Chapter XV (1)

Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions--The Greek Church--Communal System--The Ægæan Islands--The Phanariots--Greek Intellectual Revival; Koraes--Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece with the French Revolution and Napoleon--The Hetæria Philike--Hypsilanti's Attempt in the Danubian Provinces; its Failure--Revolt of the Morea: Massacres: Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople--Attitude of Russia, Austria, and England--Extension of the Revolt: Affairs at Hydra--The Greek Leaders--Fall of Tripolitza--The Massacre of Chios-- Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822--Dissensions of the Greeks--Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid--Ibrahim conquers Crete and invades the Morea--Siege of Missolonghi--Philhellenism in Europe--Russian Proposal for Intervention--Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander: Accession of Nicholas--Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg-- Anglo-Russian Protocol--Treaty between England, Russia, and France--Death of Canning--Navarino--War between Russia and Turkey--Campaigns of 1828 and 1829--Treaty of Adrianople--Capodistrias President of Greece--Leopold accepts and then declines the Greek Crown--Murder of Capodistrias--Otho, King of Greece.

[Greece in the Napoleonic age.]

Of the Christian races which at the beginning of the third decade of this century peopled the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the Greek was that which had been least visibly affected by the political and military events of the Napoleonic age. Servia, after a long struggle, had in the year 1817 gained local autonomy under its own princes, although Turkish troops still garrisoned its fortresses, and the sovereignty of the Sultan was acknowledged by the payment of tribute. The Romanic districts, Wallachia and Moldavia, which, in the famous interview of Tilsit, Napoleon had bidden the Czar to make his own, were restored by Russia to the Porte in the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, but under conditions which virtually established a Russian protectorate. Greece, with the exception of the Ionian Islands, had neither been the scene of any military operations, nor formed the subject of any treaty. Yet the age of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic wars had silently wrought in the Greek nation the last of a great series of changes which fitted it to take its place among the free peoples of Europe. The signs were there from which those who could read the future might have gathered that the political resurrection of Greece was near at hand. There were some who, with equal insight and patriotism, sought during this period to lay the intellectual foundation for that national independence which they foresaw that their children would win with the sword.

[Greece in the eighteenth century.]

The forward movement of the Greek nation may be said, in general terms, to have become visible during the first half of the eighteenth century. Serfage had then disappeared; the peasant was either a free-holder, or a farmer paying a rent in kind for his land. In the gradual and unobserved emancipation of the labouring class the first condition of national revival had already been fulfilled. The peasantry had been formed which, when the conflict with the Turk broke out, bore the brunt of the long struggle. In comparison with the Prussian serf, the Greek cultivator at the beginning of the eighteenth century was an independent man: in comparison with the English labourer, he was well fed and well housed. The evils to which the Greek population was exposed, wherever Greeks and Turks lived together, were those which brutalised or degraded the Christian races in every Ottoman province. There was no redress for injury inflicted by a Mohammedan official or neighbour. If a wealthy Turk murdered a Greek in the fields, burnt down his house, and outraged his family, there was no court where the offender could be brought to justice. The term by which the Turk described his Christian neighbour was "our rayah," that is, "our subject." A Mohammedan landowner might terrorise the entire population around him, carry off the women, flog and imprison the men, and yet feel that he had committed no offence against the law; for no law existed but the Koran, and no Turkish court of justice but that of the Kadi, where the complaint of the Christian passed for nothing.

This was the monstrous relation that existed between the dominant and the subject nationalities, not in Greece only, but in every part of the Ottoman Empire where Mohammedans and Christians inhabited the same districts. The second great and general evil was the extortion practised by the tax-gatherers, and this fell upon the poorer Mohammedans equally with the Christians, except in regard to the poll-tax, or haratsch, the badge of servitude, which was levied on Christians alone. All land paid tithe to the State; and until the tax-gatherer had paid his visit it was not permitted to the peasant to cut the ripe crop. This rule enabled the tax-gatherer, whether a Mohammedan or a Christian, to inflict ruin upon those who did not bribe himself or his masters; for by merely postponing his visit he could destroy the value of the harvest. Round this central institution of tyranny and waste, there gathered, except in the districts protected by municipal privileges, every form of corruption natural to a society where the State heard no appeals, and made no inquiry into the processes employed by those to whom it sold the taxes. What was possible in the way of extortion was best seen in the phenomenon of well-built villages being left tenantless, and the population of rich districts dying out in a time of peace, without pestilence, without insurrection, without any greater wrong on the part of the Sultan's government than that normal indifference which permitted the existence of a community to depend upon the moderation or the caprice of the individual possessors of force.

[Origin of modern Greece Byzantine, not classic.]

[Slavonic and Albanian elements.]

