eyes of its
actual rulers. Before the year 1720 Austria, not Russia, was the great
enemy of Turkey and the aggressive Power of the east of Europe. After 1780
the Emperor Joseph had united with Catherine of Russia in a plan for
dividing the Sultan's dominions in Europe, and actually waged a war for
this purpose. In 1795 the alliance, with the same object, had been
prospectively revived by Thugut; in 1809, after the Treaty of Tilsit,
Metternich had determined in the last resort to combine with Napoleon and
Alexander in dismembering Turkey, if all diplomatic means should fail to
prevent a joint attack on the Porte by France and Russia, But this
resolution had been adopted by Metternich only as a matter of necessity,
and in view of a combination which threatened to reduce Austria to the
position of a vassal State. Metternich's own definite and consistent policy
after 1814 was the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. His statesmanship
was, as a rule, governed by fear; and his fear of Alexander was second only
to his old fear of Napoleon. Times were changed since Joseph and Thugut
could hope to enter upon a game of aggression with Russia upon equal terms.
The Austrian army had been beaten in every battle that it had fought during
nearly twenty years. Province after province had been severed from it,
without, except in the Tyrol, raising a hand in its support; and when in
1821 the Minister compared Austria's actual Empire and position in Europe,
won and maintained in great part by his own diplomacy, with the ruin to
which a series of wars had brought it ten years before, he might well thank
Heaven that international Congresses were still so much in favour with the
Courts, and tremble at the clash of arms which from the remote Morea
threatened to call Napoleon's northern conquerors once more into the field
[365]

[Eastern policy of England.]

England was not, like Austria, exposed to actual danger by the advance of
Russia towards the AEgaean; but the growth of Russian power had been viewed
with alarm by English politicians since 1788, when Pitt had formed a triple
alliance with Prussia and Holland for the purpose of defending the Porte
against the attacks of Catherine and Joseph. The interest of Great Britain
in the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire had not been laid down as a
principle before that date, nor was it then acknowledged by the Whig party.
It was asserted by Pitt from considerations relating to the European
balance of power, not, as in our own times, with a direct reference to
England's position in India. The course of events from 1792 to 1807 made
England and Russia for awhile natural allies; but this friendship was
turned into hostility by the Treaty of Tilsit; and although after a few
years Alexander was again fighting for the same cause as Great Britain, and
the public opinion of this country enthusiastically hailed the issue of the
Moscow campaign, English statesmen never forgot the interview upon the
Niemen, and never, in the brightest moments of victory, regarded Alexander
without some secret misgivings. During the campaign of 1814 in France,
Castlereagh's willingness to negotiate with Bonaparte was due in great part
to the fear that Alexander's high-wrought resolutions would collapse before
Napoleon could be thoroughly crushed, and that reaction would carry him
into a worse peace than that which he then disdained. [366] The
negotiations at the Congress of Vienna brought Great Britain and Russia, as
it has been seen, into an antagonism which threatened to end in the resort
to arms; and the tension which then and for some time afterwards existed
between the two governments led English Ministers to speak, certainly in
exaggerated and misleading language, of the mutual hostility of the English
and the Russian nations. From 1815 to 1821 the Czar had been jealously
watched. It had been rumoured over and over again that he was preparing to
invade the Ottoman Empire; and when the rebellion of the Greeks broke out,
the one thought of Castlereagh and his colleagues was that Russia must be
prevented from throwing itself into the fray, and that the interests of
Great Britain required that the authority of the Sultan should as soon as
possible be restored throughout his dominions.

[Fears of new period of warfare.]

[Metternich and the Greeks.]

Both at London therefore and at Vienna the rebellion of Greece was viewed
by governments only as an unfortunate disturbance which was likely to
excite war between Russia and its neighbours, and to imperil the peace of
Europe at large. It may seem strange that the spectacle of a nation rising
to assert its independence should not even have aroused the question
whether its claims deserved to be considered. But to do justice at least to
the English Ministers of 1821, it must be remembered how terrible, how
overpowering, were the memories left by the twenty years of European war
that had closed in 1815, and at how vast a cost to mankind the regeneration
of Greece would have been effected, if, as then seemed probable, it had
ranged the Great Powers again in arms against one another, and re-kindled
the spirit of military aggression which for a whole generation had made
Europe the prey of rival coalitions. It is impossible to read the letter in
which Castlereagh pleaded with the Czar to sacrifice his own glory and
popularity to the preservation of European peace, without perceiving in
what profound earnestness the English statesman sought to avert the renewal
of an epoch of conflict, and how much the apprehension of coming calamity
predominated in his own mind over the mere jealousy of an extension of
Russian power. [367] If Castlereagh had no thought for Greece itself, it
was because the larger interests of Europe wholly absorbed him, and because
he lacked the imagination and the insight to conceive of a better
adjustment of European affairs under the widening recognition of national
rights. The Minister of Austria, to whom at this crisis Castlereagh looked
as his natural ally, had no doubt the same dread of a renewed convulsion of
Europe, but in his case it was mingled with considerations of a much
narrower kind. It is not correct to say that Metternich was indifferent to
the Greek cause; he actually hated it, because it gave a stimulus to the
liberal movement of Germany. In his empty and pedantic philosophy of human
action, Metternich linked together every form of national aspiration and
unrest as something presumptuous and wanton. He understood nothing of the
debt that mankind owes to the spirit of freedom. He was just as ready to
dogmatise upon the wickedness of the English Reform Bill as he was to trace
the hand of Capodistrias in every tumult in Servia or the Morea: and even
if there had been no fear of Russian aggression in the background, he would
instinctively have condemned the Greek revolt when he saw that the
light-headed professors in the German Universities were beginning to
agitate in its favour, and that the recalcitrant minor Courts regarded it
with some degree of sympathy.

