In the other direction, however, rebellion was spreading northward from Peloponnesos to continental Greece. Galaxídhi revolted in April, and was followed in June by Mesolonghi—a prosperous town of fishermen, impregnably situated in the midst of the lagoons at the mouth of the Aspropotamo, beyond the narrows of the Korinthian Gulf. By the end of the month, north-western Greece was free as far as the outposts of Khurshid Pasha beyond the Gulf of Arta.
Further eastward, again, in the mountains between the Gulf of Korinth and the river Elládha (Sperkheiòs), the Armatoli of Ali’s faction had held their ground, and gladly joined the revolution on the initiative of their captains Dhiakos and Odhyssèvs. But the movement found its limits. The Turkish garrison of Athens obstinately held out during the winter of 1821-2, and the Moslems of Negrepont (Euboía) maintained their mastery in the island. In Agrapha they likewise held their own, and, after one severely punished raid, the Agraphiot Armatoli were induced to re-enter the sultan’s service on liberal terms. The Vlachs in the gorges of the Aspropotamo were pacified with equal success; and Dramali, Khurshid’s lieutenant, who guarded the communications between the army investing Yannina and its base at Constantinople, was easily able to crush all symptoms of revolt in Thessaly from his head-quarters at Lárissa. Still further east, the autonomous Greek villages on the mountainous promontories of Khalkidhiki had revolted in May, in conjunction with the well-supplied and massively fortified monasteries of the ‘Ayon Oros’; but the Pasha of Salonika called down the South Slavonic Moslem landowners from the interior, sacked the villages, and amnestied the monastic confederation on condition of establishing a Turkish garrison in their midst and confiscating their arms. The monks’ compliance was assisted by the excommunication under which the new patriarch at Constantinople had placed all the insurgents by the sultan’s command.
The movement was thus successfully localised on the European continent, and further afield it was still more easily cut short. After the withdrawal of the Turkish squadron, the Greek fleet had to look on at the systematic destruction of Kydhonies,[1] a flourishing Greek industrial town on the mainland opposite Mitylini which had been founded under the sultan’s auspices only forty years before. All that the islanders could do was to take off the survivors in their boats; and when they dispersed to their ports in autumn, the Ottoman ships came out again from the Dardanelles, sailed round Peloponnesos into the Korinthian Gulf, and destroyed Galaxídhi. A still greater catastrophe followed the reopening of naval operations next spring. In March 1822 the Samians landed a force on Khios and besieged the Turkish garrison, which was relieved after three weeks by the arrival of the Ottoman fleet. A month later the Greek fleet likewise appeared on the scene, and on June 18 a Psariot captain, Constantine Kanaris, actually destroyed the Ottoman flag-ship by a daring fire-ship attack. Upon this the Ottoman fleet fled back as usual to the Dardanelles; yet the only consequence was the complete devastation, in revenge, of helpless Khios. The long-shielded prosperity of the island was remorselessly destroyed, the people were either enslaved or massacred, and the victorious fleet had to stand by as passively this time as at the destruction of Kydhonies the season before. In the following summer, again, the same fate befell Trikéri, a maritime community on the Gulf of Volo which had gained its freedom when the rest of Thessaly stirred in vain; and so in 1823 the revolution found itself confined on sea, as well as on land, to the focus where it had originated in April 1821.
[Footnote 1: Turkish Aivali.]
This isolation was a practical triumph for Sultan Mahmud. The maintenance of the Ottoman Empire on the basis of Moslem ascendancy was thereby assured; but it remained to be seen whether the isolated area could now be restored to the status quo in which the rest of his dominions had been retained.
During the whole season of 1821 the army of Khurshid had been held before Yannina. But in February 1822 Yannina fell, Ali was slain, his treasure seized, and his troops disbanded. The Ottoman forces were liberated for a counterattack on Peloponnesos. Already in April Khurshid broke up his camp at Lárissa, and his lieutenant Dramali was given command of the new expedition towards the south. He crossed the Sperkheiòs at the beginning of July with an army of twenty thousand men.[1] Athens had capitulated to Odhyssèvs ten days before; but it had kept open the road for Dramali, and north-eastern Greece fell without resistance into his hands. The citadel of Korinth surrendered as tamely as the open country, and he was master of the isthmus before the end of the month. Nauplia meanwhile had been treating with its besiegers for terms, and would have surrendered to the Greeks already if they had not driven their bargain so hard. Dramali hurried on southward into the plain to the fortress’s relief, raised the siege, occupied the town of Argos, and scattered the Greek forces into the hills. But the citadel of Argos held out against him, and the positions were rapidly reversed. Under the experienced direction of Kolokotrónis, the Greeks from their hill-fastnesses ringed round the plain of Argos and scaled up every issue. Dramali’s supplies ran out. An attempt of his vanguard to break through again towards the north was bloodily repulsed, and he barely succeeded two days later in extricating the main body in a demoralized condition, with the loss of all his baggage-train. The Turkish army melted away, Dramali was happy to die at Korinth, and Khurshid was executed by the sultan’s command. The invasion of Peloponnesos had broken down, and nothing could avert the fall of Nauplia. The Ottoman fleet hovered for one September week in the offing, but Kanaris’s fire-ships took another ship of the line in toll at the roadsteads of Tenedos before it safely regained the Dardanelles. The garrison of Nauplia capitulated in December, on condition of personal security and liberty, and the captain of a British frigate, which arrived on the spot, took measures that the compact should be observed instead of being broken by the customary massacre. But the strongest fortress in Peloponnesos was now in Greek hands.
[Footnote 1: Including a strong contingent of Moslem Slavs—Bulgarian Pomaks from the Aegean hinterland and Serbian Bosniaks from the Adriatic.]
In the north-west the season had not passed so well. When the Turks invested Ali in Yannina, they repatriated the Suliot exiles in their native mountains. But a strong sultan was just as formidable to the Suliots as a strong pasha, so they swelled their ranks by enfranchising their peasant-serfs, and made common cause with their old enemy in his adversity. Now that Ali was destroyed, the Suliots found themselves in a precarious position, and turned to the Greeks for aid. But on July 16 the Greek advance was checked by a severe defeat at Petta in the plain of Arta. In September the Suliots evacuated their impregnable fortresses in return for a subsidy and a safe-conduct, and Omer Vrioni, the Ottoman commander in the west,[1] was free to advance in turn towards the south. On November 6 he actually laid siege to Mesolonghi, but here his experiences were as discomfiting as Dramali’s. He could not keep open his communications, and after heavy losses retreated again to Arta in January 1823.
[Footnote 1: He was a renegade officer of Ali’s.]
In 1823 the struggle seemed to be lapsing into stalemate. The liberated Peloponnesos had failed to propagate the revolution through the remainder of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Government had equally failed to reconquer the Peloponnesos by military invasion. This season’s operations only seemed to emphasize the deadlock. The Ottoman commander in the west raised an auxiliary force of Moslem and Catholic clansmen from northern Albania, and attempted to reach Mesolonghi once more. But he penetrated no further than Anatolikòn—the Mesolonghiots’ outpost village at the head of the lagoons—and the campaign was only memorable for the heroic death of Marko Botzaris the Suliot in a night attack upon the Ottoman camp. At sea, the two fleets indulged in desultory cruises without an encounter, for the Turks were still timid and incompetent, while the growing insubordination and dissension on the Greek ships made concerted action there, too, impossible. By the end of the season it was clear that the struggle could only definitively be decided by the intervention of a third party on one side or the other—unless the Greeks brought their own ruin upon themselves.