Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[The AEgaean Islands.]

The settlements of the AEgaean which first raised the flag of Greek
independence were the so-called Nautical Islands, Hydra, Spetza, and Psara,
where the absence of a Turkish population and the enjoyment of a century of
self-government had allowed the bold qualities of an energetic maritime
race to grow to their full vigour. Hydra and Spetza were close to the Greek
coast, Psara was on the farther side of the archipelago, almost within view
of Asia Minor; so that in joining the insurrection its inhabitants showed
great heroism, for they were exposed to the first attack of any Turkish
force that could maintain itself for a few hours at sea, and the whole
adjacent mainland was the recruiting-ground of the Sultan. At Hydra the
revolt against the Ottoman was connected with the internal struggles of the
little community, and these in their turn were connected with the great
economical changes of Europe which, at the opposite end of the continent,
and in a widely different society, led to the enactment of the English Corn
Laws, and to the strife of classes which resulted from them. During
Napoleon's wars the carrying-trade of most nations had become extinct;
little corn reached England, and few besides Greek ships navigated the
Euxine and Mediterranean. When peace opened the markets and the ports of
all nations, just as the renewed importation of foreign corn threatened to
lower the profits of English farmers and the rents of English landlords, so
the reviving freedom of navigation made an end of the monopoly of the
Hydriote and Psarian merchantmen. The shipowners formed an oligarchy in
Hydra; the captains and crews of their ships, though they shared the
profits of each voyage, were excluded from any share in the government of
the island. Failure of trade, want and inactivity, hence led to a political
opposition. The shipowners, wealthy and privileged men, had no inclination
to break with the Turk; the captains and sailors, who had now nothing to
lose, declared for Greek independence. There was a struggle in which for
awhile nothing but the commonest impulses of need and rapacity came into
play; but the greater cause proved its power: Hydra threw in its lot with
Greece; and although private greed and ill-faith, as well as great cruelty,
too often disgraced both the Hydriote crews and those of the other islands,
the nucleus of a naval force was now formed which made the achievement of
Greek independence possible. The three islands which led the way were soon
followed by the wealthier and more populous Samos and by the greater part
of the Archipelago. Crete, inhabited by a mixed Greek and Turkish
population, also took up arms, and was for years to come the scene of a
bloody and destructive warfare.

[The Greek leaders.]

Within the Morea the first shock of the revolt had made the Greeks masters
of everything outside the fortified towns. The reduction of these places
was at once undertaken by the insurgents. Tripolitza, lately the seat of
the Turkish government, was the centre of operations, and in the
neighbourhood of this town the first provisional government of the Greeks,
called the Senate of Kaltesti, was established. Demetrius Hypsilanti, a
brother of the Hetaerist leader, whose failure in Roumania was not yet
known, landed in the Morea and claimed supreme power. He was tumultuously
welcomed by the peasant-soldiers, though the Primates, who had hitherto
held undisputed sway, bore him no good will. Two other men became prominent
at this time as leaders in the Greek war of liberation. These were
Maurokordatos, a descendant of the Hospodars of Wallachia--a politician
superior to all his rivals in knowledge and breadth of view, but wanting in
the faculty of action required by the times--and Kolokotrones, a type of
the rough fighting Klepht; a mere savage in attainments, scarcely able to
read or write, cunning, grossly avaricious and faithless, incapable of
appreciating either military or moral discipline, but a born soldier in his
own irregular way, and a hero among peasants as ignorant as himself. There
was yet another, who, if his character had been equal to his station, would
have been placed at the head of the government of the Morea. This was
Petrobei, chief of the family of Mauromichalis, ruler of the rugged
district of Maina, in the south-west of Peloponnesus, where the Turk had
never established more than nominal sovereignty. A jovial, princely person,
exercising among his clansmen a mild Homeric sway, Petrobei, surrounded by
his nine vigorous sons, was the most picturesque figure in Greece. But he
had no genius for great things. A sovereignty, which in other hands might
have expanded to national dominion, remained with Petrobei a mere ornament
and curiosity; and the power of the deeply-rooted clan-spirit of the Maina
only made itself felt when, at a later period, the organisation of a united
Hellenic State demanded its sacrifice.

