THE GREEK REVOLUTION AND ITS ANTECEDENTS.—THE MODERN GREEKS.—THE
FRIENDLY SOCIETY.—SULTAN MAHMUD AND ALI PASHA'S REBELLION.—THE
BEGINNING OF THE GREEK INSURRECTION.—COUNT JOHN CAPODISTRIAS.—PRINCE
ALEXANDER HYPSILANTES.—THE REVOLUTION IN THE MOREA.—THEODORE
KOLKOTRONES.—THE REVOLUTION IN THE ISLANDS.—THE GREEK NAVY AND ITS
CHARACTER.—THE EXCESSES OF THE GREEKS.—THEIR BAD GOVERNMENT.—PRINCE
ALEXANDER MAVROCORDATOS.—THE PROGRESS OF THE REVOLUTION.—THE
SPOLIATION OF THE CHIOS.—ENGLISH PHILHELLENES; THOMAS GORDON, FRANK
ABNEY HASTINGS, LORD BYRON.—THE FIRST GREEK LOAN, AND THE BAD USES
TO WHICH IT WAS PUT.—REVERSES OF THE GREEKS.—IBRAHIM AND HIS
SUCCESSES.—MAVROCORDATOS'S LETTER TO LORD COCHRANE.
[1820-1825.]
While Lord Cochrane was rendering efficient service to the cause of
freedom in South America, another war of independence was being waged
in Europe; and he had hardly been at home a week before solicitations
pressed upon him from all quarters that he should lend his great name
and great abilities to this war also. As he consented to do so, and
almost from the moment of his arrival was intimately connected with
the Greek Revolution, the previous stages of this memorable episode,
the incidents that occurred during his absence in Chili and Brazil,
need to be here reviewed and recapitulated.
The Greek Revolution began openly in 1821. But there had been long
previous forebodings of it. The dwellers in the land once peopled by
the noble race which planned and perfected the arts and graces, the
true refinements and the solid virtues that are the basis of our
modern civilization, had been for four centuries and more the slaves
of the Turks. They were hardly Greeks, if by that name is implied
descent from the inhabitants of classic Greece. With the old stock had
been blended, from generation to generation, so many foreign elements
that nearly all trace of the original blood had disappeared, and the
modern Greeks had nothing but their residence and their language to
justify them in maintaining the old title. But their slavery was only
too real. Oppressed by the Ottomans on account of their race and their
religion, the oppression was none the less in that it induced many of
them to cast off the last shreds of freedom and deck themselves in the
coarser, but, to slavish minds, the pleasanter bondage of trickery and
meanness. During the eighteenth century, many Greeks rose to eminence
in the Turkish service, and proved harder task-masters to their
brethren than the Turks themselves generally were. The hope of further
aggrandisement, however, led them to scheme the overthrow of their
Ottoman employers, and their projects were greatly aided by the truer,
albeit short-sighted, patriotism that animated the greater number of
their kinsmen. They groaned under Turkish thraldom, and yearned to
be freed from it, in the temper so well described and so worthily
denounced by Lord Byron in 1811:—
"And many dream withal the hour is nigh
That gives them back their fathers' heritage:
For foreign arms and aid they loudly sigh,
Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage.
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arm the conquest must be wrought.
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye?—No!
True, they may lay your proud despoilers low,
But not for you will Freedom's altars flame."
The Greeks, all but a few genuine patriots, thought otherwise. They
sought deliverance at the hands of Gauls and Muscovites; and, as the
Muscovites had good reason for desiring the overthrow of Turkey, they
listened to their prayers, and other ties than that of community in
religion bound the persecuted Greeks to Russia. The Philiké Hetaira,
or Friendly Society, chief representative of a very general movement,
was founded at Odessa in 1814. It was a secret society, which speedily
had ramifications among the Greek Christians in every part of Turkey,
encouraging them to prepare for insurrection as soon as the Czar
Alexander I. deemed it expedient to aid them by open invasion of
Turkey, or as soon as they themselves could take the initiative,
trusting to Russia to complete the work of revolution. The Friendly
Society increased its influence and multiplied its visionary schemes
during many years previous to 1821.
Its strength was augmented by the political condition of Turkey at the
time. The Sultan Mahmud—a true type of the Ottoman sovereign at
his worst—had attempted to perfect his power by a long train of
cruelties, of which murder was the lightest. Defeating his own purpose
thereby, he aroused the opposition of Mahometan as well as Christian
subjects, and induced the rebellious schemes of Ali Pasha of Joannina,
the boldest of his vassals. In Albania Ali ruled with a cruelty that
was hardly inferior to Mahmud's. Byron tells how his
"dread command
Is lawless law; for with a bloody hand
He sways a nation turbulent and told."
