CHAPTER XXV
The beginning of the Greek struggle for independence from Turkish rule can be dated to September 1814, when three young Greeks in Odessa founded a secret society. To avoid suspicion, they called it by the deliberately noncommittal name of the Philiki Eteria, the Friendly Association. None of the three had so far acquired any distinction: Nikolaos Skouphas was a hatter, Emmanuel Xanthos was a bankrupt dealer in olive oil, Athanasios Tsakalov had no settled occupation. They got off to a slow start. Although they had all three been born in Greece, as expatriates they were unable to tap into the resources of the mainland, while even among the Greek diaspora around the Black Sea they were too insignificant to be taken seriously by the rich merchants whose support they needed.
Little by little, however, the Association’s numbers increased. Its founders moved their base to Constantinople, where in those days there were almost as many Greeks as Turks, and whence they sent emissaries into Greece itself: one to Macedonia and Thessaly, one to the Peloponnese and the wealthy islands of Hydra and Spetsai, and two to the Mani (the central of the three promontories of the southern Peloponnese). The Mani had been the focus of an earlier, unsuccessful uprising instigated in 1770 by Catherine the Great through her lover, Count Gregory Orlov.217 As a somewhat paradoxical result of this incident, the Ottoman authorities had removed it from the jurisdiction of the governor of the Peloponnese and subjected it directly to the Capitan Pasha, head of the Turkish armed forces and overlord of the Aegean, and he in his turn had devolved his power to the head of one of the local families, with the title of bey. The eighth of these beys,218 appointed in 1815, was to be one of the heroes of the Greek Revolution–of whose family no fewer than forty-nine were to fall in battle during the coming struggle. His name was Petrobey Mavromichalis.
Petrobey was, like all his family, outstandingly handsome–only to be expected, perhaps, his ancestor George having reputedly married a mermaid. This quality he combined with graciousness of manner, high intelligence and, as he was later to show, indomitable courage. Like any tribal leader, he was capable of cruelty when he believed it to be justified, but he was also generous and–in his own territory–a man of peace, settling blood feuds wherever he could and doing his utmost to create the solidarity which he knew would be necessary in the years ahead. When approached by the Association, he instantly gave it his support.
Before there could be any question of taking up arms, however, the movement had to find a leader. The most distinguished Greek living at that time–and the obvious first choice–was Iannis Kapodistrias, more usually known outside Greece as Capodistria. Born in Corfu, he came from an ancient family which had emigrated to the Ionian Islands from Italy in the fourteenth century. In his youth he had been active in local political life, so impressing the occupying Russians that he had been invited to join the administration in St Petersburg. In normal circumstances his status as a civil servant of the Russian Empire might not have prevented his accepting the presidency of the Association; unfortunately, however, in 1815 Tsar Alexander had appointed him joint Foreign Minister, so that when in 1820 Emmanuel Xanthos requested an audience and extended the invitation, he was turned down flat.
The Association’s eye next fell on a dashing imperial aide-de-camp named Alexander Ipsilantis, who though still in his twenties had already lost his right arm in the service of the Tsar. Two of his brothers were already members, and he accepted without hesitation. There was still a long way to go: total membership numbered only 1,000 or so. But Ipsilantis was impatient, and on 8 October 1820 issued a proclamation calling upon all Greeks to prepare themselves for the struggle ahead. The revolution, he declared, must be unleashed in the Peloponnese before the end of the year. Characteristically, he had failed to consult his contacts on the spot, who were now obliged to inform him that the Peloponnese was not yet ready; he therefore decided to begin in the north rather than the south: in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.
It was in many ways a surprising choice. Neither of these regions–both of them lying in present-day Romania–formed part of Greece. Nor, technically, were they part of the Ottoman Empire; their legal status was that of vassal states, into which the Sultan was forbidden by treaty to send troops without Russian consent. This meant that the Tsar, in the interests of his Orthodox co-religionists, might be persuaded to prevent Turkish forces from opposing the insurgents. An additional advantage was that for the past century the two regions had been governed by Greeks from Constantinople, who could be expected to give whatever support they could. Encouraged by such considerations, on 6 March 1821 Ipsilantis, with two of his younger brothers and a few companions, crossed the border into Moldavia. That same evening they entered the capital, Iasi, where another proclamation was issued, promising ‘with very little effort’ to annihilate the Turks completely, ‘while a mighty empire defends our rights’.
There was in fact every indication that the mighty empire would do no such thing, both Capodistria and the Tsar himself having made it clear to Ipsilantis that they disapproved of the whole project and would have nothing whatever to do with it, and from that moment on the campaign–if so it could be called–was an unmitigated disaster. In Galatz, a town some 100 miles south of Iasi, the rebels massacred the Turkish garrison and all the Turkish merchants, and when the news reached Iasi the Turkish guard there of some fifty men, who had already disarmed on the promise that their lives and property would be spared, was also put to the sword. Moreover, when Ipsilantis realised that the funds which he had confidently expected in Iasi were not forthcoming, he had resorted to extortion from rich bankers. Meanwhile, the unpaid troops that he had assembled were looting the local villages. Now seriously alarmed, Ipsilantis marched on Bucharest–only to find that a local adventurer, Theodore Vladimirescu, had got there before him and occupied the city, summoning the local Wallachians to rise up, not against the Turks, but against the Phanariot Greeks,219 ‘dragons that swallow us alive’.
But the two greatest blows were yet to fall. First, the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, supported by twenty-two bishops, sentenced Ipsilantis and the other leading rebels to be ‘excommunicated and cursed, and not forgiven, and anathematised after death, and to suffer for all eternity’. Then the rising was formally denounced by the Tsar himself. In a statement drafted by Capodistria, Ipsilantis was cashiered from the army on the grounds that he had abandoned ‘all the precepts of religion and morality’. He and his colleagues would receive absolutely no support from Russia, to which he was forbidden ever to return.
Fortunately Vladimirescu was soon captured and taken to Ipsilantis’s camp, where he was quickly despatched. Their numbers swelled by Vladimirescu’s disaffected followers, the rebels then decided to tackle the Turks head-on, and on 19 June they encountered a considerable Ottoman force in the village of Dragasani. In the ensuing battle half of them were cut to pieces; the other half fled. Ipsilantis escaped into Austria, but was arrested as he crossed the border. He was imprisoned at Mohacs until 1827, and died the following year. In Greek popular legend he is usually seen as a hero and a martyr, and so in a way he was; but he possessed neither the intelligence nor the experience required to lead a successful rebellion, and it was due as much to his sheer incompetence as to anything else that the first campaign of the Greek War of Independence ended in fiasco.
In the Peloponnese the prospects for the coming revolt looked somewhat brighter, particularly after the departure in January 1821 of Khurshid Pasha, governor of the Morea, to deal with Ali Pasha of Iannina. Khurshid had been a considerable force in the region, and his replacement by a young and ineffectual deputy led to an immediate slackening of Turkish authority. Only days later there arrived from Zante the boisterous, black-moustachioed, fifty-year-old ex-brigand who was, more than anyone else, to personify the Greek War of Independence: Theodore Kolokotronis. With his commanding presence, his resounding laughter and his terrifying rages he was a born leader of men; within days of his arrival he had impressed his personality on all around him.
The fuse had already been laid, but it was Kolokotronis who lit the match, fixing the day of the rising as 25 March.220 Even then, a few communities jumped the gun. In the little town of Areopolis a plaque in the square of St Michael’s church reads: ‘From this historic square was launched the great uprising under the leadership of Petrobey, 17 March 1821’. To Mavromichalis, therefore, belongs the honour of being first in the field. But Kolokotronis was not far behind, marshalling on the 20th some 2,000 armed men who marched through Kalamata amid cheering crowds. Three days later they accepted the surrender of the Turkish garrison, having promised them that their lives would be spared. (Alas, they were not; as a contemporary writer put it, ‘the moon devoured them’.)221 In little more than a week, the entire Peloponnese was in revolt.