[Fall of Tripolitza, Oct. 5, 1821.]

Anarchy, egotism, and ill-faith disgraced the Greek insurrection from its
beginning to its close. There were, indeed, some men of unblemished honour
among the leaders, and the peasantry in the ranks fought with the most
determined courage year after year; but the action of most of those who
figured as representatives of the people brought discredit upon the
national cause. Their first successes were accompanied by gross treachery
and cruelty. Had the Greek leaders been Bourbon kings, nurtured in all the
sanctities of divine right, instead of tax-gatherers and cattle-lifters,
truants from the wild school of Turkish violence and deceit, they could not
have perjured themselves with lighter hearts. On the surrender of Navarino,
in August, 1821, after a formal capitulation providing for the safety of
its Turkish inhabitants, men, women, and children were indiscriminately
massacred. The capture of Tripolitza, which took place two months later,
was changed from a peaceful triumph into a scene of frightful slaughter by
the avarice of individual chiefs, who, while negotiations were pending,
made their way into the town, and bargained with rich inhabitants to give
them protection in return for their money and jewels. The soldiery, who had
undergone the labours of the siege for six months, saw that their reward
was being pilfered from them. Defying all orders, and in the absence of
Demetrius Hypsilanti, the commander-in-chief, they rushed upon the
fortifications of Tripolitza, and carried them by storm. A general massacre
of the inhabitants followed. For three days the work of carnage was
continued in the streets and houses, until few out of a population of many
thousands remained living. According to the testimony of Kolokotrones
himself, the roads were so choked with the dead, that as he rode from the
gateway to the citadel his horse's hoofs never touched the ground. [368]

[The Massacre of Chios, April-June, 1822.]

In the opening scenes of the Greek insurrection the barbarity of Christians
and of Ottomans was perhaps on a level. The Greek revenged himself with the
ferocity of the slave who breaks his fetters; the Turk resorted to
wholesale massacre and extermination as the normal means of government in
troubled times. And as experience has shown that the savagery of the
European yields in one generation to the influences of civilised rule,
while the Turk remains as inhuman to-day as he was under Mahmud II., so the
history of 1822 proved that the most devilish passions of the Greek were in
the end but a poor match for disciplined Turkish prowess in the work of
butchery. It was no easy matter for the Sultan to requite himself for the
sack of Tripolitza upon Kolokotrones and his victorious soldiers; but there
was a peaceful and inoffensive population elsewhere, which offered all the
conditions for free, unstinted, and unimperilled vengeance which the Turk
desires. A body of Samian troops had landed in Chios, and endeavoured, but
with little success, to excite the inhabitants to revolt, the absence of
the Greek fleet rendering them an almost certain prey to the Sultan's
troops on the mainland. The Samian leader nevertheless refused to abandon
the enterprise, and laid siege to the citadel, in which there was a Turkish
garrison. Before this fortress could be reduced, a relieving army of seven
thousand Turks, with hosts of fanatical volunteers, landed on the island.
The Samians fled; the miserable population of Chios was given up to
massacre. For week after week the soldiery and the roving hordes of
Ottomans slew, pillaged, and sold into slavery at their pleasure. In parts
of the island where the inhabitants took refuge in the monasteries, they
were slaughtered by thousands together; others, tempted back to their homes
by the promulgation of an amnesty, perished family by family. The lot of
those who were spared was almost more pitiable than of those who died. The
slave-markets of Egypt and Tunis were glutted with Chian captives. The
gentleness, the culture, the moral worth of the Chian community made its
fate the more tragical. No district in Europe had exhibited a civilisation
more free from the vices of its type: on no community had there fallen in
modern times so terrible a catastrophe. The estimates of the destruction of
life at Chios are loosely framed; among the lowest is that which sets the
number of the slain and the enslaved at thirty thousand. The island, lately
thronging with life and activity, became a thinly-populated place. After a
long period of depression and the slow return of some fraction of its
former prosperity, convulsions of nature have in our own day again made
Chios a ruin. A new life may arise when the Turk is no longer master of its
shores, but the old history of Chios is closed for ever.

