Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (36 page)

But it was too late now to make up for the mistakes already made: the dilatoriness in pressing home advantages, the waste of time on fruitless ventures, the lack of coordination of the Russian efforts, the delayed arrival of the overall Russian commander Alexis Orlov and the failure to develop the Greeks into a fighting force. Alexis Orlov attempted one last initiative, the capture of Methóni, the massive fortress a few miles south of Navarino, but on 28 May, after an eighteen-day siege, this too ended
in disaster, with 150 Russians killed and 200, including Theodore Orlov, wounded. As the Turks and Albanians moved south to reimpose control, the Mani bands put up a brave resistance in several fierce battles, but the dream of liberating Greece from the Turks was by now over.

At this point Alexis Orlov took the decision to pull out of Greece, abandoning the last Russian foothold at Navarino. Only days before the Methóni disaster the second Russian fleet had at last arrived and was stationed off Navplion, but Alexis was not prepared to wait for possible Russian success in a possible naval battle. Greeks from far afield flocked to Navarino, fearing Turkish retribution and hoping for asylum and possibly escape on Russian ships. But Alexis soon closed the town gates against the flood of refugees, who shouted angrily ‘You promised us freedom, but all we ask is shelter.’
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Many got across to Sphaktiría, the barren waterless island in Navarino bay, where it is said that four to five thousand gathered.

On 6 June the Russians left, setting fire to the town as they went. They did take with them some hundreds of Greeks, including a number of the military leaders and six of the archbishops. But they left behind them the town of Navarino in flames and a crowd of Greeks on the shore, desperate for an escape that there were now no ships to provide. It was a disaster for which the Russians blamed the Greeks. In a scathing denunciation of them, Catherine wrote to Alexis Orlov: ‘Since the Greeks followed so poorly the Russian example of courage, and from their own cowardice, disloyalty and deceit showed no willingness to free themselves from their yoke, you were wholly sensible and right to leave them to their fate.’
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The Greeks for their part felt betrayed by the Russians. As a contemporary ballad put it,

For the Greeks of the Peloponnese, the fate to which Alexis Orlov left them was indeed a terrible one – though not primarily at the hands of the Turks. Within days of the Russian departure the Turkish governor in Tripolis issued a general amnesty: ‘Any of you that throw yourself on the mercy and benevolence of our great Sultan, and proclaim your submission, shall receive pardon. If you do that, you shall be free.’
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It was the Albanian mercenaries who brought devastation to the Peloponnese for the next nine years. They claimed, perhaps with justification, that they were not being paid and therefore had to plunder instead, and it was believed that the Turks had agreed to this pernicious substitution.

From their base in Tripolis the Albanians spread out to pillage virtually the whole Peloponnese. As one chronicle recorded, ‘The Albanians came not as men but like a wild beast or a fire or a river, and the mind of man cannot calculate the amount of bloodshed and enslavement which they inflicted on the wretched Christians of the Morea.’
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Enslavement was indeed on a massive scale, the ban on enslaving subjects of the Sultan seemingly ignored, and by one reckoning 20,000 Greeks were seized in the nine years of Albanian devastation, to be sold as slaves in the Algerian markets or to Turks elsewhere in Greece. Many Greeks of the Peloponnese fled, to the Ionian islands, to Italy and elsewhere in Europe, and to Russia, especially the Crimea and the newly established town of Odessa, where they received some help from Catherine’s government. It is estimated that some 50,000 Greeks of the Peloponnese left for good, about a sixth of the pre-revolt population.

The Albanian reign of terror brought about some unlikely alignments. The Turkish commander of Koróni hired one band of Albanians to fight off their fellow countrymen. The richest Turk in Corinth recruited and armed Greek klephts to resist the Albanians who were threatening to burn down his property; the leader of these klephts was Konstantínos Kolokotrónis, whose son Theódhoros was to play a leading part in the war of independence.

