Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (46 page)

Turkish forces were in fact diverted in the crucial early months of 1821 by a quite different operation, one that had nothing to do with the Philikí Etería: the Turkish campaign to crush Ali Pasha of Iánnina. Ali, nominally the Turkish-appointed governor of the Iánnina area, with his massive and widespread landholdings and with his two sons as governors of other parts of Greece, had become virtually independent. Moreover he was in constant negotiations with the French, British and Russians, with whose help he might defy the Ottoman government and
become independent in fact. In the summer of 1820 Sultan Mahmud II sent an army against him.

The Turks’ siege of Iánnina made slow progress, partly because the army was so badly organised and poorly provisioned and partly because it had an incompetent general. In January 1821 this general was dismissed and the Sultan appointed in his place Khurshid Pasha, the governor of the Peloponnese, who moved north to Iánnina, taking with him his best troops. Khurshid, energetic and capable, had taken up office only in the previous November, so had not had time to assess how serious were the indications of a Greek rising. He left behind as acting governor his deputy, described as ‘a young man of an arrogant disposition and no military experience’,
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who was not replaced by a more able governor until mid-May. Thus during the crucial early months when the Greek rising established itself there was no effective Turkish control of the Peloponnese, and the best Turkish troops were elsewhere.

Moreover, the siege of Iánnina dragged on, the town was not taken until January 1822, and Ali was finally killed a month later. The Turkish forces assembled at Iánnina were estimated as at least 20,000 strong and in some accounts double that number, of whom only 10,000 could be belatedly spared to fight the Greeks in the Peloponnese. Thus the diversion of Turkish forces that Ipsilántis had tried but failed to achieve was unintentionally created by Ali Pasha.

Every account of the early months of 1821 speaks of the atmosphere of feverish expectation combined with frightened apprehension that prevailed among both Turks and Greeks, especially in the Peloponnese. The Turks took steps to strengthen the coastal fortresses, and in Pátras the resident Turks took refuge in the town’s citadel, taking their families and their property with them. On the Greek side the adherents of the Philikí Etería raised money and began to assemble war supplies, with the result that by March there was no powder or shot to be bought in the Pátras bazaar. News from the Danubian principalities wildly exaggerated Ipsilántis’ achievements, and some thought that the coming revolution would be instantly successful: ‘We shall go to bed in Turkey and wake up in Greece.’
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In the event the Greeks’ war of independence lasted a decade, not the single night of the optimists.

22

1821 – The War of Independence

T
he war of independence is popularly supposed to have been started on 25 March 1821, a date still celebrated annually in Greece with apparently undiminished fervour. The scene was the monastery of Ayía Lávra in the northern Peloponnese, and the leading figure was Georgios Yermanós, bishop of Old Pátras, who had presided over the revolutionary meeting at Vóstitsa in January. According to the story Yermanós refused to attend the regular meeting of Greek leaders with the Turkish authorities and went instead to Ayía Lávra, where a crowd assembled that quickly swelled to 5,000, the same number as those to whom Christ preached in the desert. After a Te Deum Yermanós celebrated Mass and then addressed the assembled throng. Do not expect help from abroad, he told them. Their supreme principle must be to conquer or die, and he concluded: ‘Our whole history, and our whole future, are enshrined in the words religion, freedom and fatherland.’ He then released the faithful from their Lenten fast, declaring that since the life and religion of all were under threat they must have strength to defend the people and the altar.
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Yermanós was in fact in that part of the Peloponnese at about that time, but the rest of this legend-creating account was pure invention, from the pen of the unreliable historian François Pouqueville. The revolution actually broke out sporadically in a number of different towns in the Peloponnese during late March 1821, but there were good reasons why Pouqueville’s story was adopted. A single defining date was needed for the later annual celebrations. To avoid disputes over primacy it was better not to place the start of the revolution in one particular town or attribute it to one of its most prominent leaders. Yermanós was a good choice as protagonist, being famous but not too famous. He had been a friend for many years of the patriarch Grigórios V, but he had sufficient status to reject the patriarch’s instruction to the Greeks to obey their rulers. He played an active part in the early days of the revolution but was not one of its most celebrated figures, and when he died in 1826 he was
forgotten, wrote Thomas Gordon ‘as soon as the grave closed over him’.
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That the story puts a bishop in centre-stage emphasises its main message, of the revolution’s link to religion: the date, which coincided with the Festival of the Annunciation, the setting at a monastery, the gathering of a Biblical 5,000, and religion ahead even of freedom and fatherland. In only one respect is religion given second place: Church observances such as the Lenten fast must not stand in the way of the fight for freedom.

By the end of March 1821 the sparks of revolution had led to a general conflagration in the Peloponnese. In April the three main naval islands of Hydra, Spétses and Psará joined the rising, and on land it spread as far as northern Greece. The years of warfare that followed can perhaps be seen as a wave of three curves. First, an upward curve in the first three years from 1821, years mainly of Greek successes. Then a downward curve from 1824, of civil war and Greek reverses. Finally, after the battle of Navarino in 1827, a struggling upward curve of attempts to repair the ravages and dissensions of war, culminating in 1833 with the arrival of King Otho and the establishment of Greek independence.

