Greece Is Declared a Fully Independent State: May 7, 1832

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations, Part II.

Since the 14th century, all of Greece—the southern peninsula called Morea (or the Peloponnese), Attica, Thessaly, Crete, and the islands of the Aegean Sea—had been under Ottoman power. Orthodox Christians in these lands had suffered bitterly from the rule of the Ottoman sultans. Their young sons had been seized, forced to become Muslim, and drafted into the sultan’s elite military guard, the Janissaries. The Greek people had been oppressed in various ways and had fallen into poverty and barbarism. For centuries, it had seemed that the Ottoman power was irresistible; but, then, came the French Revolution and the victories of Napoleon Bonaparte. The spirit of revolution entered the hearts of oppressed Christian Greeks and inspired them to rise up and seek independence.

The uprising began on April 2, 1821, when the Orthodox Archbishop Germanos raised the standard of the cross at Kalavryta in northern Morea. Gathering around the archbishop, a motley army of peasants, armed with scythes and clubs and slings, marched to Patra on the coast to the north and took the entire town, except for the citadel manned by Turkish troops. The revolt soon spread to other parts of Morea and then into other parts of Greece. Soon, the Turks were driven from Thessaly, and several of the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea rose in revolt.

Everywhere, the revolt brought on cruel atrocities; the insurgents spared no Muslim, neither man, woman, nor child. Led by desperate men, the Greeks were undisciplined; after centuries of cruel oppression, many had lost the sense of humanity. It was in response to Greek atrocities that the Ottoman sultan, Mahomet II, committed an atrocity of his own: the murder of Patriarch Gregorios on April 22, 1821. Even before this, Mahomet had done many brutal deeds; and he was to do many more.

Balkans and Greece at the time of the War of Independence

Determined to crush the Greek revolt, Mahomet II sent two Turkish armies southward into Greece in the spring of 1822. One army, under the command of Ali, the pasha of Dramati, marched through Boetia and Attica and then crossed the Isthmus of Corinth into Morea.

With the Turks approaching, the Greek government at Argos fled. However, a few hundred Greeks under the command of the rebel leader Demetrios Ypsilanti were able to hold the vastly superior Turkish army at Argos until the Greek peasant leader, Kolokotrones, could arrive with his army. In a battle fought on August 6, 1822, Kolokotrones forced the Turks to retreat from Argos. Since the Turks had to cross the mountain pass of Devernaki, Kolokotrones met them there with a small force. When the Turks attempted to force their way through the pass, they were utterly destroyed.

The story of the Greek war for independence inspired the romantic imagination of Europeans from France to Russia, and from England to Spain. Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants saw the struggle as a holy war against the Muslim Turkish oppressor. Liberals regarded it as a fight for freedom, and conservatives saw it as a battle for civilization against barbarism. Though some leaders—like Metternich, the king of Prussia, and Tsar Aleksandr I—refrained from aiding the Greeks, other European rulers encouraged sending them aid; London financiers sent large loans of money to the insurgent Greek government.

Such loans, however, did not help the Greek cause, for they led to strife among the revolutionary leaders. Different Greek factions fought for leadership of the revolution. In 1823 and 1824 the rebels were fighting a civil war among themselves while battling the Turks. In 1824, Mahomet II sent for Ibrahim Pasha, the son of the Muslim governor of Egypt, to bring an end to the troublesome rebellion once and for all.

Ibrahim Pasha, with his fleet and army, landed at Methoni on Morea and then moved north to lay siege to Pylos on the bay of Navarino. There, the Greeks suffered their first major defeat, and Pylos fell to Ibrahim on April 19, 1825. From Pylos, Ibrahim moved east and took the city of Tripolitsa, from which he sent out columns to devastate the countryside. Ibrahim showed no mercy; his forces destroyed fields of grain, pulled up olive trees by the roots, and enslaved or just slaughtered Greeks of all ages. Other Greek strongholds, such as Missolonghi and Athens, soon fell to the Turks and Ibrahim’s Egyptians. Ibrahim continued his devastation of Greece and, by July 1827, it looked as if the Turks had destroyed the Greek revolution.

Tsar Nikolai I

At this point, Tsar Nikolai I stepped in. Seeing it as his and Europe’s duty to save the Greek rebellion, Nikolai with Great Britain’s prime minister, George Canning, tried to convince Mahomet II to stop the war and come to an agreement with the Greeks. But the sultan refused and ordered his armies to continue their devastation of Greece. In response, British and Russian fleets blockaded Morea, cutting off Ibrahim’s source of supplies.

In July 1827, the great powers of the Concert of Europe met in London to discuss what to do about the sultan’s refusal to make peace. On the one side were Great Britain, Russia, and France, who urged the Concert to take up the Greek cause. Both the Greeks and the sultan, they said, should declare an armistice; and Mahomet should grant the Greeks an autonomous (self-governing) state, but under his lordship. But Austria and Prussia did not agree to this proposal. The sultan, they said, was a legitimate ruler, and the powers should not aid rebels against legitimate authority. When Austria and Prussia at length withdrew from the conference, France suggested that the remaining powers sign a treaty in which they pledged themselves to make war on the sultan if he refused their demands. Russia and Great Britain agreed, and the three powers signed the Treaty of London on July 6, 1827.

But Mahomet II refused to agree to the Concert’s demands, and the European powers prepared for war. In October 1827, a combined Russian, English, and French fleet forced Ibrahim’s fleet into Navarino harbor; and on October 20, battle was joined. Though greatly outnumbered by the Turks, the allies were quickly able to gain the advantage. After a battle of only four hours, the Turkish fleet was destroyed.

Print of Battle of Navarino by Panagiotis Zografos

The Battle of Navarino only made Mahomet angrier. Declaring a jihad against Russia, he urged his armies to more resistance. Meanwhile, Great Britain withdrew from the war, saying the Ottoman Empire must be allowed to keep all its territories, including Greece. Nikolai I, on the other hand, took up the sultan’s challenge; and, with the support of France, Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on April 26, 1828.

The Russians did not fight the Turks only in Greece. War raged along the Danube River in support of the Slavonic regions of Serbia, Wallachia, and Moldavia, which were seeking deliverance from the Turkish yoke. Soon, Russian armies freed these regions, along with the important cities of Belgrade and Bucharest.

The war at last ended with the Treaty of Adrianople, signed by Russia and the Ottoman Empire on September 14, 1829. By this treaty, the sultan agreed that Serbia, Wallachia, and Moldavia would be mostly independent, though they still acknowledged the sultan as their suzerain; and Mahomet handed over two Black Sea ports to Russia. As for Greece, the treaty declared it independent, but under the sultan’s overlordship. By the treaty, Tsar Nikolai I claimed that, as the supreme Orthodox power in the world, he had the right to intervene in Greece to protect the Orthodox faith if it was threatened. Nikolai thus took upon himself the lofty role of the protector of the Orthodox Church.

The Treaty of Adrianople, however, was not the end of the story for Greece. In a treaty signed at London on May 7, 1832, Great Britain, France, Russia, and the kingdom of Bavaria declared Greece a fully independent state. Athens was to be the capital of the new nation, which was to include all of Greece except Thessaly, Macedon, Thrace, and Epirus; these were to remain under Ottoman control. The powers also chose the form of government Greece was to have—it was not to be a republic, as the Greek rebels had wanted, but a kingdom. The powers made Otto von Wittelsbach, the Bavarian king’s 17-year-old son, the first king of Greece. To protect the throne of King Otto, the great powers of Europe claimed the right to intervene in the affairs of Greece whenever they thought it was threatened by the Ottoman power in Constantinople.