their national religion; the destitute, because they could not fail to

improve their prospects by adhering to the privileged faith. Even the

surviving organization of the Church had only been spared by the Ottoman

Government in order to facilitate its own political system--by bringing

the peasant, through the hierarchy of priest, bishop, and patriarch, under

the moral control of the new Moslem master whom the ecclesiastics

henceforth served.



The scale on which wholesale apostasy was possible is shown by the case of

Krete, which was conquered by the Turks from Venice just after these two

centuries had closed, and was in fact the last permanent addition to the

Turkish Empire. No urban or feudal settlers of Turkish blood were imported

into the island. To this day the uniform speech of all Kretans is their

native Greek. And yet the progressive conversion of whole clans and

villages had transferred at least 20 per cent. of the population to the

Moslem ranks before the Ottoman connexion was severed again in 1897.



The survival of the Greek nationality did not depend on any efforts of the

Greeks themselves. They were indeed no longer capable of effort, but lay

passive under the hand of the Turk, like the paralysed quarry of some

beast of prey. Their fate was conditional upon the development of the

Ottoman state, and, as the two centuries drew to a close, that state

entered upon a phase of transformation and of consequent weakness.



The Ottoman organism has always displayed (and never more conspicuously

than at the present moment) a much greater stability and vitality than any

of its oriental predecessors. There was a vein of genius in its creators,

and its youthful expansion permeated it with so much European blood that

it became partly Europeanized in its inner tissues--sufficiently to

partake, at any rate, in that faculty of indefinite organic growth which

has so far revealed itself in European life. This acquired force has

carried it on since the time when the impetus of its original institutions

became spent--a time when purely oriental monarchies fall to pieces, and

when Turkey herself hesitated between reconstruction and dissolution. That

critical period began for her with the latter half of the seventeenth

century, and incidentally opened new opportunities of life to her subject

Greeks.



Substantial relief from their burdens--the primary though negative

condition of national revival--accrued to the Greek peasantry from the

decay of Ottoman militarism in all its branches. The Turkish feudal

aristocracy, which had replaced the landed nobility of the Romaic Empire

in Anatolia and established itself on the choicest lands in conquered

Europe, was beginning to decline in strength. We have seen that it failed

to implant itself in Krete, and its numbers were already stationary

elsewhere. The Greek peasant slowly began to regain ground upon his Moslem

lord, and he profited further by the degeneration of the janissary corps

at the heart of the empire.



The janissaries had started as a militant, almost monastic body, condemned

to celibacy, and recruited exclusively from the Christian

tribute-children. But in 1566 they extorted the privilege of legal

marriage for themselves, and of admittance into the corps for the sons of

their wedlock. The next century completed their transformation from a

standing army into a hereditary urban militia--an armed and privileged

bourgeoisie, rapidly increasing in numbers and correspondingly jealous

of extraneous candidates for the coveted vacancies in their ranks. They

gradually succeeded in abolishing the enrolment of Christian recruits

altogether, and the last regular levy of children for that purpose was

made in 1676. Vested interests at Constantinople had freed the helpless

peasant from the most crushing burden of all.



At the same moment the contemporary tendency in western Europe towards

bureaucratic centralization began to extend itself to the Ottoman Empire.

Its exponents were the brothers Achmet and Mustapha Koeprili, who held the

grand-vizierate in succession. They laid the foundations of a centralized

administration, and, since the unadaptable Turk offered no promising

material for their policy, they sought their instruments in the subject

race. The continental Greeks were too effectively crushed to aspire beyond

the preservation of their own existence; but the islands had been less

sorely tried, and Khios, which had enjoyed over two centuries[1] of

prosperity under the rule of a Genoese chartered company, and exchanged it

for Ottoman sovereignty under peculiarly lenient conditions, could still

supply Achmet a century later with officials of the intelligence and

education he required, Khiots were the first to fill the new offices of

'Dragoman of the Porte' (secretary of state) and 'Dragoman of the Fleet'

(civil complement of the Turkish capitan-pasha); and they took care in

their turn to staff the subordinate posts of their administration with a

host of pushing friends and dependants. The Dragoman of the Fleet wielded

the fiscal, and thereby in effect the political, authority over the Greek

islands in the Aegean; but this was not the highest power to which the new

Greek bureaucracy attained. Towards the beginning of the eighteenth

century Moldavia and Wallachia--the two 'Danubian Provinces' now united in

the kingdom of Rumania--were placed in charge of Greek officials with the

rank of voivode or prince, and with practically sovereign power within

their delegated dominions. A Danubian principality became the reward of a

successful dragoman's career, and these high posts were rapidly

monopolized by a close ring of official families, who exercised their

immense patronage in favour of their race, and congregated round the Greek

patriarch in the 'Phanari',[2] the Constantinopolitan slum assigned him

for his residence by Mohammed the Conqueror.



[Footnote 1: 1346-1566.]



[Footnote 2: 'Lighthouse-quarter.']



