To win freedom is no easy feat, but to keep it is even harder. In our last episode on the Greek War
of Independence, we covered the initial insurgency against the Ottoman Empire and the establishment
of the Hellenic Republic. In this episode, while western European adventurers journey
east with romantic notions of Homeric glory, the Greeks begin to turn on themselves, and a wayward
Egyptian governor assembles a mighty armada to crush the troublesome Hellenes once and for all.
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In January of 1822, war with Persia, and rising tensions with Russia had forced the
Ottomans to deploy most of their standing army on their eastern and northern borders,
but that did not mean Sultan Mahmud II had forgotten about his rebellious Greek vassals.
In 1822, the Aegean island of Chios had among the most prosperous maritime
industries in the Mediterranean. Up until now, the Chiots had stayed out of the revolution,
enjoying substantial autonomy and privileges under the Sultan. On March 9th,
the Seawolf Lykourgos Logothetis claimed the island for the republic, but he was met with
a cold shoulder by the locals, who feared what violence his presence might bring to their homes.
Unfortunately, they were right to be afraid. Overstretched the Sultan may have been, but he
could not allow the insurrection to spread to an island so close to his heartland. Within three
weeks, a large fleet commanded by the Kapudan Pasha, Kara Ali, had arrived on the isle, and what
followed was genocide. Beginning in April, Chios was subject to indiscriminate slaughter of man,
woman, and child alike, with approximately 50,000 killed, and as many enslaved. While the Hellenes
extracted a degree of vengeance when their fireships burned down Kara Ali’s flagship on
the night of June 18th, it was a hollow victory. The bloodbath at Chios inflamed the western
sympathies for the Greek cause which had existed since the beginning of the war. Much like today,
people in 19th century Europe and America were taught about the cultural
debt that western civilization owed to Greece, and were naturally sympathetic to the modern
Greek cause. Western governments, however, were not so on board with Greek independence.
Still reeling from the French Revolution and its Napoleonic fallout, Europes’ leading policy-makers
were obsessed with maintaining continental stability by preserving the inviolable authority
of Europes’ monarchies, which unfortunately for the Greeks, also included the Ottoman Sultan.
This however, did not stop many young adventurers from journeying east
irrespective of their governments’ wishes. These Knights Errant came from all throughout Central
and Western Europe and America, and were collectively known as Philhellenes: romantic
lovers of Greek culture. Of all the Philhellenes, by far the most famous was Lord Gordon Byron,
an English aristocrat and poet, who abandoned his luxurious life to fight directly alongside the
Greeks while donating a considerable amount of his vast family fortune to fund the Hellenic cause.
Following the massacre at Chios, a 2,000 strong force led by the provisional president Alexandros
Mavrokordatos marched north to garrison Arta. This force was accompanied in consort by a small
battalion of Philhellenes led by the Swabian veteran, Karl von Normann-Ehrenfels. Hearing
of this the Ottoman-Albanian General Omer Vironi, marched south with 10,000 men. In the following
Battle of Peta, the Greeks and Philhellenes used Napoleonic tactics to inflict heavy casualties
on the Ottoman cavalry. Nevertheless, the sabotaging efforts of a turncoat, Gogos Bakolas,
allowed Vironi to win the day. The Greeks were forced to retreat, while nearly two thirds of the
European volunteers were slaughtered. Expansion into Epirus was a failure, but in other theatres,
the Greeks experienced more success. Athens had been under siege since the beginning of the war,
but in June of 1822, the Ottoman garrison holding out in the Acropolis surrendered.
The city was a far cry from the glory days of Pericles,
having become something of a squalid backwater in modern times, but its symbolic significance
to the Hellenic nation was not lost to those who fought to liberate it.
The following month, a punitive Ottoman expedition led by one Mahmud Dramali Pasha advanced into
revolutionary Greece with a massive, 23,000 strong army at his back, aiming to bring the Peloponnese
to heel. Dramali’s campaign began promisingly when he scoured Thebes and captured Corinth, but
before long, his expedition would become one of the worst Ottoman military disasters in history.
Taking charge of the defence, the old warlord Kolokotronis initiated a scorched earth policy
which left the massive invasion force trapped and without food in the sweltering plains of Argolis,
all while rebel snipers and raiders picked at their dwindling supply lines. Dramali’s force was
then utterly annihilated in the mountain passes outside the village of Dervenakia in early August.
Of Dramali’s original force of over 23,000, only 6,000 returned to Ottoman territory.
The victory at Dervenakia was a triumph for the Hellenic cause,
but it cast a long shadow, as thinly veiled rivalries began to boil to the surface.
After his defeat at the battle of Peta, President Mavrokordatos had lost prestige,
while in contrast, Kolokotronis star was ever rising after his annihilation of Dramali’s army.
