GREECE

The Greeks were the first of the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire to achieve independence, thereby setting in motion the process of the gradual breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek example was to be followed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the Serbs (who had secured a qualified autonomy in 1815), Romanians, Bulgarians, and Albanians. The Greek national movement is also significant in that it was the first nationalist movement to develop within a non-Christian polity. Although the Greeks were in their over-whelming majority Orthodox Christians, their Ottoman overlords were Muslims and Muslims were the largest element in the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. That the Greeks were the first of its subject peoples to establish an independent state is due to a number of factors. The armed insurrection that broke out in 1821 would have had no chance of success had the Ottoman Empire not been in manifest decline, under threat from external enemies and with its authority challenged by warlords and ill-disciplined janissaries from within. Geography also played a role. The very large seaboard of the Greek lands, and the fact that the Ionian Islands, to the northwest of present-day Greece, were not under Ottoman rule, made the Greeks more open to influences from the west than their neighbors to the north.

Moreover, while they were always second-class citizens as Christians, Greeks enjoyed a privileged position within the Ottoman state structure. Greeks controlled the affairs of the Orthodox Church, whose head, the Ecumenical Patriarch, and higher clergy were always Greek. The hierarchy of the Orthodox Church exercised a considerable measure of authority, civil as well as religious, over the Orthodox Christian flock, including the large numbers of Orthodox Christians who were not Greek-speakers or of Greek ethnic origin. From the early eighteenth century, Greek notables of Constantinople (called Phanariot Greeks) played an important role in the conduct of imperial foreign policy.

Much of the seaborne commerce of the empire was conducted in Greek ships, while Greek or Hellenized Orthodox merchants came to control much of the commerce of the Balkan Peninsula. These merchants generated the wealth that was indispensable to the intellectual revival that was so significant a development both in the Greek world and in the mercantile diaspora communities that were coming into existence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Well-to-do merchants founded or subsidized schools and colleges and underwrote the cost of printing the increasing number of books that began to be published in Greek for a Greek audience. Most importantly, merchants subsidized the studies of young Greeks in the universities of western and central Europe.

During the early centuries of Ottoman rule in the Greek lands, there had been little awareness among the Greeks of the heritage of ancient Greece. Now, however, Greek students became aware of the extraordinary reverence for the language and civilization of classical Greece that existed among educated Europeans. They returned from Europe to the Greek lands determined to share their enthusiasm, at times amounting to an obsession, for Greek antiquity with their compatriots. It was during the early years of the nineteenth century that Greek nationalists, to the chagrin of the Orthodox Church (which equated antiquity with paganism) began to name their children (and their ships) after worthies of ancient Greece, such as Leonidas, Pericles, Aspasia, and Miltiades. Adamantios Korais (1748–1833) played a leading role in the attempt, by no means always successful, to instill in the Greeks the notion that they were the lineal descendants of the ancient Greeks so widely regarded as the progenitors of European civilization. A native of Smyrna (Izmir), he spent most of his adult life in France and was one of the foremost classical scholars of his age. He essentially saw education as the means of emancipating the Greeks from what he perceived as the yoke of the Ottoman Turks.

Others, however, placed their hopes of freedom in armed struggle. Foremost among these was Rigas Velestinlis (also known as Rigas Pheraios, 1758–1798). Under the influence of the French Revolution, Rigas elaborated an ambitious scheme for a Balkan-wide uprising against the Turks, and seems to have won the support of a small group of like-minded revolutionaries. He envisaged a revived Byzantine Empire, but with republican in place of monarchical institutions. Although he advocated equality for all the many peoples of the Ottoman Empire, including the Turks, the new state was to be Greek in language and culture. When, however, he arrived in Trieste on his way to launch his insurrection in December 1797, he was betrayed by a fellow Greek and handed over, with a number of his fellow conspirators, to the Ottoman authorities. The Ottomans strangled Rigas in Belgrade in June 1798.

Rigas's revolutionary project thus came to nothing, although his example remained an inspiration to future generations of Greek nationalists. These included the three young Greeks, Athanasios Tsakalof, Emmanuel Xanthos, and Nikolaos Skoufas. In 1814 in Odessa in southern Russia, these men founded the Philiki Etairia, or "Friendly Society," a secret revolutionary society whose purpose was to free the Greek motherland from the Ottoman yoke. With an elaborate hierarchical structure and initiation rituals influenced by free-masonry, attempts were made to recruit adherents throughout the Greek world and the communities of the diaspora. A failed effort was made to recruit Count Ioannis Capodistrias, a Greek from Corfu, as leader of the conspiracy; Capodistrias had served as the joint foreign minister of the Russian Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825) from 1816. The conspirators then turned for leadership to General Alexander Ypsilantis, a Phanariot Greek in the Russian service, and put it about that the enterprise enjoyed Russian support. This claim was without foundation, but gained credence among the Greeks as Russia was the sole Orthodox Christian power and, at a popular level, there was widespread belief in prophecies that, with Russian help, Orthodox Christians would once again rule in Constantinople, the former capital of the Byzantine Empire.

