The Turkish Empire, Its Growth and Decay

by Baron G. Shaw-Lefevre Eversley

One of the earliest matters which Mahmoud had to deal with was that of Serbia. The treaty of Bucharest had left that province in a very unsettled and ambiguous position. The Turks, under its terms, were permitted to garrison Belgrade and other fortresses, and were to concede to the Serbians self-government, but there was no adequate guarantee for this. The Serbians, who were in possession of the fortresses, refused to give them up to the Turks until a scheme of self-government was arranged. The Porte insisted on immediate surrender. Subsequent proceedings showed that there was no intention to give effective self-government to the Serbians. The Sultan in 1813 sent an army to enforce his claims. Kara George, in most strange contrast to his previous heroic action, lost courage on this occasion. After burying the treasure which he had amassed as virtual ruler of Serbia, he fled the country and sought refuge with the Austrians. In so doing he passed out of the history of his country, save that when, some years later, he thought he might safely return to Serbia, he was arrested and shot as a traitor.

After this defection Serbia seemed to be at the mercy of the Turks, and the greater part of it was occupied by them. But at the moment of its great peril another national patriot and hero rose to the front in the person of Milosch Obrenowitch, who, much as Kara George had done a few years previously, took the lead in rousing the Christian population to resistance, and in leading them to victory. He succeeded in driving the Turks from all the country districts and shutting them up in the fortresses. Mahmoud then sent another army with the object of relieving the Turks in the Serbian fortresses and subduing the rebels. The army, however, halted on the frontier, and negotiations ensued which lasted for some years without any result. The Sultan, it seems, was unwilling, in view of the numerous other difficulties pending in his Empire, to risk the loss of an army in a guerrilla war in the mountains of Serbia.

The most serious of Mahmoud’s other difficulties at this period was the insurrection of the Greeks in 1821. Never was rebellion of a subject race more justifiable. Nowhere throughout the Ottoman Empire were the results of its rule more degrading and intolerable than in Greece. It served none of the purposes for which governments exist. Life and property and honour were without security, and justice had degenerated into the practice of selling injustice to the highest bidder.

The condition of the Greek population was infinitely worse than that of their compatriots in most other parts of the Empire. In Constantinople the Greeks were a wealthy community. They had a large share in the administration of the Empire. The Porte, in fact, could not do without them. Their religion was under the special protection accorded to it by Mahomet the Conqueror. The trade of the Empire was largely in their hands. At Smyrna, Salonika, and many other cities, there were large numbers of Greeks who had enjoyed facilities of trade and had accumulated wealth. Mahmoud, like many of his predecessors, recognized that, by largely contributing to taxes, these people were a source of wealth to his Government, and was not disposed to adopt any measure proposed by the more fanatical of Moslems to extirpate them or to drive them into rebellion. Not a few of the islands of the archipelago, such as Scios and Psara, were practically allowed to govern themselves, and life there was as well-ordered as in any part of Europe.

It was very different with Greece on the mainland. It seems to have been the policy of the Porte to prevent its becoming a populous and wealthy country, with a view to keeping it under close subjection. Much of its land was in the ownership of Moslems, a majority of whom were Greeks by race, who had adopted Islam in order to save their property. They were a fanatical class who were quite as oppressive to the rayas, the cultivators of the soil, as were those of pure Turkish descent. The Ottoman Government presented itself to the Greeks only as an engine to extract taxes, and the pashas who were sent to govern them thought only how best and most quickly to fill their pockets, knowing that their tenure of office would be very short. The people there compared their condition with that of the self-governing communities of Scio and other islands. Education had spread to some extent in spite of the neglect of the Government. Wealthy Greeks from other districts had endowed some schools and colleges. With education came the study of the past history of Greece and the ambition to renew its nationality and greatness. For some time past secret societies such as the Hetairia, promoted in the first instance by the Greeks of Odessa, had been spreading their influence in Greece, and had laid the seeds of revolution.

The insurrection in Greece was not only based on political and racial ideals, it was also an agrarian war, the revolt of cultivators of the soil against their feudal oppressors. This gave to the outbreak in rural districts its intensely persistent, passionate, and cruel attributes.

The revolution broke out in the Morea at the beginning of April 1821, and soon spread over the whole of its country districts. It was estimated that at that time there were twenty thousand Moslems thinly spread in the country districts, most of them of Greek race, feudal lords of the soil and oppressors of the rayas. Nearly the whole of these Moslems were now brutally murdered, without distinction of age or sex. The survivors fled into the fortresses, which were garrisoned by Turks. These fortresses were speedily invested by the Greeks, and within three months nearly all of them were compelled to surrender. In most cases capitulations were agreed to on the terms that lives would be respected, but in no case were these terms adhered to. The garrisons and the Turkish inhabitants and the refugees from the country districts who had gathered there were brutally murdered.

The first encounter between the Turkish soldiers and the Greeks that could be called a battle was at Valtetsi, in the neighbourhood of Tripolitza, the capital of the Morea. Three thousand Greek peasants there defeated five thousand Turks, with a loss of four hundred Turks and a hundred and fifty Greeks. The battle destroyed the prestige of the Turks. It showed that they were no match for the insurgent Greek peasants.

As a result of this victory, Navarino and Tripolitza fell into the hands of the Greek insurgents after short sieges. In both cases the garrisons capitulated on favourable terms for themselves and the inhabitants of the towns. In neither case were the terms observed. All the Moslem troops and inhabitants were ruthlessly massacred. At Tripolitza these numbered eight thousand, including women and children. “Greek historians,” says Finlay in his History of Greece, “have recoiled from telling of these barbarities, while they have been loud in denouncing those of the Turks.”

When news of the massacres in the Morea arrived at Constantinople the greatest alarm and indignation arose. Bloody and ruthless reprisals ensued against the Greeks residing there. The Sultan set the example. He directed that many of the leading Greeks were to be immediately executed. The Greek Patriarch was hanged by his order at the gate of the episcopal residence. The fetva authorizing this was pinned to his body. There was no reason to believe that the Patriarch was implicated in the outbreak in Greece. Four other bishops met the same fate. Thousands of Greeks of inferior position fell victims to the fury of the people at the capital and at many other cities, such as Smyrna and Salonika, and in Cyprus. The Sultan took no steps to restrain these horrors. Women and children equally with men were murdered. Their houses were burnt, their property was pillaged. It was estimated that the number of Greeks thus massacred was not short of the number of Moslems slaughtered in Greece at the outbreak of the revolution. Thenceforth Greeks and Turks emulated one another in their acts of barbarity. The Turks had always been bloodthirsty when their passions and fears were roused, and they now had terrible wrongs to avenge. The Greeks had been degraded by long oppression, and were little better than Turks. Both people evidently thought that the results of their cruelties were proof of the wisdom of inflicting them. The Greeks, by extirpating the Moslems in the Morea, cleared the country, once for all, of their oppressors and effected that separation of the two races which, it will be seen later, the Great Powers of Europe thought desirable, though they hoped to attain it by peaceful expropriation and indemnity. The Turks claimed that their severities checked the spread of the revolution, and compelled one half of the Greek people living within their midst to submit to Ottoman rule.