The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (68 page)

As relations between Greek and Turk deteriorated, it was only to be expected that civilians as well as fighting men should suffer. There was an ugly incident at Smyrna (Izmir) in June 1821 when, in the course of an attack on the large Greek community, hundreds of men and women were slaughtered and raped, but the most notorious atrocity was perpetrated in Constantinople, and by order of Sultan Mahmoud II himself. Shortly after dawn on Easter Sunday, 22 April 1821, Patriarch Grigorios V–who, it must be emphasised, had never voiced the slightest support for the Greek revolt–was formally stripped of his rank, and at noon on the same day was hanged from the central doors of the Patriarchate. According to Robert Walsh, chaplain to the British Embassy, ‘his person, attenuated by abstinence and emaciated by age’–he seems to have been not far short of eighty–‘had not weight sufficient to cause immediate death. He continued for a long time in pain, which no friendly hand dared abridge, and the darkness of night came on before his last convulsions were over.’ A few hours later the Sultan is said to have come in person to see the body, which was left swinging for three days.

Nor was the old Patriarch the only victim. All over the Ottoman Empire Christian churches were attacked and burned, and many of the clergy–including no less than seven bishops–were executed. And yet, though the whole western world was shocked by the outrage, only Orthodox Russia lifted its voice in protest–the Austrian and British Foreign Ministers, Metternich and Castlereagh, who could always be trusted to oppose any movement of national liberation, easily overcoming the initial hesitancy of Prussia and France. The Tsar was accordingly obliged to act alone, but he did not mince his words. In an ultimatum drafted by Capodistria, he declared that:

the Ottoman government has placed itself in a state of open hostility against the Christian world. It has legitimised the defence of the Greeks, who will henceforth be fighting solely to save themselves from inevitable destruction. In view of the nature of that struggle, Russia will find herself strictly obliged to offer them help, because they are persecuted; protection, because they need it; and assistance, jointly with the whole of Christendom, because she cannot surrender her brothers in religion to the mercy of blind fanaticism.

This was presented to the Turkish government on 18 July. On the 25th, having received no reply, the Russian ambassador, Count Stroganoff, broke off diplomatic relations with the Porte and closed his embassy.

Meanwhile, in the Peloponnese, Kolokotronis and his army were preparing to capture their greatest prize to date: Tripolis. Though garrisoned by some 10,000 men–including a body of 1,500 formidable Albanian mercenaries–the town seemed at first a comparatively easy target. Standing in the middle of an open plain, it could rely on no natural defences, merely a stone wall some fourteen feet high. Nor could it be provisioned from the sea. It was also known to be dangerously overcrowded, its civilian population of about 15,000 having been swelled by considerable numbers of local Turks for whom life in the surrounding countryside was no longer safe. In the Greek summer heat, it would be unlikely long to survive a siege.

By mid-July the Greek forces were drawn up to the north and west. Kolokotronis was in command, and there was a reserve force in waiting under Mavromichalis. Just as they were about to attack, there arrived an unexpected visitor: Dimitrios Ipsilantis, brother of the ill-fated Alexander. This alone would not have seemed much of a recommendation, even though the news of Alexander’s final débacle had not yet reached the Peloponnese. Physically, too, Dimitrios was more than usually unimpressive: less than five feet tall, skeletally thin and with a curious impediment in his speech. And yet there was something about him that inspired confidence. From the moment of his first appearance no one was in any doubt of his integrity, and when within a few days he offered to assume the leadership of a new Peloponnesian government, together with the supreme command of the armed forces, a surprising number of leading revolutionaries gave him their support. Among them was Kolokotronis himself, conscious as he was that the new Greece rapidly taking shape was much in need of an acknowledged head, and probably seeing Ipsilantis as an eminently suitable candidate whom he would have little difficulty in bending to his will. After some discussion it was agreed that the provisional government, the so-called Peloponnesian Senate, established only a month before, should continue in being, with Ipsilantis as its president and Commander-in-Chief.

