Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions--The Greek Church--Communal
System--The Ægæan Islands--The Phanariots--Greek Intellectual Revival;
Koraes--Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece with the
French Revolution and Napoleon--The Hetæria Philike--Hypsilanti's Attempt
in the Danubian Provinces; its Failure--Revolt of the Morea: Massacres:
Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople--Attitude of
Russia, Austria, and England--Extension of the Revolt: Affairs at
Hydra--The Greek Leaders--Fall of Tripolitza--The Massacre of Chios--
Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822--Dissensions of the
Greeks--Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid--Ibrahim conquers Crete and
invades the Morea--Siege of Missolonghi--Philhellenism in Europe--Russian
Proposal for Intervention--Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander:
Accession of Nicholas--Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg--
Anglo-Russian Protocol--Treaty between England, Russia, and France--Death
of Canning--Navarino--War between Russia and Turkey--Campaigns of 1828 and
1829--Treaty of Adrianople--Capodistrias President of Greece--Leopold
accepts and then declines the Greek Crown--Murder of Capodistrias--Otho,
King of Greece.
[Greece in the Napoleonic age.]
Of the Christian races which at the beginning of the third decade of this
century peopled the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the Greek was
that which had been least visibly affected by the political and military
events of the Napoleonic age. Servia, after a long struggle, had in the
year 1817 gained local autonomy under its own princes, although Turkish
troops still garrisoned its fortresses, and the sovereignty of the Sultan
was acknowledged by the payment of tribute. The Romanic districts,
Wallachia and Moldavia, which, in the famous interview of Tilsit, Napoleon
had bidden the Czar to make his own, were restored by Russia to the Porte
in the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, but under conditions which virtually
established a Russian protectorate. Greece, with the exception of the
Ionian Islands, had neither been the scene of any military operations, nor
formed the subject of any treaty. Yet the age of the French Revolution and
of the Napoleonic wars had silently wrought in the Greek nation the last of
a great series of changes which fitted it to take its place among the free
peoples of Europe. The signs were there from which those who could read the
future might have gathered that the political resurrection of Greece was
near at hand. There were some who, with equal insight and patriotism,
sought during this period to lay the intellectual foundation for that
national independence which they foresaw that their children would win with
the sword.
[Greece in the eighteenth century.]
The forward movement of the Greek nation may be said, in general terms, to
have become visible during the first half of the eighteenth century.
Serfage had then disappeared; the peasant was either a free-holder, or a
farmer paying a rent in kind for his land. In the gradual and unobserved
emancipation of the labouring class the first condition of national revival
had already been fulfilled. The peasantry had been formed which, when the
conflict with the Turk broke out, bore the brunt of the long struggle. In
comparison with the Prussian serf, the Greek cultivator at the beginning of
the eighteenth century was an independent man: in comparison with the
English labourer, he was well fed and well housed. The evils to which the
Greek population was exposed, wherever Greeks and Turks lived together,
were those which brutalised or degraded the Christian races in every
Ottoman province. There was no redress for injury inflicted by a Mohammedan
official or neighbour. If a wealthy Turk murdered a Greek in the fields,
burnt down his house, and outraged his family, there was no court where the
offender could be brought to justice. The term by which the Turk described
his Christian neighbour was "our rayah," that is, "our subject." A
Mohammedan landowner might terrorise the entire population around him,
carry off the women, flog and imprison the men, and yet feel that he had
committed no offence against the law; for no law existed but the Koran, and
no Turkish court of justice but that of the Kadi, where the complaint of
the Christian passed for nothing.
This was the monstrous relation that existed between the dominant and the
subject nationalities, not in Greece only, but in every part of the Ottoman
Empire where Mohammedans and Christians inhabited the same districts. The
second great and general evil was the extortion practised by the
tax-gatherers, and this fell upon the poorer Mohammedans equally with the
Christians, except in regard to the poll-tax, or haratsch, the badge of
servitude, which was levied on Christians alone. All land paid tithe to the
State; and until the tax-gatherer had paid his visit it was not permitted
to the peasant to cut the ripe crop. This rule enabled the tax-gatherer,
whether a Mohammedan or a Christian, to inflict ruin upon those who did not
bribe himself or his masters; for by merely postponing his visit he could
destroy the value of the harvest. Round this central institution of tyranny
and waste, there gathered, except in the districts protected by municipal
privileges, every form of corruption natural to a society where the State
heard no appeals, and made no inquiry into the processes employed by those
to whom it sold the taxes. What was possible in the way of extortion was
best seen in the phenomenon of well-built villages being left tenantless,
and the population of rich districts dying out in a time of peace, without
pestilence, without insurrection, without any greater wrong on the part of
the Sultan's government than that normal indifference which permitted the
existence of a community to depend upon the moderation or the caprice of
the individual possessors of force.
[Origin of modern Greece Byzantine, not classic.]
[Slavonic and Albanian elements.]
Such was the framework, or, as it may be said, the common-law of the mixed
Turkish and Christian society of the Ottoman Empire. On this background we
have now to trace the social and political features which stood out in
Greek life, which preserved the race from losing its separate nationality,
and which made the ultimate recovery of its independence possible. In the
first outburst of sympathy and delight with which every generous heart in
western Europe hailed the standard of Hellenic freedom upraised in 1821,
the twenty centuries which separated the Greece of literature from the
Greece of to-day were strangely forgotten. The imagination went straight
back to Socrates and Leonidas, and pictured in the islander or the hillsman
who rose against Mahmud II. the counterpart of those glorious beings who
gave to Europe the ideals of intellectual energy, of plastic beauty, and of
poetic truth. The illusion was a happy one, if it excited on behalf of a
brave people an interest which Servia or Montenegro might have failed to
gain; but it led to a reaction when disappointments came; it gave
inordinate importance to the question of the physical descent of the
Greeks; and it produced a false impression of the causes which had led up
to the war of independence, and of the qualities, the habits, the bonds of
union, which exercised the greatest power over the nation. These were, to a
great extent, unlike anything existing in the ancient world; they had
originated in Byzantine, not in classic Greece; and where the scenes of old
Hellenic history appeared to be repeating themselves, it was due more to
the continuing influence of the same seas and the same mountains than to
the survival of any political fragments of the past. The Greek population
had received a strong Slavonic infusion many centuries before. More
recently, Albanian settlers had expelled the inhabitants from certain
districts both in the mainland and in the Morea. Attica, Boeotia, Corinth,
and Argolis were at the outbreak of the war of independence peopled in the
main by a race of Albanian descent, who still used, along with some Greek,
the Albanian language. [349] The sense of a separate nationality was,
however, weak among these settlers, who, unlike some small Albanian
communities in the west of the Morea, were Christians, not Mohammedans.
Neighbourhood, commerce, identity of religion and similarity of local
institutions were turning these Albanians into Greeks; and no community of
pure Hellenic descent played a greater part in the national war, or
exhibited more of the maritime energy and daring which we associate
peculiarly with the Hellenic name, than the islanders of Hydra and Spetza,
who had crossed from the Albanian parts of the Morea and taken possession
of these desert rocks not a hundred years before. The same phenomenon of an
assimilation of Greeks and Albanians was seen in southern Epirus, the
border-ground between the two races. The Suliotes, Albanian mountaineers,
whose military exploits form one of the most extraordinary chapters in
history, showed signs of Greek influences before the Greek war of
independence began, and in this war they made no distinction between the
Greek cause and their own. Even the rule of the ferocious Ali Pasha at
Janina had been favourable to the extension of Greek civilisation in
Epirus. Under this Mohammedan tyrant Janina contained more schools than
Athens. The Greek population of the district increased; and in the sense of
a common religious antagonism to the Mohammedan, the Greek and the Albanian
Christians in Epirus forgot their difference of race.
[The Greek Church.]
[Lower clergy.]
[The Patriarch an imperial functionary.]
[The Bishops civil magistrates.]
The central element in modern Greek life was the religious profession of
the Orthodox Eastern Church. Where, as in parts of Crete, the Greek adopted
Mohammedanism, all the other elements of his nationality together did not
prevent him from amalgamating with the Turk. The sound and popular forces
of the Church belonged to the lower clergy, who, unlike the priests of the
Roman Church, were married and shared the life of the people. If ignorant
and bigoted, they were nevertheless the real guardians of national spirit;
and if their creed was a superstition rather than a religion, it at least
kept the Greeks in a wholesome antagonism to the superstition of their
masters. The higher clergy stood in many respects in a different position.
