The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  The Greek rebellion and its consequences shaped Mahmud’s policies, directly or indirectly, for the remaining eighteen years of his reign. Yet the Greek awakening took the Sultan and his viziers by surprise.9 Until the end of the eighteenth century there had been little awareness of any Hellenistic heritage among those subjects of the Sultan who spoke the Greek language—almost one in four of the total population of the empire. Officially, the Patriarchate in Constantinople sought to maintain the traditional status of the Orthodox Church as a recognized millet, and so too did the wealthy Phanariot aristocracy. But commercial links with France, and in particular with Marseilles, had helped to spread the ideas of the French Revolution on both the mainland and the islands of modern Greece. Greeks who had lived in France encouraged an ideal of Hellenism which stemmed from Classical Greece and had nothing in common with the nostalgic longing of Orthodox believers for the resurrection of a Byzantine Christian society. In combating these dangerous ideas, successive Sultans could therefore count on support from the Patriarchate. In 1798 a ‘Paternal Exhortation’, circulated in Constantinople in the name of Patriarch Anthimos of Jerusalem, emphasized the role of the Sultan as God’s chosen protector of Christian life and denounced the ‘teachings of these new liberties’ as the work of the Devil. ‘The Almighty Lord’, it explained, ‘puts into the heart of the Sultan of these Ottomans an inclination to keep free the religious beliefs of our Orthodox faith and, as a work of supererogation, to protect them, even to the point of occasionally chastising Christians who deviate from their faith, in order that they may have always before their eyes the fear of God.’10

  Such ultra-conservative teaching, though effective at the heart of the Empire, carried little weight with the Hellenizing communities in Wallachia and Moldavia, who looked for support from Tsar Alexander I and from his Corfiot adviser, John Capodistrias. This was unrealistic. Despite Alexander’s genuine religious zeal, the Tsar would not back any conspiratorial body and Capodistrias, knowing that Alexander had no wish ‘to set the cannon moving again’, treated all approaches from Greek revolutionaries with extreme caution.11 Nevertheless it was in the rapidly growing Russian port of Odessa that, in 1814, three Greek merchants founded (or, possibly, revived) a secret ‘Society of Friends’, PhilikiHetairia, to support the liberation of the Balkan peoples from Ottoman rule. Three years later, with the connivance of Russian consular authorities, the Philiki Hetairia moved its headquarters to Constantinople. Soon it could count on the support of the principal Greeks in the Mani, on the sympathy of Metropolitan Germanos (Bishop of Old Patras), on the chiefs of certain Christian bandit groups (klephts) in the Peloponnese, and on some distinguished Phanariot officers serving in the Russian army. In March 1821 it was one of these officers who sought to set the Balkans ablaze. General Alexander Ypsilantis, an aide-de-camp of the Tsar, led a handful of Greek patriots from across the Russian frontier in a raid on Bucharest and Jassy.

  Ultimately Ypsilantis’s raid proved a tragic failure, for the general wrongly counted on the rapid spread of national revolutions against the Sultan throughout Ottoman Europe, a crusade of Orthodoxy which the Tsar would enthusiastically lead. Ypsilantis proposed an alliance with Milos̆ Obrenović, who in the spring of 1815 had led a second Serbian rebellion against the local tyranny of Janissary commanders and gained considerable autonomy for Serbia from Sultan Mahmud, who saw in Milos̆ a shrewdly competent vassal. The wily Milos̆, hoping for recognition as hereditary Prince of Serbia, had more to lose than to gain by supporting Ypsilantis against the Sultan. The peasantry of Moldavia saw no reason to exchange remote Ottoman sovereignty for a more immediate Greek-Russian rule, and they therefore remained hostile to Ypsilantis’s appeals, while the Tsar disowned his aide-de-camp almost immediately. Within three months the Ottoman forces had restored order in the two Danubian Principalities, and Ypsilantis was a fugitive in Austria.