The cruelty could be tolerated; but not opposition to Mahmud's
will. Long and growing jealousy existed between the Sultan and his
tributary. At length, in 1820, there was an open rupture. Ali was
denounced as a traitor, and ordered to surrender his pashalik. Instead
of so doing, he organized his army for prompt rebellion, trusting for
success partly to the support of the Greeks. Most of the Greeks held
aloof; but the Suliots, a race of Christian marauders, the fiercest of
the fierce community of Albanians, sided with him, and for more than a
year rendered him valuable aid by reason of their hereditary skill in
lawless warfare. Not till January, 1822, was Ali forced to surrender,
and then only, perhaps, through the defection of the Suliots.
The Suliots, dissatisfied with Ali's recompense for their services,
had gone over to the Greeks, who, not caring to serve under Ali in his
rebellion, had welcomed that rebellion as a Heaven-sent opportunity
for realising their long-cherished hopes. The Turkish garrisons in
Greece being half unmanned in order that the strongest possible force
might be used in subduing Ali, and Turkish government in the peninsula
being at a standstill, the Greeks found themselves in an excellent
position for asserting their freedom. Had they been less degraded than
they were by their long centuries of slavery, or had there been some
better organization than that which the purposes and the methods of
the Friendly Society afforded for developing the latent patriotism
which was honest and wide-spread, they might have achieved a triumph
worthy of the classic name they bore and the heroic ancestry that they
claimed.
Unfortunately, the Friendly Society, already degenerated from the
unworthy aim with which it started, now an elaborate machinery of
personal ambition, private greed, and local spite, the willing tool of
Russia, was master of the situation. The mastery, however, was by no
means thorough. The society had dispossessed all other organizations,
but had no organization of its own adequate to the working out of
a successful rebellion. Its machinery was tolerably perfect, but
efficient motive-power was wanting. Its exchequer was empty; its
counsels were divided; above all, it had alienated the sympathies of
the worthiest patriots of Greece. Finding itself suddenly in the
way of triumph, it was incapable of rightly progressing in that way.
Obstacles of its own raising, and obstacles raised by others, stood
in the path, and only a very wise man had the chance of successfully
removing them.
The wise man did not exist, or was not to be obtained. Perhaps the
wisest, though, as later history proved, not very wise, was Count John
Capodistrias, a native of Corfu. Born in 1777, he had gone to Italy to
study and practise medicine. There also he studied, afterwards to put
in practice, the effete Machiavellianism then in vogue. In 1803 he
entered political life as secretary to the lately-founded republic
of the Ionian Islands. Napoleon's annexation of the Ionian Islands in
1807 drove him into the service of Russia, and, as Russian agent, he
advocated, at the Vienna Conference of 1815, the reconstruction of the
Ionian republic. The partial concession of Great Britain towards that
project, by which the Ionian Islands were established as a sort of
commonwealth, dependent upon England, enabled him to live and work
in Corfu, awaiting the realization of his own patriotic schemes, and
watching the patriotic movement in Greece. Italian in his education,
and Russian in his sympathies, he was still an honest Greek, worthier
and abler than most other influential Greeks. "He had many virtues and
great abilities," says a competent critic. "His conduct was firm and
disinterested, his manners simple and dignified. His personal feelings
were warm, and, as a consequence of this virtue, they were sometimes
so strong as to warp his judgment. He wanted the equanimity and
impartiality of mind, and the elevation of soul necessary to make
a great man."[A] In spite of his defects, he might have done good
service to the Greek Revolution, had he accepted the offer of its
leadership, shrewdly tendered to him by the Friendly Society. But this
he declined, having no liking for the society, and no trust in its
methods and designs.
[Footnote A: Finlay, "History of the Greek Revolution" (1861), vol.
ii., p. 196. Mr. Finlay served as a volunteer in Greece under Captain
Abney Hastings. His work is certainly the best on the subject, though
we shall have in later pages to differ widely from its strictures on
Lord Cochrane's motives and action. But our complaints will be less
against his history than against the two other leading ones—General
Gordon's "History of the Greek Revolution" (1832), and M. Trikoupes's
"[Greek: Historia tês Hellênikês Epanastaseôs]" (1853-6), which is not
very much more than a paraphrase of Gordon's work.]
The Friendly Society then sought and found a leader, far inferior
to Count Capodistrias, in Prince Alexander Hypsilantes, the son of a
Hospodar of Wallachia who had been deposed in 1806. Hypsilantes had
been educated in Russia, and had there risen to some rank, high enough
at any rate to quicken his ambition and vanity, both as a soldier and
as a courtier. He was not without virtues; but he was utterly unfit
for the duties imposed upon him as leader of the Greek Revolution.
