A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878 Part 35

Alone among the European nations the Russians understood the ecclesiastical character of the Greek insurrection, and owed nothing of their sympathy with it to the spell of cla.s.sical literature and art. It is characteristic of the strength of the religious element in the political views of the Russian people, that the floods of the Neva which overwhelmed St.

Petersburg in the winter of 1825 should have been regarded as a sign of divine anger at the Czar's inaction in the struggle between the Crescent and the Cross. But other causes of discontent were not wanting in Russia.

Though Alexander had forgotten his promises to introduce const.i.tutional rule, there were many, especially in the army, who had not done so.

Officers who served in the invasion of France in 1815, and in the three years' occupation which followed it, returned from Western Europe with ideas of social progress and of const.i.tutional rights which they could never have gathered in their own country. And when the bright hopes which had been excited by the recognition of these same ideas by the Czar pa.s.sed away, and Russia settled down into the routine of despotism and corruption, the old unquestioning loyalty of the army was no longer proof against the workings of the revolutionary spirit. In a land where legal means of opposition to government and of the initiation of reform were wholly wanting, discontent was forced into its most dangerous form, that of military conspiracy. The army was honeycombed with secret societies. Both in the north and in the south of Russia men of influence worked among the younger officers, and gained a strong body of adherents to their design of establis.h.i.+ng a const.i.tution by force. The southern army contained the most resolute and daring conspirators. These men had definitely abandoned the hope of effecting any public reform as long as Alexander lived, and they determined to sacrifice the sovereign, as his father and others before him had been sacrificed, to the political necessities of the time. If the evidence subsequently given by those implicated in the conspiracy is worthy of credit, a definite plan had been formed for the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Czar in the presence of his troops at one of the great reviews intended to be held in the south of Russia in the autumn of 1825. On the death of the monarch a provisional government was at once to be established, and a const.i.tution proclaimed.

[Death of the Czar, Dec. 1, 1825.]

Alexander, aware of the rising indignation of his people, and irritated beyond endurance by the failure of his diplomatic efforts, had dissolved the St. Petersburg Conferences in August, 1825, and declared that Russia would henceforth act according to its own discretion. He quitted St.

Petersburg and travelled to the Black Sea, accompanied by some of the leaders of the war-party. Here, plunged in a profound melancholy, conscious that all his early hopes had only served to surround him with conspirators, and that his sacrifice of Russia's military interests to international peace had only rendered his country impotent before all Europe, he still hesitated to make the final determination between peace and war. A certain mystery hung over his movements, his acts, and his intentions. Suddenly, while all Europe waited for the signal that should end the interval of suspense, the news was sent out from a lonely port on the Black Sea that the Czar was dead. Alexander, still under fifty years of age, had welcomed the illness which carried him from a world of cares, and closed a career in which anguish and disappointment had succeeded to such intoxicating glory and such unbounded hope. Young as he still was for one who had reigned twenty-four years, Alexander was of all men the most life-weary. Power, pleasure, excitement, had lavished on him hours of such existence as none but Napoleon among all his contemporaries had enjoyed. They had left him nothing but the solace of religious resignation, and the belief that a Power higher than his own might yet fulfil the purposes in which he himself had failed. Ever in the midst of great acts and great events, he had missed greatness himself. Where he had been best was exactly where men inferior to himself considered him to have been worst--in his hopes; and these hopes he had himself abandoned and renounced. Strength, insight, unity of purpose, the qualities which enable men to mould events, appeared in him but momentarily or in semblance. For want of them the large and fair horizon of his earlier years was first obscured and then wholly blotted out from his view, till in the end nothing but his pietism and his generosity distinguished him from the politicians of repression whose instrument he had become.

[Military insurrection at St. Petersburg, Dec 26, 1825.]

The sudden death of Alexander threw the Russian Court into the greatest confusion, for it was not known who was to succeed him. The heir to the throne was his brother Constantine, an ignorant and brutal savage, who had just sufficient sense not to desire to be Czar of Russia, though he considered himself good enough to tyrannise over the Poles. Constantine had renounced his right to the crown some years before, but the renunciation had not been made public, nor had the Grand Duke Nicholas, Constantine's younger brother, been made aware that the succession was irrevocably fixed upon himself. Accordingly, when the news of Alexander's death reached St.

Petersburg, and the doc.u.ment embodying Constantine's abdication was brought from the archives by the officials to whose keeping it had been entrusted, Nicholas refused to acknowledge it as binding, and caused the troops to take the oath of allegiance to Constantine, who was then at Warsaw.

