GREECE

Any attempt to explain the emergence of an independent Greece in the 1830s is complicated by the fact that the Greeks were scattered across the Balkans,

The Black Sea littoral and the Ottoman Levant. Equally confusing, there were two main revolts against Ottoman rule in 1821, one in the Romanian principalities, the other in what became the Greek state, primarily the Peloponnesus and the southern area of mainland Greece. The Danubian revolt was quickly snuffed out, not just by the sultan's armies but also by the hostility of the surrounding Romanian population. It was in the heartlands of the south that the state was established, a circumstance which made its domination by outside powers for the remainder of this period all the easier.

The significance of the Greek diaspora and the eighteenth-century roots of Greek nationalism have already been described. More Greeks lived in the trading capitals of the Empire and Europe than lived in what is now Greece. The Greek merchant class had grown in size and wealth throughout the eighteenth century, and the numbers of educated, cosmopolitan Greeks, alive to the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, increased accordingly.

Yet it was not the wealthiest merchants who provided the advance guard of Greek nationalism. Still less was it the Phanariots, integrated as they were into the Ottoman governing system. Active nationalists were instead typified by Emmanouil Xanthos, Nikolaos Skouphas and Athanasios Tsakaloff, the impoverished and bankrupt merchants who founded the Philiki Etairia (Society of Friends) at Odessa in 1814. These men, influenced by their contacts with Western Europe and inspired by the example of forerunners like Velestinlis, saw in revolt and national independence a meaningful role for themselves. Their vision was not so much of a nation-state as of a revival of the medieval Byzantine Empire, centred on Constantinople, on the basis that this had been the apotheosis of the Greek nation.

The Etairia relied on a secret, cellular organisation and a fearsome oath of loyalty, and attracted similar idealists and malcontents from among petty merchants, professionals like teachers and physicians, and local notables. Its recruitment was minimal until, in 1818, it moved headquarters to Constantinople and started promoting the rumour that it had Russian support for its plans. This quite misleading impression was reinforced by the fact that the Etairia had established contact with Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Greek from Corfu who had risen through the Russian diplomatic service to become joint foreign minister, with Count Karl Nesselrode, to Alexander I. As a servant of the tsar, Kapodistrias did not encourage revolt but almost certainly knew that the Etairia was preparing one. By 1821 the Etairia was well established in the Danubian principalities and southern Greece, with a membership of around 1,000. Its preparations were assisted by the Greek nationality of many of Russia's consuls in these regions, and it had secured for the military leadership of the revolt the services of General Alexandros Ypsilantis, the son of a former Phanariot hospodar of Wallachia, who also happened to be a personal aide-de-camp to the tsar. It was assumed that the revolt would profit from the concurrent conflict between the Porte and Ali Pasha, the warlord of the western Balkans, who from 1820 was besieged

In his stronghold loannina and was sending out feelers to the Etairia for concerted action.

The main focus of the revolt was to be in Greece, with a diversionary uprising in the Romanian principalities, but since there was little coordination of effort the initial outbreaks were in the principalities. In Moldavia the ruling hospodar was a member of the Etairia; in Wallachia the Society recruited the Romanian notable Tudor Vladimirescu, who was also a commander of the local militia. The Etairia assumed, against all the signs, that they would gain support from the other Balkan Christians, especially the Serbs; they also reckoned, disastrously, on Russian intervention. Ypsilantis, when he crossed into Moldavia from Russia on 6 March 1821, ostentatiously wore a Russian uniform and created the impression that a Russian army was on its way, which encouraged others to join him. Muslims in laji and Galat;i, in Moldavia, were deliberately massacred, in the hope that Ottoman reprisals would prompt the tsar to step in.

These calculations were shattered when the tsar disavowed the revolt as an offence against the legitimate order. But in the Romanian principalities the fundamental weakness was that this was a Greek uprising, in a population largely Romanian, and the Greeks were hated there because of their identification with the corruption of the Phanariots. Romanian boyars and peasants alike were intent on shaking off Greek rule, not breaking away from the Ottoman Empire. Even Vladimirescu, when he joined forces with the Etairia, assumed the Greeks would carry on to Greece itself, leaving the Romanians to make their peace with the Ottomans. In the meantime, however, Vladimirescu's proclamation in February 1821, by calling on the peasants for support, unleashed a social rather than a national uprising, in which the peasants attacked boyar estates.

