Chapter XV (4)

The spirits of the Turks and of their European friends were raised by the unexpected failure of the Czar's arms. Metternich resumed his efforts to form a coalition, and tempted French Ministers with the prospect of recovering the Rhenish provinces, but in vain. The Sultan began negotiations, but broke them off when he found that the events of the campaign had made no difference in the enemy's tone. The prestige of Russia was in fact at stake, and Nicholas would probably have faced a war with Austria and Turkey combined rather than have made peace without restoring the much-diminished reputation of his troops. The winter was therefore spent in bringing up distant reserves. Wittgenstein was removed from his command; the Czar withdrew from military operations in which he had done nothing but mischief; and Diebitsch, a Prussian by birth and training, was placed at the head of the army, untrammelled by the sovereign presence or counsels which had hampered his predecessor. The intention of the new commander was to cross the Balkans as soon as Silistria should have fallen, without waiting for the capture of Shumla. In pursuance of this design the fleet was despatched early in the spring of 1829 to seize a port beyond the mountain-range. Diebitsch then placed a corps in front of Silistria, and made his preparations for the southward march; but before any progress had been made in the siege the Turks themselves took the field. Reschid Pasha, now Grand Vizier, moved eastwards from Shumla at the beginning of May against the weak Russian contingent that still lay in winter quarters between that place and Varna. The superiority of his force promised him an easy victory; but after winning some unimportant successes, and advancing to a considerable distance from his stronghold, he allowed himself to be held at bay until Diebitsch, with the army of the Danube, was ready to fall upon his rear. The errors of the Turks had given to the Russian commander, who hastened across Bulgaria on hearing of his colleague's peril, the choice of destroying their army, or of seizing Shumla by a _coup-de-main_. Diebitsch determined upon attacking his enemy in the open field, and on the 10th of June Reschid's army, attempting to regain the roads to Shumla, was put to total rout at Kulewtscha. A fortnight later Silistria surrendered, and Diebitsch, reinforced by the troops that had besieged that fortress, was now able to commence his march across the Balkans.

[Crossing of the Balkans, July, 1829.]

Rumour magnified into hundreds of thousands the scanty columns which for the first time carried the Russian flag over the Balkan range. Resistance everywhere collapsed. The mountains were crossed without difficulty, and on the 19th of August the invaders appeared before Adrianople, which immediately surrendered. Putting on the boldest countenance in order to conceal his real weakness, Diebitsch now struck out right and left, and sent detachments both to the Euxine and the Ægæan coast. The fleet co-operated with him, and the ports of the Black Sea, almost as far south as the Bosphorus, fell into the invaders' hands. The centre of the army began to march upon Constantinople. If the Sultan had known the real numbers of the force which threatened his capital, a force not exceeding twenty thousand men, he would probably have recognised that his assailant's position was a more dangerous one than his own. Diebitsch had advanced into the heart of the enemy's country with a mere handful of men. Sickness was daily thinning his ranks; his troops were dispersed over a wide area from sea to sea; and the warlike tribes of Albania threatened to fall upon his communications from the west. For a moment the Sultan spoke of fighting upon the walls of Constantinople; but the fear of rebellion within his own capital, the discovery of conspiracies, and the disasters sustained by his arms in Asia, where Kars and Erzeroum had fallen into the enemy's hands, soon led him to make overtures of peace and to accept the moderate terms which the Russian Government, aware of its own difficulties, was willing to grant. It would have been folly for the Czar to stimulate the growing suspicion of England and to court the attack of Austria by prolonging hostilities; and although King Charles X. and the French Cabinet, reverting to the ideas of Tilsit, proposed a partition of the Ottoman Empire, and a general re-arrangement of the map of Europe which would have given Belgium and the Palatinate to France, the plan was originated too late to produce any effect. [379] Russia had everything to lose and nothing to gain by a European war. It had reduced Turkey to submission, and might fairly hope to maintain its ascendency at Constantinople during coming years without making any of those great territorial changes which would have given its rivals a pretext for intervening on the Sultan's behalf. Under the guise of a generous forbearance the Czar extricated himself from a dangerous position with credit and advantage. As much had been won as could be maintained without hazard; and on the 14th of September peace was concluded in Adrianople.

