1
_From Ancient to Modern Greece_
The name of Greece has two entirely different associations in our
minds. Sometimes it calls up a wonderful literature enshrined in a
‘dead language’, and exquisite works of a vanished art recovered by the
spade; at other times it is connected with the currant-trade returns
quoted on the financial page of our newspapers or with the ‘Balance of
Power’ discussed in their leading articles. Ancient and Modern Greece
both mean much to us, but usually we are content to accept them as
independent phenomena, and we seldom pause to wonder whether there is
any deeper connexion between them than their name. It is the purpose of
these pages to ask and give some answer to this question.
The thought that his own Greece might perish, to be succeeded by
another Greece after the lapse of more than two thousand years, would
have caused an Ancient Greek surprise. In the middle of the fifth
century B.C., Ancient Greek civilization seemed triumphantly vigorous
and secure. A generation before, it had flung back the onset of a
political power which combined all the momentum of all the other
contemporary civilizations in the world; and the victory had proved not
merely the superiority of Greek arms—the Spartan spearman and the
Athenian galley—but the superior vitality of Greek politics—the
self-governing, self-sufficing city-state. In these cities a wonderful
culture had burst into flower—an art expressing itself with equal
mastery in architecture, sculpture, and drama, a science which ranged
from the most practical medicine to the most abstract mathematics, and
a philosophy which blended art, science, and religion into an
ever-developing and ever more harmonious view of the universe. A
civilization so brilliant and so versatile as this seemed to have an
infinite future before it, yet even here death lurked in ambush.
When the cities ranged themselves in rival camps, and squandered their
strength on the struggle for predominance, the historian of the
Peloponnesian war could already picture Athens and Sparta in ruins,[1]
and the catastrophe began to warp the soul of Plato before he had
carried Greek philosophy to its zenith. This internecine strife of free
communities was checked within a century by the imposition of a single
military autocracy over them all, and Alexander the Great crowned his
father Philip’s work by winning new worlds for Hellenism from the
Danube to the Ganges and from the Oxus to the Nile. The city-state and
its culture were to be propagated under his aegis, but this vision
vanished with Alexander’s death, and Macedonian militarism proved a
disappointment. The feuds of these crowned condottieri harassed the
cities more sorely than their own quarrels, and their arms could not
even preserve the Hellenic heritage against external foes. The Oriental
rallied and expelled Hellenism again from the Asiatic hinterland, while
the new cloud of Rome was gathering in the west. In four generations[2]
of the most devastating warfare the world had seen, Rome conquered all
the coasts of the Mediterranean. Greek city and Greek dynast went down
before her, and the political sceptre passed irrevocably from the
Hellenic nation.
[Footnote 1: Thucydides, Book I, chap. 10.]
[Footnote 2: 264-146 B.C.]
Yet this political abdication seemed to open for Hellenic culture a
future more brilliant and assured than ever. Rome could organize as
well as conquer. She accepted the city-state as the municipal unit of
the Roman Empire, thrust back the Oriental behind the Euphrates, and
promoted the Hellenization of all the lands between this river-frontier
and the Balkans with much greater intensity than the Macedonian
imperialists. Her political conquests were still further
counterbalanced by her spiritual surrender, and Hellenism was the soul
of the new Latin culture which Rome created, and which advanced with
Roman government over the vast untutored provinces of the west and
north, bringing them, too, within the orbit of Hellenic civilization.
Under the shadow of the Roman Empire, Plutarch, the mirror of
Hellenism, could dwell in peace in his little city-state of Chaeronea,
and reflect in his writings all the achievements of the Hellenic spirit
as an ensample to an apparently endless posterity.
Yet the days of Hellenic culture were also numbered. Even Plutarch
lived[1] to look down from the rocky citadel of Chaeronea upon Teutonic
raiders wasting the Kephisos vale, and for more than three centuries
successive hordes of Goths searched out and ravaged the furthest
corners of European Greece. Then the current set westward to sweep
away[2] the Roman administration in the Latin provinces, and Hellenism
seemed to have been granted a reprieve. The Greek city-state of
Byzantium on the Black Sea Straits had been transformed into the Roman
administrative centre of Constantinople, and from this capital the
Emperor Justinian in the sixth century A.D. still governed and defended
the whole Greek-speaking world. But this political glamour only threw
the symptoms of inward dissolution into sharper relief. Within the
framework of the Empire the municipal liberty of the city-state had
been stifled and extinguished by the waxing jungle of bureaucracy, and
the spiritual culture which the city-state fostered, and which was more
essential to Hellenism than any political institutions, had been part
ejected, part exploited, and wholly compromised by a new gospel from
the east.
[Footnote 1: About A.D. 100]
[Footnote 2: A.D. 404-476]
While the Oriental had been compelled by Rome to draw his political
frontier at the Euphrates, and had failed so far to cross the
river-line, he had maintained his cultural independence within sight of
the Mediterranean. In the hill country of Judah, overlooking the high
road between Antioch and Alexandria, the two chief foci of Hellenism in
the east which the Macedonians had founded, and which had grown to
maturity under the aegis of Rome, there dwelt a little Semitic
community which had defied all efforts of Greek or Roman to assimilate
it, and had finally given birth to a world religion about the time that
a Roman punitive expedition razed its holy city of Jerusalem to the
ground.[1] Christianity was charged with an incalculable force, which
shot like an electric current from one end of the Roman Empire to the
other. The highly-organized society of its adherents measured its
strength in several sharp conflicts with the Imperial administration,
from which it emerged victorious, and it was proclaimed the official
religious organization of the Empire by the very emperor that founded
Constantinople.[2]
[Footnote 1: A.D. 70.]
[Footnote 2: Constantine the Great recognized Christianity in A.D. 313
and founded Constantinople in A.D. 328.]
The established Christian Church took the best energies of Hellenism
into its service. The Greek intellectuals ceased to become lecturers
and professors, to find a more human and practical career in the
bishop’s office. The Nicene Creed, drafted by an ‘oecumenical’
conference of bishops under the auspices of Constantine himself,[1] was
the last notable formulation of Ancient Greek philosophy. The cathedral
of Aya Sophia, with which Justinian adorned Constantinople, was the
last original creation of Ancient Greek art.[2] The same Justinian
closed the University of Athens, which had educated the world for nine
hundred years and more, since Plato founded his college in the Academy.
Six recalcitrant professors went into exile for their spiritual
freedom, but they found the devout Zoroastrianism of the Persian court
as unsympathetic as the devout Christianity of the Roman. Their
humiliating return and recantation broke the ‘Golden Chain’ of Hellenic
thought for ever.
Hellenism was thus expiring from its own inanition, when the inevitable
avalanche overwhelmed it from without. In the seventh century A.D.
there was another religious eruption in the Semitic world, this time in
the heart of Arabia, where Hellenism had hardly penetrated, and under
the impetus of Islam the Oriental burst his bounds again after a
thousand years. Syria was reft away from the Empire, and Egypt, and
North Africa as far as the Atlantic, and their political severance
meant their cultural loss to Greek civilization. Between the Koran and
Hellenism no fusion was possible. Christianity had taken Hellenism
captive, but Islam gave it no quarter, and the priceless library of
Alexandria is said to have been condemned by the caliph’s order to feed
the furnaces of the public baths.
[Footnote 1: A.D. 325.]
[Footnote 2: Completed A.D. 538.]
While Hellenism was thus cut short in the east, a mortal blow was
struck at its heart from the north. The Teuton had raided and passed
on, but the lands he had depopulated were now invaded by immigrants who
had come to stay. As soon as the last Goth and Lombard had gone west of
the Isonzo, the Slavs poured in from the north-eastern plains of Europe
through the Moravian gap, crossed the Danube somewhere near the site of
Vienna, and drifted down along the eastern face of the Alps upon the
Adriatic littoral. Rebuffed by the sea-board, the Slavonic migration
was next deflected east, and filtered through the Bosnian mountains,
scattering the Latin-speaking provincials before it to left and right,
until it debouched upon the broad basin of the river Morava. In this
concentration-area it gathered momentum during the earlier part of the
seventh century A.D., and then burst out with irresistible force in all
directions, eastward across the Maritsa basin till it reached the Black
Sea, and southward down the Vardar to the shores of the Aegean.
