Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Greek successes off the coast of Asia Minor, September, 1824.]

[Ibrahim reaches Crete. December, 1824.]

The first part of the Turko-Egyptian plan had thus been successfully
accomplished, and if Khosrew had attacked Samos immediately after his first
victory, this island would probably have fallen before help could arrive.
But, like other Turkish commanders, Khosrew loved intervals of repose, and
he now sailed off to Mytilene to celebrate the festival of Bairam. In the
meantime the catastrophe of Psara had aroused the Hydriote Government to a
sense of its danger. A strong fleet was sent across the AEgaean, and adequate
measures were taken to defend Samos both by land and sea. The Turkish fleet
was attacked with some success, and though Ibrahim with the Egyptian
contingent now reached the coast of Asia Minor, the Greeks proved
themselves superior to their adversaries combined. The operations of the
Mussulman commanders led to no result; they were harassed and terrified by
the Greek fireships; and when at length all hope of a joint conquest of
Samos had been abandoned, and Ibrahim set sail for Crete to carry out his
own final enterprise alone, he was met on the high seas by the Greeks, and
driven back to the coast of Asia Minor. During the autumn of 1824 the
disasters of the preceding months were to some extent retrieved, and the
situation of the Egyptian fleet would have become one of some peril if the
Greeks had maintained their guard throughout the winter. But they
underrated the energy of Ibrahim, and surrendered themselves to the belief
that he would not repeat the attempt to reach Crete until the following
spring. Careless, or deluded by false information, they returned to Hydra,
and left the seas unwatched. Ibrahim saw his opportunity, and, setting sail
for Crete at the beginning of December, he reached it without falling in
with the enemy.

[Ibrahim in the Morea, Feb., 1825.]

The snowy heights of Taygetus are visible on a clear winter's day from the
Cretan coast; yet, with their enemy actually in view of them, the Greeks
neglected to guard the passage to the Morea. On the 22nd of February, 1825,
Ibrahim crossed the sea unopposed and landed five thousand men at Modon. He
was even able to return to Crete and bring over a second contingent of
superior strength before any steps were taken to hinder his movements. The
fate of the mainland was now settled. Ibrahim marched from Modon upon
Navarino, defeated the Greek forces on the way, and captured the garrison
placed in the Island of Sphakteria--the scene of the first famous surrender
of the Spartans--before the Greek fleet could arrive to relieve it. The
forts of Navarino then capitulated, and Ibrahim pushed on his victorious
march towards the centre of the Morea. It was in vain that the old chief
Kolokotrones was brought from his prison at Hydra to take supreme command.
The conqueror of Dramali was unable to resist the onslaught of Ibrahim's
regiments, recruited from the fierce races of the Soudan, and fighting
with the same arms and under the same discipline as the best troops in
Europe. Kolokotrones was driven back through Tripolitza, and retired as the
Russians had retired from Moscow, leaving a deserted capital behind him.
Ibrahim gave his troops no rest; he hurried onwards against Nauplia, and on
the 24th of June reached the summit of the mountain-pass that looks down
upon the Argolic Gulf. "Ah, little island," he cried, as he saw the rock of
Hydra stretched below him, "how long wilt thou escape me?" At Nauplia
itself the Egyptian commander rode up to the very gates and scanned the
defences, which he hoped to carry at the first assault. Here, however, a
check awaited him. In the midst of general flight and panic, Demetrius
Hypsilanti was again the undaunted soldier. He threw himself with some few
hundreds of men into the mills of Lerna, and there beat back Ibrahim's
vanguard when it attempted to carry this post by storm. The Egyptian
recognised that with men like these in front of him Nauplia could be
reduced only by a regular siege. He retired for a while upon Tripolitza,
and thence sent out his harrying columns, slaughtering and devastating in
every direction. It seemed to be his design not merely to exhaust the
resources of his enemy but to render the Morea a desert, and to exterminate
its population. In the very birthplace of European civilisation, it was
said, this savage, who had already been nominated Pasha of the Morea,
intended to extinguish the European race and name, and to found for himself
upon the ashes of Greece a new barbaric state composed of African negroes
and fellaheen. That such design had actually been formed was denied by the
Turkish government in answer to official inquiries, and its existence was
not capable of proof. But the brutality of one age is the stupidity of the
next, and Ibrahim's violence recoiled upon himself. Nothing in the whole
struggle between the Sultan and the Greeks gave so irresistible an argument
to the Philhellenes throughout Europe, or so directly overcame the scruples
of Governments in regard to an armed intervention in favour of Greece, as
Ibrahim's alleged policy of extermination and re-settlement. The days were
past when Europe could permit its weakest member to be torn from it and
added to the Mohammedan world.