the war of independence

The long-planned insurgency was launched in early 1821. The timing was intended to take advantage of the efforts of the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II (1785–1839) to crush the power of Ali Pasha (1741–1822), a Muslim Albanian warlord, who had carved out a fiefdom in what is now southern Albania and northwestern Greece that was effectively independent of Ottoman control. A force under the command of General Ypsilantis crossed the river Pruth into the Ottoman province of Moldavia, but was soon defeated. The insurgents in the Peloponnese met with greater success. Furious fighting, in which atrocities were committed on both sides, led the Turks to withdraw to their coastal fortresses. When news of the revolt reached the Ottoman capital, the Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V was executed; this was not, as is still sometimes maintained, because he could not bring himself to condemn the insurgents. He and the Holy Synod did that in robust fashion. He was executed because, in Ottoman eyes, he had failed in his primary duty: that of ensuring the loyalty of his Orthodox flock to the Ottoman sultan.

On the Greek side, much of the burden of fighting was borne by the klefts, essentially bandits skilled in guerrilla warfare who had preyed on the Ottoman authorities and on rich Greeks, and who had acquired a scarcely justified reputation as defenders of the oppressed Greeks against Ottoman tyranny. The Greek cause was also much assisted by the strong nautical tradition that had developed in the islands of the Aegean. Greek mariners made effective use of small-fire ships to wreak havoc among the cumbersome Ottoman men-of-war.

The threat to the established order posed by the insurgency found little support among the conservative powers of Europe. Nonetheless, volunteer philhellenes (supporters of the Greek cause), nurtured on an idealized vision of ancient Greece and who in many instances were somewhat shocked by their encounter with Greek reality, journeyed from the countries of Europe and the United States to help the cause of Greek freedom. Their practical contribution to the war effort was limited, but pro-Greek agitation did serve to sustain sympathy for the Greek cause in the West.

Constitutional government was established in the areas of the Peloponnese and what is now southern mainland Greece at an early stage of the war for independence, a constitution being adopted early in 1822. But dissension soon manifested itself among the insurgents. Their politics were complicated, but in essence they reflected antagonism between two broad groupings. The first consisted of the Peloponnesian notables, the ship-owners of the islands, and the small number of Phanariot grandees who had rallied to the insurgent cause. These comprised what came to be known as the "civilian" or "aristocratic" party. The second group, the "military" or "democratic" party, by contrast, reflected the interests of the kleft leaders who had borne the brunt of the fighting; the most important of these leaders was Theodore Kolokotronis (1770–1843). The internal conflict can be seen as a contest between modernizers and traditional elites. The modernizers were inspired by nationalist rhetoric. Besides ridding the Greek lands of their Turkish overlords, they sought to fashion a liberal, constitutional state on the European model. Such a state would entail curtailing the extensive privileges of the church, whose support for the nationalist cause had been ambiguous, and the creation of a regular army—again after European models—to replace the irregular bands favored by the klefts. The traditional elites tended to look on the war as a religious crusade against the Muslim Turks rather than as a struggle for constitutional government and democracy. Their overriding concern was the retention of the privileges that they had enjoyed under Ottoman rule.

In 1824 these tensions erupted in internecine strife, which inevitably had serious consequences for the conduct of the war. Moreover, a new threat to the insurgents emerged in the form of Mehmet Ali, the ruler of Egypt, and of his son Ibrahim Pasha, who had been offered lavish territorial compensation by Sultan Mahmud II in return for their assistance in crushing the revolt. For a time, the ruthless tactics employed by Ibrahim Pasha appeared to place the success of the Greek insurgency in doubt.

Help for the Greeks was at hand from an unlikely quarter, however, in the shape of the Great Powers (Britain, France, Austria, Russia, and Prussia), who were becoming increasingly concerned at the continuing instability and the consequent damage to their commercial interests in the region. Moreover, Britain and France were fearful that the ongoing conflict might strengthen Russian influence in the region. In 1826, Britain and Russia proposed joint mediation in the conflict through the Protocol of St. Petersburg. By the Treaty of London of 1827, France aligned itself with Britain and Russia. Thus was initiated the policy ambiguously termed "peaceful interference" by the British Foreign Secretary, George Canning (1770–1827). This resulted in the destruction in October 1827 of the Turkish-Egyptian fleet by a combined British, French, and Russian fleet at the Battle of Navarino.

independent greece

This naval victory ensured that some form of independent Greek state would come into existence, although its frontiers took some time to establish. Greek independence was formally recognized in 1832 by the three "Protecting Powers," Britain, France, and Russia. These Powers insisted that Greece be ruled by a king chosen from a royal house other than their own. Thus it was that Otto of Wittelsbach (1815–1867), second son of King Louis I of Bavaria, ascended the throne of Greece in 1833. His inheritance was not a promising one. Years of fighting had devastated the country economically. The structures of a functioning state had to be created where none had existed before. Moreover, the newly independent state contained fewer than a third of the Greeks that had been under Ottoman rule at the outbreak of the revolt.

