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Greek War of Independence
Part of Wars of Independence
Monastery Agia Lavra, Peloponnese, 1821. "Germanos blessing the flag". Theodoros Vryzakis, 1865.
Date 1821 – 1831 Location The Balkans (mainly Greece) and the Aegean Sea. Result Greek Victory, Establishment of the modern Greek state.
Belligerents
Greek revolutionaries United Kingdom France Russian Empire	Ottoman Empire Egyptian troops
Commanders and leaders
Theodoros Kolokotronis, Alexander Ypsilanti	Omer Vryonis, Dramalis, Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt.
Strength
100,000 Greek	400,000 Ottoman 12,000 Egyptian
Casualties and losses
50,000 Greek, 181 British, French and Russians	115,000 Ottoman; 5,000 Egyptian

The Greek War of Independence (1821–1831), also known as the Greek Revolution (Greek: Ελληνική Επανάσταση Elliniki Epanastasi, Ottoman Turkish: يؤنان ئسياني Yunan İsyanı, i.e. "Greek insurgence"), was a successful war waged by the Greeks to win independence for Greece from the Ottoman Empire. Independence was finally granted by the Treaty of Constantinople in July 1832 when Greece (Hellas) was recognized as a free country. The Greeks were the first of the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire to secure recognition as a sovereign power. Greeks celebrate their independence day annually on March 25.

Background

The Ottoman Empire had ruled almost all of Greece, with the exception of the Ionian Islands since its conquest of the Byzantine Empire over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries. However, in the 18th and 19th centuries, as revolutionary nationalism grew across Europe (due, in part, to the influence of the French Revolution), and the power of the Ottoman Empire declined, Greek nationalism began to assert itself and drew support from Western European "philhellenes".

One of the early writers who helped shape opinion among the Greek population in and out of the Ottoman Empire was Rigas Feraios (Ρήγας Φεραίος). Born in Thessaly and educated in Constantinople, Feraios published a Greek-language newspaper Ephimeris in Vienna in the 1790s. He was deeply influenced by the French Revolution and he published revolutionary tracts and proposed republican constitutions for Greek and pan-Balkan nations. He was arrested by Austrian officials in Trieste in 1797 when he was betrayed by a Greek merchant in that city. He was handed over to Ottoman officials and was transported to Belgrade with his co-conspirators. They were all strangled to death and their bodies dumped in the Danube River in June, 1798. Instead of diminishing support for Feraios' ideas, his death fanned the flames of Greek independence.

The movement for independence

The reasons why the Greeks were the first to break away from the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman Empire and secure recognition as a sovereign power are several. The fact that the Ottoman Empire was in manifest decline made such a revolt feasible. Some Greeks enjoyed a privileged position in the Ottoman state, and Ottoman Turks had always afforded a specific class of Greeks a degree of power. Since the Hellenisation of the Byzantine Empire they had controlled the affairs of the Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, based in Constantinople, and the higher clergy were always Greek. From the 18th century onwards Phanariot Greek notables (Turkish-appointed Greek administrators from the Phanar district of Constantinople) played an influential role in the governance of the Ottoman Empire.

A strong maritime tradition in the islands of the Aegean together with the emergence in the 18th century of an influential merchant class generated the wealth necessary to found schools and libraries and to pay for young Greeks to study in the universities of Western Europe. Here they came into contact with the radical ideas of the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Rigas Velestinlis (Pheraios), aimed to overthrow Ottoman rule in an armed uprising, although Rigas was killed by the Turks before he could put his ideas into practice. In 1814 three young Greeks, much influenced by the martyrdom of Rigas, founded the Filiki Eteria, the secret "Friendly Society" which laid the organizational groundwork for the revolt. The society was founded in Odessa, an important centre of the Greek mercantile diaspora. The Greeks' success marked the beginning of the gradual break-up of the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, the other peoples of the Balkan peninsula were to follow the Greek example in seeking their freedom from Ottoman rule.

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Philhellenism

See Philhellenism

Due to Greece's classical past, there was tremendous sympathy for the Greek cause throughout Europe. Many European aristocrats and wealthy Americans, such as the reknowned poet Lord Byron, who died during the siege of Messolonghi took up arms to join the Greek revolutionaries. Many more also financed the revolution, and the Scottish historian and Philhellene Thomas Gordon took part in the revolutionary strugge and wrote one of the first histories of the revolution in English.

Furthermore, many Jews within Greece and throughout Europe were supporters of the Greek revolt, using their wealth (as in the case of the Rothschilds) as well as their political and public influence to assist the Greek cause. The Greek state also attracted many Jewish immigrants from the Ottoman Empire following its establishment, being one of the first countries in the world to grant legal equality to Jews.