The alliance of this parvenu 'Phanariot' aristocracy with the conservative

Orthodox Church was not unnatural, for the Church itself had greatly

extended its political power under Ottoman suzerainty. The Ottoman

Government hardly regarded its Christian subjects as integral members of

the state, and was content to leave their civil government in the hands of

their spiritual pastors to an extent the Romaic emperors would never have

tolerated. It allowed the Patriarchate at Constantinople to become its

official intermediary with the Greek race, and it further extended the

Greek patriarch's authority over the other conquered populations of

Orthodox faith--Bulgars, Rumans, and Serbs--which had never been

incorporated in the ecclesiastical or political organization of the Romaic

Empire, but which learnt under Ottoman rule to receive their priests and

bishops from the Greek ecclesiastics of the capital, and even to call

themselves by the Romaic name. In 1691 Mustapha Koeprili recognized and

confirmed the rights of all Christian subjects of the Sultan by a general

organic law.



Mustapha's 'New Ordinance' was dictated by the reverses which Christians

beyond the frontier were inflicting upon the Ottoman arms, for pressure

from without had followed hard upon disintegration within. Achmet's

pyrrhic triumph over Candia in 1669 was followed in 1683 by his brother

Mustapha's disastrous discomfiture before the walls of Vienna, and these

two sieges marked the turn of the Ottoman tide. The ebb was slow, yet the

ascendancy henceforth lay with Turkey's Christian neighbours, and they

began to cut short her frontiers on every side.



The Venetians had never lost hold upon the 'Ionian' chain of islands--

Corfu, Cefalonia, Zante, and Cerigo--which flank the western coast of

Greece, and in 1685 they embarked on an offensive on the mainland, which

won them undisputed possession of Peloponnesos for twenty years.[1] Venice

was far nearer than Turkey to her dissolution, and spent the last spasm of

her energy on this ephemeral conquest. Yet she had maintained the contact

of the Greek race with western Europe during the two centuries of despair,

and the interlude of her rule in Peloponnesos was a fitting culmination to

her work; for, brief though it was, it effectively broke the Ottoman

tradition, and left behind it a system of communal self-government among

the Peloponnesian Greeks which the returning Turk was too feeble to sweep

away. The Turks gained nothing by the rapid downfall of Venice, for

Austria as rapidly stepped into her place, and pressed with fresh vigour

the attack from the north-west. North-eastward, too, a new enemy had

arisen in Russia, which had been reorganized towards the turn of the

century by Peter the Great with a radical energy undreamed of by any

Turkish Koeprili, and which found its destiny in opposition to the Ottoman

Empire. The new Orthodox power regarded itself as the heir of the Romaic

Empire from which it had received its first Christianity and culture. It

aspired to repay the Romaic race in adversity by championing it against

its Moslem oppressors, and sought its own reward in a maritime outlet on

the Black Sea. From the beginning of the eighteenth century Russia

repeatedly made war on Turkey, either with or without the co-operation of

Austria; but the decisive bout in the struggle was the war of 1769-74. A

Russian fleet appeared in the Mediterranean, raised an insurrection in

Peloponnesos, and destroyed the Turkish squadron in battle. The Russian

armies were still more successful on the steppes, and the Treaty of

Kutchuk Kainardji not only left the whole north coast of the Black Sea in

Russia's possession, but contained an international sanction for the

rights of the sultan's Orthodox subjects. In 1783 a supplementary

commercial treaty extorted for the Ottoman Greeks the right to trade under

the Russian flag. The territorial sovereignty of Turkey in the Aegean

remained intact, but the Russian guarantee gave the Greek race a more

substantial security than the shadowy ordinance of Mustapha Koeprili. The

paralysing prestige of the Porte was broken, and Greek eyes were

henceforth turned in hope towards Petersburg.



[Footnote 1: 1699-1718.]



By the end of the eighteenth century the condition of the Greeks had in

fact changed remarkably for the better, and the French and English

travellers who now began to visit the Ottoman Empire brought away the

impression that a critical change in its internal equilibrium was at hand.

The Napoleonic wars had just extinguished the Venetian Republic and swept

the Ionian Islands into the struggle between England and France for the

mastery of the Mediterranean. England had fortified herself in Cefalonia

and Zante, France in Corfu, and interest centred on the opposite mainland,

where Ali Pasha of Yannina maintained a formidable neutrality towards

either power.



