The fuse had already been laid, but it was Kolokotronis who lit the match, fixing the day of the rising as 25 March.220 Even then, a few communities jumped the gun. In the little town of Areopolis a plaque in the square of St Michael’s church reads: ‘From this historic square was launched the great uprising under the leadership of Petrobey, 17 March 1821’. To Mavromichalis, therefore, belongs the honour of being first in the field. But Kolokotronis was not far behind, marshalling on the 20th some 2,000 armed men who marched through Kalamata amid cheering crowds. Three days later they accepted the surrender of the Turkish garrison, having promised them that their lives would be spared. (Alas, they were not; as a contemporary writer put it, ‘the moon devoured them’.)221 In little more than a week, the entire Peloponnese was in revolt.
Not everywhere, however, did the rebels have it all their own way. In Patras, the chief city and port, the rising in the last days of March met with serious opposition, the Turks barricading themselves in the citadel and firing their cannon down on the besiegers below. And within a few days there was further disappointment. Bishop Germanos–who not only held the see of Patras but was also the leading churchman and figurehead of the whole revolution–had appealed to all the Christian powers for support, and on 29 March received a reply from Sir Thomas Maitland in Corfu. Ionian subjects, wrote Maitland, were forbidden to involve themselves in the struggle on either side; were they to do so, they would instantly lose their government’s protection.
Then on Palm Sunday, 3 March, a Turkish force of several hundred men reached Patras under the command of a certain Yussuf Pasha. Yussuf had recently left the siege of Iannina to take up a new appointment as governor of Euboea; calling en route at Missolonghi (now Mesolongion), he had heard of the disturbances and had hurried at once to the city’s relief. He and his men entered Patras at dawn, surprising the Greek population in their beds. Most of them rose, panic-stricken, and fled for their lives, while Yussuf ordered the houses of all the leading citizens to be burned to the ground. With a strong scirocco blowing to fan the flames, some 700 buildings were destroyed. Meanwhile, the streets filled with rampaging Turks, all of them out for Greek blood. Of those Greeks who had stayed behind, forty were beheaded in the next few hours.
Patras was to remain a battleground until the end of the war, with Greeks and Turks alternately getting the upper hand but never so decisively as to bring the fighting to an end. Despite constant battering from the Greek guns, the Turks never lost control of the citadel, nor were they ever driven from the two other great castles, of Roumeli and the Morea, which face each other across the Gulf of Corinth at the point where the straits are at their narrowest. Without this invaluable bridgehead–for the Greeks were firmly ensconced at Corinth–the vast peninsula would have been impenetrable to them from the north, their seat of government at Tripolis dangerously isolated; with it, they were able to make life for the rebels difficult indeed.
There was no doubt now that the Peloponnese was to be the heart-land of the struggle. It was there that Kolokotronis–now officially archistrategos, commander-in-chief–won his first pitched battle, at Valtetsi only five miles from the seat of the Turkish government at Tripolis. The Turks lost some 700 killed or wounded, the Greeks perhaps 150. It was there too that the Greeks captured from the Turks their first great stronghold: Monemvasia in the southeast corner, whose immense outcrop of rock many had thought impregnable. In Roumeli, on the other hand–which is to say, all Greece to the north of the Gulf of Corinth–the occasional outbreaks of fighting were largely directed towards stopping the Turks from advancing southward. There was, for example, a significant Greek victory at Vasilika, the road running through a long and narrow pass, very similar to–and not far from–the pass of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas of Sparta and his army had perished in their heroic stand against the Persians twenty-three centuries before.222
The sea also saw its share of battles. The opposing forces were hopelessly unequal. Greek ships were essentially merchantmen, though they normally carried a number of guns to defend themselves from the pirates who still infested the eastern Mediterranean. The Turks, on the other hand, had a navy. This, on the face of it, should have made the whole concept of naval warfare between the two unequal in the extreme, but the Greeks had one immense advantage: they were seamen to their fingertips, while the Turks–originating as they had in landlocked Central Asia–were anything but. This meant that while the fighting men on board a Turkish warship were almost certainly Turks, for seamanship and navigation they tended to rely on Greeks–which, after the outbreak of the revolution, they were unable to do. Moreover, the smaller size of the Greek vessels made them faster and more manoeuvrable, just as were the victorious English ships that, two and a half centuries before, had sailed out against the Spanish Armada.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, to read that of the three separate Turkish naval expeditions despatched from Constantinople in 1821–with the dual purpose of reimposing Turkish control over the Greek islands in revolt and of bringing reinforcements and provisions to the Turkish garrisons around the Peloponnese–two were hopeless failures. The first retired after its second largest vessel was destroyed by a Greek fireship, the flames of which reached its powder magazine and blew the whole thing to smithereens with the loss of over 500 lives. The second, which was intended to subdue the island of Samos just off the Anatolian coast, was driven back having achieved nothing. Only the third succeeded, having sailed around the Peloponnese and into the Ionian Sea, where the British authorities still allowed the Turks to use the island harbours. Here it took on provisions at Zante and continued with an attack, by a largely Egyptian flotilla, on the port of Galaxidi on the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. Thirty-four Greek ships with thirty sailors were captured, the town burned to the ground. The fleet then returned to the Bosphorus by the way it had come, anchoring in the Golden Horn with the prize ships behind it, the bodies of the dead captives swinging from their yardarms.
