and unauthorized tales disseminated, but such as seemed neither in
correspondence with their opinion of your own native nobility from
rank and family, nor with what was due to the newly-instituted
administration, have slighted and turned a deaf ear to them all, coming
to this resolution--that, in absenting yourself from Greece, you are
doubtless obeying some strong necessity; for that it is not possible
nor credible of a man such as you displayed yourself to be whilst living
amongst us, that he should mean to insult the wretched--least of all,
to insult the unhappy and much-suffering people of Greece. Under these
circumstances, both the deliberative and the executive bodies of the
Grecian government, assembling separately, have come to a resolution,
without one dissentient voice, to invite you back to Greece, in order
that you may again take a share in the Grecian contest--a contest in
itself glorious, and not alien from your character and pursuits. For the
liberty of any one nation cannot be a matter altogether indifferent
to the rest, but naturally it is a common and diffusive interest; and
nothing can be more reasonable than that the Englishman and the Grecian,
in such a cause, should make themselves yoke-fellows, and should
participate as brothers in so holy a struggle. Therefore, the Grecian
government hastens, by this present distinguished expression of its
regard, to invite you to the soil of Greece, a soil united by such
tender memorials with yourself; confident that you, preferring glorious
poverty and the hard living of Greece to the luxury and indolence of an
obscure seclusion, will hasten your return to Greece, agreeably to
your native character, restoring to us our valued English connection.
Farewell!
"The Vice-president of the Executive,
"ATHANASIUS KANAKARES.
"The Chief-Secretary, Minister of Foreign Relations, NEGENZZ."
Since then, having in 1817 connected himself in marriage with a
beautiful young lady of Armenian Greek extraction, and having purchased
land and built a house in Argos, Mr. Gordon may be considered in some
sense as a Grecian citizen. Services in the field having now for some
years been no longer called for, he has exchanged his patriotic sword
for a patriotic pen--judging rightly that in no way so effectually
can Greece be served at this time with Western Europe, as by recording
faithfully the course of her revolution, tracing the difficulties which
lay or which arose in her path, the heroism with which she surmounted
them, and the multiplied errors by which she raised up others to
herself. Mr. Gordon, of forty authors who have partially treated
this theme, is the first who can be considered either impartial or
comprehensive; and upon his authority, not seldom using his words, we
shall now present to our readers the first continuous abstract of this
most interesting and romantic war:
GREECE, in the largest extent of that term, having once belonged to the
Byzantine empire, is included, by the misconception of hasty readers,
in the great wreck of 1453. They take it for granted that, concurrently
with Constantinople, and the districts adjacent, these provinces passed
at that disastrous era into the hands of the Turkish conqueror; but
this is an error. Parts of Greece, previously to that era, had been
dismembered from the Eastern empire;--other parts did not, until long
_after_ it, share a common fate with the metropolis. Venice had a
deep interest in the Morea; _in_ that, and _for_ that, she fought with
various success for generations; and it was not until the year 1717,
nearly three centuries from the establishment of the crescent in Europe,
that "the banner of St. Mark, driven finally from the Morea and the
Archipelago," was henceforth exiled (as respected Greece) to the Ionian
Islands.
In these contests, though Greece was the prize at issue, the children
of Greece had no natural interest, whether the cross prevailed or the
crescent; the same, for all substantial results, was the fate which
awaited themselves. The Moslem might be the more intolerant by his
maxims, and he might be harsher in his professions; but a slave is not
the less a slave, though his master should happen to hold the same creed
with himself; and towards a member of the Greek church one who looked
westward to Rome for his religion was likely to be little less of a
bigot than one who looked to Mecca. So that we are not surprised to find
a Venetian rule of policy recommending, for the daily allowance of these
Grecian slaves, "a _little_ bread, and a liberal application of the
cudgel"! Whichever yoke were established was sure to be hated; and,
therefore, it was fortunate for the honor of the Christian name, that
from the year 1717 the fears and the enmity of the Greeks were to be
henceforward pointed exclusively towards _Mahometan_ tyrants.
To be hated, however, sufficiently for resistance, a yoke must have been
long and continuously felt. Fifty years might be necessary to season
the Greeks with a knowledge of Turkish oppression; and less than two
generations could hardly be supposed to have manured the whole territory
with an adequate sense of the wrongs they were enduring, and the
withering effects of such wrongs on the sources of public prosperity.
Hatred, besides, without hope, is no root out of which an effective
resistance can be expected to grow; and fifty years almost had elapsed
before a great power had arisen in Europe, having in any capital
circumstance a joint interest with Greece, or specially authorized, by
visible right and power, to interfere as her protector. The semi-Asiatic
power of Russia, from the era of the Czar Peter the Great, had arisen
above the horizon with the sudden sweep and splendor of a meteor. The
arch described by her ascent was as vast in compass as it was rapid;
and, in all history, no political growth, not that of our own Indian
empire, had travelled by accelerations of speed so terrifically marked.
