The Greek Revolution began openly in 1821. But there had been long previous forebodings of it. The dwellers in the land once peopled by the noble race which planned and perfected the arts and graces, the true refinements and the solid virtues that are the basis of our modern civilization, had been for four centuries and more the slaves of the Turks. They were hardly Greeks, if by that name is implied descent from the inhabitants of classic Greece. With the old stock had been blended, from generation to generation, so many foreign elements that nearly all trace of the original blood had disappeared, and the modern Greeks had nothing but their residence and their language to justify them in maintaining the old title. But their slavery was only too real. Oppressed by the Ottomans on account of their race and their religion, the oppression was none the less in that it induced many of them to cast off the last shreds of freedom and deck themselves in the coarser, but, to slavish minds, the pleasanter bondage of trickery and meanness. During the eighteenth century, many Greeks rose to eminence in the Turkish service, and proved harder task-masters to their brethren than the Turks themselves generally were. The hope of further aggrandisement, however, led them to scheme the overthrow of their Ottoman employers, and their projects were greatly aided by the truer, albeit short-sighted, patriotism that animated the greater number of their kinsmen. They groaned under Turkish thraldom, and yearned to be freed from it, in the temper so well described and so worthily denounced by Lord Byron in 1811:—
"And many dream withal the hour is nigh That gives them back their fathers' heritage: For foreign arms and aid they loudly sigh, Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage. Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? By their right arm the conquest must be wrought. Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye?—No! True, they may lay your proud despoilers low, But not for you will Freedom's altars flame."
The Greeks, all but a few genuine patriots, thought otherwise. They sought deliverance at the hands of Gauls and Muscovites; and, as the Muscovites had good reason for desiring the overthrow of Turkey, they listened to their prayers, and other ties than that of community in religion bound the persecuted Greeks to Russia. The Philiké Hetaira, or Friendly Society, chief representative of a very general movement, was founded at Odessa in 1814. It was a secret society, which speedily had ramifications among the Greek Christians in every part of Turkey, encouraging them to prepare for insurrection as soon as the Czar Alexander I. deemed it expedient to aid them by open invasion of Turkey, or as soon as they themselves could take the initiative, trusting to Russia to complete the work of revolution. The Friendly Society increased its influence and multiplied its visionary schemes during many years previous to 1821.
Its strength was augmented by the political condition of Turkey at the time. The Sultan Mahmud—a true type of the Ottoman sovereign at his worst—had attempted to perfect his power by a long train of cruelties, of which murder was the lightest. Defeating his own purpose thereby, he aroused the opposition of Mahometan as well as Christian subjects, and induced the rebellious schemes of Ali Pasha of Joannina, the boldest of his vassals. In Albania Ali ruled with a cruelty that was hardly inferior to Mahmud's. Byron tells how his
"dread command Is lawless law; for with a bloody hand He sways a nation turbulent and told."
The cruelty could be tolerated; but not opposition to Mahmud's will. Long and growing jealousy existed between the Sultan and his tributary. At length, in 1820, there was an open rupture. Ali was denounced as a traitor, and ordered to surrender his pashalik. Instead of so doing, he organized his army for prompt rebellion, trusting for success partly to the support of the Greeks. Most of the Greeks held aloof; but the Suliots, a race of Christian marauders, the fiercest of the fierce community of Albanians, sided with him, and for more than a year rendered him valuable aid by reason of their hereditary skill in lawless warfare. Not till January, 1822, was Ali forced to surrender, and then only, perhaps, through the defection of the Suliots.
The Suliots, dissatisfied with Ali's recompense for their services, had gone over to the Greeks, who, not caring to serve under Ali in his rebellion, had welcomed that rebellion as a Heaven-sent opportunity for realising their long-cherished hopes. The Turkish garrisons in Greece being half unmanned in order that the strongest possible force might be used in subduing Ali, and Turkish government in the peninsula being at a standstill, the Greeks found themselves in an excellent position for asserting their freedom. Had they been less degraded than they were by their long centuries of slavery, or had there been some better organization than that which the purposes and the methods of the Friendly Society afforded for developing the latent patriotism which was honest and wide-spread, they might have achieved a triumph worthy of the classic name they bore and the heroic ancestry that they claimed.
Unfortunately, the Friendly Society, already degenerated from the unworthy aim with which it started, now an elaborate machinery of personal ambition, private greed, and local spite, the willing tool of Russia, was master of the situation. The mastery, however, was by no means thorough. The society had dispossessed all other organizations, but had no organization of its own adequate to the working out of a successful rebellion. Its machinery was tolerably perfect, but efficient motive-power was wanting. Its exchequer was empty; its counsels were divided; above all, it had alienated the sympathies of the worthiest patriots of Greece. Finding itself suddenly in the way of triumph, it was incapable of rightly progressing in that way. Obstacles of its own raising, and obstacles raised by others, stood in the path, and only a very wise man had the chance of successfully removing them.
The wise man did not exist, or was not to be obtained. Perhaps the wisest, though, as later history proved, not very wise, was Count John Capodistrias, a native of Corfu. Born in 1777, he had gone to Italy to study and practise medicine. There also he studied, afterwards to put in practice, the effete Machiavellianism then in vogue. In 1803 he entered political life as secretary to the lately-founded republic of the Ionian Islands. Napoleon's annexation of the Ionian Islands in 1807 drove him into the service of Russia, and, as Russian agent, he advocated, at the Vienna Conference of 1815, the reconstruction of the Ionian republic. The partial concession of Great Britain towards that project, by which the Ionian Islands were established as a sort of commonwealth, dependent upon England, enabled him to live and work in Corfu, awaiting the realization of his own patriotic schemes, and watching the patriotic movement in Greece. Italian in his education, and Russian in his sympathies, he was still an honest Greek, worthier and abler than most other influential Greeks. "He had many virtues and great abilities," says a competent critic. "His conduct was firm and disinterested, his manners simple and dignified. His personal feelings were warm, and, as a consequence of this virtue, they were sometimes so strong as to warp his judgment. He wanted the equanimity and impartiality of mind, and the elevation of soul necessary to make a great man."[A] In spite of his defects, he might have done good service to the Greek Revolution, had he accepted the offer of its leadership, shrewdly tendered to him by the Friendly Society. But this he declined, having no liking for the society, and no trust in its methods and designs.
[Footnote A: Finlay, "History of the Greek Revolution" (1861), vol. ii., p. 196. Mr. Finlay served as a volunteer in Greece under Captain Abney Hastings. His work is certainly the best on the subject, though we shall have in later pages to differ widely from its strictures on Lord Cochrane's motives and action. But our complaints will be less against his history than against the two other leading ones—General Gordon's "History of the Greek Revolution" (1832), and M. Trikoupes's "[Greek: Historia tês Hellênikês Epanastaseôs]" (1853-6), which is not very much more than a paraphrase of Gordon's work.]