As relations between Greek and Turk deteriorated, it was only to be expected that civilians as well as fighting men should suffer. There was an ugly incident at Smyrna (Izmir) in June 1821 when, in the course of an attack on the large Greek community, hundreds of men and women were slaughtered and raped, but the most notorious atrocity was perpetrated in Constantinople, and by order of Sultan Mahmoud II himself. Shortly after dawn on Easter Sunday, 22 April 1821, Patriarch Grigorios V–who, it must be emphasised, had never voiced the slightest support for the Greek revolt–was formally stripped of his rank, and at noon on the same day was hanged from the central doors of the Patriarchate. According to Robert Walsh, chaplain to the British Embassy, ‘his person, attenuated by abstinence and emaciated by age’–he seems to have been not far short of eighty–‘had not weight sufficient to cause immediate death. He continued for a long time in pain, which no friendly hand dared abridge, and the darkness of night came on before his last convulsions were over.’ A few hours later the Sultan is said to have come in person to see the body, which was left swinging for three days.
Nor was the old Patriarch the only victim. All over the Ottoman Empire Christian churches were attacked and burned, and many of the clergy–including no less than seven bishops–were executed. And yet, though the whole western world was shocked by the outrage, only Orthodox Russia lifted its voice in protest–the Austrian and British Foreign Ministers, Metternich and Castlereagh, who could always be trusted to oppose any movement of national liberation, easily overcoming the initial hesitancy of Prussia and France. The Tsar was accordingly obliged to act alone, but he did not mince his words. In an ultimatum drafted by Capodistria, he declared that:
the Ottoman government has placed itself in a state of open hostility against the Christian world. It has legitimised the defence of the Greeks, who will henceforth be fighting solely to save themselves from inevitable destruction. In view of the nature of that struggle, Russia will find herself strictly obliged to offer them help, because they are persecuted; pr
otection, because they need it; and assistance, jointly with the whole of Christendom, because she cannot surrender her brothers in religion to the mercy of blind fanaticism.
This was presented to the Turkish government on 18 July. On the 25th, having received no reply, the Russian ambassador, Count Stroganoff, broke off diplomatic relations with the Porte and closed his embassy.
Meanwhile, in the Peloponnese, Kolokotronis and his army were preparing to capture their greatest prize to date: Tripolis. Though garrisoned by some 10,000 men–including a body of 1,500 formidable Albanian mercenaries–the town seemed at first a comparatively easy target. Standing in the middle of an open plain, it could rely on no natural defences, merely a stone wall some fourteen feet high. Nor could it be provisioned from the sea. It was also known to be dangerously overcrowded, its civilian population of about 15,000 having been swelled by considerable numbers of local Turks for whom life in the surrounding countryside was no longer safe. In the Greek summer heat, it would be unlikely long to survive a siege.
By mid-July the Greek forces were drawn up to the north and west. Kolokotronis was in command, and there was a reserve force in waiting under Mavromichalis. Just as they were about to attack, there arrived an unexpected visitor: Dimitrios Ipsilantis, brother of the ill-fated Alexander. This alone would not have seemed much of a recommendation, even though the news of Alexander’s final débacle had not yet reached the Peloponnese. Physically, too, Dimitrios was more than usually unimpressive: less than five feet tall, skeletally thin and with a curious impediment in his speech. And yet there was something about him that inspired confidence. From the moment of his first appearance no one was in any doubt of his integrity, and when within a few days he offered to assume the leadership of a new Peloponnesian government, together with the supreme command of the armed forces, a surprising number of leading revolutionaries gave him their support. Among them was Kolokotronis himself, conscious as he was that the new Greece rapidly taking shape was much in need of an acknowledged head, and probably seeing Ipsilantis as an eminently suitable candidate whom he would have little difficulty in bending to his will. After some discussion it was agreed that the provisional government, the so-called Peloponnesian Senate, established only a month before, should continue in being, with Ipsilantis as its president and Commander-in-Chief.
The siege began, and went much as the Greeks had expected. Before long Tripolis was desperately short of food and water, and disease rapidly followed. At the end of August came the news that a Turkish relief force, advancing from the north via Thermopylae, had been successfully cut off by the Greeks, and a few days later the embattled Turks in the city signified their readiness to negotiate. They held a single card in their hands: a party of thirty-eight Greek hostages, captured with their servants at the beginning of the siege. All were being held in a single tiny cell, the masters shackled by one chain round their necks, the servants by another, both chains so tightly drawn that if any one man chose to sit down or stand up, the rest had to do the same. Perhaps it was this flagrant inhumanity that enraged the besiegers. With the promise of plunder in the air their numbers were now rapidly increasing, and their mood grew steadily more ugly as they began to discuss the division of the spoils.