Not that even Russia could have really grown in strength according to
the _apparent_ scale of her progress. The strength was doubtless there,
or much of it, before Peter and Catherine; but it was latent: there
had been no such sudden growth as people fancied; but there had been a
sudden evolution. Infinite resources had been silently accumulating from
century to century; but, before the Czar Peter, no mind had come across
them of power sufficient to reveal their situation, or to organize them
for practical effects. In some nations, the manifestations of power are
coincident with its growth; in others, from vicious institutions, a vast
crystallization goes on for ages blindly and in silence, which the lamp
of some meteoric mind is required to light up into brilliant display.
Thus it had been in Russia; and hence, to the abused judgment of all
Christendom, she had seemed to leap like Pallas from the brain of
Jupiter--gorgeously endowed, and in panoply of civil array, for all
purposes of national grandeur, at the _fiat_ of one coarse barbarian.
As the metropolitan home of the Greek church, she could not disown a
maternal interest in the humblest of the Grecian tribes, holding the
same faith with herself, and celebrating their worship by the same
rites. This interest she could, at length, venture to express in a tone
of sufficient emphasis; and Greece became aware that she could, about
the very time when Turkish oppression had begun to unite its victims in
aspirations for redemption, and had turned their eyes abroad in search
of some great standard under whose shadow they could flock for momentary
protection, or for future hope. What cabals were reared upon this
condition of things by Russia, and what premature dreams of independence
were encouraged throughout Greece in the reign of Catherine II., may be
seen amply developed, in the once celebrated work of Mr. William Eton.
Another great circumstance of hope for Greece, coinciding with the dawn
of her own earliest impetus in this direction, and travelling _puri
passu_ almost with the growth of her mightiest friend, was the advancing
decay of her oppressor. The wane of the Turkish crescent had seemed to
be in some secret connection of fatal sympathy with the growth of the
Russian cross. Perhaps the reader will thank us for rehearsing the main
steps by which the Ottoman power had flowed and ebbed. The foundations
of this empire were laid in the thirteenth century, by Ortogrul, the
chief of a Turkoman tribe, residing in tents not far from Dorylæum, in
Phrygia (a name so memorable in the early crusades), about the time
when Jenghiz had overthrown the Seljukian dynasty. His son Osman first
assumed the title of Sultan; and, in 1300, having reduced the city of
Prusa, in Bithynia, he made it the capital of his dominions. The Sultans
who succeeded him for some generations, all men of vigor, and availing
themselves not less of the decrepitude which had by that time begun
to palsy the Byzantine sceptre, than of the martial and religious
fanaticism which distinguished their own followers, crossed the
Hellespont, conquering Thrace and the countries up to the Danube.
In 1453, the most eminent of these Sultans, Mahomet II., by storming
Constantinople, put an end to the Roman empire; and before his death he
placed the Ottoman power in Europe pretty nearly on that basis to which
it had again fallen back by 1821. The long interval of time between
these two dates involved a memorable flux and reflux of power, and an
oscillation between two extremes of panic-striking grandeur, in the
ascending scale (insomuch that the Turkish Sultan was supposed to
be charged in the Apocalypse with the dissolution of the Christian
thrones), and in the descending scale of paralytic dotage tempting its
own instant ruin. In speculating on the causes of the extraordinary
terror which the Turks once inspired, it is amusing, and illustrative of
the revolutions worked by time, to find it imputed, in the first place,
to superior discipline; for, if their discipline was imperfect, they
had, however, a _standing_ army of Janissaries, whilst the whole of
Christian Europe was accustomed to fight merely summer campaigns
with hasty and untrained levies; a second cause lay in their superior
finances, for the Porte had a regular revenue, when the other powers of
Europe relied upon the bounty of their vassals and clergy; and, thirdly,
which is the most surprising feature of the whole statement, the Turks
were so far ahead of others in the race of improvement, that to
them belongs the credit of having first adopted the extensive use
of gunpowder, and of having first brought battering-trains against
fortified places. To his artillery and his musketry it was that Selim
the Ferocious (grandson of that Sultan who took Constantinople) was
indebted for his victories in Syria and Egypt. Under Solyman the
Magnificent (the well-known contemporary of the Emperor Charles Y.) the
crescent is supposed to have attained its utmost altitude; and already
for fifty years the causes had been in silent progress which were to
throw the preponderance into the Christian scale. In the reign of his
son, Selim the Second, this crisis was already passed; and the battle
of Lepanto, in 1571, which crippled the Turkish navy in a degree never
wholly recovered, gave the first overt signal to Europe of a turn in the
course of their prosperity. Still, as this blow did not equally affect
the principal arm of their military service, and as the strength of
the German empire was too much distracted by Christian rivalship, the
_prestige_ of the Turkish name continued almost unbroken until their
bloody overthrow in 1664, at St. Gothard, by the imperial General
Montecuculi. In 1673 they received another memorable defeat from
Sobieski, on which occasion they lost twenty-five thousand men. In
what degree, however, the Turkish Samson had been shorn of his original
strength, was not yet made known to Europe by any adequate expression,
before the great catastrophe of 1683. In that year, at the instigation
of the haughty vizier, Kara Mustafa, the Turks had undertaken the siege
of Vienna; and great was the alarm of the Christian world. But, on the
12th of September, their army of one hundred and fifty thousand men
was totally dispersed by seventy thousand Poles and Germans, under John
Sobieski--"He conquering _through_ God, and God by him." [Footnote: See
the sublime Sonnet of Chiabrora on this subject, as translated by Mr.