Such was the framework, or, as it may be said, the common-law of the mixed Turkish and Christian society of the Ottoman Empire. On this background we have now to trace the social and political features which stood out in Greek life, which preserved the race from losing its separate nationality, and which made the ultimate recovery of its independence possible. In the first outburst of sympathy and delight with which every generous heart in western Europe hailed the standard of Hellenic freedom upraised in 1821, the twenty centuries which separated the Greece of literature from the Greece of to-day were strangely forgotten. The imagination went straight back to Socrates and Leonidas, and pictured in the islander or the hillsman who rose against Mahmud II. the counterpart of those glorious beings who gave to Europe the ideals of intellectual energy, of plastic beauty, and of poetic truth. The illusion was a happy one, if it excited on behalf of a brave people an interest which Servia or Montenegro might have failed to gain; but it led to a reaction when disappointments came; it gave inordinate importance to the question of the physical descent of the Greeks; and it produced a false impression of the causes which had led up to the war of independence, and of the qualities, the habits, the bonds of union, which exercised the greatest power over the nation. These were, to a great extent, unlike anything existing in the ancient world; they had originated in Byzantine, not in classic Greece; and where the scenes of old Hellenic history appeared to be repeating themselves, it was due more to the continuing influence of the same seas and the same mountains than to the survival of any political fragments of the past. The Greek population had received a strong Slavonic infusion many centuries before. More recently, Albanian settlers had expelled the inhabitants from certain districts both in the mainland and in the Morea. Attica, Boeotia, Corinth, and Argolis were at the outbreak of the war of independence peopled in the main by a race of Albanian descent, who still used, along with some Greek, the Albanian language. [349] The sense of a separate nationality was, however, weak among these settlers, who, unlike some small Albanian communities in the west of the Morea, were Christians, not Mohammedans. Neighbourhood, commerce, identity of religion and similarity of local institutions were turning these Albanians into Greeks; and no community of pure Hellenic descent played a greater part in the national war, or exhibited more of the maritime energy and daring which we associate peculiarly with the Hellenic name, than the islanders of Hydra and Spetza, who had crossed from the Albanian parts of the Morea and taken possession of these desert rocks not a hundred years before. The same phenomenon of an assimilation of Greeks and Albanians was seen in southern Epirus, the border-ground between the two races. The Suliotes, Albanian mountaineers, whose military exploits form one of the most extraordinary chapters in history, showed signs of Greek influences before the Greek war of independence began, and in this war they made no distinction between the Greek cause and their own. Even the rule of the ferocious Ali Pasha at Janina had been favourable to the extension of Greek civilisation in Epirus. Under this Mohammedan tyrant Janina contained more schools than Athens. The Greek population of the district increased; and in the sense of a common religious antagonism to the Mohammedan, the Greek and the Albanian Christians in Epirus forgot their difference of race.

[The Greek Church.]

[Lower clergy.]

[The Patriarch an imperial functionary.]

[The Bishops civil magistrates.]

The central element in modern Greek life was the religious profession of the Orthodox Eastern Church. Where, as in parts of Crete, the Greek adopted Mohammedanism, all the other elements of his nationality together did not prevent him from amalgamating with the Turk. The sound and popular forces of the Church belonged to the lower clergy, who, unlike the priests of the Roman Church, were married and shared the life of the people. If ignorant and bigoted, they were nevertheless the real guardians of national spirit; and if their creed was a superstition rather than a religion, it at least kept the Greeks in a wholesome antagonism to the superstition of their masters. The higher clergy stood in many respects in a different position. The Patriarch of Constantinople was a great officer of the Porte. His dignities and his civil jurisdiction had been restored and even enlarged by the Mohammedan conquerors of the Greek Empire, with the express object of employing the Church as a means of securing obedience to themselves: and it was quite in keeping with the history of this great office that, when the Greek national insurrection at last broke out, the Patriarch Gregorius IV. should have consented, though unwillingly, to launch the curse of the Church against it. The Patriarch gained his office by purchase, or through intrigues at the Divan; he paid an enormous annual backsheesh for it; and he was liable to be murdered or deposed as soon as his Mussulman patrons lost favour with the Sultan, or a higher bid was made for his office by a rival ecclesiastic. To satisfy the claims of the Palace the Patriarch was compelled to be an extortioner himself. The bishoprics in their turn were sold in his ante-chambers, and the Bishops made up the purchase-money by fleecing their clergy. But in spite of a deserved reputation for venality, the Bishops in Greece exercised very great influence, both as ecclesiastics and as civil magistrates. Whether their jurisdiction in lawsuits between Christians arose from the custom of referring disputes to their arbitration or was expressly granted to them by the Sultan, they virtually displaced in all Greek communities the court of the Kadi, and afforded the merchant or the farmer a tribunal where his own law was administered in his own language. Even a Mohammedan in dispute with a Christian would sometimes consent to bring the matter before the Bishops' Court rather than enforce his right to obtain the dilatory and capricious decision of an Ottoman judge.

[Communal organisation.]

[The Morea.]

The condition of the Greeks living in the country that now forms the Hellenic Kingdom and in the Ægæan Islands exhibited strong local contrasts. It was, however, common to all that, while the Turk held the powers of State in his hand, the details of local administration in each district were left to the inhabitants, the Turk caring nothing about these matters so long as the due amount of taxes was paid and the due supply of sailors provided. The apportionment of taxes among households and villages seems to have been the germ of self-government from which several types of municipal organisation, some of them of great importance in the history of the Greek nation, developed. In the Paschalik of the Morea the taxes were usually farmed by the Voivodes, or Beys, the Turkish governors of the twenty-three provinces into which the Morea was divided. But in each village or township the inhabitants elected officers called Proestoi, who, besides collecting the taxes and managing the affairs of their own communities, met in a district-assembly, and there determined what share of the district-taxation each community should bear. One Greek officer, called Primate, and one Mohammedan, called Ayan, were elected to represent the district, and to take part in the council of the Pasha of the Morea, who resided at Tripolitza. [350] The Primates exercised considerable power. Created originally by the Porte to expedite the collection of the revenue, they became a Greek aristocracy. They were indeed an aristocracy of no very noble kind. Agents of a tyrannical master, they shared the vices of the tyrant and of the slave. Often farmers of the taxes themselves, obsequious and intriguing in the palace of the Pasha at Tripolitza, grasping and despotic in their native districts, they were described as a species of Christian Turk. But whatever their vices, they saved the Greeks from being left without leaders. They formed a class accustomed to act in common, conversant with details of administration, and especially with the machinery for collecting and distributing supplies. It was this financial experience of the Primates of the Morea which gave to the rebellion of the Greeks what little unity of organisation it exhibited in its earliest stage.