The curve of Greek fortunes was at first decidedly upward. They had two initial aims. One was to capture the Turkish fortresses in the Peloponnese. Most were on the coast, and the Greeks took Monemvasía and Old and New Navarino in 1821, and Corinth and Navplion plus Athens in the following year. The Turks were now confined to Methóni and Koróni in the south and in the north Pátras with the nearby castles on either side of the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. The one central Turkish stronghold was at Tripolis, the seat of Turkish government, and Kolokotrónis consistently urged the importance of taking it: if the Turks held it they could attack outward from the centre, without it they could attack only inward from the edge. Tripolis fell to the Greeks under Kolokotrónis’ leadership, amid terrible scenes of slaughter and destruction, in October 1821. The other Greek military aim was to block the passage of Turkish troops to the Peloponnese from the north down either side of Roumeli. On the west side they achieved this by persistent skirmishing, and on the east side by a victory near Thermopylae, where in 480
BC
Leonidas and his 300 Spartans heroically resisted the Persians under Xerxes.

In the war at sea both sides were initially on the defensive. One aim of Turkish naval strategy in 1821 was to provision their remaining coastal strongholds, and the other was to prevent other Aegean islands joining the revolution. In both operations they were harried with some success by ships from the three Greek naval islands, and the Greeks used fireships against them with devastating effect. But in 1822 the Turks became more aggressive in the Aegean, using excessive force to suppress revolt
on Chíos. This left about a quarter of the island’s population dead and nearly half taken into slavery, and was condemned by Britain’s foreign secretary Castlereagh as ‘the most ferocious and hateful barbarism’.
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The one consolation for the Greeks was the night attack by a combined fleet from Hydra, Spétses and Psará on the Turkish fleet anchored off the main harbour of Chíos. Greek fireships destroyed the kapitan pasha’s flagship in a fireball that could be seen from Smyrna 50 miles away. The kapitan pasha was fatally injured and died next day, and nearly all on board his flagship were killed. In 1822 Turkish action on land also became more aggressive. They mounted a massive expedition under Dramali that moved into the Peloponnese by the Corinth isthmus, but Dramali’s troops were eventually forced to retreat. They were trapped and virtually destroyed in the narrow pass between Argos and Corinth by Greek forces again under Kolokotrónis.

Kolokotrónis had by now been recognised as overall leader of the Greek forces. ‘It would be impossible’, wrote Thomas Gordon, ‘for a painter or novelist to trace a more romantic delineation of a robber chieftain, than the figure of Colocotroni presented; tall and athletic, with a profusion of black hair and expressive features, alternately lighted up with boisterous gaiety, or darkened by bursts of passion: among his soldiers he seemed born to command, having just the manners and bearing calculated to gain their confidence.’
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Kolokotrónis had no doubt of his own abilities: ‘If Wellington had given me an army of forty thousand,’ he wrote, ‘I could have governed it, but if five hundred Greeks had been given to him to lead, he could not have governed them for an hour.’
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The outbreak of the Greek revolution created enormous interest abroad. Idealistic young men flocked to Marseille from as far north as Denmark to take ship for Greece. In the United States, prompted by an appeal from Kora
ḯ
s in Paris, large sums were raised for the Greeks, notably at a spectacular fund-raising ball in New York, and food supplies were shipped to them. Russians, from the Tsar and his court to humble peasants, contributed money for the relief of refugees and the ransoming of captives – though not for military supplies. In Britain the London Greek Committee was actively involved in arranging two separate loans for the Greeks, raised from private investors, and British support for the Greek cause was dramatically emphasised by Byron’s arrival in Mesolongi. But helpful and encouraging as these various initiatives were, Greece would ultimately need more direct help from foreign powers to achieve success.

The first days of 1822 saw the establishment of the first provisional national government of Greece by a national assembly near Epídhavros,
east of Navplion. It was essential for Greece to have a single national government. At the time of the Orlov revolt 50 years earlier there had been short-lived efforts to create such a national government. Now it was essential. If foreign powers were to provide support, diplomatic, financial or military, they would do so only for a government that could claim to represent the Greek people as a whole. Support would not be granted to the leader of a faction.

The national government was made up of a Senate, elected by the people, to pass laws, and an Executive, appointed by the national assembly, to run the government and prosecute the war. The first president of the Executive, in effect the national president, was Alexander Mavrokordhátos, a Greek with a thoroughly west European background and outlook. There could hardly have been a greater contrast than between Mavrokordhátos and Kolokotrónis. Samuel Howe described Mavrokordhátos:

One of the aims of the westernisers in the government was to develop the small body of regular troops that already existed into a regular army, paid and controlled by the government and trained on western European lines. The military class thought otherwise, believing that irregular bands, operating as klephts had always done, were the best means of defeating the Turks.

Western military methods were soon put to the test. In the summer of 1822 Mavrokordhátos led north towards the Turkish military base at Árta a mixed body of hastily trained regulars and philhellene volunteers from abroad. These were joined by some of the local captains and in mid-July, in a well-prepared defensive position at Péta within sight of Árta, they faced attack from a much larger Turkish force. Though the western tactic of holding fire until the enemy was close was initially successful, the outcome was total defeat for the Greeks. This confirmed the captains’ distrust of a regular army, and brought the end of widespread enthusiasm among foreign philhellenes to come and fight for the Greek cause.

However, for the Turks it was the major defeat of Dramali in 1822 rather than their lesser successes at Péta and at Chíos that determined their cautious strategy in 1823. To send another army into the Peloponnese from the north would be putting the burned hand back into the fire, and in the course of 1823 not a single additional Turkish soldier entered the Peloponnese. This lull brought Greek dissensions out into the open.

These dissensions became clear at the second national assembly, held near Navplion in April 1823, to restructure the government. At this second assembly, wrote a contemporary, ‘Everything was irregular, disorderly and alarming, and it was as rowdy as the first was tranquil.’
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The underlying conflict was between the civilian politicians and the military leaders, and it became overt in clashes between the Senate, whose powers had been strengthened at the 1823 assembly, and the Executive.