Not everywhere, however, did the rebels have it all their own way. In Patras, the chief city and port, the rising in the last days of March met with serious opposition, the Turks barricading themselves in the citadel and firing their cannon down on the besiegers below. And within a few days there was further disappointment. Bishop Germanos–who not only held the see of Patras but was also the leading churchman and figurehead of the whole revolution–had appealed to all the Christian powers for support, and on 29 March received a reply from Sir Thomas Maitland in Corfu. Ionian subjects, wrote Maitland, were forbidden to involve themselves in the struggle on either side; were they to do so, they would instantly lose their government’s protection.
Then on Palm Sunday, 3 March, a Turkish force of several hundred men reached Patras under the command of a certain Yussuf Pasha. Yussuf had recently left the siege of Iannina to take up a new appointment as governor of Euboea; calling en route at Missolonghi (now Mesolongion), he had heard of the disturbances and had hurried at once to the city’s relief. He and his men entered Patras at dawn, surprising the Greek population in their beds. Most of them rose, panic-stricken, and fled for their lives, while Yussuf ordered the houses of all the leading citizens to be burned to the ground. With a strong scirocco blowing to fan the flames, some 700 buildings were destroyed. Meanwhile, the streets filled with rampaging Turks, all of them out for Greek blood. Of those Greeks who had stayed behind, forty were beheaded in the next few hours.
Patras was to remain a battleground until the end of the war, with Greeks and Turks alternately getting the upper hand but never so decisively as to bring the fighting to an end. Despite constant battering from the Greek guns, the Turks never lost control of the citadel, nor were they ever driven from the two other great castles, of Roumeli and the Morea, which face each other across the Gulf of Corinth at the point where the straits are at their narrowest. Without this invaluable bridgehead–for the Greeks were firmly ensconced at Corinth–the vast peninsula would have been impenetrable to them from the north, their seat of government at Tripolis dangerously isolated; with it, they were able to make life for the rebels difficult indeed.
There was no doubt now that the Peloponnese was to be the heart-land of the struggle. It was there that Kolokotronis–now officially archistrategos, commander-in-chief–won his first pitched battle, at Valtetsi only five miles from the seat of the Turkish government at Tripolis. The Turks lost some 700 killed or wounded, the Greeks perhaps 150. It was there too that the Greeks captured from the Turks their first great stronghold: Monemvasia in the southeast corner, whose immense outcrop of rock many had thought impregnable. In Roumeli, on the other hand–which is to say, all Greece to the north of the Gulf of Corinth–the occasional outbreaks of fighting were largely directed towards stopping the Turks from advancing southward. There was, for example, a significant Greek victory at Vasilika, the road running through a long and narrow pass, very similar to–and not far from–the pass of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas of Sparta and his army had perished in their heroic stand against the Persians twenty-three centuries before.222
The sea also saw its share of battles. The opposing forces were hopelessly unequal. Greek ships were essentially merchantmen, though they normally carried a number of guns to defend themselves from the pirates who still infested the eastern Mediterranean. The Turks, on the other hand, had a navy. This, on the face of it, should have made the whole concept of naval warfare between the two unequal in the extreme, but the Greeks had one immense advantage: they were seamen to their fingertips, while the Turks–originating as they had in landlocked Central Asia–were anything but. This meant that while the fighting men on board a Turkish warship were almost certainly Turks, for seamanship and navigation they tended to rely on Greeks–which, after the outbreak of the revolution, they were unable to do. Moreover, the smaller size of the Greek vessels made them faster and more manoeuvrable, just as were the victorious English ships that, two and a half centuries before, had sailed out against the Spanish Armada.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, to read that of the three separate Turkish naval expeditions despatched from Constantinople in 1821–with the dual purpose of reimposing Turkish control over the Greek islands in revolt and of bringing reinforcements and provisions to the Turkish garrisons around the Peloponnese–two were hopeless failures. The first retired after its second largest vessel was destroyed by a Greek fireship, the flames of which reached its powder magazine and blew the whole thing to smithereens with the loss of over 500 lives. The second, which was intended to subdue the island of Samos just off the Anatolian coast, was driven back having achieved nothing. Only the third succeeded, having sailed around the Peloponnese and into the Ionian Sea, where the British authorities still allowed the Turks to use the island harbours. Here it took on provisions at Zante and continued with an attack, by a largely Egyptian flotilla, on the port of Galaxidi on the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. Thirty-four Greek ships with thirty sailors were captured, the town burned to the ground. The fleet then returned to the Bosphorus by the way it had come, anchoring in the Golden Horn with the prize ships behind it, the bodies of the dead captives swinging from their yardarms.
As relations between Greek and Turk deteriorated, it was only to be expected that civilians as well as fighting men should suffer. There was an ugly incident at Smyrna (Izmir) in June 1821 when, in the course of an attack on the large Greek community, hundreds of men and women were slaughtered and raped, but the most notorious atrocity was perpetrated in Constantinople, and by order of Sultan Mahmoud II himself. Shortly after dawn on Easter Sunday, 22 April 1821, Patriarch Grigorios V–who, it must be emphasised, had never voiced the slightest support for the Greek revolt–was formally stripped of his rank, and at noon on the same day was hanged from the central doors of the Patriarchate. According to Robert Walsh, chaplain to the British Embassy, ‘his person, attenuated by abstinence and emaciated by age’–he seems to have been not far short of eighty–‘had not weight sufficient to cause immediate death. He continued for a long time in pain, which no friendly hand dared abridge, and the darkness of night came on before his last convulsions were over.’ A few hours later the Sultan is said to have come in person to see the body, which was left swinging for three days.
Nor was the old Patriarch the only victim. All over the Ottoman Empire Christian churches were attacked and burned, and many of the clergy–including no less than seven bishops–were executed. And yet, though the whole western world was shocked by the outrage, only Orthodox Russia lifted its voice in protest–the Austrian and British Foreign Ministers, Metternich and Castlereagh, who could always be trusted to oppose any movement of national liberation, easily overcoming the initial hesitancy of Prussia and France. The Tsar was accordingly obliged to act alone, but he did not mince his words. In an ultimatum drafted by Capodistria, he declared that:
the Ottoman government has placed itself in a state of open hostility against the Christian world. It has legitimised the defence of the Greeks, who will henceforth be fighting solely to save themselves from inevitable destruction. In view of the nature of that struggle, Russia will find herself strictly obliged to offer them help, because they are persecuted; protection, because they need it; and assistance, jointly with the whole of Christendom, because she cannot surrender her brothers in religion to the mercy of blind fanaticism.
This was presented to the Turkish government on 18 July. On the 25th, having received no reply, the Russian ambassador, Count Stroganoff, broke off diplomatic relations with the Porte and closed his embassy.
Meanwhile, in the Peloponnese, Kolokotronis and his army were preparing to capture their greatest prize to date: Tripolis. Though garrisoned by some 10,000 men–including a body of 1,500 formidable Albanian mercenaries–the town seemed at first a comparatively easy target. Standing in the middle of an open plain, it could rely on no natural defences, merely a stone wall some fourteen feet high. Nor could it be provisioned from the sea. It was also known to be dangerously overcrowded, its civilian population of about 15,000 having been swelled by considerable numbers of local Turks for whom life in the surrounding countryside was no longer safe. In the Greek summer heat, it would be unlikely long to survive a siege.
By mid-July the Greek forces were drawn up to the north and west. Kolokotronis was in command, and there was a reserve force in waiting under Mavromichalis. Just as they were about to attack, there arrived an unexpected visitor: Dimitrios Ipsilantis, brother of the ill-fated Alexander. This alone would not have seemed much of a recommendation, even though the news of Alexander’s final débacle had not yet reached the Peloponnese. Physically, too, Dimitrios was more than usually unimpressive: less than five feet tall, skeletally thin and with a curious impediment in his speech. And yet there was something about him that inspired confidence. From the moment of his first appearance no one was in any doubt of his integrity, and when within a few days he offered to assume the leadership of a new Peloponnesian government, together with the supreme command of the armed forces, a surprising number of leading revolutionaries gave him their support. Among them was Kolokotronis himself, conscious as he was that the new Greece rapidly taking shape was much in need of an acknowledged head, and probably seeing Ipsilantis as an eminently suitable candidate whom he would have little difficulty in bending to his will. After some discussion it was agreed that the provisional government, the so-called Peloponnesian Senate, established only a month before, should continue in being, with Ipsilantis as its president and Commander-in-Chief.
