In 1827, the tides of the revolution had turned back in the Greeks’ favour,
as the three titans, Britain, France and Russia, finally came to their aid. However,
regardless of his scope of his new enemies, Sultan Mahmud II was still resolved to grind
his rebellious peasants to dust. Welcome to our fourth and final episode on the Greek
war of Independence, where we will cover the decisive naval battle at Navarino,
the final stages of the military conflict, and the political maelstrom which would determine
the modern Greek nation state’s place in the international community for centuries to come.
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In the summer of 1827, Britain, France and Russia had signed a joint agreement to establish Greece
as an autonomous nation under the loose suzerainty of the Ottoman Sultan. However,
defiant in the face of outside nations interfering in internal civil unrest within his Empire,
Sultan Mahmud II unilaterally rejected this, and geared up to confront the great powers.
On the 7th of September, 1827, the combined fleets of the Sublime Porte and Ibrahim’s modern
Egyptian armada anchored in the bay of Navarino in anticipation of the arrival of their new foes.
Sure enough, less than a week later, a British fleet under one Admiral Edward Codrington
anchored a ways outside the harbour, with a French flotilla commanded by a Count de Rigny joining
it shortly after, and the Russian ships under the Dutch admiral Lodewijk van Heiden en route.
On the 25th of September, the Admirals Codrington and de Rigny parlayed with
Ibrahim Pasha on a beach north of Pylos. The two sides were at an impasse. Ibrahim was
under orders from the Sultan to attack the Hellenic naval stronghold of Hydra island,
while the allied admirals were under orders to prevent any further ravaging of Greek lands.
Codrington warned Ibrahim that if the Turko-Egyptian ships sailed for Hydra, the allies
would have to sink them all. Ibrahim weighed his options- he was deeply outgunned, as the Europeans
had ten ships-of-the-line, the dreadnoughts of the era, while the Turko-Egyptian fleet only had
three. Thus, the Egyptian Pasha played for time, agreeing, for now, to keep his fleets in Navarino
harbour while he awaited new orders from the Porte. Satisfied, the British and French admirals
sailed away to reprovision, leaving only two ships at Navarino Bay to report on Ibrahim’s actions.
This uneasy ceasefire lasted about as long as one would imagine. The Greeks, for their part, were
still fighting on. In the last days of September, Hellenic forces launched a campaign on Patras,
and under the leadership of Richard Church, who was kind of doing a redemption arc thing after
the debacle at Athens, destroyed a flotilla of seven Ottoman ships in the gulf of Corinth.
This enraged Ibrahim, who wondered why the Europeans imposed an armistice on him, but
allowed his enemies to continue waging war. So, he weighed anchor and attempted to sail to reinforce
the Ottoman garrison in Patras, but Codrington caught wind of this, and British ships arrived
in time to fire warning shots at them, forcing the Turko-Egyptian fleet back into Navarino bay.
At sea, Ibrahim was hemmed in. However on land, the allies had no forces, and the Egyptians still
had a mostly unopposed 20,000 strong army. So, leaving his ships, Ibrahim resumed command of his
ground forces and began ravaging the Peloponnese once more, albeit dogged by Kolokotronis and his
guerilla fighters. By now, Heiden’s Russian fleet had joined the British and French squadrons,
and it had become clear to all the allied Admirals that neither Ibrahim nor the rulers in Alexandria
and Istanbul who enabled him would ever relent in their desire to grind the Greek rebellion to dust.
As the senior Admiral of the combined allied forces, Codrington realized
that there was only one recourse left to him. On October 20th, 1827, the combined might of
the British, French and Russian navies sailed into Navarino bay with their gunports raised,
and the battle was joined. In the end, it was a completely one-sided affair. Outgunned and
outmatched, over 60 Egyptian and Ottoman ships were consigned to the bottom of Navarino bay,
condemning over 6,000 hands to drown with them. In contrast, the allies suffered less than 200
fatal casualties, and lost no ships. Mehmed Ali’s modern navy, the pride of invincible Egypt, had
been obliterated, and as a result, an absolutely crippling blow had been dealt to Sultan Mahmud II.
After the Battle of Navarino, the result of the Greek war of Independence was set in stone. For
six long years the fate of Hellas had been hanging in the balance. But now, Greece would be free.
However, the Greek nation, if one could even call it that at this point, was in dire straits.
After the three year spree of Ibrahim’s marauding, the land was utterly desolate, while factional
squabbles between revolutionary warlords had resurfaced. Even with freedom secured,
it seemed that the Greeks were destined to remain an impoverished, divided, and little people. That
is, unless a true leader could take the reins and pull together the frayed threads that was
Hellas. It is here that the statesman himself, Ioannis Kapodistrias, finally re-enters our story.