Beginning of the Revolution

In 1814, Greek nationalists formed a secret organization called the Friendly Society (Filiki Eteria) in Odessa. With the support of wealthy Greek exile communities in Britain and the United States, the aid of sympathizers in Western Europe and covert assistance from Russia, they planned a rebellion. The basic objective of the society was a revival of the Byzantine Empire, with Constantinople as the capital, not the formation of a national state. John Capodistria, an official from the Ionian Islands who had become the Russian Foreign Minister, was secured as the leader of the planned revolt. In 1821, Ottoman Empire was occupied with war against Persia and with the revolt of Ali Pasha in the Balkans. The Great Powers, who opposed revolutions in principle in the aftermath of Napoleon were preoccupied with revolts in Italy and Spain and the revolutionaries started their actions. The planned revolt originally involved uprisings in three places, Peloponnese, the Danubian Principalities and Istanbul. The start of the uprising can be set in 1821 on March 6 when Alexander Ypsilanti accompanied by several other Greek officers of the Russian army crossed the river Prut in Romania, when the Maniots declared war of the Ottomans on the March 17 or on March 23 when rebels took control of Kalamata in Peloponnese. Simultaneous risings were planned across Greece, including in Macedonia, Crete and Cyprus, or the declaration on March 25 (see Germanos of Patras (Παλαιών Πατρών Γερμανός, Palaion Patron Germanos).

The revolution initially broke in the Peloponnese and Central Greece and quickly spread across the whole Aegean to Crete and Cyprus. In January 1822 the 1st National Assembly at Epidauros declared the independence of the Greek Nation and consolidated their position with remarkable victories on land and sea until 1823 when attempts by the revolutionaries to assert control beyond the Peloponnese ended in a stalemate. As soon as the revolution broke out, the Ottoman authorities hung the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, prompting outrage across Greece which was expressed in the killings of many Turks.

The Ottomans retaliated violently in parts of Greece to the massacre of thousands of Muslims by the Greek insurgents, and uprisings were suppressed by the Ottoman government, massacring in retaliation the Greek population of Chios and other towns. These incidents, however, drew sympathy for the Greek cause in western Europe—although the British and French governments suspected that the uprising was a Russian plot to seize Greece and possibly Constantinople from the Ottomans. The Greeks were unable to establish a coherent government in the areas they controlled, and soon fell to fighting among themselves. Inconclusive fighting between Greeks and Ottomans continued until 1825, when Sultan Mahmud II asked for help from his most powerful vassal, Egypt.

Egypt was then ruled by the Albanian Mehmet Ali Pasha who was eager to test his newly modernized armed forces. The Ottoman Sultan also promised Ali concessions in Syria if Egypt participated. The Egyptian force, under the command of Ali's son Ibrahim, was successful and quickly gained dominance of the seas and Aegean islands through the navy. Ibrahim was also successful in the Peloponnese, where he managed to recapture Tripolis, the administrative center of the area.

In Europe, the Greek revolt aroused widespread sympathy among the public but at the beginning was met with lukewarm reception by the Great Powers, with Britain supporting the insurrection only after 1823 when the Ottomans failed to assert their power despite a Greek civil war and Russia adding their support after Britain, to limit the British influence over the Greeks. Greece was viewed as the cradle of western civilization, and it was especially lauded by the spirit of romanticism that was current at the time. The sight of a Christian nation attempting to cast off the rule of a Muslim Empire also appealed to the western European public.

One of those who heard the call was the poet Lord Byron who spent time in Albania and Greece, organising funds and supplies (including the provision of several ships), but died from fever at Messolonghi in 1824. Byron's death did even more to augment European sympathy for the Greek cause. This eventually led the western powers to intervene directly.

Foreign intervention

On 20 October 1827 the British, Russian and French fleets, on the initiative of local commanders but with the tacit approval of their governments, attacked and destroyed the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Navarino (Πύλος). This was the decisive moment in the war of independence, although the British Admiral Edward Codrington nearly ruined his career, since he wasn't ordered to achieve such a victory or destroy completely the Turko/Egyptian fleet. In October 1828, the Greeks regrouped and formed a new government under John Capodistria (Καποδíστριας). They then advanced to seize as much territory as possible, including Athens and Thebes , before the western powers imposed a ceasefire. The Greeks seized the last Turkish strongholds in the Peloponnese with the help of the French general, Nicolas Joseph Maison.

Massacres during the Revolution

Almost as soon as the revolution began, there were large scale massacres of civilians by both the Greek revolutionaries and the Ottoman authorities. The Greek revolutionaries massacred many Muslims inhabiting the Peloponnese and Attica where Greek forces were dominant, whereas the Turks massacred many Greeks especially in Ionia (Asia Minor) and the Aegean islands where the revolutionary forces were weaker.