Beneath this Slavonic flood the Greek race in Europe was engulfed. A
few fortified cities held out, Adrianople on the Maritsa continued to
cover Constantinople; Salonika at the mouth of the Vardar survived a
two hundred years siege; while further south Athens, Korinth, and
Patras escaped extinction. But the tide of invasion surged around their
walls. The Slavs mastered all the open country, and, pressing across
the Korinthian Gulf, established themselves in special force throughout
the Peloponnesos. The thoroughness of their penetration is witnessed to
this day by the Slavonic names which still cling to at least a third of
the villages, rivers, and mountains in European Greece, and are found
in the most remote as well as in the most accessible quarters of the
land.[1]
[Footnote 1: For example: Tsimova and Panitsa in the Tainaron peninsula
(Maina); Tsoupana and Khrysapha in Lakonia; Dhimitzana, Karytena, and
Andhritsena in the centre of Peloponnesos, and Vostitsa on its north
coast; Dobrena and Kaprena in Boiotia; Vonitza on the Gulf of Arta;
Kardhitsa in the Thessalian plain.]
With the coming of the Slavs darkness descends like a curtain upon
Greek history. We catch glimpses of Arab hosts ranging across Anatolia
at will and gazing at Slavonic hordes across the narrow Bosphorus. But
always the Imperial fleet patrols the waters between, and always the
triple defences of Constantinople defy the assailant. Then after about
two centuries the floods subside, the gloom disperses, and the Greek
world emerges into view once more. But the spectacle before us is
unfamiliar, and most of the old landmarks have been swept away.
By the middle of the ninth century A.D., the Imperial Government had
reduced the Peloponnesos to order again, and found itself in the
presence of three peoples. The greater part of the land was occupied by
‘Romaioi’—normal, loyal, Christian subjects of the empire—but in the
hilly country between Eurotas, Taygetos, and the sea, two Slavonic
tribes still maintained themselves in defiant savagery and worshipped
their Slavonic gods, while beyond them the peninsula of Tainaron, now
known as Maina, sheltered communities which still clung to the pagan
name of Hellene and knew no other gods but Zeus, Athena, and Apollo.
Hellene and Slav need not concern us. They were a vanishing minority,
and the Imperial Government was more successful in obliterating their
individuality than in making them contribute to its exchequer. The
future lay with the Romaioi.
The speech of these Romaioi was not the speech of Rome. ‘Romaikà,’ as
it is still called popularly in the country-side, is a development of
the ‘koinè’ or ‘current’ dialect of Ancient Greek, in which the
Septuagint and the New Testament are written. The vogue of these books
after the triumph of Christianity and the oncoming of the Dark Age,
when they were the sole intellectual sustenance of the people, gave the
idiom in which they were composed an exclusive prevalence. Except in
Tzakonia—the iron-bound coast between Cape Malea and Nauplia Bay—all
other dialects of Ancient Greek became extinct, and the varieties of
the modern language are all differentiations of the ‘koinè’, along
geographical lines which in no way correspond with those which divided
Doric from Ionian. Yet though Romaic is descended from the ‘koinè’, it
is almost as far removed from it as modern Italian is from the language
of St. Augustine or Cicero. Ancient Greek possessed a pitch-accent
only, which allowed the quantitative values of syllables to be measured
against one another, and even to form the basis of a metrical system.
In Romaic the pitch-accent has transformed itself into a stress-accent
almost as violent as the English, which has destroyed all quantitative
relation between accented and unaccented syllables, often wearing away
the latter altogether at the termination of words, and always
impoverishing their vowel sounds. In the ninth century A.D. this new
enunciation was giving rise to a new poetical technique founded upon
accent and rhyme, which first essayed itself in folk-songs and
ballads,[1] and has since experimented in the same variety of forms as
English poetry.
[Footnote 1: The earliest products of the modern technique were called
‘city’ verses, because they originated in Constantinople, which has
remained ‘the city’ _par excellence_ for the Romaic Greek ever since
the Dark Age made it the asylum of his civilization.]
These humble beginnings of a new literature were supplemented by the
rudiments of a new art. Any visitor at Athens who looks at the three
tiny churches [1] built in this period of first revival, and compares
them with the rare pre-Norman churches of England, will find the same
promise of vitality in the Greek architecture as in his own. The
material—worked blocks of marble pillaged from ancient monuments,
alternating with courses of contemporary brick—produces a completely
new aesthetic effect upon the eye; and the structure—a grouping of
lesser cupolas round a central dome— is the very antithesis of the
‘upright-and-horizontal’ style which confronts him in ruins upon the
Akropolis.
[Footnote 1: The Old Metropolitan, the Kapnikaria, and St. Theodore.]
These first achievements of Romaic architecture speak by implication of
the characteristic difference between the Romaios and the Hellene. The
linguistic and the aesthetic change were as nothing compared to the
change in religion, for while the Hellene had been a pagan, the Romaios
was essentially a member of the Christian Church. Yet this new and
determining characteristic was already fortified by tradition. The
Church triumphant had swiftly perfected its organisation on the model
of the Imperial bureaucracy. Every Romaios owed ecclesiastical
allegiance, through a hierarchy of bishops and metropolitans, to a
supreme patriarch at Constantinople, and in the ninth century this
administrative segregation of the imperial from the west-European
Church had borne its inevitable fruit in a dogmatic divergence, and
ripened into a schism between the Orthodox Christianity of the east on
the one hand and the Catholicism of the Latin world on the other.
The Orthodox Church exercised an important cultural influence over its
Romaic adherents. The official language of its scriptures, creeds, and
ritual had never ceased to be the Ancient Greek ‘koinè’ and by keeping
the Romaios familiar with this otherwise obsolete tongue it kept him in
touch with the unsurpassable literature of his Ancient Greek
predecessors. The vast body of Hellenic literature had perished during
the Dark Age, when all the energies of the race were absorbed by the
momentary struggle for survival; but about a third of the greatest
authors’ greatest works had been preserved, and now that the stress was
relieved, the wreckage of the remainder was sedulously garnered in
anthologies, abridgements, and encyclopaedias. The rising monasteries
offered a safe harbourage both for these compilations and for such
originals as survived unimpaired, and in their libraries they were
henceforth studied, cherished, and above all recopied with more or less
systematic care.
The Orthodox Church was thus a potent link between past and present,
but the most direct link of all was the political survival of the
Empire. Here, too, many landmarks had been swept away. The marvellous
system of Roman Law had proved too subtle and complex for a world in
the throes of dissolution. Within a century of its final codification
by Justinian’s commissioners) it had begun to fall into disuse, and was
now replaced by more summary legislation, which was as deeply imbued
with Mosaic principles as the literary language with the Hebraisms of
the New Testament, and bristled with barbarous applications of the _Lex
Talionis_. The administrative organization instituted by Augustus and
elaborated by Diocletian had likewise disappeared, and the army-corps
districts were the only territorial units that outlasted the Dark Age.
Yet the tradition of order lived on. The army itself preserved Roman
discipline and technique to a remarkable degree, and the military
districts were already becoming the basis for a reconstituted civil
government. The wealth of Latin technicalities incorporated in the
Greek style of ninth-century officialdom witnesses to this continuity
with the past and to the consequent political superiority of the Romaic
Empire over contemporary western Europe.
Within the Imperial frontiers the Romaic race was offered an apparently
secure field for its future development. In the Balkan peninsula the
Slav had been expelled or assimilated to the south of a line stretching
from Avlona to Salonika. East of Salonika the empire still controlled
little more in Europe than the ports of the littoral, and a military
highway linking them with each other and with Constantinople. But
beyond the Bosphorus the frontier included the whole body of Anatolia
as far as Taurus and Euphrates, and here was the centre of gravity both
of the Romaic state and of the Romaic nation.
A new Greek nation had in fact come into being, and it found itself in
touch with new neighbours, whom the Ancient Greek had never known.
