army of Austria, fifty thousand strong, not only possessed an immense superiority in organisation and military spirit, but actually outnumbered the forces of the defence. At the first encounter, which took place at Rieti, in the Papal States, the Neapolitans were put to the rout. Their army melted away, as it had in Murat’s campaign in 1815. Nothing was heard among officers and men but accusations of treachery; not a single strong point was defended; and on the 24th of March the Austrians made their entry into Naples. Ferdinand, halting at Florence, sent on before him the worst instruments of his former despotism. It was indeed impossible for these men to renew, under Austrian protection, the scenes of reckless bloodshed which had followed the restoration of 1799; and a great number of compromised persons had already been provided with the means of escape. But the hand of vengeance was not easily stayed. Courts-martial and commissions of judges began in all parts of the kingdom to sentence to imprisonment and death. An attempted insurrection in Sicily and some desperate acts of rebellion in Southern Italy cost the principal actors their lives; and when an amnesty was at length proclaimed, an exception was made against those who were now called the deserters, and who were lately called the Sacred Band, of Nola, that is to say, the soldiers who had first risen for the Constitution. Morelli, who had received the Viceroy’s treacherous thanks for his conduct, was executed, along with one of his companions; the rest were sent in chains to labour among felons. Hundreds of persons were left lying, condemned or uncondemned, in prison; others, in spite of the amnesty, were driven from their native land; and that great, long-lasting stream of fugitives now began to pour into England, which, in the early memories of many who are not yet old, has associated the name of Italian with the image of an exile and a sufferer.
[Insurrection in Piedmont, March 10.]
There was a moment in the campaign of Austria against Naples when the invading army was threatened with the most serious danger. An insurrection broke out in Piedmont, and the troops of that country attempted to unite with the patriotic party of Lombardy in a movement which would have thrown all Northern Italy upon the rear of the Austrians. In the first excess of alarm, the Czar ordered a hundred thousand Russians to cross the Galician frontier, and to march in the direction of the Adriatic. It proved unnecessary, however, to continue this advance. The Piedmontese army was divided against itself; part proclaimed the Spanish Constitution, and, on the abdication of the King, called upon his cousin, the Regent, Charles Albert of Carignano, to march against the Austrians; part adhered to the rightful heir, the King’s brother, Charles Felix, who was absent at Modena, and who, with an honesty in strong contrast to the frauds of the Neapolitan Court, refused to temporise with rebels, or to make any compromise with the Constitution. The scruples of the Prince of Carignano, after he had gone some way with the military party of action, paralysed the movement of Northern Italy. Unsupported by Piedmontese troops, the conspirators of Milan failed to raise any open insurrection. Austrian soldiers thronged westwards from the Venetian fortresses, and entered Piedmont itself; the collapse of the Neapolitan army destroyed the hopes of the bravest patriots; and the only result of the Piedmontese movement was that the grasp of Austria closed more tightly on its subject provinces, while the martyrs of Italian freedom passed out of the sight of the world, out of the range of all human communication, buried for years to come in the silent, unvisited prison of the North. [329]
[The French Ultra Royalists urging attack on Spain.]
Thus the victory of absolutism was completed, and the law was laid down to Europe that a people seeking its liberties elsewhere than in the grace and spontaneous generosity of its legitimate sovereign became a fit object of attack for the armies of the three Great Powers. It will be seen in a later chapter how Metternich persuaded the Czar to include under the anathema issued by the Congress of Laibach (May, 1821) [330] the outbreak of the Greeks, which at this moment began, and how Lord Castlereagh supported the Austrian Minister in denying to these rebels against the Sultan all right or claim to the consideration of Europe. Spain was for the present left unmolested; but the military operations of 1821 prepared the way for a similar crusade against that country by occasioning the downfall of Richelieu’s Ministry, and throwing the government of France entirely into the hands of the Ultra-Royalists. All parties in the French Chamber, whether they condemned or approved the suppression of Neapolitan liberty, censured a policy which had kept France in inaction, and made Austria supreme in Italy. The Ultra-Royalists profited by the general discontent to overthrow the Minister whom they had promised to support (Dec., 1821); and from this time a war with Spain, conducted either by France alone or in combination with the three Eastern Powers, became the dearest hope of the rank and file of the dominant faction. Villèle, their nominal chief, remained what he had been before, a statesman among fanatics, and desired to maintain the attitude of observation as long as this should be possible. A body of troops had been stationed on the southern frontier in 1820 to prevent all intercourse with the Spanish districts afflicted with the yellow fever. This epidemic had passed away, but the number of the troops was now raised to a hundred thousand. It was, however, the hope of Villèle that hostilities might be averted unless the Spaniards should themselves provoke a combat, or, by resorting to extreme measures against King Ferdinand, should compel Louis XVIII. to intervene on behalf of his kinsman. The more violent section of the French Cabinet, represented by Montmorency, the Foreign Minister, called for an immediate march on Madrid, or proposed to delay operations only until France should secure the support of the other Continental Powers.
[Spain from 1820 to 1822.]
[Ferdinand plots with the Serviles against the Constitution.]
The condition of Spain in the year 1822 gave ample encouragement to those who longed to employ the arms of France in the royalist cause. The hopes of peaceful reform, which for the first few months after the revolution had been shared even by foreign politicians at Madrid, had long vanished. In the moment of popular victory Ferdinand had brought the leaders of the Cortes from their prisons and placed them in office. These men showed a dignified forgetfulness of the injuries which they had suffered. Misfortune had calmed their impetuosity, and taught them more of the real condition of the Spanish people. They entered upon their task with seriousness and good faith, and would have proved the best friends of constitutional monarchy if Ferdinand had had the least intention of co-operating with them loyally. But they found themselves encountered from the first by a double enemy. The clergy, who had overthrown the Constitution six years before, intrigued or openly declared against it as soon as it was revived; the more violent of the Liberals, with Riego at their head, abandoned themselves to extravagances like those of the club-orators of Paris in 1791, and did their best to make any peaceable administration impossible. After combating these anarchists, or Exaltados, with some success, the Ministry was forced to call in their aid, when, at the instigation of the Papal Nuncio, the King placed his veto upon a law dissolving most of the monasteries [331] (Oct., 1820). Ferdinand now openly combined with the enemies of the Constitution, and attempted to transfer the command of the army to one of his own agents. The plot failed; the Ministry sent the alarm over the whole country, and Ferdinand stood convicted before his people as a conspirator against the Constitution which he had sworn to defend. The agitation of the clubs, which the Ministry had hitherto suppressed, broke out anew. A storm of accusations assailed Ferdinand himself. He was compelled at the end of the year 1820 to banish from Madrid most of the persons who had been his confidants; and although his dethronement was not yet proposed, he had already become, far more than Louis XVI. of France under similar conditions, the recognised enemy of the revolution, and the suspected patron of every treason against the nation.
[The Ministry between the Exaltados and Serviles, 1821.]
[Attempted coup d’état, July 6, 1822.]
[Royalists revolt in the north.]