[Siege of Missolongi, April, 1825-April, 1826.]

One episode of the deepest tragic interest yet remained in the
Turko-Hellenic conflict before the Powers of Europe stepped in and struck
with weapons stronger than those which had fallen from dying hands. The
town of Missolonghi was now beleaguered by the Turks, who had invaded
Western Greece while Ibrahim was overrunning the Morea. Missolonghi had
already once been besieged without success; and, as in the case of
Saragossa, the first deliverance appears to have inspired the townspeople
with the resolution, maintained even more heroically at Missolonghi than at
the Spanish city, to die rather than capitulate. From the time when
Reschid, the Turkish commander, opened the second attack by land and sea in
the spring of 1825, the garrison and the inhabitants met every movement of
the enemy with the most obstinate resistance. It was in vain that Reschid
broke through the defences with his artillery, and threw mass after mass
upon the breaches which he made. For month after month the assaults of the
Turks were uniformly repelled, until at length the arrival of a Hydriote
squadron forced the Turkish fleet to retire from its position, and made the
situation of Reschid himself one of considerable danger. And now, as winter
approached, and the guerilla bands in the rear of the besiegers grew more
and more active, the Egyptian army with its leader was called from the
Morea to carry out the task in which the Turks had failed. The Hydriote
sea-captains had departed, believing their presence to be no longer needed;
and although they subsequently returned for a short time, their services
were grudgingly rendered and ineffective. Ibrahim, settling down to his
work at the beginning of 1826, conducted his operations with the utmost
vigour, boasting that he would accomplish in fourteen days what the Turks
could not effect in nine months. But his veteran soldiers were thoroughly
defeated when they met the Greeks hand to hand; and the Egyptian, furious
with his enemy, his allies, and his own officers, confessed that
Missolonghi could only be taken by blockade. He now ordered a fleet of
flat-bottomed boats to be constructed and launched upon the lagoons that
lie between Missolonghi and the open sea. Missolonghi was thus completely
surrounded; and when the Greek admirals appeared for the last time and
endeavoured to force an entrance through the shallows, they found the
besieger in full command of waters inaccessible to themselves, and after
one unsuccessful effort abandoned Missolonghi to its fate. In the third
week of April, 1826, exactly a year after the commencement of the siege,
the supply of food was exhausted. The resolution, long made, that the
entire population, men, women, and children, should fall by the enemy's
sword rather than surrender, was now actually carried out. On the night of
the 22nd of April all the Missolonghiots, with the exception of those whom
age, exhaustion, or illness made unable to leave their homes, were drawn up
in bands at the city gates, the women armed and dressed as men, the
children carrying pistols. Preceded by a body of soldiers, they crossed the
moat under Turkish fire. The attack of the vanguard carried everything
before it, and a way was cut through the Turkish lines. But at this moment
some cry of confusion was mistaken by those who were still on the bridges
for an order to retreat. A portion of the non-combatants returned into the
town, and with them the rearguard of the military escort. The leading
divisions, however, continued their march forward, and would have escaped
with the loss of some of the women and children, had not treachery already
made the Turkish commander acquainted with the routes which they intended
to follow. They had cleared the Turkish camp, and were expecting to meet
the bands of Greek armatoli, who had promised to fall upon the enemy's
rear, when, instead of friends, they encountered troop after troop of
Ottoman cavalry and of Albanians placed in ambush along the road between
Missolonghi and the mountains. Here, exhausted and surprised, they were cut
down without mercy, and out of a body numbering several thousand not more
than fifteen hundred men, with a few women and children, ultimately reached
places of safety. Missolonghi itself was entered by the Turks during the
sortie. The soldiers who had fallen back during the confusion on the
bridges, proved that they had not acted from cowardice. They fought
unflinchingly to the last, and three bands, establishing themselves in the
three powder magazines of the town, set fire to them when surrounded by the
Turks, and perished in the explosion Some thousands of women and children
were captured around and within the town, or wandering on the mountains;
but the Turks had few other prisoners. The men were dead or free.