Eventually the Turkish government moved decisively to restore order in the Peloponnese. In 1779 the kapitan pasha, head of the Turkish navy, sailed from Constantinople and landed with 2,000 men near Corinth. He immediately set about securing the cooperation of the Greeks against the Albanians and his instructions to the Greeks were brutally clear: ‘We order you to kill these Albanian blackguards (
zorbádhes
) without fear. All their possessions are yours. Just bring us their heads. Whatever you do is condoned. Give no quarter.’
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He even issued Turkish uniforms to the Greeks. The final showdown came in July 1779 at the Albanians’ base of Tripolis, where they were surrounded and cut down as they tried to escape. At the eastern gate of Tripolis a pyramid of Albanian heads was set up, held together by mortar, and it was still there 30 years later, an enduring monument to a dreadful decade.

There remained a final task for the kapitan pasha in restoring Turkish control of the Peloponnese. Not all the Greek klephts had agreed to cooperate with the Turks, and foremost among the dissidents was Konstantínos Kolokótronis. He was ready, as we have seen, to enter the service of an individual Turk, but to throw in his lot with the Turkish governing power was a different matter. His stance was widely approved by the Greeks: as a popular song had it,

A year later Kolokotrónis and his companions paid the price for their intransigence, in much the same way as the Albanians had done, being besieged in the village of Kastanítsa some 25 miles south of Navplion, and killed as they fled. Among the dead was Kolokotrónis.

The Orlov revolt and its aftermath can be seen as an unmitigated disaster for the Greeks. The Russians had embarked on a massive enterprise without questioning wildly optimistic forecasts of support, with no clear strategy, without providing enough resources and without coordinating those that they did provide. The Greeks had joined them only so far as cooperation might serve their immediate interests. The result was the devastation of much of the Peloponnese and the deaths totalling tens of thousands of Russians, Greeks, Turks and Albanians. So did any good come of it at last?

One outcome was an improvement of the lot of the Greeks under the restored Turkish rule. The Turks adhered to their amnesty and there was no retribution on the Greeks for their support of the Russians. The Turkish government was more concerned to make the Peloponnese once again a peaceful productive tax-paying province. In 1776 the Mani, which had been the area most active in the Orlov revolt, was granted semi-autonomy under a Greek bey of the Mani. New land was brought under cultivation, trade developed, and the following decades have been characterised as the golden age of the Mani. Greeks in the rest of the Peloponnese were granted increased rights to make representations to the Turkish governor of the province, and even directly to Constantinople.

But perhaps the main benefit for the Greeks from the Orlov revolt lay in the lessons learned, albeit painfully, which would have results in the war of independence. One was that foreign intervention came at a price, for instance the required oath of allegiance to Catherine the Great. For success in their war of independence there were other prices to be paid to foreign powers, and for long resented: foreign influence on Greek affairs, and decades of crippling Greek indebtedness for their wartime loans.

A second lesson was, as we have seen, the need for a Greece fighting for independence to establish a government. Essential to this would be the so-called westerners, Greeks with experience of the politics of other European countries. In 1821 local forms of government were set up wherever the revolt broke out, and within a year there was a national government appointed by representatives from all over Greece. It was clearly named as a provisional government, underwent many changes
and faced many vicissitudes, some of its own making. But it did provide a degree of control over the often unruly military captains, and a focus for the Greeks as a nation.

That perhaps was the major difference between 1770 and the war of independence: by 1821 the aspirations had become national. When Alexis Orlov addressed the Greeks on arrival in the Peloponnese in 1770 he spoke as if they had a common aim; in fact they cared only about their own people in their own locality. The word
patrídha
still meant ‘home town’ or ‘birthplace’. The change in meaning to ‘fatherland’, and hence to the idea of a nation and its rights, was part of the ferment of ideas that swept the world in the late eighteenth century, loosely characterised as the Enlightenment.