The career of Ali marked that phase in the decline of an Oriental empire

when the task of strong government becomes too difficult for the central

authority and is carried on by independent satraps with greater efficiency

in their more limited sphere. Ali governed the Adriatic hinterland with

practically sovereign power, and compelled the sultan for some years to

invest his sons with the pashaliks of Thessaly and Peloponnesos. The

greater part of the Greek race thus came in some degree under his control,

and his policy towards it clearly reflected the transition from the old to

the new. He waged far more effective war than the distant sultan upon

local liberties, and, though the elimination of the feudal Turkish

landowner was pure gain to the Greeks, they suffered themselves from the

loss of traditional privileges which the original Ottoman conquest had

left intact. The Armatoli, a local Christian militia who kept order in the

mountainous mainland north of Peloponnesos where Turkish feudatories were

rare, were either dispersed by Ali or enrolled in his regular army. And he

was ruthless in the extermination of recalcitrant communities, like

Agrapha on the Aspropotarno, which had never been inscribed on the

taxation-rolls of the Romaic or the Ottoman treasury, or Suli, a robber

clan ensconced in the mountains Immediately west of Ali's capital. On the

other hand, the administration of these pacified and consolidated

dominions became as essentially Greek in character as the Phanariot regime

beyond the Danube. Ali was a Moslem and an Albanian, but the Orthodox

Greeks were in a majority among his subjects, and he knew how to take

advantage of their abilities. His business was conducted by Greek

secretaries in the Greek tongue, and Yannina, his capital, was a Greek

city. European visitors to Yannina (for every one began the Levantine tour

by paying his respects to Ali) were struck by the enterprise and

intelligence of its citizens. The doctors were competent, because they had

taken their education in Italy or France; the merchants were prosperous,

because they had established members of their family at Odessa, Trieste,

or even Hamburg, as permanent agents of their firm. A new Greek

bourgeoisie had arisen, in close contact with the professional life of

western Europe, and equally responsive to the new philosophical and

political ideas that were being propagated by the French Revolution.



This intellectual ferment was the most striking change of all. Since the

sack of Constantinople in 1204, Greek culture had retired into the

monasteries--inaccessible fastnesses where the monks lived much the same

life as the clansmen of Suli or Agrapha. Megaspelaion, the great cave

quarried in the wall of a precipitous Peloponnesian ravine; Meteora,

suspended on half a dozen isolated pinnacles of rock in Thessaly, where

the only access was by pulley or rope-ladder; 'Ayon Oros', the

confederation of monasteries great and small upon the mountain-promontory

of Athos--these succeeded in preserving a shadow of the old tradition, at

the cost of isolation from all humane influences that might have kept

their spiritual inheritance alive. Their spirit was mediaeval,

ecclesiastical, and as barren as their sheltering rocks; and the new

intellectual disciples of Europe turned to the monasteries in vain. The

biggest ruin on Athos is a boys' school planned in the eighteenth century

to meet the educational needs of all the Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire,

and wrecked on the reefs of monastic obscurantism. But its founder, the

Corfiot scholar Evyenios Voulgaris, did not hesitate to break with the

past. He put his own educational ideas into practice at Yannina and

Constantinople, and contributed to the great achievement of his

contemporary, the Khiot Adhamandios Korais, who settled in Paris and there

evolved a literary adaptation of the Romaic patois to supersede the

lifeless travesty of Attic style traditionally affected by ecclesiastical

penmen. But the renaissance was not confined to Greeks abroad. The school

on Athos failed, but others established themselves before the close of the

eighteenth century in the people's midst, even in the smaller towns and

the remoter villages. The still flourishing secondary school of

Dhimitzana, in the heart of Peloponnesos, began its existence in this

period, and the national revival found expression in a new name. Its

prophets repudiated the 'Romaic' name, with its associations of ignorance

and oppression, and taught their pupils to think of themselves as

'Hellenes' and to claim in their own right the intellectual and political

liberty of the Ancient Greeks.



This spiritual 'Hellenism', however, was only one manifestation of

returning vitality, and was ultimately due to the concrete economic

development with which it went hand in hand. The Greeks, who had found

culture in western Europe, had come there for trade, and their commercial

no less than their intellectual activity reacted in a penetrating way upon

their countrymen at home. A mountain village like Ambelakia in Thessaly

found a regular market for its dyed goods in Germany, and the commercial

treaty of 1783 between Turkey and Russia encouraged communities which

could make nothing of the land to turn their attention to the sea.

Galaxhidi, a village on the northern shore of the Korinthian Gulf, whose

only asset was its natural harbour, and Hydhra, Spetza, and Psara, three

barren little islands in the Aegean, had begun to lay the foundations of a

merchant marine, when Napoleon's boycott and the British blockade, which

left no neutral flag but the Ottoman in the Mediterranean, presented the

Greek shipmen that sailed under it with an opportunity they exploited to

the full. The whitewashed houses of solid stone, rising tier above tier up

the naked limestone mountainside, still testify to the prosperity which

chance thus suddenly brought to the Hydhriots and their fellow islanders,

and did not withdraw again till it had enabled them to play a decisive

part in their nation's history.



Their ships were small, but they were home-built, skilfully navigated, and

profitably employed in the carrying trade of the Mediterranean ports.

