Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Military condition of Russia.]

The actual military resources of Russia were in 1828 much below what they
were believed to be by all Europe. The destruction of Napoleon's army in
1812 and the subsequent exploits of Alexander in the campaigns which ended
in the capture of Paris had left behind them an impression of Russian
energy and power which was far from corresponding with the reality, and
which, though disturbed by the events of 1828, had by no means vanished at
the time of the Crimean War. The courage and patience of the Russian
soldier were certainly not over-rated; but the progress supposed to have
been made in Russian military organisation since the campaign of 1799, when
it was regarded in England and Austria as little above that of savages, was
for the most part imaginary. The proofs of a radically bad system--scanty
numbers, failing supplies, immense sickness--were never more conspicuous
than in 1828. Though Russia had been preparing for war for at least seven
years, scarcely seventy thousand soldiers could be collected on the Pruth.
The general was Wittgenstein, one of the heroes of 1812, but now a veteran
past effective work. Nicholas came to the camp to make things worse by
headstrong interference. The best Russian officer, Paskiewitsch, was put in
command of the forces about to operate in Asia Minor, and there, thrown on
his own resources and free to create a system of his own, he achieved
results in strong contrast to the failure of the Russian arms on the
Danube.

[Campaign of 1828.]

In entering on the campaign of 1828, it was necessary for the Czar to avoid
giving any unnecessary causes of anxiety to Austria, which had already made
unsuccessful attempts to form a coalition against him. The line of
operations was therefore removed as far as possible from the Austrian
frontier; and after the Roumanian principalities had been peacefully
occupied, the Danube was crossed at a short distance above the point where
its mouths divide (June 7). The Turks had no intention of meeting the enemy
in a pitched battle; they confined themselves to the defence of fortresses,
the form of warfare to which, since the decline of the military art in
Turkey, the patience and abstemiousness of the race best fit them. Ibraila
and Silistria on the Danube, Varna and Shumla in the neighbourhood of the
Balkans, were their principal strongholds; of these Ibraila was at once
besieged by a considerable force, while Silistria was watched by a weak
contingent, and the vanguard of the Russian army pushed on through the
Dobrudscha towards the Black Sea, where, with the capture of the minor
coast-towns, it expected to enter into communication with the fleet. The
first few weeks of the campaign were marked by considerable successes.
Ibraila capitulated on the 18th of June, and the military posts in the
Dobrudscha fell one after another into the hands of the invaders, who met
with no effective resistance in this district. But their serious work was
only now beginning. The Russian army, in spite of its weakness, was divided
into three parts, occupied severally in front of Silistria, Shumla, and
Varna. At Shumla the mass of the Turkish army, under Omer Brionis, was
concentrated. The force brought against it by the invader was inadequate to
its task, and the attempts which were made to lure the Turkish army from
its entrenched camp into the open field proved unsuccessful. The
difficulties of the siege proved so great that Wittgenstein after a while
proposed to abandon offensive operations at this point, and to leave a mere
corps of observation before the enemy until Varna should have fallen. This,
however, was forbidden by the Czar. As the Russians wasted away before
Shumla with sickness and fatigue, the Turks gained strength, and on the
24th of September Omer broke out from his entrenchments and moved eastwards
to the relief of Varna. Nicholas again over-ruled his generals, and ordered
his cousin, Prince Eugene of Wuertemberg, to attack the advancing Ottomans
with the troops then actually at his disposal. Eugene did so, and suffered
a severe defeat. A vigorous movement of the Turks would probably have made
an end of the campaign, but Omer held back at the critical moment, and on
the 10th of October Varna surrendered. This, however, was the only conquest
made by the Russians. The season was too far advanced for them either to
cross the Balkans or to push forward operations against the uncaptured
fortresses. Shumla and Silistria remained in the hands of their defenders,
and the Russians, after suffering enormous losses in proportion to the
smallness of their numbers, withdrew to Varna and the Danube, to resume the
campaign in the spring of the following year. [378]

[Campaign of 1829.]

