Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  And then, on the first day of April, the civil war for the second time broke upon Missolonghi. Mavrokordatos’ and Byron's alternative policy for confronting the warlords was about to be put to its toughest test yet.

  Chapter 12 Pyrrhic victory

  Private quarrel, public woes

  Georgios Karaiskakis had no interest either in the civil war or in the affairs of the Peloponnese. It was a chance combination of circumstances that set him on a collision course with the authorities in Missolonghi during the first days of April, and offered up an unlikely scapegoat, just at the moment when Mavrokordatos needed one. The Karaiskakis affair, that rocked Missolonghi for a fortnight, would have the most unlooked-for repercussions. One was to turn an ailing, ranting, foul-mouthed, forty-two-year-old petty chieftain into one of the most revered military heroes of the Greek Revolution (Plate 8b).1 Another was the effect that the affair would have on Byron.

  Plate 8b. Georgios Karaiskakis, by an unknown artist, oil on canvas (Athens: Benaki Museum, Collection of Paintings, Drawings, and Prints)

  Karaiskakis during the early months of 1824 had but a single aim: to regain control of the mountainous region of Agrafa, in the foothills of the Pindos some way north of Missolonghi, that he had won for himself in the early stages of the Revolution and held precariously until the campaign by the pashas of Skodra and Ioannina, the previous autumn, had forced him to flee southwards. A victim of tuberculosis, he had sought treatment in Cephalonia. From there, in December, he had written to Mavrokordatos, to beg for his support in regaining control of Agrafa, and to complain of the depredations against his own clients there by his rival Ioannis Rangos, who had moved in and taken over in the meantime.2 Rangos was one of the chiefs who attended the assembly in Missolonghi at the start of the year and pledged support for Mavrokordatos. Karaiskakis also attended, and seems to have been snubbed or ignored by Mavrokordatos. His name is missing from the list of supporters.3

  When he left Cephalonia in December, Karaiskakis had travelled part of the way to Missolonghi with Millingen. The doctor had been impressed, and perhaps a little intimidated, by his companion's ‘dark scintillating eye…deeply sunk in its socket’ – the consequence of his illness – and ‘fierce glances’. Millingen continued: ‘The folds of a yellow ceshmeere, twisted negligently, in the Albanian manner, round his head and the sides of the face, gave to his sallow and emaciated physiognomy a grim – I might almost say, a fiendlike – expression.’ Along the way, Karaiskakis regaled the doctor with his grievances and the colourful and violent story of his life. Millingen concluded that his travelling companion ‘had not the most distant idea of the meaning of liberty; confounding it with anarchy’. This was not someone on whom a government – any government – could rely. ‘He ridiculed the idea of Greeks aiming at the establishment of a regular government; and invariably spoke of it in the most scurrilous terms.’4 The lesson that Millingen learned between Cephalonia and Ithaca in the company of Karaiskakis was the same one that Byron and Hobhouse had learned while they travelled south from Preveza to Missolonghi under the protection of Ali Pasha's men in the autumn of 1809. Karaiskakis was one of those fearsome and ungovernable klefts, on whom Byron had based so many of his ‘byronic’ heroes, and who had more recently proved themselves the most formidable fighters that Greece possessed.

  Evidently, Mavrokordatos had confided his suspicions about Karaiskakis’ loyalty and motives to Byron as early as January.5 When all the armed forces left Missolonghi in early March, supposedly to prepare for the campaign against Arta, some of them did not go very far. Karaiskakis, at the head of 100 men, all that the assembly had allowed him, went no farther than Anatoliko, the fortified island at the western end of the lagoon. There he joined forces with the Tzavellas brothers and their men, who were especially in disgrace with Mavrokordatos after the debacle over Lepanto, and inclined to be fractious anyway, as they were hereditary enemies of the loyal Botsaris clan. Karaiskakis made it loudly known that he was opposed to an assault on Arta, as well as to Mavrokordatos’ authority. If there was to be a new concerted campaign to the north, why not head for Agrafa instead?6