[Fall of the Acropolis of Athens, June 5, 1827.]

From Missolonghi the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled eastward, and the
Acropolis of Athens was in its turn the object of a long and arduous siege.
The Government, which now held scarcely any territory on the mainland
except Nauplia, where it was itself threatened by Ibrahim, made the most
vigorous efforts to prevent the Acropolis from falling into Reschid's
hands. All, however, was in vain. The English officers, Church and
Cochrane, who were now placed at the head of the military and naval forces
of Greece, failed ignominiously in the attacks which they made on Reschid's
besieging army; and the garrison capitulated on June 5, 1827. But the time
was past when the liberation of Greece could be prevented by any Ottoman
victory. The heroic defence of the Missolonghiots had achieved its end.
Greece had fought long enough to enlist the Powers of Europe on its side;
and in the same month that Missolonghi fell the policy of non-intervention
was definitely abandoned by those Governments which were best able to carry
their intentions into effect. If the struggle had ended during the first
three years of the insurrection, no hand would have been raised to prevent
the restoration of the Sultan's rule. Russia then lay as if spell-bound
beneath the diplomacy of the Holy Alliance; and although in the second year
of the war the death of Castlereagh and the accession of Canning to power
had given Greece a powerful friend instead of a powerful foe within the
British Ministry, it was long before England stirred from its neutrality.
Canning indeed made no secret of his sympathies for Greece, and of his
desire to give the weaker belligerent such help as a neutral might afford;
but when he took up office the time had not come when intervention would
have been useful or possible. Changes in the policy of other great Powers
and in the situation of the belligerents themselves were, he considered,
necessary before the influence of England could be successfully employed in
establishing peace in the East.

[First Russian project of joint intervention, 12 Jan., 1824.]

A vigorous movement of public opinion in favour of Greece made itself felt
throughout Western Europe as the struggle continued; and the vivid and
romantic interest excited over the whole civilised world by the death of
Lord Byron in 1823, among the people whom he had come to free, probably
served the Greek cause better than all that Byron could have achieved had
his life been prolonged. In France and England, where public opinion had
great influence on the action of the Government, as well as in Germany,
where it had none whatever, societies were formed for assisting the Greeks
with arms, stores, and money. The first proposal, however, for a joint
intervention in favour of Greece came from St. Petersburg. The undisguised
good-will of Canning towards the insurgents led the Czar's Government to
anticipate that England itself might soon assume that championship of the
Greek cause which Russia, at the bidding of Metternich and of Canning's
predecessor, had up to that time declined. If the Greeks were to be
befriended, it was intolerable that others should play the part of the
patron. Accordingly, on the 12th of January, 1824, a note was submitted in
the Czar's name to all the Courts of Europe, containing a plan for a
settlement of the Greek question, which it was proposed that the great
Powers of Europe should enforce upon Turkey either by means of an armed
demonstration or by the threat of breaking off all diplomatic relations.
According to this scheme, Greece, apart from the islands, was to be divided
into three Principalities, each tributary to the Sultan and garrisoned by
Turkish troops, but in other respects autonomous, like the Principalities
of Moldavia and Wallachia. The islands were to retain their municipal
organisation as before. In one respect this scheme was superior to all that
have succeeded it, for it included in the territory of the Greeks both
Crete and Epirus; in all other respects it was framed in the interest of
Russia alone. Its object was simply to create a second group of provinces,
like those on the Danube, which should afford Russia a constant opportunity
for interfering with the Ottoman Empire, and which at the same time should
prevent the Greeks from establishing an independent and self-supporting
State. The design cannot be called insidious, for its object was so
palpable that not a single politician in Europe was deceived by it; and a
very simple ruse of Metternich's was enough to draw from the Russian
Government an explicit declaration against the independence of Greece,
which was described by the Czar as a mere chimera. But of all the parties
concerned, the Greeks themselves were loudest in denounciation of the
Russian plan. Their Government sent a protest against it to London, and was
assured by Canning in reply that the support of this country should never
be given to any scheme for disposing of the Greeks without their own
consent. Elsewhere the Czar's note was received with expressions of
politeness due to a Court which it might be dangerous to contradict; and a
series of conferences was opened at St. Petersburg for the purpose of
discussing propositions which no one intended to carry into execution.
Though Canning ordered the British ambassador at St. Petersburg to
dissociate himself from these proceedings, the conferences dragged on, with
long adjournments, from the spring of 1824 to the summer of the following
year. [371]