[Exploit of Kanaris, June 18th, 1822.]

The impression made upon public opinion in Europe by the massacre of 1822
was a deep and lasting one, although it caused no immediate change in the
action of Governments. The general feeling of sympathy for the Greeks and
hatred for the Turks, which ultimately forced the Governments to take up a
different policy, was intensified by a brilliant deed of daring by which a
Greek captain avenged the Chians upon their devastor, and by the unexpected
success gained by the insurgents on the mainland against powerful armies of
the Sultan. The Greek executive, which was now headed by Maurokordatos, had
been guilty of gross neglect in not sending over the fleet in time to
prevent the Turks from landing in Chios. When once this landing had been
effected, the ships which afterwards arrived were powerless to prevent the
massacre, and nothing could be attempted except against the Turkish fleet
itself. The instrument of destruction employed by the Greeks was the
fire-ship, which had been used with success against the Turk in these same
waters in the war of 1770. The sacred month of the Ramazan was closing, and
on the night of June 18, Kara Ali, the Turkish commander, celebrated the
festival of Bairam with above a thousand men on board his flag-ship. The
vessel was illuminated with coloured lanterns. In the midst of the
festivities, Constantine Kanaris, a Psarian captain, brought his fire-ship
unobserved right up to the Turkish man-of-war, and drove his bowsprit
firmly into one of her portholes; then, after setting fire to the
combustibles, he stepped quietly into a row-boat, and made away. A breeze
was blowing, and in a moment the Turkish crew were enveloped in a mass of
flames. The powder on board exploded; the boats were sunk; and the vessel,
with its doomed crew, burned to the water-edge, its companions sheering off
to save themselves from the shower of blazing fragments that fell all
around. Kara Ali was killed by a broken mast; a few of his men saved their
lives by swimming or were picked up by rescuers; the rest perished. Such
was the consternation caused by the deed of Kanaris, that the Ottoman fleet
forthwith quitted the AEgaean waters, and took refuge under the guns of the
Dardanelles. Kanaris, unknown before, became from this exploit a famous man
in Europe. It was to no stroke of fortune or mere audacity that he owed his
success, but to the finest combination of nerve and nautical skill. His
feat, which others were constantly attempting, but with little success, to
imitate, was repeated by him in the same year. He was the most brilliant of
Greek seamen, a simple and modest hero; and after his splendid achievements
in the war of liberation, he served his country well in a political career.
Down to his death in a hale old age, he was with justice the idol and pride
of the Greek nation.

[Double invasion of Greece 1822.]

[Destruction of the Pilhellenes near Arta, July 16.]

[Unsuccessful siege of Missolonghi, Nov., 1822.]