The attack of the despotic Courts on Naples in the spring of 1821 heightened the fury of parties in Spain, encouraging the Serviles, or Absolutists, in their plots, and forcing the Ministry to yield to the cry for more violent measures against the enemies of the Constitution. In the south of Spain the Exaltados gained possession of the principal military and civil commands, and openly refused obedience to the central administration when it attempted to interfere with their action Seville, Carthagena, and Cadiz acted as if they were independent Republics and even spoke of separation from Spain. Defied by its own subordinates in the provinces, and unable to look to the King for any sincere support, the moderate governing party lost all hold upon the nation. In the Cortes elected in 1822 the Exaltados formed the majority, and Riego was appointed President. Ferdinand now began to concert measures of action with the French Ultra-Royalists. The Serviles, led by priests, and supported by French money, broke into open rebellion in the north. When the session of the Cortes ended, the King attempted to overthrow his enemies by military force. Three battalions of the Royal Guard, which had been withdrawn from Madrid, received secret orders to march upon the capital (July 6, 1822), where Ferdinand was expected to place himself at their head. They were, however, met and defeated in the streets by other regiments, and Ferdinand, vainly attempting to dissociate himself from the action of his partisans, found his crown, if not his life, in peril. He wrote to Louis XVIII. that he was a prisoner. Though the French King gave nothing more than good counsel, the Ultra-Royalists in the French Cabinet and in the army now strained every nerve to accelerate a war between the two countries. The Spanish Absolutists seized the town of Seo d’Urgel, and there set up a provisional government. Civil war spread over the northern provinces. The Ministry, which was now formed of Riego’s friends, demanded and obtained from the Cortes dictatorial powers like those which the French Committee of Public Safety had wielded in 1793, but with far other result. Spain found no Danton, no Carnot, at this crisis, when the very highest powers of intellect and will would have been necessary to arouse and to arm a people far less disposed to fight for liberty than the French were in 1793. One man alone, General Mina, checked and overthrew the rebel leaders of the north with an activity superior to their own. The Government, boastful and violent in its measures, effected scarcely anything in the organisation of a national force, or in preparing the means of resistance against those foreign armies with whose attack the country was now plainly threatened.
[England and the Congress of 1822.]
When the Congress of Laibach broke up in the spring of 1821. its members determined to renew their meeting in the following year, in order to decide whether the Austrian army might then be withdrawn from Naples, and to discuss other questions affecting their common interests. The progress of the Greek insurrection and a growing strife between Russia and Turkey had since then thrown all Italian difficulties into the shade. The Eastern question stood in the front rank of European politics; next in importance came the affairs of Spain. It was certain that these, far more than the occupation of Naples, would supply the real business of the Congress of 1822. England had a far greater interest in both questions than in the Italian negotiations of the two previous years. It was felt that the system of abstention which England had then followed could be pursued no longer, and that the country must be represented not by some casual and wandering diplomatist, but by its leading Minister, Lord Castlereagh. The intentions of the other Powers in regard to Spain were matter of doubt; it was the fixed policy of Great Britain to leave the Spanish revolution in Europe to run its own course, and to persuade the other Powers to do the same. But the difficulties connected with Spain did not stop at the Spanish frontier. The South American colonies had now in great part secured their independence. They had developed a trade with Great Britain which made it impossible for this country to ignore their flag and the decisions of their law courts. The British navigation-laws had already been modified by Parliament in favour of their shipping; and although it was no business of the English Government to grant a formal title to communities which had made themselves free, the practical recognition of the American States by the appointment of diplomatic agents could in several cases not be justly delayed. Therefore, without interfering with any colonies which were still fighting or still negotiating with Spain, the British Minister proposed to inform the Allied cabinets of the intention of this country to accredit agents to some of the South American Republics, and to recommend to them the adoption of a similar policy.
[Death of Castlereagh, Aug. 12, 1822.]
Such was the tenour of the instructions which, a few weeks before his expected departure for the Continent, Castlereagh drew up for his own guidance, and submitted to the Cabinet and the King. [332] Had he lived to fulfil the mission with which he was charged, the recognition of the South American Republics, which adds so bright a ray to the fame of Canning, would probably have been the work of the man who, more than any other, is associated in popular belief with the traditions of a hated and outworn system of oppression. Two more years of life, two more years of change in the relations of England to the Continent, would have given Castlereagh a different figure in the history both of Greece and of America. No English statesman in modern times has been so severely judged. Circumstances, down to the close of his career, withheld from Castlereagh the opportunities which fell to his successor; ties from which others were free made it hard for him to accelerate the breach with the Allies of 1814. Antagonists showed Castlereagh no mercy, no justice. The man whom Byron disgraced himself by ridiculing after his death possessed in a rich measure the qualities which, in private life, attract esteem and love. His public life, if tainted in earlier days by the low political morality of the time, rose high above that of every Continental statesman of similar rank, with the single exception of Stein. The best testimony to his integrity is the irritation which it caused to Talleyrand. [333] If the consciousness of labour unflaggingly pursued in the public cause, and animated on the whole by a pure and earnest purpose, could have calmed the distress of a breaking mind, the decline of Castlereagh’s days might have been one of peace. His countrymen would have recognised that, if blind to the rights of nations, Castlereagh had set to foreign rulers the example of truth and good faith. But the burden of his life was too heavy to bear. Mists of despondency obscured the outlines of the real world, and struck chill into his heart. Death, self-invoked, brought relief to the over-wrought brain, and laid Castlereagh, with all his cares, in everlasting sleep.
[Canning Foreign Secretary. Wellington deputed to the Congress, Sept., 1822.]
[Congress of Verona, Oct., 1822.]
The vacant post was filled by Canning, by far the most gifted of the band of statesmen who had begun their public life in the school of Pitt. Wellington undertook to represent England at the Congress of 1822, which was now about to open at Vienna. His departure was, however, delayed for several weeks, and the preliminary meeting, at which it had been intended to transact all business not relating to Italy, was almost over before his arrival. Wellington accordingly travelled on to Verona, where Italian affairs were to be dealt with; and the Italian Conference, which the British Government had not intended to recognise, thus became the real Congress of 1822. Anxious as Lord Castlereagh had been on the question of foreign interference with Spain, he hardly understood the imminence of the danger. In passing through Paris, Wellington learnt for the first time that a French or European invasion of Spain would be the foremost object of discussion among the Powers; and on reaching Verona he made the unwelcome discovery that the Czar was bent upon sending a Russian army to take part, as the mandatary of Europe, in overthrowing the Spanish Constitution. Alexander’s desire was to obtain a joint declaration from the Congress like that which had been issued against Naples by the three Courts at Troppau, but one even more formidable, since France might be expected in the present case to give its concurrence, which had been withheld before. France indeed occupied, according to the absolutist theory of the day, the same position in regard to a Jacobin Spain as Austria in regard to a Jacobin Naples, and might perhaps claim to play the leading military part in the crusade of repression. But the work was likely to be a much more difficult one than that of 1821. The French troops, said the Czar, were not trustworthy; and there was a party in France which might take advantage of the war to proclaim the second Napoleon or the Republic. King Louis XVIII. could not therefore be allowed to grapple with Spain alone. It was necessary that the principal force employed by the alliance should be one whose loyalty and military qualities were above suspicion: the generals who had marched from Moscow to Paris were not likely to fail beyond the Pyrenees: and a campaign of the Russian army in Western Europe promised to relieve the Czar of some of the discontent of his soldiers, who had been turned back after entering Galicia in the previous year, and who had not been allowed to assist their fellow-believers in Greece in their struggle against the Sultan. [334]
[No joint declaration by made by the Congress against Spain.]