Not a Greek himself, his purpose in accepting the office seems to have
been to make Greece an appendage of the despotic monarchy, which, by
means of the political crisis, he hoped to establish in Wallachia,
under Russian protection. With that view, in March 1821, he led the
first crude army of Greek and other Christian rebels into Moldavia.
There and in Wallachia he stirred up a brief revolt, attended by
military blunders and lawless atrocities which soon brought vengeance
upon himself and made a false beginning of the revolutionary work.
Moldavia and Wallachia were quickly restored to Turkish rule, and
Hypsilantes had in June to fly for safety into Austria. But the bad
example that he set, and the evil influence that he and his promoters
and followers of the Friendly Society exerted, initiated a false
policy and encouraged a pernicious course of action, by which the
cause of the Greeks was injured for years.
The real Greek revolution began in the Morea. There the Friendly
Society did good work in showing the people that the hour for action
had come; but its direction of that action was for the most part
mischievous. The worst Greeks were the leaders, and, under their
guidance, the play of evil passions—inevitable in all efforts of the
oppressed to overturn their oppressors—was developed to a grievous
extent. Turkish blood was first shed on the 25th of March, 1821, and
within a week the whole of the Morea was in a ferment of rebellion. By
the 22nd of April, which was Easter Sunday, it is reckoned that from
ten to fifteen thousand Mahometans had been slaughtered in cold blood,
and about three thousand Turkish homes destroyed.
The promoters of all that wanton atrocity were the directors of the
Friendly Society, among whom the Archimandrate Gregorios Dikaios,
nicknamed Pappa Phlesas, and Petros Mavromichales, or Petro-Bey, were
the most conspicuous. Its principal agents were the klepht or brigand
chieftains, best represented by Theodore Kolokotrones.
Born about 1770, of a family devoted to the use of arms in predatory
ways, Kolokotrones had led a lawless life until 1806, when the Greek
peasantry called in the assistance of their Turkish rulers in hunting
down their persecutors of their own race, and when, several of his
family being slain, he himself had to seek refuge in Zante. There he
maintained himself, partly by piracy, partly by cattle-dealing.
In 1810 the English annexation of the Ionian Islands led to his
employment, first as captain and afterwards as major, in the Greek
contingent of the British army. He had amassed much wealth, and was
in the prime of life when, in January, 1821, he returned to his early
home, to revive his old brigand life under the name of legitimate
warfare. His thorough knowledge of the country, its passes and its
strongholds, and his familiarity with the modes of fighting proper to
them, his handsome person and agreeable deportment, his shrewd wit and
persuasive oratory, made him one of the most influential agents of
the Revolution at its commencement, and his influence grew during the
ensuing years.
The flame of rebellion, having spread through the Morea during the
early weeks of April, extended rapidly over the adjoining districts of
the mainland. By the end of June the insurgents were masters of
nearly all the country now possessed by modern Greece. Their cause
was heartily espoused by the Suliots of Albania and other
fellow-Christians in the various Turkish provinces, and their kinsmen
of the outlying islands were eager to join in the work of national
regeneration, and to contribute largely to the completion of that work
by their naval prowess.
It was naval prowess, as our later pages will abundantly show, of
a very barbarous and undeveloped sort. Besides the two principal
seaports on the mainland, Tricheri on Mount Pelion and Galaxidhi on
the Gulf of Corinth, there were famous colonies of Greek seamen in the
islands of Psara and Kasos, and similar colonies of Albanians in Hydra
and Spetzas. These and the other islands had long practised irregular
commerce, and protected that commerce by irregular fighting with the
Turks. At the first sound of revolution they threw in their lot with
the insurgents of the mainland, and thus a nondescript navy of some
four hundred brigs and schooners, of from sixty to four hundred tons'
burthen, and manned by about twelve thousand sailors, adepts alike
in trade and piracy, but very unskilled in orderly warfare, and very
feebly inspired by anything like disinterested patriotism, was ready
to use and abuse its powers during the ensuing seven years' fight for
Greek independence.
During the summer of 1821, while the continental Greeks were rushing
to arms, murdering the Turkish residents among them by thousands, and
thus bringing down upon themselves, or upon those of their own race
who, as peasants and burghers, took no important share in actual
fighting, the murderous vengeance of the Turkish troops sent to
attempt the suppression of the revolt, these sailors were pursuing an
easier and more profitable game. The Turkish ports were not warlike,
and the Turkish trading ships were not prepared for fighting. In May,
a formidable crowd of vessels left the islands on a cruise, from which
they soon returned with an immense store of booty. Early in June, the
best Turkish fleet that could be brought together, consisting of two
line-of-battle ships, three frigates, and three sloops, went out to
harass, if not to destroy, the swarm of smaller enemies. Jakomaki
Tombazes, with thirty-seven of these smaller enemies, set off to meet
them, and falling in with one of the ships, gave her chase, till, in
the roads of Eripos, she was attacked on the 8th of June, and, with
the help of a fireship, destroyed with a loss of nearly four hundred
men. That victory caused the flight of the other Turkish vessels, and
was the beginning of much cruel work at sea and with ships, which,
not often daring to meet in open fight, wrought terrible mischief to
unprotected ports and islands.
