by David Brewer
Three Russian fleets were intended to sail from the Baltic to the Aegean to support the Greeks, but only the first played any part in the rising. The second fleet arrived off the Peloponnese when the fighting was virtually over, and the third did not even sail from the Baltic until after the Russians had abandoned Greece.
The first fleet left Russia at the end of July 1769, but was struck by accumulating disasters. Many of the sailors were raw recruits from mainland Russia who had never seen the sea before; many of them fell ill and some died on the voyage. The ships were old and constantly damaged by storms, and had to stop in England for repairs. It was not until late January 1770 that the fleet, by now reduced from nineteen to nine ships, assembled at the Minorca harbour of Mahon. There Theodore Orlov joined them from Livorno and was keen to press on at once, so with a few ships he led the way and reached Ítilo in the Mani on 28 February, to be greeted by a whole day of celebratory Greek gunfire. On the next day the rest of the fleet arrived.
The euphoria that attended the arrival of the Russians did not last long. The number of Russian troops, 600 at the most, was far lower than the Greeks had expected. Only Theodore Orlov had arrived in Greece, while his brother Alexis, overall commander of the expedition, stayed in Livorno, where he was to remain for many weeks longer. The Greek fighters were required to take an oath of allegiance to Catherine, and were put under the command of Russian officers. The Greeks were also given Russian uniforms to wear, and however galling this was to the Greeks it was initially effective. The Turks of the Mani fled at the sight of them with a cry of ‘They’re not Greeks, they’re Russians,’ but only a few weeks later the Turks besieged in Pátras spotted the deception and said scathingly ‘Show us one real Russian and we’ll open the gates.’4
Despite their disagreements the Russians and the Greeks had some early successes. Two legions were formed, both with Greek captains but under the command of a Russian officer. The Eastern Legion, formed of 1,200 Greeks and 20 Russians, moved to besiege Mistrás, which contained few Turkish troops but a large number of non-combatant local Turks. The siege began at dawn on 10 March 1770 and the town’s outnumbered defenders surrendered nine days later. An appalling orgy of slaughter followed, much of it due to the uncontrolled bands from the Mani who followed the legion in the hope of plunder, and would fire on Russian troops in pursuit of it. The metropolitan bishop, in full episcopal robes and accompanied by his clergy, went out in an attempt to control the Mani bands, and the Russian commander tried to restrain them, sending Turks to Christian households for protection, but soon gave up. Probably 1,000 Turks were killed and another 1,000 taken captive, while many more fled. This episode worked against future Russian and Greek successes, since any Turkish garrison would resist to the last to avoid such a fate. Also the success at Mistrás was not followed up: eighteen days were lost in plundering and making dilatory repairs to the town’s defensive walls.
Only one significant development followed the fall of Mistrás: a provisional Greek government was set up, under the leading Greek captain of the Eastern Legion, Antónios Psarós. Its two main aims were first to recruit more Greeks to the cause, in which it was successful to the tune of some 8,000 men, and second to control them, which it was wholly unable to do. But short-lived and ineffective as this provisional government was, it was the first recognition by the Greeks that the overthrow of Turkish rule would require a political structure as well as battlefield success, something well understood by the Greeks of the war of independence.
The other legion, the Western, was smaller, composed of 200 Greeks and 12 Russians. Its main task was to join the Russian ships in besieging Koróni. This fortress is on a commanding rocky height at the far south-western tip of the Peloponnese, and the Russians saw the harbour below it as a suitable base for their fleet. This Western Legion left Ítilo on 9 March, and in the course of their march to Koróni drove the Turks from the towns of Andhroúsa and Leondári, killing, it was said, Greeks as well as Turks in the process. By 12 March both the Russian fleet and the Western Legion were in position under the walls of Koróni and the siege began, personally commanded by Theodore Orlov.
However, all attempts by the attackers failed. Bombardment from the ships was ineffective, a mine intended to bring down part of the wall was put out of action by a Turkish counter-mine, and the Turks refused a demand to surrender. The Russians were already coming to see that Navarino, with its fine harbour in an enclosed bay, would be a better base for their fleet than Koróni, but the Mani troops insisted that the fortress could still be taken. So the Russian and Greek forces remained for six weeks under the walls of Koróni, achieving nothing.