Wellington had ascertained, while in Paris, that King Louis XVIII. and Villèle were determined under no circumstances to give Russian troops a passage through France. His knowledge of this fact enabled him to speak with some confidence to Alexander. It was the earnest desire of the English Government to avert war, and its first object was therefore to prevent the Congress, as a body, from sending an ultimatum to Spain. If all the Powers united in a declaration like that of Troppau, war was inevitable; if France were left to settle its own disputes with its neighbour, English mediation might possibly preserve peace. The statement of Wellington, that England would rather sever itself from the great alliance than consent to a joint declaration against Spain, had no doubt its effect in preventing such a declaration being proposed; but a still weightier reason against it was the direct contradiction between the intentions of the French Government and those of the Czar. If the Czar was determined to be the soldier of Europe, while on the other hand King Louis absolutely denied him a passage through France, it was impossible that the Congress should threaten Spain with a collective attack. No great expenditure of diplomacy was therefore necessary to prevent the summary framing of a decree against Spain like that which had been framed against Naples two years before. In the first despatches which he sent back to England Wellington expressed his belief that the deliberations of the Powers would end in a decision to leave the Spaniards to themselves.
[Course of the negotiation against Spain.]
But the danger was only averted in appearance. The impulse to war was too strong among the French Ultra-Royalists for the Congress to keep silence on Spanish affairs. Villèle indeed still hoped for peace, and, unlike other members of his Cabinet, he desired that, if war should arise, France should maintain entire freedom of action, and enter upon the struggle as an independent Power, not as the instrument of the European concert. This did not prevent him, however, from desiring to ascertain what assistance would be forthcoming, if France should be hard pressed by its enemy. Instructions were given to the French envoys at Verona to sound the Allies on this question. [335] It was out of the inquiry so suggested that a negotiation sprang which virtually combined all Europe against Spain. The envoy Montmorency, acting in the spirit of the war party, demanded of all the Powers whether, in the event of France withdrawing its ambassador from Madrid, they would do the same, and whether, in case of war, France would receive their moral and material support. Wellington in his reply protested against the framing of hypothetical cases; the other envoys answered Montmorency’s questions in the affirmative. The next step was taken by Metternich, who urged that certain definite acts of the Spanish people or Government ought to be specified as rendering war obligatory on France and its allies, and also that, with a view of strengthening the Royalist party in Spain, notes ought to be presented by all the ambassadors at Madrid, demanding a change in the Constitution. This proposal was in its turn submitted to Wellington and rejected by him. It was accepted by the other plenipotentiaries, and the acts of the Spanish people were specified on which war should necessarily follow. These were, the commission of any act of violence against a member of the royal family, the deposition of the King, or an attempt to change the dynasty. A secret clause was added to the second part of the agreement, to the effect that if the Spanish Government made no satisfactory answer to the notes requiring a change in the Constitution, all the ambassadors should be immediately withdrawn. A draft of the notes to be presented was sketched; and Montmorency, who thought that he had probably gone too far in his stipulations, returned to Paris to submit the drafts to the King before handing them over to the ambassadors at Paris for transmission to Madrid.
[Villèle and Montmorency.]
[Speech of Louis XVIII., Jan. 27, 1823.]
It was with great dissatisfaction that Villèle saw how his colleague had committed France to the direction of the three Eastern Powers. There was no likelihood that the Spanish Government would make the least concession of the kind required, and in that case France stood pledged, if the action of Montmorency was ratified, to withdraw its ambassador from Madrid at once. Villèle accordingly addressed himself to the ambassadors at Paris, asking that the despatch of the notes might be postponed. No notice was taken of his request: the notes were despatched forthwith. Roused by this slight, Villèle appealed to the King not to submit to the dictation of foreign Courts. Louis XVIII. declared in his favour against all the rest of the Cabinet, and Montmorency had to retire from office. But the decision of the King meant that he disapproved of the negotiations of Verona as shackling the movements of France, not that he had freed himself from the influence of the war-party. Chateaubriand, the most reckless agitator for hostilities, was appointed Foreign Minister. The mediation of Great Britain was rejected; [336] and in his speech at the opening of the Chambers of 1823, King Louis himself virtually published the declaration of war.
[England in 1823.]
[French invasion of Spain, April, 1823.]
The ambassadors of the three Eastern Courts had already presented their notes at Madrid demanding a change in the Constitution; and, after receiving a high-spirited answer from the Ministers, they had quitted the country. Canning, while using every diplomatic effort to prevent an unjust war, had made it clear to the Spaniards that England could not render them armed assistance. The reasons against such an intervention were indeed overwhelming. Russia, Austria, and Prussia would have taken the field rather than have permitted the Spanish Constitution to triumph; and although, if leagued with Spain in a really national defence like that of 1808, Great Britain might perhaps have protected the Peninsula against all the Powers of Europe combined, it was far otherwise when the cause at stake was one to which a majority of the Spanish nation had shown itself to be indifferent, and against which the northern provinces had actually taken up arms. The Government and the Cortes were therefore left to defend themselves as best they could against their enemies. They displayed their weakness by enacting laws of extreme severity against deserters, and by retiring, along with the recalcitrant King, from Madrid to Seville. On the 7th of April the French troops, led by the Duke of Angoulême, crossed the frontier. The priests and a great part of the peasantry welcomed them as deliverers: the forces opposed to them fell back without striking a blow. As the invader advanced towards the capital, gangs of royalists, often led by monks, spread such terror and devastation over the northern provinces that the presence of foreign troops became the only safeguard for the peaceable inhabitants. [337] Madrid itself was threatened by the corps of a freebooter named Bessières. The commandant sent his surrender to the French while they were still at some distance, begging them to advance as quickly as possible in order to save the city from pillage. The message had scarcely been sent when Bessières and his bandits appeared in the suburbs. The governor drove them back, and kept the royalist mob within the city at bay for four days more. On the 23rd of May the advance-guard of the French army entered the capital.
[Angoulême and the Regency, and the ambassadors.]
It had been the desire of King Louis XVIII. and Angoulême to save Spain from the violence of royalist and priestly fanaticism. On reaching Madrid, Angoulême intended to appoint a provisional, government himself; he was, however, compelled by orders from Paris to leave the election in the hands of the Council of Castille, and a Regency came into power whose first acts showed in what spirit the victory of the French was to be used. Edicts were issued declaring all the acts of the Cortes affecting the monastic orders to be null and void, dismissing all officials appointed since March 7, 1820, and subjecting to examination those who, then being in office, had not resigned their posts. [338] The arrival of the ambassadors of the three Eastern Powers encouraged the Regency in their antagonism to the French commander. It was believed that the Cabinet of Paris was unwilling to restore King Ferdinand as an absolute monarch, and intended to obtain from him the grant of institutions resembling those of the French Charta. Any such limitation of absolute power was, however, an object of horror to the three despotic Courts. Their ambassadors formed themselves into a council with the express object of resisting the supposed policy of Angoulême. The Regency grew bolder, and gave the signal for general retribution upon the Liberals by publishing an order depriving all persons who had served in the voluntary militia since March, 1820, of their offices, pensions, and titles. The work inaugurated in the capital was carried much further in the provinces. The friends of the Constitution, and even soldiers who were protected by their capitulation with the French, were thrown into prison by the new local authorities. The violence of the reaction reached such a height that Angoulême, now on the march to Cadiz, was compelled to publish an ordinance forbidding arrests to be made without the consent of a French commanding officer, and ordering his generals to release the persons who had been arbitrarily imprisoned. The council of ambassadors, blind in their jealousy of France to the danger of an uncontrolled restoration, drew up a protest against his ordinance, and desired that the officers of the Regency should be left to work their will.
[The Cortes at Cadiz.]
[Ferdinand liberated, Oct. 1.]