The mischief wrought upon the land was yet more terrible. A seething
tide of Greek and Moslem blood heaved to and fro, as, during the
second half of 1821, each party in turn gained temporary ascendency in
one district after another. Greeks murdered Turks, and Turks murdered
Greeks, with equal ferocity; or perhaps the ferocity of the Greeks,
stirred by bad leaders to revenge themselves for all their previous
sufferings, even surpassed that of the Turks. Of their cruelty a
glaring instance occurred in their capture of Navarino. The Turkish
inhabitants having held out as long as a mouthful of food was left
in the town, were forced to capitulate on the 19th of August. It was
promised that, upon their surrendering, the Greek vessels were to
convey them, their wearing apparel, and their household furniture,
either to Egypt or to Tunis. No sooner were the gates opened than
a wholesale plunder and slaughter ensued. A Greek ecclesiastic has
described the scene. "Women wounded with musket-balls and sabre-cuts
rushed to the sea, seeking to escape, and were deliberately shot.
Mothers robbed of their clothes, with infants in their arms, plunged
into the water to conceal themselves from shame, and they were then
made a mark for inhuman riflemen. Greeks seized infants from their
mothers' breasts and dashed them against the rocks. Children, three
and four years old, were hurled, living, into the sea, and left to
drown. When the massacre was ended, the dead bodies washed ashore, or
piled on the beach, threatened to cause a pestilence."[A] At the sack
of Tripolitza, on the 8th of October, about eight thousand Moslems
were murdered, the last two thousand, chiefly women and children,
being taken into a neighbouring ravine, there to be slaughtered at
leisure. Two years afterwards a ghastly heap of bones attested the
inhuman deed.
[Footnote A: Finlay, vol. i.; p. 263, citing Phrantzes.]
In ways like these the first stage of the Greek Revolution was
achieved. Before the close of 1821, it appeared to the Greeks
themselves, to their Moslem enemies, and to their many friends in
England, France, and other countries, that the triumph was complete.
Unfortunately, the same bad motives and the same bad methods that had
so grievously polluted the torrent of patriotism continued to poison
and disturb the stream which might otherwise have been henceforth
clear, steady, and health-giving. Greece was free, but, unless another
and a much harder revolution could be effected in the temper and
conduct of its own people, unfit to put its freedom to good use or
even to maintain it. "The rapid success of the Greeks during the first
few weeks of the revolution," says their ablest historian, "threw the
management of much civil and financial business into the hands of the
proësti and demogeronts in office. The primates, who already exercised
great official authority, instantly appropriated that which had been
hitherto exercised by murdered voivodes and beys. Every primate strove
to make himself a little independent potentate, and every captain of
a district assumed the powers of a commander-in-chief. The Revolution,
before six months had passed, seemed to have peopled Greece with a
host of little Ali Pashas. When the primate and the captain acted in
concert, they collected the public revenues; administered the Turkish
property, which was declared national; enrolled, paid, and provisioned
as many troops as circumstances required, or as they thought fit;
named officers; formed a local guard for the primate of the best
soldiers in the place, who were thus often withdrawn from the public
service; and organised a local police and a local treasury. This I
system of local self-government, constituted in a very self-willed
manner, and relieved from almost all responsibility, was soon
established as a natural result of the Revolution over all Greece.
The Sultan's authority having ceased, every primate assumed the
prerogatives of the Sultan. For a few weeks this state of things was
unavoidable, and, to an able and honest chief or government, it would
have facilitated the establishment of a strong central authority; but
by the vices of Greek society it was perpetuated into an organised
anarchy. No improvement was made in financial arrangements, or in the
system of taxation; no measures were adopted for rendering property
more secure; no attempt was made to create an equitable administration
of justice; no courts of law were established; and no financial
accounts were published. Governments were formed, constitutions were
drawn up, national assemblies met, orators debated, and laws were
passed according to the political fashion patronised by the liberals
of the day. But no effort was made to prevent the Government
being virtually absolute, unless it was by rendering it absolutely
powerless. The constitutions were framed to remain a dead letter. The
national assemblies were nothing but conferences of parties, and the
laws passed were intended to fascinate Western Europe, not to operate
with effect in Greece."[A]
[Footnote A: Finlay, vol. i., pp. 280, 281.]
