THE GREEK REVOLUTION.

BOOK SECOND.

THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE REVOLUTION.

CHAPTER IV.

The Causes of the Greek Revolution.

The Greek Revolution was the natural result of general causes: its success was the consequence of peculiar circumstances. Various events afforded the Greeks under the sultan’s domination opportunities of acquiring knowledge and experience, and the development of their minds rendered the tyranny of the Turks insupportable. When a nation desires independence, a revolution is probable; but when it is spurred into action by an appetite for revenge as well as by a passion for liberty, a revolution becomes inevitable.

The most striking feature in the Othoman administration was the utter want of any judicial organization for the dispensation of justice. The judicial administration of Turkey only contemplated revenge for acts of injustice, not the distribution of justice to those who suffered wrong. A novelist has observed that when the Turks cut the wrong man's head off, they found a consolation in the fact that after it was over it could not be helped; the vengeance of the law was wreaked, though an additional act of injustice was perpetrated. Now, both the good and the bad qualities of the Greeks rendered them peculiarly liable to become the victims of the precipitancy of Turkish justice and of the injustice of Turkish judges. The Othoman government constantly pointed out to them the inestimable value of constitutional liberty by practical lessons, and educated them to prepare for a revolution as soon as they ceased to feel as slaves. It was not necessary for them to become acquainted with the writings of Voltaire or the theories of Rousseau. The same moral and political causes which produced the French Revolution produced the Revolution in Greece. English liberty and American independence had struck chords that vibrated wherever civilized men dwelt.

Education among the Greeks was the herald of liberty. Several individuals endowed schools, and sought to raise their countrymen from the degradation to which they had sunk towards the middle of the last century. The French Revolution certainly gave an unnatural degree of excitement to all political ideas. Its crimes and its grandeur fixed the attention of Europe on Paris. The Greeks were excited to proclaim their rights as members of the human race more loudly, and to urge their nationality as a reason for throwing off the Othoman yoke more openly, when they found similar doctrines supported by powerful armies and glorious victories in other lands. It was everywhere the fashion for the discontented subjects of established governments to imitate the French. The influence of the clubs of Paris was peculiarly calculated to produce a powerful impression on the minds of the Greeks; for it seemed to prove that great results might be effected by small assemblies, and that words, in which Greece has always been rich, might be employed as an effectual weapon to overthrow governments, and to do the work of swords. The Greeks began to form literary clubs and secret societies, with the vain hope that the Othoman empire might be destroyed by such inadequate instruments. Two societies are supposed to have contributed directly to accelerating the epoch of the Greek Revolution, and to have aided in insuring its success. These were the Philomuse Society, founded at Athens in 1812, and the Philike Hetairia, established at Odessa in 1814. But these societies ought rather to be considered as accessories before the fact than as causes of the Revolution. The Philomuse Society was a kind of literary club, and it contributed the funds which enabled many men who took a distinguished part in the Revolution to acquire a European education. The Philike Hetairia was in its origin a political society, and it taught the Greeks, in every province of the Othoman empire, to expect immediate assistance from Russia as soon as they should take up arms, and thereby propagated the conviction that a contest with the Turks, far from being a desperate enterprise, was one which was sure of success.

As the Philike Hetairia was a political society expressly established to accelerate and direct a revolution in Greece, its composition and proceedings deserve to be noticed. The power of secret societies is very apt to be overrated, and in no case has the influence of a secret political society been more unduly magnified than in the case of the Philike Hetairia. Historians have recorded its exploits: they have displayed its weakness, and revealed the ignorance and incapacity of its members. While its proceedings were veiled in mystery, they were easily magnified; when its acts were all fully known, it was evident that its conduct deserved contempt. It had, however, many paid agents, and many political adventurers gained both influence and profit by entering its precincts. It is not wonderful, therefore, that its historians have been its panegyrists. Many of the best Hetairists were more directly under the influence of Russian orthodoxy than of Hellenic independence, and many of the best men who distinguished themselves in the Greek Revolution were not Hetairists.