After spending some weeks in idle debates at Seville, the Cortes had been compelled by the appearance of the French on the Sierra Morena to retire to Cadiz. As King Ferdinand refused to accompany them, he was declared temporarily insane, and forced to make the journey (June 12). Angoulême, following the French vanguard after a considerable interval, appeared before Cadiz in August, and sent a note to King Ferdinand, recommending him to publish an amnesty, and to promise the restoration of the mediæval Cortes. It was hoped that the terms suggested in this note might be accepted by the Government in Cadiz as a basis of peace, and so render an attack upon the city unnecessary. The Ministry, however, returned a defiant answer in the King’s name. The siege of Cadiz accordingly began in earnest. On the 30th of August the fort of the Trocadero was stormed; three weeks later the city was bombarded. In reply to all proposals for negotiation Angoulême stated that he could only treat when King Ferdinand was within his own lines. There was not the least hope of prolonging the defence of Cadiz with success, for the combat was dying out even in those few districts of Spain where the constitutional troops had fought with energy. Ferdinand himself pretended that he bore no grudge against his Ministers, and that the Liberals had nothing to fear from his release. On the 30th of September he signed, as if with great satisfaction, an absolute and universal amnesty. [339] On the following day he was conveyed with his family across the bay to Angoulême’s head-quarters.
[Violence of the Restoration.]
The war was over: the real results of the French invasion now came into sight. Ferdinand had not been twelve hours in the French camp when, surrounded by monks and royalist desperadoes, he published a proclamation invalidating every act of the constitutional Government of the last three years, on the ground that his sanction had been given under constraint. The same proclamation ratified the acts of the Regency of Madrid. As the Regency of Madrid had declared all persons concerned in the removal of the King to Cadiz to be liable to the penalties of high treason, Ferdinand had in fact ratified a sentence of death against several of the men from whom he had just parted in friendship. [340] Many of these victims of the King’s perfidy were sent into safety by the French. But Angoulême was powerless to influence Ferdinand’s policy and conduct. Don Saez, the King’s confessor, was made First Secretary of State. On the 4th of October an edict was issued banishing for ever from Madrid, and from the country fifty miles round it, every person who during the last three years had sat in the Cortes, or who had been a Minister, counsellor of State, judge, commander, official in any public office, magistrate, or officer in the so-called voluntary militia. It was ordered that throughout Spain a solemn service should be celebrated in expiation of the insults offered to the Holy Sacrament; that missions should be sent over the land to combat the pernicious and heretical doctrines associated with the late outbreak, and that the bishops should relegate to monasteries of the strictest observance the priests who had acted as the agents of an impious faction. [341] Thus the war of revenge was openly declared against the defeated party. It was in vain that Angoulême indignantly reproached the King, and that the ambassadors of the three Eastern Courts pressed him to draw up at least some kind of amnesty. Ferdinand travelled slowly towards Madrid, saying that he could take no such step until he reached the capital. On the 7th of November, Riego was hanged. Thousands of persons were thrown into prison, or compelled to fly from the country. Except where order was preserved by the French, life and property were at the mercy of royalist mobs and the priests who led them; and although the influence of the Russian statesman Pozzo di Borgo at length brought a respectable Ministry into office, this only roused the fury of the clerical party, and led to a cry for the deposition of the King, and for the elevation of his more fanatical brother, Don Carlos, to the throne. Military commissions were instituted at the beginning of 1824 for the trial of accused persons, and a pretended amnesty, published six months later, included in its fifteen classes of exception the participators in almost every act of the revolution. Ordinance followed upon ordinance, multiplying the acts punishable with death, and exterminating the literature which was believed to be the source of all religious and social heterodoxy. Every movement of life was watched by the police; every expression of political opinion was made high treason. Young men were shot for being freemasons; women were sent to prison for ten years for possessing a portrait of Riego. The relation of the restored Government to its subjects was in fact that which belonged to a state of civil war. Insurrections arose among the fanatics who were now taking the name of the Carlist or Apostolic party, as well as among a despairing remnant of the Constitutionalists. After a feeble outbreak of the latter at Tarifa, a hundred and twelve persons were put to death by the military commissions within eighteen days. [342] It was not until the summer of 1825 that the jurisdiction of these tribunals and the Reign of Terror ended.
[England prohibits the conquest of Spanish colonies by France or its allies.]
[England recognises the independence of the colonies. 1824-5.]
France had won a cheap and inglorious victory. The three Eastern Courts had seen their principle of absolutism triumph at the cost of everything that makes government morally better than anarchy. One consolation remained for those who felt that there was little hope for freedom on the Continent of Europe. The crusade against Spanish liberty had put an end for ever to the possibility of a joint conquest of Spanish America in the interest of despotism. The attitude of England was no longer what it had been in 1818. When the Czar had proposed at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle that the allied monarchs should suppress the republican principle beyond the seas, Castlereagh had only stated that England could bear no part in such an enterprise; he had not said that England would effectually prevent others from attempting it. This was the resolution by which Canning, isolated and baffled by the conspiracy of Verona, proved that England could still do something to protect its own interest and the interests of mankind against a league of autocrats. There is indeed little doubt that the independence of the Spanish colonies would have been recognised by Great Britain soon after the war of 1823, whoever might have been our Minister for Foreign Affairs, but this recognition was a different matter in the hands of Canning from what it would have been in the hands of his predecessor. The contrast between the two men was one of spirit rather than of avowed rules of action. Where Castlereagh offered apologies to the Continental sovereigns, Canning uttered defiance [343] The treaties of 1815, which connected England so closely with the foreign courts, were no work of his; though he sought not to repudiate them, he delighted to show that in spite of them England has still its own policy, its own sympathies, its own traditions. In face of the council of kings and its assumption of universal jurisdiction, he publicly described himself as an enthusiast for the independence of nations. If others saw little evidence that France intended to recompense itself for its services to Ferdinand by appropriating some of his rebellious colonies, Canning was quick to lay hold of every suspicious circumstance. At the beginning of the war of 1823 he gave a formal warning to the ambassador of Louis XVIII. that France would not be permitted to bring any of these provinces under its dominion, whether by conquest or cession. [344] When the war was over, he rejected the invitation of Ferdinand’s Government to take part in a conference at Paris, where the affairs of South America were to be laid before the Allied Powers. [345] What these Powers might or might not think on the subject of America was now a matter of indifference, for the policy of England was fixed, and it was useless to debate upon a conclusion that could not be altered. British consular agents were appointed in most of the colonies before the close of the year 1823; and after some interval the independence of Buenos Ayres, Colombia, and Mexico were formally recognised by the conclusion of commercial treaties. “I called the New World into existence,” cried Canning, when reproached with permitting the French occupation of Spain, “in order to redress the balance of the Old.” The boast, famous in our Parliamentary history, has left an erroneous impression of the part really played by Canning at this crisis. He did not call the New World into existence; he did not even assist it in winning independence, as France had assisted the United States fifty years before; but when this independence had been won, he threw over it the aegis of Great Britain, declaring that no other European Power should reimpose the yoke which Spain had not been able to maintain.
[Affairs in Portugal.]
[Constitution granted by Petro, May, 1826.]