  According to his own values, Karaiskakis was being wholly consistent. All he wanted was to be reinstalled in Agrafa. To this end, and following an age-old convention, he treated with Omer Vryonis, the pasha of Ioannina, as well as with Mavrokordatos at Missolonghi. A bolder stroke was to try to convince Mavrokordatos that Omer actually wanted a deal with him. Ever the diplomat, Mavrokordatos took the bait and for a few days (just when he had been looking around for pretexts to put off going to Kranidi) even entertained the idea of a meeting with the pasha in the no-man's-land between Missolonghi and Arta. He was soon disabused. What Karaiskakis had told him about the pasha's intentions was not borne out by other sources. Vryonis would have to make a proper diplomatic approach if he really wanted to discuss terms, Mavrokordatos wrote to inform Karaiskakis on 24 March. Remarkably, and despite all the reasons for caution, he had even sent Karaiskakis a draft of the letter he proposed sending to Vryonis.7

  Despite this setback, by the end of March, everything seemed to be going Karaiskakis’ way. Whether or not Karaiskakis had a hand in this, Omer Pasha had been alerted to the Greeks’ designs on Arta and despatched 3,000 troops to reinforce the town.8 Since the chiefs were traditionally averse to fighting against ‘stone walls’ or well-defended places, this meant that Agrafa became the obvious next target for a notional campaign, even though it had no strategic importance. On the last day of the month, Mavrokordatos wrote out new orders to be delivered to the chiefs in Xiromero. They would be marching towards Agrafa. This must have been the campaign for which he and Byron drew up plans that were recorded by Parry, though without specifying the target. Now that the loan was on its way, ‘Lord Byron's brigade’ was to be brought up to strength by redeploying an additional 1,500 men – paid, for the first time, by the Greek government. ‘The brigade’, the document ends, ‘with every material of war, should be ready to march by the 7th day of May for a particular service.’9

  Karaiskakis had waited for months. He would have waited until the seventh of May. This was exactly what he wanted. He himself was instructed by Mavrokordatos, on 31 March, to rendezvous with the other chiefs at Machalas (today's Fyteies) in a few days’ time.10 All at once, Karaiskakis had less reason to be disaffected than at any time while he had been in the vicinity of Missolonghi.

  But the new orders never reached him. Most likely, they were entrusted to his nephew, a young man by the name of Psaroyannopoulos, who was in such excitement to return across the lagoon to Anatoliko without delay that he got into a fight with the local ferrymen. Psaroyannopoulos was roundly thrashed and returned to his uncle in a pitiable state.

  Karaiskakis reacted like any kleft, or byronic hero. His prestige had been insulted. The only law he knew was revenge. The next day, 1 April according to the western calendar, a Thursday, Karaiskakis sent 250 of his and Tzavellas’ troops into Missolonghi. Unable to find the culprits, they terrorised the town. When they left, the next day, they took with them several leading citizens as hostages. At the same time, a detachment of forty men in flat-bottomed boats rowed across to the fortified island of Vasiladi that guards the entrance to the lagoon and seized control of it.11

  Karaiskakis’ actions caused panic in a town that was already on edge. The day before the spat began, enemy ships had once again appeared off the lagoon. (This was what provided the occasion for Byron, Parry, and Mavrokordatos to be out on punts, inspecting the defences.) On land, a detachment of Turkish cavalry had approached as close as the steep pass overlooking the Gulf of Patras, before turning back. No one, now, talked of Lepanto being ripe for the taking. Yusuf Pasha, in Patras, had re-garrisoned his fortresses with more reliable troops, and was giving notice of the fact.12 But then, on the morning of Saturday, 3 April, the seven Turkish ships lifted their blockade and sailed away. All the action was now inside the lagoon, where Greek was pitted against Greek. According to the Greek Ch
ronicle, ‘the Government at dawn took the most drastic measures’. It was a phrase that Mavrokordatos liked to use in his own correspondence. Irregular troops loyal to the chieftains whose power-bases were closest to Missolonghi responded to his appeal and came down from their mountains. Boats were armed and the occupiers of Vasiladi surrounded.13