Eastward lay the Armenians, reviving, like the Greeks, after the ebb of
the Arab flood, and the Arabs themselves, quiescent within their
natural bounds and transfusing the wisdom of Aristotle and Hippokrates
into their native culture. Both these peoples were sundered from the
Orthodox Greek by religion[1] as well as by language, but a number of
nationalities established on his opposite flank had been evangelized
from Constantinople and followed the Orthodox patriarch in his schism
with Rome. The most important neighbour of the Empire in this quarter
was the Bulgarian kingdom, which covered all the Balkan hinterland from
the Danube and the Black Sea to the barrier-fortresses of Adrianople
and Salonika. It had been founded by a conquering caste of non-Slavonic
nomads from the trans-Danubian steppes, but these were completely
absorbed in the Slavonic population which they had endowed with their
name and had preserved by political consolidation from the fate of
their brethren further south. This Bulgarian state included a large
‘Vlach’ element descended from those Latin-speaking provincials whom
the Slavs had pushed before them in their original migration; while the
main body of the ‘Rumans’, whom the same thrust of invasion had driven
leftwards across the Danube, had established itself in the mountains of
Transylvania, and was just beginning to push down into the Wallachian
and Moldavian plains. Like the Bulgars, this Romance population had
chosen the Orthodox creed, and so had the purely Slavonic Serbs, who
had replaced the Rumans in the basin of the Morava and the Bosnian
hills, as far westward as the Adriatic coast. Beyond, the heathen
Magyars had pressed into the Danubian plains like a wedge, and cut off
the Orthodox world from the Latin-Teutonic Christendom of the west; but
it looked as though the two divisions of Europe were embarked upon the
same course of development. Both were evolving a system of
strongly-knit nationalities, neither wholly interdependent nor wholly
self-sufficient, but linked together in their individual growth by the
ties of common culture and religion. In both the darkness was passing.
The future of civilization seemed once more assured, and in the
Orthodox world the new Greek nation seemed destined to play the leading
part.
[Footnote 1: The Armenians split off from the Catholic Church four
centuries before the schism between the Roman and Orthodox sections of
the latter.]
His cultural and political heritage from his ancient predecessors gave
the Romaic Greek in this period of revival an inestimable advantage
over his cruder neighbours, and his superiority declared itself in an
expansion of the Romaic Empire. In the latter half of the tenth century
A.D. the nest of Arab pirates from Spain, which had established itself
in Krete and terrorized the Aegean, was exterminated by the Emperor
Nikiphóros Phokas, and on the eastern marches Antioch was gathered
within the frontier at the Arabs’ expense, and advanced posts pushed
across Euphrates. In the first half of the eleventh century Basil,
‘Slayer of the Bulgars’, destroyed the Balkan kingdom after a
generation of bitter warfare, and brought the whole interior of the
peninsula under the sway of Constantinople. His successors turned their
attention to the cast again, and attracted one Armenian principality
after another within the Imperial protectorate. Nor was the revival
confined to politics. The conversion of the Russians about A.D. 1000
opened a boundless hinterland to the Orthodox Church, and any one who
glances at a series of Greek ivory carvings or studies Greek history
from the original sources, will here encounter a literary and artistic
renaissance remarkable enough to explain the fascination which the
barbarous Russian and the outlandish Armenian found in Constantinople.
Yet this renaissance had hardly set in before it was paralysed by an
unexpected blow, which arrested the development of Modern Greece for
seven centuries.
Modern, like Ancient, Greece was assailed in her infancy by a conqueror
from the east, and, unlike Ancient Greece, she succumbed. Turkish
nomads from the central Asiatic steppes had been drifting into the
Moslem world as the vigour of the Arabs waned. First they came as
slaves, then as mercenaries, until at last, in the eleventh century,
the clan of Seljuk grasped with a strong hand the political dominion of
Islam. As champions of the caliph the Turkish sultans disputed the
infidels encroachment on the Moslem border. They challenged the Romaic
Empire’s progress in Armenia, and in A.D. 1071—five years after the
Norman founded at Hastings the strong government which has been the
making of England—the Seljuk Turk shattered at the battle of Melasgerd
that heritage of strong government which had promised so much to
Greece.
Melasgerd opened the way to Anatolia. The Arab could make no lodgement
there, but in the central steppe of the temperate plateau the Turk
found a miniature reproduction of his original environment. Tribe after
tribe crossed the Oxus, to make the long pilgrimage to these new
marches which their race had won for Islam on the west, and the
civilization developed in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive
and undisturbed Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities
wore isolated from one another till their commerce fell into decay. The
elaborately cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they
were good for nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad
required. The only monuments of architecture that have survived in
Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses
built by the Seljuk sultans themselves after the consolidation of their
rule, and they are the best witnesses of the vigorous barbarism by
which Romaic culture was effaced. The vitality of the Turk was indeed
unquestionable. He imposed his language and religion upon the native
Anatolian peasantry, as the Greek had imposed his before him, and in
time adopted their sedentary life, though too late to repair the
mischief his own nomadism had wrought. Turk and Anatolian coalesced
into one people; every mountain, river, lake, bridge, and village in
the country took on a Turkish name, and a new nation was established
for ever in the heart of the Romaic world, which nourished itself on
the life-blood of the Empire and was to prove the supreme enemy, of the
race.
This sequel to Melasgerd sealed the Empire’s doom. Robbed of its
Anatolian governing class and its Anatolian territorial army, it ceased
to be self-sufficient, and the defenders it attracted from the west
were at least as destructive as its eastern foes. The brutal régime of
the Turks in the pilgrimage places of Syria had roused a storm of
indignation in Latin Europe, and a cloud gathered in the west once
more. It was heralded by adventurers from Normandy, who had first
served the Romaic Government as mercenaries in southern Italy and then
expelled their employers, about the time of Melasgerd, from their last
foothold in the peninsula. Raids across the straits of Otranto carried
the Normans up to the walls of Salonika, their fleets equipped in
Sicily scoured the Aegean, and, before the eleventh century was out,
they had followed up these reconnoitring expeditions by conducting
Latin Christendom on its first crusade. The crusaders assembled at
Constantinople, and the Imperial Government was relieved when the flood
rolled on and spent itself further east. But one wave was followed by
another, and the Empire itself succumbed to the fourth. In A.D. 1204,
Constantinople was stormed by a Venetian flotilla and the crusading
host it conveyed on board, and more treasures of Ancient Hellenism were
destroyed in the sack of its hitherto inviolate citadel than had ever
perished by the hand of Arab or Slav.
With the fall of the capital the Empire dissolved in chaos, Venice and
Genoa, the Italian trading cities whose fortune had been made by the
crusades, now usurped the naval control of the Mediterranean which the
Empire had exercised since Nikiphóros pacified Krete. They seized all
strategical points of vantage on the Aegean coasts, and founded an
‘extra-territorial’ community at Pera across the Golden Horn, to
monopolize the trade of Constantinople with the Black Sea. The Latins
failed to retain their hold on Constantinople itself, for the puppet
emperors of their own race whom they enthroned there were evicted
within a century by Romaic dynasts, who clung to such fragments of
Anatolia as had escaped the Turk. But the Latin dominion was less
ephemeral in the southernmost Romaic provinces of Europe. The Latins’
castles, more conspicuous than the relics of Hellas, still crown many
high hills in Greece, and their French tongue has added another strain,
to the varied nomenclature of the country.[1] Yet there also
pandemonium prevailed. Burgundian barons, Catalan condottieri, and
Florentine bankers snatched the Duchy of Athens from one another in
bewildering succession, while the French princes of Achaia were at feud
with their kindred vassals in the west of the Peloponnesos whenever
they were not resisting the encroachments of Romaic despots in the
south and east. To complete the anarchy, the non-Romaic peoples in the
interior of the Balkan peninsula had taken the fall of Constantinople
as a signal to throw off the Imperial yoke. In the hinterland of the
capital the Bulgars had reconstituted their kingdom. The
Romance-speaking Vlachs of Pindus moved down into the Thessalian
plains. The aboriginal Albanians, who with their back to the Adriatic
had kept the Slavs at bay, asserted their vitality and sent out
migratory swarms to the south, which entered the service of the warring
princelets and by their prowess won broad lands in every part of
continental Greece, where Albanian place-names are to this day only
less common than Slavonic. South-eastern Europe was again in the throes
of social dissolution, and the convulsions continued till they were
stilled impartially by the numbing hand of their ultimate author the
Turk.
[Footnote 1: e.g. Klemoutsi, Glarentsa (Clarence) and Gastouni—villages
of the currant district in Peloponnesos—and Sant-Omeri, the mountain
that overlooks them.]