The Koróni siege was a failure but the Orlov venture in its first weeks was successful elsewhere. The Eastern Legion had taken Mistrás, Greeks rose in revolt in Corinth, besieged Navplion, shut up the Turks in the citadel at Monemvasía and took Kiparissía in three days with the slaughter of 1,000 Turks. Volunteers from the Ionian islands were brought into the north-west Peloponnese on Russian transports, 2,000 from Zákinthos and 3,000 from Kephaloniá, in defiance of their Venetian masters. They drove the Turks from Gastoúni and besieged Pátras, though with no more success than at Koróni. Further north there were risings in the towns around Mesolongi and Návpaktos, and in distant Crete there was a sympathetic revolt in the always lawless region of Sphakiá.
At the beginning of April Theodore Orlov sent to Catherine an exaggerated report of his victories. He gave little credit to the Greeks, saying that they were deceitful flatterers, reckless but cowardly, interested only in plunder and with no trace of Christian virtue. But he claimed that apart from Tripolis, Corinth and Pátras he was master of the whole Peloponnese and only needed more Russian troops to complete his conquest.
Now, however, the tide turned. The Turks had been completely unprepared for the rising, and could not believe that Russian warships would sail all the way from the Baltic to the eastern Mediterranean. Their own troops were fully engaged against the Russians on other fronts, so their solution was to bring in Albanian mercenaries. In early April 1770 one Albanian band crossed the Corinth isthmus and relieved the siege of Corinth, and another, of 500 foot soldiers and 500 cavalry, crossed the narrow channel near Mesolongi and drove off the besiegers of Pátras. From there they moved on to reinforce the garrison of Tripolis, which was now under siege by the Russians and Greeks of the Eastern Legion who were ranged on the hills overlooking the town.
The Turks and Albanians of Tripolis were not content to defend but attacked, and at the first onslaught the Greeks threw away their weapons and fled. They had come for plunder, even bringing sacks in which to carry it away; now they were cut down by the pursuing horsemen. Though the Russians stood firm they were soon overwhelmed. The Albanians then turned on the Greek inhabitants of Tripolis. The metropolitan bishop and five of his clergy met a horrible death by impalement, and it is claimed that within a few hours around 3,000 Greeks were slaughtered.
Before the Albanians could reach the far south of the Peloponnese the Russians achieved one last military success: the capture of Navarino, which had become the preferred base for their fleet. A few days later, on 22 April 1770, Alexis Orlov, the commander-in-chief of the expedition, finally reached the Peloponnese, nearly eight weeks after the arrival of his younger brother Theodore and the first Russian troops. Alexis immediately ordered the fruitless siege of Koróni to be abandoned, leaving the local Greeks to the revenge of the Turks. For most of the Greeks of Koróni the only escape was to make the twenty-mile journey to the protection of Navarino, on foot and carrying their belongings with them.
Alexis’ first priority was to win back the support of the Greeks after the catastrophe at Tripolis and the ignominious withdrawal from Koróni. Accordingly he sent letters to the leading Greek captains, urging cooperation and promising rewards for victory from Catherine’s abundant treasury. He also issued a general appeal to the Greeks at a symbolic ceremony in Navarino celebrating the conversion of a Turkish mosq
ue to a Christian church. The appeal spoke to the Greeks as if they were a united body, which was far from the case, and was framed in religious terms, being addressed to ‘all orthodox Christian Greeks who are subject to the tyranny of the Turks’, and proclaiming that ‘all the world knows how our fellow Christians are tormented by the infidel Turks.’ It claimed that the Russians in the present war had annihilated 600,000 Turks. It also promised that the Russians would do everything necessary to support the Greeks, and that Catherine wished the Greeks ‘to remain always under her care and protection’.5 This last statement may have been counterproductive, reviving fears that liberation from the Turks might lead only to subservience to Russia.
But it was too late now to make up for the mistakes already made: the dilatoriness in pressing home advantages, the waste of time on fruitless ventures, the lack of coordination of the Russian efforts, the delayed arrival of the overall Russian commander Alexis Orlov and the failure to develop the Greeks into a fighting force. Alexis Orlov attempted one last initiative, the capture of Methóni, the massive fortress a few miles south of Navarino, but on 28 May, after an eighteen-day siege, this too ended in disaster, with 150 Russians killed and 200, including Theodore Orlov, wounded. As the Turks and Albanians moved south to reimpose control, the Mani bands put up a brave resistance in several fierce battles, but the dream of liberating Greece from the Turks was by now over.