[Northern Greece. The Armatoli and the Klephts.]

On the north of the Gulf of Corinth the features of the communal system were less distinct than in the Morea. There was, however, in the mountain-country of Ætolia and Pindus a rough military organisation which had done great service to Greece in keeping alive the national spirit and habits of personal independence. The Turks had found a local militia established in this wild region at the time of their conquest, and had not interfered with it for some centuries. The Armatoli, or native soldiery, recruited from peasants, shepherds, and muleteers, kept Mohammedan influences at a distance, until, in the eighteenth century, the Sultans made it a fixed rule of policy to diminish their numbers and to reduce the power of their captains. Before 1820 the Armatoli had become comparatively few and weak; but as they declined, bands of Klephts, or brigands, grew in importance; and the mountaineer who was no longer allowed to practise arms as a guardian of order, enlisted himself among the robbers. Like the freebooters of our own northern border, these brigands became the heroes of song. Though they plundered the Greek as well as the Mohammedan, the national spirit approved their exploits. It was, no doubt, something, that the physical energy of the marauder and the habit of encountering danger should not be wholly on the side of the Turk and the Albanian. But the influence of the Klephts in sustaining Greek nationality has been overrated. They had but recently become numerous, and the earlier organisation of the northern Armatoli was that to which the sound and vigorous character of the Greek peasantry in these regions, the finest part of the Greek race on the mainland, was really due. [351]

[The Ægæan Islands.]

[Chios.]

In the islands of the Ægæan the condition of the Greeks was on the whole happy and prosperous. Some of these islands had no Turkish population; in others the caprice of a Sultana, the goodwill of the Capitan Pasha who governed the Archipelago, or the judicious offer of a sum of money when money was wanted by the Porte, had so lightened the burden of Ottoman sovereignty, that the Greek island-community possessed more liberty than was to be found in any part of Europe, except Switzerland. The taxes payable to the central government, including the haratsch or poll-tax levied on all Christians, had often been commuted for a fixed sum, which was raised without the interposition of the Turkish tax-gatherer. In Hydra, Spetza, and Psara, the so-called nautical islands, the supremacy of the Turk was felt only in the obligation to furnish sailors to the Ottoman navy, and in the payment of a tribute of about £100 per annum. The government of these three islands was entirely in the hands of the inhabitants. In Chios, though a considerable Mussulman population existed by the side of the Greek, there was every sign of peace and prosperity. Each island bore its own peculiar social character, and had its municipal institutions of more or less value. The Hydriote was quarrelsome, turbulent, quick to use the knife, but outspoken, honest in dealing, and an excellent sailor. The picture of Chian life, as drawn even by those who have judged the Greeks most severely, is one of singular beauty and interest; the picture of a self-governing society in which the family trained the citizen in its own bosom, and in which, while commerce enriched all, the industry of the poor within their homes and in their gardens was refined by the practice of an art. The skill which gave its value to the embroidery and to the dyes of Chios was exercised by those who also worked the hand-loom and cultivated the mastic and the rose. The taste and the labour of man requited nature's gifts of sky, soil, and sea; and in the pursuit of occupations which stimulated, not deadened, the faculties of the worker, idleness and intemperance were alike unknown. [352] How bright a scene of industry, when compared with the grime and squalor of the English factory-town, where the human and the inanimate machine grind out their yearly mountains of iron-ware and calico, in order that the employer may vie with his neighbours in soulless ostentation, and the workman consume his millions upon millions in drink.

[The Greeks have ecclesiastical power in other Turkish provinces.]

The territory where the Greeks formed the great majority of the population included, beyond the boundaries of the present Hellenic Kingdom, the islands adjacent to the coast of Asia Minor, Crete, and the Chalcidic peninsula in Macedonia. But the activity of the race was not confined within these limits. If the Greek was a subject in his own country, he was master in the lands of some of his neighbours. A Greek might exercise power over other Christian subjects of the Porte either as an ecclesiastic, or as the delegate of the Sultan in certain fixed branches of the administration. The authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople was recognised over the whole of the European provinces of Turkey, except Servia. The Bishops in all these provinces were Greeks; the services of the Church were conducted in the Greek tongue; the revenues of the greater part of the Church-lands, and the fees of all the ecclesiastical courts, went into Greek pockets. In things religious, and in that wide range of civil affairs which in communities belonging to the Eastern Church appertains to the higher religious office, the Greeks had in fact regained the ascendancy which they had possessed under the Byzantine Empire. The dream of the Churchman was not the creation of an independent kingdom of Greece, but the restoration of the Eastern Empire under Greek supremacy. When it was seen that the Slav and the Rouman came to the Greek for law, for commercial training, for religious teaching, and looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople as the ultimate judge of all disputes, it was natural that the belief should arise that, when the Turk passed away, the Greek would step into his place. But the influence of the Greeks, great as it appeared to be, did not in reality reach below the surface, except in Epirus. The bishops were felt to be foreigners and extortioners. There was no real process of assimilation at work, either in Bulgaria or in the Danubian Provinces. The slow and plodding Bulgarian peasant, too stupid for the Greek to think of him as a rival, preserved his own unchanging tastes and nationality, sang to his children the songs which he had learnt from his parents, and forgot the Greek which he had heard in the Church when he re-entered his home. [353] In Roumania, the only feeling towards the Greek intruder was one of intense hatred.

