IV. FINAL CONQUEST OF GREECE BY TURKEY.
The fall of Corinth opened the way to a successful advance of the Turkish forces through the Peloponnesus, and the Venetians were soon compelled to abandon it. By the peace of Passä'rowitz, in 1718, the whole of Greece was again surrendered to Turkey, and under her rule the country, divided into military districts called Pasha'lics, sunk into a deplorable condition which the progress of time did nothing to ameliorate. The Greeks, being virtually reduced to bondage, suffered untold miseries from the rapacity and barbarism of their masters. Says the historian, SIR EMERSON TENNENT, "So undefined was the system of extortion, and so uncontrolled the power of those to whose execution it was intrusted, that the evil spread over the whole system of administration, and insinuated itself with a polypous fertility into every relation and ordinance of society, till there were few actions or occupations of the Greeks that were not burdened with the scrutiny and interference of their masters, and none that did not suffer, in a greater or less degree, from their heartless rapine." For four centuries and over the Greeks suffered under this despotism, which stamped out industry and education, and tended to the extinction of every manly trait in the people, while it also developed the native vices of the Hellenic character.
In a poem written in 1786 by the afterward celebrated British statesman, GEORGE CANNING, the writer, after paying a handsome tribute to the greatness and glory of the Greece of olden time, draws the following truthful picture of her degeneracy in his own day:
The Slavery of Greece.
Oh, how changed thy fame,
And all thy glories fading into shame!
What! that thy bold, thy freedom-breathing land
Should crouch beneath a tyrant's stern command!
That servitude should bind in galling chain
Whom Asia's millions once opposed in vain,
Who could have thought? Who sees without a groan
Thy cities mouldering and thy walls o'erthrown;
That where once towered the stately, solemn fane,
Now moss-grown ruins strew the ravaged plain;
And, unobserved but by the traveller's eye,
Proud, vaulted domes in fretted fragments lie;
And the fallen column, on the dusty ground,
Pale ivy throws its sluggish arms around?
Thy sons (sad change!) in abject bondage sigh;
Unpitied toil, and unlamented die;
Groan at the labors of the galling oar,
Or the dark caverns of the mine explore.
The glittering tyranny of Othman's sons,
The pomp of horror which surrounds their thrones,
Have awed their servile spirits into fear;
Spurned by the foot, they tremble and revere.
The day of labor, night's sad, sleepless hour,
The inflictive scourge of arbitrary power,
The bloody terror of the pointed steel,
The murderous stake, the agonizing wheel,
And (dreadful choice!) the bowstring or the bowl,
Damps their faint vigor and unmans the soul.
Disastrous fate! Still tears will fill the eye,
Still recollection prompt the mournful sigh,
When to the mind recurs thy former fame,
And all the horrors of thy present shame.
In 1810-'11 the poet BYRON spent considerable time in Greece, visiting its many scenes of historic interest, and noting the condition of its people. Here he wrote the second canto of Childe Harold, in which the following fine apostrophe and appeal to Greece, still under Moslem rule, are found:
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth,
And long accustomed bondage uncreate?
Not such thy sons who whilom did await,
The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,
In bleak Thermopylæ's sepulchral strait—
Oh, who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Euro'ta's banks, and call thee from the tomb?
Spirit of Freedom! when on Phy'le's brow
Thou sat'st with Thrasybu'lus and his train,
Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now
Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain?
Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain,
But every carle can lord it o'er thy land;
Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain,
Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand,
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned.
In all, save form alone, how changed! and who
That marks the fire still sparkling in each eye,
Who but would deem their bosoms burned anew
With thy unquenched beam, lost Liberty!
And many dream withal the hour is nigh
That gives them back their father's heritage:
For foreign arms and aid they fondly sigh,
Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage,
Or tear their name defiled from Slavery's mournful page.
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress thee? No!
True, they may lay your proud despoilers low,
But not for you will Freedom's altars flame.
Shades of the Helots! triumph o'er your foe!
Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;
Thy glorious day is o'er, but not thy years of shame.
When riseth Lacedæmon's hardihood,
When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,
When Athens' children are with hearts endued,
When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men,
Then may'st thou be restored; but not till then.
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust: and when
Can man, in shattered splendor renovate,
Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?
FIRST STEPS TO SECURE LIBERTY.
