A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878 Part 33

[Development of Greek commerce, 1750-1820.]

[The Treaty of Kainardji, 1774.]

The intellectual advance of the Greeks in the eighteenth century was closely connected with the development of their commerce, and this in its turn was connected with events in the greater cycle of European history. A period of comparative peace and order in the Levantine waters, following the final expulsion of the Venetians from the Morea in 1718, gave play to the natural apt.i.tude of the Greek islanders for coasting-trade. Then s.h.i.+ps, still small and unfit to venture on long voyages, plied between the harbours in the aegaean and in the Black Sea, and brought profit to their owners in spite of the imposition of burdens from which not only many of the Mussulman subjects of the Sultan, but foreign nations protected by commercial treaties, were free. It was at this epoch, after Venice had lost its commercial supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean, that Russia began to exercise a direct influence upon the fortunes of Greece. The Empress Catherine had formed the design of conquering Constantinople, and intended, under the t.i.tle of Protectress of the Christian Church, to use the Greeks as her allies. In the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey in 1768, a Russian expeditionary force landed in the Morea, and the Greeks were persuaded to take up arms. The Moreotes themselves paid dearly for the trust which they had placed in the orthodox Empress. They were virtually abandoned to the vengeance of their oppressors; but to Greece at large the conditions on which peace was made proved of immense benefit. The Treaty of Kainardji, signed in 1774, gave Russia the express right to make representations at Constantinople on behalf of the Christian inhabitants of the Danubian provinces; it also bound the Sultan to observe certain conditions in his treatment of the Greek islanders. Out of these clauses, Russian diplomacy constructed a general right of interference on behalf of any Christian subjects of the Porte. The Treaty also opened the Black Sea to Russian s.h.i.+ps of commerce, and conferred upon Russia the commercial privileges of the most favoured nation. [357] The result of this compact was a very remarkable one. The Russian Government permitted hundreds of Greek s.h.i.+powners to hoist its own flag, and so changed the footing of Greek merchantmen in every port of the Ottoman Empire. The burdens which had placed the Greek trader at a disadvantage, when compared with the Mohammedan, vanished. A host of Russian consular agents, often Greeks themselves, was scattered over the Levant. Eager for opportunities of attaching the Greeks to their Russian patrons, quick to make their newly-won power felt by the Turks, these men extracted a definite meaning from the clauses of the Treaty of Kainardji, by which the Porte had bound itself to observe the rights of its Christian subjects. The sense of security in the course of their business, no less than the emanc.i.p.ation from commercial fetters, gave an immense impulse to Greek traders. Their s.h.i.+ps were enlarged; voyages, hitherto limited to the Levant, were extended to England and even to America; and a considerable armament of cannon was placed on board each s.h.i.+p for defence against the attack of Algerian pirates.

[Foundation of Odessa, 1792.]

[Death of Rhegas, 1798.]

[Influence of the French Revolution on Greece.]

Before the end of the eighteenth century another war between Turkey and Russia, resulting in the cession of the district of Oczakoff on the northern sh.o.r.e of the Black Sea, made the Greeks both carriers and vendors of the corn-export of Southern Russia. The city of Odessa was founded on the ceded territory. The merchants who raised it to its sudden prosperity were not Russians but Greeks; and in the course of a single generation many a Greek trading-house, which had hitherto deemed the sum of 3,000 to be a large capital, rose to an opulence little behind that of the great London firms. Profiting by the neutrality of Turkey or its alliance with England during a great part of the revolutionary war, the Greeks succeeded to much of the Mediterranean trade that was lost by France and its dependencies.