[The Phanariot officials of the Porte.]

[Greek Hospodars.]

Four great offices of the Ottoman Empire were always held by Greeks. These were the offices of Dragoman, [354] or Secretary, of the Porte, Dragoman of the Fleet, and the governorships, called Hospodariates, of Wallachia and Moldavia. The varied business of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the administration of its revenues, the conduct of its law-courts, had drawn a multitude of pushing and well-educated Greeks to the quarter of Constantinople called the Phanar, in which the palace of the Patriarch is situated. Merchants and professional men inhabited the same district. These Greeks of the capital, the so-called Phanariots, gradually made their way into the Ottoman administration as Turkish energy declined, and the conquering race found that it could no longer dispense with the weapons of calculation and diplomacy. The Treaty of Carlowitz, made in 1699, after the unsuccessful war in which the Turks laid siege to Vienna, was negotiated on behalf of the Porte by Alexander Maurokordatos, a Chian by birth, who had become physician to the Sultan and was virtually the Foreign Minister of Turkey. His sons, Nicholas and Constantine, were made Hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia early in the eighteenth century; and from this time forward, until the outbreak of the Greek insurrection, the governorships of the Roumanian provinces were entrusted to Phanariot families. The result was that a troop of Greek adventurers passed to the north of the Danube, and seized upon every office of profit in these unfortunate lands. There were indeed individuals among the Hospodars, especially among the Maurokordati, who rendered good service to their Roumanian subjects; but on the whole the Phanariot rule was grasping, dishonest, and cruel. [355] Its importance in relation to Greece was not that it Hellenised the Danubian countries, for that it signally failed to do; but that it raised the standard of Greek education, and enlarged the range of Greek thought, by opening a political and administrative career to ambitious men. The connection of the Phanariots with education was indeed an exceedingly close one. Alexander Maurokordatos was the ardent and generous founder of schools for the instruction of his countrymen in Constantinople as well as in other cities, and for the improvement of the existing language of Greece. His example was freely followed throughout the eighteenth century. It is, indeed, one of the best features in the Greek character that the owner of wealth has so often been, and still so often is, the promoter of the culture of his race. As in Germany in the last century, and in Hungary and Bohemia at a more recent date, the national revival of Greece was preceded by a striking revival of interest in the national language.

[Greek intellectual movement in the eighteenth century.]

The knowledge of ancient Greek was never wholly lost among the priesthood, but it had become useless. Nothing was read but the ecclesiastic commonplace of a pedantic age; and in the schools kept by the clergy before the eighteenth century the ancient language was taught only as a means of imparting divinity. The educational movement promoted by men like Maurokordatos had a double end; it revived the knowledge of the great age of Greece through its literature, and it taught the Greek to regard the speech which he actually used not as a mere barbarous patois which each district had made for itself, but as a language different indeed from that of the ancient world, yet governed by its own laws, and capable of performing the same functions as any other modern tongue. It was now that the Greek learnt to call himself Hellen, the name of his forefathers, instead of Romaios, a Roman. As the new schools grew up and the old ones were renovated or transformed, education ceased to be merely literary. In the second half of the eighteenth century science returned in a humble form to the land that had given it birth, and the range of instruction was widened by men who had studied law, physics, and moral philosophy at foreign Universities. Something of the liberal spirit of the inquirers of Western Europe arose among the best Greek teachers. Though no attack was made upon the doctrines of the Church, and no direct attack was made upon the authority of the Sultan, the duty of religious toleration was proclaimed in a land where bigotry had hitherto reigned supreme, and the political freedom of ancient Greece was held up as a glorious ideal to a less happy age. Some of the higher clergy and of the Phanariot instruments of Turkish rule took fright at the independent spirit of the new learning, and for a while it seemed as if the intellectual as well as the political progress of Greece might be endangered by ecclesiastical ill-will. But the attachment of the Greek people to the Church was so strong and so universal that, although satire might be directed against the Bishops, a breach with the Church formed no part of the design of any patriot. The antagonism between episcopal and national feeling, strongest about the end of the eighteenth century, declined during succeeding years, and had almost disappeared before the outbreak of the war of liberation.

[Koraes, 1748-1833.]

[The language of Modern Greece.]