Finally, the Orlov revolt showed Greece to Europe, and particularly to France and England, in a new light. Before the revolt began there were high hopes of its success. At the end of 1769 the writer of England’s
The Annual Register
maintained that the long preceding period of peace had enfeebled the Turkish military, that the Greeks were numerous, fierce and warlike, and that with their support Russia would be ‘the restorer of the Greek empire’.
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By the end of the following year the events of the revolt had dashed these hopes. The
Gentleman’s Magazine
, summarising the events of 1770, said: ‘On the first appearance of the Russian succours, the Greeks assumed for a moment the appearance of the manly bravery of their renowned ancestors; but their first attacks discovered the womanly spirit by which they were inspired: they fell furiously on all the Turks they could master, and massacred without distinction; their boasted victories were the frantic exploits of enraged madness.’ On the Greeks’ first sight of the enemy, it went on, ‘in a moment their courage failed them.’
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And
The Annual Register
for 1770 declared that it would be absurd to think that the Greeks, ‘a people immersed in a corruption of two thousand years, broken by long slavery, and sunk thro’ every state of degradation, and whose imaginary bravery only depended upon their having never seen the face of an enemy, should all at once do more than inherit the valour of their ancestors’.
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The valour of the Greeks’ ancestors and the contrast with contemporary Greeks became an increasingly dominant theme. In 1776, some years after the revolt had run its course, the young Choiseul-Gouffier, later to be French ambassador to Constantinople, travelled in the Peloponnese. Choiseul-Gouffier was saddened by the contrast between the Greeks of his day and their ancestors: ‘These slaves were not merely ordinary mortals, they were the descendants of the ancient Greeks, and my respect for their name intensified my sense of their debasement.’
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But he saw signs of hope. The inhabitants of Tínos were patriotic and independent, the people of the Mani were, like the ancient Spartans, warlike and freedom loving. He thought it was the duty of Europe to intervene and help the Greeks. Choiseul-Gouffier’s message was summarised in the frontispiece and accompanying caption of his account of his journey. Greece is shown as a woman in chains, surrounded by monuments to Leonidas, Epaminondas, Demosthenes and other great names from the past. The caption concludes with the words that are carved on the rock that towers above enslaved Greece: ‘Exoriare aliquis . . .’. Choiseul-Gouffier’s readers would have known their
Aeneid
and would not have needed the complete quotation: ‘Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor’ – ‘Let an avenger arise from our dead bones.’
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The context was not altogether appropriate – the words are from Dido’s castigation of Aeneas after he has deserted her – but the sentiment is completely clear.

The process was taken a step further by the French merchant Pierre-Augustin Guys. Based in Constantinople, he made many visits to Greece from 1744 onwards, and his close association with Greece continued until his death on Zákinthos in 1796. His
Voyage Littéraire de la Grèce
was first published in 1771, and in its final revised form in 1783.

Guys too compared the Greeks of his day with their ancestors, but not to denigrate the contemporary Greeks. In his view there was an unbroken continuity between the ancients and the moderns. Their potential for achievement was the same: ‘I see’, he declared, ‘natural scenes and living models that can still inspire talent successfully. I see the most regular forms, black, bright eyes animated with a natural fire, elegant and majestic physiques, a simple and light dress.’ Their faults too were the same: ‘I found the Greeks just as their Historians, especially Thucydides, characterized them: dissembling, vain, supple, volatile, avid for gain, enthusiasts of novelty, unscrupulous on their oaths.’
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In Guys’ view this continuity was expressed through folk traditions, the persistence of the Greek language and the religious festivals that replicated the rites of the ancient gods. It was these, thought Guys, which should be studied, rather than antique monuments. Guys had an apt simile for his different approach: ‘Look at me as an Antiquarian, who instead of neglecting a copper coin, as so many other travellers have done, because it is unpolished and badly preserved, takes the trouble to wash it, to clean it carefully, and finally discovers the characters that were believed to be entirely effaced.’
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