Their economic life was based on co-operation, for the sailors, as well as

the captain and owner of the ship, who were generally the same person,

took shares in the outlay and profit of each voyage; but their political

organization was oligarchical--an executive council elected by and from

the owners of the shipping. Feud and intrigue were rife between family and

family, class and class, and between the native community and the resident

aliens, without seriously affecting the vigour and enterprise of the

commonwealth as a whole. These seafaring islands on the eve of the modern

Greek Revolution were an exact reproduction of the Aigina, Korinth, and

Athens which repelled the Persian from Ancient Greece. The germs of a new

national life were thus springing up among the Greeks in every direction--

in mercantile colonies scattered over the world from Odessa to Alexandria

and from Smyrna to Trieste; among Phanariot princes in the Danubian

Provinces and their ecclesiastical colleagues at Constantinople; in the

islands of the Aegean and the Ionian chain, and upon the mountains of Suli

and Agrapha. But the ambitions this national revival aroused were even

greater than the reality itself. The leaders of the movement did not

merely aspire to liberate the Greek nation from the Turkish yoke. They

were conscious of the assimilative power their nationality possessed. The

Suliots, for example, were an immigrant Albanian tribe, who had learnt to

speak Greek from the Greek peasants over whom they tyrannized. The

Hydhriot and Spetziot islanders were Albanians too, who had even clung to

their primitive language during the two generations since they took up

their present abode, but had become none the less firmly linked to their

Greek-speaking neighbours in Peloponnesos by their common fellowship in

the Orthodox Church. The numerous Albanian colonies settled up and down

the Greek continent were at least as Greek in feeling as they. And why

should not the same prove true of the Bulgarian population, in the

Balkans, who had belonged from the beginning to the Orthodox Church, and

had latterly been brought by improvident Ottoman policy within the Greek

patriarch's fold? Or why should not the Greek administrators beyond the

Danube imbue their Ruman subjects with a sound Hellenic sentiment? In

fact, the prophets of Hellenism did not so much desire to extricate the

Greek nation from the Ottoman Empire as to make it the ruling element in

the empire itself by ejecting the Moslem Turks from their privileged

position and assimilating all populations of Orthodox faith. These dreams

took shape in the foundation of a secret society--the 'Philiki Hetairia'

or 'League of Friends'--which established itself at Odessa in 1814 with

the connivence of the Russian police, and opened a campaign of propaganda

in anticipation of an opportunity to strike.



The initiative came from the Ottoman Government itself. At the weakest

moment in its history the empire found in Sultan Mahmud a ruler of

peculiar strength, who saw that the only hope of overcoming his dangers

lay in meeting them half-way. The national movement of Hellenism was

gathering momentum in the background, but it was screened by the personal

ambitions of Ali of Yannina, and Mahmud reckoned to forestall both enemies

by quickly striking Ali down.



In the winter of 1819-20 Ali was outlawed, and in the spring the invasion

of his territories began. Both the Moslem combatants enlisted Christian

Armatoli, and all continental Greece was under arms. By the end of the

summer Ali's outlying strongholds had fallen, his armies were driven in,

and he himself was closely invested in Yannina; but with autumn a deadlock

set in, and the sultan's reckoning was thrown out. In November 1820 the

veteran soldier Khurshid was appointed to the pashalik of Peloponnesos to

hold the Greeks in check and close accounts with Ali. In March 1821, after

five months spent in organizing his province, Khurshid felt secure enough

to leave it for the Yannina lines. But he was mistaken; for within a month

of his departure Peloponnesos was ablaze.



The 'Philiki Hetairia' had decided to act, and the Peloponnesians

responded enthusiastically to the signal. In the north Germanos,

metropolitan bishop of Patras, rallied the insurgents at the monastery of

Megaspelaion, and unfurled the monastic altar-cloth as a national

standard. In the south the peninsula of Maina, which had been the latest

refuge of ancient Hellenism, was now the first to welcome the new, and to

throw off the shadowy allegiance it had paid for a thousand years to

Romaic archonts and Ottoman capitan-pashas. Led by Petros Mavromichalis,

the chief of the leading clan, the Mainates issued from their mountains.

This was in April, and by the middle of May all the open country had been

swept clear, and the hosts joined hands before Tripolitza, which was the

seat of Ottoman government at the central point of the province. The

Turkish garrison attacked, but was heavily defeated at Valtetzi by the

tactical skill of Theodore Kolokotronis the 'klepht', who had become

experienced in guerrilla warfare through his alternate professions of

brigand and gendarme--a career that had increased its possibilities as

the Ottoman system decayed. After Kolokotronis's victory, the Greeks kept

Tripolitza under a close blockade. Early in October it fell amid frightful

scenes of pillage and massacre, and Ottoman dominion in the Peloponnesos

fell with it. On January 22, 1822, Korinth, the key to the isthmus, passed

into the Greeks' hands, and only four fortresses--Nauplia, Patras, Koron,

and Modhon--still held out within it against Greek investment. Not a Turk

survived in the Peloponnesos beyond their walls, for the slaughter at

Tripolitza was only the most terrible instance of what happened wherever a

Moslem colony was found. In Peloponnesos, at any rate, the revolution had

been grimly successful.



There had also been successes at sea. The merchant marine of the Greek

islands had suffered grievously from the fall of Napoleon and the

settlement at Vienna, which, by restoring normal conditions of trade, had

destroyed their abnormal monopoly. The revolution offered new

opportunities for profitable venture, and in April 1821 Hydhra, Spetza and

Psara hastened to send a privateering fleet to sea. As soon as the fleet

crossed the Aegean, Samos rid itself of the Turks. At the beginning of

June the rickety Ottoman squadron issued from the Dardanelles, but it was

chased back by the islanders under the lee of Mitylini. Memories of

Russian naval tactics in 1770 led the Psariots to experiment in

fire-ships, and one of the two Turkish ships of the line fell a victim to

this attack. Within a week of setting sail, the diminished Turkish

squadron was back again in the Dardanelles, and the islanders were left

with the command of the sea.