The Seljuk sultanate in Anatolia, shaken by the crusades, had gone the
way of all oriental empires to make room for one of its fractions,
which showed a most un-oriental faculty of organic growth. This was the
extreme march on the north-western rim of the Anatolian plateau,
overlooking the Asiatic littoral of the Sea of Marmora. It had been
founded by one of those Turkish chiefs who migrated with their clans
from beyond the Oxus; and it was consolidated by Othman his son, who
extended his kingdom to the cities on the coast and invested his
subjects with his own name. In 1355 the Narrows of Gallipoli passed
into Ottoman hands, and opened a bridge to unexpected conquests in
Europe. Serbia and Bulgaria collapsed at the first attack, and the
hosts which marched to liberate them from Hungary and from France only
ministered to Ottoman prestige by their disastrous discomfiture. Before
the close of the fourteenth century the Ottoman sultan had transferred
his capital to Adrianople, and had become immeasurably the strongest
power in the Balkan peninsula.
After that the end came quickly. At Constantinople the Romaic dynasty
of Palaiologos had upheld a semblance of the Empire for more than a
century after the Latin was expelled. But in 1453 the Imperial city
fell before the assault of Sultan Mohammed; and before his death the
conqueror eliminated all the other Romaic and Latin principalities from
Peloponnesos to Trebizond, which had survived as enclaves to mar the
uniformity of the Ottoman domain. Under his successors the tide of
Ottoman conquest rolled on for half a century more over south-eastern
Europe, till it was stayed on land beneath the ramparts of Vienna,[1]
and culminated on sea, after the systematic reduction of the Venetian
strongholds, in the capture of Rhodes from the Knights of St. John.[2]
The Romaic race, which had been split into so many fragments during the
dissolution of the Empire, was reunited again in the sixteenth century
under the common yoke of the Turk.
[Footnote 1: 1526.]
[Footnote 2: 1522.]
Even in the Dark Age, Greece had hardly been reduced to so desperate a
condition as now. Through the Dark Age the Greek cities had maintained
a continuous life, but Mohammed II depopulated Constantinople to
repeople it with a Turkish majority from Anatolia. Greek commerce would
naturally have benefited by the ejection of the Italians from the
Levant, had not the Ottoman Government given asylum simultaneously to
the Jews expelled from Spain. These Sephardim established themselves at
Constantinople, Salonika, and all the other commercial centres of the
Ottoman dominion, and their superiority in numbers and industry made
them more formidable urban rivals of the Greeks than the Venetians and
Genoese had ever been.
Ousted from the towns, the Greek race depended for its preservation on
the peasantry, yet Greece had never suffered worse rural oppression
than under the Ottoman régime. The sultan’s fiscal demands were the
least part of the burden. The paralysing land-tax, collected in kind by
irresponsible middlemen, was an inheritance from the Romaic Empire, and
though it was now reinforced by the special capitation-tax levied by
the sultan on his Christian subjects, the greater efficiency and
security of his government probably compensated for the additional
charge. The vitality of Greece was chiefly sapped by the ruthless
military organization of the Ottoman state. The bulk of the Ottoman
army was drawn from a feudal cavalry, bound to service, as in the
mediaeval Latin world, in return for fiefs or ‘timaria’ assigned to
them by their sovereign; and many beys and agas have bequeathed their
names in perpetuity to the richest villages on the Messenian and
Thessalian plains, to remind the modern peasant that his Christian
ancestors once tilled the soil as serfs of a Moslem timariot. But the
sultan, unlike his western contemporaries, was not content with
irregular troops, and the serf-communes of Greece had to deliver up a
fifth of their male children every fourth year to be trained at
Constantinople as professional soldiers and fanatical Moslems. This
corps of ‘Janissaries’[1] was founded in the third generation of the
Ottoman dynasty, and was the essential instrument of its military
success. One race has never appropriated and exploited the vitality of
another in so direct or so brutal a fashion, and the institution of
‘tribute-children’, so long as it lasted, effectually prevented any
recovery of the Greek nation from the untimely blows which had stricken
it down.
[Footnote 1: Yeni Asker—New soldiery.]
2
_The Awakening of the Nation_
During the two centuries that followed the Ottoman conquest of
Constantinople, the Greek race was in serious danger of annihilation.
Its life-blood was steadily absorbed into the conquering
community—quite regularly by the compulsory tribute of children and
spasmodically by the voluntary conversion of individual households. The
rich apostasized, because too heavy a material sacrifice was imposed
upon them by loyalty to their national religion; the destitute, because
they could not fail to improve their prospects by adhering to the
privileged faith. Even the surviving organization of the Church had
only been spared by the Ottoman Government in order to facilitate its
own political system—by bringing the peasant, through the hierarchy of
priest, bishop, and patriarch, under the moral control of the new
Moslem master whom the ecclesiastics henceforth served.
The scale on which wholesale apostasy was possible is shown by the case
of Krete, which was conquered by the Turks from Venice just after these
two centuries had closed, and was in fact the last permanent addition
to the Turkish Empire. No urban or feudal settlers of Turkish blood
were imported into the island. To this day the uniform speech of all
Kretans is their native Greek. And yet the progressive conversion of
whole clans and villages had transferred at least 20 per cent. of the
population to the Moslem ranks before the Ottoman connexion was severed
again in 1897.
The survival of the Greek nationality did not depend on any efforts of
the Greeks themselves. They were indeed no longer capable of effort,
but lay passive under the hand of the Turk, like the paralysed quarry
of some beast of prey. Their fate was conditional upon the development
of the Ottoman state, and, as the two centuries drew to a close, that
state entered upon a phase of transformation and of consequent
weakness.
The Ottoman organism has always displayed (and never more conspicuously
than at the present moment) a much greater stability and vitality than
any of its oriental predecessors. There was a vein of genius in its
creators, and its youthful expansion permeated it with so much European
blood that it became partly Europeanized in its inner
tissues—sufficiently to partake, at any rate, in that faculty of
indefinite organic growth which has so far revealed itself in European
life. This acquired force has carried it on since the time when the
impetus of its original institutions became spent—a time when purely
oriental monarchies fall to pieces, and when Turkey herself hesitated
between reconstruction and dissolution. That critical period began for
her with the latter half of the seventeenth century, and incidentally
opened new opportunities of life to her subject Greeks.
Substantial relief from their burdens—the primary though negative
condition of national revival—accrued to the Greek peasantry from the
decay of Ottoman militarism in all its branches. The Turkish feudal
aristocracy, which had replaced the landed nobility of the Romaic
Empire in Anatolia and established itself on the choicest lands in
conquered Europe, was beginning to decline in strength. We have seen
that it failed to implant itself in Krete, and its numbers were already
stationary elsewhere. The Greek peasant slowly began to regain ground
upon his Moslem lord, and he profited further by the degeneration of
the janissary corps at the heart of the empire.
The janissaries had started as a militant, almost monastic body,
condemned to celibacy, and recruited exclusively from the Christian
tribute-children. But in 1566 they extorted the privilege of legal
marriage for themselves, and of admittance into the corps for the sons
of their wedlock. The next century completed their transformation from
a standing army into a hereditary urban militia—an armed and privileged
_bourgeoisie_, rapidly increasing in numbers and correspondingly
jealous of extraneous candidates for the coveted vacancies in their
ranks. They gradually succeeded in abolishing the enrolment of
Christian recruits altogether, and the last regular levy of children
for that purpose was made in 1676. Vested interests at Constantinople
had freed the helpless peasant from the most crushing burden of all.
