Karaiskakis had, of course, been perfectly right. But if the plan was foolhardy, its execution was little short of shameful. Gordon commented afterwards:
As the Admiral had nothing to do with the motions of the troops when once ashore, and the General [Church], satisfied with having sketched a disposition, staid in his vessel till daylight, the captains, all on a footing of equality, acted independently, halting where they chose; so that the column was scattered over a space of four miles, the front within cannon-shot of Athens, the rear close to the sea, and the soldiers, unprovided with spades and pickaxes, dug the earth with their daggers, in order to cover themselves from the charge of horse.
Reshid attacked at dawn, with all too foreseeable results. The Greeks lost 1,500 men, more than on any single day since the beginning of the war. When, after a comfortable night’s rest, Cochrane and Church disembarked from their respective ships, it was to find the survivors, exhausted and terrified, dragging themselves back to the shore and clambering into the small boats in which they hoped to escape to safety. Church, in an attempt to restore his reputation, held out heroically with a handful of men at Phaleron for three more weeks, but by the end of the month heat and thirst had compelled him to surrender. The garrison on the Acropolis gave in a few days later.
Who was to blame? In one way or another, just about everyone: Cochrane for his overweening arrogance and refusal to listen to other, wiser men; Church for not standing up to him; both of them for staying on board their ships when they should have been with their men; the Greek captains for demonstrating once again their hopeless lack of discipline and inability to agree on a supreme commander. Their failure proved a tragedy, and it served them right.
Meanwhile, the question of European intervention dragged on, as ambassadors shuttled between London, Paris and St Petersburg. British interests were in the capable hands of the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, who in April 1827 succeeded Lord Liverpool as Prime Minister; it was largely through his efforts that the Treaty of London was signed by Britain, France and Russia on 6 July. By its terms Greece would enjoy autonomy, theoretically as a dependency of Turkey (in that she would pay an annual tribute) but effectively independent, as the three powers would recognise by establishing commercial relations with her. She and Turkey must conclude an armistice within a month–Canning later shortened this to a fortnight–after which, if they had failed to do so, the powers would intervene. For the Greeks this was good news indeed. Turkey, they knew, would reject any idea of an armistice, so intervention was virtually certain.
Events were to prove them right. Some months before, the Sultan had appointed Mohammed Ali titular supreme commander of all land and sea forces in Greece, Turkish as well as Egyptian; Mohammed Ali had thereupon raised a new army of nearly 15,000, and a new fleet consisting of three Turkish ships of the line, sixty smaller vessels–five of them French-built–forty transports and six fireships. All told, they carried some 3,500 guns. This was the force which dropped anchor on 7 September in the Bay of Navarino, where Ibrahim was waiting.
The three allied navies hastened to Navarino; but their respective admirals had strict orders not to go directly into battle. They were first to do everything in their power to ‘encourage’ all Turkish and Egyptian warships to return peaceably to Constantinople or Alexandria, though Canning made it clear that, if they persisted in remaining in Greece, the orders of the British admiral, Sir Edward Codrington, ‘were to be enforced, if necessary and when all other means are exhausted, by cannon shot’. Codrington–another veteran of Trafalgar, where he had commanded HMS Orion–had been appointed Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, the previous December. He was the first to reach Navarino, where he was joined by his French colleague, the Comte de Rigny, a few days later. The Russians having not yet arrived, on 25 September the two admirals, accompanied by a few of their senior officers and by Codrington’s son Henry, a midshipman on his father’s ship, had an interview with Ibrahim in his tent just outside the neighbouring town of Pylos.
The conversation, as recorded by Henry Codrington, was polite and cordial, accompanied by quantities of coffee and the smoking of enormous jewel-studded chibouks. It went very much as might have been imagined, with Codrington issuing his courteous warning and Ibrahim agreeing to take no action until he received new instructions from Alexandria and Constantinople. All the same it is a pity that no minutes were taken, for it soon became clear that the two sides had very different ideas of the conclusions. Ibrahim apparently believed that the Greeks as well as the Turks were bound by the temporary armistice; he also assumed that there would be no allied objection to his taking supplies and provisions to the Turkish garrison at Patras.