The spirits of the Turks and of their European friends were raised by the
unexpected failure of the Czar's arms. Metternich resumed his efforts to
form a coalition, and tempted French Ministers with the prospect of
recovering the Rhenish provinces, but in vain. The Sultan began
negotiations, but broke them off when he found that the events of the
campaign had made no difference in the enemy's tone. The prestige of Russia
was in fact at stake, and Nicholas would probably have faced a war with
Austria and Turkey combined rather than have made peace without restoring
the much-diminished reputation of his troops. The winter was therefore
spent in bringing up distant reserves. Wittgenstein was removed from his
command; the Czar withdrew from military operations in which he had done
nothing but mischief; and Diebitsch, a Prussian by birth and training, was
placed at the head of the army, untrammelled by the sovereign presence or
counsels which had hampered his predecessor. The intention of the new
commander was to cross the Balkans as soon as Silistria should have fallen,
without waiting for the capture of Shumla. In pursuance of this design the
fleet was despatched early in the spring of 1829 to seize a port beyond the
mountain-range. Diebitsch then placed a corps in front of Silistria, and
made his preparations for the southward march; but before any progress had
been made in the siege the Turks themselves took the field. Reschid Pasha,
now Grand Vizier, moved eastwards from Shumla at the beginning of May
against the weak Russian contingent that still lay in winter quarters
between that place and Varna. The superiority of his force promised him
an easy victory; but after winning some unimportant successes, and
advancing to a considerable distance from his stronghold, he allowed
himself to be held at bay until Diebitsch, with the army of the Danube,
was ready to fall upon his rear. The errors of the Turks had given to the
Russian commander, who hastened across Bulgaria on hearing of his
colleague's peril, the choice of destroying their army, or of seizing
Shumla by a _coup-de-main_. Diebitsch determined upon attacking his
enemy in the open field, and on the 10th of June Reschid's army, attempting
to regain the roads to Shumla, was put to total rout at Kulewtscha. A
fortnight later Silistria surrendered, and Diebitsch, reinforced by the
troops that had besieged that fortress, was now able to commence his
march across the Balkans.

[Crossing of the Balkans, July, 1829.]

Rumour magnified into hundreds of thousands the scanty columns which for
the first time carried the Russian flag over the Balkan range. Resistance
everywhere collapsed. The mountains were crossed without difficulty, and on
the 19th of August the invaders appeared before Adrianople, which
immediately surrendered. Putting on the boldest countenance in order to
conceal his real weakness, Diebitsch now struck out right and left, and
sent detachments both to the Euxine and the Aegean coast. The fleet
co-operated with him, and the ports of the Black Sea, almost as far south
as the Bosphorus, fell into the invaders' hands. The centre of the army
began to march upon Constantinople. If the Sultan had known the real
numbers of the force which threatened his capital, a force not exceeding
twenty thousand men, he would probably have recognised that his assailant's
position was a more dangerous one than his own. Diebitsch had advanced into
the heart of the enemy's country with a mere handful of men. Sickness was
daily thinning his ranks; his troops were dispersed over a wide area from
sea to sea; and the warlike tribes of Albania threatened to fall upon his
communications from the west. For a moment the Sultan spoke of fighting
upon the walls of Constantinople; but the fear of rebellion within his own
capital, the discovery of conspiracies, and the disasters sustained by his
arms in Asia, where Kars and Erzeroum had fallen into the enemy's hands,
soon led him to make overtures of peace and to accept the moderate terms
which the Russian Government, aware of its own difficulties, was willing to
grant. It would have been folly for the Czar to stimulate the growing
suspicion of England and to court the attack of Austria by prolonging
hostilities; and although King Charles X. and the French Cabinet, reverting
to the ideas of Tilsit, proposed a partition of the Ottoman Empire, and a
general re-arrangement of the map of Europe which would have given Belgium
and the Palatinate to France, the plan was originated too late to produce
any effect. [379] Russia had everything to lose and nothing to gain by a
European war. It had reduced Turkey to submission, and might fairly hope to
maintain its ascendency at Constantinople during coming years without
making any of those great territorial changes which would have given its
rivals a pretext for intervening on the Sultan's behalf. Under the guise of
a generous forbearance the Czar extricated himself from a dangerous
position with credit and advantage. As much had been won as could be
maintained without hazard; and on the 14th of September peace was concluded
in Adrianople.

[Treaty of Adrianople, Sept. 14, 1829.]