Back in the summer of 1827, the Greek National Assembly- or what was left of it anyways,
had met at Troezen. With allies on the way, Hellas had a future once more, and it was time
to put affairs of state back in order. There, they had ratified a new national constitution,
an amendment to the one crafted by Mavrokordatos at Epidaurus in 1822. More importantly,
they unanimously elected Ioannis Kapodistrias, by far the most accomplished Greek-born politician
in Europe, to serve as leader of the Hellenic state. As one may recall from our first video,
when the revolution first broke out in 1821, Kapodistrias had been offered a leadership
position on account of his vast experience as Russia’s chief foreign minister. However, he
declined the role, condemning the insurrection as an unwinnable folly. He had been wrong about that,
but hindsight is 20-20. The situation had changed, so when Kapodistrias was elected
by the National Assembly, he accepted what must have seemed like the role he was destined for.
On January 18th, 1828, Kapodistrias landed in Navplion. Having been born in the
Venetian-then-French-then-British controlled island of Corfu, and spent the lion’s share of
his adult life as a Russian statesman, it was the first time he had stepped foot in mainland Greece.
The first thing he did was persuade the Greek senate to suspend the constitution and the
national assembly and temporarily give him full powers. Greece, he declared, was not yet ready
for democracy. He was wary of the various factions within the Hellenic body-politic who had spent the
duration of the war fighting one another more than they had actually fought the Ottomans, and did not
want to have to navigate around the capricious whims of squabbling magnates and warlords just
to get anything done. Luckily for him, the national assembly willingly gave him full control.
Kapodistrias was a civil servant in every sense of the word. Working from 5 in the morning to
10 at night every day, he utilized his vast state-building experience to rebuild the pillars
of Greek society so thoroughly eviscerated by six years of brutal war. To that end,
he involved himself in every theatre of national reconstruction, developing the foundations of a
standard currency, a method of taxation, a legal framework, courts of justice, orphanages and
schools, and even a modern quarantine system to fight the typhoid, cholera and dysentery
epidemics which had spread like wildfire during the worst years of the war. However,
the titanic task of domestic reconstruction was but one Kapodistrias’ many challenges.
For one thing, there was still technically a war on.
Although Ibrahim Pasha’s navy had been destroyed, the man himself, alongside 20,000 ground troops,
were still active in the Peloponnese. In the summer of 1828, a French expeditionary force
landed in the Peloponnese to support the Greeks, who having previously been on the ropes
against against Ibrahim’s relentless onslaught, were imbued with a renewed fighting spirit to
finally crush the loathsome Egyptian host which had terrorized their homeland so thoroughly.
However, Ibrahim knew that the conquest of the Peloponnese was no longer feasible. Despite all
the terrors he had inflicted on the Morea, he had not crushed the Greeks’ spirit, and now with
the situation turned decidedly against him, it was time to make a graceful exit. Through the eloquent
work of French diplomats in Alexandria, governor Mehmed Ali agreed to order his son’s return home.
On the fourth of October, 1828, Ibrahim and his Egyptian legions
departed the ancient land of Hellas. Over the last three years, Ibrahim Pasha had turned the
Peloponnese into a barren wasteland. However, in the end, he gained absolutely nothing out of it.
After his departure, the bulk of Ottoman-aligned forces in Greece were gone, and the forts in the
Peloponnese which had been occupied by the Egyptians fell mainly into French hands.
Kapodistrias, meanwhile, had been busy doing away with the loose hodgepodge of bandit gangs who had
thus far carried the Greek cause, but also proven extremely prone to insubordination and infighting.
To that end, he established the Hellenic Army Academy and a regular Greek army corp,
which he deployed into central Greece, hoping to take as much land as possible from the Ottomans to
strengthen the Hellenic State’s territorial claims when the time came to properly define its borders.
Certain familiar faces were appointed to spearhead this campaign:
in eastern Roumeli, Dmitrios Ypsilantis began securing the hinterlands around Athens, while
in the west, the old goat Kolokotronis, fighting alongside his British bromance Richard Church,
liberated the gulf of Arta and its surrounding environs. These advances were aided in part by
the fact that, in April of 1828, Russia had finally launched a full-scale invasion of the
Ottoman Empire, which had stretched the Sublime Portes’ military capacity to its very limits.
However, Kapodistrias’ relations with his generals were strained, to say the least.
His predilection for micromanagement infuriated the military men who were perfectly capable of
leading an army without the constant nagging of this bookish civilian statesmen thank
you very much. Kapodistrias’ quarrels with the likes of Ypsilantis and Church were ultimately
indicative of the great statesman’s deeply strained relationship with the Greek elites,
a schism which would eventually lead to his doom.