The Ottoman response to the Greek revolution took place throughout the empire. St. Clair wrote: "The Ottoman Government in Constantinople, faced with violent revolutions in different parts of the Empire, decided to answer terror with terror." One of the most infamous acts was the hanging of Patriarch Gregory IV on Easter Sunday, 1821. After his hanging, the Patriarch's body was mutilated and thrown into the sea, where it was rescued by Greek sailors. This was followed by the execution of two metropolitans and twelve Bishops by the Turkish authorities. In June, Turkish massacres of Greek civilians began in earnest in Ionia. In the town of Kydonia in Ionia, the Turkish garrison began plundering houses and massacred an estimated 25,000 people. After the beginning of the Greek War of Independence, Ottoman soldiers began the massacre of thousands of Greeks around the Ottoman Empire. Jelavich states: "As a rule, Ottoman actions were fully reported in Europe, with all the gruesome details; Christian atrocities tended to be ignored." In the Chios Massacre, one of the most notorious occurrences, during 1822, about 42,000 Greek islanders of Chios were hanged, butchered, starved or tortured to death; 50,000 were enslaved; and 23,000 were exiled. The French painted Eugène Delacroix immortalised this massacre in his famous painting The Massacre of Chios.

According to Barbara Jelavich some of the first Greek actions were taken against unarmed Ottoman civilians. and according to William St. Clair, upwards of twenty thousand Turkish men, women and children were murdered by their Greek neighboors in a few weeks of slaughter. Other estimates of the Turkish and Muslim Albanian civilian deaths by the rebels range from 15.000 out of 40,000 Muslim residents to 30,000 only in Tripolis to 60.000 (Turkish claim), but the revolution was successful in removing the entire Turkish and Muslim Albanian population from the Peloponnese, whether through death or displacement. The Turkish and Moslem Albanian population of the Peloponnese had ceased to exist as a settled community. Historian W. Alison Phillips wrote in 1897: "Everywhere, as though at a preconcerted signal, the peasantry rose, and massacred all the Turks-men,women and children- on whom they could lay hands.. The Mussulman population of the Morea had been reckoned at twenty-five thousand souls. Within three weeks of the outbreak of the revolt, not a moslem was left, save those who had succeeded in escaping into the towns." St. Clair said: The orgy of genocide exhausted itself in Pelleponnese only when there were no more Turks to kill.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Jews curried disfavour with the Greeks by supporting the Ottoman Empire and during the Greek War of Independence, thousands of Jews were massacred alongside the Ottoman Turks by the Greek rebels and the Jewish communities of Mistras, Tripolis, Kalamata and Patras were completely destroyed. A few survivors moved north to areas still under Ottoman rule . Despite the fact that many Jews were killed, they were not targetted specifically:"Such a tragedy seems to be more a side-effect of the butchering of the Turks of Tripolis, the last Ottoman stronghold in the South where the Jews had taken refuge from the fighting, than a specific action against Jews per se." Nevertheless, many Jews within Greece and throughout Europe were supporters of the Greek revolt, using their wealth (as in the case of the Rothschilds) as well as their political and public influence to assist the Greek cause. The Greek state also attracted many Jewish immigrants from the Ottoman Empire following its establishment, being one of the first countries in the world to grant legal equality to Jews.

Diplomatic endgame

John Capodistria was assassinated in 1831 in Nafplion. As a state of confusion continued in the Greek peninsula, the Great Powers sought a formal end of the war and a recognized government in Greece. The Greek throne was initially offered to Léopold I of Belgium, but he refused, as he was not at all satisfied with the Aspropotamos-Zitouni borderline, which replaced the more favourable Arta-Volos line considered by the Great Powers earlier.

The withdrawal of Léopold as a candidate for the throne of Greece, and the July Revolution in France, delayed the final settlement of the frontiers of the new kingdom until a new government was formed in the United Kingdom. Lord Palmerston, who took over as British Foreign Secretary, agreed to the Arta-Volos borderline. However, the secret note on Crete, which the Bavarian plenipotentiary communicated to the Courts of the United Kingdom, France and Russia, bore no fruit.