Constantine, on the other hand, proclaimed his brother emperor. An interregnum of three weeks followed, during which messages pa.s.sed between Warsaw and St. Petersburg, Nicholas positively refusing to accept the crown unless by his elder brother's direct command. This at length arrived, and on the 26th of December Nicholas a.s.sumed the rank of sovereign. But the interval of uncertainty had been turned to good account by the conspirators at St. Petersburg. The oath already taken by the soldiers to Constantine enabled the officers who were concerned in the plot to denounce Nicholas as a usurper, and to disguise their real designs under the cloak of loyalty to the legitimate Czar. Ignorant of the very meaning of a const.i.tution, the common soldiers mutinied because they were told to do so; and it is said that they shouted the word Const.i.tution, believing it to be the name of Constantine's wife. When summoned to take the oath to Nicholas, the Moscow Regiment refused it, and marched off to the place in front of the Senate House, where it formed square, and repulsed an attack made upon it by the Cavalry of the Guard. Companies from other regiments now joined the mutineers, and symptoms of insurrection began to show themselves among the civil population. Nicholas himself did not display the energy of character which distinguished him through all his later life; on the contrary, his att.i.tude was for some time rather that of resignation than of self-confidence. Whether some doubt as to the justice of his cause haunted him, or a trial like that to which he was now exposed was necessary to bring to its full strength the iron quality of his nature, it is certain that the conduct of the new Czar during these critical hours gave to those around him little indication of the indomitable will which was hence forth to govern Russia. Though the great ma.s.s of the army remained obedient, it was but slowly brought up to the scene of revolt. Officers of high rank were sent to harangue the insurgents, and one of these, General Miloradovitsch, a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns, was mortally wounded while endeavouring to make himself heard. It was not until evening that the artillery was ordered into action, and the command given by the Czar to fire grape-shot among the insurgents. The effect was decisive. The mutineers fled before a fire which they were unable to return, and within a few minutes the insurrection was over. It had possessed no chief of any military capacity; its leaders were missing at the moment when a forward march or an attack on the palace of the Czar might have given them the victory; and among the soldiers at large there was not the least desire to take part in any movement against the established system of Russia. The only effect left by the conspiracy within Russia itself was seen in the rigorous and uncompromising severity with which Nicholas henceforward enforced the principle of autocratic rule. The illusions of the previous reign were at an end. A man with the education and the ideas of a drill-sergeant and the religious a.s.surance of a Covenanter was on the throne; rebellion had done its worst against him; and woe to those who in future should deviate a hair's breadth from their duty of implicit obedience to the sovereign's all-sufficing power. [372]

[Anglo-Russian Protocol, April 4, 1826.]

It has been stated, and with some probability of truth, that the military insurrection of 1825 disposed the new Czar to a more vigorous policy abroad. The conspirators, when on their trial, declared it to have been their intention to throw the army at once into an attack upon the Turks; and in so doing they would certainly have had the feeling of the nation on their side. Nicholas himself had little or no sympathy for the Greeks. They were a democratic people, and the freedom which they sought to gain was nothing but anarchy. "Do not speak of the Greeks," he said to the representative of a foreign power, "I call them the rebels." Nevertheless, little as Nicholas wished to serve the Greek democracy, both inclination and policy urged him to make an end of his predecessor's faint-hearted system of negotiation, and to bring the struggle in the East to a summary close. Canning had already, in conversation with the Russian amba.s.sador at London, discussed a possible change of policy on the part of the two rival Courts. He now saw that time had come for establis.h.i.+ng new relations between Great Britain and Russia, and for attempting that co-operation in the East which he had held to be impracticable during Alexander's reign.

The Duke of Wellington was sent to St. Petersburg, nominally to offer the usual congratulations to the new sovereign, in reality to dissuade him from going to war, and to propose either the separate intervention of England or a joint intervention by England and Russia on behalf of Greece. The mission was successful. It was in vain that Metternich endeavoured to entangle the new Czar in the diplomatic web that had so long held his predecessor. The spell of the Holy Alliance was broken. Nicholas looked on the past influence of Austria on the Eastern Question only with resentment; he would hear of no more conferences of amba.s.sadors; and on the 4th of April, 1826, a Protocol was signed at St. Petersburg, by which Great Britain and Russia fixed the conditions under which the mediation of the former Power was to be tendered to the Porte. Greece was to remain tributary to the Sultan; it was, however, to be governed by its own elected authorities, and to be completely independent in its commercial relations. The policy known in our own day as that of bag-and-baggage expulsion was to be carried out in a far more extended sense than that in which it has been advocated by more recent champions of the subject races of the East; the Protocol of 1826 stipulating for the removal not only of Turkish officials but of the entire surviving Turkish population of Greece. All property belonging to the Turks, whether on the continent or in the islands, was to be purchased by the Greeks. [373]

Thus was the first step taken in the negotiations which ended in the establishment of h.e.l.lenic independence. The Protocol, which had been secretly signed, was submitted after some interval to the other Courts of Europe. At Vienna it was received with the utmost disgust. Metternich had at first declared the union of England and Russia to be an impossibility.

When this union was actually established, no language was sufficiently strong to express his mortification and his spite. At one moment he declared that Canning was a revolutionist who had entrapped the young and inexperienced Czar into an alliance with European radicalism; at another, that England had made itself the cat's-paw of Russian ambition. Not till now, he protested, could Europe understand what it had lost in Castlereagh.

