The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  Yet the disaster at Peta was as nothing compared with the tragedy which was simultaneously being enacted 150 miles to the east, on the island of Chios. Of all the isles of Greece, Chios had been, until the revolution, the richest and the happiest. Unlike many of its neighbours it was enviably fertile and, after many centuries of Italian occupation, quite exceptionally sophisticated, boasting a number of great merchant families–including the Mavrogordatos–whose names were well-known throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Thanks to its wealth and its influence–twenty-two of its villages, producers of the mastic gum so much in demand at Constantinople, were the property of the Sultan’s sister–the Ottoman yoke was light. Left to themselves, the people of this blessed island would never have dreamed of rebelling; indeed, when in May 1821 a fleet from Hydra arrived with an invitation to join the revolution, they categorically refused. It was only in the following year–when another fleet, this time from the neighbouring island of Samos, unceremoniously landed 1,500 troops and a good deal of heavy artillery on their shores–that they found themselves swept up into a nightmare.

  It was the Samians, not the Chiots, who were responsible for the attack on the Turkish-held citadel of Chora, the island’s principal town. It was they who burned down the customs house and stripped the lead from the roofs of the mosques to melt down into bullets. But it was the Chiots who suffered. Eighty of their most prominent citizens were taken prisoner, three of them sent as hostages to Constantinople. On 11 April 1822 an Ottoman fleet arrived under the admiral Kara Ali. Some 15,000 Anatolian toughs were landed and deliberately left to their own devices. The Samians fled, and the massacre began. It was Tripolis all over again, but this time the Turks were the butchers, the Greeks the victims. Not a man, woman or child in Chora was left alive, and the rest of the island was scarcely safer. Two thousand terrified refugees huddled in the great monastery of Nea Monì, famous throughout the Byzantine world for its glorious mosaics; all were put to the sword. Another monastery, Agios Minas, gave shelter to another 3,000; on Easter Sunday, 14 April, it was burned to the ground with everyone within it. A month later forty-nine of the eighty hostages were publicly hanged, eight from the yardarms of the Turkish flagship, the remainder on the trees lining the road which is still known as the Street of the Martyrs.

  The Greeks scored one victory. On the night of 18 June they sent fireships against the Turkish fleet lying outside Chora, targeting in particular the flagship of Kara Ali himself. The operation was wholly successful: within minutes of the strike, the flagship was in flames. Kara Ali tried to escape in a lifeboat, but was hit on the head by a falling spar and died the next day. Turkish casualties are said to have numbered over 2,000. But by now those Chiots left alive hardly cared. They had lost some 70,000 of their compatriots: 25,000 dead and another 45,000–nearly half the original population–carried off into slavery.

  The celebrated painting by Delacroix–bastard son of Talleyrand–of the Massacres of Chios223 is only one indication of the wave of revulsion and horror which swept through western Europe as the news of the atrocity spread. The Turks were not quickly forgiven.

  Elsewhere, there was better news for the Greeks. The most dramatic of their successes–though not, perhaps, the most strategically important–was their capture of the Acropolis of Athens. Apart from this majestic elevation, the city would have been unrecognisable to anyone who had known it in the days of Pericles, still less to anyone who knows it today. Its population was no more than 10,000, at least half of whom were Albanians; Greeks and Turks together made up the rest. Already in the summer of 1821 the Greeks had begun a blockade of the Turkish garrison on the Acropolis, but they made little headway until the end of the year, when they managed to seize the well just outside the walls to the south, which they promptly poisoned. This left the garrison entirely dependent on rainwater, and it chanced that that winter and the spring of 1822 were among the driest in living memory. Every attempt to take the great rock by storm failed, but it hardly mattered; thirst, and the disease which it brought in its train, proved far more effective. On 22 June what was left of the garrison–it numbered some 1,150–surrendered.