The Patriarch of Constantinople was a great officer of the Porte. His
dignities and his civil jurisdiction had been restored and even enlarged by
the Mohammedan conquerors of the Greek Empire, with the express object of
employing the Church as a means of securing obedience to themselves: and it
was quite in keeping with the history of this great office that, when the
Greek national insurrection at last broke out, the Patriarch Gregorius IV.
should have consented, though unwillingly, to launch the curse of the
Church against it. The Patriarch gained his office by purchase, or through
intrigues at the Divan; he paid an enormous annual backsheesh for it; and
he was liable to be murdered or deposed as soon as his Mussulman patrons
lost favour with the Sultan, or a higher bid was made for his office by a
rival ecclesiastic. To satisfy the claims of the Palace the Patriarch was
compelled to be an extortioner himself. The bishoprics in their turn were
sold in his ante-chambers, and the Bishops made up the purchase-money by
fleecing their clergy. But in spite of a deserved reputation for venality,
the Bishops in Greece exercised very great influence, both as ecclesiastics
and as civil magistrates. Whether their jurisdiction in lawsuits between
Christians arose from the custom of referring disputes to their arbitration
or was expressly granted to them by the Sultan, they virtually displaced in
all Greek communities the court of the Kadi, and afforded the merchant or
the farmer a tribunal where his own law was administered in his own
language. Even a Mohammedan in dispute with a Christian would sometimes
consent to bring the matter before the Bishops' Court rather than enforce
his right to obtain the dilatory and capricious decision of an Ottoman
judge.
[Communal organisation.]
[The Morea.]
The condition of the Greeks living in the country that now forms the
Hellenic Kingdom and in the Ægæan Islands exhibited strong local contrasts.
It was, however, common to all that, while the Turk held the powers of
State in his hand, the details of local administration in each district
were left to the inhabitants, the Turk caring nothing about these matters
so long as the due amount of taxes was paid and the due supply of sailors
provided. The apportionment of taxes among households and villages seems to
have been the germ of self-government from which several types of municipal
organisation, some of them of great importance in the history of the Greek
nation, developed. In the Paschalik of the Morea the taxes were usually
farmed by the Voivodes, or Beys, the Turkish governors of the twenty-three
provinces into which the Morea was divided. But in each village or township
the inhabitants elected officers called Proestoi, who, besides collecting
the taxes and managing the affairs of their own communities, met in a
district-assembly, and there determined what share of the district-taxation
each community should bear. One Greek officer, called Primate, and one
Mohammedan, called Ayan, were elected to represent the district, and to
take part in the council of the Pasha of the Morea, who resided at
Tripolitza. [350] The Primates exercised considerable power. Created
originally by the Porte to expedite the collection of the revenue, they
became a Greek aristocracy. They were indeed an aristocracy of no very
noble kind. Agents of a tyrannical master, they shared the vices of the
tyrant and of the slave. Often farmers of the taxes themselves, obsequious
and intriguing in the palace of the Pasha at Tripolitza, grasping and
despotic in their native districts, they were described as a species of
Christian Turk. But whatever their vices, they saved the Greeks from being
left without leaders. They formed a class accustomed to act in common,
conversant with details of administration, and especially with the
machinery for collecting and distributing supplies. It was this financial
experience of the Primates of the Morea which gave to the rebellion of the
Greeks what little unity of organisation it exhibited in its earliest
stage.
[Northern Greece. The Armatoli and the Klephts.]
On the north of the Gulf of Corinth the features of the communal system
were less distinct than in the Morea. There was, however, in the
mountain-country of Ætolia and Pindus a rough military organisation which
had done great service to Greece in keeping alive the national spirit and
habits of personal independence. The Turks had found a local militia
established in this wild region at the time of their conquest, and had not
interfered with it for some centuries. The Armatoli, or native soldiery,
recruited from peasants, shepherds, and muleteers, kept Mohammedan
influences at a distance, until, in the eighteenth century, the Sultans
made it a fixed rule of policy to diminish their numbers and to reduce the
power of their captains. Before 1820 the Armatoli had become comparatively
few and weak; but as they declined, bands of Klephts, or brigands, grew in
importance; and the mountaineer who was no longer allowed to practise arms
as a guardian of order, enlisted himself among the robbers. Like the
freebooters of our own northern border, these brigands became the heroes of
song. Though they plundered the Greek as well as the Mohammedan, the
national spirit approved their exploits. It was, no doubt, something, that
the physical energy of the marauder and the habit of encountering danger
should not be wholly on the side of the Turk and the Albanian. But the
influence of the Klephts in sustaining Greek nationality has been
overrated. They had but recently become numerous, and the earlier
organisation of the northern Armatoli was that to which the sound and
vigorous character of the Greek peasantry in these regions, the finest part
of the Greek race on the mainland, was really due. [351]
[The Ægæan Islands.]
[Chios.]
In the islands of the Ægæan the condition of the Greeks was on the whole
happy and prosperous. Some of these islands had no Turkish population; in
others the caprice of a Sultana, the goodwill of the Capitan Pasha who
governed the Archipelago, or the judicious offer of a sum of money when
money was wanted by the Porte, had so lightened the burden of Ottoman
sovereignty, that the Greek island-community possessed more liberty than
was to be found in any part of Europe, except Switzerland. The taxes
payable to the central government, including the haratsch or poll-tax
levied on all Christians, had often been commuted for a fixed sum, which
was raised without the interposition of the Turkish tax-gatherer. In Hydra,
Spetza, and Psara, the so-called nautical islands, the supremacy of the
Turk was felt only in the obligation to furnish sailors to the Ottoman
navy, and in the payment of a tribute of about £100 per annum. The
government of these three islands was entirely in the hands of the
inhabitants. In Chios, though a considerable Mussulman population existed
by the side of the Greek, there was every sign of peace and prosperity.
Each island bore its own peculiar social character, and had its municipal
institutions of more or less value. The Hydriote was quarrelsome,
turbulent, quick to use the knife, but outspoken, honest in dealing, and an
excellent sailor. The picture of Chian life, as drawn even by those who
have judged the Greeks most severely, is one of singular beauty and
interest; the picture of a self-governing society in which the family
trained the citizen in its own bosom, and in which, while commerce enriched
all, the industry of the poor within their homes and in their gardens was
refined by the practice of an art. The skill which gave its value to the
embroidery and to the dyes of Chios was exercised by those who also worked
the hand-loom and cultivated the mastic and the rose. The taste and the
labour of man requited nature's gifts of sky, soil, and sea; and in the
pursuit of occupations which stimulated, not deadened, the faculties of the
worker, idleness and intemperance were alike unknown. [352] How bright a
scene of industry, when compared with the grime and squalor of the English
factory-town, where the human and the inanimate machine grind out their
yearly mountains of iron-ware and calico, in order that the employer may
vie with his neighbours in soulless ostentation, and the workman consume
his millions upon millions in drink.
[The Greeks have ecclesiastical power in other Turkish provinces.]
The territory where the Greeks formed the great majority of the population
included, beyond the boundaries of the present Hellenic Kingdom, the
islands adjacent to the coast of Asia Minor, Crete, and the Chalcidic
peninsula in Macedonia. But the activity of the race was not confined
within these limits. If the Greek was a subject in his own country, he was
master in the lands of some of his neighbours. A Greek might exercise power
over other Christian subjects of the Porte either as an ecclesiastic, or as
the delegate of the Sultan in certain fixed branches of the administration.
The authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople was recognised over the
whole of the European provinces of Turkey, except Servia. The Bishops in
all these provinces were Greeks; the services of the Church were conducted
in the Greek tongue; the revenues of the greater part of the Church-lands,
and the fees of all the ecclesiastical courts, went into Greek pockets. In
things religious, and in that wide range of civil affairs which in
communities belonging to the Eastern Church appertains to the higher
religious office, the Greeks had in fact regained the ascendancy which they
had possessed under the Byzantine Empire. The dream of the Churchman was
not the creation of an independent kingdom of Greece, but the restoration
of the Eastern Empire under Greek supremacy. When it was seen that the Slav
and the Rouman came to the Greek for law, for commercial training, for
religious teaching, and looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople as the
ultimate judge of all disputes, it was natural that the belief should arise
that, when the Turk passed away, the Greek would step into his place. But
the influence of the Greeks, great as it appeared to be, did not in reality
reach below the surface, except in Epirus. The bishops were felt to be
foreigners and extortioners. There was no real process of assimilation at
work, either in Bulgaria or in the Danubian Provinces. The slow and
plodding Bulgarian peasant, too stupid for the Greek to think of him as a
rival, preserved his own unchanging tastes and nationality, sang to his
children the songs which he had learnt from his parents, and forgot the
Greek which he had heard in the Church when he re-entered his home. [353]
In Roumania, the only feeling towards the Greek intruder was one of intense
hatred.
[The Phanariot officials of the Porte.]
[Greek Hospodars.]