[Treaty of Adrianople, Sept. 14, 1829.]

The Treaty of Adrianople gave Russia a slight increase of territory in Asia, incorporating with the Czar's dominions the ports of Anapa and Poti on the eastern coast of the Black Sea; but its most important provisions were those which confirmed and extended the Protectorate exercised by the Czar over the Danubian Principalities, and guaranteed the commercial rights of Russian subjects throughout the Ottoman Empire both by land and sea. In order more effectively to exclude the Sultan's influence from Wallachia and Moldavia, the office of Hospodar, hitherto tenable for seven years, was now made an appointment for life, and the Sultan specifically engaged to permit no interference on the part of his neighbouring Pashas with the affairs of these provinces. No fortified point was to be retained by the Turks on the left bank of the Danube; no Mussulman was to be permitted to reside within the Principalities; and those possessing landed estates there were to sell them within eighteen months. The Porte pledged itself never again to detain Russian ships of commerce coming from the Black Sea, and acknowledged that such an act would amount to an infraction of treaties justifying Russia in having recourse to reprisals. The Straits of Constantinople and the Dardanelles were declared free and open to the merchant ships of all Powers at peace with the Porte, upon the same conditions which were stipulated for vessels under the Russian flag. The same freedom of trade and navigation was recognised within the Black Sea. All treaties and conventions hitherto concluded between Turkey and Russia were recognised as in force, except in so far as modified by the present agreement. The Porte further gave its adhesion to the Treaty of London relating to Greece, and to an Act entered into by the Allied Powers in March, 1829, for regulating the Greek frontier. An indemnity in money was declared to be owing to Russia; and as the amount of this remained to be fixed by mutual agreement, the means were still left open to the Russian Government for exercising a gentle pressure at Constantinople, or for rewarding the compliance of the conquered. [380]

[Capodistrias elected President of Greece, April, 1827.]

The war between Turkey and Russia, while it left the European frontier between the belligerents unchanged, exercised a two-fold influence upon the settlement of Greece. On the one hand, by exciting the fears and suspicions of Great Britain, it caused the Government of our own country, under the Duke of Wellington, to insist on the limitation of the Greek State to the narrowest possible area; [381] on the other hand, by reducing Turkey itself almost to the condition of a Russian dependency, it led to the abandonment of the desire to maintain the Sultan's supremacy in any form over the emancipated provinces, and resulted in the establishment of an absolutely independent Hellenic kingdom. An important change had taken place within Greece itself just at the time when the allied Powers determined upon intervention. The parts of the local leaders were played out, and in April, 1827, Capodistrias, ex-Minister of Russia, was elected President for seven years. Capodistrias accepted the call. He was then, as he had been throughout the insurrection, at a distance from Greece; and before making his way thither, he visited the principal Courts of Europe, with the view of ascertaining what moral or financial support he should be likely to receive from them. His interview with the Czar Nicholas led to a clear statement by that sovereign of the conditions which he expected Capodistrias, in return for Russia's continued friendship, to fulfil. Greece was to be rescued from revolution: in other words, personal was to be substituted for popular government. The State was to remain tributary to the Sultan: that is, in both Greece and Turkey the door was to be kept open for Russia's interference. Whether Capodistrias had any intention of fulfilling the latter condition is doubtful. His love for Greece and his own personal ambition prevented his regard for Russia, strong though this might be, from making him the mere instrument of the Court of St. Petersburg; and while outwardly acquiescing in the Czar's decision that Greece should remain a tributary State, he probably resolved from the first to aim at establishing its complete independence. With regard to the Czar's demand that the system of local self-government should be superseded within Greece itself by one of autocratic rule, Capodistrias was in harmony with his patron. He had been the Minister of a centralised despotism himself. His experience was wholly that of the official of an absolute sovereign; and although Capodistrias had represented the more liberal tendencies of the Russian Court when it was a question of arguing against Metternich about the complete or the partial restoration of despotic rule in Italy, he had no real acquaintance and no real sympathy with the action of free institutions, and moved in the same circle of ideas as the autocratic reformers of the eighteenth century, of whom Joseph II. was the type. [382]