  To all appearances, the civil war, that was then coming to a head in the Peloponnese, had spread to Missolonghi – even though, as Gamba correctly noted, in reality ‘this was only a private quarrel’.14 It was a situation that anyone familiar with Byron's ‘Turkish tales’ should have recognised. But the sense of a more general threat was intensified by the arrival, at the height of the confrontation, of a series of warnings from the government at Kranidi: ‘Colonel Stanhope is in Athens, surrounded by the worst troublemakers in Greece…What they must be telling the English philhellene, you can imagine for yourself. I fear that they will dupe him. This you must tell to Byron’, Mavrokordatos was urgently advised.15 A captured letter, enclosed as evidence, gave credence to growing suspicions that Odysseus and Negris were actively plotting not only against Mavrokordatos but the government as well. Stanhope, to his credit, would later publish this letter, whose author he would describe as ‘one of the most execrable villains that ever existed’. In this way Stanhope would exonerate himself of the charge of complicity, but not of dangerous naivety.16

  Such was the state of crisis in the town that Mavrokordatos did not bring these letters to Byron himself, but sent Praidis in his stead. This was to become a pattern during the ensuing days, with far-reaching consequences. One face-to-face meeting, at least, there must have been, when these developments were discussed. The new information put quite a different complexion on the proposed conference at Salona. Mavrokordatos had now to consider very carefully whether he should attend. And then there was the problem of what to do about Stanhope's involvement – effectively, now, with the opposing side in the civil war, as Parry noted.17 Mavrokordatos reported the outcome of this meeting: ‘His Lordship had been very much annoyed and wrote…in appropriate terms, both to Stanhope and the London Committee.’ No such letters have been preserved but, again according to Mavrokordatos, Byron

  said openly to his friends and to the committee, that Stanhope, being gullible and led astray by those who favoured him with fine addresses on the subject of liberty, without recognising the nature of affairs in Greece and the hidden purposes of those who addressed him, would seriously damage the cause, and that he (His Lordship, that is to say) had no desire to work with him.18

  Whether or not Byron actually asked Bowring to arrange for Stanhope's recall, as Mavrokordatos believed, he was undoubtedly shocked at the way the colonel's susceptibility was being exploited by the internal enemy – the very same, to all appearances, that was now threatening Missolonghi.

  To the immediate crisis Byron responded with his usual cool courage. ‘The row has had one good effect – it has put them on the alert’, he wrote to Barff on the sixth, perhaps still thinking of Parry's criticisms on the lagoon. According to Millingen, he ‘urged Mavrokordato not to fear, but instantly to display all possible energy to defeat the designs of the rebel chief. He offered his own personal assistance, that of the artillery brigade, and of the three hundred Suliots on this service.’19 Once again, Mavrokordatos was too busy dealing with the emergency to visit Byron. In reply to an anxious message from Gamba, he warned that ‘it would be prudent to have our brigade in readiness, and not to suffer them to separate’. It was not long before Byron discovered that his own Souliots would not fire on their cousins of the Tzavellas clan from Anatoliko. The best he could do to save face and not make matters worse was to order them to ‘preserve the strictest neutrality’.20

  The stand-off lasted three days. Mavrokordatos was able to muster a sufficient show of force that Karaiskakis could not have continued the quarrel without serious loss of prestige. Even the law of revenge had its unwritten rules. On Sunday, 4 April, two local chiefs wrote to Karaiskakis, no doubt at Mavrokordatos’ instigation, pointing this out in the name of friendship, and urging him to give up the hostages he had taken. In less forgiving tone, Mavrokordatos wrote too. Karaiskakis was to be prosecuted for his actions so far. In the meantime, the hostages must be returned forthwith.21 The patient application of pressure bore fruit. On Monday, 5 April, Karaiskakis’ men surrendered Vasiladi and withdrew from Missolonghi. The hostages returned to their homes. By evening, it was all over.