Four great offices of the Ottoman Empire were always held by Greeks. These
were the offices of Dragoman, [354] or Secretary, of the Porte, Dragoman of
the Fleet, and the governorships, called Hospodariates, of Wallachia and
Moldavia. The varied business of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the
administration of its revenues, the conduct of its law-courts, had drawn a
multitude of pushing and well-educated Greeks to the quarter of
Constantinople called the Phanar, in which the palace of the Patriarch is
situated. Merchants and professional men inhabited the same district. These
Greeks of the capital, the so-called Phanariots, gradually made their way
into the Ottoman administration as Turkish energy declined, and the
conquering race found that it could no longer dispense with the weapons of
calculation and diplomacy. The Treaty of Carlowitz, made in 1699, after the
unsuccessful war in which the Turks laid siege to Vienna, was negotiated on
behalf of the Porte by Alexander Maurokordatos, a Chian by birth, who had
become physician to the Sultan and was virtually the Foreign Minister of
Turkey. His sons, Nicholas and Constantine, were made Hospodars of
Wallachia and Moldavia early in the eighteenth century; and from this time
forward, until the outbreak of the Greek insurrection, the governorships of
the Roumanian provinces were entrusted to Phanariot families. The result
was that a troop of Greek adventurers passed to the north of the Danube,
and seized upon every office of profit in these unfortunate lands. There
were indeed individuals among the Hospodars, especially among the
Maurokordati, who rendered good service to their Roumanian subjects; but on
the whole the Phanariot rule was grasping, dishonest, and cruel. [355] Its
importance in relation to Greece was not that it Hellenised the Danubian
countries, for that it signally failed to do; but that it raised the
standard of Greek education, and enlarged the range of Greek thought, by
opening a political and administrative career to ambitious men. The
connection of the Phanariots with education was indeed an exceedingly close
one. Alexander Maurokordatos was the ardent and generous founder of schools
for the instruction of his countrymen in Constantinople as well as in other
cities, and for the improvement of the existing language of Greece. His
example was freely followed throughout the eighteenth century. It is,
indeed, one of the best features in the Greek character that the owner of
wealth has so often been, and still so often is, the promoter of the
culture of his race. As in Germany in the last century, and in Hungary and
Bohemia at a more recent date, the national revival of Greece was preceded
by a striking revival of interest in the national language.
[Greek intellectual movement in the eighteenth century.]
The knowledge of ancient Greek was never wholly lost among the priesthood,
but it had become useless. Nothing was read but the ecclesiastic
commonplace of a pedantic age; and in the schools kept by the clergy before
the eighteenth century the ancient language was taught only as a means of
imparting divinity. The educational movement promoted by men like
Maurokordatos had a double end; it revived the knowledge of the great age
of Greece through its literature, and it taught the Greek to regard the
speech which he actually used not as a mere barbarous patois which each
district had made for itself, but as a language different indeed from that
of the ancient world, yet governed by its own laws, and capable of
performing the same functions as any other modern tongue. It was now that
the Greek learnt to call himself Hellen, the name of his forefathers,
instead of Romaios, a Roman. As the new schools grew up and the old ones
were renovated or transformed, education ceased to be merely literary. In
the second half of the eighteenth century science returned in a humble form
to the land that had given it birth, and the range of instruction was
widened by men who had studied law, physics, and moral philosophy at
foreign Universities. Something of the liberal spirit of the inquirers of
Western Europe arose among the best Greek teachers. Though no attack was
made upon the doctrines of the Church, and no direct attack was made upon
the authority of the Sultan, the duty of religious toleration was
proclaimed in a land where bigotry had hitherto reigned supreme, and the
political freedom of ancient Greece was held up as a glorious ideal to a
less happy age. Some of the higher clergy and of the Phanariot instruments
of Turkish rule took fright at the independent spirit of the new learning,
and for a while it seemed as if the intellectual as well as the political
progress of Greece might be endangered by ecclesiastical ill-will. But the
attachment of the Greek people to the Church was so strong and so universal
that, although satire might be directed against the Bishops, a breach with
the Church formed no part of the design of any patriot. The antagonism
between episcopal and national feeling, strongest about the end of the
eighteenth century, declined during succeeding years, and had almost
disappeared before the outbreak of the war of liberation.
[Koraes, 1748-1833.]
[The language of Modern Greece.]
The greatest scholar of modern Greece was also one of its greatest
patriots. Koraes, known as the legislator of the Greek language, was born
in 1748, of Chian parents settled at Smyrna. The love of learning, combined
with an extreme independence of character, made residence insupportable to
him in a land where the Turk was always within sight, and where few
opportunities existed for gaining wide knowledge. His parents permitted him
to spend some years at Amsterdam, where a branch of their business was
established. Recalled to Smyrna at the age of thirty, Koraes almost
abandoned human society. The hand of a beautiful heiress could not tempt
him from the austere and solitary life of the scholar; and quitting his
home, he passed through the medical school of Montpellier, and settled at
Paris. He was here when the French Revolution began. The inspiration of
that time gave to his vast learning and inborn energy a directly patriotic
aim. For forty years Koraes pursued the work of serving Greece by the means
open to the scholar. The political writings in which he addressed the
Greeks themselves or appealed to foreigners in favour of Greece, admirable
as they are, do not form the basis of his fame. The peculiar task of Koraes
was to give to the reviving Greek nation the national literature and the
form of expression which every civilised people reckons among its most
cherished bonds of unity. Master, down to the minutest details, of the
entire range of Greek writings, and of the history of the Greek language
from classical times down to our own century, Koraes was able to select the
Hellenic authors, Christian as well as Pagan, whose works were best suited
for his countrymen in their actual condition, and to illustrate them as no
one could who had not himself been born and bred among Greeks. This was one
side of Koraes' literary task. The other was to direct the language of the
future Hellenic kingdom into its true course. Classical writing was still
understood by the educated in Greece, but the spoken language of the people
was something widely different. Turkish and Albanian influences had
barbarised the vocabulary; centuries of ignorance had given play to every
natural irregularity of local dialect. When the restoration of Greek
independence came within view, there were some who proposed to revive
artificially each form used in the ancient language, and thus, without any
real blending, to add the old to the new: others, seeing this to be
impossible, desired that the common idiom, corrupt as it was, should be
accepted as a literary language. Koraes chose the middle and the rational
path. Taking the best written Greek of the day as his material, he
recommended that the forms of classical Greek, where they were not wholly
obsolete, should be fixed in the grammar of the language. While ridiculing
the attempt to restore modes of expression which, even in the written
language, had wholly passed out of use, he proposed to expunge all words
that were in fact not Greek at all, but foreign, and to replace them by
terms formed according to the natural laws of the language. The Greek,
therefore, which Koraes desired to see his countrymen recognise as their
language, and which he himself used in his writings, was the written Greek
of the most cultivated persons of his time, purged of its foreign elements,
and methodised by a constant reference to a classical model, which,
however, it was not to imitate pedantically. The correctness of this theory
has been proved by its complete success. The patois which, if it had been
recognised as the language of the Greek kingdom, would now have made
Herodotus and Plato foreign authors in Athens, is indeed still preserved in
familiar conversation, but it is little used in writing and not taught in
schools. A language year by year more closely approximating in its forms to
that of classical Greece unites the Greeks both with their past and among
themselves, and serves as the instrument of a widening Hellenic
civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. The political object of Koraes
has been completely attained. No people in Europe is now prouder of its
native tongue, or turns it to better account in education, than his
countrymen. In literature, the renovated language has still its work before
it. The lyric poetry that has been written in Greece since the time of
Koraes is not wanting, if a foreigner may express an opinion, in tenderness
and grace The writer who shall ennoble Greek prose with the energy and
directness of the ancient style has yet to arise [356]
[Development of Greek commerce, 1750-1820.]
[The Treaty of Kainardji, 1774.]
The intellectual advance of the Greeks in the eighteenth century was
closely connected with the development of their commerce, and this in its
turn was connected with events in the greater cycle of European history. A
period of comparative peace and order in the Levantine waters, following
the final expulsion of the Venetians from the Morea in 1718, gave play to
the natural aptitude of the Greek islanders for coasting-trade. Then ships,
still small and unfit to venture on long voyages, plied between the
harbours in the Ægæan and in the Black Sea, and brought profit to their
owners in spite of the imposition of burdens from which not only many of
the Mussulman subjects of the Sultan, but foreign nations protected by
commercial treaties, were free. It was at this epoch, after Venice had lost
its commercial supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean, that Russia began to
exercise a direct influence upon the fortunes of Greece. The Empress
Catherine had formed the design of conquering Constantinople, and intended,
under the title of Protectress of the Christian Church, to use the Greeks
as her allies. In the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey in
1768, a Russian expeditionary force landed in the Morea, and the Greeks
were persuaded to take up arms. The Moreotes themselves paid dearly for the
trust which they had placed in the orthodox Empress. They were virtually
abandoned to the vengeance of their oppressors; but to Greece at large the
conditions on which peace was made proved of immense benefit. The Treaty of
Kainardji, signed in 1774, gave Russia the express right to make
representations at Constantinople on behalf of the Christian inhabitants of
the Danubian provinces; it also bound the Sultan to observe certain
conditions in his treatment of the Greek islanders. Out of these clauses,
Russian diplomacy constructed a general right of interference on behalf of
any Christian subjects of the Porte. The Treaty also opened the Black Sea
to Russian ships of commerce, and conferred upon Russia the commercial
privileges of the most favoured nation. [357] The result of this compact
was a very remarkable one. The Russian Government permitted hundreds of
Greek shipowners to hoist its own flag, and so changed the footing of Greek
merchantmen in every port of the Ottoman Empire. The burdens which had
placed the Greek trader at a disadvantage, when compared with the
Mohammedan, vanished. A host of Russian consular agents, often Greeks
themselves, was scattered over the Levant. Eager for opportunities of
attaching the Greeks to their Russian patrons, quick to make their
newly-won power felt by the Turks, these men extracted a definite meaning
from the clauses of the Treaty of Kainardji, by which the Porte had bound
itself to observe the rights of its Christian subjects. The sense of
security in the course of their business, no less than the emancipation
from commercial fetters, gave an immense impulse to Greek traders. Their
ships were enlarged; voyages, hitherto limited to the Levant, were extended
to England and even to America; and a considerable armament of cannon was
placed on board each ship for defence against the attack of Algerian
pirates.