The overthrow of the Spanish Constitution by foreign arms led to a series of events in Portugal which forced England to a more direct intervention in the Peninsula than had yet been necessary, and heightened the conflict that had sprung up between its policy and that of Continental absolutism. The same parties and the same passions, political and religious, existed in Portugal as in Spain, and the enemies of the Constitution found the same support at foreign Courts. The King of Portugal, John VI., was a weak but not ill-meaning man; his wife, who was a sister of Ferdinand of Spain, and his son Don Miguel were the chiefs of the conspiracy against the Cortes. In June, 1823, a military revolt, arranged by Miguel, brought the existing form of government to an end: the King promised, however, when dissolving the Cortes, that a Constitution should be bestowed by himself upon Portugal; and he seems to have intended to keep his word. The ambassadors of France and Austria were, however, busy in throwing hindrances in the way, and Don Miguel prepared to use violence to prevent his father from making any concession to the Liberals. King John, in fear for his life, applied to England for troops; Canning declined to land soldiers at Lisbon, but sent a squadron, with orders to give the King protection. The winter of 1823 was passed in intrigues; in May, 1824, Miguel arrested the Ministers and surrounded the King’s palace with troops. After several days of confusion King John made his escape to the British ships, and Miguel, who was alternately cowardly and audacious, then made his submission, and was ordered to leave the country. King John died in the spring of 1826 without having granted a Constitution. Pedro, his eldest son, had already been made Emperor of Brazil; and, as it was impossible that Portugal and Brazil could again be united, it was arranged that Pedro’s daughter, when of sufficient age, should marry her uncle Miguel, and so save Portugal from the danger of a contested succession. Before renouncing the crown of Portugal, Pedro granted a Constitution to that country. A Regency had already been appointed by King John, in which neither the Queen-dowager nor Miguel was included.
[Desertion of Portuguese soldiery, 1826.]
[Spain permits the deserters to attack Portugal.]
[Canning sends troops to Lisbon, Dec., 1826.]
Miguel had gone to Vienna. Although a sort of Caliban in character and understanding, this Prince met with the welcome due to a kinsman of the Imperial house, and to a representative of the good cause of absolutism. He was received by Metternich with great interest, and his fortunes were taken under the protection of the Austrian Court. In due time, it was hoped this savage and ignorant churl would do yeoman’s service to Austrian principles in the Peninsula. But the Regency and the new Constitution of Portugal had not to wait for the tardy operation of Metternich’s covert hostility. The soldiery who had risen at Miguel’s bidding in 1823 now proclaimed him King, and deserted to Spanish soil. Within the Spanish frontier they were received by Ferdinand’s representatives with open arms. The demands made by the Portuguese ambassador at Madrid for their dispersion and for the surrender of their weapons were evaded. The cause of these armed bands on the frontier became the cause of the Clerical and Ultra-Royalist party over all Europe. Money was sent to them from France and Austria. They were joined by troops of Spanish Carlists or Apostolicals; they were fed, clothed, and organised, if not by the Spanish Government itself, at least by those over whose action the Spanish Government exercised control. [346] Thus raised to considerable military strength, they made incursions into Portugal, and at last attempted a regular invasion. The Regency of Lisbon, justly treating these outrages as the act of the Spanish Government, and appealing to the treaties which bound Great Britain to defend Portugal against foreign attack, demanded the assistance of this country. More was involved in the action taken by Canning than a possible contest with Spain; the seriousness of the danger lay in the fact that Spain was still occupied by French armies, and that a war with Spain might, and probably would, involve a war with France, if not with other Continental Powers. But the English Ministry waited only for the confirmation of the alleged facts by their own ambassador. The treaty-rights of Portugal were undoubted; the temper of the English Parliament and nation, strained to the utmost by the events of the last three years, was such that a war against Ferdinand and against the destroyers of Spanish liberty would have caused more rejoicing than alarm. Nine days after the formal demand of the Portuguese arrived, four days after their complaint was substantiated by the report of our ambassador, Canning announced to the House of Commons that British troops were actually on the way to Lisbon. In words that alarmed many of his own party, and roused the bitter indignation of every Continental Court, Canning warned those whose acts threatened to force England into war, that the war, if war arose, would be a war of opinion, and that England, however earnestly she might endeavour to avoid it, could not avoid seeing ranked under her banner all the restless and discontented of any nation with which she might come into conflict. As for the Portuguese Constitution which formed the real object of the Spanish attack, it had not, Canning said, been given at the instance of Great Britain, but he prayed that Heaven might prosper it. It was impossible to doubt that a Minister who spoke thus, and who, even under expressions of regret, hinted at any alliance with the revolutionary elements in France and Spain, was formidably in earnest. The words and the action of Canning produced the effect which he desired. The Government of Ferdinand discovered the means of checking the activity of the Apostolicals: the presence of the British troops at Lisbon enabled the Portuguese Regency to throw all its forces upon the invaders and to drive them from the country. They were disbanded when they re-crossed the Spanish frontier; the French Court loudly condemned their immoral enterprise; and the Constitution of Portugal seemed, at least for the moment, to have triumphed over its open and its secret enemies.
[The policy of Canning.]
The tone of the English Government had indeed changed since the time when Metternich could express a public hope that the three Eastern Powers would have the approval of this country in their attack upon the Constitution of Naples. In 1820 such a profession might perhaps have passed for a mistake; in 1826 it would have been a palpable absurdity. Both in England and on the Continent it was felt that the difference between the earlier and the later spirit of our policy was summed up in the contrast between Canning and Castlereagh. It has become an article of historical faith that Castlereagh’s melancholy death brought one period of our foreign policy to a close and inaugurated another: it has been said that Canning liberated England from its Continental connexions; it has even been claimed for him that he performed for Europe no less a task than the dissolution of the Holy Alliance. [347] The figure of Canning is indeed one that will for ever fill a great space in European history; and the more that is known of the opposition which he encountered both from his sovereign and from his great rival Wellington, the greater must be our admiration for his clear, strong mind, and for the conquering force of his character. But the legend which represents English policy as taking an absolutely new departure in 1822 does not correspond to the truth of history. Canning was a member of the Cabinet from 1816 to 1820; it is a poor compliment to him to suppose that he either exercised no influence upon his colleagues or acquiesced in a policy of which he disapproved; and the history of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle proves that his counsels had even at that time gained the ascendant. The admission made by Castlereagh in 1820, after Canning had left the Cabinet, that Austria, as a neighbouring and endangered State, had a right to suppress the revolutionary constitution of Naples, would probably not have gained Canning’s assent; in all other points, the action of our Government at Troppau and Laibach might have been his own. Canning loved to speak of his system as one of neutrality, and of non-interference in that struggle between the principles of despotism and of democracy which seemed to be spreading over Europe. He avowed his sympathy for Spain as the object of an unjust and unprovoked war, but he most solemnly warned the Spaniards not to expect English assistance. He prayed that the Constitution of Portugal might prosper, but he expressly disclaimed all connection with its origin, and defended Portugal not because it was a Constitutional State, but because England was bound by treaties to defend it against foreign invasion. The arguments against intervention on behalf of Spain which Canning addressed to the English sympathisers with that country might have been uttered by Castlereagh; the denial of the right of foreign Powers to attack the Spanish Constitution, with which Castlereagh headed his own instructions for Verona, might have been written by Canning.
[Canning and the European concert.]
The statements that Canning withdrew England from the Continental system, and that he dissolved the Holy Alliance, cannot be accepted without large correction. The general relations existing between the Great Powers were based, not on the ridiculous and obsolete treaty of Holy Alliance, but on the Acts which were signed at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. The first of these was the secret Quadruple Treaty which bound England and the three Eastern Powers to attack France in case a revolution in that country should endanger the peace of Europe; the second was the general declaration of all the five Powers that they would act in amity and take counsel with one another. From the first of these alliances Canning certainly did not withdraw England. He would perhaps have done so in 1823 if the Quadruple Treaty had bound England to maintain the House of Bourbon on the French throne; but it had been expressly stated that the deposition of the Bourbons would not necessarily and in itself be considered by England as endangering the peace of Europe. This treaty remained in full force up to Canning’s death; and if a revolutionary army had marched from Paris upon Antwerp, he would certainly have claimed the assistance of the three Eastern Powers. With respect to the general concert of Europe, established or confirmed by the declaration of Aix-la-Chapelle, this had always been one of varying extent and solidity. Both France and England had held themselves aloof at Troppau. The federative action was strongest and most mischievous not before but after the death of Castlereagh, and in the period that followed the Congress of Verona; for though the war against Spain was conducted by France alone, the three Eastern Powers had virtually made themselves responsible for the success of the enterprise, and it was the influence of their ambassadors at Paris and Madrid which prevented any restrictions from being imposed upon Ferdinand’s restored sovereignty.
