The Friendly Society then sought and found a leader, far inferior to Count Capodistrias, in Prince Alexander Hypsilantes, the son of a Hospodar of Wallachia who had been deposed in 1806. Hypsilantes had been educated in Russia, and had there risen to some rank, high enough at any rate to quicken his ambition and vanity, both as a soldier and as a courtier. He was not without virtues; but he was utterly unfit for the duties imposed upon him as leader of the Greek Revolution. Not a Greek himself, his purpose in accepting the office seems to have been to make Greece an appendage of the despotic monarchy, which, by means of the political crisis, he hoped to establish in Wallachia, under Russian protection. With that view, in March 1821, he led the first crude army of Greek and other Christian rebels into Moldavia. There and in Wallachia he stirred up a brief revolt, attended by military blunders and lawless atrocities which soon brought vengeance upon himself and made a false beginning of the revolutionary work. Moldavia and Wallachia were quickly restored to Turkish rule, and Hypsilantes had in June to fly for safety into Austria. But the bad example that he set, and the evil influence that he and his promoters and followers of the Friendly Society exerted, initiated a false policy and encouraged a pernicious course of action, by which the cause of the Greeks was injured for years.
The real Greek revolution began in the Morea. There the Friendly Society did good work in showing the people that the hour for action had come; but its direction of that action was for the most part mischievous. The worst Greeks were the leaders, and, under their guidance, the play of evil passions—inevitable in all efforts of the oppressed to overturn their oppressors—was developed to a grievous extent. Turkish blood was first shed on the 25th of March, 1821, and within a week the whole of the Morea was in a ferment of rebellion. By the 22nd of April, which was Easter Sunday, it is reckoned that from ten to fifteen thousand Mahometans had been slaughtered in cold blood, and about three thousand Turkish homes destroyed.
The promoters of all that wanton atrocity were the directors of the Friendly Society, among whom the Archimandrate Gregorios Dikaios, nicknamed Pappa Phlesas, and Petros Mavromichales, or Petro-Bey, were the most conspicuous. Its principal agents were the klepht or brigand chieftains, best represented by Theodore Kolokotrones.
Born about 1770, of a family devoted to the use of arms in predatory ways, Kolokotrones had led a lawless life until 1806, when the Greek peasantry called in the assistance of their Turkish rulers in hunting down their persecutors of their own race, and when, several of his family being slain, he himself had to seek refuge in Zante. There he maintained himself, partly by piracy, partly by cattle-dealing. In 1810 the English annexation of the Ionian Islands led to his employment, first as captain and afterwards as major, in the Greek contingent of the British army. He had amassed much wealth, and was in the prime of life when, in January, 1821, he returned to his early home, to revive his old brigand life under the name of legitimate warfare. His thorough knowledge of the country, its passes and its strongholds, and his familiarity with the modes of fighting proper to them, his handsome person and agreeable deportment, his shrewd wit and persuasive oratory, made him one of the most influential agents of the Revolution at its commencement, and his influence grew during the ensuing years.
The flame of rebellion, having spread through the Morea during the early weeks of April, extended rapidly over the adjoining districts of the mainland. By the end of June the insurgents were masters of nearly all the country now possessed by modern Greece. Their cause was heartily espoused by the Suliots of Albania and other fellow-Christians in the various Turkish provinces, and their kinsmen of the outlying islands were eager to join in the work of national regeneration, and to contribute largely to the completion of that work by their naval prowess.
It was naval prowess, as our later pages will abundantly show, of a very barbarous and undeveloped sort. Besides the two principal seaports on the mainland, Tricheri on Mount Pelion and Galaxidhi on the Gulf of Corinth, there were famous colonies of Greek seamen in the islands of Psara and Kasos, and similar colonies of Albanians in Hydra and Spetzas. These and the other islands had long practised irregular commerce, and protected that commerce by irregular fighting with the Turks. At the first sound of revolution they threw in their lot with the insurgents of the mainland, and thus a nondescript navy of some four hundred brigs and schooners, of from sixty to four hundred tons' burthen, and manned by about twelve thousand sailors, adepts alike in trade and piracy, but very unskilled in orderly warfare, and very feebly inspired by anything like disinterested patriotism, was ready to use and abuse its powers during the ensuing seven years' fight for Greek independence.