[Foundation of Odessa, 1792.]
[Death of Rhegas, 1798.]
[Influence of the French Revolution on Greece.]
Before the end of the eighteenth century another war between Turkey and
Russia, resulting in the cession of the district of Oczakoff on the
northern shore of the Black Sea, made the Greeks both carriers and vendors
of the corn-export of Southern Russia. The city of Odessa was founded on
the ceded territory. The merchants who raised it to its sudden prosperity
were not Russians but Greeks; and in the course of a single generation many
a Greek trading-house, which had hitherto deemed the sum of £3,000 to be a
large capital, rose to an opulence little behind that of the great London
firms. Profiting by the neutrality of Turkey or its alliance with England
during a great part of the revolutionary war, the Greeks succeeded to much
of the Mediterranean trade that was lost by France and its dependencies.
The increasing intelligence of the people was shown in the fact that
foreigners were no longer employed by Greek merchants as their travelling
agents in distant countries; there were countrymen enough of their own who
could negotiate with an Englishman or a Dane in his own language. The
richest Greeks were no doubt those of Odessa and Salonica, not of Hellas
proper; but even the little islands of Hydra and Spetza, the refuge of the
Moreotes whom Catherine had forsaken in 1770, now became communities of no
small wealth and spirit. Psara, which was purely Greek, formed with these
Albanian colonies the nucleus of an Ægæan naval Power. The Ottoman
Government, cowed by its recent defeats, and perhaps glad to see the means
of increasing its resources, made no attempt to check the growth of the
Hellenic armed marine. Under the very eyes of the Sultan, the Hydriote and
Psarian captains, men as venturesome as the sea-kings of ancient Greece,
accumulated the artillery which was hereafter to hold its own against many
an Ottoman man-of-war, and to sweep the Turkish merchantmen from the
Ægæan. Eighteen years before the Greek insurrection broke out, Koraes,
calling the attention of Western Europe to the progress made by his
country, wrote the following significant words:--"If the Ottoman Government
could have foreseen that the Greeks would create a merchant-navy, composed
of several hundred vessels, most of them regularly armed, it would have
crushed the movement at its commencement. It is impossible to calculate the
effects which may result from the creation of this marine, or the influence
which it may exert both upon the destiny of the oppressed nation and upon
that of its oppressors." [358] Like its classic sisterland in the
Mediterranean, Greece was stirred by the far-sounding voices of the French
Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the revival of a supposed
antique Republicanism, the victories of Hoche and Bonaparte, successively
kindled the enthusiasm of a race already restless under the Turkish yoke.
France drew to itself some of the hopes that had hitherto been fixed
entirely upon Russia. Images and ideas of classic freedom invaded the
domain where the Church had hitherto been all in all; the very sailors
began to call their boats by the names of Spartan and Athenian heroes, as
well as by those of saints and martyrs. In 1797 Venice fell, and Bonaparte
seized its Greek possessions, the Ionian Islands. There was something of
the forms of liberation in the establishment of French rule; the
inhabitants of Zante were at least permitted to make a bonfire of the
stately wigs worn by their Venetian masters. Great changes seemed to be
near at hand. It was not yet understood that France fought for empire, not
for justice; and the man who, above all others, represented the early
spirit of the revolution among the Greeks, the poet Rhegas, looked to
Bonaparte to give the signal for the rising of the whole of the Christian
populations subject to Mohammedan rule. Rhegas, if he was not a wise
politician, was a thoroughly brave man, and he was able to serve his
country as a martyr. While engaged in Austria in conspiracies against the
Sultan's Government, and probably in intrigues with Bernadotte, French
ambassador at Vienna, he was arrested by the agents of Thugut, and handed
over to the Turks. He was put to death at Belgrade, with five of his
companions, in May, 1798. The songs of Rhegas soon passed through every
household in Greece. They were a precious treasure to his countrymen, and
they have immortalised his name as a patriot. But the work which he had
begun languished for a time after his death. The series of events which
followed Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt extinguished the hope of the
liberation of Greece by the French Republic. Among the higher Greek clergy
the alliance with the godless followers of Voltaire was seen with no
favourable eye. The Porte was even able to find a Christian Patriarch to
set his name to a pastoral, warning the faithful against the sin of
rebellion, and reminding them that, while Satan was creating the Lutherans
and Calvinists, the infinite mercy of God had raised up the Ottoman Power
in order that the Orthodox Church might be preserved pure from the heresies
of the West. [359]
[The Ionian Islands. 1798-1815.]
[Ali Pasha, 1798-1821.]
From the year 1798 down to the Peace of Paris, Greece was more affected by
the vicissitudes of the Ionian Islands and by the growth of dominion of Ali
Pasha in Albania than by the earlier revolutionary ideas. France was
deprived of its spoils by the combined Turkish and Russian fleets in the
coalition of 1799, and the Ionian Islands were made into a Republic under
the protection of the Czar and the Sultan. It was in the native
administration of Corfu that the career of Capodistrias began. At the peace
of Tilsit the Czar gave these islands back to Napoleon, and Capodistrias,
whose ability had gained general attention, accepted an invitation to enter
the Russian service. The islands were then successively beleaguered and
conquered by the English, with the exception of Corfu; and after the fall
of Napoleon they became a British dependency. Thus the three greatest
Powers of Europe were during the first years of this century in constant
rivalry on the east of the Adriatic, and a host of Greeks, some fugitives,
some adventurers, found employment among their armed forces. The most
famous chieftain in the war of liberation, Theodore Kolokotrones, a Klepht
of the Morea, was for some years major of a Greek regiment in the pay of
England. In the meantime Ali Pasha, on the neighbouring mainland, neither
rested himself nor allowed any of his neighbours to rest. The Suliotes,
vanquished after years of heroic defence, migrated in a body to the Ionian
Islands in 1804. Every Klepht and Armatole of the Epirote border had fought
at some time either for Ali or against him; for in the extension of his
violent and crafty rule Ali was a friend to-day and an enemy to-morrow
alike to Greek, Turk, and Albanian. When his power was at its height, Ali's
court at Janina was as much Greek as it was Mohammedan: soldiers,
merchants, professors, all, as it was said, with a longer or a shorter rope
round their necks, played their part in the society of the Epirote capital.
[360] Among the officers of Ali's army there were some who were soon to be
the military rivals of Kolokotrones in the Greek insurrection: Ali's
physician, Dr. Kolettes, was gaining an experience and an influence among
these men which afterwards placed him at the head of the Government. For
good or for evil, it was felt that the establishment of a virtually
independent kingdom of Albania must deeply affect the fate of Greece; and
when at length Ali openly defied the Sultan, and Turkish armies closed
round his castle at Janina, the conflict between the Porte and its most
powerful vassal gave the Greeks the signal to strike for their own
independence.
[The Hetæria Philike.]
The secret society, which under the name of Hetæria Philike, or association
of friends, inaugurated the rebellion of Greece, was founded in 1814, after
it had become clear that the Congress of Vienna would take no steps on
behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte. The founders of this society
were traders of Odessa, and its earliest members seem to have been drawn
more from the Greeks in Russia and in the Danubian provinces than from
those of Greece Proper. The object of the conspiracy was the expulsion of
the Turk from Europe, and the re-establishment of a Greek Eastern Empire.
It was pretended by the council of directors that the Emperor Alexander had
secretly joined them; and the ingenious fiction was circulated that a
society for the preservation of Greek antiquities, for which Capodistrias
had gained the patronage of the Czar and other eminent men at the Congress
of Vienna, was in fact this political association in disguise. The real
chiefs of the conspiracy always spoke of themselves as acting under the
instructions of a nameless superior power. They were as little troubled by
scruple in thus deceiving their followers as they were in planning a
general massacre of the Turks, and in murdering their own agents when they
wished to have them out of the way. The ultimate design of the Hetæria was
an unsound one, and its operations were based upon an imposture; but in
exciting the Greeks against Turkish rule, and in inspiring confidence in
its own resources and authority, it was completely successful. In the
course of six years every Greek of note, both in Greece itself and in the
adjacent countries, had joined the association. The Turkish Government had
received warnings of the danger which threatened it, but disregarded them
until revolt was on the point of breaking out. The very improvement in the
condition of the Christians, the absence of any crying oppression or
outrage in Greece during late years, probably lulled the anxieties of
Sultan Mahmud, who, terrible as he afterwards proved himself, had not
hitherto been without sympathy for the Rayah. But the history of France, no
less than the history of Greece, shows that it is not the excess, but the
sense, of wrong that produces revolution. A people may be so crushed by
oppression as to suffer all conceivable misery with patience. It is when
the pulse has again begun to beat strong, when the eye is fixed no longer
on the ground, and the knowledge of good and evil again burns in the heart,
that the right and the duty of resistance is felt.