The general Christian revolution thus seemed fairly launched, and in the

first panic the threatened Moslems began reprisals of an equally general

kind. In the larger Turkish cities there were massacres of Christian

minorities, and the Government lent countenance to them by murdering its

own principal Christian official Gregorios, the Greek patriarch at

Constantinople, on April 22, 1821. But Sultan Mahmud quickly recovered

himself. He saw that his empire could not survive a racial war, and

determined to prevent the present revolt from assuming such a character.

His plan was to localize it by stamping out the more distant sparks with

all his energy, before concentrating his force at leisure upon the main

conflagration.



This policy was justified by the event. On March 6 the 'Philiki Hetairia'

at Odessa had opened its own operations in grandiose style by sending a

filibustering expedition across the Russo-Turkish frontier under command

of Prince Alexander Hypsilantis, a Phanariot in the Russian service.

Hypsilantis played for a general revolt of the Ruman population in the

Danubian Principalities and a declaration of war against Turkey on the

part of Russia. But the Rumans had no desire to assist the Greek

bureaucrats who oppressed them, and the Tsar Alexander had been converted

by the experiences of 1812-13 to a pacifistic respect for the status

quo. Prince Hypsilantis was driven ignominiously to internment across the

Austrian frontier, little more than a hundred days after his expedition

began; and his fiasco assured the Ottoman Government of two encouraging

facts--that the revolution would not carry away the whole Orthodox

population but would at any rate confine itself to the Greeks; and that

the struggle against it would be fought out for the present, at least,

without foreign intervention.



In the other direction, however, rebellion was spreading northward from

Peloponnesos to continental Greece. Galaxidhi revolted in April, and was

followed in June by Mesolonghi--a prosperous town of fishermen,

impregnably situated in the midst of the lagoons at the mouth of the

Aspropotamo, beyond the narrows of the Korinthian Gulf. By the end of the

month, north-western Greece was free as far as the outposts of Khurshid

Pasha beyond the Gulf of Arta.



Further eastward, again, in the mountains between the Gulf of Korinth and

the river Elladha (Sperkheios), the Armatoli of Ali's faction had held

their ground, and gladly joined the revolution on the initiative of their

captains Dhiakos and Odhyssevs. But the movement found its limits. The

Turkish garrison of Athens obstinately held out during the winter of

1821-2, and the Moslems of Negrepont (Euboia) maintained their mastery in

the island. In Agrapha they likewise held their own, and, after one

severely punished raid, the Agraphiot Armatoli were induced to re-enter

the sultan's service on liberal terms. The Vlachs in the gorges of the

Aspropotamo were pacified with equal success; and Dramali, Khurshid's

lieutenant, who guarded the communications between the army investing

Yannina and its base at Constantinople, was easily able to crush all

symptoms of revolt in Thessaly from his head-quarters at Larissa. Still

further east, the autonomous Greek villages on the mountainous

promontories of Khalkidhiki had revolted in May, in conjunction with the

well-supplied and massively fortified monasteries of the 'Ayon Oros'; but

the Pasha of Salonika called down the South Slavonic Moslem landowners

from the interior, sacked the villages, and amnestied the monastic

confederation on condition of establishing a Turkish garrison in their

midst and confiscating their arms. The monks' compliance was assisted by

the excommunication under which the new patriarch at Constantinople had

placed all the insurgents by the sultan's command.



The movement was thus successfully localised on the European continent,

and further afield it was still more easily cut short. After the

withdrawal of the Turkish squadron, the Greek fleet had to look on at the

systematic destruction of Kydhonies,[1] a flourishing Greek industrial

town on the mainland opposite Mitylini which had been founded under the

sultan's auspices only forty years before. All that the islanders could do

was to take off the survivors in their boats; and when they dispersed to

their ports in autumn, the Ottoman ships came out again from the

Dardanelles, sailed round Peloponnesos into the Korinthian Gulf, and

destroyed Galaxidhi. A still greater catastrophe followed the reopening of

naval operations next spring. In March 1822 the Samians landed a force on

Khios and besieged the Turkish garrison, which was relieved after three

weeks by the arrival of the Ottoman fleet. A month later the Greek fleet

likewise appeared on the scene, and on June 18 a Psariot captain,

Constantine Kanaris, actually destroyed the Ottoman flag-ship by a daring

fire-ship attack. Upon this the Ottoman fleet fled back as usual to the

Dardanelles; yet the only consequence was the complete devastation, in

revenge, of helpless Khios. The long-shielded prosperity of the island was

remorselessly destroyed, the people were either enslaved or massacred, and

the victorious fleet had to stand by as passively this time as at the

destruction of Kydhonies the season before. In the following summer,

again, the same fate befell Trikeri, a maritime community on the Gulf of

Volo which had gained its freedom when the rest of Thessaly stirred in

vain; and so in 1823 the revolution found itself confined on sea, as well

as on land, to the focus where it had originated in April 1821.



[Footnote 1: Turkish Aivali.]



This isolation was a practical triumph for Sultan Mahmud. The maintenance

of the Ottoman Empire on the basis of Moslem ascendancy was thereby

assured; but it remained to be seen whether the isolated area could now be

restored to the status quo in which the rest of his dominions had been

retained.