[Alexander adheres to policy of peace.]

[Capdostrias retires, Aug 1822.]

The policy of Metternich in the Eastern Question had for its object the
maintenance of the existing order of things; and as it was certain that
some satisfaction or other must be given to Russian pride, Metternich's
counsel was that the grievances of the Czar which were specifically Russian
should be clearly distinguished from questions relating to the independence
of Greece; and that on the former the Porte should be recommended to agree
with its adversary quickly, the good offices of Europe being employed
within given limits on the Czar's behalf; so that, the Russian causes of
complaint being removed, Alexander might without loss of honour leave the
Greeks to be subdued, and resume the diplomatic relations with
Constantinople which had been so perilously severed by Strogonoff's
departure. It remained for the Czar to decide whether, as head of Russia
and protector of the Christians of the East, he would solve the Eastern
Question by his own sword, or whether, constant to the principle and ideal
of international action to which he had devoted himself since 1815, he
would commit his cause to the joint mediation of Europe, and accept such
solution of the problem as his allies might attain. In the latter case it
was clear that no blow would be struck on behalf of Greece. For a year or
more the balance wavered; at length the note of triumph sounded in the
Austrian Cabinet. Capodistrias, the representative of the Greek cause at
St. Petersburg, rightly measured the force of the opposing impulses in the
Czar's mind. He saw that Alexander, interested as he was in Italy and
Spain, would never break with that federation of the Courts which he had
himself created, nor shake off the influences of legitimism which had
dominated him since the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. Submitting when
contention had become hopeless, and anticipating his inevitable fall by a
voluntary retirement from public affairs, Capodistrias, still high in
credit and reputation, quitted St. Petersburg under the form leave of
absence, and withdrew to Geneva, there to await events, and to enjoy the
distinction of a patriot whom love for Greece had constrained to abandon
one of the most splendid positions in Europe. Grave, melancholy, and
austere, as one who suffered with his country, Capodistrias remained in
private life till the vanquished cause had become the victorious one, and
the liberated Greek nation called him to place himself at its head.

[Extension of the Greek revolt.]

[Central Greece.]

[Fall of Ali Pasha, Feb., 1822.]

[Chalcidice.]

An international diplomatic campaign of vast activity and duration began in
the year 1821, but the contest of arms was left, as Metternich desired, to
the Greeks and the Turks alone. The first act of the war was the
insurrection of the Morea: the second was the extension of this
insurrection over parts of Continental Greece and the Archipelago, and its
summary extinction by the Turk in certain districts, which in consequence
remained for the future outside the area of hostilities, and so were not
ultimately included in the Hellenic Kingdom. Central Greece, that is, the
country lying immediately north of the Corinthian Gulf, broke into revolt a
few weeks later than the Morea. The rising against the Mohammedans was
distinguished by the same merciless spirit: the men were generally
massacred; the women, if not killed, were for the most part sold into
slavery; and when, after an interval of three years, Lord Byron came to
Missolonghi, he found that a miserable band of twenty-three captive women
formed the sole remnant of the Turkish population of that town. Thessaly,
with some exceptions, remained passive, and its inaction was of the utmost
service to the Turkish cause; for Ali Pasha in Epirus was now being
besieged by the Sultan's armies, and if Thessaly had risen in the rear of
these troops, they could scarcely have escaped destruction. Khurshid, the
Ottoman commander conducting the siege of Janina, held firmly to his task,
in spite of the danger which threatened his communications, and in spite of
the circumstance that his whole household had fallen into the hands of the
Moreot insurgents. His tenacity saved the border-provinces for the Ottoman
Empire. No combination was effected between Ali and the Greeks, and at the
beginning of 1822 the Albanian chieftain lost both his stronghold and his
life. In the remoter district of Chalcidice, on the Macedonian coast, where
the promontory of Athos and the two parallel peninsulas run out into the
AEgaean, and a Greek population, clearly severed from the Slavic inhabitants
of the mainland, maintained its own communal and religious organisation,
the national revolt broke out under Hetaerist leaders. The monks of Mount
Athos, like their neighbours, took up arms. But there was little sympathy
between the privileged chiefs of these abbeys and the desperate men who had
come to head the revolt. The struggle was soon abandoned; and, partly by
force of arms, partly by negotiation, the authority of the Sultan was
restored without much difficulty throughout this region.

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