The siege began, and went much as the Greeks had expected. Before long Tripolis was desperately short of food and water, and disease rapidly followed. At the end of August came the news that a Turkish relief force, advancing from the north via Thermopylae, had been successfully cut off by the Greeks, and a few days later the embattled Turks in the city signified their readiness to negotiate. They held a single card in their hands: a party of thirty-eight Greek hostages, captured with their servants at the beginning of the siege. All were being held in a single tiny cell, the masters shackled by one chain round their necks, the servants by another, both chains so tightly drawn that if any one man chose to sit down or stand up, the rest had to do the same. Perhaps it was this flagrant inhumanity that enraged the besiegers. With the promise of plunder in the air their numbers were now rapidly increasing, and their mood grew steadily more ugly as they began to discuss the division of the spoils.

Shortly before the expected surrender, Kolokotronis persuaded Ipsilantis to leave the camp. The excuse given was that the Turkish fleet had appeared off the west coast and that it was his duty to prevent its disembarkation. (In fact, the single two-pounder gun that he took with him would have had little effect on the Ottoman navy–which, as we know, proceeded unopposed to Galaxidi.) The real reason seems to have been that, as Kolokotronis well knew, the capture of Tripolis would end in an orgy of bloodshed. It would be better if the high-minded Ipsilantis were not there to witness it, or to risk–as head of the government–being held responsible.

Of course he was perfectly right. The peace talks were still in progress when the Greeks burst into Tripolis on 5 October, to find the unburied bodies of those who had died of hunger or disease lying scattered over the streets; within hours they had been covered by hundreds more, victims this time of a lust for indiscriminate slaughter. Nor did this occur only within the town; some 2,000 refugees, mostly women and children, who had left of their own free will on guarantee of safe conduct, were also massacred. Ipsilantis, returning a few days after the nightmare had ended, was appalled. It has been suggested that he should have stayed, using his influence to curb the frenzy of his countrymen; but that influence, never great, was already beginning to decline, and there is little in any case that he could have done. War, as we know, all too easily dehumanises those who engage in it; history is full of such horrors, and the sack of Tripolis was neither the first nor the worst of them. It is sad, nonetheless, that the often heroic story of Greek independence should be tarnished with so indelible a stain.

The Greeks were fighting for liberty and nationhood, but they were not yet a nation. The Peloponnesian Senate was all very well, but its members had not been elected–many, indeed, were self-appointed–and its writ, such as it was, was by its very definition confined to southern Greece. North of the Gulf of Corinth there were similar organisations in both East and West Roumeli–the latter, based on Missolonghi, being firmly under the control of Alexander Mavrogordatos, a highly sophisticated westerniser who spoke seven languages and had recently arrived from Pisa, where he had been a close friend of the poet Shelley and had given Mary Shelley lessons in Greek. The moment he heard of the revolt he had hurried to Greece, landing at Missolonghi in the middle of August, and from that moment on his was the dominant influence in the revolution.

What was now urgently needed was a supreme body which would unite these three bodies, together with several other smaller groups which had formed in individual cities and towns. With that objective, representatives of all the organisations met during the last weeks of the year in Piada, an insignificant little village some five miles away from the great classical theatre of Epidaurus. The Assembly of Epidaurus, as it was called, was to draft Greece’s first constitution. This first proclaimed the ‘political existence and independence’ of the Greek nation, adopting Greek Orthodoxy as the state religion; it went on to list the civil rights which would be guaranteed; finally, it laid down the essentials of the administrative machinery, with a five-man executive and a Senate. Mavrogordatos was elected president of the executive, effectively head of state; Ipsilantis, away besieging Corinth, was fobbed off with the presidency of the Senate, with Mavromichalis as his vice-president.

But it was one thing to proclaim independence and a constitution; it was quite another to bring these into active existence and to have them universally accepted. The delegates at Epidaurus had made one serious mistake: they had omitted to choose a capital. Perhaps, at so early a stage, such a decision might have seemed premature, but it meant in practice that when their deliberations were over they all returned to their individual seats of power, and that very little administrative work was done to make the national government a reality. Mavrogordatos himself, fully aware that the Turkish fleet was still lingering in the southern Adriatic, left immediately for Hydra and Spetsai–two of the three islands (the third was Psara in the Aegean) on which the revolutionary navy depended for its ships and crews, and whose support would be vitally necessary in the maritime struggle to come. He returned only in May 1822, when he went straight to Missolonghi to strengthen the town’s defences.