During the whole season of 1821 the army of Khurshid had been held before

Yannina. But in February 1822 Yannina fell, Ali was slain, his treasure

seized, and his troops disbanded. The Ottoman forces were liberated for a

counterattack on Peloponnesos. Already in April Khurshid broke up his camp

at Larissa, and his lieutenant Dramali was given command of the new

expedition towards the south. He crossed the Sperkheios at the beginning

of July with an army of twenty thousand men.[1] Athens had capitulated to

Odhyssevs ten days before; but it had kept open the road for Dramali, and

north-eastern Greece fell without resistance into his hands. The citadel

of Korinth surrendered as tamely as the open country, and he was master of

the isthmus before the end of the month. Nauplia meanwhile had been

treating with its besiegers for terms, and would have surrendered to the

Greeks already if they had not driven their bargain so hard. Dramali

hurried on southward into the plain to the fortress's relief, raised the

siege, occupied the town of Argos, and scattered the Greek forces into the

hills. But the citadel of Argos held out against him, and the positions

were rapidly reversed. Under the experienced direction of Kolokotronis,

the Greeks from their hill-fastnesses ringed round the plain of Argos and

scaled up every issue. Dramali's supplies ran out. An attempt of his

vanguard to break through again towards the north was bloodily repulsed,

and he barely succeeded two days later in extricating the main body in a

demoralized condition, with the loss of all his baggage-train. The Turkish

army melted away, Dramali was happy to die at Korinth, and Khurshid was

executed by the sultan's command. The invasion of Peloponnesos had broken

down, and nothing could avert the fall of Nauplia. The Ottoman fleet

hovered for one September week in the offing, but Kanaris's fire-ships

took another ship of the line in toll at the roadsteads of Tenedos before

it safely regained the Dardanelles. The garrison of Nauplia capitulated in

December, on condition of personal security and liberty, and the captain

of a British frigate, which arrived on the spot, took measures that the

compact should be observed instead of being broken by the customary

massacre. But the strongest fortress in Peloponnesos was now in Greek

hands.



[Footnote 1: Including a strong contingent of Moslem Slavs--Bulgarian

Pomaks from the Aegean hinterland and Serbian Bosniaks from the Adriatic.]



In the north-west the season had not passed so well. When the Turks

invested Ali in Yannina, they repatriated the Suliot exiles in their

native mountains. But a strong sultan was just as formidable to the

Suliots as a strong pasha, so they swelled their ranks by enfranchising

their peasant-serfs, and made common cause with their old enemy in his

adversity. Now that Ali was destroyed, the Suliots found themselves in a

precarious position, and turned to the Greeks for aid. But on July 16 the

Greek advance was checked by a severe defeat at Petta in the plain of

Arta. In September the Suliots evacuated their impregnable fortresses in

return for a subsidy and a safe-conduct, and Omer Vrioni, the Ottoman

commander in the west,[1] was free to advance in turn towards the south.

On November 6 he actually laid siege to Mesolonghi, but here his

experiences were as discomfiting as Dramali's. He could not keep open his

communications, and after heavy losses retreated again to Arta in January

1823.



[Footnote 1: He was a renegade officer of Ali's.]



In 1823 the struggle seemed to be lapsing into stalemate. The liberated

Peloponnesos had failed to propagate the revolution through the remainder

of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Government had equally failed to

reconquer the Peloponnesos by military invasion. This season's operations

only seemed to emphasize the deadlock. The Ottoman commander in the west

raised an auxiliary force of Moslem and Catholic clansmen from northern

Albania, and attempted to reach Mesolonghi once more. But he penetrated no

further than Anatolikon--the Mesolonghiots' outpost village at the head of

the lagoons--and the campaign was only memorable for the heroic death of

Marko Botzaris the Suliot in a night attack upon the Ottoman camp. At sea,

the two fleets indulged in desultory cruises without an encounter, for the

Turks were still timid and incompetent, while the growing insubordination

and dissension on the Greek ships made concerted action there, too,

impossible. By the end of the season it was clear that the struggle could

only definitively be decided by the intervention of a third party on one

side or the other--unless the Greeks brought their own ruin upon

themselves.



This indeed was not unlikely to happen; for the new house of Hellenism had

hardly arisen before it became desperately divided against itself. The

vitality of the national movement resided entirely in the local communes.

It was they that had found the fighting men, kept them armed and supplied,

and by spontaneous co-operation expelled the Turk from Peloponnesos. But

if the co-operation was to be permanent it must have a central

organization, and with the erection of this superstructure the troubles

began. As early as June 1821 a 'Peloponnesian Senate' was constituted and

at once monopolized by the 'Primates', the propertied class that had been

responsible for the communal taxes under the Romaic and Ottoman regimes

and was allowed to control the communal government in return. About the

same time two Phanariot princes threw in their lot with the revolution--

Alexander Mavrokordatos and Demetrius, the more estimable brother of the

futile Alexander Hypsilantis. Both were saturated with the most recent

European political theory, and they committed the peasants and seamen of

the liberated districts to an ambitious constitutionalism. In December

1821 a 'National Assembly' met at Epidauros, passed an elaborate organic

law, and elected Mavrokordatos first president of the Hellenic Republic.