The fall of the Albanian rebel, Ali Pasha, in the spring of 1822 made it
possible for Sultan Mahmud, who had hitherto been crippled by the
resistance of Janina, to throw his whole land-force against the Hellenic
revolt; and the Greeks of the mainland, who had as yet had to deal only
with scattered detachments or isolated garrisons, now found themselves
exposed to the attack of two powerful armies. Kurshid, the conqueror of Ali
Pasha, took up his headquarters at Larissa in Thessaly, and from this base
the two invading armies marched southwards on diverging lines. The first,
under Omer Brionis, was ordered to make its way through Southern Epirus to
the western entrance of the Corinthian Gulf, and there to cross into the
Morea; the second, under Dramali, to reduce Central Greece, and enter the
Morea by the isthmus of Corinth; the conquest of Tripolitza and the relief
of the Turkish coast-fortresses which were still uncaptured being the
ultimate end to be accomplished by the two armies in combination with one
another and with the Ottoman fleet. Not less than fifty thousand men were
under the orders of the Turkish commanders, the division of Dramali being
by far the larger of the two. Against this formidable enemy the Greeks
possessed poor means of defence, nor were their prospects improved when
Maurokordatos, the President, determined to take a military command, and to
place himself at the head of the troops in Western Greece. There were
indeed urgent reasons for striking with all possible force in this quarter.
The Suliotes, after seventeen years of exile in Corfu, had returned to
their mountains, and were now making common cause with Greece. They were
both the military outwork of the insurrection, and the political link
between the Hellenes and the Christian communities of Albania, whose action
might become of decisive importance in the struggle against the Turks.
Maurokordatos rightly judged the relief of Suli to be the first and most
pressing duty of the Government. Under a capable leader this effort would
not have been beyond the power of the Greeks; directed by a politician who
knew nothing of military affairs, it was perilous in the highest degree.
Maurokordatos, taking the command out of abler hands, pushed his troops
forward to the neighbourhood of Arta, mismanaged everything, and after
committing a most important post to Botzares, an Albanian chieftain of
doubtful fidelity, left two small regiments exposed to the attack of the
Turks in mass. One of these regiments, called the corps of Philhellenes,
was composed of foreign officers who had volunteered to serve in the Greek
cause as common soldiers. Its discipline was far superior to anything that
existed among the Greeks themselves; and at its head were men who had
fought in Napoleon's campaigns. But this corps, which might have become the
nucleus of a regular army, was sacrificed to the incapacity of the general
and the treachery of his confederate. Betrayed and abandoned by the
Albanian, the Philhellenes met the attack of the Turks gallantly, and
almost all perished. Maurokordatos and the remnant of the Greek troops now
retired to Missolonghi. The Suliotes, left to their own resources, were
once more compelled to quit their mountain home, and to take refuge in
Corfu. Their resistance, however, delayed the Turks for some months, and it
was not until the beginning of November that the army of Omer Brionis,
after conquering the intermediate territory, appeared in front of
Missolonghi. Here the presence of Maurokordatos produced a better effect
than in the field. He declared that he would never leave the town as long
as a man remained to fight the Turks. Defences were erected, and the
besiegers kept at bay for two months. On the 6th of January, 1823, Brionis
ordered an assault. It was beaten back with heavy loss; and the Ottoman
commander, hopeless of maintaining his position throughout the winter,
abandoned his artillery, and retired into the interior of the country.
[369]

[Dramali passes the Isthmus of Corinth, July 1822.]

[His retreat and destruction, Aug., 1822.]

In the meantime Dramali had advanced from Thessaly with twenty-four
thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry, the most formidable armament
that had been seen in Greece since the final struggle between the Turks and
Venetians in 1715. At the terror of his approach all hopes of resistance
vanished. He marched through Boeotia and Attica, devastating the country,
and reached the isthmus of Corinth in July, 1822. The mountain passes were
abandoned by the Greeks; the Government, whose seat was at Argos,
dispersed; and Dramali moved on to Nauplia, where the Turkish garrison was
on the point of surrendering to the Greeks. The entrance to the Morea had
been won; the very shadow of a Greek government had disappeared, and the
definite suppression of the revolt seemed now to be close at hand. But two
fatal errors of the enemy saved the Greek cause. Dramali neglected to
garrison the passes through which he had advanced; and the commander of the
Ottoman fleet, which ought to have met the land-force at Nauplia, disobeyed
his instructions and sailed on to Patras. Two Greeks, at this crisis of
their country's history, proved themselves equal to the call of events.
Demetrius Hypsilanti, now President of the Legislature, refused to fly with
his colleagues, and threw himself, with a few hundred men, into the
Acropolis of Argos. Kolokotrones, hastening to Tripolitza, called out every
man capable of bearing arms, and hurried back to Argos, where the Turks
were still held at bay by the defenders of the citadel. Dramali could no
longer think of marching into the interior of the Morea. The gallantry of
Demetrius had given time for the assemblage of a considerable force, and
the Ottoman general now discovered the ruinous effect of his neglect to
garrison the passes in his rear. These were seized by Kolokotrones. The
summer-drought threatened the Turkish army with famine; the fleet which
would have rendered them independent of land-supplies was a hundred miles
away; and Dramali, who had lately seen all Greece at his feet, now found
himself compelled to force his way back through the enemy to the isthmus of
Corinth. The measures taken by Kolokotrones to intercept his retreat were
skilfully planned, and had they been adequately executed not a man of the
Ottoman army would have escaped. It was only through the disorder and the
cupidity of the Greeks themselves that a portion of Dramali's force
succeeded in cutting its way back to Corinth. Baggage was plundered while
the retreating enemy ought to have been annihilated, and divisions which
ought to have co-operated in the main attack sought trifling successes of
their own. But the losses and the demoralisation of the Turkish army were
as ruinous to it as total destruction. Dramali himself fell ill and died;
and the remnant of his troops which had escaped from the enemy's hands
perished in the neighbourhood of Corinth from sickness and want.