The greatest scholar of modern Greece was also one of its greatest patriots. Koraes, known as the legislator of the Greek language, was born in 1748, of Chian parents settled at Smyrna. The love of learning, combined with an extreme independence of character, made residence insupportable to him in a land where the Turk was always within sight, and where few opportunities existed for gaining wide knowledge. His parents permitted him to spend some years at Amsterdam, where a branch of their business was established. Recalled to Smyrna at the age of thirty, Koraes almost abandoned human society. The hand of a beautiful heiress could not tempt him from the austere and solitary life of the scholar; and quitting his home, he passed through the medical school of Montpellier, and settled at Paris. He was here when the French Revolution began. The inspiration of that time gave to his vast learning and inborn energy a directly patriotic aim. For forty years Koraes pursued the work of serving Greece by the means open to the scholar. The political writings in which he addressed the Greeks themselves or appealed to foreigners in favour of Greece, admirable as they are, do not form the basis of his fame. The peculiar task of Koraes was to give to the reviving Greek nation the national literature and the form of expression which every civilised people reckons among its most cherished bonds of unity. Master, down to the minutest details, of the entire range of Greek writings, and of the history of the Greek language from classical times down to our own century, Koraes was able to select the Hellenic authors, Christian as well as Pagan, whose works were best suited for his countrymen in their actual condition, and to illustrate them as no one could who had not himself been born and bred among Greeks. This was one side of Koraes' literary task. The other was to direct the language of the future Hellenic kingdom into its true course. Classical writing was still understood by the educated in Greece, but the spoken language of the people was something widely different. Turkish and Albanian influences had barbarised the vocabulary; centuries of ignorance had given play to every natural irregularity of local dialect. When the restoration of Greek independence came within view, there were some who proposed to revive artificially each form used in the ancient language, and thus, without any real blending, to add the old to the new: others, seeing this to be impossible, desired that the common idiom, corrupt as it was, should be accepted as a literary language. Koraes chose the middle and the rational path. Taking the best written Greek of the day as his material, he recommended that the forms of classical Greek, where they were not wholly obsolete, should be fixed in the grammar of the language. While ridiculing the attempt to restore modes of expression which, even in the written language, had wholly passed out of use, he proposed to expunge all words that were in fact not Greek at all, but foreign, and to replace them by terms formed according to the natural laws of the language. The Greek, therefore, which Koraes desired to see his countrymen recognise as their language, and which he himself used in his writings, was the written Greek of the most cultivated persons of his time, purged of its foreign elements, and methodised by a constant reference to a classical model, which, however, it was not to imitate pedantically. The correctness of this theory has been proved by its complete success. The patois which, if it had been recognised as the language of the Greek kingdom, would now have made Herodotus and Plato foreign authors in Athens, is indeed still preserved in familiar conversation, but it is little used in writing and not taught in schools. A language year by year more closely approximating in its forms to that of classical Greece unites the Greeks both with their past and among themselves, and serves as the instrument of a widening Hellenic civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. The political object of Koraes has been completely attained. No people in Europe is now prouder of its native tongue, or turns it to better account in education, than his countrymen. In literature, the renovated language has still its work before it. The lyric poetry that has been written in Greece since the time of Koraes is not wanting, if a foreigner may express an opinion, in tenderness and grace The writer who shall ennoble Greek prose with the energy and directness of the ancient style has yet to arise [356]

[Development of Greek commerce, 1750-1820.]

[The Treaty of Kainardji, 1774.]

The intellectual advance of the Greeks in the eighteenth century was closely connected with the development of their commerce, and this in its turn was connected with events in the greater cycle of European history. A period of comparative peace and order in the Levantine waters, following the final expulsion of the Venetians from the Morea in 1718, gave play to the natural aptitude of the Greek islanders for coasting-trade. Then ships, still small and unfit to venture on long voyages, plied between the harbours in the Ægæan and in the Black Sea, and brought profit to their owners in spite of the imposition of burdens from which not only many of the Mussulman subjects of the Sultan, but foreign nations protected by commercial treaties, were free. It was at this epoch, after Venice had lost its commercial supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean, that Russia began to exercise a direct influence upon the fortunes of Greece. The Empress Catherine had formed the design of conquering Constantinople, and intended, under the title of Protectress of the Christian Church, to use the Greeks as her allies. In the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey in 1768, a Russian expeditionary force landed in the Morea, and the Greeks were persuaded to take up arms. The Moreotes themselves paid dearly for the trust which they had placed in the orthodox Empress. They were virtually abandoned to the vengeance of their oppressors; but to Greece at large the conditions on which peace was made proved of immense benefit. The Treaty of Kainardji, signed in 1774, gave Russia the express right to make representations at Constantinople on behalf of the Christian inhabitants of the Danubian provinces; it also bound the Sultan to observe certain conditions in his treatment of the Greek islanders. Out of these clauses, Russian diplomacy constructed a general right of interference on behalf of any Christian subjects of the Porte. The Treaty also opened the Black Sea to Russian ships of commerce, and conferred upon Russia the commercial privileges of the most favoured nation. [357] The result of this compact was a very remarkable one. The Russian Government permitted hundreds of Greek shipowners to hoist its own flag, and so changed the footing of Greek merchantmen in every port of the Ottoman Empire. The burdens which had placed the Greek trader at a disadvantage, when compared with the Mohammedan, vanished. A host of Russian consular agents, often Greeks themselves, was scattered over the Levant. Eager for opportunities of attaching the Greeks to their Russian patrons, quick to make their newly-won power felt by the Turks, these men extracted a definite meaning from the clauses of the Treaty of Kainardji, by which the Porte had bound itself to observe the rights of its Christian subjects. The sense of security in the course of their business, no less than the emancipation from commercial fetters, gave an immense impulse to Greek traders. Their ships were enlarged; voyages, hitherto limited to the Levant, were extended to England and even to America; and a considerable armament of cannon was placed on board each ship for defence against the attack of Algerian pirates.