The first members of the Philike Hetairia were bankrupt merchants and intriguing adventurers, possessed of some cunning and great enthusiasm. Fanaticism was then one of the characteristics of every member of the Oriental or Orthodox Church. The Russians felt it; the Greeks often affected it. Turkey was supposed to be on the eve of dissolution, and Russia to be on the point of gaining possession of Constantinople. The Philike Hetairia was formed when these opinions were predominant, and by men who entertained them. It prospered. Subscriptions were easily collected; and agents, called apostles, were sent among the orthodox population of Turkey to preach hatred of the Turks and devotion to the czar of Russia. The supreme direction of the society was, unfortunately, always in the hands of incapable men, and the apostles were often so ill selected that the members who resided in Greece refused to intrust them with large sums of money, and feared to confide their lives and fortunes to their prudence.

When this society was founded, orthodoxy and Greek nationality were so generally confounded, that the traders of Odessa who framed its organization called the popular class of initiated brethren by the barbarous appellation of Vlamides, from the Albanian word vlameria, signifying brotherhood. In all probability the Philike Hetairia would have soon expired of inanition had it not been kept alive by its members making use of the name of Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, who was generally supposed to grant it his secret protection. For several years it watched in vain for a field of action. The rebellion of Ali Pasha at last opened a chance of success. Had that rebellion not occurred, the Hetairists would have remained powerless until hostilities occurred between Russia and Turkey.

The influence of secret societies on national movements can only be powerful when these movements coincide with the general impulse to which the societies owe their own existence. But men are more disposed to attribute great events to anomalous causes than to trace patiently the gradual operation of natural impulsions. The schemes of the Hetairists at Odessa were wild and visionary—the object of the inhabitants of Greece was definite and patriotic. The Hetairists proposed to set fire to Constantinople, to burn the arsenal, to destroy the fleet, to assassinate the sultan, to murder his ministers, and to efface the memory of the Sicilian vespers by a general massacre of the Mussulman population in the capital of the Othoman empire. And so infatuated were they, that the advantages and disadvantages of these diabolical projects are coolly discussed in a history of the Philike Hetairia published at Athens in the year 1834. These counting-house Catilines of Odessa imagined that they could overthrow an empire by burning an arsenal and assassinating a prince. They overlooked the possibility of arousing the just indignation and bloody vengeance of millions of warlike Mohammedans, who would have rushed to Constantinople to defend the Turkish domination, and who, when the conspirators had destroyed the fountain-head of all the vices of the Othoman administration, might have laid the foundations of a new and more powerful Turkish empire.

The increased boldness of the Greeks in European Turkey after the commencement of hostilities with Ali Pasha did not escape the observation of the Mussulmans. The attention of the sultan and his ministers was repeatedly called to the conduct of Russian agents, and to the bold language held by many Greeks. Yet it is not surprising that the operations of the Philike Hetairia escaped the observation of the Othoman government, though its existence was discovered by the Russian police as early as 1818, for the Turks employ no spies. Russia also, by permitting her consuls and dragomans in the Levant to act as agents and couriers for the Hetairists, both concealed their intrigues and encouraged their activity. Apathetic as the Turks were, they could not overlook the great alteration which took place in the demeanour of the Greeks during the year 1820. The attitude assumed by the Christians was often seditious. Russian agents were always ready to protect them, and the evidence of a secret understanding seemed to be so strong that all foreign merchants, except the English consuls in the Levant, considered a rising of the Greeks and a war between Russia and the Porte to be inevitable.

The position of the Othoman authorities in the provinces where the Greeks were numerous was one of considerable difficulty. The conduct of the Russians rendered it dangerous for any pasha to venture on taking measures for restraining the insolence of the Greeks before receiving express instructions from Constantinople. Any attempt to disarm the Greeks would have produced little effect in those provinces where it could have been carried into execution with ease, and any attempt to disarm the Christians in Romelia would have caused all the armatoli to join the cause of Ali Pasha. It would hardly have been prudent to disarm even the unwarlike Moreots without making a great addition to the Othoman forces then in the peninsula. When we reflect, therefore, on the delicate circumstances in which the Turkish officials were placed, it must be owned that they were not wanting in that combination of prudence and courage, toleration and cruelty, which has enabled three millions of Mussulmans to retain ten millions of Christians in subjection for four centuries. Yet every hour was bringing the antagonism of the Greeks and Turks nearer to a hostile collision, and it was by a general disarming of the Greeks that a revolution could alone be avoided. The fear that this measure would be considered by Russia as a declaration of war, prevented its adoption by Sultan Mahmud at a period when it was still practicable.

