Part 34 (1/2)

[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 h.e.l.lenic 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 ma.s.sacred; 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 pa.s.sive, 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. Khurs.h.i.+d, 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 circ.u.mstance 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 aegaean, 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 Hetaerist 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 aegaean Islands.]

The settlements of the aegaean 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 cla.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+powners formed an oligarchy in Hydra; the captains and crews of their s.h.i.+ps, 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 s.h.i.+powners, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 Hetaerist 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 the faculty of action required by the times--and Kolokotrones, a type of the rough fighting Klepht; a mere savage in attainments, scarcely able to read or write, cunning, grossly avaricious and faithless, incapable of appreciating either military or moral discipline, but a born soldier in his own irregular way, and a hero among peasants as ignorant as himself. There was yet another, who, if his character had been equal to his station, would have been placed at the head of the government of the Morea. This was Petrobei, chief of the family of Mauromichalis, ruler of the rugged district of Maina, in the south-west of Peloponnesus, where the Turk had never established more than nominal sovereignty. A jovial, princely person, exercising among his clansmen a mild Homeric sway, Petrobei, surrounded by his nine vigorous sons, was the most picturesque figure in Greece. But he had no genius for great things. A sovereignty, which in other hands might have expanded to national dominion, remained with Petrobei a mere ornament and curiosity; and the power of the deeply-rooted clan-spirit of the Maina only made itself felt when, at a later period, the organisation of a united h.e.l.lenic State demanded its sacrifice.

[Fall of Tripolitza, Oct. 5, 1821.]

Anarchy, egotism, and ill-faith disgraced the Greek insurrection from its beginning to its close. There were, indeed, some men of unblemished honour among the leaders, and the peasantry in the ranks fought with the most determined courage year after year; but the action of most of those who figured as representatives of the people brought discredit upon the national cause. Their first successes were accompanied by gross treachery and cruelty. Had the Greek leaders been Bourbon kings, nurtured in all the sanct.i.ties of divine right, instead of tax-gatherers and cattle-lifters, truants from the wild school of Turkish violence and deceit, they could not have perjured themselves with lighter hearts. On the surrender of Navarino, in August, 1821, after a formal capitulation providing for the safety of its Turkish inhabitants, men, women, and children were indiscriminately ma.s.sacred. The capture of Tripolitza, which took place two months later, was changed from a peaceful triumph into a scene of frightful slaughter by the avarice of individual chiefs, who, while negotiations were pending, made their way into the town, and bargained with rich inhabitants to give them protection in return for their money and jewels. The soldiery, who had undergone the labours of the siege for six months, saw that their reward was being pilfered from them. Defying all orders, and in the absence of Demetrius Hypsilanti, the commander-in-chief, they rushed upon the fortifications of Tripolitza, and carried them by storm. A general ma.s.sacre of the inhabitants followed. For three days the work of carnage was continued in the streets and houses, until few out of a population of many thousands remained living. According to the testimony of Kolokotrones himself, the roads were so choked with the dead, that as he rode from the gateway to the citadel his horse's hoofs never touched the ground. [368]

[The Ma.s.sacre of Chios, April-June, 1822.]

In the opening scenes of the Greek insurrection the barbarity of Christians and of Ottomans was perhaps on a level. The Greek revenged himself with the ferocity of the slave who breaks his fetters; the Turk resorted to wholesale ma.s.sacre and extermination as the normal means of government in troubled times. And as experience has shown that the savagery of the European yields in one generation to the influences of civilised rule, while the Turk remains as inhuman to-day as he was under Mahmud II., so the history of 1822 proved that the most devilish pa.s.sions of the Greek were in the end but a poor match for disciplined Turkish prowess in the work of butchery. It was no easy matter for the Sultan to requite himself for the sack of Tripolitza upon Kolokotrones and his victorious soldiers; but there was a peaceful and inoffensive population elsewhere, which offered all the conditions for free, unstinted, and unimperilled vengeance which the Turk desires. A body of Samian troops had landed in Chios, and endeavoured, but with little success, to excite the inhabitants to revolt, the absence of the Greek fleet rendering them an almost certain prey to the Sultan's troops on the mainland. The Samian leader nevertheless refused to abandon the enterprise, and laid siege to the citadel, in which there was a Turkish garrison. Before this fortress could be reduced, a relieving army of seven thousand Turks, with hosts of fanatical volunteers, landed on the island.