The struggle for life and death in 1822 had staved off the internal

crisis, but the Peloponnesian Senate remained obstinately recalcitrant

towards the National Government in defence of its own vested interests;

and the insubordination of the fleet in 1823 was of one piece with the

political faction which broke out as soon as the immediate danger from

without was removed.



Towards the end of 1823 European 'Philhellenes' began to arrive in Greece.

In those dark days of reaction that followed Waterloo, self-liberated

Hellas seemed the one bright spot on the continent; but the idealists who

came to offer her their services were confronted with a sorry spectacle.

The people were indifferent to their leaders, and the leaders at variance

among themselves. The gentlemanly Phanariots had fallen into the

background. Mavrokordatos only retained influence in north-western Greece.

In Peloponnesos the Primates were all-powerful, and Kolokotronis the

klepht was meditating a popular dictatorship at their expense. In the

north-east the adventurer Odhyssevs had won a virtual dictatorship

already, and was suspected of intrigue with the Turks; and all this

factious dissension rankled into civil war as soon as the contraction of a

loan in Great Britain had invested the political control of the Hellenic

Republic with a prospective value in cash. The first civil war was fought

between Kolokotronis on the one side and the Primates of Hydhra and

Peloponnesos on the other; but the issue was decided against Kolokotronis

by the adhesion to the coalition of Kolettis the Vlach, once physician to

Mukhtar Pasha, the son of Ali, and now political agent for all the

northern Armatoli in the national service. The fighting lasted from

November 1823 to June 1824, and was followed by another outbreak in

November of the latter year, when the victors quarrelled over the spoils,

and the Primates were worsted in turn by the islanders and the Armatoli.

The nonentity Kondouriottis of Hydhra finally emerged as President of

Greece, with the sharp-witted Kolettis as his principal wire-puller, but

the disturbances did not cease till the last instalment of the loan had

been received and squandered and there was no more spoil to fight for.



Meanwhile, Sultan Mahmud had been better employed. Resolved to avert

stalemate by the only possible means, he had applied in the course of 1823

to Mohammed Ali Pasha of Egypt, a more formidable, though more distant,

satrap than Ali of Yannina himself. Mohammed Ali had a standing army and

navy organized on the European model. He had also a son Ibrahim, who knew

how to manoeuvre them, and was ambitious of a kingdom. Mahmud hired the

father's troops and the son's generalship for the re-conquest of

Peloponnesos, under engagement to invest Ibrahim with the pashalik as soon

as he should effectively make it his own. By this stroke of diplomacy a

potential rebel was turned into a willing ally, and the preparations for

the Egyptian expedition went forward busily through the winter of 1823-4.



The plan of campaign was systematically carried out. During the season of

respite the Greek islanders had harried the coasts and commerce of

Anatolia and Syria at will. The first task was to deprive them of their

outposts in the Aegean, and an advanced squadron of the Egyptian fleet

accordingly destroyed the community of Kasos in June 1824, while the

Ottoman squadron sallied out of the Dardanelles a month later and dealt

out equal measure to Psara. The two main flotillas then effected a

junction off Rhodes; and, though the crippled Greek fleet still ventured

pluckily to confront them, it could not prevent Ibrahim from casting

anchor safely in Soudha Bay and landing his army to winter in Krete. In

February 1825 he transferred these troops with equal impunity to the

fortress of Modhon, which was still held for the sultan by an Ottoman

garrison. The fire-ships of Hydhra came to harry his fleet too late, and

on land the Greek forces were impotent against his trained soldiers. The

Government in vain promoted Kolokotronis from captivity to

commandership-in-chief. The whole south-western half of Peloponnesos

passed into Ibrahim's hands, and in June 1825 he even penetrated as far as

the mills of Lerna on the eastern coast, a few miles south of Argos

itself.



At the same time the Ottoman army of the west moved south again under a

new commander, Rashid Pasha of Yannina, and laid final siege on April 27

to Mesolonghi, just a year after Byron had died of fever within its walls.

The Greeks were magnificent in their defence of these frail mud-bastions,

and they more than held their own in the amphibious warfare of the

lagoons. The struggle was chequered by the continual coming and going of

the Greek and Ottoman fleets. They were indeed the decisive factor; for

without the supporting squadron Rashid would have found himself in the

same straits as his predecessors at the approach of autumn, while the

slackness of the islanders in keeping the sea allowed Mesolonghi to be

isolated in January 1826. The rest was accomplished by the arrival of

Ibrahim on the scene. His heavy batteries opened fire in February; his

gunboats secured command of the lagoons, and forced Anatolikon to

capitulate in March. In April provisions in Mesolonghi itself gave out,

and, scorning surrender, the garrison--men, women, and children together--

made a general sortie on the night of April 22. Four thousand fell, three

thousand were taken, and two thousand won through. It was a glorious end

for Mesolonghi, but it left the enemy in possession of all north-western

Greece.