The Greeks for their part saw no reason to call a halt. They after all had accepted the terms of the Treaty of London; it was the Turks who had rejected them. Thus it was that in the last days of September, while Church was leading an expedition against Patras, Ibrahim sailed for the city with a fleet of no less than forty-eight ships–far more than could have been needed for a simple supply drop. But he never reached it: Codrington was there to block him, and ferocious equinoctial gales did the rest. Ibrahim then changed his tactics. The admirals might frustrate him by sea, but they were powerless to check him on land. Very well, he would continue with the devastation of the Peloponnese.
With the agreement of 25 September now little more than a dead letter, the three admirals–Codrington and de Rigny had now been joined by the Russian, the Dutch-born Rear-Admiral Count Heiden–decided on a show of strength. The ten French naval officers on board the Egyptian ships as advisers were summoned back at once, and in the late morning of 20 October Codrington–in his flagship, the Asia–led the three fleets, together numbering eleven ships of the line, eight large frigates and eight smaller vessels, through the narrow entrance to the Bay of Navarino.
Both sides were still under orders not to begin hostilities, but in so tense a situation it was impossible to tell whether any individual action was merely provocative or actually aggressive. Moreover, unlike the allied admirals, the Turkish and Egyptian commanders had agreed on no overall plan to guide them. Sooner or later, battle was inevitable. It began at about two o’clock in the afternoon, and continued until about six. Those four hours saw the last naval battle ever fought in which no steamship took part. More remarkable still was the fact that the ships were all lying at anchor, at close quarters in a small bay; they could manoeuvre only by swinging round on the anchor cables so that the guns along their broadsides could face their chosen target. Dr Howe unforgettably described the scene:
The Turkish ships, more than triple the number of their opponents, opened all their broadsides, and seconded by the batteries onshore, poured such tremendous volleys of shot as, if well directed, must have annihilated the Europeans, but the latter sent back, if a smaller, yet a far more destructive fire, for every gun was pointed, every shot told…The allies, sending out their boats, cut the cables of the Turkish fire-vessels, and setting fire to them, let them drive down upon their own fleet. In a few minutes several ships-of-war, taking fire, added to the horror of a scene already terrible; the two long lines of ships, from which roared nearly two thousand cannon; the blazing fire-ships, driving to and fro among the huge Turkish vessels, whose falling masts and shattered hulls began to show how the battle went; the sea covered with spars and half-burnt masses of wood to which clung thousands of sailors escaped from their exploded vessels; the lines of batteries upon the shore, which blazed away all the time, and were covered by the whole Turkish army most anxiously watching a scene upon which their own fate depended…But a contest could not be long where one side had only a vast superiority of force, directed by blind fury alone, against cool courage, discipline, and naval skill.
Strangely enough, the allied losses at Navarino were comparatively light: not a single ship was sunk, the casualties amounting to 174 killed and 475 wounded. For the Ottoman fleet, however, it was a very different story. From the start it had been a
t a disadvantage. Its supreme commander Ibrahim Pasha missed the whole engagement, being still away in the Peloponnese; the Egyptian admiral, Moharrem Bey, had no stomach for the fight and had left with the French officers before it began. There remained only the Turk, Tahir Pasha, whose flagship was sunk at an early stage of the battle. Of the eighty-nine fighting ships under his command, only twenty-nine survived. Codrington estimated that some 6,000 Turks and Egyptians were killed, and another 4,000 wounded.
The pendulum had swung dramatically. Little more than five months before, on 6 May, the Turkish recovery of Athens had seemed to sound a death-knell to Greek hopes; after Navarino, Greek independence was certain.
All was not quite over. Ibrahim’s troops–some 24,000 of them–remained in the devastated Peloponnese; it was not until September 1828 that they were finally embarked on Egyptian ships and returned to Alexandria. Fighting continued, too, beyond the Gulf of Corinth: the further the Greeks could advance to the north, the more territory they could claim for their new state. Church in the west and Dimitrios Ipsilantis in the east pushed steadily forward, the former as far as Arta, the latter to Thermopylae, opposite the northern tip of Euboea–although he was unable to dislodge the Turks from Athens itself.