  But not for Mavrokordatos. When, exactly, he perceived his opportunity is impossible to tell. Somebody – surely one of the Europeans, it could even have been Byron himself – while the panic had been at its height, made the connection: the Turks had appeared, after an absence of months, by land and sea. And the very next day a rebel chieftain had threatened to seize control of the town. There must be some sinister link between the two alarms.22

  Mavrokordatos will have dismissed the idea at once. Temporary truces, deals with their enemy opposite numbers for short-term mutual interest, yes. These were as much a part of the daily life of chieftains, on both sides, as the ferocity with which on other occasions they would massacre the same people, their wives, and their children. It was such an everyday occurrence, there was even a word for it. It was called kapaki. But a coordinated act of treachery, involving troops from Lepanto, thirty kilometres the other side of Missolonghi from Anatoliko, and ships from Patras on the other side of the gulf – no, that was just not the way things were done. So Mavrokordatos will have said.

  And then he saw the beauty of it. It was the perfect set-up.

  Just at the moment when Byron (probably) and the other Europeans (certainly) were accusing him of being irresolute in a crisis, Mavrokordatos had been given the means to win his very own microcosm of the civil war, here in Missolonghi. It was not ethical. But it was deeply political. And it was fiendishly clever. He would show the government, at Kranidi, how a war could be won without recourse to arms and bloodshed. He would make an example of Karaiskakis that no one would ever forget.

  There may have been no time. Or it may have seemed too much of a risk. Or, quite likely, by now, he was determined that Byron, too, must be impressed by a fait accompli. Whatever the reason, for once Mavrokordatos did not take Byron into his confidence. It was to prove a costly error.

  High treason

  The moment the hostages returned to Missolonghi, on the evening of the fifth, Mavrokordatos went into action. At nine in the evening, Praidis called on Byron, bringing this note from his master:

  My Lord,

  Constantine Voulpiotti, who is now a guest in the house of your landlord, is strongly suspected of high treason. Not being willing to permit any of the town guard to enter a house inhabited by you, I pray you to order him under charge of your own guards to the outward gate, where the police will be in readiness to receive him.23

  The original French has been lost, but for the first time the words were there in black and white: high treason. The suspect, Konstantinos Voulpiotis, was the father-in-law of Christos Kapsalis, one of the most respected primates in Missolonghi, in whose house Byron had been living for the past three months. His connection to Karaiskakis would prove to be tenuous. But Voulpiotis was necessary to Mavrokordatos’ purpose, precisely because in this way Byron could not possibly fail to be impressed, either by the severity of the charge, or by the ‘drastic’ nature of the measures now being taken.

  Byron complied at once. Voulpiotis was arrested and handed over. Late that night, Byron wrote to Barff in Zante. Repeating the terrible words of Mavrokordatos’ letter, he confessed his bewilderment: ‘What is to become of the father-in-law, I do not know: nor what he has done, exactly.’24

  Next, Mavrokordatos had to bring in the chieftains who had promised him their support back in January, and secure their complicity in what was about to happen. On Tuesday, 6 April, he wrote to Xiromero, urgently recalling the very troops that he had been at such pains to remove from Missolonghi only a little over a month bef
ore. They were to meet him at Anatoliko, the scene of the crime. The message reached them that evening. It was an eight-hour march from Machalas, where most of them were billeted. They arrived late on Wednesday, 7 April. Once again, in the language of the Greek Chronicle, the Government was resorting to ‘drastic measures’.25

  But there was a difficulty. Either Mavrokordatos saw this too late, or more likely he was counting on resolving it in the way that had worked so often before. To Byron he wrote, in evident haste, on the sixth: ‘The troops of Stornaris, Tzongas, and Botsaris…will be at Anatoliko this evening.’ They were 1,500 men in arms, and there were no provisions to feed them: ‘The treasury is not only empty, but also in debt. All the primates and the captains here are resolved to call upon you and petition you to come to the aid of the fatherland at this critical time, by making another temporary loan.’26 Once again, Mavrokordatos was too busy to visit Byron himself, and sent Praidis instead. Byron had never got on with Praidis. He had no idea what was happening, and had already become irked at being asked for new personal loans, now that the money from London was supposed to be on its way and he should no longer be having to dig into his own pocket to shore up the government.27 It was the only time when Byron ever refused Mavrokordatos point-blank. Three days later he wrote again to Barff: ‘The Greeks here of the Govt. have been boring me for more money. I have given them a refusal – and as they would not take that – another refusal in terms of considerable sincerity.’28