[Greek Civil Wars, 1824.]

The decisive events of 1822 opened the eyes of European Governments to the
real character of the Greek national rising, and to the probability of its
ultimate success. The forces of Turkey were exhausted for the moment, and
during the succeeding year no military operations could be undertaken by
the Sultan on anything like the same scale. It would perhaps have been
better for the Greeks themselves if the struggle had been more continuously
sustained. Nothing but foreign pressure could give unity to the efforts of
a race distracted by so many local rivalries, and so many personal
ambitions and animosities. Scarcely was the extremity of danger passed when
civil war began among the Greeks themselves. Kolokotrones set himself up in
opposition to the Legislature, and seized on some of the strong places in
the Morea. This first outbreak of the so-called military party against the
civil authorities was, however, of no great importance. The Primates of the
Morea took part with the representatives of the islands and of Central
Greece against the disturber of the peace, and an accommodation was soon
arranged. Konduriottes, a rich ship-owner of Hydra, was made President,
with Kolettes, a politician of great influence in Central Greece, as his
Minister. But in place of the earlier antagonism between soldier and
civilian, a new and more dangerous antagonism, that of district against
district, now threatened the existence of Greece. The tendency of the new
government to sacrifice everything to the interest of the islands at once
became evident. Konduriottes was a thoroughly incompetent man, and made
himself ridiculous by appointing his friends, the Hydriote sea-captains, to
the highest military and civil posts. Rebellion again broke out, and
Kolokotrones was joined by his old antagonists, the Primates of the Morea.
A serious struggle ensued, and the government, which was really conducted
by Kolettes, displayed an energy that surprised both its friends and its
foes. The Morea was invaded by a powerful force from Hydra. No mercy was
shown to the districts which supported the rebels. Kolokotrones was
thoroughly defeated, and compelled to give himself up to the Government. He
was carried to Hydra and thrown into prison, where he remained until new
peril again rendered his services indispensable to Greece.

[Mahmud calls for the help of Egypt.]