The Treaty of Adrianople gave Russia a slight increase of territory in
Asia, incorporating with the Czar's dominions the ports of Anapa and Poti
on the eastern coast of the Black Sea; but its most important provisions
were those which confirmed and extended the Protectorate exercised by the
Czar over the Danubian Principalities, and guaranteed the commercial rights
of Russian subjects throughout the Ottoman Empire both by land and sea. In
order more effectively to exclude the Sultan's influence from Wallachia and
Moldavia, the office of Hospodar, hitherto tenable for seven years, was now
made an appointment for life, and the Sultan specifically engaged to permit
no interference on the part of his neighbouring Pashas with the affairs of
these provinces. No fortified point was to be retained by the Turks on the
left bank of the Danube; no Mussulman was to be permitted to reside within
the Principalities; and those possessing landed estates there were to sell
them within eighteen months. The Porte pledged itself never again to detain
Russian ships of commerce coming from the Black Sea, and acknowledged that
such an act would amount to an infraction of treaties justifying Russia in
having recourse to reprisals. The Straits of Constantinople and the
Dardanelles were declared free and open to the merchant ships of all Powers
at peace with the Porte, upon the same conditions which were stipulated for
vessels under the Russian flag. The same freedom of trade and navigation
was recognised within the Black Sea. All treaties and conventions hitherto
concluded between Turkey and Russia were recognised as in force, except in
so far as modified by the present agreement. The Porte further gave its
adhesion to the Treaty of London relating to Greece, and to an Act entered
into by the Allied Powers in March, 1829, for regulating the Greek
frontier. An indemnity in money was declared to be owing to Russia; and as
the amount of this remained to be fixed by mutual agreement, the means were
still left open to the Russian Government for exercising a gentle pressure
at Constantinople, or for rewarding the compliance of the conquered. [380]

[Capodistrias elected President of Greece, April, 1827.]

The war between Turkey and Russia, while it left the European frontier
between the belligerents unchanged, exercised a two-fold influence upon the
settlement of Greece. On the one hand, by exciting the fears and suspicions
of Great Britain, it caused the Government of our own country, under the
Duke of Wellington, to insist on the limitation of the Greek State to the
narrowest possible area; [381] on the other hand, by reducing Turkey itself
almost to the condition of a Russian dependency, it led to the abandonment
of the desire to maintain the Sultan's supremacy in any form over the
emancipated provinces, and resulted in the establishment of an absolutely
independent Hellenic kingdom. An important change had taken place within
Greece itself just at the time when the allied Powers determined upon
intervention. The parts of the local leaders were played out, and in April,
1827, Capodistrias, ex-Minister of Russia, was elected President for seven
years. Capodistrias accepted the call. He was then, as he had been
throughout the insurrection, at a distance from Greece; and before making
his way thither, he visited the principal Courts of Europe, with the view
of ascertaining what moral or financial support he should be likely to
receive from them. His interview with the Czar Nicholas led to a clear
statement by that sovereign of the conditions which he expected
Capodistrias, in return for Russia's continued friendship, to fulfil.
Greece was to be rescued from revolution: in other words, personal was to
be substituted for popular government. The State was to remain tributary to
the Sultan: that is, in both Greece and Turkey the door was to be kept open
for Russia's interference. Whether Capodistrias had any intention of
fulfilling the latter condition is doubtful. His love for Greece and his
own personal ambition prevented his regard for Russia, strong though this
might be, from making him the mere instrument of the Court of St.
Petersburg; and while outwardly acquiescing in the Czar's decision that
Greece should remain a tributary State, he probably resolved from the first
to aim at establishing its complete independence. With regard to the Czar's
demand that the system of local self-government should be superseded within
Greece itself by one of autocratic rule, Capodistrias was in harmony with
his patron. He had been the Minister of a centralised despotism himself.
His experience was wholly that of the official of an absolute sovereign;
and although Capodistrias had represented the more liberal tendencies of
the Russian Court when it was a question of arguing against Metternich
about the complete or the partial restoration of despotic rule in Italy, he
had no real acquaintance and no real sympathy with the action of free
institutions, and moved in the same circle of ideas as the autocratic
reformers of the eighteenth century, of whom Joseph II. was the type. [382]

[The Protocols of Nov., 1828, and March, 1829.]