The supreme government of Greece had been assumed in June by Prince
Demetrius Hypsilantes, a worthier man than his brother Alexander, but
by no means equal to the task he took in hand. At first the brigand
chiefs and local potentates, not willing to surrender any of the power
they had acquired, were disposed to render to him nominal submission,
believing that his name and his Russian influence would be serviceable
to the cause of Greece. But Hypsilantes showed himself utterly
incompetent, and it was soon apparent that his sympathies were wholly
alien to those both of the Greek people and of their military and
civil leaders. Therefore another master had to be chosen. Kolokotrones
might have succeeded to the dignity, and he certainly had vigour
enough of disposition, and enough honesty and dishonesty combined, to
make the position one of power as well as of dignity. For that very
reason, however, his comrades and rivals were unwilling to place him
in it. They desired a president skilful enough to hold the reins of
government with a very loose hand, yet so as to keep them from getting
hopelessly entangled—one who should be a smart secretary and adviser,
without assuming the functions of a director.
Such a man they found in Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos, then about
thirty-two years old. He was a kinsman of a Hospodar of Wallachia,
by whom he had in his youth been employed in political matters. After
that he had resided in France, where he acquired much fresh knowledge,
and where his popularity helped to quicken sympathy on behalf of
the Greek Revolution at its first outburst. He had lately come
to Missolonghi with a ship-load of ammunition and other material,
procured and brought at his own expense, and soon attained
considerable influence. Always courteous in his manners, only
ungenerous in his actions where the interests of others came into
collision with his own, less strong-willed and less ambitious than
most of his associates, those associates were hardly jealous of his
popularity at home, and wholly pleased with his popularity among
foreigners. It was a clear gain to their cause to have Shelley writing
his "Hellas," and dedicating the poem to Mavrocordatos, as "a token of
admiration, sympathy, and friendship."
Mavrocordatos was named President of Greece in the Constitution of
Epidaurus, chiefly his own workmanship, which was proclaimed on the
13th of January—New Year's Day, according to the reckoning of the
Greek Church—1822. It is not necessary here to detail his own acts or
those of his real or professing subordinates. All we have to do is to
furnish a general account, and a few characteristic illustrations, of
the course of events during the Greek Revolution, in explanation of
the state of parties and of politics at the time of Lord Cochrane's
advent among them. These events were marked by continuance of the same
selfish policy, divided interests, class prejudice, and individual
jealousy that have been already referred to. The mass of the Greek
people were, as they had been from the first, zealous in their desire
for freedom, and, having won it, they were not unwilling to use it
honestly. For their faults their leaders are chiefly to be blamed; and
in apology for those leaders, it must be remembered that they were an
assemblage of soldiers who had been schooled in oriental brigandage,
of priests whose education had been in a corrupt form of Christianity
made more corrupt by persecution, of merchants who had found it hard
to trade without trickery, and of seamen who had been taught to
regard piracy as an honourable vocation. Perhaps we have less cause to
condemn them for the errors and vices that they exhibited during their
fight for freedom, than to wonder that those errors and vices were not
more reprehensible in themselves and disastrous in their issues.
For about six years the fight was maintained without foreign aid, save
that given by private volunteers and generous champions in Western
Europe, against a state numerically nearly twenty times as strong as
the little community of revolutionists. In it, along with much wanton
cruelty, was displayed much excellent heroism. But the heroism was
reckless and undisciplined, and therefore often worse than useless.
Memorable instances both of recklessness and of want of discipline
appeared in the attempts made to wrest Chios from the Turks in 1822.
The Greek inhabitants of this island, on whom the Turkish yoke pressed
lightly, had refused to join in the insurgent movement of their
brethren on the mainland and in the neighbouring islands. But it was
considered that a little coercion would induce them to share in
the Revolution and convert their prosperous island into a Greek
possession. Therefore, in March, a small force of two thousand five
hundred men crossed the archipelago, took possession of Koutari,
the principal town, and proceeded to invest the Turkish citadel.
The Chiots, though perhaps not very willingly, took part in the
enterprise; but the invading party was quite unequal to the work it
had undertaken. In April a formidable Turkish squadron arrived, and
by it Chios was easily recovered, to become the scene of vindictive
atrocities, which brought all the terrified inhabitants who were
not slaughtered, or who could not escape, into abject submission.