Nor did Metternich confine himself to lamentations. While his representatives at Paris and Berlin spared no effort to excite the suspicion of those Courts against the Anglo-Russian project of intervention, the Austrian amba.s.sador at London worked upon King George's personal hostility to Canning, and conspired against the Minister with that important section of the English aristocracy which was still influenced by the traditional regard for Austria. Berlin, however, was the only field where Metternich's diplomacy still held its own. King Frederick William had not yet had time to acquire the habit of submission to the young Czar Nicholas, and was therefore saved the pain of deciding which of two masters he should obey. In spite of his own sympathy for the Greeks, he declined to connect Prussia with the proposed joint-intervention, and remained pa.s.sive, justifying this course by the absence of any material interests of Prussia in the East. Being neither a neighbour of the Ottoman Empire nor a maritime Power, Prussia had in fact no direct means of making its influence felt.

[Treaty between England, Russia and France, July, 1827.]

France, on whose action much more depended, was now governed wholly in the interests of the Legitimist party. Louis XVIII. had died in 1824, and the Count of Artois had succeeded to the throne, under the t.i.tle of Charles X.

The principles of the Legitimists would logically have made them defenders of the hereditary rights of the Sultan against his rebellious subjects; but the Sultan, unlike Ferdinand of Spain, was not a Bourbon nor even a Christian; and in a case where the legitimate prince was an infidel and the rebels were Christians, the conscience of the most pious Legitimist might well recoil from the perilous task of deciding between the divine rights of the Crown and the divine rights of the Church, and choose, in so painful an emergency, the simpler course of gratifying the national love of action.

There existed, both among Liberals and among Ultramontanes, a real sympathy for Greece, and this interest was almost the only one in which all French political sections felt that they had something in common. Liberals rejoiced in the prospect of making a new free State in Europe; Catholics, like Charles X. himself, remembered Saint Louis and the Crusades; diplomatists understood the extreme importance of the impending breach between Austria and Russia, and of the opportunity of allying France with the latter Power. Thus the natural and disinterested impulse of the greater part of the public coincided exactly with the dictates of a far-seeing policy; and the Government, in spite of its Legitimist principles and of some a.s.surances given to Metternich in person when he visited Paris in 1825, determined to accept the policy of the Anglo-Russian intervention in the East, and to partic.i.p.ate in the active measures about to be taken by the two Powers. The Protocol of St. Petersburg formed the basis of a definitive treaty which was signed at London in July, 1827. By this act England, Russia, and France undertook to put an end to the conflict in the East, which, through the injury done to the commerce of all nations, had become a matter of European concern. The contending parties were to be summoned to accept the mediation of the Powers and to consent to an armistice. Greece was to be made autonomous, under the paramount sovereignty of the Sultan; the Mohammedan population of the Greek provinces was, as in the Protocol of St. Petersburg, to be entirely removed; and the Greeks were to enter upon possession of all Turkish property within their limits, paying an indemnity to the former owners. Each of the three contracting Governments pledged itself to seek no increase of territory in the East, and no special commercial advantages. In the secret articles of the treaty provisions were made for the case of the rejection by the Turks of the proposed offer of mediation. Should the armistice not be granted within one month, the Powers agreed that they would announce to each belligerent their intention to prevent further encounters, and that they would take the necessary steps for enforcing this declaration, without, however, taking part in hostilities themselves. Instructions in conformity with the Treaty were to be sent to the Admirals commanding the Mediterranean squadrons of the three Powers. [374]

[Death of Canning, August, 1827.]

[Policy of Canning.]

Scarcely was the Treaty of London signed when Canning died. He had definitely broken from the policy of his predecessors, that policy which, for the sake of guarding against Russia's advance, had condemned the Christian races of the East to 1827. eternal subjection to the Turk, and bound up Great Britain with the Austrian system of resistance to the very principle and name of national independence. Canning was no blind friend to Russia. As keenly as any of his adversaries he appreciated the importance of England's interests in the East; of all English statesmen of that time he would have been the last to submit to any diminution of England's just influence or power. But, unlike his predecessors, he saw that there were great forces at work which, whether with England's concurrence or in spite of it, would accomplish that revolution in the East for which the time was now come; and he was statesman enough not to acquiesce in the belief that the welfare of England was in permanent and necessary antagonism to the moral interests of mankind and the better spirit of the age. Therefore, instead of attempting to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or holding aloof and resorting to threats and armaments while Russia accomplished the liberation of Greece by itself, he united with Russia in this work, and relied on concerted action as the best preventive against the undue extension of Russia's influence in the East. In committing England to armed intervention, Canning no doubt hoped that the settlement of the Greek question arranged by the Powers would be peacefully accepted by the Sultan, and that a separate war between Russia and the Porte, on this or any other issue, would be averted. Neither of these hopes was realised. The joint-intervention had to be enforced by arms, and no sooner had the Allies struck their common blow than a war between Turkey and Russia followed. How far the course of events might have been modified had Canning's life not been cut short it is impossible to say; but whether his statesmans.h.i.+p might or might not have averted war on the Danube, the balance of results proved his policy to have been the right one. Greece was established as an independent State, to supply in the future a valuable element of resistance to Slavic preponderance in the Levant; and the encounter between Russia and Turkey, so long dreaded, produced none of those disastrous effects which had been antic.i.p.ated from it. On the relative value of Canning's statesmans.h.i.+p as compared with that of his predecessors, the mind of England and of Europe has long been made up. He stands among those who have given to this country its claim to the respect of mankind. His monument, as well as his justification, is the existence of national freedom in the East; and when half a century later a British Government reverted to the principle of nonintervention, as it had been understood by Castlereagh, and declined to enter into any effective co-operation with Russia for the emanc.i.p.ation of Bulgaria, even then, when the precedent of Canning's action in 1827 stood in direct and glaring contradiction to the policy of the hour, no effective attempt was made by the leaders of the party to which Canning had belonged to impugn his authority, or to explain away his example. It might indeed be alleged that Canning had not explicitly resolved on the application of force; but those who could maintain that Canning would, like Wellington, have used the language of apology and regret when Turkish obstinacy had made it impossible to effect the object of his intervention by any other means, had indeed read the history of Canning's career in vain. [375]

