The majority of the decisions reached in Vienna affected the northern states of Europe and need not detain us. Where the Mediterranean was concerned, Venice–together with Lombardy and the Veneto–found herself once more in Austrian hands; Genoa was absorbed into Piedmont; Tuscany and Modena went to an Austrian archduke, while Parma was given to another Austrian, the Empress Marie Louise–she who had been ill-advised enough to marry Napoleon just five years before. The Papal States–which in 1798–99 had formed part of the Cisalpine and Roman Republics and in 1808–09 of the Kingdom of Italy–were generously restored to the Pope.
There remained a certain amount of tidying-up to be done, notably with the seven Ionian Islands off the west coast of Greece. The respective histories of these islands vary to some degree, but the basic pattern remains very much the same: first Byzantine, then Norman Sicilian (conquered by Robert Guiscard), then Venetian after the Fourth Crusade, then Turkish (except Corfu and Paxos, which remained Venetian till 1797). After Napoleon’s occupation of Venice in that year, one of his first actions was to send 2,000 men to the islands, possession of which he believed to be essential to his eastern–and, in particular, to his Egyptian–plans. By August they were all in French hands, and two months later the French rule was legalised at Campo Formio. As in Venice, the Golden Books of the local nobilities were systematically burned, the lions of St Mark chiselled off the gateways; but the French soon made themselves hated, first by their anticlericalism and then by their insistence on granting the Jews equal status with the Orthodox Christians. So it was that when Russia and Turkey joined the Second Coalition against Napoleon in 1798 and–taking advantage of the French defeat at the Battle of the Nile–despatched a joint fleet under Admiral Feodor Ushakov to recover the islands, the Orthodox Russians (if not the Turks) were greeted as liberators. Only on Corfu did the French have a big enough garrison to put up a fight, but after several months of siege that too was forced to surrender.
Under the terms of a Russo-Turkish convention of May 1800 the islands now became an independent federal republic, under the protection of the Tsar and paying annual tribute to the Sublime Porte; when war was resumed between Britain and France in 1803 it seemed at first as if their independence would be respected. But Napoleon still remained obsessed by Corfu, and by an annex to the Treaty of Tilsit–signed with the Tsar on a raft in the middle of the river Niemen in July 1807–the islands were transferred from Russian to French protection. A year later came a further setback to British amour-propre, when the French captured Capri; the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, Lord Collingwood, having heard from a number of Cefalonian and Zantiot merchants that the islanders were eager to regain their independence, decided to retaliate by taking as many of the Ionian Islands as he could. The considerable force that sailed from Sicily in 1809 easily recovered Cefalonia and Zante, Ithaca and Cythera, but Corfu was too strongly defended for direct assault. The only alternative was a blockade, which in fact proved little better than a farce: it was maintained by only two small frigates, and as soon as these were out of sight the French boats would run out across the straits to Albania and return with all the food they needed. Thus for the next six years the military representatives of the two powers–at daggers drawn in Europe–pursued similar peaceful policies on islands often within sight of each other.
Neither side found the islanders easy to govern. Blood feuds were part of the normal way of life, murder was an everyday occurrence, ignorance and superstition were everywhere. An English traveller reported that when the governor of Cephalonia attempted to introduce the potato to the island, ‘some of the priests laboured to convince the peasants that this was the very apple with which the serpent seduced Adam and Eve in Paradise’. Gradually, however, they were won over, and by March 1811 a Major Richard Church had succeeded in raising on Zante what he called the 1st Regiment, Duke of York’s Greek Light Infantry. A second regiment, raised on Cephalonia and officered almost entirely by Greeks, took part in the capture of Paxos in February 1814. Though both regiments were disbanded at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, many of their Greek officers and men were later to turn their experience to good use as leaders in the Greek War of Independence–notably the great Theodore Kolokotronis, nearly all of whose portraits and statues show him inseparable from his British helmet.