The result was chaos. Ypsilantis and Vladimirescu both marched on Bucharest, where they met in April, but the complete absence of outside support, and the approach of the sultan's armies, soon forced both to retreat. Vladimirescu, suspected by the Greeks of betrayal, was executed by Ypsilantis' men in June, an act which confirmed Romanians' view of Greek perfidy. Shortly after Ypsilantis was defeated and driven into Austrian territory by the Ottomans. The events in the Danubian principalities were a tragic sideshow compared with the main Greek revolt, but in the principalities themselves the most important outcome was the end of Phanariot rule. At this proof of Greek disloyalty, the Porte acceded to Romanian pressure and handed over the administration of both provinces to native Romanians.

I n the Peloponnesus and mainland Greece, by contrast, the revolt soon passed out of Philiki Etairia's control and degenerated into several different conflicts which the Ottomans found much more difficult to extinguish. This was in part a matter of geography: in the mountainous hinterland, or among the inlets and islands of the coast, the insurgents were hard to get at; they were also harder to subject to any central authority. Here most of the leaders were local notables or entirely self-made men. As in Serbia, the spark for revolt came when the Ottomans, anxious to forestall cooperation between the Greeks and Ali Pasha, tried to round up community leaders. Greeks started attacking and slaughtering Muslims, killing 15,000 out of 40,000 in the Peloponnesus alone.2 The Ottomans responded in kind and the revolt became general by early April.

The main Greek revolt succeeded in attracting outside help. In Western Europe the so-called Philhellenes, Romantics and liberals whose classical education gave them a sympathy for the Greeks as Europe's cultural forebears, raised money and public consciousness on behalf of the insurgents, and not a few, like Lord Byron, participated personally. Even more decisively, the possibility of Russian intervention was heightened when, in April, the Ottoman government ordered the lynching, in Constantinople, of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch and several other bishops, on the ground that they had not done enough to deter their co-religionists from rebellion. Accompanied by a general massacre of Constantinople's Greek community, this barbarity led to a rupture of relations with Russia, for although Alexander had not supported revolt, he took seriously his right to protect his fellow Orthodox Christians.

Politically as well as militarily the struggle for Greek independence was confused in the extreme. The revolt was in reality a number of local revolts, under no overall direction that any of the participants would accept. In December 1821 Dimitrios Ypsilantis, brother of Alexandros, succeeded in convening at Epidaurus delegates from the various insurgent regions, who drew up a constitution. However, no one paid this would-be government much attention and fighting broke out between different factions. In the meantime the Ottomans' initial preoccupation was with Ali Pasha, but on the latter's betrayal and execution in January 1822 they could devote their full attention to the Greeks. In 1824, moreover, the sultan secured the help of his most powerful vassal, the virtually independent Pasha Mohammed Ali of Egypt. The entry of the western-trained Egyptian army and navy turned the tide.

Beaten back on all fronts, the Greeks in 1826 made a formal appeal to the great powers for assistance. Russia, Britain and France, each acting out of suspicion of the others, agreed in the Treaty of London, in July 1827, to attempt a 'reconciliation' between the Greeks and the Porte. An English— Russian—French fleet was despatched to the Levant with instructions to mediate, an offer which the winning Ottomans were inherently less likely to accept than the losing Greeks. The result was the notorious battle of Navarino, in October, when the allied fleet, having been fired on by the Ottoman—Egyptian fleet, promptly destroyed it. Russia used this incident as an excuse for declaring war on the Ottomans in March 1828, which had the effect of relieving the pressure on the Greeks. Long before the Treaty of Adrianople concluded this Russo-Turkish War, in September 1829, the great powers had already settled that some form of autonomy, for some part of the Greek-inhabited areas of the Ottoman realms, was essential. At the same time the Ottoman forces effectively conceded defeat by the Greek insurgency.