[Intervention of the Admirals, Sept., 1927.]

The death of Canning, which brought his rival, the Duke of Wellington, after a short interval to the head of affairs, caused at the moment no avowed change in the execution of his plans. In accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of London the mediation of the allied Powers was at once tendered to the belligerents, and an armistice demanded. The armistice was accepted by the Greeks; it was contemptuously refused by the Turks. In consequence of this refusal the state of war continued, as it would have been absurd to ask the Greeks to sit still and be ma.s.sacred because the enemy declined to lay down his arms. The Turk being the party resisting the mediation agreed upon, it became necessary to deprive him of the power of continuing hostilities. Heavy reinforcements had just arrived from Egypt, and an expedition was on the point of sailing from Navarino, the gathering place of Ibrahim's forces, against Hydra, the capture of which would have definitely made an end of the Greek insurrection. Admiral Codrington, the commander of the British fleet, and the French Admiral De Rigny, were now off the coast of Greece. They addressed themselves to Ibrahim, and required from him a promise that he would make no movement until further orders should arrive from Constantinople. Ibrahim made this promise verbally on the 25th of September. A few days later, however, Ibrahim learnt that while he himself was compelled to be inactive, the Greeks, continuing hostilities as they were ent.i.tled to do, had won a brilliant naval victory under Captain Hastings within the Gulf of Corinth.

Unable to control his anger, he sailed out from the harbour of Navarino, and made for Patras. Codrington, who had stationed his fleet at Zante, heard of the movement, and at once threw himself across the track of the Egyptian, whom he compelled to turn back by an energetic threat to sink his fleet. Had the French and Russian contingents been at hand, Codrington would have taken advantage of Ibrahim's sortie to cut him off from all Greek harbours, and to force him to return direct to Alexandria, thus peaceably accomplis.h.i.+ng the object of the intervention. This, however, to the misfortune of Ibrahim's seamen, the English admiral could not do alone.

Ibrahim re-entered Navarino, and there found the orders of the Sultan for which it had been agreed that he should wait. These orders were dictated by true Turkish infatuation. They bade Ibrahim continue the subjugation of the Morea with the utmost vigour, and promised him the a.s.sistance of Reschid Pasha, his rival in the siege of Missolonghi. Ibrahim, perfectly reckless of the consequences, now sent out his devastating columns again. No life, and nothing that could support life, was spared. Not only were the crops ravaged, but the fruit-trees, which are the permanent support of the country, were cut down at the roots. Clouds of fire and smoke from burning villages showed the English officers who approached the coast in what spirit the Turk met their proposals for a pacification. "It is supposed that if Ibrahim remained in Greece," wrote Captain Hamilton, "more than a third of its inhabitants would die of absolute starvation."

[Battle of Navarino, Oct. 20th, 1827.]

It became necessary to act quickly, the more so as the season was far advanced, and a winter blockade of Ibrahim's fleet was impossible. A message was sent to the Egyptian head-quarters, requiring that hostilities should cease, that the Morea should be evacuated, and the Turko-Egyptian fleet return to Constantinople and Alexandria. In answer to this message there came back a statement that Ibrahim had left Navarino for the interior of the country, and that it was not known where to find him. Nothing now remained for the admirals but to make their presence felt. On the 18th of October it was resolved that the English, French, and Russian fleets, which were now united, should enter the harbour of Navarino in battle order. The movement was called a demonstration, and in so far as the admirals had not actually determined upon making an attack, it was not directly a hostile measure; but every gun was ready to open fire, and it was well understood that any act of resistance on the part of the opposite fleet would result in hostilities. Codrington, as senior officer, took command of the allied squadron, and the instructions which he gave to his colleagues for the event of a general engagement concluded with Nelson's words, that no captain could do very wrong who placed his s.h.i.+p alongside that of an enemy.

Thus, ready to strike hard, the English admiral sailed into the harbour of Navarino at noon on October 20, followed by the French and the Russians.