[Capodistrias and Hypsilanti.]
Early in 1820 the ferment in Greece had become so general that the chiefs
of the Hetæria were compelled to seek at St. Petersburg for the Russian
leader who had as yet existed only in their imagination. There was no
dispute as to the person to whom the task of restoring the Eastern Empire
rightfully belonged. Capodistrias, at once a Greek and Foreign Minister of
Russia, stood in the front rank of European statesmen; he was known to love
the Greek cause; he was believed to possess the strong personal affection
of the Emperor Alexander. The deputies of the Hetæria besought him to place
himself at its head. Capodistrias, however, knew better than any other man
the force of those influences which would dissuade the Czar from assisting
Greece. He had himself published a pamphlet in the preceding year
recommending his countrymen to take no rash step; and, apart from all
personal considerations, he probably believed that he could serve Greece
better as Minister of Russia than by connecting himself with any dangerous
enterprise. He rejected the offers of the Hetærists, who then turned to a
soldier of some distinction in the Russian army, Prince Alexander
Hypsilanti, a Greek exile, whose grandfather, after governing Wallachia as
Hospodar, had been put to death by the Turks for complicity with the
designs of Rhegas. It is said that Capodistrias encouraged Hypsilanti to
attempt the task which he had himself declined, and that he allowed him to
believe that if Greece once rose in arms the assistance of Russia could not
long be withheld. [361] Hypsilanti, sacrificing his hopes of the recovery
of a great private fortune through the intercession of the Czar at
Constantinople, placed himself at the head of the Hetæria, and entered upon
a career, for which, with the exception of personal courage proved in the
campaigns against Napoleon, he seems to have possessed no single
qualification.
[The Herærist plan.]
In October, 1820, the leading Hetærists met in council at Ismail to decide
whether the insurrection against the Turk should begin in Greece itself or
in the Danubian provinces. Most of the Greek officers in the service of
Sutsos, the Hospodar of Moldavia, were ready to join the revolt. With the
exception of a few companies serving as police, there were no Turkish
soldiers north of the Danube, the Sultan having bound himself by the Treaty
of Bucharest to send no troops into the Principalities without the Czar's
consent. It does not appear that the Hetærists had yet formed any
calculation as to the probable action of the Roumanian people: they had
certainly no reason to believe that this race bore good-will to the Greeks,
or that it would make any effort to place a Greek upon the Sultan's throne.
The conspirators at Ismail were so far on the right track that they decided
that the outbreak should begin, not on the Danube, but in Peloponnesus.
Hypsilanti, however, full of the belief that Russia would support him,
reversed this conclusion, and determined to raise his standard in Moldavia.
[362] And now for the first time some account was taken of the Roumanian
population. It was known that the mass of the people groaned under the
feudal oppression of the Boyards, or landowners, and that the Boyards
themselves detested the government of the Greek Hospodars. A plan found
favour among Hypsilanti's advisers that the Wallachian peasantry should
first be called to arms by a native leader for the redress of their own
grievances, and that the Greeks should then step in and take control of the
insurrectionary movement. Theodor Wladimiresco, a Roumanian who had served
in the Russian army, was ready to raise the standard of revolt among his
countrymen. It did not occur to the Hetærists that Wladimiresco might have
a purpose of his own, or that the Roumanian population might prefer to see
the Greek adventure fail. No sovereign by divine right had a firmer belief
in his prerogative within his own dominions than Hypsilanti in his power to
command or outwit Roumanians, Slavs, and all other Christian subjects of
the Sultan.
[Hypsilanti in Roumania March, 1821.]
The feint of a native rising was planned and executed. In February, 1821,
while Hypsilanti waited on the Russian frontier, Wladimiresco proclaimed
the abolition of feudal services, and marched with a horde of peasants upon
Bucharest. On the 16th of March the Hetærists began their own insurrection
by a deed of blood that disgraced the Christian cause. Karavias, a
conspirator commanding the Greek troops of the Hospodar at Galatz, let
loose his soldiers and murdered every Turk who could be hunted down.
Hypsilanti crossed the Pruth next day, and appeared at Jassy with a few
hundred followers. A proclamation was published in which the Prince called
upon all Christian subjects of the Porte to rise, and declared that a great
European Power, meaning Russia, supported him in his enterprise. Sutsos,
the Hospodar, at once handed over all the apparatus of government, and
supplied the insurgents with a large sum of money. Two thousand armed men,
some of them regular troops, gathered round Hypsilanti at Jassy. The roads
to the Danube lay open before him; the resources of Moldavia were at his
disposal; and had he at once thrown a force into Galatz and Ibraila, he
might perhaps have made it difficult for Turkish troops to gain a footing
on the north of the Danube.
[The Czar disavows the movement.]
But the incapacity of the leader became evident from the moment when he
began his enterprise. He loitered for a week at Jassy, holding court and
conferring titles, and then, setting out for Bucharest, wasted three weeks
more upon the road. In the meantime the news of the insurrection, and of
the fraudulent use that had been made of his own name, reached the Czar,
who was now engaged at the Congress of Laibach. Alexander was at this
moment abandoning himself heart and soul to Metternich's reactionary
influence, and ordering his generals to make ready a hundred thousand men
to put down the revolution in Piedmont. He received with dismay a letter
from Hypsilanti invoking his aid in a rising which was first described in
the phrases of the Holy Alliance as the result of a divine inspiration, and
then exhibited as a master-work of secret societies and widespread
conspiracy. A stern answer was sent back. Hypsilanti was dismissed from the
Russian service; he was ordered to lay down his arms, and a manifesto was
published by the Russian Consul at Jassy declaring that the Czar repudiated
and condemned the enterprise with which his name had been connected. The
Patriarch of Constantinople, helpless in the presence of Sultan Mahmud, now
issued a ban of excommunication against the leader and all his followers.
Some weeks later the Congress of Laibach officially branded the Greek
revolt as a work of the same anarchical spirit which had produced the
revolutions of Italy and Spain. [363]
[The enterprise fails.]
The disavowal of the Hetærist enterprise by the Czar was fatal to its
success. Hypsilanti, indeed, put on a bold countenance and pretended that
the public utterances of the Russian Court were a mere blind, and in
contradiction to the private instructions given him by the Czar; but no one
believed him. The Roumanians, when they knew that aid was not coming from
Russia, held aloof, or treated insurgents as enemies. Turkish troops
crossed the Danube, and Hypsilanti fell back from Bucharest towards the
Austrian frontier. Wladimiresco followed him, not however to assist him in
his struggle, but to cut off his retreat and to betray him to the enemy. It
was in vain that the bravest of Hypsilanti's followers, Georgakis, a Greek
from Olympus, sought the Wallachian at his own headquarters, exposed his
treason to the Hetærist officers who surrounded him, and carried him, a
doomed man, to the Greek camp. Wladimiresco's death was soon avenged. The
Turks advanced. Hypsilanti was defeated in a series of encounters, and fled
ignobly from his followers, to seek a refuge, and to find a prison, in
Austria. Bands of his soldiers, forsaken by their leader, sold their lives
dearly in a hopeless struggle. At Skuleni, on the Pruth, a troop of four
hundred men refused to cross to Russian soil until they had given battle to
the enemy. Standing at bay, they met the onslaught of ten times their
number of pursuers. Georgakis, who had sworn that he would never fall alive
into the enemy's hands, kept his word. Surrounded by Turkish troops in the
tower of a monastery, he threw open the doors for those of his comrades who
could to escape, and then setting fire to a chest of powder, perished in
the explosion, together with his assailants.
[Revolt of Morea, April 2, 1891.]
The Hetærist invasion of the Principalities had ended in total failure, and
with it there passed away for ever the dream of re-establishing the Eastern
Empire under Greek ascendancy. But while this enterprise, planned in vain
reliance upon foreign aid and in blind assumption of leadership over an
alien race, collapsed through the indifference of a people to whom the
Greeks were known only as oppressors, that genuine uprising of the Greek
nation, which, in spite of the nullity of its leaders, in spite of the
crimes, the disunion, the perversity of a race awaking from centuries of
servitude, was to add one more to the free peoples of Europe, broke out in
the real home of the Hellenes, in the Morea and the islands of the Ægæan.
Soon after Hypsilanti's appearance in Moldavia the Turkish governor of the
Morea, anticipating a general rebellion of the Greeks, had summoned the
Primates of his province to Tripolitza, with the view of seizing them as
hostages. The Primates of the northern district set out, but halted on
their way, debating whether they should raise the standard of insurrection
or wait for events. While they lingered irresolutely at Kalavryta the
decision passed out of their hands, and the people rose throughout the
Morea. The revolt of the Moreot Greeks against their oppressors was from
the first, and with set purpose, a war of extermination. "The Turk," they
sang in their war-songs, "shall live no longer, neither in Morea nor in the
whole earth." This terrible resolution was, during the first weeks of the
revolt, carried into literal effect. The Turks who did not fly from their
country-houses to the towns where there were garrisons or citadels to
defend them, were attacked and murdered with their entire families, men,
women and children. This was the first act of the revolution; and within a
few weeks after the 2nd of April, on which the first outbreaks occurred,
the open country was swept clear of its Ottoman population, which had
numbered about 25,000, and the residue of the lately dominant race was
collected within the walls of Patras, Tripolitza, and other towns, which
the Greeks forthwith began to beleaguer. [364]
[Terrorism at Constantinople.]