At the same moment the contemporary tendency in western Europe towards
bureaucratic centralization began to extend itself to the Ottoman
Empire. Its exponents were the brothers Achmet and Mustapha Köprili,
who held the grand-vizierate in succession. They laid the foundations
of a centralized administration, and, since the unadaptable Turk
offered no promising material for their policy, they sought their
instruments in the subject race. The continental Greeks were too
effectively crushed to aspire beyond the preservation of their own
existence; but the islands had been less sorely tried, and Khios, which
had enjoyed over two centuries[1] of prosperity under the rule of a
Genoese chartered company, and exchanged it for Ottoman sovereignty
under peculiarly lenient conditions, could still supply Achmet a
century later with officials of the intelligence and education he
required, Khiots were the first to fill the new offices of ‘Dragoman of
the Porte’ (secretary of state) and ‘Dragoman of the Fleet’ (civil
complement of the Turkish capitan-pasha); and they took care in their
turn to staff the subordinate posts of their administration with a host
of pushing friends and dependants. The Dragoman of the Fleet wielded
the fiscal, and thereby in effect the political, authority over the
Greek islands in the Aegean; but this was not the highest power to
which the new Greek bureaucracy attained. Towards the beginning of the
eighteenth century Moldavia and Wallachia—the two ‘Danubian Provinces’
now united in the kingdom of Rumania—were placed in charge of Greek
officials with the rank of voivode or prince, and with practically
sovereign power within their delegated dominions. A Danubian
principality became the reward of a successful dragoman’s career, and
these high posts were rapidly monopolized by a close ring of official
families, who exercised their immense patronage in favour of their
race, and congregated round the Greek patriarch in the ‘Phanari’,[2]
the Constantinopolitan slum assigned him for his residence by Mohammed
the Conqueror.
[Footnote 1: 1346-1566.]
[Footnote 2: ‘Lighthouse-quarter.’]
The alliance of this parvenu ‘Phanariot’ aristocracy with the
conservative Orthodox Church was not unnatural, for the Church itself
had greatly extended its political power under Ottoman suzerainty. The
Ottoman Government hardly regarded its Christian subjects as integral
members of the state, and was content to leave their civil government
in the hands of their spiritual pastors to an extent the Romaic
emperors would never have tolerated. It allowed the Patriarchate at
Constantinople to become its official intermediary with the Greek race,
and it further extended the Greek patriarch’s authority over the other
conquered populations of Orthodox faith—Bulgars, Rumans, and
Serbs—which had never been incorporated in the ecclesiastical or
political organization of the Romaic Empire, but which learnt under
Ottoman rule to receive their priests and bishops from the Greek
ecclesiastics of the capital, and even to call themselves by the Romaic
name. In 1691 Mustapha Köprili recognized and confirmed the rights of
all Christian subjects of the Sultan by a general organic law.
Mustapha’s ‘New Ordinance’ was dictated by the reverses which
Christians beyond the frontier were inflicting upon the Ottoman arms,
for pressure from without had followed hard upon disintegration within.
Achmet’s pyrrhic triumph over Candia in 1669 was followed in 1683 by
his brother Mustapha’s disastrous discomfiture before the walls of
Vienna, and these two sieges marked the turn of the Ottoman tide. The
ebb was slow, yet the ascendancy henceforth lay with Turkey’s Christian
neighbours, and they began to cut short her frontiers on every side.
The Venetians had never lost hold upon the ‘Ionian’ chain of islands—
Corfù, Cefalonia, Zante, and Cerigo—which flank the western coast of
Greece, and in 1685 they embarked on an offensive on the mainland,
which won them undisputed possession of Peloponnesos for twenty
years.[1] Venice was far nearer than Turkey to her dissolution, and
spent the last spasm of her energy on this ephemeral conquest. Yet she
had maintained the contact of the Greek race with western Europe during
the two centuries of despair, and the interlude of her rule in
Peloponnesos was a fitting culmination to her work; for, brief though
it was, it effectively broke the Ottoman tradition, and left behind it
a system of communal self-government among the Peloponnesian Greeks
which the returning Turk was too feeble to sweep away. The Turks gained
nothing by the rapid downfall of Venice, for Austria as rapidly stepped
into her place, and pressed with fresh vigour the attack from the
north-west. North-eastward, too, a new enemy had arisen in Russia,
which had been reorganized towards the turn of the century by Peter the
Great with a radical energy undreamed of by any Turkish Köprili, and
which found its destiny in opposition to the Ottoman Empire. The new
Orthodox power regarded itself as the heir of the Romaic Empire from
which it had received its first Christianity and culture. It aspired to
repay the Romaic race in adversity by championing it against its Moslem
oppressors, and sought its own reward in a maritime outlet on the Black
Sea. From the beginning of the eighteenth century Russia repeatedly
made war on Turkey, either with or without the co-operation of Austria;
but the decisive bout in the struggle was the war of 1769-74. A Russian
fleet appeared in the Mediterranean, raised an insurrection in
Peloponnesos, and destroyed the Turkish squadron in battle. The Russian
armies were still more successful on the steppes, and the Treaty of
Kutchuk Kainardji not only left the whole north coast of the Black Sea
in Russia’s possession, but contained an international sanction for the
rights of the sultan’s Orthodox subjects. In 1783 a supplementary
commercial treaty extorted for the Ottoman Greeks the right to trade
under the Russian flag. The territorial sovereignty of Turkey in the
Aegean remained intact, but the Russian guarantee gave the Greek race a
more substantial security than the shadowy ordinance of Mustapha
Köprili. The paralysing prestige of the Porte was broken, and Greek
eyes were henceforth turned in hope towards Petersburg.
[Footnote 1: 1699-1718.]
By the end of the eighteenth century the condition of the Greeks had in
fact changed remarkably for the better, and the French and English
travellers who now began to visit the Ottoman Empire brought away the
impression that a critical change in its internal equilibrium was at
hand. The Napoleonic wars had just extinguished the Venetian Republic
and swept the Ionian Islands into the struggle between England and
France for the mastery of the Mediterranean. England had fortified
herself in Cefalonia and Zante, France in Corfù, and interest centred
on the opposite mainland, where Ali Pasha of Yannina maintained a
formidable neutrality towards either power.
The career of Ali marked that phase in the decline of an Oriental
empire when the task of strong government becomes too difficult for the
central authority and is carried on by independent satraps with greater
efficiency in their more limited sphere. Ali governed the Adriatic
hinterland with practically sovereign power, and compelled the sultan
for some years to invest his sons with the pashaliks of Thessaly and
Peloponnesos. The greater part of the Greek race thus came in some
degree under his control, and his policy towards it clearly reflected
the transition from the old to the new. He waged far more effective war
than the distant sultan upon local liberties, and, though the
elimination of the feudal Turkish landowner was pure gain to the
Greeks, they suffered themselves from the loss of traditional
privileges which the original Ottoman conquest had left intact. The
Armatoli, a local Christian militia who kept order in the mountainous
mainland north of Peloponnesos where Turkish feudatories were rare,
were either dispersed by Ali or enrolled in his regular army. And he
was ruthless in the extermination of recalcitrant communities, like
Agrapha on the Aspropotarno, which had never been inscribed on the
taxation-rolls of the Romaic or the Ottoman treasury, or Suli, a robber
clan ensconced in the mountains Immediately west of Ali’s capital. On
the other hand, the administration of these pacified and consolidated
dominions became as essentially Greek in character as the Phanariot
régime beyond the Danube. Ali was a Moslem and an Albanian, but the
Orthodox Greeks were in a majority among his subjects, and he knew how
to take advantage of their abilities. His business was conducted by
Greek secretaries in the Greek tongue, and Yannina, his capital, was a
Greek city. European visitors to Yannina (for every one began the
Levantine tour by paying his respects to Ali) were struck by the
enterprise and intelligence of its citizens. The doctors were
competent, because they had taken their education in Italy or France;
the merchants were prosperous, because they had established members of
their family at Odessa, Trieste, or even Hamburg, as permanent agents
of their firm. A new Greek _bourgeoisie_ had arisen, in close contact
with the professional life of western Europe, and equally responsive to
the new philosophical and political ideas that were being propagated by
the French Revolution.
This intellectual ferment was the most striking change of all. Since
the sack of Constantinople in 1204, Greek culture had retired into the
monasteries—inaccessible fastnesses where the monks lived much the same
life as the clansmen of Suli or Agrapha. Megaspélaion, the great cave
quarried in the wall of a precipitous Peloponnesian ravine; Metéora,
suspended on half a dozen isolated pinnacles of rock in Thessaly, where
the only access was by pulley or rope-ladder; ‘Ayon Oros’, the
confederation of monasteries great and small upon the
mountain-promontory of Athos—these succeeded in preserving a shadow of
the old tradition, at the cost of isolation from all humane influences
that might have kept their spiritual inheritance alive. Their spirit
was mediaeval, ecclesiastical, and as barren as their sheltering rocks;
and the new intellectual disciples of Europe turned to the monasteries
in vain. The biggest ruin on Athos is a boys’ school planned in the
eighteenth century to meet the educational needs of all the Orthodox in
the Ottoman Empire, and wrecked on the reefs of monastic obscurantism.