The increasing intelligence of the people was shown in the fact that foreigners were no longer employed by Greek merchants as their travelling agents in distant countries; there were countrymen enough of their own who could negotiate with an Englishman or a Dane in his own language. The richest Greeks were no doubt those of Odessa and Salonica, not of h.e.l.las proper; but even the little islands of Hydra and Spetza, the refuge of the Moreotes whom Catherine had forsaken in 1770, now became communities of no small wealth and spirit. Psara, which was purely Greek, formed with these Albanian colonies the nucleus of an aegaean naval Power. The Ottoman Government, cowed by its recent defeats, and perhaps glad to see the means of increasing its resources, made no attempt to check the growth of the h.e.l.lenic armed marine. Under the very eyes of the Sultan, the Hydriote and Psarian captains, men as venturesome as the sea-kings of ancient Greece, acc.u.mulated the artillery which was hereafter to hold its own against many an Ottoman man-of-war, and to sweep the Turkish merchantmen from the aegaean. Eighteen years before the Greek insurrection broke out, Koraes, calling the attention of Western Europe to the progress made by his country, wrote the following significant words:--"If the Ottoman Government could have foreseen that the Greeks would create a merchant-navy, composed of several hundred vessels, most of them regularly armed, it would have crushed the movement at its commencement. It is impossible to calculate the effects which may result from the creation of this marine, or the influence which it may exert both upon the destiny of the oppressed nation and upon that of its oppressors." [358] Like its cla.s.sic sisterland in the Mediterranean, Greece was stirred by the far-sounding voices of the French Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the revival of a supposed antique Republicanism, the victories of Hoche and Bonaparte, successively kindled the enthusiasm of a race already restless under the Turkish yoke.

France drew to itself some of the hopes that had hitherto been fixed entirely upon Russia. Images and ideas of cla.s.sic freedom invaded the domain where the Church had hitherto been all in all; the very sailors began to call their boats by the names of Spartan and Athenian heroes, as well as by those of saints and martyrs. In 1797 Venice fell, and Bonaparte seized its Greek possessions, the Ionian Islands. There was something of the forms of liberation in the establishment of French rule; the inhabitants of Zante were at least permitted to make a bonfire of the stately wigs worn by their Venetian masters. Great changes seemed to be near at hand. It was not yet understood that France fought for empire, not for justice; and the man who, above all others, represented the early spirit of the revolution among the Greeks, the poet Rhegas, looked to Bonaparte to give the signal for the rising of the whole of the Christian populations subject to Mohammedan rule. Rhegas, if he was not a wise politician, was a thoroughly brave man, and he was able to serve his country as a martyr. While engaged in Austria in conspiracies against the Sultan's Government, and probably in intrigues with Bernadotte, French amba.s.sador at Vienna, he was arrested by the agents of Thugut, and handed over to the Turks. He was put to death at Belgrade, with five of his companions, in May, 1798. The songs of Rhegas soon pa.s.sed through every household in Greece. They were a precious treasure to his countrymen, and they have immortalised his name as a patriot. But the work which he had begun languished for a time after his death. The series of events which followed Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt extinguished the hope of the liberation of Greece by the French Republic. Among the higher Greek clergy the alliance with the G.o.dless followers of Voltaire was seen with no favourable eye. The Porte was even able to find a Christian Patriarch to set his name to a pastoral, warning the faithful against the sin of rebellion, and reminding them that, while Satan was creating the Lutherans and Calvinists, the infinite mercy of G.o.d had raised up the Ottoman Power in order that the Orthodox Church might be preserved pure from the heresies of the West. [359]

[The Ionian Islands. 1798-1815.]

[Ali Pasha, 1798-1821.]

From the year 1798 down to the Peace of Paris, Greece was more affected by the vicissitudes of the Ionian Islands and by the growth of dominion of Ali Pasha in Albania than by the earlier revolutionary ideas. France was deprived of its spoils by the combined Turkish and Russian fleets in the coalition of 1799, and the Ionian Islands were made into a Republic under the protection of the Czar and the Sultan. It was in the native administration of Corfu that the career of Capodistrias began. At the peace of Tilsit the Czar gave these islands back to Napoleon, and Capodistrias, whose ability had gained general attention, accepted an invitation to enter the Russian service. The islands were then successively beleaguered and conquered by the English, with the exception of Corfu; and after the fall of Napoleon they became a British dependency. Thus the three greatest Powers of Europe were during the first years of this century in constant rivalry on the east of the Adriatic, and a host of Greeks, some fugitives, some adventurers, found employment among their armed forces. The most famous chieftain in the war of liberation, Theodore Kolokotrones, a Klepht of the Morea, was for some years major of a Greek regiment in the pay of England. In the meantime Ali Pasha, on the neighbouring mainland, neither rested himself nor allowed any of his neighbours to rest. The Suliotes, vanquished after years of heroic defence, migrated in a body to the Ionian Islands in 1804. Every Klepht and Armatole of the Epirote border had fought at some time either for Ali or against him; for in the extension of his violent and crafty rule Ali was a friend to-day and an enemy to-morrow alike to Greek, Turk, and Albanian. When his power was at its height, Ali's court at Janina was as much Greek as it was Mohammedan: soldiers, merchants, professors, all, as it was said, with a longer or a shorter rope round their necks, played their part in the society of the Epirote capital.