[The Protocols of Nov., 1828, and March, 1829.]

The Turks were still masters of the Morea when Capodistrias reached Greece. The battle of Navarino had not caused Ibrahim to relax his hold upon the fortresses, and it was deemed necessary by the Allies to send a French army-corps to dislodge him from his position. This expeditionary force, under General Maison, landed in Greece in the summer of 1828, and Ibrahim, not wishing to fight to the bitter end, contented himself with burning Tripolitza to the ground and sowing it with salt, and then withdrew. The war between Turkey and Russia had now begun. Capodistrias assisted the Russian fleet in blockading the Dardanelles, and thereby gained for himself the marked ill-will of the British Government. At a conference held in London by the representatives of France, England, and Russia, in November, 1828, it was resolved that the operations of the Allies should be limited to the Morea and the islands. Capodistrias, in consequence of this decision, took the most vigorous measures for continuing the war against Turkey. What the allies refused to guarantee must be won by force of arms; and during the winter of 1829, while Russia pressed upon Turkey from the Danube, Capodistrias succeeded in reconquering Missolonghi and the whole tract of country immediately to the north of the Gulf of Corinth. The Porte, in prolonging its resistance after the November conference, played as usual into its enemy's hands. The negotiations at London were resumed in a spirit somewhat more favourable to Greece, and a Protocol was signed on the 22nd of March, 1829, extending the northern frontier of Greece up to a line drawn from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo. Greece, according to this Protocol, was still to remain under the Sultan's suzerainty: its ruler was to be a hereditary prince belonging to one of the reigning European families, but not to any of the three allied Courts. [383]

[Leopold accepts the Greek Crown, Feb., 1830.]

The mediation of Great Britain was now offered to the Porte upon the terms thus laid down, and for the fourteenth time its mediation was rejected. But the end was near at hand. Diebitsch crossed the Balkans, and it was in vain that the Sultan then proposed the terms which he had scouted in November. The Treaty of Adrianople enforced the decisions of the March Protocol. Greece escaped from a limitation of its frontier, which would have left both Athens and Missolonghi Turkish territory. The principle of the admission of the provinces north of the Gulf of Corinth within the Hellenic State was established, and nothing remained for the friends of the Porte but to cut down to the narrowest possible area the district which had been loosely indicated in the London Protocol. While Russia, satisfied with its own successes against the Ottoman Empire and anxious to play the part of patron of the conquered, ceased to interest itself in Greece, the Government of Great Britain contested every inch of territory proposed to be ceded to the new State, and finally induced the Powers to agree upon a boundary-line which did not even in letter fulfil the conditions of the treaty. Northern Acarnania and part of Ætolia were severed from Greece, and the frontier was drawn from the mouth of the river Achelous to a spot near Thermopylae. On the other hand, as Russian influence now appeared to be firmly established and likely to remain paramount at Constantinople, the Western Powers had no motive to maintain the Sultan's supremacy over Greece. This was accordingly by common consent abandoned; and the Hellenic Kingdom, confined within miserably narrow limits on the mainland, and including neither Crete nor Samos among its islands, was ultimately offered in full sovereignty to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of Charlotte, daughter of George IV. After some negotiations, in which Leopold vainly asked for a better frontier, he accepted the Greek crown on the 11th of February, 1830.

[Government of Capodistrias.]

