The year 1823 had begun with a lull in hostilities. A renewed attempt by the Sultan to regain his lost territories was imminently expected, and inexplicably delayed. As Byron sailed, the campaign in the west, in the mountains to the north of Missolonghi, was hotting up once more. Soon there would once again be a very real threat to the town. But the prime movers in these actions were the local pashas of northwestern Greece, the successors to Ali Pasha, who were more loyal subjects of the Sultan than Ali had been, but far less powerful. The concerted Ottoman counter-thrust would not come until 1825. When it did come, the consequences would be devastating for the Greeks – but that is another story.
In the meantime, the Greeks had the opportunity to recognise and to confront their internal divisions. The two years of relative inactivity on the external front, and the two civil wars that were fought in the Peloponnese during that time, have long been treated with embarrassment by Greek historians and censure in the influential foreign accounts. ‘The two civil wars are black spots in the history of the Greek Revolution’, wrote Finlay in 1861.20 But recently historians in Greece have been taking a fresh look at these events. While the military history of the Revolution has been written many times, the political, social, and economic dimensions of the conflict have only of late begun to be examined. From these changed perspectives, the internal conflict, into which Byron unwittingly sailed, is now coming to be understood as a ‘necessary, unavoidable, a defining stage’ of the Revolution, in that sense comparable to the period of the Terror in France. Far from being a shameful diversion from the main business of winning independence, the two civil wars of 1824 are today coming to be recognised as the crucible in which the future political shape of independent Greece would be forged. These wars were closely fought, and the outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion.21
Essentially, the conflict was between those who wished to create a modern, centralised state on the one side, and local warlords on the other. The first group were political rather than military leaders, educated either in the Ottoman system, or in the west, or both, and inspired by ideas derived from the western Enlightenment. The second were the military chieftains, the klefts and local leaders that at the time and since have always captured the popular imagination in Greece: simple and direct in their manners and speech, often without much education, but with a strong local power-base and a political understanding based on traditional practices and family-centred networks. During the time that Byron was in Greece, the chief protagonist of the modernisers was Alexandros Mavrokordatos, of the warlords Theodoros Kolokotronis, also known as the ‘Old Man of the Morea’ (Plate 7b). Somewhere in the middle stood Andreas Londos, Byron's host at Vostitsa in 1809 and 1810. Together with another local primate, Andreas Zaimis of Kalavryta, Londos would ally himself with Mavrokordatos and the modernisers in the first civil war, with the warlords of the Peloponnese in the second.
Plate 7b. Theodoros Kolokotronis, pencil sketch by Karl Krazeisen, dated 14 May 1827 (Athens: National Gallery–Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, published in the catalogue: Karl Krazeisen, Οι αυθεντικές μορφές των ηρώων του ’21 [Authentic Likenesses of the Heroes of 1821], curated by Marilena Z. Cassimatis, 2005–6)
The divisions that these men represented were far more than personal, although individual loyalties and antipathies were so strong as to obscure, very often, the more fundamental fault lines that lay beneath. Mavrokordatos and Londos we have already met. Theodoros Kolokotronis was a whole generation older than Mavrokordatos and Byron. He had been born in 1770, in the tiny hamlet of Libovisi, high in the mountains above Tripolitsa in the centre of the Peloponnese. As a young man, he had been the embodiment of the rough independence of the kleft, honing his military skills sometimes as brigand, sometimes in the service of the local pashas, as was common at the time. Like other klefts, too, when things became too hot on the mainland, he crossed over to the Ionian Islands. During the Napoleonic wars, in Zante, Kolokotronis had served, in succession, the occupying forces of Russia, France, and Great Britain, before returning to the Peloponnese just before the outbreak of the Revolution in 1821.
Gordon, who had fought alongside him, and would later become the first historian of the Revolution, describes a character and appearance that ought to have appealed to Byron:
It would be impossible for a painter or a novelist to trace a more romantic delineation of a robber chieftain…tall and athletic, with a profusion of black hair and expressive features, alternately lighted up with boisterous gaiety, or darkened by bursts of passion: among his soldiers, he seemed born to command[.]22
But Gordon, writing just after the Revolution was over, had harsh words too for a man whose ‘sordid avarice, and mean ambition…[had] severely scourged his country’. Finlay, who also knew him, noted with his customary wariness: ‘His manners had a degree of roughness well suited to conceal his natural cunning; and he had adopted an appearance of boisterous frankness as a veil for his watchful duplicity.’23 What no one ever denied about Kolokotronis, love him or hate him, was his genius as a guerrilla commander in the field.