  It did so on honourable terms–safe conduct and passage home at Greek expense–but although the Greek captains swore an oath before the archbishop to respect them, the Greek population of Athens felt differently. The fate of Chios, only a few weeks before, was fresh in their minds; they remembered too the so-called ‘Greek hunts’ of the previous year, when the Turkish leader Omer Vrionis had led out mounted parties of some fifty to a hundred in search of Greek peasants and then, having given them a few minutes’ start, pursued them at the gallop, firing at them as they ran and beheading them when they were caught. In consequence, they did not feel merciful. By the middle of July at least half the garrison had been massacred, and the remainder were lucky indeed to escape with their lives.

  Just a fortnight after the surrender of the Acropolis garrison, a Turkish army left Lamia–opposite the northern end of the island of Euboea–and marched south, first to recover the citadel of Acrocorinth, high above Corinth town, captured by the Greeks some months before, and then to relieve its beleaguered comrades who were being besieged at Nauplia. It was a huge force; the death of Ali Pasha had released several thousand men from Iannina, who had swelled the ranks to what may have been well over 20,000–many times the number of the Greeks against whom it was sent. Its leader was a certain Mahmoud who, being Pasha of Drama some miles east of Thessalonica, was commonly known as Dramali.

  For the first few weeks Dramali carried all before him. After the surrender of Acrocorinth he headed south towards Nauplia, where an armistice had been declared to facilitate the negotiations for the coming surrender of the Turkish garrison. The first Greek national government had hastily moved from Corinth a week or two before and settled in Argos, just ten miles or so inland. It now fled a second time, in the Greek ships which were waiting at Nauplia to carry away the Turks, and its reputation never recovered. The Greek military captains, on the other hand, showed no lack of courage. They poured men into the citadel of Argos, and were joined there by Dimitrios Ipsilantis and soon afterwards by Kolokotronis himself, who had been appointed by the Peloponnesian Senate to the supreme command. Dramali, he knew, would now march on the former Turkish headquarters at Tripolis; his own plan, therefore, would be to block the way forward and then, by sending smaller bodies of troops into the narrow mountain passes between Argos and Corinth, to cut off the retreat.

  After so promising a start, Dramali had lost his momentum. In the heat and desiccation of the Greek summer, he was having difficulty in feeding–and above all in watering–his men. Meanwhile, Ipsilantis was holding out in Argos, while in Nauplia the negotiations had broken down and the Turkish garrison in the citadel was once again under siege. There was nothing for it but to return to Corinth; unfortunately, as Dramali now realised, he had omitted to post guards on the passes and ravines through which he would have to march. Kolokotronis’s plan worked perfectly. As the Turkish advance guard entered the narrow valley of the Dervenakia on 6 August, the Greeks opened fire from the rocks above; the result was another massacre, and when two days later Dramali himself took a different route, it was the same story. Thanks to his bodyguard, he himself got through to safety, but he lost his sword and his turban–and his self-respect.

  Still more satisfactory for the Greeks than the number of the enemy dead and wounded, estimated at about 2,000, was the plunder: virtually the whole of the Turkish baggage train, with 400 horses, 1,300 beasts of burden and several hundred camels. In December the Turkish garrison at Nauplia finally gave in, and the survivors of the expedition who had made it back to Corinth were almost cut off; their only chance was to head west to Patras, which was still in Turkish hands. The thousand-odd sick and wounded were sent by sea; the 3,500 who had escaped unharmed set off on foot. About half-way along the southern shore, however, where the road narrows to cross the river Krathis, the Greeks suddenly struck, cutting them o
ff both in front and behind. For six weeks they held out, first eating their horses and finally, we are told, resorting to cannibalism. Only the following March did a Turkish flotilla from Patras succeed in rescuing the 2,000 survivors, many of them more dead than alive.

  The abject failure of the largest Turkish force seen in Greece for well over a century to make any impact on the revolution put new heart into the Greeks, but although their military successes had been impressive, the movement itself was becoming dangerously fissile. The Assembly of Epidaurus had been intended to last for only a year; its successor, which met in April 1823 near Astros–on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, some twenty miles south of Nauplia–with 260 delegates, was more than four times the size and infinitely more chaotic.