But its founder, the Corfiot scholar Evyénios Voulgáris, did not
hesitate to break with the past. He put his own educational ideas into
practice at Yannina and Constantinople, and contributed to the great
achievement of his contemporary, the Khiot Adhamandios Koráis, who
settled in Paris and there evolved a literary adaptation of the Romaic
patois to supersede the lifeless travesty of Attic style traditionally
affected by ecclesiastical penmen. But the renaissance was not confined
to Greeks abroad. The school on Athos failed, but others established
themselves before the close of the eighteenth century in the people’s
midst, even in the smaller towns and the remoter villages. The still
flourishing secondary school of Dhimitzána, in the heart of
Peloponnesos, began its existence in this period, and the national
revival found expression in a new name. Its prophets repudiated the
‘Romaic’ name, with its associations of ignorance and oppression, and
taught their pupils to think of themselves as ‘Hellenes’ and to claim
in their own right the intellectual and political liberty of the
Ancient Greeks.
This spiritual ‘Hellenism’, however, was only one manifestation of
returning vitality, and was ultimately due to the concrete economic
development with which it went hand in hand. The Greeks, who had found
culture in western Europe, had come there for trade, and their
commercial no less than their intellectual activity reacted in a
penetrating way upon their countrymen at home. A mountain village like
Ambelakia in Thessaly found a regular market for its dyed goods in
Germany, and the commercial treaty of 1783 between Turkey and Russia
encouraged communities which could make nothing of the land to turn
their attention to the sea. Galaxhidi, a village on the northern shore
of the Korinthian Gulf, whose only asset was its natural harbour, and
Hydhra, Spetza, and Psarà, three barren little islands in the Aegean,
had begun to lay the foundations of a merchant marine, when Napoleon’s
boycott and the British blockade, which left no neutral flag but the
Ottoman in the Mediterranean, presented the Greek shipmen that sailed
under it with an opportunity they exploited to the full. The
whitewashed houses of solid stone, rising tier above tier up the naked
limestone mountainside, still testify to the prosperity which chance
thus suddenly brought to the Hydhriots and their fellow islanders, and
did not withdraw again till it had enabled them to play a decisive part
in their nation’s history.
Their ships were small, but they were home-built, skilfully navigated,
and profitably employed in the carrying trade of the Mediterranean
ports. Their economic life was based on co-operation, for the sailors,
as well as the captain and owner of the ship, who were generally the
same person, took shares in the outlay and profit of each voyage; but
their political organization was oligarchical—an executive council
elected by and from the owners of the shipping. Feud and intrigue were
rife between family and family, class and class, and between the native
community and the resident aliens, without seriously affecting the
vigour and enterprise of the commonwealth as a whole. These seafaring
islands on the eve of the modern Greek Revolution were an exact
reproduction of the Aigina, Korinth, and Athens which repelled the
Persian from Ancient Greece. The germs of a new national life were thus
springing up among the Greeks in every direction— in mercantile
colonies scattered over the world from Odessa to Alexandria and from
Smyrna to Trieste; among Phanariot princes in the Danubian Provinces
and their ecclesiastical colleagues at Constantinople; in the islands
of the Aegean and the Ionian chain, and upon the mountains of Suli and
Agrapha. But the ambitions this national revival aroused were even
greater than the reality itself. The leaders of the movement did not
merely aspire to liberate the Greek nation from the Turkish yoke. They
were conscious of the assimilative power their nationality possessed.
The Suliots, for example, were an immigrant Albanian tribe, who had
learnt to speak Greek from the Greek peasants over whom they
tyrannized. The Hydhriot and Spetziot islanders were Albanians too, who
had even clung to their primitive language during the two generations
since they took up their present abode, but had become none the less
firmly linked to their Greek-speaking neighbours in Peloponnesos by
their common fellowship in the Orthodox Church. The numerous Albanian
colonies settled up and down the Greek continent were at least as Greek
in feeling as they. And why should not the same prove true of the
Bulgarian population, in the Balkans, who had belonged from the
beginning to the Orthodox Church, and had latterly been brought by
improvident Ottoman policy within the Greek patriarch’s fold? Or why
should not the Greek administrators beyond the Danube imbue their Ruman
subjects with a sound Hellenic sentiment? In fact, the prophets of
Hellenism did not so much desire to extricate the Greek nation from the
Ottoman Empire as to make it the ruling element in the empire itself by
ejecting the Moslem Turks from their privileged position and
assimilating all populations of Orthodox faith. These dreams took shape
in the foundation of a secret society—the ‘Philikì Hetairía’ or ‘League
of Friends’—which established itself at Odessa in 1814 with the
connivence of the Russian police, and opened a campaign of propaganda
in anticipation of an opportunity to strike.
The initiative came from the Ottoman Government itself. At the weakest
moment in its history the empire found in Sultan Mahmud a ruler of
peculiar strength, who saw that the only hope of overcoming his dangers
lay in meeting them half-way. The national movement of Hellenism was
gathering momentum in the background, but it was screened by the
personal ambitions of Ali of Yannina, and Mahmud reckoned to forestall
both enemies by quickly striking Ali down.
In the winter of 1819-20 Ali was outlawed, and in the spring the
invasion of his territories began. Both the Moslem combatants enlisted
Christian Armatoli, and all continental Greece was under arms. By the
end of the summer Ali’s outlying strongholds had fallen, his armies
were driven in, and he himself was closely invested in Yannina; but
with autumn a deadlock set in, and the sultan’s reckoning was thrown
out. In November 1820 the veteran soldier Khurshid was appointed to the
pashalik of Peloponnesos to hold the Greeks in check and close accounts
with Ali. In March 1821, after five months spent in organizing his
province, Khurshid felt secure enough to leave it for the Yannina
lines. But he was mistaken; for within a month of his departure
Peloponnesos was ablaze.
The ‘Philikì Hetairía’ had decided to act, and the Peloponnesians
responded enthusiastically to the signal. In the north Germanòs,
metropolitan bishop of Patras, rallied the insurgents at the monastery
of Megaspélaion, and unfurled the monastic altar-cloth as a national
standard. In the south the peninsula of Maina, which had been the
latest refuge of ancient Hellenism, was now the first to welcome the
new, and to throw off the shadowy allegiance it had paid for a thousand
years to Romaic archonts and Ottoman capitan-pashas. Led by Petros
Mavromichalis, the chief of the leading clan, the Mainates issued from
their mountains. This was in April, and by the middle of May all the
open country had been swept clear, and the hosts joined hands before
Tripolitza, which was the seat of Ottoman government at the central
point of the province. The Turkish garrison attacked, but was heavily
defeated at Valtetzi by the tactical skill of Theodore Kolokotrónis the
‘klepht’, who had become experienced in guerrilla warfare through his
alternate professions of brigand and gendarme—a career that had
increased its possibilities as the Ottoman system decayed. After
Kolokotrónis’s victory, the Greeks kept Tripolitza under a close
blockade. Early in October it fell amid frightful scenes of pillage and
massacre, and Ottoman dominion in the Peloponnesos fell with it. On
January 22, 1822, Korinth, the key to the isthmus, passed into the
Greeks’ hands, and only four fortresses—Nauplia, Patras, Koron, and
Modhon—still held out within it against Greek investment. Not a Turk
survived in the Peloponnesos beyond their walls, for the slaughter at
Tripolitza was only the most terrible instance of what happened
wherever a Moslem colony was found. In Peloponnesos, at any rate, the
revolution had been grimly successful.
There had also been successes at sea. The merchant marine of the Greek
islands had suffered grievously from the fall of Napoleon and the
settlement at Vienna, which, by restoring normal conditions of trade,
had destroyed their abnormal monopoly. The revolution offered new
opportunities for profitable venture, and in April 1821 Hydhra, Spetza
and Psarà hastened to send a privateering fleet to sea. As soon as the
fleet crossed the Aegean, Samos rid itself of the Turks. At the
beginning of June the rickety Ottoman squadron issued from the
Dardanelles, but it was chased back by the islanders under the lee of
Mitylini. Memories of Russian naval tactics in 1770 led the Psariots to
experiment in fire-ships, and one of the two Turkish ships of the line
fell a victim to this attack. Within a week of setting sail, the
diminished Turkish squadron was back again in the Dardanelles, and the
islanders were left with the command of the sea.