The Samians fled; the miserable population of Chios was given up to ma.s.sacre. For week after week the soldiery and the roving hordes of Ottomans slew, pillaged, and sold into slavery at their pleasure. In parts of the island where the inhabitants took refuge in the monasteries, they were slaughtered by thousands together; others, tempted back to their homes by the promulgation of an amnesty, perished family by family. The lot of those who were spared was almost more pitiable than of those who died. The slave-markets of Egypt and Tunis were glutted with Chian captives. The gentleness, the culture, the moral worth of the Chian community made its fate the more tragical. No district in Europe had exhibited a civilisation more free from the vices of its type: on no community had there fallen in modern times so terrible a catastrophe. The estimates of the destruction of life at Chios are loosely framed; among the lowest is that which sets the number of the slain and the enslaved at thirty thousand. The island, lately thronging with life and activity, became a thinly-populated place. After a long period of depression and the slow return of some fraction of its former prosperity, convulsions of nature have in our own day again made Chios a ruin. A new life may arise when the Turk is no longer master of its sh.o.r.es, but the old history of Chios is closed for ever.

[Exploit of Kanaris, June 18th, 1822.]

The impression made upon public opinion in Europe by the ma.s.sacre of 1822 was a deep and lasting one, although it caused no immediate change in the action of Governments. The general feeling of sympathy for the Greeks and hatred for the Turks, which ultimately forced the Governments to take up a different policy, was intensified by a brilliant deed of daring by which a Greek captain avenged the Chians upon their devastor, and by the unexpected success gained by the insurgents on the mainland against powerful armies of the Sultan. The Greek executive, which was now headed by Maurokordatos, had been guilty of gross neglect in not sending over the fleet in time to prevent the Turks from landing in Chios. When once this landing had been effected, the s.h.i.+ps which afterwards arrived were powerless to prevent the ma.s.sacre, and nothing could be attempted except against the Turkish fleet itself. The instrument of destruction employed by the Greeks was the fire-s.h.i.+p, which had been used with success against the Turk in these same waters in the war of 1770. The sacred month of the Ramazan was closing, and on the night of June 18, Kara Ali, the Turkish commander, celebrated the festival of Bairam with above a thousand men on board his flag-s.h.i.+p. The vessel was illuminated with coloured lanterns. In the midst of the festivities, Constantine Kanaris, a Psarian captain, brought his fire-s.h.i.+p un.o.bserved right up to the Turkish man-of-war, and drove his bowsprit firmly into one of her portholes; then, after setting fire to the combustibles, he stepped quietly into a row-boat, and made away. A breeze was blowing, and in a moment the Turkish crew were enveloped in a ma.s.s of flames. The powder on board exploded; the boats were sunk; and the vessel, with its doomed crew, burned to the water-edge, its companions sheering off to save themselves from the shower of blazing fragments that fell all around. Kara Ali was killed by a broken mast; a few of his men saved their lives by swimming or were picked up by rescuers; the rest perished. Such was the consternation caused by the deed of Kanaris, that the Ottoman fleet forthwith quitted the aegaean waters, and took refuge under the guns of the Dardanelles. Kanaris, unknown before, became from this exploit a famous man in Europe. It was to no stroke of fortune or mere audacity that he owed his success, but to the finest combination of nerve and nautical skill. His feat, which others were constantly attempting, but with little success, to imitate, was repeated by him in the same year. He was the most brilliant of Greek seamen, a simple and modest hero; and after his splendid achievements in the war of liberation, he served his country well in a political career.