Meanwhile, Capodistria had finally arrived to take up his presidency. He immediately antagonised the revolutionary captains by making no effort to conceal his contempt for the way in which they had failed to unite, endlessly bickering and squabbling amongst themselves while the fate of their country hung in the balance. But he worked sixteen hours a day to rebuild the country, and his immense reputation abroad had a decisive effect on the deliberations of the London Conference, which now had the task of drawing the boundaries of the new Greek state. In September 1828 the ambassadors to Constantinople of the three allied powers met on the island of Poros to consider this specific question, and three months later they announced their recommendation: a line running from Arta in the west to Volos in the east, with the inclusion of the islands of Euboea, Samos and possibly Crete.229 The only problem was Turkey, which refused outright to come to the negotiating table; this was finally resolved only by the Treaty of Adrianople, which ended a Russian–Turkish war in September 1829. By its terms the Turks finally agreed to abide by whatever future decisions on Greece might eventually be taken by the allies. Finally, on 3 February 1830 in London, Greece was declared an independent nation under the protection of Britain, France and Russia.
It was to be some years yet before peace returned. Capodistria was assassinated on 9 October 1831, and the country was plunged back into confusion. But in July 1832 the Turks gave their final approval to the Arta–Volos line–though not to the inclusion of Samos and Crete–and Greece became a sovereign state. Even then, however, its sovereignty was not absolute. The western powers had determined that it should be a monarchy, and had selected as its king the seventeen-year-old Prince Otto of Wittelsbach, son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. He arrived in Nauplia on the morning of 6 February 1833 and was given a tremendous welcome, cheered everywhere to the echo.
Greece’s long-cherished dream had finally become a reality–but her troubles were by no means over.
CHAPTER XXVI
Mohammed Ali and North Africa
The Ottoman Sultan Mahmoud II deserved better than he got. He was, in many ways, an enlightened ruler and reformer, who did everything within his power to modernise his creaking empire. In 1826 he had got rid of the janissaries–for five hundred years the empire’s crack military corps, but now becoming increasingly mutinous–by the simple expedient of massacring them wholesale. He established a new army, under his own direct control and trained by German instructors, with a military college modelled on Napoleon’s Saint-Cyr; he slashed the power of the religious ulema, depriving them of their secular responsibilities; he centralised and to some extent streamlined his civil service; he virtually introduced modern principles of education; he inaugurated a postal service and the first Turkish-language newspaper in Istanbul; he established a school of medicine and introduced new laws on public health. Finally–and perhaps rather sadly–he abolished the old Turkish dress. Away went the long robes and turbans, the billowing pantaloons and soft slippers. In came the fez, the frock coat, the European trousers and the black leather boots.
It was sad indeed for him that he had to preside over the loss of his navy, of southern Greece and of several other previously Ottoman territories–and then was still obliged to cope with that perennial thorn in his flesh, Mohammed Ali in Cairo. As a reward for his intervention in the Peloponnese, Mohammed Ali had expected the pashalik of Syria; Mahmoud, however, had fobbed him off with Crete, which his viceroy considered shamefully inadequate. In the spring of 1832 Mohammed Ali therefore sent his son Ibrahim with an army to Syria, instructing him to occupy it by force. Ibrahim obeyed him to the letter. Gaza fell, and Jerusalem, and–after a short siege–Acre; Ibrahim then swept north to Damascus and Aleppo, whence he led his army through Anatolia until he was threatening Istanbul itself.