[Discontent and conspiracies in Russia.]

In the meantime a strong spirit of discontent was rising in the Russian
army and nation. The religious feeling no less than the pride of the people
was deeply wounded by Alexander's refusal to aid the Greeks in their
struggle, and by the pitiful results of his attempted diplomatic concert.
Alone among the European nations the Russians understood the ecclesiastical
character of the Greek insurrection, and owed nothing of their sympathy
with it to the spell of classical literature and art. It is characteristic
of the strength of the religious element in the political views of the
Russian people, that the floods of the Neva which overwhelmed St.
Petersburg in the winter of 1825 should have been regarded as a sign of
divine anger at the Czar's inaction in the struggle between the Crescent
and the Cross. But other causes of discontent were not wanting in Russia.
Though Alexander had forgotten his promises to introduce constitutional
rule, there were many, especially in the army, who had not done so.
Officers who served in the invasion of France in 1815, and in the three
years' occupation which followed it, returned from Western Europe with
ideas of social progress and of constitutional rights which they could
never have gathered in their own country. And when the bright hopes which
had been excited by the recognition of these same ideas by the Czar passed
away, and Russia settled down into the routine of despotism and corruption,
the old unquestioning loyalty of the army was no longer proof against the
workings of the revolutionary spirit. In a land where legal means of
opposition to government and of the initiation of reform were wholly
wanting, discontent was forced into its most dangerous form, that of
military conspiracy. The army was honeycombed with secret societies. Both
in the north and in the south of Russia men of influence worked among the
younger officers, and gained a strong body of adherents to their design of
establishing a constitution by force. The southern army contained the most
resolute and daring conspirators. These men had definitely abandoned the
hope of effecting any public reform as long as Alexander lived, and they
determined to sacrifice the sovereign, as his father and others before him
had been sacrificed, to the political necessities of the time. If the
evidence subsequently given by those implicated in the conspiracy is worthy
of credit, a definite plan had been formed for the assassination of the
Czar in the presence of his troops at one of the great reviews intended to
be held in the south of Russia in the autumn of 1825. On the death of the
monarch a provisional government was at once to be established, and a
constitution proclaimed.

[Death of the Czar, Dec. 1, 1825.]

Alexander, aware of the rising indignation of his people, and irritated
beyond endurance by the failure of his diplomatic efforts, had dissolved
the St. Petersburg Conferences in August, 1825, and declared that Russia
would henceforth act according to its own discretion. He quitted St.
Petersburg and travelled to the Black Sea, accompanied by some of the
leaders of the war-party. Here, plunged in a profound melancholy, conscious
that all his early hopes had only served to surround him with conspirators,
and that his sacrifice of Russia's military interests to international
peace had only rendered his country impotent before all Europe, he still
hesitated to make the final determination between peace and war. A certain
mystery hung over his movements, his acts, and his intentions. Suddenly,
while all Europe waited for the signal that should end the interval of
suspense, the news was sent out from a lonely port on the Black Sea that
the Czar was dead. Alexander, still under fifty years of age, had welcomed
the illness which carried him from a world of cares, and closed a career in
which anguish and disappointment had succeeded to such intoxicating glory
and such unbounded hope. Young as he still was for one who had reigned
twenty-four years, Alexander was of all men the most life-weary. Power,
pleasure, excitement, had lavished on him hours of such existence as none
but Napoleon among all his contemporaries had enjoyed. They had left him
nothing but the solace of religious resignation, and the belief that a
Power higher than his own might yet fulfil the purposes in which he himself
had failed. Ever in the midst of great acts and great events, he had missed
greatness himself. Where he had been best was exactly where men inferior to
himself considered him to have been worst--in his hopes; and these hopes he
had himself abandoned and renounced. Strength, insight, unity of purpose,
the qualities which enable men to mould events, appeared in him but
momentarily or in semblance. For want of them the large and fair horizon of
his earlier years was first obscured and then wholly blotted out from his
view, till in the end nothing but his pietism and his generosity
distinguished him from the politicians of repression whose instrument he
had become.

