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Memorials and Other Papers

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Memorials and Other Papers




"It was the hope of Greece that, in these seasons of emergency, she
would not fail of help and earnest resort of friends from the Christian
nations throughout Europe. For it was agreeable neither to humanity nor
to piety, that the rights of nations, liable to no grudges of malice or
scruples of jealousy, should be surreptitiously and wickedly filched
away, or mocked with outrage and insult; but that they should be
settled firmly on those foundations which Nature herself has furnished
in abundance to the condition of man in society. However, so it was,
that Greece, cherishing these most reasonable expectations, met with
most unmerited disappointments.

"But you, noble and generous Englishman, no sooner heard the trumpet of
popular rights echoing melodiously from the summits of Taygetus, of
Ida, of Pindus, and of Olympus, than, turning with listening ears to
the sound, and immediately renouncing the delights of country, of
family ties, and (what is above all) of domestic luxury and ease, and
the happiness of your own fireside, you hurried to our assistance. But
suddenly, and in contradiction to the universal hope of Greece, by
leaving us, you have thrown us all into great perplexity and amazement,
and that at a crisis when some were applying their minds to military
pursuits, some to the establishment of a civil administration, others
to other objects, but all alike were hurrying and exerting themselves
wherever circumstances seemed to invite them.

"Meantime, the government of Greece having heard many idle rumors and
unauthorized tales disseminated, but such as seemed neither in
correspondence with their opinion of your own native nobility from rank
and family, nor with what was due to the newly-instituted
administration, have slighted and turned a deaf ear to them all, coming
to this resolution--that, in absenting yourself from Greece, you are
doubtless obeying some strong necessity; for that it is not possible
nor credible of a man such as you displayed yourself to be whilst
living amongst us, that he should mean to insult the wretched--least of
all, to insult the unhappy and much-suffering people of Greece. Under
these circumstances, both the deliberative and the executive bodies of
the Grecian government, assembling separately, have come to a
resolution, without one dissentient voice, to invite you back to
Greece, in order that you may again take a share in the Grecian
contest--a contest in itself glorious, and not alien from your
character and pursuits. For the liberty of any one nation cannot be a
matter altogether indifferent to the rest, but naturally it is a common
and diffusive interest; and nothing can be more reasonable than that
the Englishman and the Grecian, in such a cause, should make themselves
yoke-fellows, and should participate as brothers in so holy a struggle.
Therefore, the Grecian government hastens, by this present
distinguished expression of its regard, to invite you to the soil of
Greece, a soil united by such tender memorials with yourself; confident
that you, preferring glorious poverty and the hard living of Greece to
the luxury and indolence of an obscure seclusion, will hasten your
return to Greece, agreeably to your native character, restoring to us
our valued English connection. Farewell!

"The Vice-president of the Executive,

"ATHANASIUS KANAKARES.

"The Chief-Secretary, Minister of Foreign Relations, NEGENZZ."

Since then, having in 1817 connected himself in marriage with a
beautiful young lady of Armenian Greek extraction, and having purchased
land and built a house in Argos, Mr. Gordon may be considered in some
sense as a Grecian citizen. Services in the field having now for some
years been no longer called for, he has exchanged his patriotic sword
for a patriotic pen--judging rightly that in no way so effectually can
Greece be served at this time with Western Europe, as by recording
faithfully the course of her revolution, tracing the difficulties which
lay or which arose in her path, the heroism with which she surmounted
them, and the multiplied errors by which she raised up others to
herself. Mr. Gordon, of forty authors who have partially treated this
theme, is the first who can be considered either impartial or
comprehensive; and upon his authority, not seldom using his words, we
shall now present to our readers the first continuous abstract of this
most interesting and romantic war:

GREECE, in the largest extent of that term, having once belonged to the
Byzantine empire, is included, by the misconception of hasty readers,
in the great wreck of 1453. They take it for granted that, concurrently
with Constantinople, and the districts adjacent, these provinces passed
at that disastrous era into the hands of the Turkish conqueror; but
this is an error. Parts of Greece, previously to that era, had been
dismembered from the Eastern empire;--other parts did not, until long
_after_ it, share a common fate with the metropolis. Venice had a
deep interest in the Morea; _in_ that, and _for_ that, she fought with
various success for generations; and it was not until the year 1717,
nearly three centuries from the establishment of the crescent in
Europe, that "the banner of St. Mark, driven finally from the Morea and
the Archipelago," was henceforth exiled (as respected Greece) to the
Ionian Islands.

In these contests, though Greece was the prize at issue, the children
of Greece had no natural interest, whether the cross prevailed or the
crescent; the same, for all substantial results, was the fate which
awaited themselves. The Moslem might be the more intolerant by his
maxims, and he might be harsher in his professions; but a slave is not
the less a slave, though his master should happen to hold the same
creed with himself; and towards a member of the Greek church one who
looked westward to Rome for his religion was likely to be little less
of a bigot than one who looked to Mecca. So that we are not surprised
to find a Venetian rule of policy recommending, for the daily allowance
of these Grecian slaves, "a _little_ bread, and a liberal application
of the cudgel"! Whichever yoke were established was sure to be hated;
and, therefore, it was fortunate for the honor of the Christian name,
that from the year 1717 the fears and the enmity of the Greeks were to
be henceforward pointed exclusively towards _Mahometan_ tyrants.