  Yet the ill-considered raid had grave repercussions for the Sultan. In the Peloponnese it precipitated the war of independence, symbolically dated from the blessing accorded by Metropolitan Germanos on 25 March to a sacred banner in the monastery of Aghia Lavra. More immediately, the raid led to a panic reaction in Constantinople. The Ottoman army was campaigning, not only against Ali Pasha in Epirus, but also—with little credit—against the Persians along the ill-defined border between Mount Ararat and Lake Van. Mahmud feared lest, at this moment of Ottoman weakness, the Turks should lose Stamboul and Pera. On the last day of March 1821 the British embassy noted the issue of an order for every ‘Turk’ in Constantinople to procure arms and keep them in his home in case the Greeks should attempt to seize the city by insurrection.12 At the same time, the Janissary barracks made weapons available for over 12,000 men of the Corps, should they be needed.

  Confirmation of the rising against the Ottomans in the Peloponnese was conveyed to the Porte by Lord Strangford, the British ambassador, in a dispatch drafted by his consul in Patras.13 The news seems almost to have unhinged Mahmud. He was convinced that he was the intended victim of an Orthodox Christian conspiracy, backed by the Russians. He at once sought a fetva from the şeyhülislâm proclaiming a Holy War against Greek Christians. But the şeyhülislâm was a man of probity. He discussed the crisis with the Ecumenical Patriarch, the septuagenarian Gregorius V, and, to his credit, refused the Sultan’s request, a courageous act which almost certainly hastened his supercession before the end of the year and his eventual execution. Gregorius returned from his meeting with the şeyhülislâm hoping for a compromise. Already, seven Greek bishops had been imprisoned on the Grand Vizier’s orders. On Palm Sunday the Patriarch issued a solemn Anathema, signed by himself and twenty-two other prelates, formally condemning the Philike Hetairia and excommunicating Ypsilantis and his principal agents; all ‘prelates and priests’ were commanded to ‘concur with the Church’ in opposing the rebellion under penalty of suspension, dispossession and, ultimately, ‘the fires of hell’.14

  Ten years later Mahmud might have shown wiser statecraft, exploiting the formal Anathema to divide his enemies. But, as an Ottoman official told Strangford a few weeks later, the Sultan experienced ‘a fit of violent anger and indignation’ over the following days, becoming convinced of the Patriarch’s complicity. Had not Gregorius been born in the same village as Germanos of Patras, and had he not befriended the rebel Metropolitan when the two dignitaries were both in Constantinople five years earlier? There seemed no doubt to the Sultan that Gregorius was corresponding with insurgent leaders in the Mani and had received letters from Ypsilantis. The news that Greek and Serbian families, technically under the Patriarch’s guardianship, had fled the city and boarded ships sailing to Russia, appears finally to have sealed Gregorius’s fate.

  On Palm Sunday the Anathema was printed and published. On the following Saturday afternoon—10 April by the Orthodox calendar, 22 April by the Gregorian calendar of Western Europe—the Patriarch was officiating at the Liturgy preceding the Solemn Easter Vigil when armed soldiery burst into the patriarchal church, in the Phanar district of Stamboul. As the service ended, they seized the Patriarch and the officiating bishops and priests, still in their robes, and threw ropes around their necks. Gregorius was dragged to the gate of the Phanar quarter, hanged from the staple above the entrance, and allowed slowly to choke to death. For three days his body was left suspended from the gate, his hastily-elected successor having to push it aside before going to the palace to seek confirmation from the Sultan of the dignity bestowed upon him. Three other bishops and two eminent priests were hanged elsewhere in Stamboul. To humiliate the Orthodox Christians even further, the Sultan finally ordered Gregorius’s body to be handed over to a group of Jews, who dragged it by the legs ‘through a very dirty market’ and cast it, weighted with stones, into the waters of the Golden Horn. ‘It is impossible to carry anger, indignation and cruelty to a higher pitch’, commented Bartolomeo Pisani: as Strangford’s principal dragoman he was the ambassador’s chief informant about all that was happening in the city dur
ing this terrible Easter week, when inflamed mobs roamed the streets, looting Greek churches and even destroying the patriarchal throne.15