The situation was going from bad to worse. Ibrahim returned to

Peloponnesos, and steadily pushed forward his front, ravaging as steadily

as he went. Rashid, after pacifying the north-west, moved on to the

north-eastern districts, where the national cause had been shaken by the

final treachery and speedy assassination of Odhyssevs. Siege was laid to

Athens in June, and the Greek Government enlisted in vain the military

experience of its Philhellenes. Fabvier held the Akropolis, but

Generalissimo Sir Richard Church was heavily defeated in the spring of

1827 in an attempt to relieve him from the Attic coast; Grand Admiral

Cochrane saw his fleet sail home for want of payment in advance, when he

summoned it for review at Poros; and Karaiskakis, the Greek captain of

Armatoli, was killed in a skirmish during his more successful efforts to

harass Rashid's communications by land. On June 5, 1827, the Greek

garrison of the Akropolis marched out on terms.



It looked as if the Greek effort after independence would be completely

crushed, and as if Sultan Mahmud would succeed in getting his empire under

control. In September 1826 he had rid it at last of the mischief at its

centre by blowing up the janissaries in their barracks at Constantinople.

Turkey seemed almost to have weathered the storm when she was suddenly

overborne by further intervention on the other side.



Tsar Alexander, the vaccillator, died in November 1825, and was succeeded

by his son Nicholas I, as strong a character and as active a will as

Sultan Mahmud himself. Nicholas approached the Greek question without any

disinclination towards a Turkish war; and both Great Britain and France

found an immediate interest in removing a ground of provocation which

might lead to such a rude disturbance of the European 'Balance of Power'.

On July 6, 1827, a month after Athens surrendered, the three powers

concluded a treaty for the pacification of Greece, in which they bound

over both belligerent parties to accept an armistice under pain of

military coercion. An allied squadron appeared off Navarino Bay to enforce

this policy upon the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet which lay united there,

and the intrusion of the allied admirals into the bay itself precipitated

on October 20 a violent naval battle in which the Moslem flotilla was

destroyed. The die was cast; and in April 1828 the Russian and Ottoman

Governments drifted into a formal war, which brought Russian armies across

the Danube as far as Adrianople, and set the Ottoman Empire at bay for the

defence of its capital. Thanks to Mahmud's reorganization, the empire did

not succumb to this assault; but it had no more strength to spare for the

subjugation of Greece. The Greeks had no longer to reckon with the sultan

as a military factor; and in August 1828 they wore relieved of Ibrahim's

presence as well, by the disembarkation of 14,000 French troops in

Peloponnesos to superintend the withdrawal of the Egyptian forces. In

March 1829 the three powers delimited the Greek frontier. The line ran

east and west from the Gulf of Volo to the Gulf of Arta, and assigned to

the new state no more and no less territory than the districts that had

effectively asserted their independence against the sultan in 1821. This

settlement was the only one possible under the circumstances; but it was

essentially transitory, for it neglected the natural line of nationality

altogether, and left a numerical majority of the Greek race, as well as

the most important centres of its life, under the old regime of servitude.



Even the liberated area was not at the end of its troubles. In the spring

of 1827, when they committed themselves into the hands of their foreign

patrons, the Greeks had found a new president for the republic in John

Kapodistrias, an intimate of Alexander the tsar. Kapodistrias was a

Corfiote count, with a Venetian education and a career in the Russian

diplomatic service, and no one could have been more fantastically

unsuitable for the task of reconstructing the country to which he was

called. Kapodistrias' ideal was the fin-de-siecle 'police-state'; but

'official circles' did not exist in Greece, and he had no acquaintance

with the peasants and sailors whom he hoped to redeem by bureaucracy. He

instituted a hierarchically centralized administration which made the

abortive constitution of Mavrokordatos seem sober by comparison; he

trampled on the liberty of the rising press, which was the most hopeful

educational influence in the country; and he created superfluous

ministerial portfolios for his untalented brothers. In fact he reglamented

Greece from his palace at Aigina like a divinely appointed autocrat, from

his arrival in January 1828 till the summer of 1831, when he provoked the

Hydhriots to open rebellion, and commissioned the Russian squadron in

attendance to quell them by a naval action, with the result that Poros was

sacked by the President's regular army and the national fleet was

completely destroyed. After that, he attempted to rule as a military

dictator, and fell foul of the Mavromichalis of Maina. The Mainates knew

better how to deal with the 'police-state' than the Hydhriots; and on

October 9, 1831, Kapodistrias was assassinated in Nauplia, at the church

door, by two representatives of the Mavromichalis clan.



The country lapsed into utter anarchy. Peloponnesians and Armatoli,

Kolokotronists and Kolettists, alternately appointed and deposed

subservient national assemblies and governing commissions by naked

violence, which culminated in a gratuitous and disastrous attack upon the

French troops stationed in Peloponnesos for their common protection. The

three powers realized that it was idle to liberate Greece from Ottoman

government unless they found her another in its place. They decided on

monarchy, and offered the crown, in February 1832, to Prince Otto, a

younger son of the King of Bavaria. The negotiations dragged on many

months longer than Greece could afford to wait. But in July 1832 the

sultan recognized the sovereign independence of the kingdom of Hellas in

consideration of a cash indemnity; and in February 1833, just a year after

the first overtures had been made, the appointed king arrived at Nauplia

with a decorative Bavarian staff and a substantial loan from the allies.