[360] Among the officers of Ali's army there were some who were soon to be the military rivals of Kolokotrones in the Greek insurrection: Ali's physician, Dr. Kolettes, was gaining an experience and an influence among these men which afterwards placed him at the head of the Government. For good or for evil, it was felt that the establishment of a virtually independent kingdom of Albania must deeply affect the fate of Greece; and when at length Ali openly defied the Sultan, and Turkish armies closed round his castle at Janina, the conflict between the Porte and its most powerful va.s.sal gave the Greeks the signal to strike for their own independence.

[The Hetaeria Philike.]

The secret society, which under the name of Hetaeria Philike, or a.s.sociation of friends, inaugurated the rebellion of Greece, was founded in 1814, after it had become clear that the Congress of Vienna would take no steps on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte. The founders of this society were traders of Odessa, and its earliest members seem to have been drawn more from the Greeks in Russia and in the Danubian provinces than from those of Greece Proper. The object of the conspiracy was the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, and the re-establishment of a Greek Eastern Empire.

It was pretended by the council of directors that the Emperor Alexander had secretly joined them; and the ingenious fiction was circulated that a society for the preservation of Greek antiquities, for which Capodistrias had gained the patronage of the Czar and other eminent men at the Congress of Vienna, was in fact this political a.s.sociation in disguise. The real chiefs of the conspiracy always spoke of themselves as acting under the instructions of a nameless superior power. They were as little troubled by scruple in thus deceiving their followers as they were in planning a general ma.s.sacre of the Turks, and in murdering their own agents when they wished to have them out of the way. The ultimate design of the Hetaeria was an unsound one, and its operations were based upon an imposture; but in exciting the Greeks against Turkish rule, and in inspiring confidence in its own resources and authority, it was completely successful. In the course of six years every Greek of note, both in Greece itself and in the adjacent countries, had joined the a.s.sociation. The Turkish Government had received warnings of the danger which threatened it, but disregarded them until revolt was on the point of breaking out. The very improvement in the condition of the Christians, the absence of any crying oppression or outrage in Greece during late years, probably lulled the anxieties of Sultan Mahmud, who, terrible as he afterwards proved himself, had not hitherto been without sympathy for the Rayah. But the history of France, no less than the history of Greece, shows that it is not the excess, but the sense, of wrong that produces revolution. A people may be so crushed by oppression as to suffer all conceivable misery with patience. It is when the pulse has again begun to beat strong, when the eye is fixed no longer on the ground, and the knowledge of good and evil again burns in the heart, that the right and the duty of resistance is felt.

[Capodistrias and Hypsilanti.]

Early in 1820 the ferment in Greece had become so general that the chiefs of the Hetaeria were compelled to seek at St. Petersburg for the Russian leader who had as yet existed only in their imagination. There was no dispute as to the person to whom the task of restoring the Eastern Empire rightfully belonged. Capodistrias, at once a Greek and Foreign Minister of Russia, stood in the front rank of European statesmen; he was known to love the Greek cause; he was believed to possess the strong personal affection of the Emperor Alexander. The deputies of the Hetaeria besought him to place himself at its head. Capodistrias, however, knew better than any other man the force of those influences which would dissuade the Czar from a.s.sisting Greece. He had himself published a pamphlet in the preceding year recommending his countrymen to take no rash step; and, apart from all personal considerations, he probably believed that he could serve Greece better as Minister of Russia than by connecting himself with any dangerous enterprise. He rejected the offers of the Hetaerists, who then turned to a soldier of some distinction in the Russian army, Prince Alexander Hypsilanti, a Greek exile, whose grandfather, after governing Wallachia as Hospodar, had been put to death by the Turks for complicity with the designs of Rhegas. It is said that Capodistrias encouraged Hypsilanti to attempt the task which he had himself declined, and that he allowed him to believe that if Greece once rose in arms the a.s.sistance of Russia could not long be withheld. [361] Hypsilanti, sacrificing his hopes of the recovery of a great private fortune through the intercession of the Czar at Constantinople, placed himself at the head of the Hetaeria, and entered upon a career, for which, with the exception of personal courage proved in the campaigns against Napoleon, he seems to have possessed no single qualification.