[Foundation of Odessa, 1792.]

[Death of Rhegas, 1798.]

[Influence of the French Revolution on Greece.]

Before the end of the eighteenth century another war between Turkey and Russia, resulting in the cession of the district of Oczakoff on the northern shore of the Black Sea, made the Greeks both carriers and vendors of the corn-export of Southern Russia. The city of Odessa was founded on the ceded territory. The merchants who raised it to its sudden prosperity were not Russians but Greeks; and in the course of a single generation many a Greek trading-house, which had hitherto deemed the sum of £3,000 to be a large capital, rose to an opulence little behind that of the great London firms. Profiting by the neutrality of Turkey or its alliance with England during a great part of the revolutionary war, the Greeks succeeded to much of the Mediterranean trade that was lost by France and its dependencies. The increasing intelligence of the people was shown in the fact that foreigners were no longer employed by Greek merchants as their travelling agents in distant countries; there were countrymen enough of their own who could negotiate with an Englishman or a Dane in his own language. The richest Greeks were no doubt those of Odessa and Salonica, not of Hellas proper; but even the little islands of Hydra and Spetza, the refuge of the Moreotes whom Catherine had forsaken in 1770, now became communities of no small wealth and spirit. Psara, which was purely Greek, formed with these Albanian colonies the nucleus of an Ægæan naval Power. The Ottoman Government, cowed by its recent defeats, and perhaps glad to see the means of increasing its resources, made no attempt to check the growth of the Hellenic armed marine. Under the very eyes of the Sultan, the Hydriote and Psarian captains, men as venturesome as the sea-kings of ancient Greece, accumulated the artillery which was hereafter to hold its own against many an Ottoman man-of-war, and to sweep the Turkish merchantmen from the Ægæan. Eighteen years before the Greek insurrection broke out, Koraes, calling the attention of Western Europe to the progress made by his country, wrote the following significant words:--"If the Ottoman Government could have foreseen that the Greeks would create a merchant-navy, composed of several hundred vessels, most of them regularly armed, it would have crushed the movement at its commencement. It is impossible to calculate the effects which may result from the creation of this marine, or the influence which it may exert both upon the destiny of the oppressed nation and upon that of its oppressors." [358] Like its classic sisterland in the Mediterranean, Greece was stirred by the far-sounding voices of the French Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the revival of a supposed antique Republicanism, the victories of Hoche and Bonaparte, successively kindled the enthusiasm of a race already restless under the Turkish yoke. France drew to itself some of the hopes that had hitherto been fixed entirely upon Russia. Images and ideas of classic freedom invaded the domain where the Church had hitherto been all in all; the very sailors began to call their boats by the names of Spartan and Athenian heroes, as well as by those of saints and martyrs. In 1797 Venice fell, and Bonaparte seized its Greek possessions, the Ionian Islands. There was something of the forms of liberation in the establishment of French rule; the inhabitants of Zante were at least permitted to make a bonfire of the stately wigs worn by their Venetian masters. Great changes seemed to be near at hand. It was not yet understood that France fought for empire, not for justice; and the man who, above all others, represented the early spirit of the revolution among the Greeks, the poet Rhegas, looked to Bonaparte to give the signal for the rising of the whole of the Christian populations subject to Mohammedan rule. Rhegas, if he was not a wise politician, was a thoroughly brave man, and he was able to serve his country as a martyr. While engaged in Austria in conspiracies against the Sultan's Government, and probably in intrigues with Bernadotte, French ambassador at Vienna, he was arrested by the agents of Thugut, and handed over to the Turks. He was put to death at Belgrade, with five of his companions, in May, 1798. The songs of Rhegas soon passed through every household in Greece. They were a precious treasure to his countrymen, and they have immortalised his name as a patriot. But the work which he had begun languished for a time after his death. The series of events which followed Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt extinguished the hope of the liberation of Greece by the French Republic. Among the higher Greek clergy the alliance with the godless followers of Voltaire was seen with no favourable eye. The Porte was even able to find a Christian Patriarch to set his name to a pastoral, warning the faithful against the sin of rebellion, and reminding them that, while Satan was creating the Lutherans and Calvinists, the infinite mercy of God had raised up the Ottoman Power in order that the Orthodox Church might be preserved pure from the heresies of the West. [359]

[The Ionian Islands. 1798-1815.]

[Ali Pasha, 1798-1821.]