With his capital now in a state not far short of panic, the Sultan sent an urgent plea to London for aid. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, however, was not interested; Mahmoud had no choice but to call upon his old enemy Russia. Tsar Nicholas, ever ready to meddle in Turkish affairs, asked nothing better; early in 1833 he landed 18,000 troops at Scutari, directly across the Bosphorus from Istanbul. Against such a force Ibrahim knew that he had no chance; sensibly enough, he decided to negotiate. By this time Palmerston had woken up to the seriousness of the situation, as had the French government; together they prevailed upon the Porte to insist on the Russians’ withdrawal, in return for certain major concessions. Mohammed Ali was confirmed in the pashaliks of Egypt and of Crete, and was now in addition presented with that of Syria, which included Damascus, Tripoli, Aleppo and Adana. Simultaneously but in a separate treaty, Mahmoud confirmed an offensive and defensive agreement with Russia, a secret clause of which gave Russian warships the right to pass freely through the straits from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean–a privilege denied to all other foreign powers without Turkish consent.230
The Sultan had successfully averted both the Russian and the Egyptian threats, but he had paid a heavy price. With the whole of the southeastern Mediterranean under his control, Mohammed Ali was now a serious rival, and although Syria had been specifically awarded to him for his lifetime only, Mahmoud was well aware that he had every intention of turning his possessions into what would effectively be an independent hereditary monarchy. Five years later he was proved right, when in 1838 Mohammed Ali refused to pay his annual tribute to the Porte. The Sultan seized his opportunity and the following year declared war, sending an army of 24,000 and a supporting fleet to Syria with explicit orders to drive out the Egyptians once and for all.
The result, from his point of view, was catastrophic. On 24 June Ibrahim’s army, though heavily outnumbered, routed Mahmoud’s forces at Nezib in northern Syria. Thanks to generous Egyptian bribes vast numbers of Turkish troops deserted, while the commander of the fleet–presumably for much the same reason–sailed it straight to Alexandria; and on 1 July 1839, the very day that Sultan Mahmoud died in Istanbul, handed it over to Mohammed Ali. The French, who believed their own best interests to lie with Egypt, declined to take any action, but the other powers were horrified. On 15 July 1840 a conference in London, presided over by Palmerston himself and including both Austria and Prussia, presented Mohammed Ali with an ultimatum. He must withdraw all his troops from northern Syria and Crete and return the Turkish fleet to Istanbul. If he did so, he would be recognised as hereditary Pasha of Egypt, and Pasha of southern Syria for his lifetime; if he refused, the British and Russian fleets would together put both Egypt and Syria under a blockade.
In the hopes of receiving substantial aid from France–which, it need hardly be said, was not ultimately forthcoming–Mohammed Ali refused, and the British at least were as good as their word. That autumn a British squadron under Captai
n Charles Napier bombarded the forts of both Beirut and Acre and destroyed them; it even landed an expeditionary force, also commanded by Napier, which with the help of the local Arabs–who had greatly suffered under Mohammed Ali’s regime–easily defeated the Egyptian army of occupation at the battle of Boharsef (one of the Royal Navy’s most unlikely victories). The French, furious at what they denounced as unprovoked aggression, threatened war but were not taken very seriously; as King Louis-Philippe himself was later to point out, there was all the difference in the world between threatening war and making it. Napier then sailed on to Alexandria, which would surely have suffered the same fate as the two Syrian ports if Mohammed Ali had not agreed to negotiate. He hastily returned the Turkish fleet to Istanbul and resumed his annual tribute to the Sultan, withdrawing altogether from Syria and Crete.
The old ruffian lived on until 1849, dying at the age of eighty. He continued to rule as hereditary Pasha of Egypt and Sudan, but always under Ottoman suzerainty. And he made no further attempts at territorial expansion. He was a man of high intelligence and, we are told, great personal charm. He was also energetic and efficient: his rule in Egypt certainly marked a dramatic improvement on what had gone before. But he was uneducated and possessed no real political vision or ideology. He governed by Ottoman principles and, though he went some way towards creating a new and more forward-looking society, much of his time was spent consolidating his own position and resisting repeated attempts by sultan after sultan to get rid of him. In this he was remarkably successful. The dynasty that he established was to last well over a hundred years, until the middle of the twentieth century, and if he missed his opportunity of laying the foundations of a modern Egyptian state, he at least cleared the way for his successors. If they too failed, the blame for their failure can hardly attributed to him.
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