After the destruction of Dramali's army and the failure of the Ottoman navy
to effect any result whatever, the Sultan appears to have conceived a doubt
whether the subjugation of Greece might not in fact be a task beyond his
own unaided power. Even if the mainland were conquered, it was certain that
the Turkish fleet could never reduce the islands, nor prevent the passage
of supplies and reinforcements from these to the ports of the Morea.
Strenuous as Mahmud had hitherto shown himself in crushing his vassals who,
like Ali Pasha, attempted to establish an authority independent of the
central government, he now found himself compelled to apply to the most
dangerous of them all for assistance. Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, had
risen to power in the disturbed time that followed the expulsion of
Napoleon's forces from Egypt. His fleet was more powerful than that of
Turkey. He had organised an army composed of Arabs, negroes, and fellahs,
and had introduced into it, by means of French officers, the military
system and discipline of Europe. The same reform had been attempted in
Turkey seventeen years before by Mahmud's predecessor, Selim III., but it
had been successfully resisted by the soldiery of Constantinople, and Selim
had paid for his innovations with his life. Mahmud, silent and tenacious,
had long been planning the destruction of the Janissaries, the mutinous and
degraded representatives of a once irresistible force, who would now
neither fight themselves nor permit their rulers to organise any more
effective body of troops in their stead. It is possible that the Sultan may
have believed that a victory won over the enemies of Islam by the
re-modelled forces of Egypt would facilitate the execution of his own plans
of military reform; it is also possible that he may not have been unwilling
to see his vassal's resources dissipated by a distant and hazardous
enterprise. Not without some profound conviction of the urgency of the
present need, not without some sinister calculation as to the means of
dealing with an eventual rival in the future, was the offer of
aggrandisement--if we may judge from the whole tenor of Sultan Mahmud's
career and policy--made to the Pasha of Egypt by his jealous and far-seeing
master. The Pasha was invited to assume the supreme command of the Ottoman
forces by land and sea, and was promised the island of Crete in return for
his co-operation against the Hellenic revolt. Messages to this effect
reached Alexandria at the beginning of 1824. Mehemet, whose ambition had no
limits, welcomed the proposals of his sovereign with ardour, and, while
declining the command for himself, accepted it on behalf of Ibrahim, his
adopted son.

[Turkish-Egyptian plans.]

[Egyptians conquer Crete, April, 1824.]

[Destruction of Psara, July, 1824.]

The most vigorous preparations for war were now made at Alexandria. The
army was raised to 90,000 men, and new ships were added to the navy from
English dockyards. A scheme was framed for the combined operation of the
Egyptian and the Turkish forces which appeared to render the ultimate
conquest of Greece certain. It was agreed that the island of Crete, which
is not sixty miles distant from the southern extremity of the Morea, should
be occupied by Ibrahim, and employed as his place of arms; that
simultaneous or joint attacks should then be made upon the principal
islands of the AEgaean; and that after the capture of these strongholds and
the destruction of the maritime resources of the Greeks, Ibrahim's troops
should pass over the narrow sea between Crete and the Morea, and complete
their work by the reduction of the mainland, thus left destitute of all
chance of succour from without. Crete, like Sicily, is a natural
stepping-stone between Europe and Africa; and when once the assistance of
Egypt was invoked by the Sultan, it was obvious that Crete became the
position which above all others it was necessary for the Greeks to watch
and to defend. But the wretched Government of Konduriottes was occupied
with its domestic struggles. The appeal of the Cretans for protection
remained unanswered, and in the spring of 1824 a strong Egyptian force
landed on this island, captured its fortresses, and suppressed the
resistance of the inhabitants with the most frightful cruelty. The base of
operations had been won, and the combined attacks of the Egyptian and
Turkish fleets upon the smaller islands followed. Casos, about thirty miles
east of Crete, was surprised by the Egyptians, and its population
exterminated. Psara was selected for the attack of the Turkish fleet. Since
the beginning of the insurrection the Psariotes had been the scourge and
terror of the Ottoman coasts. The services that they had rendered in the
Greek navy had been priceless; and if there was one spot of Greek soil
which ought to have been protected as long as a single boat's crew remained
afloat, it was the little rock of Psara. Yet, in spite of repeated
warnings, the Greek Government allowed the Turkish fleet to pass the
Dardenelles unobserved, and some clumsy feints were enough to blind it to
the real object of an expedition whose aim was known to all Europe. There
were ample means for succouring the islanders, as subsequent events proved;
but when the Turkish admiral, Khosrew, with 10,000 men on board, appeared
before Psara, the Greek fleet was far away. The Psariotes themselves were
over-confident. They trusted to their batteries on land, and believed their
rocks to be impregnable. They were soon undeceived. While a corps of
Albanians scaled the cliffs behind the town, the Turks gained a footing in
front, and overwhelmed their gallant enemy by weight of numbers. No mercy
was asked or given. Eight thousand of the Psarians were slain or carried
away as slaves. Not more than one-third of the population succeeded in
escaping to the neighbouring islands. [370]

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