In the meantime, Capodistrias was struggling hard to govern and to organise according to his own conceptions a land in which every element of anarchy, ruin, and confusion appeared to be arrayed against the restoration of civilised life. The country was devastated, depopulated, and in some places utterly barbarised. Out of a population of little more than a million, it was reckoned that three hundred thousand had perished during the conflict with the Turk. The whole fabric of political and social order had to be erected anew; and, difficult as this task would have been for the wisest ruler, it was rendered much more difficult by the conflict between Capodistrias' own ideal and the character of the people among whom he had to work. Communal or local self-government lay at the very root of Greek nationality. In many different forms this intense provincialism had maintained itself unimpaired up to the end of the war, in spite of national assemblies and national armaments. The Hydriote ship-owners, the Primates of the Morea, the guerilla leaders of the north, had each a type of life and a body of institutions as distinct as the dialects which they spoke or the saints whom they cherished in their local sanctuaries. If antagonistic in some respects to national unity, this vigorous local life had nevertheless been a source of national energy while Greece had still its independence to win; and now that national independence was won, it might well have been made the basis of a popular and effective system of self-government. But to Capodistrias, as to greater men of that age, the unity of the State meant the uniformity of all its parts; and, shutting his eyes to all the obstacles in his path, he set himself to create an administrative system as rigorously centralised as that which France had received from Napoleon. Conscious of his own intellectual superiority over his countrymen, conscious of his own integrity and of the sacrifice of all his personal wealth in his country's service, he put no measure on his expressions of scorn for the freebooters and peculators whom he believed to make up the Greek official world, and he both acted and spoke as if, in the literal sense of the words, all who ever came before him were thieves and robbers. The peasants of the mainland, who had suffered scarcely less from Klephts and Primates than from Turks, welcomed Capodistrias' levelling despotism, and to the end his name was popular among them; but among the classes which had supplied the leaders in the long struggle for independence, and especially among the ship-owners of the Archipelago, who felt the contempt expressed by Capodistrias for their seven years' efforts to be grossly unjust, a spirit of opposition arose which soon made it evident that Capodistrias would need better instruments than those which he had around him to carry out his task of remodelling Greece.

[Leopold renounces the crown, May, 1830.]

It was in the midst of this growing antagonism that the news reached Capodistrias that Leopold of Saxe-Coburg had been appointed King of Greece. The resolution made by the Powers in March, 1829, that the sovereign of Greece should belong to some reigning house, had perhaps not wholly destroyed the hopes of Capodistrias that he might become Prince or Hospodar of Greece himself. There were difficulties in the way of filling the throne, and these difficulties, after the appointment of Leopold, Capodistrias certainly did not seek to lessen. His subtlety, his command of the indirect methods of effecting a purpose, were so great and so habitual to him that there was little chance of his taking any overt step for preventing Leopold's accession to the crown; there appears, however, to be evidence that he repressed the indications of assent which the Greeks attempted to offer to Leopold; and a series of letters written by him to that prince was probably intended, though in the most guarded language, to give Leopold the impression that the task which awaited him was a hopeless one. Leopold himself, at the very time when he accepted the crown, was wavering in his purpose. He saw with perfect clearness that the territory granted to the Greek State was too small to secure either its peace or its independence. The severance of Acarnania and Northern Ætolia meant the abandonment of the most energetic part of the Greek inland population, and a probable state of incessant warfare upon the northern frontier; the relinquishment of Crete meant that Greece, bankrupt as it was, must maintain a navy to protect the south coast of the Morea from Turkish attack. These considerations had been urged upon the Powers by Leopold before he accepted the crown, and he had been induced for the moment to withdraw them. But he had never fully acquiesced in the arrangements imposed upon him: he remained irresolute for some months; and at last, whether led to this decision by the letters of Capodistrias or by some other influences, he declared the conditions under which he was called upon to rule Greece to be intolerable, and renounced the crown (May, 1830). [384]

[Government and death of Capodistrias.]