The siege began, and went much as the Greeks had expected. Before long Tripolis was desperately short of food and water, and disease rapidly followed. At the end of August came the news that a Turkish relief force, advancing from the north via Thermopylae, had been successfully cut off by the Greeks, and a few days later the embattled Turks in the city signified their readiness to negotiate. They held a single card in their hands: a party of thirty-eight Greek hostages, captured with their servants at the beginning of the siege. All were being held in a single tiny cell, the masters shackled by one chain round their necks, the servants by another, both chains so tightly drawn that if any one man chose to sit down or stand up, the rest had to do the same. Perhaps it was this flagrant inhumanity that enraged the besiegers. With the promise of plunder in the air their numbers were now rapidly increasing, and their mood grew steadily more ugly as they began to discuss the division of the spoils.
Shortly before the expected surrender, Kolokotronis persuaded Ipsilantis to leave the camp. The excuse given was that the Turkish fleet had appeared off the west coast and that it was his duty to prevent its disembarkation. (In fact, the single two-pounder gun that he took with him would have had little effect on the Ottoman navy–which, as we know, proceeded unopposed to Galaxidi.) The real reason seems to have been that, as Kolokotronis well knew, the capture of Tripolis would end in an orgy of bloodshed. It would be better if the high-minded Ipsilantis were not there to witness it, or to risk–as head of the government–being held responsible.
Of course he was perfectly right. The peace talks were still in progress when the Greeks burst into Tripolis on 5 October, to find the unburied bodies of those who had died of hunger or disease lying scattered over the streets; within hours they had been covered by hundreds more, victims this time of a lust for indiscriminate slaughter. Nor did this occur only within the town; some 2,000 refugees, mostly women and children, who had left of their own free will on guarantee of safe conduct, were also massacred. Ipsilantis, returning a few days after the nightmare had ended, was appalled. It has been suggested that he should have stayed, using his influence to curb the frenzy of his countrymen; but that influence, never great, was already beginning to decline, and there is little in any case that he could have done. War, as we know, all too easily dehumanises those who engage in it; history is full of such horrors, and the sack of Tripolis was neither the first nor the worst of them. It is sad, nonetheless, that the often heroic story of Greek independence should be tarnished with so indelible a stain.
The Greeks were fighting for liberty and nationhood, but they were not yet a nation. The Peloponnesian Senate was all very well, but its members had not been elected–many, indeed, were self-appointed–and its writ, such as it was, was by its very definition confined to southern Greece. North of the Gulf of Corinth there were similar organisations in both East and West Roumeli–the latter, based on Missolonghi, being firmly under the control of Alexander Mavrogordatos, a highly sophisticated westerniser who spoke seven languages and had recently arrived from Pisa, where he had been a close friend of the poet Shelley and had given Mary Shelley lessons in Greek. The moment he heard of the revolt he had hurried to Greece, landing at Missolonghi in the middle of August, and from that moment on his was the dominant influence in the revolution.
What was now urgently needed was a supreme body which would unite these three bodies, together with several other smaller groups which had formed in individual cities and towns. With that objective, representatives of all the organisations met during the last weeks of the year in Piada, an insignificant little village some five miles away from the great classical theatre of Epidaurus. The Assembly of Epidaurus, as it was called, was to draft Greece’s first constitution. This first proclaimed the ‘political existence and independence’ of the Greek nation, adopting Greek Orthodoxy as the state religion; it went on to list the civil rights which would be guaranteed; finally, it laid down the essentials of the administrative machinery, with a five-man executive and a Senate. Mavrogordatos was elected president of the executive, effectively head of state; Ipsilantis, away besieging Corinth, was fobbed off with the presidency of the Senate, with Mavromichalis as his vice-president.
But it was one thing to proclaim independence and a constitution; it was quite another to bring these into active existence and to have them universally accepted. The delegates at Epidaurus had made one serious mistake: they had omitted to choose a capital. Perhaps, at so early a stage, such a decision might have seemed premature, but it meant in practice that when their deliberations were over they all returned to their individual seats of power, and that very little administrative work was done to make the national government a reality. Mavrogordatos himself, fully aware that the Turkish fleet was still lingering in the southern Adriatic, left immediately for Hydra and Spetsai–two of the three islands (the third was Psara in the Aegean) on which the revolutionary navy depended for its ships and crews, and whose support would be vitally necessary in the maritime struggle to come. He returned only in May 1822, when he went straight to Missolonghi to strengthen the town’s defences.
Thus it was that the Greek constitution, in the minds of Greeks and of foreigners alike, still partook to some degree of a dream. We may regret, but not perhaps be entirely surprised by, the reply given by Sir Thomas Maitland in Corfu to the new Greek government when it requested the return of an impounded ship:
His Excellency has just received letters from persons who give to themselves the name of the Government of Greece, by a messenger now in this port…
His Excellency is absolutely ignorant of the existence of a ‘provisionary government of Greece’, and therefore cannot recognise such an agent…He will not enter into a correspondence with any nominal power which he does not know.
For the Greeks, the first year of their revolution had been a surprisingly successful one. The Greek uprising had by now caught the imagination of Europe. From England and France, from Germany and Spain, from Piedmont and Switzerland, even from Poland and Hungary, parties of young philhellenes–with recent memories of a good sound classical education to inspire them–were seizing any available ship that would take them to the scene of the struggle.
Alas, all too many of them were doomed. The year 1822 was a good deal less happy than its predecessor. Most of the foreign volunteers, speaking not a word of Greek and understandably alarmed by the obvious brigands by whom they found themselves surrounded, stuck together in battalions of their own; nearly all of these were mobilised in July, when Mavrogordatos ill-advisedly challenged the Turks to a pitched battle on the plain of Peta, just outside Arta. It was fought on the 16th, and the result was catastrophe. Among the dead were no less than sixty-seven of the philhellenes. Fewer than thirty survived–most of them seriously wounded–to make their way back to Missolonghi, where several more were to die, of their wounds or of disease, during the following winter. The dream was over.
Yet the disaster at Peta was as nothing compared with the tragedy which was simultaneously being enacted 150 miles to the east, on the island of Chios. Of all the isles of Greece, Chios had been, until the revolution, the richest and the happiest. Unlike many of its neighbours it was enviably fertile and, after many centuries of Italian occupation, quite exceptionally sophisticated, boasting a number of great merchant families–including the Mavrogordatos–whose names were well-known throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Thanks to its wealth and its influence–twenty-two of its villages, producers of the mastic gum so much in demand at Constantinople, were the property of the Sultan’s sister–the Ottoman yoke was light. Left to themselves, the people of this blessed island would never have dreamed of rebelling; indeed, when in May 1821 a fleet from Hydra arrived with an invitation to join the revolution, they categorically refused. It was only in the following year–when another fleet, this time from the neighbouring island of Samos, unceremoniously landed 1,500 troops and a good deal of heavy artillery on their shores–that they found themselves swept up into a nightmare.
It was the Samians, not the Chiots, who were responsible for the attack on the Turkish-held citadel of Chora, the island’s principal town. It was they who burned down the customs house and stripped the lead from the roofs of the mosques to melt down into bullets. But it was the Chiots who suffered. Eighty of their most prominent citizens were taken prisoner, three of them sent as hostages to Constantinople. On 11 April 1822 an Ottoman fleet arrived under the admiral Kara Ali. Some 15,000 Anatolian toughs were landed and deliberately left to their own devices. The Samians fled, and the massacre began. It was Tripolis all over again, but this time the Turks were the butchers, the Greeks the victims. Not a man, woman or child in Chora was left alive, and the rest of the island was scarcely safer. Two thousand terrified refugees huddled in the great monastery of Nea Monì, famous throughout the Byzantine world for its glorious mosaics; all were put to the sword. Another monastery, Agios Minas, gave shelter to another 3,000; on Easter Sunday, 14 April, it was burned to the ground with everyone within it. A month later forty-nine of the eighty hostages were publicly hanged, eight from the yardarms of the Turkish flagship, the remainder on the trees lining the road which is still known as the Street of the Martyrs.