The existence of the Philike Hetairia was betrayed to Ali Pasha, and communicated by him to the Porte shortly before his proscription. Several Hetairists betrayed their companions to the Turks, and several apostles were assassinated by the Greeks. An apostle named Aristides Popoff was executed at Adrianople; another, Demetrius Hypatros, was murdered by Zaphyros, the primate of Niaousta. The plan of a general insurrection of the orthodox was revealed to the Porte by a Greek named Asemaki: the papers of some of the apostles were seized in consequence of this revelation; and a number of letters were discovered which spoke of projects for murdering all the resident Turks in various towns on the Danube and on the shores of the Archipelago. Mr. Tricoupi, the Greek historian of the Greek Revolution, who was formerly employed in the English consulate at Patras, and has since been King Otho’s minister in England, thinks that the existence of a secret police might have saved Turkey; and he reproaches the Othoman government with its deficiency in this branch of despotism. He overlooks the fact that the vices as well as the virtues of the Turks disqualify them from being efficient spies. The secret police of the Othoman empire must therefore have been intrusted to Greeks; and it is not probable that Greek spies would have revealed anything to the Turks sooner than Greek traitors. It was the absence of all systematic scheme of espionage that rendered the sultan’s government, in the opinion of many Greeks, preferable to that of Venice, of Austria, and even of Russia. The best historian of the Greek Revolution, General Gordon, errs in saying that “the stupid Moslems never entertained the least suspicion of a plot hatched in the midst of them”, but he adds, that “the lynx-eyed police of the Russian empire (from a different cause, doubtless) was as blind as a mole to all matters connected with the society”. The fact, however, is, that neither Sultan Mahmud nor his ministers required to be informed by traitor Hetairists that the Greeks had long been intriguing against the Othoman domination, under the direction of and in concert with Russian agents. But it was fortunate that the treachery of the Hetairists did not enable the sultan to obtain any information concerning the grand project for his own murder, and for a general massacre, until after the outbreak had taken place. When that scheme became known the sultan could not be reproached with apathy. His anger, indeed, got the better of his policy, and he made the wickedness of the Hetairists a pretext for excessive cruelty to the Greek nation.

It must be observed that very few of the Greek officials in the Othoman service, a body of men usually called Phanariots, were admitted members of the Philike Hetairia. They were not trusted by their countrymen. Halet Effendi, Sultan Mahmud’s nishandji and favourite minister, made use of the Phanariots as spies both on the orthodox clergy and on the Greek nation; and, trusting to their vigilance, he refused to believe the reports which reached the Porte that the Greeks were plotting a general insurrection. He considered it incredible that the sultan’s rayahs could risk a rebellion as long as the Porte avoided a war with Russia. His influence with Sultan Mahmud rendered this opinion the guide of Othoman policy, and prevented the grand-vizier from taking some measures of precaution suggested by the provincial pashas in Greece.

It may now be asked by my readers, What was the real cause of the Greek Revolution, if they are to consider the rebellion of Ali Pasha and the machinations of the Philike Hetairia and Russian agency only as secondary causes? The Greek Revolution was the result of the multifarious moral as well as political causes which enlarge a nation’s intelligence and awaken its feelings. The dispensations of Providence had turned many circumstances to the advantage of the Greek race. Individual virtues had been developed, and individual improvement accelerated and extended. The consequence was an increase of moral energy, a desire of action, and a longing for a national and political existence. The fulness of time had arrived: the corruption and servility of the Greek race, which had retained it in a degraded condition from the time of its conquest by the Romans, had been expiated by ages of suffering under the Othoman yoke; and the Greeks felt prepared to climb the rugged paths of virtue and self-sacrifice. The cause of the Greek Revolution embraces the history of the national character, and forms a section of the records of humanity not to be circumscribed by a survey of contemporary political events.