Canning is invested with a spurious glory when it is said that his action in Spain and in Portugal broke up the league of the Continental Courts. Canning indeed shaped the policy of our own country with equal independence and wisdom, but the political centre of Europe was at this time not London but Vienna. The keystone of the European fabric was the union of Austria and Russia, and this union was endangered, not by anything that could take place in the Spanish Peninsula, but by the conflicting interests of these two great States in regard to the Ottoman Empire. From the moment when the Treaty of Paris was signed, every Austrian politician fixed his gaze upon the roads leading to the Lower Danube, and anxiously noted the signs of coming war, or of continued peace, between Russia and the Porte. [348] It was the triumph of Metternich to have diverted the Czar’s thoughts during the succeeding years from his grievances against Turkey, and to have baffled the Russian diplomatists and generals who, like Capodistrias, sought to spur on their master to enterprises of Eastern conquest. At the Congress of Verona the shifting and incoherent manoeuvres of Austrian statecraft can indeed only be understood on the supposition that Metternich was thinking all the time less of Spain than of Turkey, and struggling at whatever cost to maintain that personal influence over Alexander which had hitherto prevented the outbreak of war in the East. But the antagonism so long suppressed broke out at last. The progress of the Greek insurrection brought Austria and Russia not indeed into war, but into the most embittered hostility with one another. It was on this rock that the ungainly craft which men called the Holy Alliance at length struck and went to pieces. Canning played his part well in the question of the East, but he did not create this question. There were forces at work which, without his intervention, would probably have made an end of the despotic amities of 1815. It is not necessary to the title of a great statesman that he should have called into being the elements which make a new political order possible; it is sufficient praise that he should have known how to turn them to account.
CHAPTER XV.
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.]
The Hetærist invasion of the Principalities had ended in total failure, and with it there passed away for ever the dream of re-establishing the Eastern Empire under Greek ascendancy. But while this enterprise, planned in vain reliance upon foreign aid and in blind assumption of leadership over an alien race, collapsed through the indifference of a people to whom the Greeks were known only as oppressors, that genuine uprising of the Greek nation, which, in spite of the nullity of its leaders, in spite of the crimes, the disunion, the perversity of a race awaking from centuries of servitude, was to add one more to the free peoples of Europe, broke out in the real home of the Hellenes, in the Morea and the islands of the Ægæan. Soon after Hypsilanti’s appearance in Moldavia the Turkish governor of the Morea, anticipating a general rebellion of the Greeks, had summoned the Primates of his province to Tripolitza, with the view of seizing them as hostages. The Primates of the northern district set out, but halted on their way, debating whether they should raise the standard of insurrection or wait for events. While they lingered irresolutely at Kalavryta the decision passed out of their hands, and the people rose throughout the Morea. The revolt of the Moreot Greeks against their oppressors was from the first, and with set purpose, a war of extermination. “The Turk,” they sang in their war-songs, “shall live no longer, neither in Morea nor in the whole earth.” This terrible resolution was, during the first weeks of the revolt, carried into literal effect. The Turks who did not fly from their country-houses to the towns where there were garrisons or citadels to defend them, were attacked and murdered with their entire families, men, women and children. This was the first act of the revolution; and within a few weeks after the 2nd of April, on which the first outbreaks occurred, the open country was swept clear of its Ottoman population, which had numbered about 25,000, and the residue of the lately dominant race was collected within the walls of Patras, Tripolitza, and other towns, which the Greeks forthwith began to beleaguer. [364]
[Terrorism at Constantinople.]
[Execution of the Patriarch, April 22.]
The news of the revolt of the Morea and of the massacre of Mohammedans reached Constantinople, striking terror into the politicians of the Turkish capital, and rousing the Sultan Mahmud to a vengeance tiger-like in its ferocity, but deliberate and calculated like every bloody deed of this resolute and able sovereign. Reprisals had already been made upon the Greeks at Constantinople for the acts of Hypsilanti, and a number of innocent persons had been put to death by the executioner, but no general attack upon the Christians had been suggested, nor had the work of punishment passed out of the hands of the government itself. Now, however, the fury of the Mohammedan populace was let loose upon the infidel. The Sultan called upon his subjects to arm themselves in defence of their faith. Executions were redoubled; soldiers and mobs devastated Greek settlements on the Bosphorus; and on the most sacred day of the Greek Church a blow was struck which sent a thrill over Eastern Europe. The Patriarch of Constantinople had celebrated the service which ushers in the dawn of Easter Sunday, when he was summoned by the Dragoman of the Porte to appear before a Synod hastily assembled. There an order of the Sultan was read declaring Gregorius IV. a traitor, and degrading him from his office. The Synod was commanded to elect his successor. It did so. While the new Archbishop was receiving his investiture, Gregorius was led out, and was hanged, still wearing his sacred robes, at the gate of his palace. His body remained during Easter Sunday and the two following days at the place of execution. It was then given to the Jews to be insulted, dragged through the streets, and cast into the sea. The Archbishops of Adrianople, Salonica, and Tirnovo suffered death on the same Easter Sunday. The body of Gregorius, floating in the waves, was picked up by a Greek ship and carried to Odessa. Brought, as it was believed, by a miracle to Christian soil, the relics of the Patriarch received at the hands of the Russian government the funeral honours of a martyr. Gregorius had no doubt had dealings with the Hetærists; but he was put to death untried; and whatever may have been the real extent of his offence, he was executed not for this but in order to strike terror into the Sultan’s Christian subjects.
[Massacre of Christians, April-October.]
[Effect on Russia.]
[Russian ambassador leaves Constantinople, July 27.]