The Greeks scored one victory. On the night of 18 June they sent fireships against the Turkish fleet lying outside Chora, targeting in particular the flagship of Kara Ali himself. The operation was wholly successful: within minutes of the strike, the flagship was in flames. Kara Ali tried to escape in a lifeboat, but was hit on the head by a falling spar and died the next day. Turkish casualties are said to have numbered over 2,000. But by now those Chiots left alive hardly cared. They had lost some 70,000 of their compatriots: 25,000 dead and another 45,000–nearly half the original population–carried off into slavery.
The celebrated painting by Delacroix–bastard son of Talleyrand–of the Massacres of Chios223 is only one indication of the wave of revulsion and horror which swept through western Europe as the news of the atrocity spread. The Turks were not quickly forgiven.
Elsewhere, there was better news for the Greeks. The most dramatic of their successes–though not, perhaps, the most strategically important–was their capture of the Acropolis of Athens. Apart from this majestic elevation, the city would have been unrecognisable to anyone who had known it in the days of Pericles, still less to anyone who knows it today. Its population was no more than 10,000, at least half of whom were Albanians; Greeks and Turks together made up the rest. Already in the summer of 1821 the Greeks had begun a blockade of the Turkish garrison on the Acropolis, but they made little headway until the end of the year, when they managed to seize the well just outside the walls to the south, which they promptly poisoned. This left the garrison entirely dependent on rainwater, and it chanced that that winter and the spring of 1822 were among the driest in living memory. Every attempt to take the great rock by storm failed, but it hardly mattered; thirst, and the disease which it brought in its train, proved far more effective. On 22 June what was left of the garrison–it numbered some 1,150–surrendered.
It did so on honourable terms–safe conduct and passage home at Greek expense–but although the Greek captains swore an oath before the archbishop to respect them, the Greek population of Athens felt differently. The fate of Chios, only a few weeks before, was fresh in their minds; they remembered too the so-called ‘Greek hunts’ of the previous year, when the Turkish leader Omer Vrionis had led out mounted parties of some fifty to a hundred in search of Greek peasants and then, having given them a few minutes’ start, pursued them at the gallop, firing at them as they ran and beheading them when they were caught. In consequence, they did not feel merciful. By the middle of July at least half the garrison had been massacred, and the remainder were lucky indeed to escape with their lives.
Just a fortnight after the surrender of the Acropolis garrison, a Turkish army left Lamia–opposite the northern end of the island of Euboea–and marched south, first to recover the citadel of Acrocorinth, high above Corinth town, captured by the Greeks some months before, and then to relieve its beleaguered comrades who were being besieged at Nauplia. It was a huge force; the death of Ali Pasha had released several thousand men from Iannina, who had swelled the ranks to what may have been well over 20,000–many times the number of the Greeks against whom it was sent. Its leader was a certain Mahmoud who, being Pasha of Drama some miles east of Thessalonica, was commonly known as Dramali.
For the first few weeks Dramali carried all before him. After the surrender of Acrocorinth he headed south towards Nauplia, where an armistice had been declared to facilitate the negotiations for the coming surrender of the Turkish garrison. The first Greek national government had hastily moved from Corinth a week or two before and settled in Argos, just ten miles or so inland. It now fled a second time, in the Greek ships which were waiting at Nauplia to carry away the Turks, and its reputation never recovered. The Greek military captains, on the other hand, showed no lack of courage. They poured men into the citadel of Argos, and were joined there by Dimitrios Ipsilantis and soon afterwards by Kolokotronis himself, who had been appointed by the Peloponnesian Senate to the supreme command. Dramali, he knew, would now march on the former Turkish headquarters at Tripolis; his own plan, therefore, would be to block the way forward and then, by sending smaller bodies of troops into the narrow mountain passes between Argos and Corinth, to cut off the retreat.
After so promising a start, Dramali had lost his momentum. In the heat and desiccation of the Greek summer, he was having difficulty in feeding–and above all in watering–his men. Meanwhile, Ipsilantis was holding out in Argos, while in Nauplia the negotiations had broken down and the Turkish garrison in the citadel was once again under siege. There was nothing for it but to return to Corinth; unfortunately, as Dramali now realised, he had omitted to post guards on the passes and ravines through which he would have to march. Kolokotronis’s plan worked perfectly. As the Turkish advance guard entered the narrow valley of the Dervenakia on 6 August, the Greeks opened fire from the rocks above; the result was another massacre, and when two days later Dramali himself took a different route, it was the same story. Thanks to his bodyguard, he himself got through to safety, but he lost his sword and his turban–and his self-respect.
Still more satisfactory for the Greeks than the number of the enemy dead and wounded, estimated at about 2,000, was the plunder: virtually the whole of the Turkish baggage train, with 400 horses, 1,300 beasts of burden and several hundred camels. In December the Turkish garrison at Nauplia finally gave in, and the survivors of the expedition who had made it back to Corinth were almost cut off; their only chance was to head west to Patras, which was still in Turkish hands. The thousand-odd sick and wounded were sent by sea; the 3,500 who had escaped unharmed set off on foot. About half-way along the southern shore, however, where the road narrows to cross the river Krathis, the Greeks suddenly struck, cutting them off both in front and behind. For six weeks they held out, first eating their horses and finally, we are told, resorting to cannibalism. Only the following March did a Turkish flotilla from Patras succeed in rescuing the 2,000 survivors, many of them more dead than alive.
The abject failure of the largest Turkish force seen in Greece for well over a century to make any impact on the revolution put new heart into the Greeks, but although their military successes had been impressive, the movement itself was becoming dangerously fissile. The Assembly of Epidaurus had been intended to last for only a year; its successor, which met in April 1823 near Astros–on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, some twenty miles south of Nauplia–with 260 delegates, was more than four times the size and infinitely more chaotic.
Already the insurgents were split down the middle: on the one hand, the politicians surrounding Mavrogordatos; on the other, the warriors led by Kolokotronis. And there were territorial divisions too: the inhabitants of the Peloponnese, of Roumeli and Epirus, and of the islands had little love for each other and resented it bitterly if their rivals received what they considered preferential treatment. Every time an important appointment was made to a senior post, it would be challenged; in the ensuing discussion pistols were fondled and tempers flared. On one occasion an infuriated Kolokotronis went so far as to threaten the whole new assembly, being pacified only when he was offered a place on the executive committee; even then, among his friends and enemies alike, jealousies and deep indignation continued to smoulder.
Such, briefly, was the situation when on 3 August 1823 George Gordon, Lord Byron, landed in Cephalonia. Byron was no stranger to Greece; he had been there fifteen years before, in 1809–10, when he had visited Ali Pasha in Iannina. On this occasion he was greeted by the British Resident, who promised him all possible assistance provided only that it did not compromise the British policy of strict neutrality between the two sides. His first problem was to discover exactly what was happening. The British could tell him virtually nothing, so he hired a small boat in which to slip through the Turkish blockade with a letter to Marcos Botsaris, who had been described to him as ‘one of the bravest and most honest of the Greek captains’. Botsaris replied at once, inviting Byron to join him and adding that he was going into battle the next day.