  ‘The Councils of this Empire are now directed by a spirit of relentless fanaticism from which the most dreadful results may be expected,’ Strangford reported to the Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh, three days after the Patriarch’s execution. But the ambassador’s mood soon changed. Unlike his Russian and Austrian colleagues, he was consistently sympathetic to Sultan Mahmud. He explained to Castlereagh that the Greeks were being punished as rebels, not as Christians; that ‘the Greek clergy were the principal agents and promoters’ of the rebellion; and that the Sultan had brought troops into Constantinople to check the wrath of the mob, whose mood Strangford likened to the anti-papist Gordon rioters in London half a century before. Three months after the Patriarch’s execution, Strangford was insisting that earlier reports had been much exaggerated: ‘Out of a number of 76 churches and chapels in the city and neighbourhood of Constantinople, but one was utterly destroyed and only 13 injured or plundered by the mob.’ As evidence that all was now in order, the ambassador commented on the ‘disarming’ of Turkish children: ‘Little miscreants under seven years of age, and armed with daggers and pistols, had till now the privilege of robbing, shooting and stabbing with impunity,’ he explained.16

  Stratford Canning, always confident of outmanoeuvring any Russian diplomat, had regarded the French as the great intriguers at Constantinople; his successor concentrated his mistrust on the Tsar’s emissaries. Strangford became the first British ambassador to accept ‘the Russian bogey’ implicitly, as an article of faith. In this conviction he was grossly unfair to his Russian colleague, Alexis Stroganov, who throughout the Greek crisis showed remarkable restraint. The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church constantly urged the government in St Petersburg to avenge the insults to the Church by a new war against the Turk. But Tsar Alexander I remained resolutely set against embarking on any expansionist policy so long as his Empire was weakened by problems left unresolved following the Napoleonic upheaval, and in his relations with the Sultan’s ministers Alexis Stroganov skilfully interpreted the Tsar’s wishes.17 He protested strongly against the widespread attacks on Christians in Constantinople, reminding the Porte of the protective rights accorded to his sovereign by the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, and he made ready to leave for Russia; but he chose his words carefully. The Ottoman authorities were left in no doubt that the Tsar deplored rebellion against legitimate government, be it Christian or Muslim. So long as Alexander remained on the throne, Mahmud II discounted the Russian bogey. He was convinced the Greek revolt would be short-lived. Although the coasts of the Peloponnese and Attica and the more prosperous islands might be controlled by Greeks, the rising was ill-coordinated and there was intense rivalry, both between the rebel leaders themselves, and between different regions in the Greek lands. Without Russian intervention it seemed to Mahmud that within a few months his armies would reconquer the Peloponnese and restore order by ruthless repression. Consistently the Ottomans underrated their insurgent opponents.

  The Sultan fatally miscalculated in failing to recognize the long-term significance of the Easter killings. In sanctioning the execution of the Patriarch and the vilification of his remains at such a moment in the Church’s calendar, Mahmud alienated a quarter of his subjects. The Orthodox Christian millet was thrown into permanent opposition to the Sultanate, thereby weakening the Ottoman Empire throughout the last century of its existence. Moreover, Gregorius V continued, in death, to trouble the Ottomans. The Patriarch’s body did not decompose in the murky waters of the Golden Horn. Shortly before dusk on one evening in that Easter Week of 1821 it floated to the surface, close to a grain ship trading with Russia. The corpse, and what remained of the vestments, were recognized by a refugee from the patriarchal household who was already aboard the ship. To the Orthodox faithful this reappearance of their martyred Patriarch came as a sign of Divine beneficence. Unobtrusively the Greek master of the vessel recovered the body before sailing for Odessa. There Gregorius was accorded a martyr’s funeral. By June he had become the symbol of that Hellenic awakening which he publicly deplored throughout the last troubled months of his life.

  Half a century later, when the Russians wished to emphasize the interdependence of the Orthodox churches, Gregorius’s bones were translated to his Greek homeland, and his remains have been revered for over 120 years in a tomb still standing near the entrance to the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens. However, in the summer of 1821 the religious demonstration in Hetairist Odessa merely confirmed Mahmud II’s hostility towards every aspect of the Russian Church. ‘The Turks’, Bartolomeo Pisani reported, ‘consider it a further proof of the uniformity of sentiments, in religion as well as political matters, prevalent between the Russians and the Greeks.’18 The Sultan, in his anger, threw caution to the wind. He personally ordered all vessels sailing through the Straits to be searched. When he refused to allow the passage of grain ships, it seemed to the diplomats in Constantinople as if another Russo-Turkish conflict was inevitable. Hastily both Strangford and his Austrian colleague intervened: the embargo on the Odessa grain ships was lifted.