Wordsworth.] Then followed the treaty of Carlovitz, which stripped the
Porte of Hungary, the Ukraine, and other places; and "henceforth" says
Mr. Gordon, "Europe ceased to dread the Turks; and began even to look
upon their existence as a necessary element of the balance of power
among its states." Spite of their losses, however, during the first
half of the eighteenth century, the Turks still maintained a respectable
attitude against Christendom. But the wars of the Empress Catherine II.,
and the French invasion of Egypt, demonstrated that either their
native vigor was exhausted and superannuated, or, at least, that the
institutions were superannuated by which their resources had been so
long administered. Accordingly, at the commencement of the present
century, the Sultan Selim II. endeavored to reform the military
discipline; but in the first collision with the prejudices of his
people, and the interest of the Janissaries, he perished by sedition.
Mustafa, who succeeded to the throne, in a few months met the same
fate. But then (1808) succeeded a prince formed by nature for such
struggles,--cool, vigorous, cruel, and intrepid. This was Mahmoud the
Second. He perfectly understood the crisis, and determined to pursue the
plans of his uncle Selim, even at the hazard of the same fate. Why was
it that Turkish soldiers had been made ridiculous in arms, as often as
they had met with French troops, who yet were so far from being the
best in Christendom, that Egypt herself, and the beaten Turks, had seen
_them_ in turn uniformly routed by the British? Physically, the
Turks were equal, at the very least, to the French. In what lay their
inferiority? Simply in discipline, and in their artillery. And so long
as their constitution and discipline continued what they had been,
suited (that is) to centuries long past and gone, and to a condition
of Christendom obsolete for ages, so long it seemed inevitable that the
same disasters should follow the Turkish banners. And to this point,
accordingly, the Sultan determined to address his earliest reforms.
But caution was necessary; he waited and watched. He seized all
opportunities of profiting by the calamities or the embarrassments
of his potent neighbors. He put down all open revolt. He sapped the
authority of all the great families in Asia Minor, whose hereditary
influence could be a counterpoise to his own. Mecca and Medina, the
holy cities of his religion, he brought again within the pale of his
dominions. He augmented and fostered, as a counterbalancing force to
the Janissaries, the corps of the Topjees or artillery-men. He amassed
preparatory treasures. And, up to the year 1820, "his government,"
says Mr. Gordon, "was highly unpopular; but it was strong, stern, and
uniform; and he had certainly removed many impediments to the execution
of his ulterior projects."
Such was the situation of Turkey at the moment when her Grecian vassal
prepared to trample on her yoke. In her European territories she
reckoned, at the utmost, eight millions of subjects. But these, besides
being more or less in a semi-barbarous condition, and scattered over
a very wide surface of country, were so much divided by origin, by
language, and religion, that, without the support of her Asiatic arm,
she could not, according to the general opinion, have stood at all. The
rapidity of her descent, it is true, had been arrested by the energy of
her Sultans during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. But
for the last thirty of the eighteenth she had made a headlong progress
downwards. So utterly, also, were the tables turned, that, whereas in
the fifteenth century her chief superiority over Christendom had been in
the three points of artillery, discipline, and fixed revenue, precisely
in these three she had sunk into utter insignificance, whilst all
Christendom had been continually improving. Selim and Mahmoud indeed had
made effectual reforms in the corps of gunners, as we have said, and had
raised it to the amount of sixty thousand men; so that at present they
have respectable field-artillery, whereas previously they had only heavy
battering-trains. But the defects in discipline cannot be remedied, so
long as the want of a settled revenue obliges the Sultan to rely upon
hurried levies from the provincial militias of police. Turkey, however,
might be looked upon as still formidable for internal purposes, in the
haughty and fanatical character of her Moslem subjects. And we may add,
as a concluding circumstance of some interest, in this sketch of her
modern condition, that pretty nearly the same European territories as
were assigned to the eastern Roman empire at the time of its separation
from the western, [Footnote: "The vitals of the monarchy lay within
that vast triangle circumscribed by the Danube, the Save, the Adriatic,
Euxine, and Egean Seas, whose altitude may be computed at five
hundred, and the length of its base at seven hundred geographical
miles."--GORDON. ] were included within the frontier line of Turkey, on
the first of January, 1821.
