1821-1822 - War for Greek Independence
The details of the war, however much they appealed to the romantic spirit of the age, are of very subordinate interest ; and it must suffice to notice the general character of the struggle. Broadly, the war may be divided into three periods: the first (1821-4), during which the Greeks, with the assistance of volunteers from western Europe, were pitted against the Ottoman Government alone ; the second, from March, 1824, when the disciplined forces of Mehemet Ali of Egypt were thrown into the scale against the insurgents; the third, from the effective intervention of the European Powers, in the autumn of 1827, to the close.
For many months the war was no more than a chaotic struggle between hostile hordes of barbarians. The few educated Phanariot Greeks, like Demetrios Ypsilanti or Prince Mavrocordato, who at the first news of the outbreak had hastened to place themselves at the head of the national cause, proved quite incompetent as leaders in irregular warfare and powerless to control the barbarous spirit of cruelty which they deplored. Their well-meant efforts to provide the nascent Hellenic State with a Liberal Constitution on the most approved western model were not more successful; and the real leaders of the people during the earlier stages of the war were the brigand chiefs and the primates and demogeronts whose traditional local authority saved the structure of Greek society from dissolving into utter anarchy.
Two main factors contributed to the success of the Greeks. The detention of the flower of the Ottoman forces, under Kurshid Pasha, the ablest of the Sultan's generals, before Ali's island stronghold of Janina, enabled the revolt to make uninterrupted headway during the first critical months. The revolt of the islands, by cutting off from the Ottoman Government its only reserves of good seamen, assured to the insurgents the command of the sea. In size of ships and weight of metal the Turks were superior; but, when their line-of-battle ships at last put to sea, manned by motley and untrained crews of Algerine pirates, Genoese mercenaries, and Constantinopolitan quay-porters, they fell an easy prey to the swift-sailing brigs and fire-ships of the Greeks.
"The Greeks," wrote Wellington, "have the superiority at sea; and those who have this superiority must be successful." This truth was abundantly illustrated in the course of the war. The great expedition of Ali, Pasha of Drama, which in the summer of 1823 threatened to crush the insurrection in the Morea, was forced to retire owing to the failure of the Ottoman fleet to come to its support, and, taken at a disadvantage in the defile of Devernaki, was exterminated on August 6. The heroic defence of Missolonghi (May 7, 1825-April 22, 1826) was rendered possible only by the fact that the Greek admiral Miaoulis could enter the lagoons and throw supplies into the town.
The appearance in the summer of 1824 of the well-equipped fleet of Mehemet Ali of Egypt changed the fortune of the war at sea, just as, in the following year, Ibrahim's disciplined troops turned it on land. Against the barbaric hordes of Dramali or of Reshid, the Greek klephts and peasants had more than held their own; they were powerless against the modern armament and modern tactics of the Egyptian leader. From the moment of Ibrahim's landing in the Morea it was realised that, if the Greeks were to be saved from practical extermination, they must oppose western methods to western methods; which meant, in effect, that those of the European Powers which desired their preservation must intervene.
So long as it was merely a question of an internal revolt against the Ottoman Government, none of the major European Powers was disposed to suggest an intervention which would have carried with it incalculable consequences and placed in jeopardy the whole international structure so painfully established by the European Alliance. But the rapid inarch of events soon stultified the policy of aloofness which had triumphed at Verona. The hopes of Metternich were dashed by the initial triumphs of the insurgents, and the policy of leaving the revolt to burn itself out "beyond the pale of civilisation" was frustrated by the refusal of the western peoples to follow the lead of their Governments. In Europe at large the news of the "resurrection of Greece" had been received with an outburst of unbounded enthusiasm, which grew with each new victory of the insurgent arms.
Everything in the temper and conditions of the times tended to encourage this Philhellenic ardour. Of the actual conditions obtaining in the Levant the western world was then even more completely ignorant than now; but all Christendom sympathised with this revolt of Christians against infidel oppression; continental Liberals, gagged by Metternich's police, found a voice for their own grievances in championing the cause of a nation struggling to be free; and the cultured classes, educated almost exclusively in the lore of classical antiquity, forgot the long centuries of corruption and degradation, and saw in the rough peasants of the Morea and mariners of the islands only the descendants of Leonidas and Odysseus.
Philhellenic societies, of which the members were drawn from all classes, sprang up all over western Europe; and within a few months of the outbreak of the revolt money and volunteers were pouring in to the assistance of the Greeks. Veterans of Napoleon's disbanded armies, like Colonel Fabvier, English officers, like Colonel Thomas Gordon and Sir Richard Church, brought to the insurgents the invaluable aid of their military experience. In the autumn of 1823 Byron, the most celebrated and romantic figure of the age, himself came, prepared to give his life for the cause which he had already illustrated by his genius. In spite of the ostentatious neutrality of the Powers, the Reis Effendi could justly complain that the Ottoman Government was fighting not the Greeks only, but all Europe.
But it seemed as though the Eastern Question would be settled for the time by the swift collapse of the revolt. On April 22 the hideous reprisals of the Ottomans culminated in the awful massacre of Scio, by which the most flourishing community of the Greek archipelago was wiped out of existence ; and a few months later the unopposed march of the Pasha of Drama into the Morea promised to place insurgent Greece at the mercy of the Sultan.
The situation was again profoundly modified by the events of the autumn and winter of 1822. The disastrous retreat of the Pasha of Drama had left the Greeks masters of the Morea, and in December Nauplia fell; while, in western Hellas, the stubborn defence of the Suliots had saved the Greeks from the destruction threatened by the parallel march planned by Kurshid. When Omar Vrioni, his lieutenant, at last marched southward, the army of Dramali was already destroyed; Petrobey, chief of the Maina, was able to hurry to the assistance of the defenders of Missolonghi with a thousand men; and on January 23, 1823, after an unsuccessful assauit, the Ottoman commander raised the siege of the town and retired northwards. While the Greeks, in spite of their suicidal dissensions, were thus retrieving their cause on. land, they had also once more gained the command of the sea: a result mainly due to the terror inspired by the Greek fire-ships.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