Thereupon, on the 10th of May, a Greek fleet of fifty-six vessels was
despatched by Mavrocordatos to attempt a more thorough capture of the
island. Its commander was Andreas Miaoulis, a Hydriot merchant, who
proved himself the best sea-captain among the Greeks. Had Miaoulis
been able, as he wished, to start sooner and meet the Turkish squadron
on its way to Chios, a brilliant victory might have resulted, instead
of one of the saddest catastrophes in the whole Greek war. Being
deterred therefrom by the vacillation of Mavrocordatos and the
insubordination of his captains and their crews, he was only able to
reach the island when it was again in the hands of the enemy, and when
all was ready for withstanding him. There was useless fighting on the
31st of May and the two following days. On the 18th of June, Miaoulis
made another attack; but he was only able to destroy the Turkish
flag-ship, and nearly all on board, by means of a fire-vessel. His
fleet was unmanageable, and he had to abandon the enterprise and to
leave the unfortunate Chiots to endure further punishment for offences
that were not their own. This punishment was so terrible that, in six
months, the population of Chios was reduced from one hundred thousand
to thirty thousand. Twenty thousand managed to escape. Fifty thousand
were either put to death or sold as slaves in Asia Minor.
That failure of the Greeks at Chios, quickly followed by their
defeat on land at Petta, greatly disheartened the revolutionists.
Mavrocordatos virtually resigned his presidentship, and there was
anarchy in Greece till 1828. Athens, captured from the Turks in June,
1822, became the centre of jealous rivalry and visionary scheming,
mismanagement, and government that was worse than no government at
all. Odysseus, the vilest of the vile men whom the Revolution brought
to the surface, was its master for some time; and, when he played
traitor to the Turks, he was succeeded by others hardly better than
himself.
In spite of some heavy disasters, however, the Greeks were so far
successful during 1822 that in 1823 they were able to hold their
newly-acquired territory and to wrest some more fortresses from their
enemies. The real heroism that they had displayed, moreover—the foul
cruelties of which they were guilty and the selfish courses which they
pursued being hardly reported to their friends, and, when reported,
hardly believed—awakened keen sympathy on their behalf. Shelley and
Byron, and many others of less note, had sung their virtues and their
sufferings in noble verse and enlarged upon them in eloquent prose,
and in England and France, in Switzerland, Germany, and the United
States, a strong party of Philhellenes was organized to collect money
and send recruits for their assistance.
The two Philhellenes of greatest note who served in Greece during the
earlier years of the Revolution were Thomas Gordon and Frank Abney
Hastings. Gordon, who attained the rank of general in the army of
independence, had the advantage of a long previous and thorough
acquaintance with the character of both Turks and Greeks and with the
languages that they spoke. He watched all the revolutionary movements
from the beginning, and took part in many of them. In the "History
of the Greek Revolution," which he published in 1832, he gave such
a vivid and, in the main, so accurate an account of them that his
narrative has formed the basis of the more ambitious work of the
native historian, Mr. Trikoupes. Of the vices and errors of the
people on whose behalf he fought and wrote he spoke boldly. "Whatever
national or individual wrong the Greeks may have endured," he said
in one place, "it is impossible to justify the ferocity of their
vengeance or to deny that a comparison instituted between them and the
Ottoman generals, Mehemet Aboulaboud, Omer Vrioni, and the Kehaya Bey
of Kurshid, would give to the latter the palm of humanity. Humanity,
however, is a word quite out of place when applied either to them or
to their opponents." In another page, further denouncing the Greek
leaders, he wrote: "Panourias was the worst of these local despots,
whom some writers have elevated into heroes. He was, in fact, an
ignoble robber, hardened in evil. He enriched himself with the spoils
of the Mahometans; yet he and his retinue of brigands compelled the
people to maintain them at free quarters, in idleness and luxury,
exacting not only bread, meat, wine, and forage, but also sugar and
coffee. Hence springs the reflection that the Greeks had cause to
repent their early predilection for the klephts, who were almost all,
beginning with Kolokotrones, infamous for the sordid perversity of
their dispositions."[A] Gordon's disinterested and brave efforts to
bring about a better state of things and to help on the cause of
real patriotism in Greece were highly praiseworthy; but, as another
historian has truly said, "he did not possess the activity and
decision of character necessary to obtain commanding influence in
council, or to initiate daring measures in the field."[B]
[Footnote A: Gordon, vol. i., pp. 313, 400.]
[Footnote B: Finlay, vol. ii., p. 129.]
Frank Abney Hastings was an abler man. Born in 1794, he was started in
the naval profession when only eleven years old. Six months after the
commencement of his midshipman's life he was present, on board the
_Neptune_, at the battle of Trafalgar, and during the ensuing fourteen
years he served in nearly every quarter of the globe. His independent
spirit, however—something akin to Lord Cochrane's—brought him into
disfavour, and, in 1819, for challenging a superior officer who had
insulted him, he was dismissed from the British navy. Disheartened and
disgusted, he resided in France for about three years. At length he
resolved to go and fight for the Greeks, partly out of sympathy for
their cause, partly as a relief from the misery of forced idleness,
partly with the view of developing a plan which he had been devising
for extending the use of steamships in naval warfare,—to which last
excellent improvement he greatly contributed. He arrived at Hydra in
April, 1822, just in time to take part in the fighting off Chios.