This exacerbated a long-growing rivalry between the central government,
led by Mavrokordatos, and the military leaders, led by Kolokotronis,
which stemmed from the central government's attempts to rein in warlords who had been
operating functionally independently without any governmental oversight since the beginning
of the revolution. By the end of 1822, these tensions were threatening to come to a head.
Mavrokordatos’ one year term as provisional president of the Hellenic Republic was about to
expire, and the national assembly was overdue to meet, not just to elect a more permanent
president, but also to fill a sweeping array of legislative and executive governmental positions.
On April 10th, 1823, both factions convened at the town of Astros for the voting. Surprisingly,
it went fairly smoothly. While Mavrokordatos was not re-elected, he was appointed as head of
the legislative body. The Maniot sealord, Petros Mavromichalis, was elected president in his stead,
and in a deliberate effort to reign in Kolokotronis and his war captains, the old Klepht
was offered the position of vice-president of the National Assembly, which after some cajoling,
he accepted. This was fortunate, for in the summer of 1823, the Greeks were reminded of their common
enemy as Mustafa Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Shkoder, advanced across the Pindos Mountains.
Mustafa’s advance was met by the Souliots- Orthodox Albanians from Epirus.
Their leader, Markos Botsaris, martyred himself at the battle of Karpenisi, while his Epirote army,
a tenth of the Ottomans’ in number, killed thousands of the invaders. Nevertheless,
the Pasha’s advance continued, joining forces with the infamous Omer Vironi and laying siege to the
Greek stronghold of Missolonghi. However, this encirclement would be broken when the Souliots,
who had since joined in the city's defence, managed to plunder the Ottoman food supply,
forcing them to retreat. The day belonged to the Greeks, but the triumph at Missolonghi was
a victory that would bear bitter fruit, for as Ottoman incursions into the Peloponnese
had stopped for the time being, the Hellenes no longer had a common enemy to unite them.
Theodoros Kolokotronis had initially joined the senate of the Hellenic Republic as Vice President
in order to help the central government control the independent warlords of the Peloponnese.
But soon, the old ex-bandits began to chafe in his new role, mainly because he
was losing the veneration of his men, who had now begun to see him less as a great warrior,
and more as just another politician, like that four-eyed, westernized pantywaist, Mavrokordatos.
In October 1823, Kolokotronis resigned from the Executive,
officially severing his pretense of cooperation with the central government. Then, when the
state finance minister, an open supporter of Kolokotronis, was dismissed from his position for
imposing an unconstitutional government monopoly on salt, the Greek body politic finally broke.
In retaliation for this firing, Kolokotronis’ son, Panos, raided the Senate in Argos while it was in
session, forcing them to disperse with threats of beatings. In retaliation for this, Mavrokordatos,
still the rudder behind the ship of state, oversaw the dismissal of President Mavromichalis, who was
Kolokotronis’ last major supporter in the central government. Thus, while Mavrokordatos appointed a
new puppet, Georgios Koundouriotis, to be his president, Kolokotronis and Mavromichalis, the
foremost military titans of the Greek revolution, started a rogue government in Tripolis.
Amusingly, one way in which the two rival governments undermined one another was in
their competing attempts to win the affections of the regions’ biggest sugar daddy, Lord Byron. As
Mavromichalis, Mavrokordatos and Kolokotronis each had letters written to the British aristocrat,
pleading for his money while persuading him not to donate to their political rivals,
Byron became utterly exasperated with the disunity of the Greek cause.
This aggressive courtship would end when, some months after he personally joined the defense of
Missolonghi against the forces of Mustafa Pasha, the eccentric British tycoon passed away after a
long bout of violent fever. Perhaps the best thing Byron could have done for the Greek cause was die,
for it gave the young Hellenic nation a foreign martyr, and helped turn the needle of diplomacy
among the Great Powers of Europe further towards supporting the Hellenic cause. Nevertheless,
at the time of his death, the Hellenes were still a small, poor, and bitterly divided people.
Indeed, the quasi-cold war between Kolokotronis and Mavrokordatos’ factions would soon turn hot.
Initially, the central government was able to mostly bloodlessly seize the cities of Argos,
Corinth, and Tripolis. Then, in June 1824, Panos Kolokotronis surrendered Navplion to
the Koundouriotis regime. This effectively ended the first civil war, but that following autumn,
a minor revolt broke out in Kiparissia over governmental taxes on local produce,
which sparked a second conflict. This one was bloodier,
resulting in the central government killing Panos Kolokotronis and ultimately capturing Theodoros
himself, imprisoning him in a fortified monastery on Hydra Isle. Following this,
Mavrokordatos reassumed the presidency of an ostensibly reunited Hellenic Republic,
but his victory would be a pyrrhic one, for the young Greek state was weaker and more impoverished
than it had ever been, and on the other end of the Mediterranean in Egypt, a vast armada was forming.