[Military insurrection at St. Petersburg, Dec 26, 1825.]

The sudden death of Alexander threw the Russian Court into the greatest
confusion, for it was not known who was to succeed him. The heir to the
throne was his brother Constantine, an ignorant and brutal savage, who had
just sufficient sense not to desire to be Czar of Russia, though he
considered himself good enough to tyrannise over the Poles. Constantine had
renounced his right to the crown some years before, but the renunciation
had not been made public, nor had the Grand Duke Nicholas, Constantine's
younger brother, been made aware that the succession was irrevocably fixed
upon himself. Accordingly, when the news of Alexander's death reached St.
Petersburg, and the document embodying Constantine's abdication was brought
from the archives by the officials to whose keeping it had been entrusted,
Nicholas refused to acknowledge it as binding, and caused the troops to
take the oath of allegiance to Constantine, who was then at Warsaw.
Constantine, on the other hand, proclaimed his brother emperor. An
interregnum of three weeks followed, during which messages passed between
Warsaw and St. Petersburg, Nicholas positively refusing to accept the crown
unless by his elder brother's direct command. This at length arrived, and
on the 26th of December Nicholas assumed the rank of sovereign. But the
interval of uncertainty had been turned to good account by the conspirators
at St. Petersburg. The oath already taken by the soldiers to Constantine
enabled the officers who were concerned in the plot to denounce Nicholas as
a usurper, and to disguise their real designs under the cloak of loyalty to
the legitimate Czar. Ignorant of the very meaning of a constitution, the
common soldiers mutinied because they were told to do so; and it is said
that they shouted the word Constitution, believing it to be the name of
Constantine's wife. When summoned to take the oath to Nicholas, the Moscow
Regiment refused it, and marched off to the place in front of the Senate
House, where it formed square, and repulsed an attack made upon it by the
Cavalry of the Guard. Companies from other regiments now joined the
mutineers, and symptoms of insurrection began to show themselves among the
civil population. Nicholas himself did not display the energy of character
which distinguished him through all his later life; on the contrary, his
attitude was for some time rather that of resignation than of
self-confidence. Whether some doubt as to the justice of his cause haunted
him, or a trial like that to which he was now exposed was necessary to
bring to its full strength the iron quality of his nature, it is certain
that the conduct of the new Czar during these critical hours gave to those
around him little indication of the indomitable will which was hence forth
to govern Russia. Though the great mass of the army remained obedient, it
was but slowly brought up to the scene of revolt. Officers of high rank
were sent to harangue the insurgents, and one of these, General
Miloradovitsch, a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns, was mortally wounded
while endeavouring to make himself heard. It was not until evening that the
artillery was ordered into action, and the command given by the Czar to
fire grape-shot among the insurgents. The effect was decisive. The
mutineers fled before a fire which they were unable to return, and within a
few minutes the insurrection was over. It had possessed no chief of any
military capacity; its leaders were missing at the moment when a forward
march or an attack on the palace of the Czar might have given them the
victory; and among the soldiers at large there was not the least desire to
take part in any movement against the established system of Russia. The
only effect left by the conspiracy within Russia itself was seen in the
rigorous and uncompromising severity with which Nicholas henceforward
enforced the principle of autocratic rule. The illusions of the previous
reign were at an end. A man with the education and the ideas of a
drill-sergeant and the religious assurance of a Covenanter was on the
throne; rebellion had done its worst against him; and woe to those who in
future should deviate a hair's breadth from their duty of implicit
obedience to the sovereign's all-sufficing power. [372]

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