Forthright in speech and absolutely ruthless in action, Kolokotronis left a memoir, dictated in later life because he had never learned to read. For the same reason, contemporary documents in his name are few. But those that exist testify to these qualities. A letter to Ignatios and other political figures, after the Turkish garrison had surrendered the fortresses above Nafplio in December 1822, demands money for repairs to the ruined town: ‘You're to send it to me without fail, if you don't, I’ll be at war with You, war without mercy, war without end, and I’ll leave it to be carried on by my descendants.’24 A proclamation to a group of villages in the district of Corinth warns, if they should continue to resist his demands (probably for money): ‘So long as there is a Kolokotronis family living in the world…eternally shall revenge be sought in rivers of men's blood.’ This, the text continues, is its author's ‘patriotic duty’.25 Terms like ‘fatherland’ (patrida) and ‘patriotic’ were used at the time in quite different senses by warlords such as Kolokotronis and by political modernisers like Mavrokordatos and Ignatios.26
In the Greek popular imagination, and in Greek schoolbooks to this day, if the Revolution has a single, outstanding hero, it is Kolokotronis. The giant equestrian statue outside the Old Parliament building in Athens, that today houses the Historical Museum where Byron's helmet is on display, is typical. No such monuments commemorate Mavrokordatos, the politician.27
These divisions had come out into the open during April 1823. The delayed Second National Assembly had the task of reviewing the Provisional Constitution that had been drawn up the previous year, and deciding the membership of the two national bodies that between them were responsible for overseeing the functions of government. It met at a place on the Gulf of Nafplio, opposite the town, known at the time as St John's Huts (Aiyannitika Kalyvia). For the purposes of a national assembly, a long-disused ancient name was resurrected. Just as its predecessor, held at the village of Piada, had appropriated the name of an ancient site in the vicinity, guaranteeing that the ‘Assembly of Epidaurus’ would resonate throughout Europe, so the huts on the shore became ‘Astros’. By this name the village, and the assembly that took place there in 1823, have been known ever since.
By all accounts, the deliberations at Astros were bad-tempered from the start. The sticking-point proved to be what to do with the huge tracts of land expropriated from wealthy Turkish landowners. Inside the Assembly it was proposed that the lands should become the property of the state and be sold to raise revenue. Outside, according to one eyewitness, the armed ‘captains’ wrote out the proposition on scraps of card, hung them from the olive trees, and pretended to use them for target practice, to the consternation of those assembled within.28 The warlords would not agree to the concentration of land, and of the revenue it might provide, in the hands of an abstract state. By temperament and upbringing, they could not identify
with such a thing. Under the old Ottoman system, the state was by definition alien: their forefathers had never had a stake in it, although most had learned to exploit it for the benefits of their own families and dependants.
For the modernisers, the failure to gain control of the only asset the fledgling state possessed was a severe setback. By the time the Astros assembly broke up, any chance there had been of resolving the land issue had been lost.29 The least contentious way to find money sufficient for the basic needs of the state was to seek loans from abroad – even if this meant offering as collateral an asset that the Provisional Government did not in fact possess. As Mavrokordatos was honest enough to concede, while skating over the reasons for it, in his very first letter to Byron, written on 14 July, ‘It is true that we already possess immense riches since 4/5ths of lands belong to the nation; but the present state of things does not allow us to profit from them.’30
These were not the only grounds for contention. The centralisers, backed by the first contingents of philhellenes from abroad, had consistently pressed for the creation of a national army. This was seen by the warlords and their supporters as a threat to their very existence, as well as to the traditional tactics that had worked so well in the Revolution until now. Kolokotronis’ violent and often unorthodox manner of warfare had been vindicated again and again in action, most recently at Dervenakia. Mavrokordatos, by contrast, had made the mistake of taking command of a relatively conventional military force at Peta – and seeing it wiped out. Mavrokordatos’ reputation, to this day, has never recovered from what most historians have condemned as a serious error of judgement in assuming direct command. At the time, opinions were more evenly divided. Napier, a military man to the core, thought that Mavrokordatos had more than made up for the disaster at Peta by his brilliant and successful defence of Missolonghi. Others, too, not naturally disposed to think well of him, thought Mavrokordatos’ conduct at Missolonghi had strengthened his following at the time of the Astros Assembly.31 On balance, though, the tide of opinion in the Peloponnese had turned against the idea of a regular, European-style army. The irregular tactics of the warlords were in the ascendant.