During the succeeding months, in Asia Minor as well as in Macedonia and at Constantinople itself, there were wholesale massacres of the Christians, and the churches of the Greeks were pillaged or destroyed by their enemies, both Jews and Turks. Smyrna, Adrianople, and Salonica, in so far as these towns were Greek, were put to the sack; thousands of the inhabitants were slain by the armed mobs who held command, or were sold into slavery. It was only the fear of a war with Russia which at length forced Sultan Mahmud to stop these deeds of outrage and to restore some of the conditions of civilised life in the part of his dominions which was not in revolt. The Russian army and nation would have avenged the execution of the Patriarch by immediate war if popular instincts had governed its ruler. Strogonoff, the ambassador at Constantinople, at once proposed to the envoys of the other Powers to unite in calling up war-ships for the protection of the Christians. Joint action was, however, declined by Lord Strangford, the representative of England, and the Porte was encouraged by the attitude of this politician to treat the threats of Strogonoff with indifference. There was an interval during which the destiny of a great part of Eastern Europe depended upon the fluctuations of a single infirm will. The Czar had thoroughly identified himself while at Laibach with the principles and the policy of European conservatism, and had assented to the declaration in which Metternich placed the Greek rebellion, together with the Spanish and Italian insurrections, under the ban of Europe. Returning to St. Petersburg, Alexander, in spite of the veil that intercepts from every sovereign the real thoughts and utterances of his people, found himself within the range of widely different influences. Russian passions were not roused by what might pass in Italy or Spain. The Russian priest, the soldier, the peasant understood nothing of theories of federal intervention, and of the connection between Neapolitan despotism and the treaties of 1815: but his blood boiled when he heard that the chief priest of his Church had been murdered by the Sultan, and that a handful of his brethren were fighting for their faith unhelped. Alexander felt to some extent the throb of national spirit. There had been a time in his life when a single hour of strong emotion or of overpowering persuasion had made him renounce every obligation and unite with Napoleon against his own allies; and there were those who in 1821 believed that the Czar would as suddenly break loose from his engagements with Metternich and throw himself, with a fanatical army and nation, into a crusade against the Turk. Sultan Mahmud had himself given to the Russian party of action a ground for denouncing him in the name of Russian honour and interests independently of all that related to Greece. In order to prevent the escape of suspected persons, the Porte had ordered Russian vessels to be searched at Constantinople, and it had forced all corn-ships coming from the Euxine to discharge their cargoes at the Bosphorus, under the apprehension that the corn-supplies of the capital would be cut off by Greek vessels in command of the Ægæan. Further, Russia had by treaty the right to insist that the Danubian Principalities should be governed by their civil authorities, the Hospodars, and not by Turkish Pashas, insurrection in Wallachia had been put down, but the rule of Hospodars had not been restored; Turkish generals, at the head of their forces, still administered their provinces under military law. On all these points Russia had at least the semblance of grievances of its own. The outrages which shocked all Europe were not the only wrong which Russian pride called upon the Czar to redress. The influence of Capodistrias revived at St. Petersburg. A despatch was sent to Constantinople declaring that the Porte had begun a war for life or death with the Christian religion, and that its continued existence among the Powers of Europe must depend upon its undertaking to restore the churches which had been destroyed, to guarantee the inviolability of Christian worship in the future, and to discriminate in its punishments between the innocent and the guilty. Presenting ultimatum from his master, Strogonoff, in accordance with his instructions, demanded a written answer within eight days. No such answer came. On the 27th of July the ambassador quitted Constantinople. War seemed to be on the point of breaking out.
[Eastern policy of Austria.]
The capital where these events were watched with the greatest apprehension was Vienna. The fortunes of the Ottoman Empire have always been most intimately connected with those of Austria; and although the long struggle of the House of Hapsburg with Napoleon and its wars in recent times with Prussia and with Italy have made the western aspect of Austrian policy more prominent and more familiar than its eastern one, the eastern interests of the monarchy have always been at least as important in the eyes of its actual rulers. Before the year 1720 Austria, not Russia, was the great enemy of Turkey and the aggressive Power of the east of Europe. After 1780 the Emperor Joseph had united with Catherine of Russia in a plan for dividing the Sultan’s dominions in Europe, and actually waged a war for this purpose. In 1795 the alliance, with the same object, had been prospectively revived by Thugut; in 1809, after the Treaty of Tilsit, Metternich had determined in the last resort to combine with Napoleon and Alexander in dismembering Turkey, if all diplomatic means should fail to prevent a joint attack on the Porte by France and Russia. But this resolution had been adopted by Metternich only as a matter of necessity, and in view of a combination which threatened to reduce Austria to the position of a vassal State. Metternich’s own definite and consistent policy after 1814 was the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. His statesmanship was, as a rule, governed by fear; and his fear of Alexander was second only to his old fear of Napoleon. Times were changed since Joseph and Thugut could hope to enter upon a game of aggression with Russia upon equal terms. The Austrian army had been beaten in every battle that it had fought during nearly twenty years. Province after province had been severed from it, without, except in the Tyrol, raising a hand in its support; and when in 1821 the Minister compared Austria’s actual Empire and position in Europe, won and maintained in great part by his own diplomacy, with the ruin to which a series of wars had brought it ten years before, he might well thank Heaven that international Congresses were still so much in favour with the Courts, and tremble at the clash of arms which from the remote Morea threatened to call Napoleon’s northern conquerors once more into the field [365]
[Eastern policy of England.]
England was not, like Austria, exposed to actual danger by the advance of Russia towards the Ægæan; but the growth of Russian power had been viewed with alarm by English politicians since 1788, when Pitt had formed a triple alliance with Prussia and Holland for the purpose of defending the Porte against the attacks of Catherine and Joseph. The interest of Great Britain in the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire had not been laid down as a principle before that date, nor was it then acknowledged by the Whig party. It was asserted by Pitt from considerations relating to the European balance of power, not, as in our own times, with a direct reference to England’s position in India. The course of events from 1792 to 1807 made England and Russia for awhile natural allies; but this friendship was turned into hostility by the Treaty of Tilsit; and although after a few years Alexander was again fighting for the same cause as Great Britain, and the public opinion of this country enthusiastically hailed the issue of the Moscow campaign, English statesmen never forgot the interview upon the Niemen, and never, in the brightest moments of victory, regarded Alexander without some secret misgivings. During the campaign of 1814 in France, Castlereagh’s willingness to negotiate with Bonaparte was due in great part to the fear that Alexander’s high-wrought resolutions would collapse before Napoleon could be thoroughly crushed, and that reaction would carry him into a worse peace than that which he then disdained. [366] The negotiations at the Congress of Vienna brought Great Britain and Russia, as it has been seen, into an antagonism which threatened to end in the resort to arms; and the tension which then and for some time afterwards existed between the two governments led English Ministers to speak, certainly in exaggerated and misleading language, of the mutual hostility of the English and the Russian nations. From 1815 to 1821 the Czar had been jealously watched. It had been rumoured over and over again that he was preparing to invade the Ottoman Empire; and when the rebellion of the Greeks broke out, the one thought of Castlereagh and his colleagues was that Russia must be prevented from throwing itself into the fray, and that the interests of Great Britain required that the authority of the Sultan should as soon as possible be restored throughout his dominions.
[Fears of new period of warfare.]
[Metternich and the Greeks.]
Both at London therefore and at Vienna the rebellion of Greece was viewed by governments only as an unfortunate disturbance which was likely to excite war between Russia and its neighbours, and to imperil the peace of Europe at large. It may seem strange that the spectacle of a nation rising to assert its independence should not even have aroused the question whether its claims deserved to be considered. But to do justice at least to the English Ministers of 1821, it must be remembered how terrible, how overpowering, were the memories left by the twenty years of European war that had closed in 1815, and at how vast a cost to mankind the regeneration of Greece would have been effected, if, as then seemed probable, it had ranged the Great Powers again in arms against one another, and re-kindled the spirit of military aggression which for a whole generation had made Europe the prey of rival coalitions. It is impossible to read the letter in which Castlereagh pleaded with the Czar to sacrifice his own glory and popularity to the preservation of European peace, without perceiving in what profound earnestness the English statesman sought to avert the renewal of an epoch of conflict, and how much the apprehension of coming calamity predominated in his own mind over the mere jealousy of an extension of Russian power. [367] If Castlereagh had no thought for Greece itself, it was because the larger interests of Europe wholly absorbed him, and because he lacked the imagination and the insight to conceive of a better adjustment of European affairs under the widening recognition of national rights. The Minister of Austria, to whom at this crisis Castlereagh looked as his natural ally, had no doubt the same dread of a renewed convulsion of Europe, but in his case it was mingled with considerations of a much narrower kind. It is not correct to say that Metternich was indifferent to the Greek cause; he actually hated it, because it gave a stimulus to the liberal movement of Germany. In his empty and pedantic philosophy of human action, Metternich linked together every form of national aspiration and unrest as something presumptuous and wanton. He understood nothing of the debt that mankind owes to the spirit of freedom. He was just as ready to dogmatise upon the wickedness of the English Reform Bill as he was to trace the hand of Capodistrias in every tumult in Servia or the Morea: and even if there had been no fear of Russian aggression in the background, he would instinctively have condemned the Greek revolt when he saw that the light-headed professors in the German Universities were beginning to agitate in its favour, and that the recalcitrant minor Courts regarded it with some degree of sympathy.
