This indeed was not unlikely to happen; for the new house of Hellenism had hardly arisen before it became desperately divided against itself. The vitality of the national movement resided entirely in the local communes. It was they that had found the fighting men, kept them armed and supplied, and by spontaneous co-operation expelled the Turk from Peloponnesos. But if the co-operation was to be permanent it must have a central organization, and with the erection of this superstructure the troubles began. As early as June 1821 a ‘Peloponnesian Senate’ was constituted and at once monopolized by the ‘Primates’, the propertied class that had been responsible for the communal taxes under the Romaic and Ottoman régimes and was allowed to control the communal government in return. About the same time two Phanariot princes threw in their lot with the revolution— Alexander Mavrokordatos and Demetrius, the more estimable brother of the futile Alexander Hypsilantis. Both were saturated with the most recent European political theory, and they committed the peasants and seamen of the liberated districts to an ambitious constitutionalism. In December 1821 a ‘National Assembly’ met at Epidauros, passed an elaborate organic law, and elected Mavrokordatos first president of the Hellenic Republic.
The struggle for life and death in 1822 had staved off the internal crisis, but the Peloponnesian Senate remained obstinately recalcitrant towards the National Government in defence of its own vested interests; and the insubordination of the fleet in 1823 was of one piece with the political faction which broke out as soon as the immediate danger from without was removed.
Towards the end of 1823 European ‘Philhellenes’ began to arrive in Greece. In those dark days of reaction that followed Waterloo, self-liberated Hellas seemed the one bright spot on the continent; but the idealists who came to offer her their services were confronted with a sorry spectacle. The people were indifferent to their leaders, and the leaders at variance among themselves. The gentlemanly Phanariots had fallen into the background. Mavrokordatos only retained influence in north-western Greece. In Peloponnesos the Primates were all-powerful, and Kolokotrónis the klepht was meditating a popular dictatorship at their expense. In the north-east the adventurer Odhyssévs had won a virtual dictatorship already, and was suspected of intrigue with the Turks; and all this factious dissension rankled into civil war as soon as the contraction of a loan in Great Britain had invested the political control of the Hellenic Republic with a prospective value in cash. The first civil war was fought between Kolokotrónis on the one side and the Primates of Hydhra and Peloponnesos on the other; but the issue was decided against Kolokotrónis by the adhesion to the coalition of Kolettis the Vlach, once physician to Mukhtar Pasha, the son of Ali, and now political agent for all the northern Armatoli in the national service. The fighting lasted from November 1823 to June 1824, and was followed by another outbreak in November of the latter year, when the victors quarrelled over the spoils, and the Primates were worsted in turn by the islanders and the Armatoli. The nonentity Kondouriottis of Hydhra finally emerged as President of Greece, with the sharp-witted Kolettis as his principal wire-puller, but the disturbances did not cease till the last instalment of the loan had been received and squandered and there was no more spoil to fight for.
Meanwhile, Sultan Mahmud had been better employed. Resolved to avert stalemate by the only possible means, he had applied in the course of 1823 to Mohammed Ali Pasha of Egypt, a more formidable, though more distant, satrap than Ali of Yannina himself. Mohammed Ali had a standing army and navy organized on the European model. He had also a son Ibrahim, who knew how to manoeuvre them, and was ambitious of a kingdom. Mahmud hired the father’s troops and the son’s generalship for the re-conquest of Peloponnesos, under engagement to invest Ibrahim with the pashalik as soon as he should effectively make it his own. By this stroke of diplomacy a potential rebel was turned into a willing ally, and the preparations for the Egyptian expedition went forward busily through the winter of 1823-4.
The plan of campaign was systematically carried out. During the season of respite the Greek islanders had harried the coasts and commerce of Anatolia and Syria at will. The first task was to deprive them of their outposts in the Aegean, and an advanced squadron of the Egyptian fleet accordingly destroyed the community of Kasos in June 1824, while the Ottoman squadron sallied out of the Dardanelles a month later and dealt out equal measure to Psarà. The two main flotillas then effected a junction off Rhodes; and, though the crippled Greek fleet still ventured pluckily to confront them, it could not prevent Ibrahim from casting anchor safely in Soudha Bay and landing his army to winter in Krete. In February 1825 he transferred these troops with equal impunity to the fortress of Modhon, which was still held for the sultan by an Ottoman garrison. The fire-ships of Hydhra came to harry his fleet too late, and on land the Greek forces were impotent against his trained soldiers. The Government in vain promoted Kolokotrónis from captivity to commandership-in-chief. The whole south-western half of Peloponnesos passed into Ibrahim’s hands, and in June 1825 he even penetrated as far as the mills of Lerna on the eastern coast, a few miles south of Argos itself.