One of his ingenious suggestions, made to Andreas Miaoulis, and its
reception, have been described by himself. "I proposed to direct a
fireship and three other vessels upon the frigate, and, when near the
enemy, to set fire to certain combustibles which should throw out
a great flame. The enemy would naturally conclude they were all
fireships. The vessels were then to attach themselves to the frigate,
fire broadsides, double-shotted, throwing on board the enemy at the
same time combustible balls which gave a great smoke without flame.
This would doubtless induce him to believe he was on fire, and give
a most favourable opportunity for boarding him. However, the admiral
returned my plan, saying only [Greek: kalo], without asking a single
question, or wishing me to explain its details; and I observed a kind
of insolent contempt in his manner. This interview with the admiral
disgusted me. They place you in a position in which it is impossible
to render any service, and then they boast of their own superiority,
and of the uselessness of the Franks, as they call us, in Turkish
warfare." Miaoulis, however, soon gained wisdom and made good use of
Captain Hastings, who spent more than 7000£—all his patrimony—in
serving the Greeks. He was almost the only officer in their employ
who, during the earlier years of the Revolution, succeeded in
establishing any sort of discipline or good management.
Lord Byron, the most illustrious of all the early Philhellenes, used
to say, shortly before his death, that with Napier at the head of the
army and Hastings in command of a fleet the triumph of Greece might
be insured. Byron was then at Missolonghi, whither he had gone in
January, 1824, to die in April. Long before, while stirring up the
sympathy of all lovers of liberty for the cause of regeneration in
Greece, he had shown that regeneration could be by no means a short or
easy work, and now he had to report that the real work was hardly
yet begun—nay, that it seemed almost further off than ever. "Of the
Greeks," he wrote, "I can't say much good hitherto, and I do not like
to speak ill of them, though they do of one another."
It was chiefly at Byron's instigation that the first Greek loan was
contracted, in London, early in 1824. Its proceeds, 300,000£, were
spent partly in unprofitable outlay upon ships, ammunition, and the
like, of which the people were in no position to make good use, but
mostly in civil war and in pandering to the greed and vanity of the
members of the Government and their subordinate officials. "Phanariots
and doctors in medicine," says an eye-witness, "who, in the month
of April, 1824, were clad in ragged coats, and who lived on scanty
rations, threw off that patriotic chrysalis before summer was past,
and emerged in all the splendour of brigand life, fluttering about in
rich Albanian habiliments, refulgent with brilliant and unused arms,
and followed by diminutive pipe-bearers and tall henchmen."[A]
[Footnote A: Finky, vol. ii. p. 39.]
Even the scanty allowance made by the Greek Government out of its
newly-acquired wealth for fighting purposes was for the most part
squandered almost as frivolously. One general who drew pay and rations
for seven hundred soldiers went to fight and die at Sphakteria at
the head of seventeen armed peasants.[A] And that is only a glaring
instance of peculations that were all but universal.
[Footnote A: Trikoupes, vol. iii., p. 206.]
That being the degradation to which the leaders of the Greek
Revolution had sunk, it is not strange that its gains in previous
years should have begun in 1824 to be followed by heavy losses. The
Greek people—the peasants and burghers—were still patriots, though
ill-trained and misdirected. They could defend their own homesteads
with unsurpassed heroism, and hold their own mountains and valleys
with fierce persistency. But they were unfit for distant fighting,
even when their chiefs consented to employ them in it. Sultan Mahmud,
therefore, who had been profiting by the hard experience of former
years, and whose strength had been steadily growing while the power
of the insurgents had been rapidly weakening, entered on a new and
successful policy. He left the Greeks to waste their energies in their
own possessions, and resolved to recapture, one after another, the
outposts and ill-protected islands. For this he took especial care
in augmenting his navy, and, besides developing his own resources,
induced his powerful and turbulent vassal, Mohammed Ali, the Pasha of
Egypt, to equip a formidable fleet and entrust it to his son Ibrahim,
on whom was conferred the title of Vizier of the Morea.
Even without that aid Mahmud was able to do much in furtherance of his
purpose. The island of Kasos was easily recovered, and full vengeance
was wreaked on its Greek inhabitants on the 20th of June. Soon
afterwards Psara was seized and punished yet more hardly.
On the 19th of July Ibrahim left Alexandria with a naval force which
swept the southern seas of Greek pirates or privateers. On the 1st
of September he effected a junction with the Turkish fleet at Budrun.
