‘And without ties – wearied and wretched – melancholy and dissatisfied – what was left me here? – I have been dying piecemeal – thin – careworn – and desponding – Such an excitement as this was necessary to rouse me into energy and life – and it has done so – I am all on fire for action – and ready to endure the worst that may befall, seeking nothing but honour.’
Trelawny to Claire Clairmont 22 July 1823 1
TEN DAYS AFTER THE Hercules anchored off the port of Argostoli, a small group from the ship lay picnicking beside the Fountain of Arethusa on the Homeric isle of Ithaca. Beneath them the water from the spring tumbled away into a dark ravine. ‘The view,’ Hamilton Browne, the young Philhellene who had joined them at Leghorn, recalled ten years later,
embracing the vast sea-prospect, the Aechirades, the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, or Lepanto, with the distant purple mountains of Epirus and Aetolia, lifting their lofty peaks into the clouds, was superb; and ascending the hill at the back of the cavern, Santa Maura, the ancient Leucadia, with its dependencies, was distinctly descried, together with Cephalonia, apparently close at hand; Zante, and the coast of the Peloponessus, trending far away to the southeast. A more lovely situation could scarcely be imagined.2
It would be difficult also to imagine a view more completely at odds with reality. If one could have followed Browne’s panoramic sweep across the map of western and southern Greece, only seen it shorn of that seductive allure which distance and classical associations gave it for him – if one could have extended that view further, beyond the ruined city of Tripolis to Nauplia and Argos in the east, and beyond those again as far northwards as Salonica or south to Crete and Cyprus: or, again, if one shortened that perspective, to take in the emaciated figures crowding the little port of Vathi hidden at the picnickers’ feet, refugees from the ruins of Patras and the horrors of Chios, then wherever one looked the wasted faces of survivors or the whitening bones which littered the Greek landscape in their thousands would all have told the same story of a war of unimaginable brutality.
The conflict that had so devastated Greece had begun just over two years earlier in the spring of 1821. On 6 March, a Russian general of Greek extraction had crossed the River Pruth from Bessarabia into what is now modern Romania, raised his banner of the phoenix and called on the Christian populations of the Ottoman empire to throw off their oppressors.
Political realism has never been a feature of modern Greek history but, even by the extravagances of the last century and a half, Moldavia was a curious place to start a revolution. For almost four hundred years the Trans-Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia had suffered the heavy burden of Ottoman rule, and yet at the end of all that time, if there was a single sentiment beyond a hatred of the Turks that might have united its disparate peoples, it was a loathing of the Greek that ran almost as deep. For nearly four centuries Greeks had worked within the Ottoman Empire as assiduously as they had within its Roman predecessor, their women stocking its harems and their children its armies, their merchants, sailors, translators and administrators garnering to themselves those tasks and powers that seemed below Moslem dignity, and their great Constantinople families – the Greeks of the Phanar on the southern shore of the Golden Horn – sending out generation after generation to govern in the Danubian provinces with a greed that comfortably eclipsed that of their masters.*
It was one of the great tragedies of the War of Independence that the melancholy condition of Greece itself meant that its leadership inevitably fell to these Greeks of the Phanar and the scattered communities which made up the world of the Greek diaspora. Since the last, magical flowering of Byzantine culture at Mystra in the fifteenth century the geographical area of Modern Greece had declined into a state of impoverished misery, an almost forgotten backwater of Ottoman Europe, its traditions of freedom wilted to the bandit culture of the mountain klephts and all memory of its unique artistic and political inheritance buried under centuries of oppression.
It was from the West that this memory, so vital and so hazardous to the regeneration of the country, was re-imported into Greece, but it was crucially among the educated communities of the diaspora that the first Greek converts were made. Throughout the eighteenth century, these colonies had grown and prospered in capitals and ports from Marseilles to Calcutta, and as this new pride in their ancient past seeped into their consciousness, western Hellenism underwent a crucial seachange that took it out of the study and into the realm of political ambition.
The result was a volatile and dangerous new faith which owed as much to the trading and cultural links of these colonies with the Phanariot world of Constantinople as it did to the architectural purism of Stuart and Revett. In the journals and paintings of European travellers and scholars, eighteenth-century Philhellenism largely remained an innocuous and literary phenomenon, but as it made its way back to the Greek communities of the Black Sea and southern Russia it became a heady mix of Hellenistic posturing and Byzantine nostalgia, of alien political theory and grandiose ambition that looked to Constantinople – simply but eloquently the ‘polis’ – as the centre of a new-born Greece.
With the spread of the ideas and language of revolution after 1789 and the increased trade of the Napoleonic years, these aspirations gained a momentum that not even the Congress of Vienna could halt. By 1820, revolution to most Greeks within and without the Ottoman Empire seemed inevitable. For the previous five years a secret society called the Philike Hetairia had been at work, proselytizing and fund raising within the thriving Greek communities of Europe and Russia, and recruiting among the clergy and leaders of the Peloponnese and Northern Greece.
In 1820, a year of revolution across Europe, with rebellions in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and crucially, Ali Pasha’s in Albania, the moment seemed at hand. Through the winter the Apostles of the Philike Hetairia moved through the islands and mainland of Greece, spreading the word from initiate to initiate to prepare for war. Secrecy was virtually abandoned, so certain was everyone of the approaching rebellion, so rightly confident of Turkish indolence. In the Peloponnese, Germanos, the Bishop of Patras, and Petro Bey Mavromichaelis, head of the Maniots in the southern mountains of ancient Sparta, made ready. From the Ionian Isles, the great bandit leader, Theodore Colocotrones, slipped back from exile onto the mainland, drawn by the irresistible lure of patriotism and plunder; and in a town in southern Russia, the committee of merchants who were the sole reality behind the Philike Hetairia’s shadowy ‘Grand Arch’ appointed Alexander Ypsilanti to its supreme command.
Perhaps nothing so typifies the limitations of the Hetairists as that choice, because if Moldavia was an improbable place to begin a Greek revolution then Alexander Ypsilanti was an even more unlikely candidate for leader. A major general in the Russian army and the son of a Moldavian Greek hospadar or prince, Ypsilanti seems to have brought little to his task beyond the arrogance of the court and the morals of an autocracy, his single, dubious qualification for command being an arm lost in battle.
Within days of crossing the Pruth and beginning his leisurely march south, the ‘steward of the stewards of the August Arch,’ as he styled himself in a piece of characteristic masonic flummery, had succeeded only in alienating the Christian