Precisely in this year commenced the Grecian revolution. Concurrently
with the decay of her oppressor the Sultan, had been the prodigious
growth of her patron the Czar. In what degree she looked up to that
throne, and the intrigues which had been pursued with a view to that
connection, may be seen (as we have already noticed) in Eton's Turkey--a
book which attracted a great deal of notice about thirty years ago.
Meantime, besides this secret reliance on Russian countenance or aid,
Greece had since that era received great encouragement to revolt from
the successful experiment in that direction made by the Turkish province
of Servia. In 1800, Czerni George came forward as the asserter of
Servian independence, and drove the Ottomans out of that province.
_Personally_ he was not finally successful. But his example outlived
him; and, after fifteen years' struggle, Servia (says Mr. Gordon)
offered "the unwonted spectacle of a brave and armed Christian nation
living under its own laws in the heart of Turkey," and retaining no
memorial of its former servitude, but the payment of a slender and
precarious tribute to the Sultan, with a _verbal_ profession of
allegiance to his sceptre. Appearances were thus saved to the pride of
the haughty Moslem by barren concessions which cost no real sacrifice to
the substantially victorious Servian.
Examples, however, are thrown away upon a people utterly degraded by
long oppression. And the Greeks were pretty nearly in that condition.
"It would, no doubt," says Mr. Gordon, "be possible to cite a more
_cruel_ oppression than that of the Turks towards their Christian
subjects, but none _so fitted to break men's spirit_." The Greeks, in
fact (under which name are to be understood, not only those who speak
Greek, but the Christian Albanians of Roumelia and the Morea, speaking a
different language, but united with the Greeks in spiritual obedience
to the same church), were, in the emphatic phrase of Mr. Gordon, "the
slaves of slaves:" that is to say, not only were they liable to the
universal tyranny of the despotic Divan, but "throughout the empire
they were in the habitual intercourse of life subjected to vexations,
affronts, and exactions, from Mahometans of every rank. Spoiled of their
goods, insulted in their religion and domestic honor, they could rarely
obtain justice. The slightest flash of courageous resentment brought
down swift destruction on their heads; and cringing humility alone
enabled them to live in ease, or even in safety." Stooping under this
iron yoke of humiliation, we have reason to wonder that the Greeks
preserved sufficient nobility of mind to raise so much as their wishes
in the direction of independence. In a condition of abasement, from
which a simple act of apostasy was at once sufficient to raise them to
honor and wealth, "and from the meanest serfs gathered them to the caste
of oppressors," we ought not to wonder that some of the Greeks should
be mean, perfidious, and dissembling, but rather that any (as Mr. Gordon
says) "had courage to adhere to their religion, and to eat the bread
of affliction." But noble aspirations are fortunately indestructible in
human nature. And in Greece the lamp of independence of spirit had been
partially kept alive by the existence of a native militia, to whom
the Ottoman government, out of mere necessity, had committed the local
defence. These were called _Armatoles_ (or Gendarmerie); their available
strength was reckoned by Pouqueville (for the year 1814) at ten thousand
men; and, as they were a very effectual little host for maintaining,
from age to age, the "true faith militant" of Greece, namely, that a
temporary and a disturbed occupation of the best lands in the country
did not constitute an absolute conquest on the part of the Moslems,
most of whom flocked for security with their families into the stronger
towns; and, as their own martial appearance, with arms in their hands,
lent a very plausible countenance to their insinuations that they, the
Christian Armatoles, were the true _bona fide_ governors and possessors
of the land under a Moslem Suzerain; and, as the general spirit of
hatred to Turkish insolence was not merely maintained in their own local
stations, [Footnote: Originally, it seems, there were fourteen companies
(or _capitanerias_) settled by imperial diplomas in the mountains of
Olympus, Othryx, Pindus, and ta; and distinct appropriations were made
by the Divan for their support. _Within_ the Morea, the institution of
the Armatoles was never tolerated; but there the same spirit was kept
alive by tribes, such as the Mainatts, whose insurmountable advantages
of natural position enabled them eternally to baffle the most powerful
enemy.] but also propagated thence with activity to every part of
Greece;--it may be interesting to hear Mr. Gordon's account of their
peculiar composition and habits.