Down to his death in a hale old age, he was with justice the idol and pride of the Greek nation.

[Double invasion of Greece 1822.]

[Destruction of the Pilh.e.l.lenes near Arta, July 16.]

[Unsuccessful siege of Missolonghi, Nov., 1822.]

The fall of the Albanian rebel, Ali Pasha, in the spring of 1822 made it possible for Sultan Mahmud, who had hitherto been crippled by the resistance of Janina, to throw his whole land-force against the h.e.l.lenic revolt; and the Greeks of the mainland, who had as yet had to deal only with scattered detachments or isolated garrisons, now found themselves exposed to the attack of two powerful armies. Kurs.h.i.+d, the conqueror of Ali Pasha, took up his headquarters at Larissa in Thessaly, and from this base the two invading armies marched southwards on diverging lines. The first, under Omer Brionis, was ordered to make its way through Southern Epirus to the western entrance of the Corinthian Gulf, and there to cross into the Morea; the second, under Dramali, to reduce Central Greece, and enter the Morea by the isthmus of Corinth; the conquest of Tripolitza and the relief of the Turkish coast-fortresses which were still uncaptured being the ultimate end to be accomplished by the two armies in combination with one another and with the Ottoman fleet. Not less than fifty thousand men were under the orders of the Turkish commanders, the division of Dramali being by far the larger of the two. Against this formidable enemy the Greeks possessed poor means of defence, nor were their prospects improved when Maurokordatos, the President, determined to take a military command, and to place himself at the head of the troops in Western Greece. There were indeed urgent reasons for striking with all possible force in this quarter.

The Suliotes, after seventeen years of exile in Corfu, had returned to their mountains, and were now making common cause with Greece. They were both the military outwork of the insurrection, and the political link between the h.e.l.lenes and the Christian communities of Albania, whose action might become of decisive importance in the struggle against the Turks.

Maurokordatos rightly judged the relief of Suli to be the first and most pressing duty of the Government. Under a capable leader this effort would not have been beyond the power of the Greeks; directed by a politician who knew nothing of military affairs, it was perilous in the highest degree.

Maurokordatos, taking the command out of abler hands, pushed his troops forward to the neighbourhood of Arta, mismanaged everything, and after committing a most important post to Botzares, an Albanian chieftain of doubtful fidelity, left two small regiments exposed to the attack of the Turks in ma.s.s. One of these regiments, called the corps of Philh.e.l.lenes, was composed of foreign officers who had volunteered to serve in the Greek cause as common soldiers. Its discipline was far superior to anything that existed among the Greeks themselves; and at its head were men who had fought in Napoleon's campaigns. But this corps, which might have become the nucleus of a regular army, was sacrificed to the incapacity of the general and the treachery of his confederate. Betrayed and abandoned by the Albanian, the Philh.e.l.lenes met the attack of the Turks gallantly, and almost all perished. Maurokordatos and the remnant of the Greek troops now retired to Missolonghi. The Suliotes, left to their own resources, were once more compelled to quit their mountain home, and to take refuge in Corfu. Their resistance, however, delayed the Turks for some months, and it was not until the beginning of November that the army of Omer Brionis, after conquering the intermediate territory, appeared in front of Missolonghi. Here the presence of Maurokordatos produced a better effect than in the field. He declared that he would never leave the town as long as a man remained to fight the Turks. Defences were erected, and the besiegers kept at bay for two months. On the 6th of January, 1823, Brionis ordered an a.s.sault. It was beaten back with heavy loss; and the Ottoman commander, hopeless of maintaining his position throughout the winter, abandoned his artillery, and retired into the interior of the country.

[369]

[Dramali pa.s.ses the Isthmus of Corinth, July 1822.]

[His retreat and destruction, Aug., 1822.]