Byron would certainly have accepted the invitation; it was a disappointment to him that the news of the captain’s death came before he was able to start out. He therefore remained in Cephalonia, moving into a small villa in the village of Metaxata. There he spent the entire autumn, defending himself as best he could against a deluge of appeals for money and support. The young George Finlay–a passionate philhellene who was later to write a definitive history of the Greek Revolution–wrote:
Kolokotrones invited him to a national assembly at Salamis. Mavrocordatos informed him that he would be of no use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordatos was then in that island. Constantine Metaxa, who was governor of Mesolonghi, wrote, saying that Greece would be ruined unless Lord Byron visited that fortress. Petrobey used plainer words. He informed Lord Byron that the true way to save Greece was to lend him, the bey, a thousand pounds…
The rebels, it was all too clear, did not speak with a single voice. Matters reached their peak in December, when Kolokotronis’s son Panos burst into the Senate while it was in session at Argos, physically driving the senators from the building, following them home and wrecking their houses. All attempts to heal the rift failed, and by the beginning of 1824 Greece had effectively two rival governments, one based at Kranidi in Argos, the other–backed by the Kolokotronis clan–at Tripolis.
By this time, however, Byron had finally acted. The proximity of their fleet in the Ionian Sea strongly suggested that the Turks would return to the attack. On 13 November, therefore, Byron had undertaken to lend the Greek government–such as it was–£4,000, with the specific purpose of funding a squadron from Hydra and Spetsai to patrol the waters off the coast. That squadron reached Missolonghi in mid-December, carrying with it Mavrogordatos, who had been entrusted with the town’s defence; and four days after Christmas Byron sailed from Cephalonia to join him, with his Newfoundland dog Lyon, his valet, William Fletcher, and his page, a good-looking fifteen-year-old from the Peloponnese called Loukas Chalandritsanos.
It was a dangerous journey, for the Turkish fleet was out in force: there was one particularly unpleasant moment when, in the early hours of 31 December, they encountered a huge Turkish vessel bearing down upon them. The captain turned their own ship round and they were able finally to outdistance it, but Byron soon afterwards put Chalandritsanos ashore with instructions to find his way to Missolonghi by land. As he wrote to Colonel Stanhope, the agent in Greece of the London Greek Committee:
I am uneasy at being here: not so much on my own account as on that of a Greek boy with me, for you know what his fate would be; and I would sooner cut him in pieces, and myself too, than have him taken out by those barbarians.
At noon on 4 January 1824 they entered the port of Missolonghi. Byron remained on board until the following morning when, at eleven o’clock and in full military uniform designed by himself, he made his formal entry into the town. An eye-witness remembered:
Crowds of soldiery, and citizens of every rank, sex, and age were assembled on the shore to testify to their delight. Hope and content were pictured in every countenance. His Lordship landed in a Speziot boat, dressed in a red uniform. He was in excellent health, and appeared moved by the scene.
It was, perhaps, the most glorious moment of Byron’s visit to Greece–for the story of his last three months makes depressing reading. He achieved none of his declared objectives. The idea that he should personally lead an expedition against Naupactos (Lepanto) came to nothing; a plan for a meeting of the Greek leaders at Salona also failed to materialise. The vast quantities of money that he spent–as well as the £4,000 in November and the living costs for his considerable retinue, he advanced another £2,000 to a perfectly useless regiment of Souliot troops,224 made a personal loan of £550 to Mavrogordatos and paid £800 to support a drunken though entertaining adventurer named William Parry–did nothing to advance the Greek cause. The house in which he lived, almost devoid of furniture, looked out on to the featureless lagoon, muddy and malarial. The winter rain poured down every day; he would return from his daily rides chilled to the bone. It was no wonder that his health began to suffer.
The first seizure occurred on 9 April. He was attended by a Dr Julius van Millingen, then serving as a surgeon with the Greeks,225 who weakened him still further by daily or even twice-daily bloodletting; meanwhile, just about every drug known to Greek science was forced down his throat. His constitution, already wrecked by years of drinking and dissipation–he looked nearer fifty than his true age of thirty-six–could no longer stand the strain. He died at six o’clock on the evening of Easter Monday, 19 April. What precisely caused his death remains a mystery: malaria, typhoid, uraemia, syphilis and stroke have all been suggested. Byron had never expected to return from Greece and had no fear of death, but his hope had been to die in battle, fighting for the independence of a land he loved, not–as he himself put it a few days before his death–‘slowly expiring on a bed of torture’.
Still, he did not die in vain. He cast the international spotlight on the Greek struggle as no one else could have done. Thanks to him, all Europe embraced the cause; countless young men were to follow in his tracks in search of death or glory. Greece, we may be sure, would have won her freedom even if he had never existed, just as Serbia had already done, and as her two other neighbours Romania and Bulgaria were later to do; but she would have done so, as they did, without that element of romance which only Byron could instil. The first two decades of the nineteenth century, it must not be forgotten, saw the beginning of the Romantic movement. The Greek War of Independence was anything but romantic; heroism was there, to be sure, but so too were cruelty, brutality and barbarism on a scale scarcely seen for centuries. Yet somehow that war epitomised all that Romanticism stood for. The West consequently looks back on it with admiration, the Greeks remember it with pride–and among them the name of Byron is not forgotten.
Already by the beginning of 1824, Greece was effectively in a state of civil war. In certain areas in the east of the country and elsewhere in the Mediterranean the Turks remained a force to be reckoned with, but in the Peloponnese and southern Roumeli Greeks were fighting Greeks. By the time Byron died in April the government forces had regained Argos, together with Tripolis and Corinth, while the Kolokotronis clan and their followers still held Nauplia. By midsummer Nauplia too had been surrendered, and the Senate and administration moved in. This did not mark a permanent end to the hostilities, but it afforded a breathing space, during which the Greek government saw the arrival of £80,000, the first two instalments of a loan of nearly £500,000 subscribed in London. Much of this was, predictably enough, to go to waste or to find its way into the wrong pockets; nonetheless, it left the government immeasurably strengthened.
Infighting broke out for the second time towards the end of October, when the citizens of Arcadia (now Kiparissa, in the southwestern Peloponnese) rose up in protest against what they considered disproportionate levies by the government. A force of 500 was sent down to restore order, under the command of a captain named Makriyannis. They would have had little difficulty in suppressing the revolt had the rebels not been joined by Theodore and Panos Kolokotronis, who brought with him a substantial number of disaffected troops from the continuing siege of Patras. Makriyannis could only return to Nauplia, whereat the rebels, much encouraged, marched on Tripolis, which had been largely garrisoned by forces from Roumeli. Immediately the fighting took on a territorial aspect, and in one particularly violent encounter Panos Kolokotronis was killed.
Only at this point did the government realise that it had on its hands not a localised rising, but a second civil war which must be stamped out while there was still time. In the existing circumstances Peloponnesian troops would clearly be untrustworthy; the government accordingly approached the Roumeliots, offering them not only money from the loan but–most irresponsibly–the possibility of the wholesale plunder of the Peloponnese. By the end of the year the Roumeliot captains, each with his own small army behind him, were swarming across the Gulf of Corinth to take full advantage of their opportunity.
The rebels, though now hopelessly outnumbered, fought on until February 1825, when Kolokotronis surrendered, followed by twelve of his principal captains. All were imprisoned in the fortified monastery of the Prophet Elijah in the hills of Hydra. The government had won–but at a heavy price. The Roumeliots had pillaged and plundered wherever they had gone, looting indiscriminately from government supporters and neutrals as well as rebels, from rich and poor, landowner and peasant alike. Makriyannis, who seems to have had a higher sense of morality than most of his colleagues, was appalled–not only by the violence but also by the realisation that his country was more dangerously split than ever before: the people of the Peloponnese would not easily forgive their northern neighbours.
He was not to know how soon national unity was to be enforced, when the Ottoman Empire was to fling its forces once more into the fray.
Even in 1824, the Turks had not been completely idle. Although their impact had scarcely been felt in the Greek mainland, in July the little Aegean island of Psarà–the principal eastern base of the Greek navy–had been sacked by a Turkish fleet, which was soon afterwards threatening the two other key naval centres, the offshore islands of Hydra and Spetsai. But the most formidable Islamic enemy that Greece now had to face was not Turkish; it was Egyptian.
