Part 10

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 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’, the Constantinopolitan slum assigned him for his residence by Mohammed the Conqueror.

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. 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.

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, 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.

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. 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.

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, 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.

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.