In the meantime Dramali had advanced from Thessaly with twenty-four thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry, the most formidable armament that had been seen in Greece since the final struggle between the Turks and Venetians in 1715. At the terror of his approach all hopes of resistance vanished. He marched through Boeotia and Attica, devastating the country, and reached the isthmus of Corinth in July, 1822. The mountain pa.s.ses were abandoned by the Greeks; the Government, whose seat was at Argos, dispersed; and Dramali moved on to Nauplia, where the Turkish garrison was on the point of surrendering to the Greeks. The entrance to the Morea had been won; the very shadow of a Greek government had disappeared, and the definite suppression of the revolt seemed now to be close at hand. But two fatal errors of the enemy saved the Greek cause. Dramali neglected to garrison the pa.s.ses through which he had advanced; and the commander of the Ottoman fleet, which ought to have met the land-force at Nauplia, disobeyed his instructions and sailed on to Patras. Two Greeks, at this crisis of their country's history, proved themselves equal to the call of events.

Demetrius Hypsilanti, now President of the Legislature, refused to fly with his colleagues, and threw himself, with a few hundred men, into the Acropolis of Argos. Kolokotrones, hastening to Tripolitza, called out every man capable of bearing arms, and hurried back to Argos, where the Turks were still held at bay by the defenders of the citadel. Dramali could no longer think of marching into the interior of the Morea. The gallantry of Demetrius had given time for the a.s.semblage of a considerable force, and the Ottoman general now discovered the ruinous effect of his neglect to garrison the pa.s.ses in his rear. These were seized by Kolokotrones. The summer-drought threatened the Turkish army with famine; the fleet which would have rendered them independent of land-supplies was a hundred miles away; and Dramali, who had lately seen all Greece at his feet, now found himself compelled to force his way back through the enemy to the isthmus of Corinth. The measures taken by Kolokotrones to intercept his retreat were skilfully planned, and had they been adequately executed not a man of the Ottoman army would have escaped. It was only through the disorder and the cupidity of the Greeks themselves that a portion of Dramali's force succeeded in cutting its way back to Corinth. Baggage was plundered while the retreating enemy ought to have been annihilated, and divisions which ought to have co-operated in the main attack sought trifling successes of their own. But the losses and the demoralisation of the Turkish army were as ruinous to it as total destruction. Dramali himself fell ill and died; and the remnant of his troops which had escaped from the enemy's hands perished in the neighbourhood of Corinth from sickness and want.

[Greek Civil Wars, 1824.]

The decisive events of 1822 opened the eyes of European Governments to the real character of the Greek national rising, and to the probability of its ultimate success. The forces of Turkey were exhausted for the moment, and during the succeeding year no military operations could be undertaken by the Sultan on anything like the same scale. It would perhaps have been better for the Greeks themselves if the struggle had been more continuously sustained. Nothing but foreign pressure could give unity to the efforts of a race distracted by so many local rivalries, and so many personal ambitions and animosities. Scarcely was the extremity of danger pa.s.sed when civil war began among the Greeks themselves. Kolokotrones set himself up in opposition to the Legislature, and seized on some of the strong places in the Morea. This first outbreak of the so-called military party against the civil authorities was, however, of no great importance. The Primates of the Morea took part with the representatives of the islands and of Central Greece against the disturber of the peace, and an accommodation was soon arranged. Konduriottes, a rich s.h.i.+p-owner of Hydra, was made President, with Kolettes, a politician of great influence in Central Greece, as his Minister. But in place of the earlier antagonism between soldier and civilian, a new and more dangerous antagonism, that of district against district, now threatened the existence of Greece. The tendency of the new government to sacrifice everything to the interest of the islands at once became evident. Konduriottes was a thoroughly incompetent man, and made himself ridiculous by appointing his friends, the Hydriote sea-captains, to the highest military and civil posts. Rebellion again broke out, and Kolokotrones was joined by his old antagonists, the Primates of the Morea.