Although the oppressive domination of the Turks was tamely submitted to for so many centuries, the Greeks did not entirely lose their national spirit, nor their devotion to their religion and their domestic institutions; and long before Byron wrote, Greece began preparations to break the Turkish yoke. The preservation of the national spirit was largely due to the warlike inhabitants of the mountainous regions of the north, who maintained their independence against the bloody tyranny of the Turks, and continually harassed their camps and villages. These mountaineers were known as Klephts; and though they were literally robbers, ofttimes plundering the Greeks as well as the Turks, yet, on the decline of the Armato'li—the Christian local militia which the Turks attempted to crush out—the Klephts acquired political and social importance as a permanent class in the Greek nation; and, as DR. FELTON says, "When the Revolution broke out, the courage, temperance, and hardihood of these bands were among the most effective agencies in rescuing Greece from the blighting tyranny of the Turks." This writer characterizes the ballads of the Klephts as "full of fire, and redolent of the mountain life, which had an irresistible charm for young and adventurous spirits chafing under the domination of the Turks in the lowlands;" and to him we are indebted for a literal version of one of these ballads, representing the feelings of a young man who had resolved to leave his mother's home and betake himself to the mountains, and "illustrating at once the impatient spirit of rebellion against the Turks, and the sweet flow of natural poetry which was ever welling up in the hearts of the people." [Footnote: This ballad is taken from "a collection published by Zampelios, a Greek gentleman, and a native of Leucadia.">[
"Mother, I can no longer be a slave to the Turks; I cannot—my heart fights against it. I will take my gun and go and become a Klepht; to dwell on the mountains, among the lofty ridges; to have the woods for my companions, and my converse with the beasts; to have the snow for my covering, the rocks for my bed; with sons of the Klephts to have my daily habitation. I will go, mother, and do not weep, but give me thy prayer. And we will pray, my dear mother, that I may slaughter many a Turk. Plant the rose, and plant the dark carnation, and give them sugar and musk to drink; and as long, O mother mine, as the flowers blossom and put forth, thy son is not dead, but is warring with the Turks. But if a day of sorrow come, a day of woe, and the plants fade away, and the flowers fall, then I too shall have been slain, and thou must clothe thyself in black.'
"Twelve years passed, and five months, while the roses blossomed and the buds bloomed; and one spring morning, the first of May, when the birds were singing and heaven was smiling, at once it thundered and lightened, and grew dark. The carnation sighed, the rose wept, both withered away together, and the flowers fell; and with them the hapless mother became a lifeless heap of earth."
The last half of the eighteenth century witnessed, in Greece, the first general desire for liberty. Secret societies were formed to aid in the emancipation of the country, and "eminent writers, at home and abroad, appealed to the glorious recollections of Greece in order to excite a universal enthusiasm for freedom." Among the latter may be mentioned CONSTANTINOS RHIGAS, a native of Thessaly, born in 1753, a man of fine accomplishments and an ardent patriot, whose lyric ballads are said to have "rung through Greece like a trumpet," and who has been styled "the Tyrtæ'us of modern Greece." One of his war-songs has been thus translated:
Sons of the Greeks, arise!
The glorious hour's gone forth,
And, worthy of such ties,
Display who gave us birth.
Then manfully despising
The Turkish tyrant's yoke,
Let your country see you rising,
And all her chains are broke.
Brave shades of chiefs and sages,
Behold the coming strife!
Hellenes of past ages,
Oh start again to life!
At the sound of my trumpet, breaking
Your sleep, oh join with me!
And the seven-hilled city [Footnote: Constantinople] seeking,
Fight, conquer, till we're free.
Sparta, Sparta, why in slumbers
Lethargic dost thou lie?
Awake, and join thy numbers
With Athens, old ally!
Leonidas recalling,
That chief of ancient song,
Who saved ye once from falling—
The terrible! the strong!
Who made that bold diversion
In old Thermopylæ,
And warring with the Persian
To keep his country free;
With his three hundred waging
The battle, long he stood,
And, like a lion raging,
Expired in seas of blood.
—Trans. by BYRON.
Another poet, POLYZOIS, writes in a similar vein:
Friends and countrymen, shall we
Slaves of Moslems ever be,
Of the old barbaric band,
Tyrants o'er Hellenic land?
Draws the hour of vengeance nigh—
Vengeance! be our battle-cry.
It may be stated that Rhigas, having visited Vienna with the hope of rousing the wealthy Greek residents of that city to immediate action, was barbarously surrendered to the Turks by the Austrian government. On the way to execution he broke from his guards and killed two of them, but was overpowered and immediately beheaded.