Above all, there was the issue of foreign involvement. In the eyes of warlords such as Kolokotronis, those educated Greeks from abroad, who had dominated the first Provisional Government after Epidaurus, were themselves foreigners. The most conspicuous of these in the Peloponnese during the first half of 1823 was Mavrokordatos, who had now abandoned the oriental robes that had so impressed the Shelleys and went about, provocatively, in a European frock coat (Plate 7a). Even some real foreigners found this off-putting.32 Kolokotronis would complain bitterly to Byron's emissaries, Browne and Trelawny, when they reached Tripolitsa in September:
the natives of Constantinople perceiving themselves without influence and not in possession of the confidence of the people, who looked upon them as foreigners, from their possessing no property in Peloponesus [sic], lost no relations in the war and never resided amongst them, commenced then a series of chicanery and intrigue in order to obtain power by creating divisions. Mavrocordato…began to correspond with foreign courts and foreigners without informing the Govt of the nature of many of his communications, this naturally excited jealousy and suspicion[.]33
Plate 7a. Alexandros Mavrokordatos, pencil sketch by Karl Krazeisen, dated 21 May 1827 (Athens: National Gallery–Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, published in the catalogue: Karl Krazeisen, Οι αυθεντικές μορφές των ηρώων του ’21 [Authentic Likenesses of the Heroes of 1821], curated by Marilena Z. Cassimatis, 2005–6)
Kolokotronis expressed the fears of many newly liberated Greeks in the Peloponnese that these ‘foreigners’ – Greeks with the benefits of education and privilege gained abroad – would go over the heads of the fighters on the ground to hand over the country to outside interests, in the process destroying the warlords’ power-base. Even the mission to seek a loan in London would come to seem a betrayal in Kolokotronis’ eyes, for the slightly circular reason that he gave to Browne at that same September meeting:
because Great Britain might thereby obtain an undue preponderance in Greece, which country he wished to be entirely unfettered, and that it might tend to aid the intrigues of Mavrocordato and the Phanariots, who…would contrive to appropriate to themselves the lion's share of it.34
It is a fear that has haunted Greek society and political life ever since – and events have often shown that it was not unfounded. Indeed, distrust of foreign interests, and still more of those fellow-Greeks who might be supposed to have sold out to them, has probably done more than any other single factor to stunt the growth and self-confidence of the Greek state, from Byron's time, through the long schism of the twentieth century, to the debt crisis that broke upon the country in 2010.
Against this background, it was only natural that Kolokotronis and his supporters should have feared the worst when Blaquiere turned up in Tripolitsa with Louriotis, an old associate of Mavrokordatos from Italy. This was in early May, soon after the end of the Astros assembly and within days of the new Provisional Government being formed. It will hardly have helped that the newcomers brought with them from London and duly handed over Jeremy Bentham's ‘Observations’ on the Epidaurus constitution, along with instructions for their translation into Greek.35
Mavrokordatos, on the other hand, saw an opportunity that could not be missed. Now was the chance to put into practice the geopolitical vision he had articulated while living in the house of Metropolitan Ignatios in Pisa, before he had met the Shelleys – and also to update it to fit the changed circumstances. Mavrokordatos had understood from the beginning that the key to the Revolution's success would lie in what today would be termed its internationalisation. So long as the conflict remained a relatively local affair, the most that could be hoped for was the kind of uneasy de facto autonomy that had already been won by Greece's northern neighbours, the Serbs, through revolts in 1804 and 1815. This was exactly the kind of arrangement that would best have suited men like Kolokotronis – in effect an extension of the relative autonomy the klefts had always claimed for themselves among their mountains. Rule would be autocratic, family-based, and unimpeded by the checks and balances that the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had laboured to devise for the regulation of a modern civic society. But Serbia was still nominally a part of the Ottoman empire, as indeed it would remain until 1878. Ignatios and Mavrokordatos, like the Ypsilantis brothers and most foreign philhellenes, aspired to something both more and different. In their eyes, success would not be won unless or until Greece could become a fully functioning, independent state. To achieve that, it would not be enough to chase the Muslim Turks out of the Peloponnese, or any number of islands, and replace their rule with that of a local Greek chief. Greece would have to win recognition and support from the Great Powers of Europe. And this at a time when these powers were universally hostile to anything that might threaten the old order restored throughout the continent by the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. This was the task that faced Mavrokordatos in the months after Astros.
Blaquiere clearly talked up the prospects for the London Greek Committee and may well have given the impression that its parliamentary members (actually belonging to the Opposition) were closer to the British government than they were.36 Mavrokordatos would have been encouraged, too, by the letters that Blaquiere brought from London. When Blaquiere wrote to Byron from Tripolitsa, soon after his arrival, he was expecting that ‘the government will most probably remain here for some months’, and implied that he himself would wait for Byron to join him there.37 But then, only a month later, Blaquiere could not wait to leave. ‘Circumstances have arisen which render it necessary for the interests of Greece, that I should absent myself a short time from the seat of government before your arrival’, he wrote to Byron on 10 June, and ended his letter: ‘I am however well assured that the object of my intended journey
will be a sufficient excuse in the eyes of your Lordship.’38
What these circumstances were Blaquiere never directly revealed. He left Tripolitsa ‘precipitately’, according to Mavrokordatos, a few days afterwards.39 Perhaps he had been intimidated by Kolokotronis or his supporters. But the main reason, sufficient even to override the promises he had made to Byron, was that Blaquiere had been entrusted by Mavrokordatos with a new mission. This was to carry personal letters to the British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, to several members of the administration of the Ionian Islands, and to a number of other influential individuals in England.40
Blaquiere was only one part of Mavrokordatos’ plan. Within days of his emissary's departure from Tripolitsa, perhaps on the very day, Mavrokordatos used his position as Secretary of the Executive to force through a resolution appointing deputies to travel to London, to raise a loan for the Greek Provisional Government. This was a policy on which almost all at this point were agreed. Even Kolokotronis seems not to have objected.
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