In November 1815 it was jointly agreed by the plenipotentiaries of Britain, Prussia, Russia and Austria that the Ionian Islands should henceforward be an independent state, under British protection and governed by a British High Commissioner. A month later there arrived to take up this post the then Governor of Malta, Sir Thomas Maitland. Sir Charles Napier, who served under him, describes him as ‘a rough old despot…insufferably rude and abrupt’, ‘particularly dirty in his person’ and ‘constantly drunk and surrounded by sycophants’. Despite these failings, however, and a Scottish accent that rendered him almost incomprehensible to Corfiots and compatriots alike, ‘King Tom’ was to rule the islands for the next ten years with a firm but surprisingly enlightened hand.
Meanwhile, across the straits on the Albanian mainland, a far more portentous drama was beginning to unfold. It was unleashed because of the ambitions of the nominal Turkish governor in the city of Iannina, a certain Ali Pasha. When Byron visited him in 1809, he wrote:
His Highness is sixty years old, very fat and not tall, but with a fine face, light blue eyes & a white beard, his manner is very kind & at the same time he possesses that dignity which I find universal among the Turks…He has the appearance of any thing but his real character, for he is a remorseless tyrant, guilty of the most horrible cruelties, very brave & so good a general, that they call him the Mahometan Buonaparte.
Ali had started life as a brigand, which is essentially what he remained. In his youth, he and his followers had instituted something like a reign of terror in Albania and Epirus. The Ottoman authorities had done their best to crush him, but time and again he had outwitted or outfought them, until at last in despair they had decided to bribe him with high imperial office. He had become governor of Iannina as early as 1787, and from this power base he and his family had extended their authority over virtually all Greece and Albania, apart from Attica and Athens itself. He had also transformed his capital. Iannina had always been beautiful, set in a spectacular setting of lake and mountains. He improved its roads, instituted two trade fairs a year, built caravanserais for the merchants and even dug a ship canal. His sumptuous palace contained the largest Gobelins tapestry ever made, which had previously hung at Versailles.
The changing fortunes of the Ionian Islands were always of interest to Ali, and sometimes of concern. During the years of Venetian rule, Venice had also controlled the four chief coastal towns on the mainland opposite: Butrint (now in Albania), directly across the strait from Corfu; Preveza and Vonitsa, flanking the entrance to the Gulf of Arta; and Parga, opposite Paxos. When in 1807 the islands became French, Ali had seized the first three before anyone could stop him, but the Russians, who maintained a strong garrison at Parga, had handed it over to France as agreed. The local population, who had no love for the French, at first had little option but to put up with them as best they could, but when the Napoleonic star began to sink they hoisted the Union Jack and appealed to the British to support them. Thus it was that on 22 March 1814 a small British military force took possession of the town. All now should have been well; unfortunately, when in the following year the Congress of Vienna made the Ionian Islands a British protectorate, the mainland towns were specifically excluded and passed instead to the Turks, with the proviso that any inhabitant of Parga who wished to cross to the islands should be allowed to do so.
Had the Congress left it at that, most of the Pargiots would probably have remained where they were, but it went further, stipulating that all emigrants should be compensated by the Ottoman government for the mainland property that they had abandoned. As a result, every single citizen chose to leave, and the Turks, faced with huge compensation payments, offered Parg
a to Ali. The amount of compensation was finally fixed at £150,000, which in due course Ali paid; and on Good Friday 1819 some 3,000 Pargiots, with their icons, their holy relics and in some cases even the bones of their ancestors, crossed the straits to Corfu, where the money was divided among them. They were, we are told, inconsolable, and their story was to become one of the great legends of Greek suffering under Turkish rule. The point is less often made that they left their homes voluntarily and were compensated for them, and that by remaining in Parga they would have fared no worse than the populations of the neighbouring towns, who were denied all chances of leaving.