Shortly before the expected surrender, Kolokotronis persuaded Ipsilantis to leave the camp. The excuse given was that the Turkish fleet had appeared off the west coast and that it was his duty to prevent its disembarkation. (In fact, the single two-pounder gun that he took with him would have had little effect on the Ottoman navy–which, as we know, proceeded unopposed to Galaxidi.) The real reason seems to have been that, as Kolokotronis well knew, the capture of Tripolis would end in an orgy of bloodshed. It would be better if the high-minded Ipsilantis were not there to witness it, or to risk–as head of the government–being held responsible.
Of course he was perfectly right. The peace talks were still in progress when the Greeks burst into Tripolis on 5 October, to find the unburied bodies of those who had died of hunger or disease lying scattered over the streets; within hours they had been covered by hundreds more, victims this time of a lust for indiscriminate slaughter. Nor did this occur only within the town; some 2,000 refugees, mostly women and children, who had left of their own free will on guarantee of safe conduct, were also massacred. Ipsilantis, returning a few days after the nightmare had ended, was appalled. It has been suggested that he should have stayed, using his influence to curb the frenzy of his countrymen; but that influence, never great, was already beginning to decline, and there is little in any case that he could have done. War, as we know, all too easily dehumanises those who engage in it; history is full of such horrors, and the sack of Tripolis was neither the first nor the worst of them. It is sad, nonetheless, that the often heroic story of Greek independence should be tarnished with so indelible a stain.
The Greeks were fighting for liberty and nationhood, but they were not yet a nation. The Peloponnesian Senate was all very well, but its members had not been elected–many, indeed, were self-appointed–and its writ, such as it was, was by its very definition confined to southern Greece. North of the Gulf of Corinth there were similar organisations in both East and West Roumeli–the latter, based on Missolonghi, being firmly under the control of Alexander Mavrogordatos, a highly sophisticated westerniser who spoke seven languages and had recently arrived from Pisa, where he had been a close friend of the poet Shelley and had given Mary Shelley lessons in Greek. The moment he heard of the revolt he had hurried to Greece, landing at Missolonghi in the middle of August, and from that moment on his was the dominant influence in the revolution.
What was now urgently needed was a supreme body which would unite these three bodies, together with several other smaller groups which had formed in individual cities and towns. With that objective, representatives of all the organisations met during the last weeks of the year in Piada, an insignificant little village some five miles away from the great classical theatre of Epidaurus. The Assembly of Epidaurus, as it was called, was to draft Greece’s first constitution. This first proclaimed the ‘political existence and independence’ of the Greek nation, adopting Greek Orthodoxy as the state religion; it went on to list the civil rights which would be guaranteed; finally, it laid down the essentials of the administrative machinery, with a five-man executive and a Senate. Mavrogordatos was elected president of the executive, effectively head of state; Ipsilantis, away besieging Corinth, was fobbed off with the presidency of the Senate, with Mavromichalis as his vice-president.
But it was one thing to proclaim independence and a constitution; it was quite another to bring these into active existence and to have them universally accepted. The delegates at Epidaurus had made one serious mistake: they had omitted to choose a capital. Perhaps, at so early a stage, such a decision might have seemed premature, but it meant in practice that when their deliberations were over they all returned to their individual seats of power, and that very little administrative work was done to make the national government a reality. Mavrogordatos himself, fully aware that the Turkish fleet was still lingering in the southern Adriatic, left immediately for Hydra and Spetsai–two of the three islands (the third was Psara in the Aegean) on which the revolutionary navy depended for its ships and crews, and whose support would be vitally necessary in the maritime struggle to come. He returned only in May 1822, when he went straight to Missolonghi to strengthen the town’s defences.
Thus it was that the Greek constitution, in the minds of Greeks and of foreigners alike, still partook to some degree of a dream. We may regret, but not perhaps be entirely surprised by, the reply given by Sir Thomas Maitland in Corfu to the new Greek government when it requested the return of an impounded ship:
His Excellency has just received letters from persons who give to themselves the name of the Government of Greece, by a messenger now in this port…
His Excellency is absolutely ignorant of the existence of a ‘provisionary government of Greece’, and therefore cannot
recognise such an agent…He will not enter into a correspondence with any nominal power which he does not know.
For the Greeks, the first year of their revolution had been a surprisingly successful one. The Greek uprising had by now caught the imagination of Europe. From England and France, from Germany and Spain, from Piedmont and Switzerland, even from Poland and Hungary, parties of young philhellenes–with recent memories of a good sound classical education to inspire them–were seizing any available ship that would take them to the scene of the struggle.
Alas, all too many of them were doomed. The year 1822 was a good deal less happy than its predecessor. Most of the foreign volunteers, speaking not a word of Greek and understandably alarmed by the obvious brigands by whom they found themselves surrounded, stuck together in battalions of their own; nearly all of these were mobilised in July, when Mavrogordatos ill-advisedly challenged the Turks to a pitched battle on the plain of Peta, just outside Arta. It was fought on the 16th, and the result was catastrophe. Among the dead were no less than sixty-seven of the philhellenes. Fewer than thirty survived–most of them seriously wounded–to make their way back to Missolonghi, where several more were to die, of their wounds or of disease, during the following winter. The dream was over.
The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean Page 61