The impressive figure of Mohammed Ali has already made an appearance in these pages, when we saw him appointed imperial viceroy in Egypt in 1805, at the age of thirty-six. Nineteen years later, in what would then have been thought of as late middle age, he was at the height of his powers. He had already transformed the country; in particular, he had given it for the first time an efficient army and navy, trained on European lines by European officers. To the Sultan Mahmoud II it was now plain that these must be swiftly employed if Greece were to remain part of his empire. An incentive was easy enough to find: if Mohammed Ali would help him to recover the Peloponnese, his son Ibrahim could take over as its pasha.
The fleet which Mohammed Ali and Ibrahim now prepared consisted of no less than fifty-five ships of the line and well over 300 transport vessels, carrying some 14,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry with their horses, and 150 cannon in the charge of 500 artillerymen. It sailed from Alexandria on 19 July 1824 and met the Turkish fleet at Bodrum (the ancient Halicarnassus) on the western coast of Asia Minor; but the Greeks were waiting, with a fleet of about seventy ships from Hydra, Spetsai and Psarà. A battle followed almost immediately–off Cape Yeronda, a mile or so to the north of the Bodrum peninsula–which, though inconclusive, was enough to persuade Ibrahim that his expedition would have to be postponed until the following year. He withdrew his ships to Crete–which had already been for over a century and a half under Ottoman rule–while the Turks returned to Constantinople for the winter.
So, at least, they intended; but in December a French captain gave Ibrahim valuable advice. There were three fortresses in the Peloponnese still in Turkish hands: Patras, and the former Venetian colonies of Methoni and Koroni.226 Ibrahim, the captain suggested, should concentrate on pouring as many troops as possible into one of these–Methoni, with its direct access to the shore, would be best–and should do so immediately, without waiting for the Turks or for the spring, so that his heavy ships could still take advantage of the winter winds. And so Ibrahim sailed on 23 February 1825, and the next day disembarked his infantry and cavalry at Methoni, where they dug themselves in. A few days later they entered Koroni. Meanwhile, the Egyptian army fanned out to the northeast, to subjugate the rest of the Peloponnese.
If it was to have any chance at all of checking Ibrahim’s advance, the Greek government now needed every man it could lay its hands on. Kolokotronis was quickly released with his fellow captains from their prison on Hydra and once again given supreme command of the Greek forces, while another decree required each district in the country to provide one conscript for every hundred of its population. But it was too late; the Egyptians were spreading rapidly across the whole peninsula. Kolokotronis, believing that Tripolis was the key to the entire Peloponnese, decided to destroy the city before their arrival, but once again he was unlucky: Ibrahim’s troops arrived before much damage was done and soon had the fires under control before first setting about the plunder and destruction and then relighting them. Once again the barbarity was appalling. Dr Samuel Gridley Howe,227 an American surgeon who had arrived in Greece earlier in the year, wrote in his journal:
I went on shore at sunrise and…went over the little ground, where still lay the dead, horseman and horse, which the enemy had not been able to carry off. They were all beheaded, and bodies savagely mangled by the Greeks, who committed on them every possible indignity. It was not enough to leave their bodies unburied, but they must show towards them a brutality the most savage.
Only two days later, on 28 June, he added:
But what is poor Greece to do? Ibrahim Pasha, with his army, has traversed the whole Morea from Modon to Napoli [Nauplia]. He has passed unharmed through defiles where five hundred resolute men might keep at bay his whole army. He has burnt Argos, Tripolitza, and Kalamata, the three largest towns in the Morea. It is not so much the loss of these places, and the immense property which they have ruined in their route, but it shows lamentably the weakness of the country that cannot resist an army which is not the fifth part of what the enemy can bring.
Dr Howe spoke no more than the truth. He could not know that the most dramatic disaster of all was still to come.
In the whole story of the Greek War of Independence, the name of Missolonghi stands out above all others. This is not only because of its resistance to two concerted attacks, in 1822 and 1823, thanks to which it was the only town north of the Gulf of Corinth to have remained in Greek hands since the beginning of hostilities; nor is it altogether due to the death there of Lord Byron in 1824, though this did much to make it celebrated throughout Europe. Missolonghi became a symbol above all as a result of the unique experience which it suffered on the eve of Palm Sunday 1825, and which captured the horrified imagination of the world.
The Turkish army that marched south from Arta early that year under the command of Reshid Pasha drew up outside the town at the end of April. It numbered some 8,000 fighting soldiers, as opposed to the Missolonghi garrison of less than half that number. Unlike the unified Turkish force, however, this garrison was characteristically composed of about a dozen different groups, each under its own captain. Concerted action was hard to achieve until one natural leader emerged above the others, a Souliot captain named Notis Botsaris. Thanks in large measure to him, in that first phase of the siege the defenders successfully withstood everything that Reshid could hurl against them. They knew too that they could not be starved out, since they still had a supply line from Zakynthos and the other Ionian islands across their lagoon, whose waters were too shallow to allow the passage of the heavy Turkish ships. When the October rains began and the Turks withdrew from the walls for the winter, there was high optimism among the Greek leaders.
But they were reckoning without the Egyptians. Since Ibrahim’s departure from Alexandria his father had built up a whole new fleet: some 135 vessels of all sizes, including a further squadron from Turkey and others from Algiers and Tunis. Ibrahim had returned to take command, and in the first days of 1826 this new armada, carrying 10,000 troops and a quantity of heavy artillery, cast anchor in the waters outside Missolonghi. After a few weeks of preparation, at dawn on 24 February the cannon opened fire, and it has been calculated that over the next three days more than 8,500 cannonballs and mortar shells were fired into the town. The destruction was appalling–but somehow the defences held.
Ibrahim–who had taken over the supreme command, making no secret of his contempt for his Turkish colleague–now turned his attention to the lagoon. Once he had gained control of those shallow waters the people of Missolonghi could be starved into submission, but the task was not an easy one. Reshid had tried it the year before, when he had launched thirty-six shallow-draft boats to attack the town by sea; but they had been turned back by heavy fire from the little island of Vasiladi. Ibrahim now tried something a good deal more powerful: a fleet of eighty-two even shallower vessels, together with five huge rafts carrying thirty-six-pounder cannon. Once again the gunners of Vasiladi put up a magnificent performance, but towards evening there was an explosion in their powder magazine and their resistance came to an end. After that the other lagoon islands quickly surrendered until only one remained: the island of Klisova, half a mile southeast of the town. Here, the attackers were obliged to disembark several yards from the shore and wade through the mud; they made easy targets, of which the island’s defenders took full advantage. Both Reshid and Ibrahim himself were wounded and the attempt on the island failed, but it made little difference. The Turks had gained control of the lagoon. Missolonghi’s lifeline was cut. Henceforth its surrender would be only a matter of time.
Unless, that is, its entire population broke out and made a bid for liberty across the plain to the northeast of the town; and this is precisely what the people of Missolonghi resolved to do. They numbered some 9,000 all told, men, women and children; it was decided that when night fell on 22 April, every able-bodied adult and adolescent would scramble over the walls, carrying the younger children who would be drugged with laudanum. They would cross the defensive ditch on makeshift bridges, and then take shelter and wait behind the outer rampart until they heard firing: this would come from a party of troops under one of the captains, George Karaiskakis, staging a diversionary attack to keep the besiegers busy. Then they would all move forward together. Those too old, too sick or too weak to leave would be gathered into a few neighbouring houses, with an explosive charge beneath them which they would ignite when the Turks approached.