The allied fleet advanced to within pistol-shot of the Ottoman s.h.i.+ps and there anch.o.r.ed. A little to the windward of the position a.s.signed to the English corvette _Dartmouth_ there lay a Turkish fire-s.h.i.+p. A request was made that this dangerous vessel might be removed to a safer distance; it was refused, and a boat's crew was then sent to cut its cable. The boat was received with musketry fire. This was answered by the _Dartmouth_ and by a French s.h.i.+p, and the battle soon became general. Codrington, still desirous to avoid bloodshed, sent his pilot to Moharem Bey, who commanded in Ibrahim's absence, proposing to withhold fire on both sides. Moharem replied with cannon-shot, killing the pilot and striking Codrington's own vessel. This exhausted the patience of the English admiral, who forthwith made his adversary a mere wreck. The entire fleets on both sides were now engaged. The Turks had a superiority of eight hundred guns, and fought with courage. For four hours the battle raged at close quarters in the land-locked harbour, while twenty thousand of Ibrahim's soldiers watched from the surrounding hills the struggle in which they could take no part.

But the result of the combat was never for a moment doubtful. The confusion and bad discipline of the Turkish fleet made it an easy prey. Vessel after vessel was sunk or blown to pieces, and before evening fell the work of the allies was done. When Ibrahim returned from his journey on the following day he found the harbour of Navarino strewed with wrecks and dead bodies.

Four thousand of his seamen had fallen; the fleet which was to have accomplished the reduction of Hydra was utterly ruined. [376]

[Inaction of England after Navarino.]

Over all Greece it was at once felt that the nation was saved. The intervention of the Powers had been sudden and decisive beyond the most sanguine hopes; and though this intervention might be intended to establish something less than the complete independence of Greece, the violence of the first collision bade fair to carry the work far beyond the bounds originally a.s.signed to it. The att.i.tude of the Porte after the news of the battle of Navarino reached Constantinople was exactly that which its worst enemies might have desired. So far from abating anything in its resistance to the mediation of the three Powers, it declared the attack made upon its navy to be a crime and an outrage, and claimed satisfaction for it from the amba.s.sadors of the Allied Powers. Arguments proved useless, and the united demand for an armistice with the Greeks having been finally and contemptuously refused, the amba.s.sadors, in accordance with their instructions, quitted the Turkish capital (Dec. 8). Had Canning been still living, it is probable that the first blow of Navarino would have been immediately followed by the measures necessary to make the Sultan submit to the Treaty of London, and that the forces of Great Britain would have been applied with sufficient vigour to render any isolated action on the part of Russia both unnecessary and impossible. But at this critical moment a paralysis fell over the English Government. Canning's policy was so much his own, he had dragged his colleagues so forcibly with him in spite of themselves, that when his place was left empty no one had the courage either to fulfil or to reverse his intentions, and the men who succeeded him acted as if they were trespa.s.sers in the fortress which Canning had taken by storm. The very ground on which Wellington, no less than Canning, had justified the agreement made with Russia in 1826 was the necessity of preventing Russia from acting alone; and when Russian and Turkish s.h.i.+ps had actually fought at Navarino, and war was all but formally declared, it became more imperative than ever that Great Britain should keep the most vigorous hold upon its rival, and by steady, consistent pressure let it be known to both Turks and Russians that the terms of the Treaty of London and no others must be enforced. To retire from action immediately after dealing the Sultan one dire, irrevocable blow, without following up this stroke or attaining the end agreed upon--to leave Russia to take up the armed compulsion where England had dropped it, and to win from its crippled adversary the gains of a private and isolated war--was surely the weakest of all possible policies that could have been adopted. Yet this was the policy followed by English Ministers during that interval of transition and incoherence that pa.s.sed between Canning's death and the introduction of the Reform Bill.

[War between Russia and Turkey, April, 1828.]

By the Russian Government nothing was more ardently desired than a contest with Turkey, in which England and France, after they had destroyed the Turkish fleet, should be mere on-lookers, debarred by the folly of the Porte itself from prohibiting or controlling hostilities between it and its neighbour. There might indeed be some want of a pretext for war, since all the points of contention between Russia and Turkey other than those relating to Greece had been finally settled in Russia's favour by a Treaty signed at Akerman in October, 1826. But the spirit of infatuation had seized the Sultan, or a secret hope that the Western Powers would in the last resort throw over the Court of St. Petersburg led him to hurry on hostilities by a direct challenge to Russia. A proclamation which reads like the work of some frantic dervish, though said to have been composed by Mahmud himself, called the Mussulman world to arms. Russia was denounced as the instigator of the Greek rebellion, and the arch-enemy of Islam. The Treaty of Akerman was declared to have been extorted by compulsion and to have been signed only for the purpose of gaining time. "Russia has imparted its own madness to the other Powers and persuaded them to make an alliance to free the Rayah from his Ottoman master. But the Turk does not count his enemies. The law forbids the people of Islam to permit any injury to be done to their religion; and if all the unbelievers together unite against them, they will enter on the war as a sacred duty, and trust in G.o.d for protection." This proclamation was followed by a levy of troops and the expulsion of most of the Christian residents in Constantinople. Russia needed no other pretext. The fanatical outburst of the Sultan was treated by the Court of St. Petersburg as if it had been the deliberate expression of some civilised Power, and was answered on the 26th of April, 1828, by a declaration of war. In order to soften the effect of this step and to reap the full benefit of its subsisting relations with France and England, Russia gave a provisional undertaking to confine its operations as a belligerent to the mainland and the Black Sea, and within the Mediterranean to act still as one of the allied neutrals under the terms of the Treaty of London.

[Military condition of Turkey.]