[The Heraerist plan.]

In October, 1820, the leading Hetaerists met in council at Ismail to decide whether the insurrection against the Turk should begin in Greece itself or in the Danubian provinces. Most of the Greek officers in the service of Sutsos, the Hospodar of Moldavia, were ready to join the revolt. With the exception of a few companies serving as police, there were no Turkish soldiers north of the Danube, the Sultan having bound himself by the Treaty of Bucharest to send no troops into the Princ.i.p.alities without the Czar's consent. It does not appear that the Hetaerists had yet formed any calculation as to the probable action of the Roumanian people: they had certainly no reason to believe that this race bore good-will to the Greeks, or that it would make any effort to place a Greek upon the Sultan's throne.

The conspirators at Ismail were so far on the right track that they decided that the outbreak should begin, not on the Danube, but in Peloponnesus.

Hypsilanti, however, full of the belief that Russia would support him, reversed this conclusion, and determined to raise his standard in Moldavia.

[362] And now for the first time some account was taken of the Roumanian population. It was known that the ma.s.s of the people groaned under the feudal oppression of the Boyards, or landowners, and that the Boyards themselves detested the government of the Greek Hospodars. A plan found favour among Hypsilanti's advisers that the Wallachian peasantry should first be called to arms by a native leader for the redress of their own grievances, and that the Greeks should then step in and take control of the insurrectionary movement. Theodor Wladimiresco, a Roumanian who had served in the Russian army, was ready to raise the standard of revolt among his countrymen. It did not occur to the Hetaerists that Wladimiresco might have a purpose of his own, or that the Roumanian population might prefer to see the Greek adventure fail. No sovereign by divine right had a firmer belief in his prerogative within his own dominions than Hypsilanti in his power to command or outwit Roumanians, Slavs, and all other Christian subjects of the Sultan.

[Hypsilanti in Roumania March, 1821.]

The feint of a native rising was planned and executed. In February, 1821, while Hypsilanti waited on the Russian frontier, Wladimiresco proclaimed the abolition of feudal services, and marched with a horde of peasants upon Bucharest. On the 16th of March the Hetaerists began their own insurrection by a deed of blood that disgraced the Christian cause. Karavias, a conspirator commanding the Greek troops of the Hospodar at Galatz, let loose his soldiers and murdered every Turk who could be hunted down.

Hypsilanti crossed the Pruth next day, and appeared at Ja.s.sy with a few hundred followers. A proclamation was published in which the Prince called upon all Christian subjects of the Porte to rise, and declared that a great European Power, meaning Russia, supported him in his enterprise. Sutsos, the Hospodar, at once handed over all the apparatus of government, and supplied the insurgents with a large sum of money. Two thousand armed men, some of them regular troops, gathered round Hypsilanti at Ja.s.sy. The roads to the Danube lay open before him; the resources of Moldavia were at his disposal; and had he at once thrown a force into Galatz and Ibraila, he might perhaps have made it difficult for Turkish troops to gain a footing on the north of the Danube.

[The Czar disavows the movement.]

But the incapacity of the leader became evident from the moment when he began his enterprise. He loitered for a week at Ja.s.sy, holding court and conferring t.i.tles, and then, setting out for Bucharest, wasted three weeks more upon the road. In the meantime the news of the insurrection, and of the fraudulent use that had been made of his own name, reached the Czar, who was now engaged at the Congress of Laibach. Alexander was at this moment abandoning himself heart and soul to Metternich's reactionary influence, and ordering his generals to make ready a hundred thousand men to put down the revolution in Piedmont. He received with dismay a letter from Hypsilanti invoking his aid in a rising which was first described in the phrases of the Holy Alliance as the result of a divine inspiration, and then exhibited as a master-work of secret societies and widespread conspiracy. A stern answer was sent back. Hypsilanti was dismissed from the Russian service; he was ordered to lay down his arms, and a manifesto was published by the Russian Consul at Ja.s.sy declaring that the Czar repudiated and condemned the enterprise with which his name had been connected. The Patriarch of Constantinople, helpless in the presence of Sultan Mahmud, now issued a ban of excommunication against the leader and all his followers.

Some weeks later the Congress of Laibach officially branded the Greek revolt as a work of the same anarchical spirit which had produced the revolutions of Italy and Spain. [363]

[The enterprise fails.]