At this point Alexis Orlov took the decision to pull out of Greece, abandoning the last Russian foothold at Navarino. Only days before the Methóni disaster the second Russian fleet had at last arrived and was stationed off Navplion, but Alexis was not prepared to wait for possible Russian success in a possible naval battle. Greeks from far afield flocked to Navarino, fearing Turkish retribution and hoping for asylum and possibly escape on Russian ships. But Alexis soon closed the town gates against the flood of refugees, who shouted angrily ‘You promised us freedom, but all we ask is shelter.’6 Many got across to Sphaktiría, the barren waterless island in Navarino bay, where it is said that four to five thousand gathered.
On 6 June the Russians left, setting fire to the town as they went. They did take with them some hundreds of Greeks, including a number of the military leaders and six of the archbishops. But they left behind them the town of Navarino in flames and a crowd of Greeks on the shore, desperate for an escape that there were now no ships to provide. It was a disaster for which the Russians blamed the Greeks. In a scathing denunciation of them, Catherine wrote to Alexis Orlov: ‘Since the Greeks followed so poorly the Russian example of courage, and from their own cowardice, disloyalty and deceit showed no willingness to free themselves from their yoke, you were wholly sensible and right to leave them to their fate.’7 The Greeks for their part felt betrayed by the Russians. As a contemporary ballad put it,
The Russian came and lit for us a flame on every mountain,
But only to extinguish it in blood and lamentation.8
For the Greeks of the Peloponnese, the fate to which Alexis Orlov left them was indeed a terrible one – though not primarily at the hands of the Turks. Within days of the Russian departure the Turkish governor in Tripolis issued a general amnesty: ‘Any of you that throw yourself on the mercy and benevolence of our great Sultan, and proclaim your submission, shall receive pardon. If you do that, you shall be free.’9 It was the Albanian mercenaries who brought devastation to the Peloponnese for the next nine years. They claimed, perhaps with justification, that they were not being paid and therefore had to plunder instead, and it was believed that the Turks had agreed to this pernicious substitution.
From their base in Tripolis the Albanians spread out to pillage virtually the whole Peloponnese. As one chronicle recorded, ‘The Albanians came not as men but like a wild beast or a fire or a river, and the mind of man cannot calculate the amount of bloodshed and enslavement which they inflicted on the wretched Christians of the Morea.’10 Enslavement was indeed on a massive scale, the ban on enslaving subjects of the Sultan seemingly ignored, and by one reckoning 20,000 Greeks were seized in the nine years of Albanian devastation, to be sold as slaves in the Algerian markets or to Turks elsewhere in Greece. Many Greeks of the Peloponnese fled, to the Ionian islands, to Italy and elsewhere in Europe, and to Russia, especially the Crimea and the newly established town of Odessa, where they received some help from Catherine’s government. It is estimated that some 50,000 Greeks of the Peloponnese left for good, about a sixth of the pre-revolt population.
The Albanian reign of terror brought about some unlikely alignments. The Turkish commander of Koróni hired one band of Albanians to fight off their fellow countrymen. The richest Turk in Corinth recruited and armed Greek klephts to resist the Albanians who were threatening to burn down his property; the leader of these klephts was Konstantínos Kolokotrónis, whose son Theódhoros was to play a leading part in the war of independence.
Eventually the Turkish government moved decisively to restore order in the Peloponnese. In 1779 the kapitan pasha, head of the Turkish navy, sailed from Constantinople and landed with 2,000 men near Corinth. He immediately set about securing the cooperation of the Greeks against the Albanians and his instructions to the Greeks were brutally clear: ‘We order you to kill these Albanian blackguards (zorbádhes) without fear. All their possessions are yours. Just bring us their heads. Whatever you do is condoned. Give no quarter.’11 He even issued Turkish uniforms to the Greeks. The final showdown came in July 1779 at the Albanians’ base of Tripolis, where they were surrounded and cut down as they tried to escape. At the eastern gate of Tripolis a pyramid of Albanian heads was set up, held together by mortar, and it was still there 30 years later, an enduring monument to a dreadful decade.