[Execution of the Patriarch, April 22.]
The news of the revolt of the Morea and of the massacre of Mohammedans
reached Constantinople, striking terror into the politicians of the Turkish
capital, and rousing the Sultan Mahmud to a vengeance tiger-like in its
ferocity, but deliberate and calculated like every bloody deed of this
resolute and able sovereign. Reprisals had already been made upon the
Greeks at Constantinople for the acts of Hypsilanti, and a number of
innocent persons had been put to death by the executioner, but no general
attack upon the Christians had been suggested, nor had the work of
punishment passed out of the hands of the government itself. Now, however,
the fury of the Mohammedan populace was let loose upon the infidel. The
Sultan called upon his subjects to arm themselves in defence of their
faith. Executions were redoubled; soldiers and mobs devastated Greek
settlements on the Bosphorus; and on the most sacred day of the Greek
Church a blow was struck which sent a thrill over Eastern Europe. The
Patriarch of Constantinople had celebrated the service which ushers in the
dawn of Easter Sunday, when he was summoned by the Dragoman of the Porte to
appear before a Synod hastily assembled. There an order of the Sultan was
read declaring Gregorius IV. a traitor, and degrading him from his office.
The Synod was commanded to elect his successor. It did so. While the new
Archbishop was receiving his investiture, Gregorius was led out, and was
hanged, still wearing his sacred robes, at the gate of his palace. His body
remained during Easter Sunday and the two following days at the place of
execution. It was then given to the Jews to be insulted, dragged through
the streets, and cast into the sea. The Archbishops of Adrianople,
Salonica, and Tirnovo suffered death on the same Easter Sunday. The body of
Gregorius, floating in the waves, was picked up by a Greek ship and carried
to Odessa. Brought, as it was believed, by a miracle to Christian soil, the
relics of the Patriarch received at the hands of the Russian government the
funeral honours of a martyr. Gregorius had no doubt had dealings with the
Hetærists; but he was put to death untried; and whatever may have been the
real extent of his offence, he was executed not for this but in order to
strike terror into the Sultan's Christian subjects.
[Massacre of Christians, April-October.]
[Effect on Russia.]
[Russian ambassador leaves Constantinople, July 27.]
During the succeeding months, in Asia Minor as well as in Macedonia and at
Constantinople itself, there were wholesale massacres of the Christians,
and the churches of the Greeks were pillaged or destroyed by their enemies,
both Jews and Turks. Smyrna, Adrianople, and Salonica, in so far as these
towns were Greek, were put to the sack; thousands of the inhabitants were
slain by the armed mobs who held command, or were sold into slavery. It was
only the fear of a war with Russia which at length forced Sultan Mahmud to
stop these deeds of outrage and to restore some of the conditions of
civilised life in the part of his dominions which was not in revolt. The
Russian army and nation would have avenged the execution of the Patriarch
by immediate war if popular instincts had governed its ruler. Strogonoff,
the ambassador at Constantinople, at once proposed to the envoys of the
other Powers to unite in calling up war-ships for the protection of the
Christians. Joint action was, however, declined by Lord Strangford, the
representative of England, and the Porte was encouraged by the attitude of
this politician to treat the threats of Strogonoff with indifference. There
was an interval during which the destiny of a great part of Eastern Europe
depended upon the fluctuations of a single infirm will. The Czar had
thoroughly identified himself while at Laibach with the principles and the
policy of European conservatism, and had assented to the declaration in
which Metternich placed the Greek rebellion, together with the Spanish and
Italian insurrections, under the ban of Europe. Returning to St.
Petersburg, Alexander, in spite of the veil that intercepts from every
sovereign the real thoughts and utterances of his people, found himself
within the range of widely different influences. Russian passions were not
roused by what might pass in Italy or Spain. The Russian priest, the
soldier, the peasant understood nothing of theories of federal
intervention, and of the connection between Neapolitan despotism and the
treaties of 1815: but his blood boiled when he heard that the chief priest
of his Church had been murdered by the Sultan, and that a handful of his
brethren were fighting for their faith unhelped. Alexander felt to some
extent the throb of national spirit. There had been a time in his life when
a single hour of strong emotion or of overpowering persuasion had made him
renounce every obligation and unite with Napoleon against his own allies;
and there were those who in 1821 believed that the Czar would as suddenly
break loose from his engagements with Metternich and throw himself, with a
fanatical army and nation, into a crusade against the Turk. Sultan Mahmud
had himself given to the Russian party of action a ground for denouncing
him in the name of Russian honour and interests independently of all that
related to Greece. In order to prevent the escape of suspected persons, the
Porte had ordered Russian vessels to be searched at Constantinople, and it
had forced all corn-ships coming from the Euxine to discharge their cargoes
at the Bosphorus, under the apprehension that the corn-supplies of the
capital would be cut off by Greek vessels in command of the Ægæan.
Further, Russia had by treaty the right to insist that the Danubian
Principalities should be governed by their civil authorities, the
Hospodars, and not by Turkish Pashas, insurrection in Wallachia had been
put down, but the rule of Hospodars had not been restored; Turkish
generals, at the head of their forces, still administered their provinces
under military law. On all these points Russia had at least the semblance
of grievances of its own. The outrages which shocked all Europe were not
the only wrong which Russian pride called upon the Czar to redress. The
influence of Capodistrias revived at St. Petersburg. A despatch was sent to
Constantinople declaring that the Porte had begun a war for life or death
with the Christian religion, and that its continued existence among the
Powers of Europe must depend upon its undertaking to restore the churches
which had been destroyed, to guarantee the inviolability of Christian
worship in the future, and to discriminate in its punishments between the
innocent and the guilty. Presenting ultimatum from his master, Strogonoff,
in accordance with his instructions, demanded a written answer within eight
days. No such answer came. On the 27th of July the ambassador quitted
Constantinople. War seemed to be on the point of breaking out.
[Eastern policy of Austria.]
The capital where these events were watched with the greatest apprehension
was Vienna. The fortunes of the Ottoman Empire have always been most
intimately connected with those of Austria; and although the long struggle
of the House of Hapsburg with Napoleon and its wars in recent times with
Prussia and with Italy have made the western aspect of Austrian policy more
prominent and more familiar than its eastern one, the eastern interests of
the monarchy have always been at least as important in the eyes of its
actual rulers. Before the year 1720 Austria, not Russia, was the great
enemy of Turkey and the aggressive Power of the east of Europe. After 1780
the Emperor Joseph had united with Catherine of Russia in a plan for
dividing the Sultan's dominions in Europe, and actually waged a war for
this purpose. In 1795 the alliance, with the same object, had been
prospectively revived by Thugut; in 1809, after the Treaty of Tilsit,
Metternich had determined in the last resort to combine with Napoleon and
Alexander in dismembering Turkey, if all diplomatic means should fail to
prevent a joint attack on the Porte by France and Russia. But this
resolution had been adopted by Metternich only as a matter of necessity,
and in view of a combination which threatened to reduce Austria to the
position of a vassal State. Metternich's own definite and consistent policy
after 1814 was the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. His statesmanship
was, as a rule, governed by fear; and his fear of Alexander was second only
to his old fear of Napoleon. Times were changed since Joseph and Thugut
could hope to enter upon a game of aggression with Russia upon equal terms.
The Austrian army had been beaten in every battle that it had fought during
nearly twenty years. Province after province had been severed from it,
without, except in the Tyrol, raising a hand in its support; and when in
1821 the Minister compared Austria's actual Empire and position in Europe,
won and maintained in great part by his own diplomacy, with the ruin to
which a series of wars had brought it ten years before, he might well thank
Heaven that international Congresses were still so much in favour with the
Courts, and tremble at the clash of arms which from the remote Morea
threatened to call Napoleon's northern conquerors once more into the field
[365]
[Eastern policy of England.]
England was not, like Austria, exposed to actual danger by the advance of
Russia towards the Ægæan; but the growth of Russian power had been viewed
with alarm by English politicians since 1788, when Pitt had formed a triple
alliance with Prussia and Holland for the purpose of defending the Porte
against the attacks of Catherine and Joseph. The interest of Great Britain
in the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire had not been laid down as a
principle before that date, nor was it then acknowledged by the Whig party.