In the meantime the Greeks had been trying to reach agreement among themselves as to what shape a Greek state should take. A National Assembly was convened at Troezene early in 1827 and a second constitution agreed in May. Kapodistrias, who had left Russian service in 1822 to devote himself to independence, was elected provisional head of state, but soon found that, as a perceived 'Russian' figure, his authority was disputed by the 'French' and 'British' factions in the assembly. Authoritarian by temperament, Kapodistrias was assassinated in October 1831. This domestic chaos only confirmed the great powers in their determination to impose their own settlement on the Greeks, but it was Britain's fear that a merely autonomous Greece would be too easily manipulated by Russia which led it to push for complete independence. By the second Treaty of London in July 1832 a sovereign Kingdom of Greece was accepted by the Porte and the 17-year-old Otto of Bavaria selected as king. Otto arrived with a retinue of Bavarian troops and advisers in February 1833, to rule over a state which comprised the Peloponnesus, southern Rumeli and the islands of the western Aegean, and 800,000 people, between a quarter and a third of all Greeks.3 The new government was provided with a massive capital loan sponsored by the great powers to enable it to function. It is no exaggeration to say that the new state would not have been created without great power intervention, and its continued existence depended on the protection of the powers, which came at the cost of constant outside interference. Because the kingdom contained only a fraction of all Greeks, the overriding preoccupation of successive governments was with the liberation of those fellow nationals still under Ottoman rule.

Throughout the first decade of King Otto's reign, what structure and order there was depended on the king's Bavarian ministers and 3,500 German mercenaries, who remained until the late 1830s. The government attempted to impose a Napoleonic-style, centralised administration on the country, but rapidly found that authority in the provinces still relied on the cooperation of local notables and former insurgent leaders. The country was plagued by banditry and insecurity. Economically Greece remained backward, with 60 per cent of the population peasants.

Normal political parties were slow to emerge. Instead factions continued to be identified as 'Russian', 'French' and 'British', depending on which great power's patronage they enjoyed. In September 1843 there was a sort of coup, the result of growing discontent at the lack of constitutional government, the continuing influence of the king's Bavarian advisers, the level of taxation forced on the government by its need to service the foreign loan, and above all the failure to liberate the Ottoman Greeks or even to support an uprising in Crete in 1841. Otto was obliged to grant a constitution which, when finalised in March 1844, established a bill of rights and a lower chamber of the National Assembly elected by universal manhood suffrage. Liberal though this constitution was, Otto was able largely to ignore it, because whichever clique the king favoured with office could then manipulate the electoral system through a mixture of bribery and intimidation. Party politics continued to reflect the priorities of the great powers, with the dominant figure down to his death in 1847 being the leader of the 'French' party, loannis Kolettis. Kolettis in particular became an exponent of what Greeks referred to as the Megali Idea (Great Idea), the expansionist dream of nineteenth-century Greek nationalism. This posited that the Greek state ultimately should take over all those lands formerly belonging to Byzantium and that its capital should be Constantinople.

Such a megalomaniacal vision completely ignored the fact that the former Byzantine lands were now inhabited by millions of non-Greeks. It also ignored the brutal realities of Greece's position, which made it the shuttlecock of international politics. The British government was especially inimical to the implications of the Megali Idea, which threatened the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. When, in 1850, the property of a Portuguese but Gibraltar-born Jew, Don Pacifico, was damaged by an anti-Semitic Athenian mob, Britain seized the opportunity to humiliate Greece with a naval blockade until compensation was paid. The Crimean War exposed Greece to further dangers. Ottoman Greeks staged an uprising and volunteers from the kingdom flocked to join them. This led Britain and France to occupy Piraeus, the port of Athens, from 1854 to 1857, and a government of the 'British' party under Alexandros Mavrokordatos was forced on Otto. In the post-Crimea period Otto's continuing inability to achieve territorial expansion, coupled with his lack of an heir and the kingdom's economic problems, finally led to another army-led coup. With the approval of the great powers, Otto was forced to abdicate in October 1862.

It was the great powers once again who determined Otto's successor, a Danish princeling who, on being accepted by the National Assembly, acceded as George I (1863—1913). The Assembly also voted in a new constitution, ratified in October 1864. This explicitly limited the king's power by making his ministry responsible to the legislature rather than the crown. The legislature was made unicameral and elected by secret ballot. As a sort of international 'dowry', Britain ceded to Greece the Ionian Islands, which it had administered since 1815. This first territorial increase since the foundation of the state served only to remind Greek nationalists that realisation of the Megali Idea was still unfinished business.

The obsession with nation-building, as well as the Greek government's crippling indebtedness to the great powers, meant that modernisation was next to impossible. There was no likelihood of a native industry emerging while the country was forced to remain open to foreign imports. What revenue the state received from taxation went on servicing the foreign debt, with little left over for the building of roads or other infrastructure, the improvement of local government or education; of a population of 1 million by 1860, only 45,000 pupils were in elementary school. Greece remained a society of small towns and villages, where political influence depended on clientism and corruption and the average Greek was 'hardly aware of the state'.4