[Alexander adheres to policy of peace.]
[Capdostrias retires, Aug 1822.]
The policy of Metternich in the Eastern Question had for its object the maintenance of the existing order of things; and as it was certain that some satisfaction or other must be given to Russian pride, Metternich’s counsel was that the grievances of the Czar which were specifically Russian should be clearly distinguished from questions relating to the independence of Greece; and that on the former the Porte should be recommended to agree with its adversary quickly, the good offices of Europe being employed within given limits on the Czar’s behalf; so that, the Russian causes of complaint being removed, Alexander might without loss of honour leave the Greeks to be subdued, and resume the diplomatic relations with Constantinople which had been so perilously severed by Strogonoff’s departure. It remained for the Czar to decide whether, as head of Russia and protector of the Christians of the East, he would solve the Eastern Question by his own sword, or whether, constant to the principle and ideal of international action to which he had devoted himself since 1815, he would commit his cause to the joint mediation of Europe, and accept such solution of the problem as his allies might attain. In the latter case it was clear that no blow would be struck on behalf of Greece. For a year or more the balance wavered; at length the note of triumph sounded in the Austrian Cabinet. Capodistrias, the representative of the Greek cause at St. Petersburg, rightly measured the force of the opposing impulses in the Czar’s mind. He saw that Alexander, interested as he was in Italy and Spain, would never break with that federation of the Courts which he had himself created, nor shake off the influences of legitimism which had dominated him since the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. Submitting when contention had become hopeless, and anticipating his inevitable fall by a voluntary retirement from public affairs, Capodistrias, still high in credit and reputation, quitted St. Petersburg under the form leave of absence, and withdrew to Geneva, there to await events, and to enjoy the distinction of a patriot whom love for Greece had constrained to abandon one of the most splendid positions in Europe. Grave, melancholy, and austere, as one who suffered with his country, Capodistrias remained in private life till the vanquished cause had become the victorious one, and the liberated Greek nation called him to place himself at its head.
[Extension of the Greek revolt.]
[Central Greece.]
[Fall of Ali Pasha, Feb., 1822.]
[Chalcidice.]
An international diplomatic campaign of vast activity and duration began in the year 1821, but the contest of arms was left, as Metternich desired, to the Greeks and the Turks alone. The first act of the war was the insurrection of the Morea: the second was the extension of this insurrection over parts of Continental Greece and the Archipelago, and its summary extinction by the Turk in certain districts, which in consequence remained for the future outside the area of hostilities, and so were not ultimately included in the Hellenic Kingdom. Central Greece, that is, the country lying immediately north of the Corinthian Gulf, broke into revolt a few weeks later than the Morea. The rising against the Mohammedans was distinguished by the same merciless spirit: the men were generally massacred; the women, if not killed, were for the most part sold into slavery; and when, after an interval of three years, Lord Byron came to Missolonghi, he found that a miserable band of twenty-three captive women formed the sole remnant of the Turkish population of that town. Thessaly, with some exceptions, remained passive, and its inaction was of the utmost service to the Turkish cause; for Ali Pasha in Epirus was now being besieged by the Sultan’s armies, and if Thessaly had risen in the rear of these troops, they could scarcely have escaped destruction. Khurshid, the Ottoman commander conducting the siege of Janina, held firmly to his task, in spite of the danger which threatened his communications, and in spite of the circumstance that his whole household had fallen into the hands of the Moreot insurgents. His tenacity saved the border-provinces for the Ottoman Empire. No combination was effected between Ali and the Greeks, and at the beginning of 1822 the Albanian chieftain lost both his stronghold and his life. In the remoter district of Chalcidice, on the Macedonian coast, where the promontory of Athos and the two parallel peninsulas run out into the Ægæan, and a Greek population, clearly severed from the Slavic inhabitants of the mainland, maintained its own communal and religious organisation, the national revolt broke out under Hetærist leaders. The monks of Mount Athos, like their neighbours, took up arms. But there was little sympathy between the privileged chiefs of these abbeys and the desperate men who had come to head the revolt. The struggle was soon abandoned; and, partly by force of arms, partly by negotiation, the authority of the Sultan was restored without much difficulty throughout this region.
[The Ægæan Islands.]
The settlements of the Ægæan which first raised the flag of Greek independence were the so-called Nautical Islands, Hydra, Spetza, and Psara, where the absence of a Turkish population and the enjoyment of a century of self-government had allowed the bold qualities of an energetic maritime race to grow to their full vigour. Hydra and Spetza were close to the Greek coast, Psara was on the farther side of the archipelago, almost within view of Asia Minor; so that in joining the insurrection its inhabitants showed great heroism, for they were exposed to the first attack of any Turkish force that could maintain itself for a few hours at sea, and the whole adjacent mainland was the recruiting-ground of the Sultan. At Hydra the revolt against the Ottoman was connected with the internal struggles of the little community, and these in their turn were connected with the great economical changes of Europe which, at the opposite end of the continent, and in a widely different society, led to the enactment of the English Corn Laws, and to the strife of classes which resulted from them. During Napoleon’s wars the carrying-trade of most nations had become extinct; little corn reached England, and few besides Greek ships navigated the Euxine and Mediterranean. When peace opened the markets and the ports of all nations, just as the renewed importation of foreign corn threatened to lower the profits of English farmers and the rents of English landlords, so the reviving freedom of navigation made an end of the monopoly of the Hydriote and Psarian merchantmen. The shipowners formed an oligarchy in Hydra; the captains and crews of their ships, though they shared the profits of each voyage, were excluded from any share in the government of the island. Failure of trade, want and inactivity, hence led to a political opposition. The shipowners, wealthy and privileged men, had no inclination to break with the Turk; the captains and sailors, who had now nothing to lose, declared for Greek independence. There was a struggle in which for awhile nothing but the commonest impulses of need and rapacity came into play; but the greater cause proved its power: Hydra threw in its lot with Greece; and although private greed and ill-faith, as well as great cruelty, too often disgraced both the Hydriote crews and those of the other islands, the nucleus of a naval force was now formed which made the achievement of Greek independence possible. The three islands which led the way were soon followed by the wealthier and more populous Samos and by the greater part of the Archipelago. Crete, inhabited by a mixed Greek and Turkish population, also took up arms, and was for years to come the scene of a bloody and destructive warfare.
[The Greek leaders.]
Within the Morea the first shock of the revolt had made the Greeks masters of everything outside the fortified towns. The reduction of these places was at once undertaken by the insurgents. Tripolitza, lately the seat of the Turkish government, was the centre of operations, and in the neighbourhood of this town the first provisional government of the Greeks, called the Senate of Kaltesti, was established. Demetrius Hypsilanti, a brother of the Hetærist leader, whose failure in Roumania was not yet known, landed in the Morea and claimed supreme power. He was tumultuously welcomed by the peasant-soldiers, though the Primates, who had hitherto held undisputed sway, bore him no good will. Two other men became prominent at this time as leaders in the Greek war of liberation. These were Maurokordatos, a descendant of the Hospodars of Wallachia–a politician superior to all his rivals in knowledge and breadth of view, but wanting in