  Already the insurgents were split down the middle: on the one hand, the politicians surrounding Mavrogordatos; on the other, the warriors led by Kolokotronis. And there were territorial divisions too: the inhabitants of the Peloponnese, of Roumeli and Epirus, and of the islands had little love for each other and resented it bitterly if their rivals received what they considered preferential treatment. Every time an important appointment was made to a senior post, it would be challenged; in the ensuing discussion pistols were fondled and tempers flared. On one occasion an infuriated Kolokotronis went so far as to threaten the whole new assembly, being pacified only when he was offered a place on the executive committee; even then, among his friends and enemies alike, jealousies and deep indignation continued to smoulder.

  Such, briefly, was the situation when on 3 August 1823 George Gordon, Lord Byron, landed in Cephalonia. Byron was no stranger to Greece; he had been there fifteen years before, in 1809–10, when he had visited Ali Pasha in Iannina. On this occasion he was greeted by the British Resident, who promised him all possible assistance provided only that it did not compromise the British policy of strict neutrality between the two sides. His first problem was to discover exactly what was happening. The British could tell him virtually nothing, so he hired a small boat in which to slip through the Turkish blockade with a letter to Marcos Botsaris, who had been described to him as ‘one of the bravest and most honest of the Greek captains’. Botsaris replied at once, inviting Byron to join him and adding that he was going into battle the next day.

  Byron would certainly have accepted the invitation; it was a disappointment to him that the news of the captain’s death came before he was able to start out. He therefore remained in Cephalonia, moving into a small villa in the village of Metaxata. There he spent the entire autumn, defending himself as best he could against a deluge of appeals for money and support. The young George Finlay–a passionate philhellene who was later to write a definitive history of the Greek Revolution–wrote:

  Kolokotrones invited him to a national assembly at Salamis. Mavrocordatos informed him that he would be of no use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordatos was then in that island. Constantine Metaxa, who was governor of Mesolonghi, wrote, saying that Greece would be ruined unless Lord Byron visited that fortress. Petrobey used plainer words. He informed Lord Byron that the true way to save Greece was to lend him, the bey, a thousand pounds…

  The rebels, it was all too clear, did not speak with a single voice. Matters reached their peak in December, when Kolokotronis’s son Panos burst into the Senate while it was in session at Argos, physically driving the senators from the building, following them home and wrecking their houses. All attempts to heal the rift failed, and by the beginning of 1824 Greece had effectively two rival governments, one based at Kranidi in Argos, the other–backed by the Kolokotronis clan–at Tripolis.

  By this time, however, Byron had finally acted. The proximity of their fleet in the Ionian Sea strongly suggested that the Turks would return to the attack. On 13 November, therefore, Byron had undertaken to lend the Greek government–such as it was–£4,000, with the specific purpose of funding a squadron from Hydra and Spetsai to patrol the waters off the coast. That squadron reached Missolonghi in mid-December, carrying with it Mavrogordatos, who had been entrusted with the town’s defence; and four days after Christmas Byron sailed from Cephalonia to join him, with his Newfoundland dog Lyon, his valet, William Fletcher, and his page, a good-looking fifteen-year-old from the Peloponnese called Loukas Chalandritsanos.

  It was a dangerous journey, for the Turkish fleet was out in force: there was one particularly unpleasant moment when, in the early hours of 31 December, they encountered a huge Turkish vessel bearing down upon them. The captain turned their own ship round and they were able finally to outdistance it, but Byron soon afterwards put Chalandritsanos ashore with instructions to find his way to Missolonghi by land. As he wrote to Colonel Stanhope, the agent in Greece of the London Greek Committee:

  I am uneasy at being here: not so much on my own account as on that of a Greek boy with me, for you know what his fate would be; and I would sooner cut him in pieces, and myself too, than have him taken out by those barbarians.

  At noon on 4 January 1824 they entered the port of Missolonghi. Byron remained on board until the following morning when, at eleven o’clock and in full military uniform designed by himself, he made his formal entry into the town. An eye-witness remembered:

  Crowds of soldiery, and citizens of every rank, sex, and age were assembled on the shore to testify to their delight. Hope and content were pictured in every countenance. His Lordship landed in a Speziot boat, dressed in a red uniform. He was in excellent health, and appeared moved by the scene.