The disavowal of the Hetaerist enterprise by the Czar was fatal to its success. Hypsilanti, indeed, put on a bold countenance and pretended that the public utterances of the Russian Court were a mere blind, and in contradiction to the private instructions given him by the Czar; but no one believed him. The Roumanians, when they knew that aid was not coming from Russia, held aloof, or treated insurgents as enemies. Turkish troops crossed the Danube, and Hypsilanti fell back from Bucharest towards the Austrian frontier. Wladimiresco followed him, not however to a.s.sist him in his struggle, but to cut off his retreat and to betray him to the enemy. It was in vain that the bravest of Hypsilanti's followers, Georgakis, a Greek from Olympus, sought the Wallachian at his own headquarters, exposed his treason to the Hetaerist officers who surrounded him, and carried him, a doomed man, to the Greek camp. Wladimiresco's death was soon avenged. The Turks advanced. Hypsilanti was defeated in a series of encounters, and fled ign.o.bly from his followers, to seek a refuge, and to find a prison, in Austria. Bands of his soldiers, forsaken by their leader, sold their lives dearly in a hopeless struggle. At Skuleni, on the Pruth, a troop of four hundred men refused to cross to Russian soil until they had given battle to the enemy. Standing at bay, they met the onslaught of ten times their number of pursuers. Georgakis, who had sworn that he would never fall alive into the enemy's hands, kept his word. Surrounded by Turkish troops in the tower of a monastery, he threw open the doors for those of his comrades who could to escape, and then setting fire to a chest of powder, perished in the explosion, together with his a.s.sailants.

[Revolt of Morea, April 2, 1891.]

The Hetaerist invasion of the Princ.i.p.alities had ended in total failure, and with it there pa.s.sed away for ever the dream of re-establis.h.i.+ng the Eastern Empire under Greek ascendancy. But while this enterprise, planned in vain reliance upon foreign aid and in blind a.s.sumption of leaders.h.i.+p over an alien race, collapsed through the indifference of a people to whom the Greeks were known only as oppressors, that genuine uprising of the Greek nation, which, in spite of the nullity of its leaders, in spite of the crimes, the disunion, the perversity of a race awaking from centuries of servitude, was to add one more to the free peoples of Europe, broke out in the real home of the h.e.l.lenes, in the Morea and the islands of the aegaean.

Soon after Hypsilanti's appearance in Moldavia the Turkish governor of the Morea, antic.i.p.ating a general rebellion of the Greeks, had summoned the Primates of his province to Tripolitza, with the view of seizing them as hostages. The Primates of the northern district set out, but halted on their way, debating whether they should raise the standard of insurrection or wait for events. While they lingered irresolutely at Kalavryta the decision pa.s.sed out of their hands, and the people rose throughout the Morea. The revolt of the Moreot Greeks against their oppressors was from the first, and with set purpose, a war of extermination. "The Turk," they sang in their war-songs, "shall live no longer, neither in Morea nor in the whole earth." This terrible resolution was, during the first weeks of the revolt, carried into literal effect. The Turks who did not fly from their country-houses to the towns where there were garrisons or citadels to defend them, were attacked and murdered with their entire families, men, women and children. This was the first act of the revolution; and within a few weeks after the 2nd of April, on which the first outbreaks occurred, the open country was swept clear of its Ottoman population, which had numbered about 25,000, and the residue of the lately dominant race was collected within the walls of Patras, Tripolitza, and other towns, which the Greeks forthwith began to beleaguer. [364]

[Terrorism at Constantinople.]

[Execution of the Patriarch, April 22.]

The news of the revolt of the Morea and of the ma.s.sacre of Mohammedans reached Constantinople, striking terror into the politicians of the Turkish capital, and rousing the Sultan Mahmud to a vengeance tiger-like in its ferocity, but deliberate and calculated like every b.l.o.o.d.y deed of this resolute and able sovereign. Reprisals had already been made upon the Greeks at Constantinople for the acts of Hypsilanti, and a number of innocent persons had been put to death by the executioner, but no general attack upon the Christians had been suggested, nor had the work of punishment pa.s.sed out of the hands of the government itself. Now, however, the fury of the Mohammedan populace was let loose upon the infidel. The Sultan called upon his subjects to arm themselves in defence of their faith. Executions were redoubled; soldiers and mobs devastated Greek settlements on the Bosphorus; and on the most sacred day of the Greek Church a blow was struck which sent a thrill over Eastern Europe. The Patriarch of Constantinople had celebrated the service which ushers in the dawn of Easter Sunday, when he was summoned by the Dragoman of the Porte to appear before a Synod hastily a.s.sembled. There an order of the Sultan was read declaring Gregorius IV. a traitor, and degrading him from his office.