It was a desperate plan, which could hardly have been expected to succeed even as well as it did. There was none of the long-awaited firing from Karaiskakis; after standing for an hour behind the rampart the refugees lost patience and burst out on to the plain. Then, suddenly, there were cries of ‘Opiso! Opiso!’ – ‘Back! Back!’–and all was confusion. Some continued forward, others retreated. Such was the crowding and jostling on the bridges that many fell into the ditch; those who got back into the town were made short work of by the Turkish troops who, seeing the walls undefended, had lost no time in smashing their way in. Those still hurrying across the plain were attacked first by Turkish cavalry and, later, by Albanian soldiery; the men were killed, the women and children taken prisoner. Behind them, meanwhile, Missolonghi was a blazing inferno. Dr Howe could not contain his feelings. He wrote on 30 April:
Missolonghi has fallen! Her brave warriors have thrown themselves in desperation upon the bayonets of their enemies; her women and children have perished in the flames of their own dwellings, kindled by their own hands; and their scorched and mangled carcasses lie a damning proof of the selfish indifference of the Christian world…For ten months have the eyes of Christian Europe been turned upon Missolonghi. They have seen her inhabitants struggling at enormous odds against the horrors of war and famine; her men worn out, bleeding and dying; her women gnawing the bones of dead horses and mules; her walls surrounded by Arabs, yelling for the blood of her warriors, and to glut their hellish lusts upon her women and children. All this they have seen, and not raised a finger for their defence…
As for the casualties, it is impossible to give an exact figure; by the end of that ghastly night, however, it seems likely that nearly half the population of Missolonghi–perhaps 4,000–were dead and some 3,000, mostly women and children, captive. Less than a quarter–2,000 at the most–had made their way to safety.
Even more than the tragedy of Chios, the fate of Missolonghi was mourned throughout Europe. Once again an outraged Delacroix seized his brush in protest: his tremendous painting, La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi, did much to focus the prevailing indignation, and across Europe his contemporaries–painters and sculptors, writers and poets–enthusiastically followed his lead. The western powers could no longer sit on their hands in the name of neutrality; the time had come to gird on their swords and hasten to Greece’s aid.
The disaster of Missolonghi left all Greece demoralised; and it was soon afterwards followed by another, greater still. In June 1826 Reshid Pasha launched, with an army of 7,000 men, a concerted attack on Athens. The city, because of its position, had never been the Greek capital; it was exceptional, however, for two reasons. The first was the obvious one: it had been the scene of the greatest achievements of classical antiquity and still, for all its long dégringolade, remained a symbol of the artistic, cultural and intellectual distinction of which the Greeks had once been capable and, it was hoped, might one day be capable again. The second, less romantic, had still greater relevance to the present situation. After the fall of Missolonghi it was the only city in Greek hands north of the Gulf of Corinth. Despite recent Turkish and Egyptian successes, it now seemed likely that the continuing struggle, together with the increasing sympathy for it among the powers of western Europe, would result in at least some degree of Greek autonomy. With Athens back in Muslim hands, that autonomy might well be limited to the Peloponnese; if, on the other hand, the Greeks were able to hold the city, the frontier would have to be a good deal further north.
By mid-August Reshid was in control of the whole city except the Acropolis, where a Greek garrison of 500 held out through the following winter–during which time the Greek government, such as it was, fell victim to yet another outbreak of factional strife. Once again, Kolokotronis seems to have been largely to blame, and by the summer of 1827 there were no less than seven separate conflicts in progress. Oddly enough, it was two Britons who managed to impose some degree of calm, though both failed ultimately to distinguish themselves. The first was General Sir Richard Church, who had raised the Anglo-Greek regiment on Zakynthos sixteen years before. In the interim he had served in the army of the King of Naples, but his heart had remained in Greece. He returned there in March 1827, having been offered the supreme command of the Greek land forces–only a foreigner, it seemed, could hope to establish order over so chaotic a country–but he had refused to take up his post until the two rival governments had settled their differences.
Church was followed a week later by a still more remarkable figure. Thomas, Lord Cochrane–later 10th Earl of Dundonald–had early in his career been court-martialled for insubordination, and in 1814 had been put on trial for fraud on the Stock Exchange. In the first instance he had been acquitted, in the second found guilty.228 Nonetheless, he was generally accounted England’s greatest admiral since Nelson. He had spent seven years in South America, where he had fought for the independence of Chile, Peru and Brazil, and as early as November 1825 he had been offered the command, such as it was, of the Greek navy. The delay had been occasioned by his insistence, as a condition of his employment, on the provision of six steamships and two frigates, to be designed by another British aristocrat, Frank Abney Hastings, who had served as a ship’s boy at Trafalgar and had reached the rank of captain before being dismissed from the service.
Steamships were still in their infancy. Even they were still normally propelled by sail, using their primitive engines only in calm or in battle. Cochrane’s order was to be paid for by a second loan, organised in London, of £566,000, but it was never fulfilled. One of the two frigates had to be sold to the American government to pay for the other, and only two of the six steamships ever reached Greece, neither of them–thanks to design failings, poor construction, corruption and the activities of Egyptian agents–to be trusted an inch. When he eventually arrived in Greece–on his yacht–in the spring of 1827, Cochrane took an even stronger line than Church. How, he demanded, could the Greek leaders make such fools of themselves, squabbling about where to hold their next assembly, when they should have been attacking the Turks and Egyptians, driving them out of the country before it was totally destroyed? His words had their effect: the two sides were forced into an agreement, according to which a new Assembly should meet at Trizini, the ancient Troezen. By the end of March both Church and Cochrane had withdrawn their objections and assumed their posts, and only a week or two later the Assembly resolved to offer the presidency of Greece to Capodistria, who had now left the Russian service and was living quietly in Geneva.
Meanwhile, in Athens, the Acropolis was still under siege. In an attempt to break the deadlock, it was decided early in 1827 to despatch a force of 2,300, under the English philhellene commander Thomas Gordon. Gordon was soon joined by Karaiskakis with several detachments of local troops, so that his numbers were probably not far short of 10,000 by the time Cochrane arrived at Piraeus in his flagship, the Hellas, shortly to be followed by Church in a commandeered schooner. Various plans of action were now put forward, but Cochrane had determined on a direct march on Athens and, as usual, rode roughshod over any opposition. ‘Where I command,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘all other authority ceases.’ Karaiskakis, realising that such an advance would involve a dangerous crossing of an open plain almost certainly surrounded by Turkish cavalry, did not immediately accept this view, but a day or two later he was shot by a Turkish musketeer and there were no more objections. So it was agreed that at midnight on 5 May 1827 a force of 2,500 should disembark from the near side of Phaleron Bay and march on Athens, while the remainder–almost three times as many–should remain at Piraeus to await further orders.
Karaiskakis had, of course, been perfectly right. But if the plan was foolhardy, its execution was little short of shameful. Gordon commented afterwards:
As the Admiral had nothing to do with the motions of the troops when once ashore, and the General [Church], satisfied with having sketched a disposition, staid in his vessel till daylight, the captains, all on a footing of equality, acted independently, halting where they chose; so that the column was scattered over a space of four miles, the front within cannon-shot of Athens, the rear close to the sea, and the soldiers, unprovided with spades and pickaxes, dug the earth with their daggers, in order to cover themselves from the charge of horse.
Reshid attacked at dawn, with all too foreseeable results. The Greeks lost 1,500 men, more than on any single day since the beginning of the war. When, after a comfortable night’s rest, Cochrane and Church disembarked from their respective ships, it was to find the survivors, exhausted and terrified, dragging themselves back to the shore and clambering into the small boats in which they hoped to escape to safety. Church, in an attempt to restore his reputation, held out heroically with a handful of men at Phaleron for three more weeks, but by the end of the month heat and thirst had compelled him to surrender. The garrison on the Acropolis gave in a few days later.
Who was to blame? In one way or another, just about everyone: Cochrane for his overweening arrogance and refusal to listen to other, wiser men; Church for not standing up to him; both of them for staying on board their ships when they should have been with their men; the Greek captains for demonstrating once again their hopeless lack of discipline and inability to agree on a supreme commander. Their failure proved a tragedy, and it served them right.
Meanwhile, the question of European intervention dragged on, as ambassadors shuttled between London, Paris and St Petersburg. British interests were in the capable hands of the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, who in April 1827 succeeded Lord Liverpool as Prime Minister; it was largely through his efforts that the Treaty of London was signed by Britain, France and Russia on 6 July. By its terms Greece would enjoy autonomy, theoretically as a dependency of Turkey (in that she would pay an annual tribute) but effectively independent, as the three powers would recognise by establishing commercial relations with her. She and Turkey must conclude an armistice within a month–Canning later shortened this to a fortnight–after which, if they had failed to do so, the powers would intervene. For the Greeks this was good news indeed. Turkey, they knew, would reject any idea of an armistice, so intervention was virtually certain.