  It was, perhaps, the most glorious moment of Byron’s visit to Greece–for the story of his last three months makes depressing reading. He achieved none of his declared objectives. The idea that he should personally lead an expedition against Naupactos (Lepanto) came to nothing; a plan for a meeting of the Greek leaders at Salona also failed to materialise. The vast quantities of money that he spent–as well as the £4,000 in November and the living costs for his considerable retinue, he advanced another £2,000 to a perfectly useless regiment of Souliot troops,224 made a personal loan of £550 to Mavrogordatos and paid £800 to support a drunken though entertaining adventurer named William Parry–did nothing to advance the Greek cause. The house in which he lived, almost devoid of furniture, looked out on to the featureless lagoon, muddy and malarial. The winter rain poured down every day; he would return from his daily rides chilled to the bone. It was no wonder that his health began to suffer.

  The first seizure occurred on 9 April. He was attended by a Dr Julius van Millingen, then serving as a surgeon with the Greeks,225 who weakened him still further by daily or even twice-daily bloodletting; meanwhile, just about every drug known to Greek science was forced down his throat. His constitution, already wrecked by years of drinking and dissipation–he looked nearer fifty than his true age of thirty-six–could no longer stand the strain. He died at six o’clock on the evening of Easter Monday, 19 April. What precisely caused his death remains a mystery: malaria, typhoid, uraemia, syphilis and stroke have all been suggested. Byron had never expected to return from Greece and had no fear of death, but his hope had been to die in battle, fighting for the independence of a land he loved, not–as he himself put it a few days before his death–‘slowly expiring on a bed of torture’.

  Still, he did not die in vain. He cast the international spotlight on the Greek struggle as no one else could have done. Thanks to him, all Europe embraced the cause; countless young men were to follow in his tracks in search of death or glory. Greece, we may be sure, would have won her freedom even if he had never existed, just as Serbia had already done, and as her two other neighbours Romania and Bulgaria were later to do; but she would have done so, as they did, without that element of romance which only Byron could instil. The first two decades of the nineteenth century, it must not be forgotten, saw the beginning of the Romantic movement. The Greek War of Independence was anything but romantic; heroism was there, to be sure, but so too were cruelty, brutality and barbarism on a scale scarcely seen for centuries. Yet somehow th
at war epitomised all that Romanticism stood for. The West consequently looks back on it with admiration, the Greeks remember it with pride–and among them the name of Byron is not forgotten.

  Already by the beginning of 1824, Greece was effectively in a state of civil war. In certain areas in the east of the country and elsewhere in the Mediterranean the Turks remained a force to be reckoned with, but in the Peloponnese and southern Roumeli Greeks were fighting Greeks. By the time Byron died in April the government forces had regained Argos, together with Tripolis and Corinth, while the Kolokotronis clan and their followers still held Nauplia. By midsummer Nauplia too had been surrendered, and the Senate and administration moved in. This did not mark a permanent end to the hostilities, but it afforded a breathing space, during which the Greek government saw the arrival of £80,000, the first two instalments of a loan of nearly £500,000 subscribed in London. Much of this was, predictably enough, to go to waste or to find its way into the wrong pockets; nonetheless, it left the government immeasurably strengthened.

  Infighting broke out for the second time towards the end of October, when the citizens of Arcadia (now Kiparissa, in the southwestern Peloponnese) rose up in protest against what they considered disproportionate levies by the government. A force of 500 was sent down to restore order, under the command of a captain named Makriyannis. They would have had little difficulty in suppressing the revolt had the rebels not been joined by Theodore and Panos Kolokotronis, who brought with him a substantial number of disaffected troops from the continuing siege of Patras. Makriyannis could only return to Nauplia, whereat the rebels, much encouraged, marched on Tripolis, which had been largely garrisoned by forces from Roumeli. Immediately the fighting took on a territorial aspect, and in one particularly violent encounter Panos Kolokotronis was killed.