Back in 1798, when a certain Corsican artillery officer had launched an invasion of Egypt,
an ethnic Albanian Pasha named Mehmed Ali played a crucial role in repelling his Grande Armée.
In subsequent years, Mehmed Ali would navigate treacherous political waters to
become the governor of the Ottoman Province he had helped liberate.
Like so many other provincial notables across the Empire, the Albanian lord would take advantage of
the declining power of the Sultanate to establish a quasi-independent fief in his new realm,
and by virtue of sitting on the richest breadbasket in the Mediterranean,
quickly became perhaps the most powerful ruler in the near east, an Ottoman vassal in name alone.
Meanwhile in Istanbul, Sultan Mahmud II was growing increasingly infuriated at his Greek
quagmire, and he needed help. It may have pricked his pride to plead a vassal for aid
in putting down what was essentially a small peasant rebellion in his poorest province,
but at this rate, he had no choice. However, Mehmed Ali’s aid wouldn’t come free.
So it was that the renegade Pasha was promised that whatever land he helped subdue
would be added to his already massive autonomous realm, and with that, Egypt entered the fray.
Mehmed Ali first intervened in the Greek insurrection in 1822,
when the Sultan promised him Crete in return for crushing the rebels on that island.
Although the Cretans put up a fierce resistance, they were ultimately smothered by the end of 1823,
and Crete was restored to nominal Ottoman control as a part of the Albanian Pasha’s de facto
Egyptian empire. Buoyed by the first major success against the Greeks since the rebellion’s onset,
the Sultan leaned on Mehmed Ali further, promising him control over the Peloponnese
in exchange for the total annihilation of that nucleus of rebel activity.
On July 19th, 1824, 450 warships and transport vessels ferrying 14,000 European-trained
infantrymen and cavalry, perhaps the first truly modern army to be raised in Ottoman lands,
set sail from Alexandria. At its head was Ibrahim Pasha, the eldest son of Mehmed Ali,
an experienced warrior battle-hardened from putting down rebellions in Arabia.
Ibrahim navigated his armada into the Aegean, leaving a wake of Hellene blood behind him. The
islands of Kasos and Psara were subdued quickly, a devastating blow to the Greeks, who relied
heavily on them for naval power. Nevertheless, the Hellenic republic, which was at the time
still mired in the Kolokotronis-Mavrokordatos civil war, did nothing to stop Ibrahim’s advance.
On February 11th, 1825, the Egyptians finally made landfall in the Morea. Seeing Ibrahim as
no different than the likes of Dramali or Mustafa Pasha, both of whom they’d handily repulsed,
the Greeks arrogantly disregarded the threat. A fatal mistake, for Ibrahim possessed a ruthless
logistical and tactical genius the likes of which the rebel nation had never seen.
Within a few weeks, Ibrahim had conquered the old Venetian Fortress of Methoni,
while the Hellenic Republic, still busy finishing up its second civil war, did little to resist.
The Egyptians then advanced on to take the twin fortresses of old and new Navarino. Having finally
subdued Kolokotronis by this point, the Hellenic government finally put up a serious resistance,
but their 7,500 strong army was crushed outside the village of Kremmydia on April 19th.
The Fortresses of Navarino fell a month later, forcing the Greeks to come to the
bitter realization that the Egyptian foes they had underestimated were, infact, far tougher
and more professional than the mostly Albanian mercenaries they had been fighting previously.
After his initial success, Ibrahim pushed deeper into the Peloponnese at a blitzkrieging rate.
Now in a panic, the central Hellenic government quickly released Kolokotronis
from his imprisonment, gave him full amnesty, and made him commander-in-chief of the Greek forces.
This was no time to keep the republic’s best general behind bars. Now reconciled with his
former political enemies, Kolokotronis managed to slow Ibrahim’s advance through guerilla tactics,
and even deter him from advancing on the provisional capital of Nafplion. However, the
Egyptian advance could not be stopped entirely, and by the end of 1825, most of Peloponnesus'
major towns were back in Ottoman hands. Meanwhile at sea, the formerly deadly Greek navy was
becoming less effective as Ottoman and Egyptian methods adapted to their fireship techniques.
At the onset of 1826, Ibrahim Pasha and his Egyptian legions were the new masters
of the Peloponnese, and by all metrics, the Hellenic Republic was hanging on by a thread.
In our next video, the Greeks will reach their darkest hour as Ottoman forces advance
upon Missolonghi, the fortress which had twice repulsed them. However, as the candle of rebellion
threatens to be extinguished entirely, hope shines over the horizons, as the great powers of Europe:
France, Britain and Russia, finally join the fray. Our series on the Greek War of Independence will
continue, so make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button to see it.
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