Events were to prove them right. Some months before, the Sultan had appointed Mohammed Ali titular supreme commander of all land and sea forces in Greece, Turkish as well as Egyptian; Mohammed Ali had thereupon raised a new army of nearly 15,000, and a new fleet consisting of three Turkish ships of the line, sixty smaller vessels–five of them French-built–forty transports and six fireships. All told, they carried some 3,500 guns. This was the force which dropped anchor on 7 September in the Bay of Navarino, where Ibrahim was waiting.
The three allied navies hastened to Navarino; but their respective admirals had strict orders not to go directly into battle. They were first to do everything in their power to ‘encourage’ all Turkish and Egyptian warships to return peaceably to Constantinople or Alexandria, though Canning made it clear that, if they persisted in remaining in Greece, the orders of the British admiral, Sir Edward Codrington, ‘were to be enforced, if necessary and when all other means are exhausted, by cannon shot’. Codrington–another veteran of Trafalgar, where he had commanded HMS Orion–had been appointed Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, the previous December. He was the first to reach Navarino, where he was joined by his French colleague, the Comte de Rigny, a few days later. The Russians having not yet arrived, on 25 September the two admirals, accompanied by a few of their senior officers and by Codrington’s son Henry, a midshipman on his father’s ship, had an interview with Ibrahim in his tent just outside the neighbouring town of Pylos.
The conversation, as recorded by Henry Codrington, was polite and cordial, accompanied by quantities of coffee and the smoking of enormous jewel-studded chibouks. It went very much as might have been imagined, with Codrington issuing his courteous warning and Ibrahim agreeing to take no action until he received new instructions from Alexandria and Constantinople. All the same it is a pity that no minutes were taken, for it soon became clear that the two sides had very different ideas of the conclusions. Ibrahim apparently believed that the Greeks as well as the Turks were bound by the temporary armistice; he also assumed that there would be no allied objection to his taking supplies and provisions to the Turkish garrison at Patras.
The Greeks for their part saw no reason to call a halt. They after all had accepted the terms of the Treaty of London; it was the Turks who had rejected them. Thus it was that in the last days of September, while Church was leading an expedition against Patras, Ibrahim sailed for the city with a fleet of no less than forty-eight ships–far more than could have been needed for a simple supply drop. But he never reached it: Codrington was there to block him, and ferocious equinoctial gales did the rest. Ibrahim then changed his tactics. The admirals might frustrate him by sea, but they were powerless to check him on land. Very well, he would continue with the devastation of the Peloponnese.
With the agreement of 25 September now little more than a dead letter, the three admirals–Codrington and de Rigny had now been joined by the Russian, the Dutch-born Rear-Admiral Count Heiden–decided on a show of strength. The ten French naval officers on board the Egyptian ships as advisers were summoned back at once, and in the late morning of 20 October Codrington–in his flagship, the Asia–led the three fleets, together numbering eleven ships of the line, eight large frigates and eight smaller vessels, through the narrow entrance to the Bay of Navarino.
Both sides were still under orders not to begin hostilities, but in so tense a situation it was impossible to tell whether any individual action was merely provocative or actually aggressive. Moreover, unlike the allied admirals, the Turkish and Egyptian commanders had agreed on no overall plan to guide them. Sooner or later, battle was inevitable. It began at about two o’clock in the afternoon, and continued until about six. Those four hours saw the last naval battle ever fought in which no steamship took part. More remarkable still was the fact that the ships were all lying at anchor, at close quarters in a small bay; they could manoeuvre only by swinging round on the anchor cables so that the guns along their broadsides could face their chosen target. Dr Howe unforgettably described the scene:
The Turkish ships, more than triple the number of their opponents, opened all their broadsides, and seconded by the batteries onshore, poured such tremendous volleys of shot as, if well directed, must have annihilated the Europeans, but the latter sent back, if a smaller, yet a far more destructive fire, for every gun was pointed, every shot told…The allies, sending out their boats, cut the cables of the Turkish fire-vessels, and setting fire to them, let them drive down upon their own fleet. In a few minutes several ships-of-war, taking fire, added to the horror of a scene already terrible; the two long lines of ships, from which roared nearly two thousand cannon; the blazing fire-ships, driving to and fro among the huge Turkish vessels, whose falling masts and shattered hulls began to show how the battle went; the sea covered with spars and half-burnt masses of wood to which clung thousands of sailors escaped from their exploded vessels; the lines of batteries upon the shore, which blazed away all the time, and were covered by the whole Turkish army most anxiously watching a scene upon which their own fate depended…But a contest could not be long where one side had only a vast superiority of force, directed by blind fury alone, against cool courage, discipline, and naval skill.
Strangely enough, the allied losses at Navarino were comparatively light: not a single ship was sunk, the casualties amounting to 174 killed and 475 wounded. For the Ottoman fleet, however, it was a very different story. From the start it had been at a disadvantage. Its supreme commander Ibrahim Pasha missed the whole engagement, being still away in the Peloponnese; the Egyptian admiral, Moharrem Bey, had no stomach for the fight and had left with the French officers before it began. There remained only the Turk, Tahir Pasha, whose flagship was sunk at an early stage of the battle. Of the eighty-nine fighting ships under his command, only twenty-nine survived. Codrington estimated that some 6,000 Turks and Egyptians were killed, and another 4,000 wounded.
The pendulum had swung dramatically. Little more than five months before, on 6 May, the Turkish recovery of Athens had seemed to sound a death-knell to Greek hopes; after Navarino, Greek independence was certain.
All was not quite over. Ibrahim’s troops–some 24,000 of them–remained in the devastated Peloponnese; it was not until September 1828 that they were finally embarked on Egyptian ships and returned to Alexandria. Fighting continued, too, beyond the Gulf of Corinth: the further the Greeks could advance to the north, the more territory they could claim for their new state. Church in the west and Dimitrios Ipsilantis in the east pushed steadily forward, the former as far as Arta, the latter to Thermopylae, opposite the northern tip of Euboea–although he was unable to dislodge the Turks from Athens itself.
Meanwhile, Capodistria had finally arrived to take up his presidency. He immediately antagonised the revolutionary captains by making no effort to conceal his contempt for the way in which they had failed to unite, endlessly bickering and squabbling amongst themselves while the fate of their country hung in the balance. But he worked sixteen hours a day to rebuild the country, and his immense reputation abroad had a decisive effect on the deliberations of the London Conference, which now had the task of drawing the boundaries of the new Greek state. In September 1828 the ambassadors to Constantinople of the three allied powers met on the island of Poros to consider this specific question, and three months later they announced their recommendation: a line running from Arta in the west to Volos in the east, with the inclusion of the islands of Euboea, Samos and possibly Crete.229 The only problem was Turkey, which refused outright to come to the negotiating table; this was finally resolved only by the Treaty of Adrianople, which ended a Russian–Turkish war in September 1829. By its terms the Turks finally agreed to abide by whatever future decisions on Greece might eventually be taken by the allies. Finally, on 3 February 1830 in London, Greece was declared an independent nation under the protection of Britain, France and Russia.
It was to be some years yet before peace returned. Capodistria was assassinated on 9 October 1831, and the country was plunged back into confusion. But in July 1832 the Turks gave their final approval to the Arta–Volos line–though not to the inclusion of Samos and Crete–and Greece became a sovereign state. Even then, however, its sovereignty was not absolute. The western powers had determined that it should be a monarchy, and had selected as its king the seventeen-year-old Prince Otto of Wittelsbach, son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. He arrived in Nauplia on the morning of 6 February 1833 and was given a tremendous welcome, cheered everywhere to the echo.
Greece’s long-cherished dream had finally become a reality–but her troubles were by no means over.