Ali Pasha did not live long to enjoy his new acquisition. An attempt in February 1820 to assassinate one of his relations, a certain Ismail Pasha who had incurred his displeasure and fled to Constantinople, was traced back to him and gave Sultan Mahmoud II the opportunity he had long been seeking. He thereupon appointed Ismail governor of Iannina in Ali’s place, gave him a small army and ordered him to do the rest. That same autumn, with Ismail’s troops closing in, Ali set fire to the city and retreated to his citadel, which stood on a promontory projecting into the lake and was additionally protected by a broad moat. Here he seemed likely to hold out indefinitely, but in January 1821, with a stalemate still persisting, Mahmoud dismissed Ismail and replaced him with the infinitely more capable Khurshid Pasha, governor of the Morea. Khurshid, seeing that nothing could be expected of Ismail’s motley army–which consisted of a number of separate forces each going its own way under the command of its own pasha–spent the next year putting it into shape; then, at the beginning of 1822, he smashed his way into the citadel. There were various stories about how Ali met his end; a few days later his severed head was exhibited on a pike in Iannina before being borne back in triumph to Constantinople.
CHAPTER XXV
Freedom for Greece
The beginning of the Greek struggle for independence from Turkish rule can be dated to September 1814, when three young Greeks in Odessa founded a secret society. To avoid suspicion, they called it by the deliberately noncommittal name of the Philiki Eteria, the Friendly Association. None of the three had so far acquired any distinction: Nikolaos Skouphas was a hatter, Emmanuel Xanthos was a bankrupt dealer in olive oil, Athanasios Tsakalov had no settled occupation. They got off to a slow start. Although they had all three been born in Greece, as expatriates they were unable to tap into the resources of the mainland, while even among the Greek diaspora around the Black Sea they were too insignificant to be taken seriously by the rich merchants whose support they needed.
Little by little, however, the Association’s numbers increased. Its founders moved their base to Constantinople, where in those days there were almost as many Greeks as Turks, and whence they sent emissaries into Greece itself: one to Macedonia and Thessaly, one to the Peloponnese and the wealthy islands of Hydra and Spetsai, and two to the Mani (the central of the three promontories of the southern Peloponnese). The Mani had been the focus of an earlier, unsuccessful uprising instigated in 1770 by Catherine the Great through her lover, Count Gregory Orlov.217 As a somewhat paradoxical result of this incident, the Ottoman authorities had removed it from the jurisdiction of the governor of the Peloponnese and subjected it directly to the Capitan Pasha, head of the Turkish armed forces and overlord of the Aegean, and he in his turn had devolved his power to the head of one of the local families, with the title of bey. The eighth of these beys,218 appointed in 1815, was to be one of the heroes of the Greek Revolution–of whose family no fewer than forty-nine were to fall in battle during the coming struggle. His name was Petrobey Mavromichalis.
Petrobey was, like all his family, outstandingly handsome–only to be expected, perhaps, his ancestor George having reputedly married a mermaid. This quality he combined with graciousness of manner, high intelligence and, as he was later to show, indomitable courage. Like any tribal leader, he was capable of cruelty when he believed it to be justified, but he was also generous and–in his own territory–a man of peace, settling blood feuds wherever he could and doing his utmost to create the solidarity which he knew would be necessary in the years ahead. When approached by the Association, he instantly gave it his support.
Before there could be any question of taking up arms, however, the movement had to find a leader. The most distinguished Greek living at that time–and the obvious first choice–was Iannis Kapodistrias, more usually known outside Greece as Capodistria. Born in Corfu, he came from an ancient family which had emigrated to the Ionian Islands from Italy in the fourteenth century. In his youth he had been active in local political life, so impressing the occupying Russians that he had been invited to join the administration in St Petersburg. In normal circumstances his status as a civil servant of the Russian Empire might not have prevented his accepting the presidency of the Association; unfortunately, however, in 1815 Tsar Alexander had appointed him joint Foreign Minister, so that when in 1820 Emmanuel Xanthos requested an audience and extended the invitation, he was turned down flat.
The Association’s eye next fell on a dashing imperial aide-de-camp named Alexander Ipsilantis, who though still in his twenties had already lost his right arm in the service of the Tsar. Two of his brothers were already members, and he accepted without hesitation. There was still a long way to go: total membership numbered only 1,000 or so. But Ipsilantis was impatient, and on 8 October 1820 issued a proclamation calling upon all Greeks to prepare themselves for the struggle ahead. The revolution, he declared, must be unleashed in the Peloponnese before the end of the year. Characteristically, he had failed to consult his contacts on the spot, who were now obliged to inform him that the Peloponnese was not yet ready; he therefore decided to begin in the north rather than the south: in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.