From the year 1798 down to the Peace of Paris, Greece was more affected by the vicissitudes of the Ionian Islands and by the growth of dominion of Ali Pasha in Albania than by the earlier revolutionary ideas. France was deprived of its spoils by the combined Turkish and Russian fleets in the coalition of 1799, and the Ionian Islands were made into a Republic under the protection of the Czar and the Sultan. It was in the native administration of Corfu that the career of Capodistrias began. At the peace of Tilsit the Czar gave these islands back to Napoleon, and Capodistrias, whose ability had gained general attention, accepted an invitation to enter the Russian service. The islands were then successively beleaguered and conquered by the English, with the exception of Corfu; and after the fall of Napoleon they became a British dependency. Thus the three greatest Powers of Europe were during the first years of this century in constant rivalry on the east of the Adriatic, and a host of Greeks, some fugitives, some adventurers, found employment among their armed forces. The most famous chieftain in the war of liberation, Theodore Kolokotrones, a Klepht of the Morea, was for some years major of a Greek regiment in the pay of England. In the meantime Ali Pasha, on the neighbouring mainland, neither rested himself nor allowed any of his neighbours to rest. The Suliotes, vanquished after years of heroic defence, migrated in a body to the Ionian Islands in 1804. Every Klepht and Armatole of the Epirote border had fought at some time either for Ali or against him; for in the extension of his violent and crafty rule Ali was a friend to-day and an enemy to-morrow alike to Greek, Turk, and Albanian. When his power was at its height, Ali's court at Janina was as much Greek as it was Mohammedan: soldiers, merchants, professors, all, as it was said, with a longer or a shorter rope round their necks, played their part in the society of the Epirote capital. [360] Among the officers of Ali's army there were some who were soon to be the military rivals of Kolokotrones in the Greek insurrection: Ali's physician, Dr. Kolettes, was gaining an experience and an influence among these men which afterwards placed him at the head of the Government. For good or for evil, it was felt that the establishment of a virtually independent kingdom of Albania must deeply affect the fate of Greece; and when at length Ali openly defied the Sultan, and Turkish armies closed round his castle at Janina, the conflict between the Porte and its most powerful vassal gave the Greeks the signal to strike for their own independence.

[The Hetæria Philike.]

The secret society, which under the name of Hetæria Philike, or association of friends, inaugurated the rebellion of Greece, was founded in 1814, after it had become clear that the Congress of Vienna would take no steps on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte. The founders of this society were traders of Odessa, and its earliest members seem to have been drawn more from the Greeks in Russia and in the Danubian provinces than from those of Greece Proper. The object of the conspiracy was the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, and the re-establishment of a Greek Eastern Empire. It was pretended by the council of directors that the Emperor Alexander had secretly joined them; and the ingenious fiction was circulated that a society for the preservation of Greek antiquities, for which Capodistrias had gained the patronage of the Czar and other eminent men at the Congress of Vienna, was in fact this political association in disguise. The real chiefs of the conspiracy always spoke of themselves as acting under the instructions of a nameless superior power. They were as little troubled by scruple in thus deceiving their followers as they were in planning a general massacre of the Turks, and in murdering their own agents when they wished to have them out of the way. The ultimate design of the Hetæria was an unsound one, and its operations were based upon an imposture; but in exciting the Greeks against Turkish rule, and in inspiring confidence in its own resources and authority, it was completely successful. In the course of six years every Greek of note, both in Greece itself and in the adjacent countries, had joined the association. The Turkish Government had received warnings of the danger which threatened it, but disregarded them until revolt was on the point of breaking out. The very improvement in the condition of the Christians, the absence of any crying oppression or outrage in Greece during late years, probably lulled the anxieties of Sultan Mahmud, who, terrible as he afterwards proved himself, had not hitherto been without sympathy for the Rayah. But the history of France, no less than the history of Greece, shows that it is not the excess, but the sense, of wrong that produces revolution. A people may be so crushed by oppression as to suffer all conceivable misery with patience. It is when the pulse has again begun to beat strong, when the eye is fixed no longer on the ground, and the knowledge of good and evil again burns in the heart, that the right and the duty of resistance is felt.

[Capodistrias and Hypsilanti.]

Early in 1820 the ferment in Greece had become so general that the chiefs of the Hetæria were compelled to seek at St. Petersburg for the Russian leader who had as yet existed only in their imagination. There was no dispute as to the person to whom the task of restoring the Eastern Empire rightfully belonged. Capodistrias, at once a Greek and Foreign Minister of Russia, stood in the front rank of European statesmen; he was known to love the Greek cause; he was believed to possess the strong personal affection of the Emperor Alexander. The deputies of the Hetæria besought him to place himself at its head. Capodistrias, however, knew better than any other man the force of those influences which would dissuade the Czar from assisting Greece. He had himself published a pamphlet in the preceding year recommending his countrymen to take no rash step; and, apart from all personal considerations, he probably believed that he could serve Greece better as Minister of Russia than by connecting himself with any dangerous enterprise. He rejected the offers of the Hetærists, who then turned to a soldier of some distinction in the Russian army, Prince Alexander Hypsilanti, a Greek exile, whose grandfather, after governing Wallachia as Hospodar, had been put to death by the Turks for complicity with the designs of Rhegas. It is said that Capodistrias encouraged Hypsilanti to attempt the task which he had himself declined, and that he allowed him to believe that if Greece once rose in arms the assistance of Russia could not long be withheld. [361] Hypsilanti, sacrificing his hopes of the recovery of a great private fortune through the intercession of the Czar at Constantinople, placed himself at the head of the Hetæria, and entered upon a career, for which, with the exception of personal courage proved in the campaigns against Napoleon, he seems to have possessed no single qualification.

[The Herærist plan.]