In May 1832, Palmerston convened the London Conference of 1832. The three Great Powers (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, July Monarchy France and the Russian Empire) offered the throne to the Bavarian prince, Otto Wittelsbach, without regard to Greek views on this. The line of succession was also established which would pass the crown to the heirs of Otto, or his younger brothers in succession, should he have no heirs. In no case would the crowns of Greece and Bavaria be joined. As co-guarantors of the monarchy, the Great Powers also empowered their Ambassadors in the Ottoman capital to secure the end of the war. Under the protocol signed on May 71832 between Bavaria and the protecting Powers, and basically dealing with the way in which the Regency was to be managed until Otto reached his majority (while also concluding the second Greek loan, for a sum of £2,400,000 sterling), Greece was defined as an independent kingdom, with the Arta-Volos line as its northern frontier. The Ottoman Empire was given 40,000,000 piastres in compensation for the loss of the territory.

On July 21,1832 British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte Sir Stratford Canning and the other representatives of the Great Powers concluded the Treaty of Constantinople, which set the boundaries of the new Greek Kingdom at a line running from Arta (Αρτα) to Volos (Βολος). The borders of the Kingdom were reiterated in the London Protocol of August 301832, signed by the Great Powers, which ratified the terms of the Constantinople Arrangement.

Aftermath

The consequences of the Greek revolution were somewhat ambiguous in the immediate aftermath. An independent Greek state had been established, but with Britain, Russia and France claiming a major role in Greek politics afterwards and with the import of a Bavarian dynasty as the ruler and a mercenary army. The country had been ravaged by ten years of fighting, was full of displaced refugees and empty Turkish estates, necessitating a series of land reforms over several decades.

The new state also contained 800,000 people, fewer than one third of the two and a half million Greek inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire and for much of the next century the Greek state was to seek the liberation of the “unredeemed” Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, following Megale Idea, the goal of uniting all Greeks in one country.

As a people, the Greeks no longer provided the princes for the Danubian Principalities and were regarded within the Ottoman Empire, especially by the Muslim population, as traitors. Phanariots who had up to then held high office within the Ottoman Empire were henceforth regarded as suspect and lost their special, privileged category. In Constantinople and the rest of the Ottoman Empire where Greek banking and merchant presence had been dominant, Armenians mostly replaced Greeks in banking and Bulgarian merchants gained importance.

Gallery of paintings glorifying the uprisings

• Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi. Eugène Delacroix, 1826.
• Greek boy defending his wounded father. Ary Scheffer, 1827. Greek boy defending his wounded father. Ary Scheffer, 1827.
• Detail of "The Entry of King Othon of Greece in Athens". Peter von Hess, 1839.
• Monastery Agia Lavra, Peloponnese, 1821. "Germanos blessing the flag". Theodoros Vryzakis, 1865. Subject: Hellas' rebirth.

References

1. Gordon, Thomas History of the Greek Revolution Kessenger Publishing 2004
2. Bowman, Steven, "History of the Jews in Greece" University of Massachusettes www.umass.edu/judaic/anniversaryvolume/articles/30-F3-Bowman.pdf
3. Jelavich, Barbara (1983). History of the Balkans, 18th and 19th Centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 204–205. ISBN 0-521 27458-3.
4. ^ Sowards, Steven W. (1996). "Twenty-five Lectures on Modern Balkan History (The Balkans in the Age of Nationalism)". Retrieved 2007-02-14. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
5. Alexandris, D. (1997-11-21). "Great Britain and the Eastern Question - The case of the Greek War of Independence 1821-1828". Anistoriton. Retrieved 2007-02-11.
6. William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free The Philhellenes in the War of Independence, Oxford University Press London 1972 p.3 ISBN 0192151940
7. The history of the Greek Orthodox Church http://www.greekorthodoxchurch.org/history.html
8. History of the Greek Revolution, Thomas Gordon, 1844, p.188
9. ^ Jelavich, Barbara (1983). History of the Balkans, 18th and 19th Centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 217. ISBN 0-521 27458-3.
10. William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free The Philhellenes in the War of Independence, Oxford University Press London 1972 p.1 ISBN 0192151940
11. "Bouboulina Museum, Spetses Greece". Greek Island Spetses. Retrieved 2007-02-14.
12. William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free The Philhellenes in the War of Independence, Oxford University Press London 1972 p.2 ISBN 0192151940
13. W.Alison Phillips, The War of Greek Independence,1821 to 1833,New york,1897,p.48
15. Bowman, Steven, "History of the Jews in Greece" University of Massachusettes www.umass.edu/judaic/anniversaryvolume/articles/30-F3-Bowman.pdf
16. ^ Jelavich, Barbara (1983). History of the Balkans, 18th and 19th Centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 229–234. ISBN 0-521 27458-3.

External links

• Treaty of Constantinople
• of London, 1832
• History of Athens
• War of Independence

• Greek War of Independence
• History of Ottoman Greece
• Rebellions against the Ottoman Empire
• March observances
• Wars involving Russia