The general Christian revolution thus seemed fairly launched, and in
the first panic the threatened Moslems began reprisals of an equally
general kind. In the larger Turkish cities there were massacres of
Christian minorities, and the Government lent countenance to them by
murdering its own principal Christian official Gregorios, the Greek
patriarch at Constantinople, on April 22, 1821. But Sultan Mahmud
quickly recovered himself. He saw that his empire could not survive a
racial war, and determined to prevent the present revolt from assuming
such a character. His plan was to localize it by stamping out the more
distant sparks with all his energy, before concentrating his force at
leisure upon the main conflagration.
This policy was justified by the event. On March 6 the ‘Philikì
Hetairia’ at Odessa had opened its own operations in grandiose style by
sending a filibustering expedition across the Russo-Turkish frontier
under command of Prince Alexander Hypsilantis, a Phanariot in the
Russian service. Hypsilantis played for a general revolt of the Ruman
population in the Danubian Principalities and a declaration of war
against Turkey on the part of Russia. But the Rumans had no desire to
assist the Greek bureaucrats who oppressed them, and the Tsar Alexander
had been converted by the experiences of 1812-13 to a pacifistic
respect for the _status quo_. Prince Hypsilantis was driven
ignominiously to internment across the Austrian frontier, little more
than a hundred days after his expedition began; and his fiasco assured
the Ottoman Government of two encouraging facts—that the revolution
would not carry away the whole Orthodox population but would at any
rate confine itself to the Greeks; and that the struggle against it
would be fought out for the present, at least, without foreign
intervention.
In the other direction, however, rebellion was spreading northward from
Peloponnesos to continental Greece. Galaxídhi revolted in April, and
was followed in June by Mesolonghi—a prosperous town of fishermen,
impregnably situated in the midst of the lagoons at the mouth of the
Aspropotamo, beyond the narrows of the Korinthian Gulf. By the end of
the month, north-western Greece was free as far as the outposts of
Khurshid Pasha beyond the Gulf of Arta.
Further eastward, again, in the mountains between the Gulf of Korinth
and the river Elládha (Sperkheiòs), the Armatoli of Ali’s faction had
held their ground, and gladly joined the revolution on the initiative
of their captains Dhiakos and Odhyssèvs. But the movement found its
limits. The Turkish garrison of Athens obstinately held out during the
winter of 1821-2, and the Moslems of Negrepont (Euboía) maintained
their mastery in the island. In Agrapha they likewise held their own,
and, after one severely punished raid, the Agraphiot Armatoli were
induced to re-enter the sultan’s service on liberal terms. The Vlachs
in the gorges of the Aspropotamo were pacified with equal success; and
Dramali, Khurshid’s lieutenant, who guarded the communications between
the army investing Yannina and its base at Constantinople, was easily
able to crush all symptoms of revolt in Thessaly from his head-quarters
at Lárissa. Still further east, the autonomous Greek villages on the
mountainous promontories of Khalkidhiki had revolted in May, in
conjunction with the well-supplied and massively fortified monasteries
of the ‘Ayon Oros’; but the Pasha of Salonika called down the South
Slavonic Moslem landowners from the interior, sacked the villages, and
amnestied the monastic confederation on condition of establishing a
Turkish garrison in their midst and confiscating their arms. The monks’
compliance was assisted by the excommunication under which the new
patriarch at Constantinople had placed all the insurgents by the
sultan’s command.
The movement was thus successfully localised on the European continent,
and further afield it was still more easily cut short. After the
withdrawal of the Turkish squadron, the Greek fleet had to look on at
the systematic destruction of Kydhonies,[1] a flourishing Greek
industrial town on the mainland opposite Mitylini which had been
founded under the sultan’s auspices only forty years before. All that
the islanders could do was to take off the survivors in their boats;
and when they dispersed to their ports in autumn, the Ottoman ships
came out again from the Dardanelles, sailed round Peloponnesos into the
Korinthian Gulf, and destroyed Galaxídhi. A still greater catastrophe
followed the reopening of naval operations next spring. In March 1822
the Samians landed a force on Khios and besieged the Turkish garrison,
which was relieved after three weeks by the arrival of the Ottoman
fleet. A month later the Greek fleet likewise appeared on the scene,
and on June 18 a Psariot captain, Constantine Kanaris, actually
destroyed the Ottoman flag-ship by a daring fire-ship attack. Upon this
the Ottoman fleet fled back as usual to the Dardanelles; yet the only
consequence was the complete devastation, in revenge, of helpless
Khios. The long-shielded prosperity of the island was remorselessly
destroyed, the people were either enslaved or massacred, and the
victorious fleet had to stand by as passively this time as at the
destruction of Kydhonies the season before. In the following summer,
again, the same fate befell Trikéri, a maritime community on the Gulf
of Volo which had gained its freedom when the rest of Thessaly stirred
in vain; and so in 1823 the revolution found itself confined on sea, as
well as on land, to the focus where it had originated in April 1821.
[Footnote 1: Turkish Aivali.]
This isolation was a practical triumph for Sultan Mahmud. The
maintenance of the Ottoman Empire on the basis of Moslem ascendancy was
thereby assured; but it remained to be seen whether the isolated area
could now be restored to the _status quo_ in which the rest of his
dominions had been retained.
During the whole season of 1821 the army of Khurshid had been held
before Yannina. But in February 1822 Yannina fell, Ali was slain, his
treasure seized, and his troops disbanded. The Ottoman forces were
liberated for a counterattack on Peloponnesos. Already in April
Khurshid broke up his camp at Lárissa, and his lieutenant Dramali was
given command of the new expedition towards the south. He crossed the
Sperkheiòs at the beginning of July with an army of twenty thousand
men.[1] Athens had capitulated to Odhyssèvs ten days before; but it had
kept open the road for Dramali, and north-eastern Greece fell without
resistance into his hands. The citadel of Korinth surrendered as tamely
as the open country, and he was master of the isthmus before the end of
the month. Nauplia meanwhile had been treating with its besiegers for
terms, and would have surrendered to the Greeks already if they had not
driven their bargain so hard. Dramali hurried on southward into the
plain to the fortress’s relief, raised the siege, occupied the town of
Argos, and scattered the Greek forces into the hills. But the citadel
of Argos held out against him, and the positions were rapidly reversed.
Under the experienced direction of Kolokotrónis, the Greeks from their
hill-fastnesses ringed round the plain of Argos and scaled up every
issue. Dramali’s supplies ran out. An attempt of his vanguard to break
through again towards the north was bloodily repulsed, and he barely
succeeded two days later in extricating the main body in a demoralized
condition, with the loss of all his baggage-train. The Turkish army
melted away, Dramali was happy to die at Korinth, and Khurshid was
executed by the sultan’s command. The invasion of Peloponnesos had
broken down, and nothing could avert the fall of Nauplia. The Ottoman
fleet hovered for one September week in the offing, but Kanaris’s
fire-ships took another ship of the line in toll at the roadsteads of
Tenedos before it safely regained the Dardanelles. The garrison of
Nauplia capitulated in December, on condition of personal security and
liberty, and the captain of a British frigate, which arrived on the
spot, took measures that the compact should be observed instead of
being broken by the customary massacre. But the strongest fortress in
Peloponnesos was now in Greek hands.
[Footnote 1: Including a strong contingent of Moslem Slavs—Bulgarian
Pomaks from the Aegean hinterland and Serbian Bosniaks from the
Adriatic.]
In the north-west the season had not passed so well. When the Turks
invested Ali in Yannina, they repatriated the Suliot exiles in their
native mountains. But a strong sultan was just as formidable to the
Suliots as a strong pasha, so they swelled their ranks by enfranchising
their peasant-serfs, and made common cause with their old enemy in his
adversity. Now that Ali was destroyed, the Suliots found themselves in
a precarious position, and turned to the Greeks for aid. But on July 16
the Greek advance was checked by a severe defeat at Petta in the plain
of Arta. In September the Suliots evacuated their impregnable
fortresses in return for a subsidy and a safe-conduct, and Omer Vrioni,
the Ottoman commander in the west,[1] was free to advance in turn
towards the south. On November 6 he actually laid siege to Mesolonghi,
but here his experiences were as discomfiting as Dramali’s. He could
not keep open his communications, and after heavy losses retreated
again to Arta in January 1823.