The Synod was commanded to elect his successor. It did so. While the new Archbishop was receiving his invest.i.ture, Gregorius was led out, and was hanged, still wearing his sacred robes, at the gate of his palace. His body remained during Easter Sunday and the two following days at the place of execution. It was then given to the Jews to be insulted, dragged through the streets, and cast into the sea. The Archbishops of Adrianople, Salonica, and Tirnovo suffered death on the same Easter Sunday. The body of Gregorius, floating in the waves, was picked up by a Greek s.h.i.+p and carried to Odessa. Brought, as it was believed, by a miracle to Christian soil, the relics of the Patriarch received at the hands of the Russian government the funeral honours of a martyr. Gregorius had no doubt had dealings with the Hetaerists; but he was put to death untried; and whatever may have been the real extent of his offence, he was executed not for this but in order to strike terror into the Sultan's Christian subjects.

[Ma.s.sacre of Christians, April-October.]

[Effect on Russia.]

[Russian amba.s.sador leaves Constantinople, July 27.]

During the succeeding months, in Asia Minor as well as in Macedonia and at Constantinople itself, there were wholesale ma.s.sacres of the Christians, and the churches of the Greeks were pillaged or destroyed by their enemies, both Jews and Turks. Smyrna, Adrianople, and Salonica, in so far as these towns were Greek, were put to the sack; thousands of the inhabitants were slain by the armed mobs who held command, or were sold into slavery. It was only the fear of a war with Russia which at length forced Sultan Mahmud to stop these deeds of outrage and to restore some of the conditions of civilised life in the part of his dominions which was not in revolt. The Russian army and nation would have avenged the execution of the Patriarch by immediate war if popular instincts had governed its ruler. Strogonoff, the amba.s.sador at Constantinople, at once proposed to the envoys of the other Powers to unite in calling up war-s.h.i.+ps for the protection of the Christians. Joint action was, however, declined by Lord Strangford, the representative of England, and the Porte was encouraged by the att.i.tude of this politician to treat the threats of Strogonoff with indifference. There was an interval during which the destiny of a great part of Eastern Europe depended upon the fluctuations of a single infirm will. The Czar had thoroughly identified himself while at Laibach with the principles and the policy of European conservatism, and had a.s.sented to the declaration in which Metternich placed the Greek rebellion, together with the Spanish and Italian insurrections, under the ban of Europe. Returning to St.

Petersburg, Alexander, in spite of the veil that intercepts from every sovereign the real thoughts and utterances of his people, found himself within the range of widely different influences. Russian pa.s.sions were not roused by what might pa.s.s in Italy or Spain. The Russian priest, the soldier, the peasant understood nothing of theories of federal intervention, and of the connection between Neapolitan despotism and the treaties of 1815: but his blood boiled when he heard that the chief priest of his Church had been murdered by the Sultan, and that a handful of his brethren were fighting for their faith unhelped. Alexander felt to some extent the throb of national spirit. There had been a time in his life when a single hour of strong emotion or of overpowering persuasion had made him renounce every obligation and unite with Napoleon against his own allies; and there were those who in 1821 believed that the Czar would as suddenly break loose from his engagements with Metternich and throw himself, with a fanatical army and nation, into a crusade against the Turk. Sultan Mahmud had himself given to the Russian party of action a ground for denouncing him in the name of Russian honour and interests independently of all that related to Greece. In order to prevent the escape of suspected persons, the Porte had ordered Russian vessels to be searched at Constantinople, and it had forced all corn-s.h.i.+ps coming from the Euxine to discharge their cargoes at the Bosphorus, under the apprehension that the corn-supplies of the capital would be cut off by Greek vessels in command of the aegaean.