It was asserted by Pitt from considerations relating to the European
balance of power, not, as in our own times, with a direct reference to
England's position in India. The course of events from 1792 to 1807 made
England and Russia for awhile natural allies; but this friendship was
turned into hostility by the Treaty of Tilsit; and although after a few
years Alexander was again fighting for the same cause as Great Britain, and
the public opinion of this country enthusiastically hailed the issue of the
Moscow campaign, English statesmen never forgot the interview upon the
Niemen, and never, in the brightest moments of victory, regarded Alexander
without some secret misgivings. During the campaign of 1814 in France,
Castlereagh's willingness to negotiate with Bonaparte was due in great part
to the fear that Alexander's high-wrought resolutions would collapse before
Napoleon could be thoroughly crushed, and that reaction would carry him
into a worse peace than that which he then disdained. [366] The
negotiations at the Congress of Vienna brought Great Britain and Russia, as
it has been seen, into an antagonism which threatened to end in the resort
to arms; and the tension which then and for some time afterwards existed
between the two governments led English Ministers to speak, certainly in
exaggerated and misleading language, of the mutual hostility of the English
and the Russian nations. From 1815 to 1821 the Czar had been jealously
watched. It had been rumoured over and over again that he was preparing to
invade the Ottoman Empire; and when the rebellion of the Greeks broke out,
the one thought of Castlereagh and his colleagues was that Russia must be
prevented from throwing itself into the fray, and that the interests of
Great Britain required that the authority of the Sultan should as soon as
possible be restored throughout his dominions.
[Fears of new period of warfare.]
[Metternich and the Greeks.]
Both at London therefore and at Vienna the rebellion of Greece was viewed
by governments only as an unfortunate disturbance which was likely to
excite war between Russia and its neighbours, and to imperil the peace of
Europe at large. It may seem strange that the spectacle of a nation rising
to assert its independence should not even have aroused the question
whether its claims deserved to be considered. But to do justice at least to
the English Ministers of 1821, it must be remembered how terrible, how
overpowering, were the memories left by the twenty years of European war
that had closed in 1815, and at how vast a cost to mankind the regeneration
of Greece would have been effected, if, as then seemed probable, it had
ranged the Great Powers again in arms against one another, and re-kindled
the spirit of military aggression which for a whole generation had made
Europe the prey of rival coalitions. It is impossible to read the letter in
which Castlereagh pleaded with the Czar to sacrifice his own glory and
popularity to the preservation of European peace, without perceiving in
what profound earnestness the English statesman sought to avert the renewal
of an epoch of conflict, and how much the apprehension of coming calamity
predominated in his own mind over the mere jealousy of an extension of
Russian power. [367] If Castlereagh had no thought for Greece itself, it
was because the larger interests of Europe wholly absorbed him, and because
he lacked the imagination and the insight to conceive of a better
adjustment of European affairs under the widening recognition of national
rights. The Minister of Austria, to whom at this crisis Castlereagh looked
as his natural ally, had no doubt the same dread of a renewed convulsion of
Europe, but in his case it was mingled with considerations of a much
narrower kind. It is not correct to say that Metternich was indifferent to
the Greek cause; he actually hated it, because it gave a stimulus to the
liberal movement of Germany. In his empty and pedantic philosophy of human
action, Metternich linked together every form of national aspiration and
unrest as something presumptuous and wanton. He understood nothing of the
debt that mankind owes to the spirit of freedom. He was just as ready to
dogmatise upon the wickedness of the English Reform Bill as he was to trace
the hand of Capodistrias in every tumult in Servia or the Morea: and even
if there had been no fear of Russian aggression in the background, he would
instinctively have condemned the Greek revolt when he saw that the
light-headed professors in the German Universities were beginning to
agitate in its favour, and that the recalcitrant minor Courts regarded it
with some degree of sympathy.
[Alexander adheres to policy of peace.]
[Capdostrias retires, Aug 1822.]
The policy of Metternich in the Eastern Question had for its object the
maintenance of the existing order of things; and as it was certain that
some satisfaction or other must be given to Russian pride, Metternich's
counsel was that the grievances of the Czar which were specifically Russian
should be clearly distinguished from questions relating to the independence
of Greece; and that on the former the Porte should be recommended to agree
with its adversary quickly, the good offices of Europe being employed
within given limits on the Czar's behalf; so that, the Russian causes of
complaint being removed, Alexander might without loss of honour leave the
Greeks to be subdued, and resume the diplomatic relations with
Constantinople which had been so perilously severed by Strogonoff's
departure. It remained for the Czar to decide whether, as head of Russia
and protector of the Christians of the East, he would solve the Eastern
Question by his own sword, or whether, constant to the principle and ideal
of international action to which he had devoted himself since 1815, he
would commit his cause to the joint mediation of Europe, and accept such
solution of the problem as his allies might attain. In the latter case it
was clear that no blow would be struck on behalf of Greece. For a year or
more the balance wavered; at length the note of triumph sounded in the
Austrian Cabinet. Capodistrias, the representative of the Greek cause at
St. Petersburg, rightly measured the force of the opposing impulses in the
Czar's mind. He saw that Alexander, interested as he was in Italy and
Spain, would never break with that federation of the Courts which he had
himself created, nor shake off the influences of legitimism which had
dominated him since the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. Submitting when
contention had become hopeless, and anticipating his inevitable fall by a
voluntary retirement from public affairs, Capodistrias, still high in
credit and reputation, quitted St. Petersburg under the form leave of
absence, and withdrew to Geneva, there to await events, and to enjoy the
distinction of a patriot whom love for Greece had constrained to abandon
one of the most splendid positions in Europe. Grave, melancholy, and
austere, as one who suffered with his country, Capodistrias remained in
private life till the vanquished cause had become the victorious one, and
the liberated Greek nation called him to place himself at its head.
[Extension of the Greek revolt.]
[Central Greece.]
[Fall of Ali Pasha, Feb., 1822.]
[Chalcidice.]
An international diplomatic campaign of vast activity and duration began in
the year 1821, but the contest of arms was left, as Metternich desired, to
the Greeks and the Turks alone. The first act of the war was the
insurrection of the Morea: the second was the extension of this
insurrection over parts of Continental Greece and the Archipelago, and its
summary extinction by the Turk in certain districts, which in consequence
remained for the future outside the area of hostilities, and so were not
ultimately included in the Hellenic Kingdom. Central Greece, that is, the
country lying immediately north of the Corinthian Gulf, broke into revolt a
few weeks later than the Morea. The rising against the Mohammedans was
distinguished by the same merciless spirit: the men were generally
massacred; the women, if not killed, were for the most part sold into
slavery; and when, after an interval of three years, Lord Byron came to
Missolonghi, he found that a miserable band of twenty-three captive women
formed the sole remnant of the Turkish population of that town. Thessaly,
with some exceptions, remained passive, and its inaction was of the utmost
service to the Turkish cause; for Ali Pasha in Epirus was now being
besieged by the Sultan's armies, and if Thessaly had risen in the rear of
these troops, they could scarcely have escaped destruction. Khurshid, the
Ottoman commander conducting the siege of Janina, held firmly to his task,
in spite of the danger which threatened his communications, and in spite of
the circumstance that his whole household had fallen into the hands of the
Moreot insurgents. His tenacity saved the border-provinces for the Ottoman
Empire. No combination was effected between Ali and the Greeks, and at the
beginning of 1822 the Albanian chieftain lost both his stronghold and his
life. In the remoter district of Chalcidice, on the Macedonian coast, where
the promontory of Athos and the two parallel peninsulas run out into the
Ægæan, and a Greek population, clearly severed from the Slavic inhabitants
of the mainland, maintained its own communal and religious organisation,
the national revolt broke out under Hetærist leaders. The monks of Mount
Athos, like their neighbours, took up arms. But there was little sympathy
between the privileged chiefs of these abbeys and the desperate men who had
come to head the revolt. The struggle was soon abandoned; and, partly by
force of arms, partly by negotiation, the authority of the Sultan was
restored without much difficulty throughout this region.
[The Ægæan Islands.]
The settlements of the Ægæan which first raised the flag of Greek
independence were the so-called Nautical Islands, Hydra, Spetza, and Psara,
where the absence of a Turkish population and the enjoyment of a century of
self-government had allowed the bold qualities of an energetic maritime
race to grow to their full vigour. Hydra and Spetza were close to the Greek
coast, Psara was on the farther side of the archipelago, almost within view
of Asia Minor; so that in joining the insurrection its inhabitants showed
great heroism, for they were exposed to the first attack of any Turkish
force that could maintain itself for a few hours at sea, and the whole
adjacent mainland was the recruiting-ground of the Sultan. At Hydra the
revolt against the Ottoman was connected with the internal struggles of the
little community, and these in their turn were connected with the great
economical changes of Europe which, at the opposite end of the continent,
and in a widely different society, led to the enactment of the English Corn
Laws, and to the strife of classes which resulted from them. During
Napoleon's wars the carrying-trade of most nations had become extinct;
little corn reached England, and few besides Greek ships navigated the
Euxine and Mediterranean. When peace opened the markets and the ports of
all nations, just as the renewed importation of foreign corn threatened to
lower the profits of English farmers and the rents of English landlords, so
the reviving freedom of navigation made an end of the monopoly of the
Hydriote and Psarian merchantmen. The shipowners formed an oligarchy in
Hydra; the captains and crews of their ships, though they shared the
profits of each voyage, were excluded from any share in the government of
the island. Failure of trade, want and inactivity, hence led to a political
opposition. The shipowners, wealthy and privileged men, had no inclination
to break with the Turk; the captains and sailors, who had now nothing to
lose, declared for Greek independence. There was a struggle in which for
awhile nothing but the commonest impulses of need and rapacity came into
play; but the greater cause proved its power: Hydra threw in its lot with
Greece; and although private greed and ill-faith, as well as great cruelty,
too often disgraced both the Hydriote crews and those of the other islands,
the nucleus of a naval force was now formed which made the achievement of
Greek independence possible. The three islands which led the way were soon
followed by the wealthier and more populous Samos and by the greater part
of the Archipelago. Crete, inhabited by a mixed Greek and Turkish
population, also took up arms, and was for years to come the scene of a
bloody and destructive warfare.