Thus it was that the Greek constitution, in the minds of Greeks and of foreigners alike, still partook to some degree of a dream. We may regret, but not perhaps be entirely surprised by, the reply given by Sir Thomas Maitland in Corfu to the new Greek government when it requested the return of an impounded ship:

His Excellency has just received letters from persons who give to themselves the name of the Government of Greece, by a messenger now in this port…

His Excellency is absolutely ignorant of the existence of a ‘provisionary government of Greece’, and therefore cannot recognise such an agent…He will not enter into a correspondence with any nominal power which he does not know.

For the Greeks, the first year of their revolution had been a surprisingly successful one. The Greek uprising had by now caught the imagination of Europe. From England and France, from Germany and Spain, from Piedmont and Switzerland, even from Poland and Hungary, parties of young philhellenes–with recent memories of a good sound classical education to inspire them–were seizing any available ship that would take them to the scene of the struggle.

Alas, all too many of them were doomed. The year 1822 was a good deal less happy than its predecessor. Most of the foreign volunteers, speaking not a word of Greek and understandably alarmed by the obvious brigands by whom they found themselves surrounded, stuck together in battalions of their own; nearly all of these were mobilised in July, when Mavrogordatos ill-advisedly challenged the Turks to a pitched battle on the plain of Peta, just outside Arta. It was fought on the 16th, and the result was catastrophe. Among the dead were no less than sixty-seven of the philhellenes. Fewer than thirty survived–most of them seriously wounded–to make their way back to Missolonghi, where several more were to die, of their wounds or of disease, during the following winter. The dream was over.

Yet the disaster at Peta was as nothing compared with the tragedy which was simultaneously being enacted 150 miles to the east, on the island of Chios. Of all the isles of Greece, Chios had been, until the revolution, the richest and the happiest. Unlike many of its neighbours it was enviably fertile and, after many centuries of Italian occupation, quite exceptionally sophisticated, boasting a number of great merchant families–including the Mavrogordatos–whose names were well-known throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Thanks to its wealth and its influence–twenty-two of its villages, producers of the mastic gum so much in demand at Constantinople, were the property of the Sultan’s sister–the Ottoman yoke was light. Left to themselves, the people of this blessed island would never have dreamed of rebelling; indeed, when in May 1821 a fleet from Hydra arrived with an invitation to join the revolution, they categorically refused. It was only in the following year–when another fleet, this time from the neighbouring island of Samos, unceremoniously landed 1,500 troops and a good deal of heavy artillery on their shores–that they found themselves swept up into a nightmare.

It was the Samians, not the Chiots, who were responsible for the attack on the Turkish-held citadel of Chora, the island’s principal town. It was they who burned down the customs house and stripped the lead from the roofs of the mosques to melt down into bullets. But it was the Chiots who suffered. Eighty of their most prominent citizens were taken prisoner, three of them sent as hostages to Constantinople. On 11 April 1822 an Ottoman fleet arrived under the admiral Kara Ali. Some 15,000 Anatolian toughs were landed and deliberately left to their own devices. The Samians fled, and the massacre began. It was Tripolis all over again, but this time the Turks were the butchers, the Greeks the victims. Not a man, woman or child in Chora was left alive, and the rest of the island was scarcely safer. Two thousand terrified refugees huddled in the great monastery of Nea Monì, famous throughout the Byzantine world for its glorious mosaics; all were put to the sword. Another monastery, Agios Minas, gave shelter to another 3,000; on Easter Sunday, 14 April, it was burned to the ground with everyone within it. A month later forty-nine of the eighty hostages were publicly hanged, eight from the yardarms of the Turkish flagship, the remainder on the trees lining the road which is still known as the Street of the Martyrs.