There remained a final task for the kapitan pasha in restoring Turkish control of the Peloponnese. Not all the Greek klephts had agreed to cooperate with the Turks, and foremost among the dissidents was Konstantínos Kolokótronis. He was ready, as we have seen, to enter the service of an individual Turk, but to throw in his lot with the Turkish governing power was a different matter. His stance was widely approved by the Greeks: as a popular song had it,
The sun shines on the mountainside, it shines upon the valleys,
So shines the noble klephtic band that’s led by Kolokotrónis.12
A year later Kolokotrónis and his companions paid the price for their intransigence, in much the same way as the Albanians had done, being besieged in the village of Kastanítsa some 25 miles south of Navplion, and killed as they fled. Among the dead was Kolokotrónis.
The Orlov revolt and its aftermath can be seen as an unmitigated disaster for the Greeks. The Russians had embarked on a massive enterprise without questioning wildly optimistic forecasts of support, with no clear strategy, without providing enough resources and without coordinating those that they did provide. The Greeks had joined them only so far as cooperation might serve their immediate interests. The result was the devastation of much of the Peloponnese and the deaths totalling tens of thousands of Russians, Greeks, Turks and Albanians. So did any good come of it at last?
One outcome was an improvement of the lot of the Greeks under the restored Turkish rule. The Turks adhered to their amnesty and there was no retribution on the Greeks for their support of the Russians. The Turkish government was more concerned to make the Peloponnese once again a peaceful productive tax-paying province. In 1776 the Mani, which had been the area most active in the Orlov revolt, was granted semi-autonomy under a Greek bey of the Mani. New land was brought under cultivation, trade developed, and the following decades have been characterised as the golden age of the Mani. Greeks in the rest of the Peloponnese were granted increased rights to make representations to the Turkish governor of the province, and even directly to Constantinople.
But perhaps the main benefit for the Greeks from the Orlov revolt lay in the lessons learned, albeit painfully, which would have results in the war of independence. One was that foreign intervention came at a price, for instance the required oat
h of allegiance to Catherine the Great. For success in their war of independence there were other prices to be paid to foreign powers, and for long resented: foreign influence on Greek affairs, and decades of crippling Greek indebtedness for their wartime loans.
A second lesson was, as we have seen, the need for a Greece fighting for independence to establish a government. Essential to this would be the so-called westerners, Greeks with experience of the politics of other European countries. In 1821 local forms of government were set up wherever the revolt broke out, and within a year there was a national government appointed by representatives from all over Greece. It was clearly named as a provisional government, underwent many changes and faced many vicissitudes, some of its own making. But it did provide a degree of control over the often unruly military captains, and a focus for the Greeks as a nation.
That perhaps was the major difference between 1770 and the war of independence: by 1821 the aspirations had become national. When Alexis Orlov addressed the Greeks on arrival in the Peloponnese in 1770 he spoke as if they had a common aim; in fact they cared only about their own people in their own locality. The word patrídha still meant ‘home town’ or ‘birthplace’. The change in meaning to ‘fatherland’, and hence to the idea of a nation and its rights, was part of the ferment of ideas that swept the world in the late eighteenth century, loosely characterised as the Enlightenment.
Finally, the Orlov revolt showed Greece to Europe, and particularly to France and England, in a new light. Before the revolt began there were high hopes of its success. At the end of 1769 the writer of England’s The Annual Register maintained that the long preceding period of peace had enfeebled the Turkish military, that the Greeks were numerous, fierce and warlike, and that with their support Russia would be ‘the restorer of the Greek empire’.13 By the end of the following year the events of the revolt had dashed these hopes. The Gentleman’s Magazine, summarising the events of 1770, said: ‘On the first appearance of the Russian succours, the Greeks assumed for a moment the appearance of the manly bravery of their renowned ancestors; but their first attacks discovered the womanly spirit by which they were inspired: they fell furiously on all the Turks they could master, and massacred without distinction; their boasted victories were the frantic exploits of enraged madness.’ On the Greeks’ first sight of the enemy, it went on, ‘in a moment their courage failed them.’14 And The Annual Register for 1770 declared that it would be absurd to think that the Greeks, ‘a people immersed in a corruption of two thousand years, broken by long slavery, and sunk thro’ every state of degradation, and whose imaginary bravery only depended upon their having never seen the face of an enemy, should all at once do more than inherit the valour of their ancestors’.15