It was in many ways a surprising choice. Neither of these regions–both of them lying in present-day Romania–formed part of Greece. Nor, technically, were they part of the Ottoman Empire; their legal status was that of vassal states, into which the Sultan was forbidden by treaty to send troops without Russian consent. This meant that the Tsar, in the interests of his Orthodox co-religionists, might be persuaded to prevent Turkish forces from opposing the insurgents. An additional advantage was that for the past century the two regions had been governed by Greeks from Constantinople, who could be expected to give whatever support they could. Encouraged by such considerations, on 6 March 1821 Ipsilantis, with two of his younger brothers and a few companions, crossed the border into Moldavia. That same evening they entered the capital, Iasi, where another proclamation was issued, promising ‘with very little effort’ to annihilate the Turks completely, ‘while a mighty empire defends our rights’.
There was in fact every indication that the mighty empire would do no such thing, both Capodistria and the Tsar himself having made it clear to Ipsilantis that they disapproved of the whole project and would have nothing whatever to do with it, and from that moment on the campaign–if so it could be called–was an unmitigated disaster. In Galatz, a town some 100 miles south of Iasi, the rebels massacred the Turkish garrison and all the Turkish merchants, and when the news reached Iasi the Turkish guard there of some fifty men, who had already disarmed on the promise that their lives and property would be spared, was also put to the sword. Moreover, when Ipsilantis realised that the funds which he had confidently expected in Iasi were not forthcoming, he had resorted to extortion from rich bankers. Meanwhile, the unpaid troops that he had assembled were looting the local villages. Now seriously alarmed, Ipsilantis marched on Bucharest–only to find that a local adventurer, Theodore Vladimirescu, had got there before him and occupied the city, summoning the local Wallachians to rise up, not against the Turks, but against the Phanariot Greeks,219 ‘dragons that swallow us alive’.
But the two greatest blows were yet to fall. First, the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, supported by twenty-two bishops, sentenced Ipsilantis and the other leading rebels to be ‘excommunicated and cu
rsed, and not forgiven, and anathematised after death, and to suffer for all eternity’. Then the rising was formally denounced by the Tsar himself. In a statement drafted by Capodistria, Ipsilantis was cashiered from the army on the grounds that he had abandoned ‘all the precepts of religion and morality’. He and his colleagues would receive absolutely no support from Russia, to which he was forbidden ever to return.
Fortunately Vladimirescu was soon captured and taken to Ipsilantis’s camp, where he was quickly despatched. Their numbers swelled by Vladimirescu’s disaffected followers, the rebels then decided to tackle the Turks head-on, and on 19 June they encountered a considerable Ottoman force in the village of Dragasani. In the ensuing battle half of them were cut to pieces; the other half fled. Ipsilantis escaped into Austria, but was arrested as he crossed the border. He was imprisoned at Mohacs until 1827, and died the following year. In Greek popular legend he is usually seen as a hero and a martyr, and so in a way he was; but he possessed neither the intelligence nor the experience required to lead a successful rebellion, and it was due as much to his sheer incompetence as to anything else that the first campaign of the Greek War of Independence ended in fiasco.
In the Peloponnese the prospects for the coming revolt looked somewhat brighter, particularly after the departure in January 1821 of Khurshid Pasha, governor of the Morea, to deal with Ali Pasha of Iannina. Khurshid had been a considerable force in the region, and his replacement by a young and ineffectual deputy led to an immediate slackening of Turkish authority. Only days later there arrived from Zante the boisterous, black-moustachioed, fifty-year-old ex-brigand who was, more than anyone else, to personify the Greek War of Independence: Theodore Kolokotronis. With his commanding presence, his resounding laughter and his terrifying rages he was a born leader of men; within days of his arrival he had impressed his personality on all around him.
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