Capodistrias thus found himself delivered from his rival, and again face to face with the task to which duty or ambition called him. The candidature of Leopold had embittered the relations between Capodistrias and all who confronted him in Greece, for it gave him the means of measuring their hostility to himself by the fervour of their addresses to this unknown foreigner. A dark shadow fell over his government. As difficulties thickened and resistance grew everywhere more determined, the President showed himself harsher and less scrupulous in the choice of his means. The men about him were untrustworthy; to crush them, he filled the offices of government with relatives and creatures of his own who were at once tyrannous and incapable. Thwarted and checked, he met opposition by imprisonment and measures of violence, suspended the law-courts, and introduced the espionage and the police-system of St. Petersburg. At length armed rebellion broke out, and while Miaoulis, the Hydriote admiral, blew up the best ships of the Greek navy to prevent them falling into the President's hands, the wild district of Maina, which had never admitted the Turkish tax-gatherer, refused to pay taxes to the Hellenic State. The revolt was summarily quelled by Capodistrias, and several members of the family of Mauromichalis, including the chief Petrobei, formerly feudal ruler of Maina, were arrested. Some personal insult, imaginary or real, was moreover offered by Capodistrias to this fallen foe, after the aged mother of Petrobei, who had lost sixty-four kinsmen in the war against the Turks, had begged for his release. The vendetta of the Maina was aroused. A son and a nephew of Petrobei laid wait for the President, and as he entered the Church of St. Spiridion at Nauplia on the 9th of October, 1831, a pistol-shot and a blow from a yataghan laid him dead on the ground. He had been warned that his life was sought, but had refused to make any change in his habits, or to allow himself to be attended by a guard.

[Otho King of Greece, Feb. 1, 1833.]

The death of Capodistrias excited sympathies and regrets which to a great extent silenced criticism upon his government, and which have made his name one of those most honoured by the Greek nation. His fall threw the country into anarchy. An attempt was made by his brother Augustine to retain autocratic power, but the result was universal dissension and the interference of the foreigner. At length the Powers united in finding a second sovereign for Greece, and brought the weary scene of disorder to a close. Prince Otho of Bavaria was sent to reign at Athens, and with him there came a group of Bavarian officials to whom the Courts of Europe persuaded themselves that the future of Greece might be safely entrusted. A frontier somewhat better than that which had been offered to Leopold was granted to the new sovereign, but neither Crete, Thessaly, nor Epirus was included within his kingdom. Thus hemmed in within intolerably narrow limits, while burdened with the expenses of an independent state, alike unable to meet the calls upon its national exchequer and to exclude the intrigues of foreign Courts, Greece offered during the next generation little that justified the hopes that had been raised as to its future. But the belief of mankind in the invigorating power of national independence is not wholly vain, nor, even under the most hostile conditions, will the efforts of a liberated people fail to attract the hope and the envy of those branches of its race which still remain in subjection. Poor and inglorious as the Greek kingdom was, it excited the restless longings not only of Greeks under Turkish bondage, but of the prosperous Ionian Islands under English rule; and in 1864 the first step in the expansion of the Hellenic kingdom was accomplished by the transfer of these islands from Great Britain to Greece. Our own day has seen Greece further strengthened and enriched by the annexation of Thessaly. The commercial and educational development of the kingdom is now as vigorous as that of any State in Europe: in agriculture and in manufacturing industry it still lingers far behind. Following the example of Cavour and the Sardinian statesmen who judged no cost too great in preparing for Italian union, the rulers of Greece burden the national finances with the support of an army and navy excessive in comparison both with the resources and with the present requirements of the State. To the ideal of a great political future the material progress of the land has been largely sacrificed. Whether, in the re-adjustment of frontiers which must follow upon the gradual extrusion of the Turk from Eastern Europe, Greece will gain from its expenditure advantages proportionate to the undoubted evils which it has involved, the future alone can decide.