Although the Protecting Powers had envisaged that Otto would introduce constitutional rule to Greece, it was not until 1844 that a reluctant Otto conceded a constitution and then only after a military coup, the earliest manifestation of a pattern of military intervention in the political system that was to characterize the politics of the new state. By the standards of the day, the 1844 constitution was a relatively liberal document (it granted virtually universal manhood suffrage, although women had to wait for over a century for the vote). Transplanting the institutions of parliamentary democracy to a society whose historical experience and values were very different from those of western Europe, however, proved difficult. Moreover, Greek politicians showed themselves adept at manipulating the country's fledgling democratic institutions and keeping themselves in power through the dispensation of patronage. Rouspheti, the dispensation of favors, and mesa, having the right connections, were key elements in the political system.

Otto's affection for his adopted country (he frequently wore the traditional dress of the foustanella or kilt) was not reciprocated by many of his subjects. They resented the fact that he remained a Catholic in a country whose Orthodox religious tradition manifested strong undercurrents of anti-Catholicism and, indeed, of anti-Westernism. In 1862 there was an attempt against the life of his wife, Amalia, and Otto was driven into exile in his native Bavaria following a putsch by the army.

Otto's successor was a member of the Danish Glucksberg dynasty who ascended the throne in 1863 as King George I, beginning a fifty-year reign that was ended by his assassination by a madman in 1913. A new constitution amplified the democratic rights granted in 1844, although the sovereign retained considerable, albeit vaguely defined, powers in matters of foreign policy. An important stage in the country's constitutional evolution was reached when, in 1875, King George conceded the principle that he would only call upon a politician to form a government if he enjoyed the "declared" support of a majority of members of parliament. The adoption of this principle brought an end to continual changes of government and ushered in a more or less functioning two-party political system, with the modernizing Harilaos Trikoupis alternating in power with his more demagogic rival, Theodore Deliyannis during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

territorial expansion

The slow and uneven process of consolidating the country's democratic institutions took place against a background of continued agitation for the implementation of the Megali Idea, the "Great Idea" of bringing about the incorporation within the Greek kingdom of the large Greek populations that had remained under Ottoman rule when Greece had achieved its independence in the 1830s. Politicians across the political spectrum shared in these aspirations. Where they differed was in how best they could be achieved. Politicians such as Trikoupis believed that territorial expansion was best essayed by a strong and economically developed state. By contrast, his rival Deliyannis believed that Greece could only become a truly viable state when the large, and in many cases prosperous, Greek populations that remained under Ottoman rule were incorporated into the Greek state.

A basic problem confronting Greece in the nineteenth century was that while the Ottoman Empire may have been "the sick man of Europe," it was nonetheless a great deal more powerful than Greece, whose territorial aspirations ran far ahead of its military potential. Hence, during the nineteenth century, the incorporation of areas of Greek

settlement into the new state came about as a result of great-power diplomacy and not by military action. The first accession of territory was Britain's 1863 cession of the Ionian Islands, which had been a British protectorate since 1815, as a kind of dowry for King George I. The second great accession of territory, that of the agriculturally rich province of Thessaly and a part of Epirus, came about in 1881 as a result of negotiations at the Congress of Berlin of 1878, which brought an end to the great Eastern crisis of 1875–1878. When Greece tried to go it alone in armed confrontation with the Ottoman Empire, as in the ill-fated Greco-Turkish War of 1897 (also known as the Thirty Days' War), the results were disastrous. It was during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 that Greece learned the lesson that it could hope to confront the Ottoman Empire militarily only in alliance with the other Balkan states that had gained their independence during the nineteenth century. The Balkan Wars resulted in a massive increase in the territory of the Greek kingdom and broadly established the country's present-day frontiers.

See alsoNationalism; Ottoman Empire.

bibliography

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Clogg, Richard. A Concise History of Greece. 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.

Clogg, Richard, ed. and trans. The Movement for Greek Independence 1770–1821: A Collection of Documents. London, 1976.

Dakin, Douglas. The Unification of Greece 1770–1923. London, 1972.

——. The Greek Struggle for Independence, 1821–1833. London, 1973.

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Koliopoulos, John S. Brigands with a Cause: Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece. 1821–1912. Oxford, U.K., 1987.

Petropulos, John Anthony. Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, 1833–1843. Princeton, N.J., 1968.

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Richard Clogg