The Turks were still masters of the Morea when Capodistrias reached Greece.
The battle of Navarino had not caused Ibrahim to relax his hold upon the
fortresses, and it was deemed necessary by the Allies to send a French
army-corps to dislodge him from his position. This expeditionary force,
under General Maison, landed in Greece in the summer of 1828, and Ibrahim,
not wishing to fight to the bitter end, contented himself with burning
Tripolitza to the ground and sowing it with salt, and then withdrew. The
war between Turkey and Russia had now begun. Capodistrias assisted the
Russian fleet in blockading the Dardanelles, and thereby gained for himself
the marked ill-will of the British Government. At a conference held in
London by the representatives of France, England, and Russia, in November,
1828, it was resolved that the operations of the Allies should be limited
to the Morea and the islands. Capodistrias, in consequence of this
decision, took the most vigorous measures for continuing the war against
Turkey. What the allies refused to guarantee must be won by force of arms;
and during the winter of 1829, while Russia pressed upon Turkey from the
Danube, Capodistrias succeeded in reconquering Missolonghi and the whole
tract of country immediately to the north of the Gulf of Corinth. The
Porte, in prolonging its resistance after the November conference, played
as usual into its enemy's hands. The negotiations at London were resumed in
a spirit somewhat more favourable to Greece, and a Protocol was signed on
the 22nd of March, 1829, extending the northern frontier of Greece up to a
line drawn from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo. Greece, according to
this Protocol, was still to remain under the Sultan's suzerainty: its ruler
was to be a hereditary prince belonging to one of the reigning European
families, but not to any of the three allied Courts. [383]

[Leopold accepts the Greek Crown, Feb., 1830.]

The mediation of Great Britain was now offered to the Porte upon the terms
thus laid down, and for the fourteenth time its mediation was rejected. But
the end was near at hand. Diebitsch crossed the Balkans, and it was in vain
that the Sultan then proposed the terms which he had scouted in November.
The Treaty of Adrianople enforced the decisions of the March Protocol.
Greece escaped from a limitation of its frontier, which would have left
both Athens and Missolonghi Turkish territory. The principle of the
admission of the provinces north of the Gulf of Corinth within the Hellenic
State was established, and nothing remained for the friends of the Porte
but to cut down to the narrowest possible area the district which had been
loosely indicated in the London Protocol. While Russia, satisfied with its
own successes against the Ottoman Empire and anxious to play the part of
patron of the conquered, ceased to interest itself in Greece, the
Government of Great Britain contested every inch of territory proposed to
be ceded to the new State, and finally induced the Powers to agree upon a
boundary-line which did not even in letter fulfil the conditions of the
treaty. Northern Acarnania and part of AEtolia were severed from Greece,
and the frontier was drawn from the mouth of the rivor Achelous to a spot
near Thermopylae. On the other hand, as Russian influence now appeared to
be firmly established and likely to remain paramount at Constantinople, the
Western Powers had no motive to maintain the Sultan's supremacy over
Greece. This was accordingly by common consent abandoned; and the Hellenic
Kingdom, confined within miserably narrow limits on the mainland, and
including neither Crete nor Samos among its islands, was ultimately offered
in full sovereignty to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of
Charlotte, daughter of George IV. After some negotiations, in which Leopold
vainly asked for a better frontier, he accepted the Greek crown on the 11th
of February, 1830.

[Government of Capodistrias.]

In the meantime, Capodistrias was struggling hard to govern and to organise
according to his own conceptions a land in which every element of anarchy,
ruin, and confusion appeared to be arrayed against the restoration of
civilised life. The country was devastated, depopulated, and in some places
utterly barbarised. Out of a population of little more than a million, it
was reckoned that three hundred thousand had perished during the conflict
with the Turk. The whole fabric of political and social order had to be
erected anew; and, difficult as this task would have been for the wisest
ruler, it was rendered much more difficult by the conflict between
Capodistrias' own ideal and the character of the people among whom he had
to work. Communal or local self-government lay at the very root of Greek
nationality. In many different forms this intense provincialism had
maintained itself unimpaired up to the end of the war, in spite of national
assemblies and national armaments. The Hydriote ship-owners, the Primates
of the Morea, the guerilla leaders of the north, had each a type of life
and a body of institutions as distinct as the dialects which they spoke or
the saints whom they cherished in their local sanctuaries. If antagonistic
in some respects to national unity, this vigorous local life had
nevertheless been a source of national energy while Greece had still its
independence to win; and now that national independence was won, it might
well have been made the basis of a popular and effective system of
self-government. But to Capodistrias, as to greater men of that age, the
unity of the State meant the uniformity of all its parts; and, shutting his
eyes to all the obstacles in his path, he set himself to create an
administrative system as rigorously centralised as that which France had
received from Napoleon. Conscious of his own intellectual superiority over
his countrymen, conscious of his own integrity and of the sacrifice of all
his personal wealth in his country's service, he put no measure on his
expressions of scorn for the freebooters and peculators whom he believed to
make up the Greek official world, and he both acted and spoke as if, in the
literal sense of the words, all who ever came before him were thieves and
robbers. The peasants of the mainland, who had suffered scarcely less from
Klephts and Primates than from Turks, welcomed Capodistrias' levelling
despotism, and to the end his name was popular among them; but among the
classes which had supplied the leaders in the long struggle for
independence, and especially among the ship-owners of the Archipelago, who
felt the contempt expressed by Capodistrias for their seven years' efforts
to be grossly unjust, a spirit of opposition arose which soon made it
evident that Capodistrias would need better instruments than those which he
had around him to carry out his task of remodelling Greece.