The moment seized by Russia for the declaration of war was one singularly favourable to itself and unfortunate for its adversary. Not only had the Turkish fleet been destroyed by the neutrals, but the old Turkish force of the Janissaries had been destroyed by its own master, and the new-modelled regiments which were to replace it had not yet been organised. The Sultan had determined in 1826 to postpone his long-planned military reform no longer, and to stake everything on one bold stroke against the Janissaries.

Troops enough were brought up from the other side of the Bosphorus to make Mahmud certain of victory. The Janissaries were summoned to contribute a proportion of their number to the regiments about to be formed on the European pattern; and when they proudly refused to do so and raised the standard of open rebellion they were cut to pieces and exterminated by Mahmud's Anatolian soldiers in the midst of Constantinople. [377] The princ.i.p.al difficulty in the way of a reform of the Turkish army was thus removed and the work of reorganisation was earnestly taken in hand; but before there was time to complete it the enemy entered the field. Mahmud had to meet the attack of Russia with an army greatly diminished in number, and confused by the admixture of European and Turkish discipline. The resources of the empire were exhausted by the long struggle with Greece, and, above all, the destruction of the Janissaries had left behind it an exasperation which made the Sultan believe that rebellion might at any moment break out in his own capital. Nevertheless, in spite of its inherent weakness and of all the disadvantages under which it entered into war, Turkey succeeded in prolonging its resistance through two campaigns, and might, with better counsels, have tried the fortune of a third.

[Military condition of Russia.]

The actual military resources of Russia were in 1828 much below what they were believed to be by all Europe. The destruction of Napoleon's army in 1812 and the subsequent exploits of Alexander in the campaigns which ended in the capture of Paris had left behind them an impression of Russian energy and power which was far from corresponding with the reality, and which, though disturbed by the events of 1828, had by no means vanished at the time of the Crimean War. The courage and patience of the Russian soldier were certainly not over-rated; but the progress supposed to have been made in Russian military organisation since the campaign of 1799, when it was regarded in England and Austria as little above that of savages, was for the most part imaginary. The proofs of a radically bad system--scanty numbers, failing supplies, immense sickness--were never more conspicuous than in 1828. Though Russia had been preparing for war for at least seven years, scarcely seventy thousand soldiers could be collected on the Pruth.

The general was Wittgenstein, one of the heroes of 1812, but now a veteran past effective work. Nicholas came to the camp to make things worse by headstrong interference. The best Russian officer, Paskiewitsch, was put in command of the forces about to operate in Asia Minor, and there, thrown on his own resources and free to create a system of his own, he achieved results in strong contrast to the failure of the Russian arms on the Danube.

[Campaign of 1828.]

In entering on the campaign of 1828, it was necessary for the Czar to avoid giving any unnecessary causes of anxiety to Austria, which had already made unsuccessful attempts to form a coalition against him. The line of operations was therefore removed as far as possible from the Austrian frontier; and after the Roumanian princ.i.p.alities had been peacefully occupied, the Danube was crossed at a short distance above the point where its mouths divide (June 7). The Turks had no intention of meeting the enemy in a pitched battle; they confined themselves to the defence of fortresses, the form of warfare to which, since the decline of the military art in Turkey, the patience and abstemiousness of the race best fit them. Ibraila and Silistria on the Danube, Varna and Shumla in the neighbourhood of the Balkans, were their princ.i.p.al strongholds; of these Ibraila was at once besieged by a considerable force, while Silistria was watched by a weak contingent, and the vanguard of the Russian army pushed on through the Dobrudscha towards the Black Sea, where, with the capture of the minor coast-towns, it expected to enter into communication with the fleet. The first few weeks of the campaign were marked by considerable successes.

Ibraila capitulated on the 18th of June, and the military posts in the Dobrudscha fell one after another into the hands of the invaders, who met with no effective resistance in this district. But their serious work was only now beginning. The Russian army, in spite of its weakness, was divided into three parts, occupied severally in front of Silistria, Shumla, and Varna. At Shumla the ma.s.s of the Turkish army, under Omer Brionis, was concentrated. The force brought against it by the invader was inadequate to its task, and the attempts which were made to lure the Turkish army from its entrenched camp into the open field proved unsuccessful. The difficulties of the siege proved so great that Wittgenstein after a while proposed to abandon offensive operations at this point, and to leave a mere corps of observation before the enemy until Varna should have fallen. This, however, was forbidden by the Czar. As the Russians wasted away before Shumla with sickness and fatigue, the Turks gained strength, and on the 24th of September Omer broke out from his entrenchments and moved eastwards to the relief of Varna. Nicholas again over-ruled his generals, and ordered his cousin, Prince Eugene of Wurtemberg, to attack the advancing Ottomans with the troops then actually at his disposal. Eugene did so, and suffered a severe defeat. A vigorous movement of the Turks would probably have made an end of the campaign, but Omer held back at the critical moment, and on the 10th of October Varna surrendered. This, however, was the only conquest made by the Russians. The season was too far advanced for them either to cross the Balkans or to push forward operations against the uncaptured fortresses. Shumla and Silistria remained in the hands of their defenders, and the Russians, after suffering enormous losses in proportion to the smallness of their numbers, withdrew to Varna and the Danube, to resume the campaign in the spring of the following year. [378]

[Campaign of 1829.]