On December 21st, 1828, the ambassadors of Britain, France and Russia met on the island
of Poros to discuss the borders of the new Greek nation. Whether Kapodistrias liked it or not, the
future of his people was now in the hands of these three titans, so he had to play ball with them.
Kapodistrias himself argued that the Hellenic state’s borders should extend from Delvinë to
Thessaloniki, while representatives of the current British Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington,
yes the Waterloo guy, wanted to confine the Greek state solely to the Peloponnese.
In the end, the diplomats at Poros agreed to a border which ran from Arta to the Gulf of Volos,
which they argued would be the most practical and easily defendable frontier for Young Hellas.
Notably not present at the Conference of Poros were any representatives of Sultan Mahmud II,
who was still clinging to the increasingly unrealistic prospect of re-conquering his
erstwhile Rumelian territories. However, the Sublime Porte’s tune changed when in September of
1829, the ongoing Russo-Turkish war ended in their defeat, resulting in the Russians’ annexing more
of their Black Sea territory, and taking their place as overlords of the Romanian principalities.
His position critically weakened, Sultan Mahmud II finally agreed to accept the terms of the 1827
Treaty of London, whereby Greece would become an autonomous state, but still his tributary vassal.
However, for Britain and France, this was no longer good enough. To them, Russia’s recent
gains were threatening, and if Greece remained an Ottoman vassal, no matter how nominally,
then it would always remain under the predominant influence of the Tsar in St. Petersburg.
So, the British and French, influenced in no small part by Kapodistrias’ political maneuvering,
conceived that Greece would not be an autonomous vassal, but a completely independent nation-state
under the equal “protection” of all three Great Powers. This decision was ratified
in the London Protocol of 1830, which the Russians only reluctantly agreed to,
and the Ottomans were in no position to refuse. Thus, the international community welcomed the
independent Hellenic nation-state into the fold. In the end, the Greek war of independence
concluded in the same way much of it was carried out: with bloody infighting. That
Ioannis Kapodistrias had done much for Greece was indisputable, but in his short time in power,
his complete mistrust of the Greek elites who had carried the revolution caused him to make several
powerful enemies. Among these were the powerful maritime magnates of Hydra, and the Maniots under
Petros Mavromichalis, two areas of Greece deeply accustomed to localized self-rule. When in the
interest of centralizing the state, Kapodistrias forced stringent taxation policies upon them,
and tried to impose regional governors on them; he instead was faced with an uprising on his hands.
In May 1831, the Hydriots convened their own national assembly in direct defiance of
Kapodistrias’ government, and declared the Maniot Lord, Mavromichalis, to be their president. Even
a certain Alexandros Mavrokordatos came out of retirement to support this rival regime. However,
Kapodistrias put down this rebellion, sinking the Hydriot frigate Hellas in the process.
To prevent further insurrection, he had Mavromichalis arrested and imprisoned.
This would be his final mistake. To the mafia-like Maniots, such an act was enough to trigger
a blood-feud, and as such, the Mavromichalis clan resolved to kill the great statesmen for
the incarceration of their patriarch. On the 9th of October, 1831, as the first president
of the Hellenic State walked up the steps to the Church of Nafplion to attend the morning
service, he found himself confronted by Petros’ brother, Konstantis Mavromichalis, and his son,
Georgios Mavromichalis. Without due ceremony, they shot and stabbed Kapodistrias to death.
Immediately afterwards, Greece was plunged into chaos, and all that the Kapodistrias
had accomplished threatened to become undone. In this, the Great Powers saw opportunity.
They had long preferred that Greece be a monarchy, rather than a republic-
after all, in a still revolutionarily-charged Europe, it set a better precedent for their own
divinely appointed monarchs. So it was that, in May of 1832, a German Prince, Otto I, was imported
from his native Bavaria to Greece, and appointed the first Monarch of an re-augmented “Kingdom”
of Greece, stabilizing the country once more. When the Kingdom of Greece emerged onto the
world-stage in 1832, it was small, poor, and ruled by a foreign King, who was imposed upon
them by three great powers who held significant sway over the young nations’ internal politics.
Moreover, only a third of all ethnic Greeks in the Ottoman Empire had been liberated, as Hellenes in
Cyprus, Crete, Thrace, the Pontus and beyond remained under the rule of the Sublime Porte.
Many Greeks who had once prospered under the Sultan, like the Phanariote merchants,
were now no longer able to do so, looked upon in suspicion and disdain. Overall, it was not quite
the freedom that Greece had hoped for, but it was freedom nonetheless. No matter the circumstances,
the Greeks were the first people to win full independence from the Ottoman Empire, and
the modern Greek nation-state they created is the very same which, through trials and tribulations,
endures to this day. In the coming months we will release the feature-length version of this series
which will include detailed descriptions of a number of battles that happened during the
Greek War of Independence, so make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button to
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