  By the autumn the crisis in the capital was over. Although Stroganov was recalled to St Petersburg in July, Russia did not declare war on the Ottoman Empire for seven more years; and by then the Eastern Question was posed in an entirely different form. The intermittent clashes of Ottoman troops and Greek rebels were merciless encounters, each side perpetrating acts of cruelty long and bitterly remembered. In July 1822 it seemed as if the Greeks would soon be subdued: at Peta, three miles to the east of Arta, the army which had disposed of Ali Pasha earlier in the year gained a striking victory, restoring to Ottoman rule all of western Greece except for Missolonghi; and at the same time 20,000 of the Sultan’s best troops sought to cross the isthmus of Corinth and advance on the Greek strongholds in the Peloponnese. But, to Mahmud’s fury, his commanders could make little headway. By the spring of 1823 there was complete stalemate: rival insurgent leaders fought among themselves, but the Sultan could not take advantage of these divisions, for the Greeks had command of the islands and the sea.

  At this point Mahmud took a gambler’s risk: he turned for help to the most efficient and most ambitious of his vassals, Muhammad Ali. Over the preceding ten years the Viceroy of Egypt had gone from strength to strength, creating in this historic Ottoman dependency the Europeanized-Islamic New Order which Selim III had vainly sought to impose at the heart of his empire. At Sultan Mahmud’s request Muhammad Ali had sent disciplined troops to crush Wahhabi revolts in Arabia, ensuring that his army controlled the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, in the name of the Sultan-Caliph. Another army, trained by Napoleonic veterans, thrust southwards along the Nile, swelling its number with slaves and in 1822 founding the city of Khartoum. The Viceroy could give his Sultan a well-drilled and disciplined army, a good navy, and an able commander to restore order in Greece as in Arabia. In return, Sultan Mahmud offered Muhammad’s son, Ibrahim, considerable power as both Pasha of Crete and Governor of the Peloponnese. The Greek seamen assumed that, although Ibrahim might establish himself in Crete, he would not attempt a sea crossing in winter. They were wrong. In February 1825 Ibrahim landed some 10,000 men, with horses and artillery, at Modon, in the southern Peloponnese. A co-ordinated grand strategy ensured that, at the same time, the Greeks were attacked from the north by the regular Ottoman army.19

  At first it seemed as if Ibrahim would gain a speedy victory. In the Peloponnese only Nauplion successfuly resisted the Egyptian assault. But in western Greece Missolonghi defied a siege by a predominantly Turkish army until April 1826, when Ibrahim himself crossed the Gulf and took the town where Byron had died two years earlier. The legendary association of Missolonghi with those last heroic months of ‘the noblest spirit in Europe’ made it certain that Ibrahim’s intervention would revive old prejudices in Britain and in France, where philhellenic sentiment was grow
ing rapidly. Reports from merchants and consuls in the Peloponnese emphasized the devastation caused by Ibrahim’s ‘inhuman barbarians’ as they set fire to villages and small towns along their line of march. As early as July 1825 the Greek provisional government had asked for British protection, relying on the apparent sympathy of the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, and on the influence of the City of London, where a Greek loan of £800,000 had been floated nine months before. The long-disputed Ionian Islands had passed under British protection in 1815 by agreement among the four Great Powers. A unilateral assurance of protection for the whole of Greece was more than any British statesman could give, but the Foreign Secretary was unwilling to stand aside and leave the fate of the Greeks to be decided in Constantinople—or St Petersburg. Accordingly, in the winter of 1825–6 the British and Russian governments—though at heart mutually suspicious—came gradually to accept the need for joint mediation between the Sultan and his rebellious Christian subjects. The Duke of Wellington, in Russia for the funeral of Tsar Alexander I, signed an agreement with Count Nesselrode in early April 1826 which provided for mediation ‘in the contest of which Greece and the Archipelago are the theatre’, and for the creation of an autonomous Greek state within the Ottoman Empire. At the same time George Canning sent his cousin Stratford back to Constantinople as ambassador, but with instructions to pursue a devious policy. ‘Exaggerate, if you can, the danger from Russia,’ ‘Stratty’ was told.20