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In all their troubles the Greeks never quite lost heart. The merchants
who had thriven in trade sent their sons to be educated in France,
Russia, and Germany, and these learned to think much of the great old
deeds of their forefathers, and they formed a secret society among
themselves, called the _Hetaira_, which in time the princes and nobles of
the Peloponnesus joined; so that they felt that if they only were so
united and resolute as to make some Christian power think it worth while
to take up their cause in earnest, they really might shake off the
Turkish yoke.
In 1820, Ali Pasha, the governor of Albania, rebelled, and shut himself
up in the town of Yanina, stirring up the Greeks to begin fighting on
their own account, so as to prevent the Sultan from using all his power
to crush him. So the Greeks began, under Prince Ipsilanti, who had
served in the Russian army, to march into the provinces on the Danube;
but they were not helped by the Russians, and were defeated by the Turks.
Ipsilanti fled into Austria; but another leader, called George the
Olympian, lived a wild, outlaw life for some years longer, but as he had
no rank the Greeks were too proud to join him. At last he shut himself
up in the old convent of Secka, and held it out against the Turks for
thirty-six hours, until, finding that he could defend it no longer, he
put a match to the powder, and blew himself and his men up in it rather
than surrender.
But the next year there was another rising all over Greece. The peasants
of Attica drove the Turkish garrison out of all Athens but the Acropolis;
the Suliots rose again, with secret encouragement from Ali Pasha, and
hope seemed coming back. But when Omar Pasha had been sent from
Constantinople with 4000 Turkish troops, he found it only too easy to
rout 700 Greeks at Thermopylae, and, advancing into Attica, he drove back
the peasants, and relieved the Turkish garrison in the Acropolis, which
had been besieged for eighty-three days; but no sooner had he left the
place than the brave peasants returned to the siege.
The worst of the Greeks was that they were very cruel and treacherous,
and had very little notion of truth or honour, for people who have been
long ground down are apt to learn the vices of slaves; and when the Turks
slaughtered the men, burnt the villages, and carried off the women, they
were ready to return their savage deeds with the like ferocity, and often
with more cunning than the Turks could show; and this made the European
nations slow of helping them. In this year, 1821, a Greek captain
plotted to set fire to the arsenal at Constantinople, murder the Sultan
in the confusion, and begin a great revolt of all the Greeks living at
Constantinople. The plot was found out, and terribly visited, for
thousands of Christian families, who had never even heard of it, were
slain in their houses, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, an aged man,
whom everyone loved and respected, was also put to death. Not only were
the Christians massacred at Constantinople, but in most of the other
large cities of Turkey, and only in a few were the people able to escape
on board the Greek merchant ships. These ships carried ten or twelve
guns, were small, swift, and well managed, and little fire-ships were
sometimes sent by them into the Turkish fleet, which did a great deal of
damage.
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The slaughter of so many Christians had only enraged instead of
terrifying the others; and a Greek prince named Mavrocordato brought an
army together, which took several cities, but unhappily was as cruel as
the Turks themselves in their treatment of the conquered. However, they
now held Argos, met there, and made Mavrocordato their President in 1822.
Ali Pasha of Yanina was reduced and shot by the Turks that same year; and
Omar Pasha, who had been sent against him, had a great deal of desperate
fighting with the Suliots and other Albanian Greeks, but at last he was
driven back through the mountains with terrible loss.
Another horrid deed of the Turks did much to turn men's minds against
them. There were about 120,000 Christians in the island of Scio, who had
taken no part in the war, and only prayed to be let alone; but two Greek
captains chose to make an attack on the Turkish garrison, and thus
provoked the vengeance of the Turks, who burst in full force on the
unhappy island, killed every creature they found in the capital, and
ravaged it everywhere. Forty thousand were carried off as slaves, and
almost all the rest killed; and when these horrors were over, only 1800
were left in the place.
The cruelty of the Turks and the constancy of the Greeks began to make
all Europe take an interest in the war. People began to think them a
race of heroes like those of old, and parties of young men, calling
themselves Philhellenes, or lovers of Greece, came to fight in their
cause. The chief of these was the English poet, Lord Byron; but he, as
well as most of the others, found it was much easier to admire the Greeks
when at a distance, for a war like this almost always makes men little
better than treacherous savage robbers in their ways; and they were all
so jealous of one another that there was no obedience to any kind of
government, nor any discipline in their armies. Byron soon said he was a
fool to have come to Greece, and before he could do anything he died at
Missolonghi, in the year 1824. But though the Greeks fought in strange
ways of their own, they at least won respect and interest by their
untamableness, and though Missolonghi was taken, it was only after a most
glorious resistance. When the defenders could hold out no longer, they
resolved to cut their way through the Turks. One division of them were
deceived by a false alarm, and returned to the town, where, when the
enemy entered the powder magazine, they set fire to it, and blew
themselves up, together with the Turks; the others escaped.
Athens was taken again by the Turks, all but the Acropolis; but the
nations of Europe had begun to believe in the Greeks enough to advance
them a large sum of money, which was called the Greek Loan; and the
English admiral, Lord Cochrane, and an English soldier, General Church,
did them much good by making up the quarrels among their own princes, for
actually, in the midst of this desperate war with the Turks, there were
seven little civil wars going on among different tribes of the Greeks
themselves. General Church collected them all, and fought a great battle
in the plain of Athens with the Turkish commander, Ibrahim Pasha, but was
beaten again; the Acropolis was taken, and nothing remained to the Greek
patriots but the citadel of Corinth and Naupliae.
However, France, Russia, and England had now resolved to interfere on
behalf of the Greeks, and when the Sultan refused to attend to them, a
fleet, consisting of ships belonging to the three nations, was sent into
the Mediterranean. They meant to treat with the Turks, but the Turks and
Greeks thought they meant to fight, and in the bay of Navarino a battle
began, which ended in the utter destruction of the Turkish fleet. Out of
120 ships, only 20 or 30 were left, and 6000 men were slain. This was on
the 20th of October, 1827, and the terrible loss convinced Ibrahim Pasha
that no further attempt to keep the Morea was of any use, so he sailed
away to Egypt, of which his father was then Viceroy for the Sultan, but
which he and his son have since made into a separate kingdom. It was in
October, 1828, that the Peloponnesus thus shook off the Turkish yoke.
It was thought best that a French army should be sent to hold the chief
fortresses in the Morea, because the Greeks quarrelled so among
themselves. In the meantime General Church went on driving the Turks
back in the northern parts of Greece, and Count Capo d'Istria was chosen
President, but he did not manage well, and gave the command of Western
Greece to his own dull brother, taking it away from General Church. It
seemed as if the Greeks would not know how to use their freedom now they
had gained it, for the Council and the President were always quarrelling,
and being jealous of each other; and there was falsehood, robbery,
treachery, and assassination everywhere. And yet everyone hoped that the
race that had stood so bravely all these years would improve now it was
free.
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