Their united strength comprised forty-six ships, frigates, and
corvettes, and about three hundred transports, large and small. The
Greek fleet, between seventy and eighty sail, would have been strong
enough to withstand it under any sort of good management; but good
management was wanting, and the crews were quite beyond the control of
their masters. The result was that in a series of small battles during
the autumn of 1824 the Mahometans were generally successful, and their
enemies found themselves at the close of the year terribly discomfited
The little organization previously existing was destroyed, and the
revolutionists felt that they had no prospect of advantageously
carrying on their strife at sea without assistance and guidance that
could not be looked for among themselves.
Their troubles were increased in the following year. In February and
March, 1825, Ibrahim landed a formidable army in the Morea, and began
a course of operations in which the land forces and the fleet
combined to dispossess the Greeks of their chief strongholds. The
strongly-fortified island of Sphakteria, the portal of Navarino and
Pylos, was taken on the 8th of May. Pylos capitulated on the 11th,
and Navarino on the 21st of the same month. Other citadels, one after
another, were surrendered; and Ibrahim and his army spent the summer
in scouring the Morea and punishing its inhabitants, with the utmost
severity, for the lawless brigandage and the devoted patriotism of
which they had been guilty during the past four years.
The result was altogether disheartening to the Greeks. They saw that
their condition was indeed desperate. George Konduriottes, a Hydriot
merchant, an Albanian who could not speak Greek, and who was alike
unable to govern himself or others, had, in June, 1824, been named
president of the republic, and since then the rival interests of the
primates, the priests, and the military leaders had been steadily
causing the decay of all that was left of patriotism and increase of
the selfishness that had so long been rampant.
There was one consequence of this degradation, however, which promised
to be very beneficial. Seeing that their cause was being rapidly
weakened, and that their hard-fought battle for liberty was in danger
of speedy and ignominious reversal by their own divisions, by the
stealthy encroachments of the Ottomans in the north, and by the more
energetic advances of the Egyptians in the south, the Greeks resolved
to abandon some of their jealousies and greeds, to look for a saviour
from without, and, on his coming, to try and submit themselves
honestly and heartily to his leadership. The issue of that resolution
was the following letter, written by Mavrocordatos, then Secretary to
the National Assembly:—
"Milord,—Tandis que vos rares talens étaient consacrés à procurer le
bonheur d'un pays séparé par un espace immense de la Grèce, celle-ci
ne voyait pas sans admiration, sans intérêt, sans une espèce de
jalousie secrète même, les succès brillants qui ont toujours couronné
vos nobles efforts, et rendu à l'indépendance un des plus beaux, des
plus riches pays du monde. Votre retour en Angleterre a excité la plus
vive joie dans le coeur du citoyen Grèc et de ses représentans par
l'espoir flattereur qu'ils commencent à concevoir que, celui qui s'est
si noblement dédié à procurer le bonheur d'une nation, ne refusera
pas d'en faire autant pour celui d'une autre, qui ne lui offre pas
une carrière moins brillante et moins digne de lui et par son nom
historique, et par ses malheurs passés et par ses efforts actuels pour
reconquérir sa liberté et son indépendance. Les mers qui rappellent
les victoires des Thémistocles et des Timon, ne seront pas un théâtre
indifférent pour celui qui sait apprécier les grands hommes, et un des
premiers amiraux de notre siècle ne verra qu' avec plaisir qu'il est
appellé à renouveler les beaux jours de Salamine et de Mycale à la
tête des Miaoulis, des Sachtouris et des Kanaris.
"C'est avec la plus grande satisfaction, milord, que je me vois chargé
de faire, au nom du Gouvernement, à votre seigneurie, la proposition
du commandement général des forces navales de la Grèce. Si votre
seigneurie est disposée à l'accepter, Messieurs les Deputés
du Gouvernement Grèc à Londres ont toute l'autorisation et les
instructions nécessaires pour combiner avec elle sur les moyens à
mettre à sa disposition, afin d'utiliser le plutôt possible
votre noble décision et accélérer l'heureux moment que la Grèce
reconnaissante et enthousiasmée vous verra combattre pour la cause de
sa liberté.
"Je profite de cette occasion pour prier votre seigneurie de vouloir
bien agréer l'assurance de mon respect et de la plus haute estime avec
laquelle j'ai l'honneur d'être, milord, de votre seigneurie le très
humble et très obéissant serviteur,
"A. Mavrocordatos,
"Naples de Romanie,
"Secre-genl d'Etat.
"
_le 20 Août_, —————- 1825 1er 7bre
"A Sa Seigneurie le très Honorable Lord Cochrane, à Londres."