The spirits of the Turks and of their European friends were raised by the unexpected failure of the Czar's arms. Metternich resumed his efforts to form a coalition, and tempted French Ministers with the prospect of recovering the Rhenish provinces, but in vain. The Sultan began negotiations, but broke them off when he found that the events of the campaign had made no difference in the enemy's tone. The prestige of Russia was in fact at stake, and Nicholas would probably have faced a war with Austria and Turkey combined rather than have made peace without restoring the much-diminished reputation of his troops. The winter was therefore spent in bringing up distant reserves. Wittgenstein was removed from his command; the Czar withdrew from military operations in which he had done nothing but mischief; and Diebitsch, a Prussian by birth and training, was placed at the head of the army, untrammelled by the sovereign presence or counsels which had hampered his predecessor. The intention of the new commander was to cross the Balkans as soon as Silistria should have fallen, without waiting for the capture of Shumla. In pursuance of this design the fleet was despatched early in the spring of 1829 to seize a port beyond the mountain-range. Diebitsch then placed a corps in front of Silistria, and made his preparations for the southward march; but before any progress had been made in the siege the Turks themselves took the field. Reschid Pasha, now Grand Vizier, moved eastwards from Shumla at the beginning of May against the weak Russian contingent that still lay in winter quarters between that place and Varna. The superiority of his force promised him an easy victory; but after winning some unimportant successes, and advancing to a considerable distance from his stronghold, he allowed himself to be held at bay until Diebitsch, with the army of the Danube, was ready to fall upon his rear. The errors of the Turks had given to the Russian commander, who hastened across Bulgaria on hearing of his colleague's peril, the choice of destroying their army, or of seizing Shumla by a _coup-de-main_. Diebitsch determined upon attacking his enemy in the open field, and on the 10th of June Reschid's army, attempting to regain the roads to Shumla, was put to total rout at Kulewtscha. A fortnight later Silistria surrendered, and Diebitsch, reinforced by the troops that had besieged that fortress, was now able to commence his march across the Balkans.

[Crossing of the Balkans, July, 1829.]

Rumour magnified into hundreds of thousands the scanty columns which for the first time carried the Russian flag over the Balkan range. Resistance everywhere collapsed. The mountains were crossed without difficulty, and on the 19th of August the invaders appeared before Adrianople, which immediately surrendered. Putting on the boldest countenance in order to conceal his real weakness, Diebitsch now struck out right and left, and sent detachments both to the Euxine and the Aegean coast. The fleet co-operated with him, and the ports of the Black Sea, almost as far south as the Bosphorus, fell into the invaders' hands. The centre of the army began to march upon Constantinople. If the Sultan had known the real numbers of the force which threatened his capital, a force not exceeding twenty thousand men, he would probably have recognised that his a.s.sailant's position was a more dangerous one than his own. Diebitsch had advanced into the heart of the enemy's country with a mere handful of men. Sickness was daily thinning his ranks; his troops were dispersed over a wide area from sea to sea; and the warlike tribes of Albania threatened to fall upon his communications from the west. For a moment the Sultan spoke of fighting upon the walls of Constantinople; but the fear of rebellion within his own capital, the discovery of conspiracies, and the disasters sustained by his arms in Asia, where Kars and Erzeroum had fallen into the enemy's hands, soon led him to make overtures of peace and to accept the moderate terms which the Russian Government, aware of its own difficulties, was willing to grant. It would have been folly for the Czar to stimulate the growing suspicion of England and to court the attack of Austria by prolonging hostilities; and although King Charles X. and the French Cabinet, reverting to the ideas of Tilsit, proposed a part.i.tion of the Ottoman Empire, and a general re-arrangement of the map of Europe which would have given Belgium and the Palatinate to France, the plan was originated too late to produce any effect. [379] Russia had everything to lose and nothing to gain by a European war. It had reduced Turkey to submission, and might fairly hope to maintain its ascendency at Constantinople during coming years without making any of those great territorial changes which would have given its rivals a pretext for intervening on the Sultan's behalf. Under the guise of a generous forbearance the Czar extricated himself from a dangerous position with credit and advantage. As much had been won as could be maintained without hazard; and on the 14th of September peace was concluded in Adrianople.

[Treaty of Adrianople, Sept. 14, 1829.]