[Leopold renounces the crown, May, 1830.]

It was in the midst of this growing antagonism that the news reached
Capodistrias that Leopold of Saxe-Coburg had been appointed King of Greece.
The resolution made by the Powers in March, 1829, that the sovereign of
Greece should belong to some reigning house, had perhaps not wholly
destroyed the hopes of Capodistrias that he might become Prince or Hospodar
of Greece himself. There were difficulties in the way of filling the
throne, and these difficulties, after the appointment of Leopold,
Capodistrias certainly did not seek to lessen. His subtlety, his command of
the indirect methods of effecting a purpose, were so great and so habitual
to him that there was little chance of his taking any overt step for
preventing Leopold's accession to the crown; there appears, however, to be
evidence that he repressed the indications of assent which the Greeks
attempted to offer to Leopold; and a series of letters written by him to
that prince was probably intended, though in the most guarded language, to
give Leopold the impression that the task which awaited him was a hopeless
one. Leopold himself, at the very time when he accepted the crown, was
wavering in his purpose. He saw with perfect clearness that the territory
granted to the Greek State was too small to secure either its peace or its
independence. The severance of Acarnania and Northern AEtolia meant the
abandonment of the most energetic part of the Greek inland population, and
a probable state of incessant warfare upon the northern frontier; the
relinquishment of Crete meant that Greece, bankrupt as it was, must
maintain a navy to protect the south coast of the Morea from Turkish
attack. These considerations had been urged upon the Powers by Leopold
before he accepted the crown, and he had been induced for the moment to
withdraw them. But he had never fully acquiesced in the arrangements
imposed upon him: he remained irresolute for some months; and at last,
whether led to this decision by the letters of Capodistrias or by some
other influences, he declared the conditions under which he was called upon
to rule Greece to be intolerable, and renounced the crown (May, 1830).
[384]

[Government and death of Capodistrias.]

Capodistrias thus found himself delivered from his rival, and again face to
face with the task to which duty or ambition called him. The candidature of
Leopold had embittered the relations between Capodistrias and all who
confronted him in Greece, for it gave him the means of measuring their
hostility to himself by the fervour of their addresses to this unknown
foreigner. A dark shadow fell over his government. As difficulties
thickened and resistance grew everywhere more determined, the President
showed himself harsher and less scrupulous in the choice of his means. The
men about him were untrustworthy; to crush them, he filled the offices of
government with relatives and creatures of his own who were at once
tyrannous and incapable. Thwarted and checked, he met opposition by
imprisonment and measures of violence, suspended the law-courts, and
introduced the espionage and the police-system of St. Petersburg. At length
armed rebellion broke out, and while Miaoulis, the Hydriote admiral, blew
up the best ships of the Greek navy to prevent them falling into the
President's hands, the wild district of Maina, which had never admitted the
Turkish tax-gatherer, refused to pay taxes to the Hellenic State. The
revolt was summarily quelled by Capodistrias, and several members of the
family of Mauromichalis, including the chief Petrobei, formerly feudal
ruler of Maina, were arrested. Some personal insult, imaginary or real, was
moreover offered by Capodistrias to this fallen foe, after the aged mother
of Petrobei, who had lost sixty-four kinsmen in the war against the Turks,
had begged for his release. The vendetta of the Maina was aroused. A son
and a nephew of Petrobei laid wait for the President, and as he entered the
Church of St. Spiridion at Nauplia on the 9th of October, 1831, a
pistol-shot and a blow from a yataghan laid him dead on the ground. He had
been warned that his life was sought, but had refused to make any change in
his habits, or to allow himself to be attended by a guard.

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