At the same time the Ottoman army of the west moved south again under a new commander, Rashid Pasha of Yannina, and laid final siege on April 27 to Mesolonghi, just a year after Byron had died of fever within its walls. The Greeks were magnificent in their defence of these frail mud-bastions, and they more than held their own in the amphibious warfare of the lagoons. The struggle was chequered by the continual coming and going of the Greek and Ottoman fleets. They were indeed the decisive factor; for without the supporting squadron Rashid would have found himself in the same straits as his predecessors at the approach of autumn, while the slackness of the islanders in keeping the sea allowed Mesolonghi to be isolated in January 1826. The rest was accomplished by the arrival of Ibrahim on the scene. His heavy batteries opened fire in February; his gunboats secured command of the lagoons, and forced Anatolikòn to capitulate in March. In April provisions in Mesolonghi itself gave out, and, scorning surrender, the garrison—men, women, and children together— made a general sortie on the night of April 22. Four thousand fell, three thousand were taken, and two thousand won through. It was a glorious end for Mesolonghi, but it left the enemy in possession of all north-western Greece.
The situation was going from bad to worse. Ibrahim returned to Peloponnesos, and steadily pushed forward his front, ravaging as steadily as he went. Rashid, after pacifying the north-west, moved on to the north-eastern districts, where the national cause had been shaken by the final treachery and speedy assassination of Odhyssèvs. Siege was laid to Athens in June, and the Greek Government enlisted in vain the military experience of its Philhellenes. Fabvier held the Akropolis, but Generalissimo Sir Richard Church was heavily defeated in the spring of 1827 in an attempt to relieve him from the Attic coast; Grand Admiral Cochrane saw his fleet sail home for want of payment in advance, when he summoned it for review at Poros; and Karaiskakis, the Greek captain of Armatoli, was killed in a skirmish during his more successful efforts to harass Rashid’s communications by land. On June 5, 1827, the Greek garrison of the Akropolis marched out on terms.
It looked as if the Greek effort after independence would be completely crushed, and as if Sultan Mahmud would succeed in getting his empire under control. In September 1826 he had rid it at last of the mischief at its centre by blowing up the janissaries in their barracks at Constantinople. Turkey seemed almost to have weathered the storm when she was suddenly overborne by further intervention on the other side.
Tsar Alexander, the vaccillator, died in November 1825, and was succeeded by his son Nicholas I, as strong a character and as active a will as Sultan Mahmud himself. Nicholas approached the Greek question without any disinclination towards a Turkish war; and both Great Britain and France found an immediate interest in removing a ground of provocation which might lead to such a rude disturbance of the European ‘Balance of Power’. On July 6, 1827, a month after Athens surrendered, the three powers concluded a treaty for the pacification of Greece, in which they bound over both belligerent parties to accept an armistice under pain of military coercion. An allied squadron appeared off Navarino Bay to enforce this policy upon the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet which lay united there, and the intrusion of the allied admirals into the bay itself precipitated on October 20 a violent naval battle in which the Moslem flotilla was destroyed. The die was cast; and in April 1828 the Russian and Ottoman Governments drifted into a formal war, which brought Russian armies across the Danube as far as Adrianople, and set the Ottoman Empire at bay for the defence of its capital. Thanks to Mahmud’s reorganization, the empire did not succumb to this assault; but it had no more strength to spare for the subjugation of Greece. The Greeks had no longer to reckon with the sultan as a military factor; and in August 1828 they wore relieved of Ibrahim’s presence as well, by the disembarkation of 14,000 French troops in Peloponnesos to superintend the withdrawal of the Egyptian forces. In March 1829 the three powers delimited the Greek frontier. The line ran east and west from the Gulf of Volo to the Gulf of Arta, and assigned to the new state no more and no less territory than the districts that had effectively asserted their independence against the sultan in 1821. This settlement was the only one possible under the circumstances; but it was essentially transitory, for it neglected the natural line of nationality altogether, and left a numerical majority of the Greek race, as well as the most important centres of its life, under the old régime of servitude.
Even the liberated area was not at the end of its troubles. In the spring of 1827, when they committed themselves into the hands of their foreign patrons, the Greeks had found a new president for the republic in John Kapodistrias, an intimate of Alexander the tsar. Kapodistrias was a Corfiote count, with a Venetian education and a career in the Russian diplomatic service, and no one could have been more fantastically unsuitable for the task of reconstructing the country to which he was called. Kapodistrias’ ideal was the fin-de-siècle ‘police-state’; but ‘official circles’ did not exist in Greece, and he had no acquaintance with the peasants and sailors whom he hoped to redeem by bureaucracy. He instituted a hierarchically centralized administration which made the abortive constitution of Mavrokordatos seem sober by comparison; he trampled on the liberty of the rising press, which was the most hopeful educational influence in the country; and he created superfluous ministerial portfolios for his untalented brothers. In fact he reglamented Greece from his palace at Aigina like a divinely appointed autocrat, from his arrival in January 1828 till the summer of 1831, when he provoked the Hydhriots to open rebellion, and commissioned the Russian squadron in attendance to quell them by a naval action, with the result that Poros was sacked by the President’s regular army and the national fleet was completely destroyed. After that, he attempted to rule as a military dictator, and fell foul of the Mavromichalis of Maina. The Mainates knew better how to deal with the ‘police-state’ than the Hydhriots; and on October 9, 1831, Kapodistrias was assassinated in Nauplia, at the church door, by two representatives of the Mavromichalis clan.