[The Greek leaders.]
Within the Morea the first shock of the revolt had made the Greeks masters
of everything outside the fortified towns. The reduction of these places
was at once undertaken by the insurgents. Tripolitza, lately the seat of
the Turkish government, was the centre of operations, and in the
neighbourhood of this town the first provisional government of the Greeks,
called the Senate of Kaltesti, was established. Demetrius Hypsilanti, a
brother of the Hetærist leader, whose failure in Roumania was not yet
known, landed in the Morea and claimed supreme power. He was tumultuously
welcomed by the peasant-soldiers, though the Primates, who had hitherto
held undisputed sway, bore him no good will. Two other men became prominent
at this time as leaders in the Greek war of liberation. These were
Maurokordatos, a descendant of the Hospodars of Wallachia--a politician
superior to all his rivals in knowledge and breadth of view, but wanting in
the faculty of action required by the times--and Kolokotrones, a type of
the rough fighting Klepht; a mere savage in attainments, scarcely able to
read or write, cunning, grossly avaricious and faithless, incapable of
appreciating either military or moral discipline, but a born soldier in his
own irregular way, and a hero among peasants as ignorant as himself. There
was yet another, who, if his character had been equal to his station, would
have been placed at the head of the government of the Morea. This was
Petrobei, chief of the family of Mauromichalis, ruler of the rugged
district of Maina, in the south-west of Peloponnesus, where the Turk had
never established more than nominal sovereignty. A jovial, princely person,
exercising among his clansmen a mild Homeric sway, Petrobei, surrounded by
his nine vigorous sons, was the most picturesque figure in Greece. But he
had no genius for great things. A sovereignty, which in other hands might
have expanded to national dominion, remained with Petrobei a mere ornament
and curiosity; and the power of the deeply-rooted clan-spirit of the Maina
only made itself felt when, at a later period, the organisation of a united
Hellenic State demanded its sacrifice.
[Fall of Tripolitza, Oct. 5, 1821.]
Anarchy, egotism, and ill-faith disgraced the Greek insurrection from its
beginning to its close. There were, indeed, some men of unblemished honour
among the leaders, and the peasantry in the ranks fought with the most
determined courage year after year; but the action of most of those who
figured as representatives of the people brought discredit upon the
national cause. Their first successes were accompanied by gross treachery
and cruelty. Had the Greek leaders been Bourbon kings, nurtured in all the
sanctities of divine right, instead of tax-gatherers and cattle-lifters,
truants from the wild school of Turkish violence and deceit, they could not
have perjured themselves with lighter hearts. On the surrender of Navarino,
in August, 1821, after a formal capitulation providing for the safety of
its Turkish inhabitants, men, women, and children were indiscriminately
massacred. The capture of Tripolitza, which took place two months later,
was changed from a peaceful triumph into a scene of frightful slaughter by
the avarice of individual chiefs, who, while negotiations were pending,
made their way into the town, and bargained with rich inhabitants to give
them protection in return for their money and jewels. The soldiery, who had
undergone the labours of the siege for six months, saw that their reward
was being pilfered from them. Defying all orders, and in the absence of
Demetrius Hypsilanti, the commander-in-chief, they rushed upon the
fortifications of Tripolitza, and carried them by storm. A general massacre
of the inhabitants followed. For three days the work of carnage was
continued in the streets and houses, until few out of a population of many
thousands remained living. According to the testimony of Kolokotrones
himself, the roads were so choked with the dead, that as he rode from the
gateway to the citadel his horse's hoofs never touched the ground. [368]
[The Massacre of Chios, April-June, 1822.]
In the opening scenes of the Greek insurrection the barbarity of Christians
and of Ottomans was perhaps on a level. The Greek revenged himself with the
ferocity of the slave who breaks his fetters; the Turk resorted to
wholesale massacre and extermination as the normal means of government in
troubled times. And as experience has shown that the savagery of the
European yields in one generation to the influences of civilised rule,
while the Turk remains as inhuman to-day as he was under Mahmud II., so the
history of 1822 proved that the most devilish passions of the Greek were in
the end but a poor match for disciplined Turkish prowess in the work of
butchery. It was no easy matter for the Sultan to requite himself for the
sack of Tripolitza upon Kolokotrones and his victorious soldiers; but there
was a peaceful and inoffensive population elsewhere, which offered all the
conditions for free, unstinted, and unimperilled vengeance which the Turk
desires. A body of Samian troops had landed in Chios, and endeavoured, but
with little success, to excite the inhabitants to revolt, the absence of
the Greek fleet rendering them an almost certain prey to the Sultan's
troops on the mainland. The Samian leader nevertheless refused to abandon
the enterprise, and laid siege to the citadel, in which there was a Turkish
garrison. Before this fortress could be reduced, a relieving army of seven
thousand Turks, with hosts of fanatical volunteers, landed on the island.
The Samians fled; the miserable population of Chios was given up to
massacre. For week after week the soldiery and the roving hordes of
Ottomans slew, pillaged, and sold into slavery at their pleasure. In parts
of the island where the inhabitants took refuge in the monasteries, they
were slaughtered by thousands together; others, tempted back to their homes
by the promulgation of an amnesty, perished family by family. The lot of
those who were spared was almost more pitiable than of those who died. The
slave-markets of Egypt and Tunis were glutted with Chian captives. The
gentleness, the culture, the moral worth of the Chian community made its
fate the more tragical. No district in Europe had exhibited a civilisation
more free from the vices of its type: on no community had there fallen in
modern times so terrible a catastrophe. The estimates of the destruction of
life at Chios are loosely framed; among the lowest is that which sets the
number of the slain and the enslaved at thirty thousand. The island, lately
thronging with life and activity, became a thinly-populated place. After a
long period of depression and the slow return of some fraction of its
former prosperity, convulsions of nature have in our own day again made
Chios a ruin. A new life may arise when the Turk is no longer master of its
shores, but the old history of Chios is closed for ever.
[Exploit of Kanaris, June 18th, 1822.]
The impression made upon public opinion in Europe by the massacre of 1822
was a deep and lasting one, although it caused no immediate change in the
action of Governments. The general feeling of sympathy for the Greeks and
hatred for the Turks, which ultimately forced the Governments to take up a
different policy, was intensified by a brilliant deed of daring by which a
Greek captain avenged the Chians upon their devastor, and by the unexpected
success gained by the insurgents on the mainland against powerful armies of
the Sultan. The Greek executive, which was now headed by Maurokordatos, had
been guilty of gross neglect in not sending over the fleet in time to
prevent the Turks from landing in Chios. When once this landing had been
effected, the ships which afterwards arrived were powerless to prevent the
massacre, and nothing could be attempted except against the Turkish fleet
itself. The instrument of destruction employed by the Greeks was the
fire-ship, which had been used with success against the Turk in these same
waters in the war of 1770. The sacred month of the Ramazan was closing, and
on the night of June 18, Kara Ali, the Turkish commander, celebrated the
festival of Bairam with above a thousand men on board his flag-ship. The
vessel was illuminated with coloured lanterns. In the midst of the
festivities, Constantine Kanaris, a Psarian captain, brought his fire-ship
unobserved right up to the Turkish man-of-war, and drove his bowsprit
firmly into one of her portholes; then, after setting fire to the
combustibles, he stepped quietly into a row-boat, and made away. A breeze
was blowing, and in a moment the Turkish crew were enveloped in a mass of
flames. The powder on board exploded; the boats were sunk; and the vessel,
with its doomed crew, burned to the water-edge, its companions sheering off
to save themselves from the shower of blazing fragments that fell all
around. Kara Ali was killed by a broken mast; a few of his men saved their
lives by swimming or were picked up by rescuers; the rest perished. Such
was the consternation caused by the deed of Kanaris, that the Ottoman fleet
forthwith quitted the Ægæan waters, and took refuge under the guns of the
Dardanelles. Kanaris, unknown before, became from this exploit a famous man
in Europe. It was to no stroke of fortune or mere audacity that he owed his
success, but to the finest combination of nerve and nautical skill. His
feat, which others were constantly attempting, but with little success, to
imitate, was repeated by him in the same year. He was the most brilliant of
Greek seamen, a simple and modest hero; and after his splendid achievements
in the war of liberation, he served his country well in a political career.
Down to his death in a hale old age, he was with justice the idol and pride
of the Greek nation.
[Double invasion of Greece 1822.]
[Destruction of the Philhellenes near Arta, July 16.]
[Unsuccessful siege of Missolonghi, Nov., 1822.]