The Revolution was facilitated by the moral and physical decline of the Othoman race. That decline was in no small degree the result of the social circumstances which inevitably undermine the energy of every privileged dominant class; but it proceeded also from the constitution of society in Mohammedan countries, and particularly from the sultan’s despotism, which consumed the riches and paralyzed the energy of the Osmanlis more effectually than that of the Christians. Nothing is more certain than that during a considerable period of Othoman history the Turkish population of the provinces was subjected to as much moral and political restraint as the Greek. This fact has been so generally overlooked, that it is difficult to state it plainly without having the air of advancing a paradox. The Mussulmans were a dominant class on account of their religion, but the Turkish population of Asia, whose feudal institutions were older than the Othoman empire, had always been an object of jealousy to the Othoman government at Constantinople. It is too much the habit to identify everything that is Turkish and Othoman in the sultan’s empire. For ages the highest offices in the Othoman government were conferred on favourites of the sultan, and the cabinet was composed of men educated in his palace, or taken from domestic employments in the imperial household. In that household a slave was more honoured than a free man. The ordinance of the Mosaic law was in full vigour. “The servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof” (of the passover). “A foreigner and a hired servant shall not eat thereof”. A long period elapsed before the cabinet of the sultan contained many Turks who were born subjects of the sultan, and the counsels of the sultan were generally shared, and the conduct of the grand-vizier controlled, by purchased menials in the palace. With these men, the hereditary beys, agas, and timariots had no sympathy, and little political connection; nor could the slaves of the imperial household understand or support the feudal institutions of the Turkish race, of which they rarely heard, except as obstacles to their measures. A Turk might possess patriotism as well as religious zeal: an Othoman official might be a good Mohammedan and a devoted servant of the sultan, but in him palace prejudices occupied the place of national feelings.

We ought not to feel astonished, therefore, when we find that provincial Turks rose with greater difficulty to high rank in the Othoman service than Greeks, and possessed less influence in the administration of the empire. The Turkish aga was ill suited for an Othoman instrument. He was deficient both in knowledge and servility. The Greeks possessed both in a high degree. A wicked government requires unprincipled agents; and during the whole of the eighteenth century the Greeks held several important offices in the sultan’s government because they were without principle.

Greek influence was both ecclesiastical and civil. The authority of the patriarch and synod of Constantinople, as an administrative agency in the Othoman government, was very great. It formed a more efficient protection for the orthodox Greeks than the Ulema did for the rights of the Mohammedan Turks. The dragoman of the Porte and the dragoman of the fleet formed a more direct representation of the Greek people in the Othoman government than the Turks of Asia Minor possessed. Roman law, which regulated the civil relations of the Greeks, was better preserved and more equitably administered than the feudal institutions of the Seljouk empire, or the ordinances of the Othoman sultans, which regulated the civil rights and protected the property of the Turks. This circumstance, that a Greek could speak of equity as something permanent, while a Turk could only regard it as arbitrary, gave the Greek population a moral superiority over the Turkish, in one of the most important elements of society.

The Romans, by imposing their jurisprudence on all the nations they conquered, conferred a great benefit on Greece. The Greeks have ever been self-willed and presumptuous. Every Greek has always been eager to enforce judgment on others, and ready to defy law whenever he could do so to his own personal advantage with a hope of impunity. The Romans forced the Greeks to acknowledge the principle that justice ought to be invariably administered according to fixed forms of judicial procedure. The attempt was made to render the law more powerful and more permanent than the government. A sense of the value of justice was transfused into the minds of the Greeks, and its basis being enlarged by the conversion to Christianity, it was never lost. This combination of law and religion, which is so interwoven into the national existence as to influence every individual mind, is the great element of the social superiority of the Greeks over the Turks.

The sense of equity appears to be as strong in the mind of the individual Turk, and he is not so ready to gratify his selfishness by acts of injustice as a Greek is. Yet there can be no doubt that both life and property were, on the whole, more insecure among the Turkish population of the Othoman empire than among the Greek. The want of laws, judicial institutions, and legal forms of procedure, rendered the administration of justice arbitrary, and retained Turkish society in a state of barbarism. If the solution of the Eastern question require the regeneration of the Turkish power, this end cannot be attained without the introduction of a fixed legislation and a systematic code of procedure. If the Turks persist in despising law and contemning justice, the Eastern question, instead of being solved, must be exploded. New combinations and new governments must arise, and many Eastern questions will soon become Western ones. The five great Powers of Europe cannot regulate the waters of the political inundation of which they appear neither to know the depth nor the level.