[Footnote 1: He was a renegade officer of Ali’s.]
In 1823 the struggle seemed to be lapsing into stalemate. The liberated
Peloponnesos had failed to propagate the revolution through the
remainder of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Government had equally
failed to reconquer the Peloponnesos by military invasion. This
season’s operations only seemed to emphasize the deadlock. The Ottoman
commander in the west raised an auxiliary force of Moslem and Catholic
clansmen from northern Albania, and attempted to reach Mesolonghi once
more. But he penetrated no further than Anatolikòn—the Mesolonghiots’
outpost village at the head of the lagoons—and the campaign was only
memorable for the heroic death of Marko Botzaris the Suliot in a night
attack upon the Ottoman camp. At sea, the two fleets indulged in
desultory cruises without an encounter, for the Turks were still timid
and incompetent, while the growing insubordination and dissension on
the Greek ships made concerted action there, too, impossible. By the
end of the season it was clear that the struggle could only
definitively be decided by the intervention of a third party on one
side or the other—unless the Greeks brought their own ruin upon
themselves.
This indeed was not unlikely to happen; for the new house of Hellenism
had hardly arisen before it became desperately divided against itself.
The vitality of the national movement resided entirely in the local
communes. It was they that had found the fighting men, kept them armed
and supplied, and by spontaneous co-operation expelled the Turk from
Peloponnesos. But if the co-operation was to be permanent it must have
a central organization, and with the erection of this superstructure
the troubles began. As early as June 1821 a ‘Peloponnesian Senate’ was
constituted and at once monopolized by the ‘Primates’, the propertied
class that had been responsible for the communal taxes under the Romaic
and Ottoman régimes and was allowed to control the communal government
in return. About the same time two Phanariot princes threw in their lot
with the revolution— Alexander Mavrokordatos and Demetrius, the more
estimable brother of the futile Alexander Hypsilantis. Both were
saturated with the most recent European political theory, and they
committed the peasants and seamen of the liberated districts to an
ambitious constitutionalism. In December 1821 a ‘National Assembly’ met
at Epidauros, passed an elaborate organic law, and elected
Mavrokordatos first president of the Hellenic Republic.
The struggle for life and death in 1822 had staved off the internal
crisis, but the Peloponnesian Senate remained obstinately recalcitrant
towards the National Government in defence of its own vested interests;
and the insubordination of the fleet in 1823 was of one piece with the
political faction which broke out as soon as the immediate danger from
without was removed.
Towards the end of 1823 European ‘Philhellenes’ began to arrive in
Greece. In those dark days of reaction that followed Waterloo,
self-liberated Hellas seemed the one bright spot on the continent; but
the idealists who came to offer her their services were confronted with
a sorry spectacle. The people were indifferent to their leaders, and
the leaders at variance among themselves. The gentlemanly Phanariots
had fallen into the background. Mavrokordatos only retained influence
in north-western Greece. In Peloponnesos the Primates were
all-powerful, and Kolokotrónis the klepht was meditating a popular
dictatorship at their expense. In the north-east the adventurer
Odhyssévs had won a virtual dictatorship already, and was suspected of
intrigue with the Turks; and all this factious dissension rankled into
civil war as soon as the contraction of a loan in Great Britain had
invested the political control of the Hellenic Republic with a
prospective value in cash. The first civil war was fought between
Kolokotrónis on the one side and the Primates of Hydhra and
Peloponnesos on the other; but the issue was decided against
Kolokotrónis by the adhesion to the coalition of Kolettis the Vlach,
once physician to Mukhtar Pasha, the son of Ali, and now political
agent for all the northern Armatoli in the national service. The
fighting lasted from November 1823 to June 1824, and was followed by
another outbreak in November of the latter year, when the victors
quarrelled over the spoils, and the Primates were worsted in turn by
the islanders and the Armatoli. The nonentity Kondouriottis of Hydhra
finally emerged as President of Greece, with the sharp-witted Kolettis
as his principal wire-puller, but the disturbances did not cease till
the last instalment of the loan had been received and squandered and
there was no more spoil to fight for.
Meanwhile, Sultan Mahmud had been better employed. Resolved to avert
stalemate by the only possible means, he had applied in the course of
1823 to Mohammed Ali Pasha of Egypt, a more formidable, though more
distant, satrap than Ali of Yannina himself. Mohammed Ali had a
standing army and navy organized on the European model. He had also a
son Ibrahim, who knew how to manoeuvre them, and was ambitious of a
kingdom. Mahmud hired the father’s troops and the son’s generalship for
the re-conquest of Peloponnesos, under engagement to invest Ibrahim
with the pashalik as soon as he should effectively make it his own. By
this stroke of diplomacy a potential rebel was turned into a willing
ally, and the preparations for the Egyptian expedition went forward
busily through the winter of 1823-4.
The plan of campaign was systematically carried out. During the season
of respite the Greek islanders had harried the coasts and commerce of
Anatolia and Syria at will. The first task was to deprive them of their
outposts in the Aegean, and an advanced squadron of the Egyptian fleet
accordingly destroyed the community of Kasos in June 1824, while the
Ottoman squadron sallied out of the Dardanelles a month later and dealt
out equal measure to Psarà. The two main flotillas then effected a
junction off Rhodes; and, though the crippled Greek fleet still
ventured pluckily to confront them, it could not prevent Ibrahim from
casting anchor safely in Soudha Bay and landing his army to winter in
Krete. In February 1825 he transferred these troops with equal impunity
to the fortress of Modhon, which was still held for the sultan by an
Ottoman garrison. The fire-ships of Hydhra came to harry his fleet too
late, and on land the Greek forces were impotent against his trained
soldiers. The Government in vain promoted Kolokotrónis from captivity
to commandership-in-chief. The whole south-western half of Peloponnesos
passed into Ibrahim’s hands, and in June 1825 he even penetrated as far
as the mills of Lerna on the eastern coast, a few miles south of Argos
itself.
At the same time the Ottoman army of the west moved south again under a
new commander, Rashid Pasha of Yannina, and laid final siege on April
27 to Mesolonghi, just a year after Byron had died of fever within its
walls. The Greeks were magnificent in their defence of these frail
mud-bastions, and they more than held their own in the amphibious
warfare of the lagoons. The struggle was chequered by the continual
coming and going of the Greek and Ottoman fleets. They were indeed the
decisive factor; for without the supporting squadron Rashid would have
found himself in the same straits as his predecessors at the approach
of autumn, while the slackness of the islanders in keeping the sea
allowed Mesolonghi to be isolated in January 1826. The rest was
accomplished by the arrival of Ibrahim on the scene. His heavy
batteries opened fire in February; his gunboats secured command of the
lagoons, and forced Anatolikòn to capitulate in March. In April
provisions in Mesolonghi itself gave out, and, scorning surrender, the
garrison—men, women, and children together— made a general sortie on
the night of April 22. Four thousand fell, three thousand were taken,
and two thousand won through. It was a glorious end for Mesolonghi, but
it left the enemy in possession of all north-western Greece.
The situation was going from bad to worse. Ibrahim returned to
Peloponnesos, and steadily pushed forward his front, ravaging as
steadily as he went. Rashid, after pacifying the north-west, moved on
to the north-eastern districts, where the national cause had been
shaken by the final treachery and speedy assassination of Odhyssèvs.
Siege was laid to Athens in June, and the Greek Government enlisted in
vain the military experience of its Philhellenes. Fabvier held the
Akropolis, but Generalissimo Sir Richard Church was heavily defeated in
the spring of 1827 in an attempt to relieve him from the Attic coast;
Grand Admiral Cochrane saw his fleet sail home for want of payment in
advance, when he summoned it for review at Poros; and Karaiskakis, the
Greek captain of Armatoli, was killed in a skirmish during his more
successful efforts to harass Rashid’s communications by land. On June
5, 1827, the Greek garrison of the Akropolis marched out on terms.
It looked as if the Greek effort after independence would be completely
crushed, and as if Sultan Mahmud would succeed in getting his empire
under control. In September 1826 he had rid it at last of the mischief
at its centre by blowing up the janissaries in their barracks at
Constantinople. Turkey seemed almost to have weathered the storm when
she was suddenly overborne by further intervention on the other side.