In October, 1820, the leading Hetærists met in council at Ismail to decide whether the insurrection against the Turk should begin in Greece itself or in the Danubian provinces. Most of the Greek officers in the service of Sutsos, the Hospodar of Moldavia, were ready to join the revolt. With the exception of a few companies serving as police, there were no Turkish soldiers north of the Danube, the Sultan having bound himself by the Treaty of Bucharest to send no troops into the Principalities without the Czar's consent. It does not appear that the Hetærists had yet formed any calculation as to the probable action of the Roumanian people: they had certainly no reason to believe that this race bore good-will to the Greeks, or that it would make any effort to place a Greek upon the Sultan's throne. The conspirators at Ismail were so far on the right track that they decided that the outbreak should begin, not on the Danube, but in Peloponnesus. Hypsilanti, however, full of the belief that Russia would support him, reversed this conclusion, and determined to raise his standard in Moldavia. [362] And now for the first time some account was taken of the Roumanian population. It was known that the mass of the people groaned under the feudal oppression of the Boyards, or landowners, and that the Boyards themselves detested the government of the Greek Hospodars. A plan found favour among Hypsilanti's advisers that the Wallachian peasantry should first be called to arms by a native leader for the redress of their own grievances, and that the Greeks should then step in and take control of the insurrectionary movement. Theodor Wladimiresco, a Roumanian who had served in the Russian army, was ready to raise the standard of revolt among his countrymen. It did not occur to the Hetærists that Wladimiresco might have a purpose of his own, or that the Roumanian population might prefer to see the Greek adventure fail. No sovereign by divine right had a firmer belief in his prerogative within his own dominions than Hypsilanti in his power to command or outwit Roumanians, Slavs, and all other Christian subjects of the Sultan.

[Hypsilanti in Roumania March, 1821.]

The feint of a native rising was planned and executed. In February, 1821, while Hypsilanti waited on the Russian frontier, Wladimiresco proclaimed the abolition of feudal services, and marched with a horde of peasants upon Bucharest. On the 16th of March the Hetærists began their own insurrection by a deed of blood that disgraced the Christian cause. Karavias, a conspirator commanding the Greek troops of the Hospodar at Galatz, let loose his soldiers and murdered every Turk who could be hunted down. Hypsilanti crossed the Pruth next day, and appeared at Jassy with a few hundred followers. A proclamation was published in which the Prince called upon all Christian subjects of the Porte to rise, and declared that a great European Power, meaning Russia, supported him in his enterprise. Sutsos, the Hospodar, at once handed over all the apparatus of government, and supplied the insurgents with a large sum of money. Two thousand armed men, some of them regular troops, gathered round Hypsilanti at Jassy. The roads to the Danube lay open before him; the resources of Moldavia were at his disposal; and had he at once thrown a force into Galatz and Ibraila, he might perhaps have made it difficult for Turkish troops to gain a footing on the north of the Danube.

[The Czar disavows the movement.]

But the incapacity of the leader became evident from the moment when he began his enterprise. He loitered for a week at Jassy, holding court and conferring titles, and then, setting out for Bucharest, wasted three weeks more upon the road. In the meantime the news of the insurrection, and of the fraudulent use that had been made of his own name, reached the Czar, who was now engaged at the Congress of Laibach. Alexander was at this moment abandoning himself heart and soul to Metternich's reactionary influence, and ordering his generals to make ready a hundred thousand men to put down the revolution in Piedmont. He received with dismay a letter from Hypsilanti invoking his aid in a rising which was first described in the phrases of the Holy Alliance as the result of a divine inspiration, and then exhibited as a master-work of secret societies and widespread conspiracy. A stern answer was sent back. Hypsilanti was dismissed from the Russian service; he was ordered to lay down his arms, and a manifesto was published by the Russian Consul at Jassy declaring that the Czar repudiated and condemned the enterprise with which his name had been connected. The Patriarch of Constantinople, helpless in the presence of Sultan Mahmud, now issued a ban of excommunication against the leader and all his followers. Some weeks later the Congress of Laibach officially branded the Greek revolt as a work of the same anarchical spirit which had produced the revolutions of Italy and Spain. [363]

[The enterprise fails.]

The disavowal of the Hetærist enterprise by the Czar was fatal to its success. Hypsilanti, indeed, put on a bold countenance and pretended that the public utterances of the Russian Court were a mere blind, and in contradiction to the private instructions given him by the Czar; but no one believed him. The Roumanians, when they knew that aid was not coming from Russia, held aloof, or treated insurgents as enemies. Turkish troops crossed the Danube, and Hypsilanti fell back from Bucharest towards the Austrian frontier. Wladimiresco followed him, not however to assist him in his struggle, but to cut off his retreat and to betray him to the enemy. It was in vain that the bravest of Hypsilanti's followers, Georgakis, a Greek from Olympus, sought the Wallachian at his own headquarters, exposed his treason to the Hetærist officers who surrounded him, and carried him, a doomed man, to the Greek camp. Wladimiresco's death was soon avenged. The Turks advanced. Hypsilanti was defeated in a series of encounters, and fled ignobly from his followers, to seek a refuge, and to find a prison, in Austria. Bands of his soldiers, forsaken by their leader, sold their lives dearly in a hopeless struggle. At Skuleni, on the Pruth, a troop of four hundred men refused to cross to Russian soil until they had given battle to the enemy. Standing at bay, they met the onslaught of ten times their number of pursuers. Georgakis, who had sworn that he would never fall alive into the enemy's hands, kept his word. Surrounded by Turkish troops in the tower of a monastery, he threw open the doors for those of his comrades who could to escape, and then setting fire to a chest of powder, perished in the explosion, together with his assailants.

[Revolt of Morea, April 2, 1891.]