Further, Russia had by treaty the right to insist that the Danubian Princ.i.p.alities should be governed by their civil authorities, the Hospodars, and not by Turkish Pashas, insurrection in Wallachia had been put down, but the rule of Hospodars had not been restored; Turkish generals, at the head of their forces, still administered their provinces under military law. On all these points Russia had at least the semblance of grievances of its own. The outrages which shocked all Europe were not the only wrong which Russian pride called upon the Czar to redress. The influence of Capodistrias revived at St. Petersburg. A despatch was sent to Constantinople declaring that the Porte had begun a war for life or death with the Christian religion, and that its continued existence among the Powers of Europe must depend upon its undertaking to restore the churches which had been destroyed, to guarantee the inviolability of Christian wors.h.i.+p in the future, and to discriminate in its punishments between the innocent and the guilty. Presenting ultimatum from his master, Strogonoff, in accordance with his instructions, demanded a written answer within eight days. No such answer came. On the 27th of July the amba.s.sador quitted Constantinople. War seemed to be on the point of breaking out.

[Eastern policy of Austria.]

The capital where these events were watched with the greatest apprehension was Vienna. The fortunes of the Ottoman Empire have always been most intimately connected with those of Austria; and although the long struggle of the House of Hapsburg with Napoleon and its wars in recent times with Prussia and with Italy have made the western aspect of Austrian policy more prominent and more familiar than its eastern one, the eastern interests of the monarchy have always been at least as important in the eyes of its actual rulers. Before the year 1720 Austria, not Russia, was the great enemy of Turkey and the aggressive Power of the east of Europe. After 1780 the Emperor Joseph had united with Catherine of Russia in a plan for dividing the Sultan's dominions in Europe, and actually waged a war for this purpose. In 1795 the alliance, with the same object, had been prospectively revived by Thugut; in 1809, after the Treaty of Tilsit, Metternich had determined in the last resort to combine with Napoleon and Alexander in dismembering Turkey, if all diplomatic means should fail to prevent a joint attack on the Porte by France and Russia. But this resolution had been adopted by Metternich only as a matter of necessity, and in view of a combination which threatened to reduce Austria to the position of a va.s.sal State. Metternich's own definite and consistent policy after 1814 was the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. His statesmans.h.i.+p was, as a rule, governed by fear; and his fear of Alexander was second only to his old fear of Napoleon. Times were changed since Joseph and Thugut could hope to enter upon a game of aggression with Russia upon equal terms.

The Austrian army had been beaten in every battle that it had fought during nearly twenty years. Province after province had been severed from it, without, except in the Tyrol, raising a hand in its support; and when in 1821 the Minister compared Austria's actual Empire and position in Europe, won and maintained in great part by his own diplomacy, with the ruin to which a series of wars had brought it ten years before, he might well thank Heaven that international Congresses were still so much in favour with the Courts, and tremble at the clash of arms which from the remote Morea threatened to call Napoleon's northern conquerors once more into the field [365]

[Eastern policy of England.]

England was not, like Austria, exposed to actual danger by the advance of Russia towards the aegaean; but the growth of Russian power had been viewed with alarm by English politicians since 1788, when Pitt had formed a triple alliance with Prussia and Holland for the purpose of defending the Porte against the attacks of Catherine and Joseph. The interest of Great Britain in the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire had not been laid down as a principle before that date, nor was it then acknowledged by the Whig party.

It was a.s.serted by Pitt from considerations relating to the European balance of power, not, as in our own times, with a direct reference to England's position in India. The course of events from 1792 to 1807 made England and Russia for awhile natural allies; but this friends.h.i.+p was turned into hostility by the Treaty of Tilsit; and although after a few years Alexander was again fighting for the same cause as Great Britain, and the public opinion of this country enthusiastically hailed the issue of the Moscow campaign, English statesmen never forgot the interview upon the Niemen, and never, in the brightest moments of victory, regarded Alexander without some secret misgivings. During the campaign of 1814 in France, Castlereagh's willingness to negotiate with Bonaparte was due in great part to the fear that Alexander's high-wrought resolutions would collapse before Napoleon could be thoroughly crushed, and that reaction would carry him into a worse peace than that which he then disdained. [366] The negotiations at the Congress of Vienna brought Great Britain and Russia, as it has been seen, into an antagonism which threatened to end in the resort to arms; and the tension which then and for some time afterwards existed between the two governments led English Ministers to speak, certainly in exaggerated and misleading language, of the mutual hostility of the English and the Russian nations. From 1815 to 1821 the Czar had been jealously watched. It had been rumoured over and over again that he was preparing to invade the Ottoman Empire; and when the rebellion of the Greeks broke out, the one thought of Castlereagh and his colleagues was that Russia must be prevented from throwing itself into the fray, and that the interests of Great Britain required that the authority of the Sultan should as soon as possible be restored throughout his dominions.