The condition of the Greek population in Turkey was, as has been already mentioned, greatly bettered by the treaty of Kainardji in 1774. A considerable increase of its numbers in the commercial cities and maritime provinces soon became apparent. The Turkish government began also at this period to be more dependent on the state of its finances, and this circumstance increased the political power of the Greeks, who were growing richer while the Turks were growing poorer. The sultan and his ministers persisted in relieving themselves from every financial difficulty by acts of bankruptcy. In this species of dishonesty the Othoman empire surpassed the Austrian. When a demand was made on the sultan’s treasury, which it was deemed necessary to discharge without delay, and the sum in the hands of the treasurer did not amount to more than two-thirds of the sum due, the discrepancy was arranged by adding one-third more of alloy to the coinage. Two hundred thousand piastres’ worth of bullion were thus converted into three hundred thousand piastres in money, and the debt was paid. By these depreciations of the coinage, which followed one another in rapid succession, Greek capitalists were very often gainers, Turkish landlords invariably losers.

While wealth was flowing into the hands of the Greeks, and ebbing from the coffers of the Turks, the ambition of the Greeks was directed to the sultan’s service by a number of the highest official prizes in the Othoman administration. A slippered Greek, without stockings, a taoushan of the Archipelago, might become a sovereign prince beyond the Danube. Mavroyeni, a Greek secretary of the great capitan-pasha Hassan Ghazi, after serving as dragoman of the fleet, was appointed Prince of Vallachia.

A still more striking advantage which the provincial Greeks enjoyed over the Turks was the facility of obtaining a complete exemption from the principal evils of the Othoman administration, by placing themselves under the protection of some foreign power. A practice had grown up in the Othoman empire of granting charters of denaturalization called berats, which placed the born subjects of the sultan in the situation of subjects of some friendly sovereign, to whom their allegiance was transferred. The number of Greeks who obtained this privilege was very large, and it often enabled them to transgress all the laws of the empire with impunity. The beratlis lived in the midst of the Turkish population, evading many of the heaviest financial burdens to which even Mohammedans were subjected, and carrying on commerce without paying the same duties or being amenable to the same laws in their transactions. They were even protected in their persons from the gripe of the Othoman police by the ambassador or consul to whom their allegiance was virtually transferred. This class of Christians was known to share largely in the profits of debasing the coinage, defrauding the custom-house, and cheating the people by local monopolies. An instance is recounted of a Greek beratli who realized a large fortune by forging a new coinage of more intrinsic value than the debased issue from the sultan’s treasury. He had taken his measures to have his forged money ready for circulation at the same time as the government. It was not difficult, in the greater part of the empire, to persuade the people that the coinage which contained most pure metal was the lawful money, and the forger made his fortune by cheating less than the sovereign.

Individuals belonging to this privileged class were the most active agents of the Greek Revolution; and many who enjoyed the protection of Russia were members of the Philike Hetairia. The protection they enjoyed insured their escape from punishment, should their complicity be discovered. In this way a vast body of the orthodox, who retained as much of their connection with the patriarch and the ecclesiastical Greek nationality as suited their purpose, lived in the Othoman empire relieved not only from the yoke of the sultan, but almost from the restraint of every other government. It is needless to point out that such a position engendered the vices of avarice, falsehood, and dishonesty, or that these emancipated slaves, suddenly converted into privileged freemen, conducted themselves in general with extreme arrogance. The Turks were insulted whenever it was possible to insult them with impunity, and the Turks, in spite of their forming a dominant caste in the empire, had no revenge but the poor consolation that they could beat the lowest class of Christians whenever they thought fit. Under these circumstances, the hatred of the Turks and Greeks became every day more violent. Both were justly irritated by chronic and irremediable evils in the condition of the society in which they lived. They felt what Milton tells us, “that justice is the only true sovereign and supreme majesty upon earth”, but how to place themselves under the authority of the empire of justice they knew not.

CHAPTER V.

The Operations of the Greek Hetairists beyond the Danube.

READING HALL

DOORS OF WISDOM

THE GREEK REVOLUTION.