The Treaty of Adrianople gave Russia a slight increase of territory in Asia, incorporating with the Czar's dominions the ports of Anapa and Poti on the eastern coast of the Black Sea; but its most important provisions were those which confirmed and extended the Protectorate exercised by the Czar over the Danubian Princ.i.p.alities, and guaranteed the commercial rights of Russian subjects throughout the Ottoman Empire both by land and sea. In order more effectively to exclude the Sultan's influence from Wallachia and Moldavia, the office of Hospodar, hitherto tenable for seven years, was now made an appointment for life, and the Sultan specifically engaged to permit no interference on the part of his neighbouring Pashas with the affairs of these provinces. No fortified point was to be retained by the Turks on the left bank of the Danube; no Mussulman was to be permitted to reside within the Princ.i.p.alities; and those possessing landed estates there were to sell them within eighteen months. The Porte pledged itself never again to detain Russian s.h.i.+ps of commerce coming from the Black Sea, and acknowledged that such an act would amount to an infraction of treaties justifying Russia in having recourse to reprisals. The Straits of Constantinople and the Dardanelles were declared free and open to the merchant s.h.i.+ps of all Powers at peace with the Porte, upon the same conditions which were stipulated for vessels under the Russian flag. The same freedom of trade and navigation was recognised within the Black Sea. All treaties and conventions. .h.i.therto concluded between Turkey and Russia were recognised as in force, except in so far as modified by the present agreement. The Porte further gave its adhesion to the Treaty of London relating to Greece, and to an Act entered into by the Allied Powers in March, 1829, for regulating the Greek frontier. An indemnity in money was declared to be owing to Russia; and as the amount of this remained to be fixed by mutual agreement, the means were still left open to the Russian Government for exercising a gentle pressure at Constantinople, or for rewarding the compliance of the conquered. [380]

[Capodistrias elected President of Greece, April, 1827.]

The war between Turkey and Russia, while it left the European frontier between the belligerents unchanged, exercised a two-fold influence upon the settlement of Greece. On the one hand, by exciting the fears and suspicions of Great Britain, it caused the Government of our own country, under the Duke of Wellington, to insist on the limitation of the Greek State to the narrowest possible area; [381] on the other hand, by reducing Turkey itself almost to the condition of a Russian dependency, it led to the abandonment of the desire to maintain the Sultan's supremacy in any form over the emanc.i.p.ated provinces, and resulted in the establishment of an absolutely independent h.e.l.lenic kingdom. An important change had taken place within Greece itself just at the time when the allied Powers determined upon intervention. The parts of the local leaders were played out, and in April, 1827, Capodistrias, ex-Minister of Russia, was elected President for seven years. Capodistrias accepted the call. He was then, as he had been throughout the insurrection, at a distance from Greece; and before making his way thither, he visited the princ.i.p.al Courts of Europe, with the view of ascertaining what moral or financial support he should be likely to receive from them. His interview with the Czar Nicholas led to a clear statement by that sovereign of the conditions which he expected Capodistrias, in return for Russia's continued friends.h.i.+p, to fulfil.

Greece was to be rescued from revolution: in other words, personal was to be subst.i.tuted for popular government. The State was to remain tributary to the Sultan: that is, in both Greece and Turkey the door was to be kept open for Russia's interference. Whether Capodistrias had any intention of fulfilling the latter condition is doubtful. His love for Greece and his own personal ambition prevented his regard for Russia, strong though this might be, from making him the mere instrument of the Court of St.

Petersburg; and while outwardly acquiescing in the Czar's decision that Greece should remain a tributary State, he probably resolved from the first to aim at establis.h.i.+ng its complete independence. With regard to the Czar's demand that the system of local self-government should be superseded within Greece itself by one of autocratic rule, Capodistrias was in harmony with his patron. He had been the Minister of a centralised despotism himself.

His experience was wholly that of the official of an absolute sovereign; and although Capodistrias had represented the more liberal tendencies of the Russian Court when it was a question of arguing against Metternich about the complete or the partial restoration of despotic rule in Italy, he had no real acquaintance and no real sympathy with the action of free inst.i.tutions, and moved in the same circle of ideas as the autocratic reformers of the eighteenth century, of whom Joseph II. was the type. [382]

[The Protocols of Nov., 1828, and March, 1829.]

The Turks were still masters of the Morea when Capodistrias reached Greece.

The battle of Navarino had not caused Ibrahim to relax his hold upon the fortresses, and it was deemed necessary by the Allies to send a French army-corps to dislodge him from his position. This expeditionary force, under General Maison, landed in Greece in the summer of 1828, and Ibrahim, not wis.h.i.+ng to fight to the bitter end, contented himself with burning Tripolitza to the ground and sowing it with salt, and then withdrew. The war between Turkey and Russia had now begun. Capodistrias a.s.sisted the Russian fleet in blockading the Dardanelles, and thereby gained for himself the marked ill-will of the British Government. At a conference held in London by the representatives of France, England, and Russia, in November, 1828, it was resolved that the operations of the Allies should be limited to the Morea and the islands. Capodistrias, in consequence of this decision, took the most vigorous measures for continuing the war against Turkey. What the allies refused to guarantee must be won by force of arms; and during the winter of 1829, while Russia pressed upon Turkey from the Danube, Capodistrias succeeded in reconquering Missolonghi and the whole tract of country immediately to the north of the Gulf of Corinth. The Porte, in prolonging its resistance after the November conference, played as usual into its enemy's hands. The negotiations at London were resumed in a spirit somewhat more favourable to Greece, and a Protocol was signed on the 22nd of March, 1829, extending the northern frontier of Greece up to a line drawn from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo. Greece, according to this Protocol, was still to remain under the Sultan's suzerainty: its ruler was to be a hereditary prince belonging to one of the reigning European families, but not to any of the three allied Courts. [383]

[Leopold accepts the Greek Crown, Feb., 1830.]