During the summer of 1821, while the continental Greeks were rushing to arms, murdering the Turkish residents among them by thousands, and thus bringing down upon themselves, or upon those of their own race who, as peasants and burghers, took no important share in actual fighting, the murderous vengeance of the Turkish troops sent to attempt the suppression of the revolt, these sailors were pursuing an easier and more profitable game. The Turkish ports were not warlike, and the Turkish trading ships were not prepared for fighting. In May, a formidable crowd of vessels left the islands on a cruise, from which they soon returned with an immense store of booty. Early in June, the best Turkish fleet that could be brought together, consisting of two line-of-battle ships, three frigates, and three sloops, went out to harass, if not to destroy, the swarm of smaller enemies. Jakomaki Tombazes, with thirty-seven of these smaller enemies, set off to meet them, and falling in with one of the ships, gave her chase, till, in the roads of Eripos, she was attacked on the 8th of June, and, with the help of a fireship, destroyed with a loss of nearly four hundred men. That victory caused the flight of the other Turkish vessels, and was the beginning of much cruel work at sea and with ships, which, not often daring to meet in open fight, wrought terrible mischief to unprotected ports and islands.
The mischief wrought upon the land was yet more terrible. A seething tide of Greek and Moslem blood heaved to and fro, as, during the second half of 1821, each party in turn gained temporary ascendency in one district after another. Greeks murdered Turks, and Turks murdered Greeks, with equal ferocity; or perhaps the ferocity of the Greeks, stirred by bad leaders to revenge themselves for all their previous sufferings, even surpassed that of the Turks. Of their cruelty a glaring instance occurred in their capture of Navarino. The Turkish inhabitants having held out as long as a mouthful of food was left in the town, were forced to capitulate on the 19th of August. It was promised that, upon their surrendering, the Greek vessels were to convey them, their wearing apparel, and their household furniture, either to Egypt or to Tunis. No sooner were the gates opened than a wholesale plunder and slaughter ensued. A Greek ecclesiastic has described the scene. "Women wounded with musket-balls and sabre-cuts rushed to the sea, seeking to escape, and were deliberately shot. Mothers robbed of their clothes, with infants in their arms, plunged into the water to conceal themselves from shame, and they were then made a mark for inhuman riflemen. Greeks seized infants from their mothers' breasts and dashed them against the rocks. Children, three and four years old, were hurled, living, into the sea, and left to drown. When the massacre was ended, the dead bodies washed ashore, or piled on the beach, threatened to cause a pestilence."[A] At the sack of Tripolitza, on the 8th of October, about eight thousand Moslems were murdered, the last two thousand, chiefly women and children, being taken into a neighbouring ravine, there to be slaughtered at leisure. Two years afterwards a ghastly heap of bones attested the inhuman deed.
[Footnote A: Finlay, vol. i.; p. 263, citing Phrantzes.]
In ways like these the first stage of the Greek Revolution was achieved. Before the close of 1821, it appeared to the Greeks themselves, to their Moslem enemies, and to their many friends in England, France, and other countries, that the triumph was complete. Unfortunately, the same bad motives and the same bad methods that had so grievously polluted the torrent of patriotism continued to poison and disturb the stream which might otherwise have been henceforth clear, steady, and health-giving. Greece was free, but, unless another and a much harder revolution could be effected in the temper and conduct of its own people, unfit to put its freedom to good use or even to maintain it. "The rapid success of the Greeks during the first few weeks of the revolution," says their ablest historian, "threw the management of much civil and financial business into the hands of the proësti and demogeronts in office. The primates, who already exercised great official authority, instantly appropriated that which had been hitherto exercised by murdered voivodes and beys. Every primate strove to make himself a little independent potentate, and every captain of a district assumed the powers of a commander-in-chief. The Revolution, before six months had passed, seemed to have peopled Greece with a host of little Ali Pashas. When the primate and the captain acted in concert, they collected the public revenues; administered the Turkish property, which was declared national; enrolled, paid, and provisioned as many troops as circumstances required, or as they thought fit; named officers; formed a local guard for the primate of the best soldiers in the place, who were thus often withdrawn from the public service; and organised a local police and a local treasury. This I system of local self-government, constituted in a very self-willed manner, and relieved from almost all responsibility, was soon established as a natural result of the Revolution over all Greece. The Sultan's authority having ceased, every primate assumed the prerogatives of the Sultan. For a few weeks this state of things was unavoidable, and, to an able and honest chief or government, it would have facilitated the establishment of a strong central authority; but by the vices of Greek society it was perpetuated into an organised anarchy. No improvement was made in financial arrangements, or in the system of taxation; no measures were adopted for rendering property more secure; no attempt was made to create an equitable administration of justice; no courts of law were established; and no financial accounts were published. Governments were formed, constitutions were drawn up, national assemblies met, orators debated, and laws were passed according to the political fashion patronised by the liberals of the day. But no effort was made to prevent the Government being virtually absolute, unless it was by rendering it absolutely powerless. The constitutions were framed to remain a dead letter. The national assemblies were nothing but conferences of parties, and the laws passed were intended to fascinate Western Europe, not to operate with effect in Greece."[A]