[Fears of new period of warfare.]

[Metternich and the Greeks.]

Both at London therefore and at Vienna the rebellion of Greece was viewed by governments only as an unfortunate disturbance which was likely to excite war between Russia and its neighbours, and to imperil the peace of Europe at large. It may seem strange that the spectacle of a nation rising to a.s.sert its independence should not even have aroused the question whether its claims deserved to be considered. But to do justice at least to the English Ministers of 1821, it must be remembered how terrible, how overpowering, were the memories left by the twenty years of European war that had closed in 1815, and at how vast a cost to mankind the regeneration of Greece would have been effected, if, as then seemed probable, it had ranged the Great Powers again in arms against one another, and re-kindled the spirit of military aggression which for a whole generation had made Europe the prey of rival coalitions. It is impossible to read the letter in which Castlereagh pleaded with the Czar to sacrifice his own glory and popularity to the preservation of European peace, without perceiving in what profound earnestness the English statesman sought to avert the renewal of an epoch of conflict, and how much the apprehension of coming calamity predominated in his own mind over the mere jealousy of an extension of Russian power. [367] If Castlereagh had no thought for Greece itself, it was because the larger interests of Europe wholly absorbed him, and because he lacked the imagination and the insight to conceive of a better adjustment of European affairs under the widening recognition of national rights. The Minister of Austria, to whom at this crisis Castlereagh looked as his natural ally, had no doubt the same dread of a renewed convulsion of Europe, but in his case it was mingled with considerations of a much narrower kind. It is not correct to say that Metternich was indifferent to the Greek cause; he actually hated it, because it gave a stimulus to the liberal movement of Germany. In his empty and pedantic philosophy of human action, Metternich linked together every form of national aspiration and unrest as something presumptuous and wanton. He understood nothing of the debt that mankind owes to the spirit of freedom. He was just as ready to dogmatise upon the wickedness of the English Reform Bill as he was to trace the hand of Capodistrias in every tumult in Servia or the Morea: and even if there had been no fear of Russian aggression in the background, he would instinctively have condemned the Greek revolt when he saw that the light-headed professors in the German Universities were beginning to agitate in its favour, and that the recalcitrant minor Courts regarded it with some degree of sympathy.

[Alexander adheres to policy of peace.]

[Capdostrias retires, Aug 1822.]

The policy of Metternich in the Eastern Question had for its object the maintenance of the existing order of things; and as it was certain that some satisfaction or other must be given to Russian pride, Metternich's counsel was that the grievances of the Czar which were specifically Russian should be clearly distinguished from questions relating to the independence of Greece; and that on the former the Porte should be recommended to agree with its adversary quickly, the good offices of Europe being employed within given limits on the Czar's behalf; so that, the Russian causes of complaint being removed, Alexander might without loss of honour leave the Greeks to be subdued, and resume the diplomatic relations with Constantinople which had been so perilously severed by Strogonoff's departure. It remained for the Czar to decide whether, as head of Russia and protector of the Christians of the East, he would solve the Eastern Question by his own sword, or whether, constant to the principle and ideal of international action to which he had devoted himself since 1815, he would commit his cause to the joint mediation of Europe, and accept such solution of the problem as his allies might attain. In the latter case it was clear that no blow would be struck on behalf of Greece. For a year or more the balance wavered; at length the note of triumph sounded in the Austrian Cabinet. Capodistrias, the representative of the Greek cause at St. Petersburg, rightly measured the force of the opposing impulses in the Czar's mind. He saw that Alexander, interested as he was in Italy and Spain, would never break with that federation of the Courts which he had himself created, nor shake off the influences of legitimism which had dominated him since the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. Submitting when contention had become hopeless, and antic.i.p.ating his inevitable fall by a voluntary retirement from public affairs, Capodistrias, still high in credit and reputation, quitted St. Petersburg under the form leave of absence, and withdrew to Geneva, there to await events, and to enjoy the distinction of a patriot whom love for Greece had constrained to abandon one of the most splendid positions in Europe. Grave, melancholy, and austere, as one who suffered with his country, Capodistrias remained in private life till the vanquished cause had become the victorious one, and the liberated Greek nation called him to place himself at its head.

[Extension of the Greek revolt.]