To be hated, however, sufficiently for resistance, a yoke must have
been long and continuously felt. Fifty years might be necessary to
season the Greeks with a knowledge of Turkish oppression; and less than
two generations could hardly be supposed to have manured the whole
territory with an adequate sense of the wrongs they were enduring, and
the withering effects of such wrongs on the sources of public
prosperity. Hatred, besides, without hope, is no root out of which an
effective resistance can be expected to grow; and fifty years almost
had elapsed before a great power had arisen in Europe, having in any
capital circumstance a joint interest with Greece, or specially
authorized, by visible right and power, to interfere as her protector.
The semi-Asiatic power of Russia, from the era of the Czar Peter the
Great, had arisen above the horizon with the sudden sweep and splendor
of a meteor. The arch described by her ascent was as vast in compass as
it was rapid; and, in all history, no political growth, not that of our
own Indian empire, had travelled by accelerations of speed so
terrifically marked. Not that even Russia could have really grown in
strength according to the _apparent_ scale of her progress. The
strength was doubtless there, or much of it, before Peter and
Catherine; but it was latent: there had been no such sudden growth as
people fancied; but there had been a sudden evolution. Infinite
resources had been silently accumulating from century to century; but,
before the Czar Peter, no mind had come across them of power sufficient
to reveal their situation, or to organize them for practical effects.
In some nations, the manifestations of power are coincident with its
growth; in others, from vicious institutions, a vast crystallization
goes on for ages blindly and in silence, which the lamp of some
meteoric mind is required to light up into brilliant display. Thus it
had been in Russia; and hence, to the abused judgment of all
Christendom, she had seemed to leap like Pallas from the brain of
Jupiter--gorgeously endowed, and in panoply of civil array, for all
purposes of national grandeur, at the _fiat_ of one coarse
barbarian. As the metropolitan home of the Greek church, she could not
disown a maternal interest in the humblest of the Grecian tribes,
holding the same faith with herself, and celebrating their worship by
the same rites. This interest she could, at length, venture to express
in a tone of sufficient emphasis; and Greece became aware that she
could, about the very time when Turkish oppression had begun to unite
its victims in aspirations for redemption, and had turned their eyes
abroad in search of some great standard under whose shadow they could
flock for momentary protection, or for future hope. What cabals were
reared upon this condition of things by Russia, and what premature
dreams of independence were encouraged throughout Greece in the reign
of Catherine II., may be seen amply developed, in the once celebrated
work of Mr. William Eton.

Another great circumstance of hope for Greece, coinciding with the dawn
of her own earliest impetus in this direction, and travelling _puri
passu_ almost with the growth of her mightiest friend, was the
advancing decay of her oppressor. The wane of the Turkish crescent had
seemed to be in some secret connection of fatal sympathy with the
growth of the Russian cross. Perhaps the reader will thank us for
rehearsing the main steps by which the Ottoman power had flowed and
ebbed. The foundations of this empire were laid in the thirteenth
century, by Ortogrul, the chief of a Turkoman tribe, residing in tents
not far from Dorylæum, in Phrygia (a name so memorable in the early
crusades), about the time when Jenghiz had overthrown the Seljukian
dynasty. His son Osman first assumed the title of Sultan; and, in 1300,
having reduced the city of Prusa, in Bithynia, he made it the capital
of his dominions. The Sultans who succeeded him for some generations,
all men of vigor, and availing themselves not less of the decrepitude
which had by that time begun to palsy the Byzantine sceptre, than of
the martial and religious fanaticism which distinguished their own
followers, crossed the Hellespont, conquering Thrace and the countries
up to the Danube. In 1453, the most eminent of these Sultans, Mahomet
II., by storming Constantinople, put an end to the Roman empire; and
before his death he placed the Ottoman power in Europe pretty nearly on
that basis to which it had again fallen back by 1821. The long interval
of time between these two dates involved a memorable flux and reflux of
power, and an oscillation between two extremes of panic-striking
grandeur, in the ascending scale (insomuch that the Turkish Sultan was
supposed to be charged in the Apocalypse with the dissolution of the
Christian thrones), and in the descending scale of paralytic dotage
tempting its own instant ruin. In speculating on the causes of the
extraordinary terror which the Turks once inspired, it is amusing, and
illustrative of the revolutions worked by time, to find it imputed, in
the first place, to superior discipline; for, if their discipline was
imperfect, they had, however, a _standing_ army of Janissaries,
whilst the whole of Christian Europe was accustomed to fight merely
summer campaigns with hasty and untrained levies; a second cause lay in
their superior finances, for the Porte had a regular revenue, when the
other powers of Europe relied upon the bounty of their vassals and
clergy; and, thirdly, which is the most surprising feature of the whole
statement, the Turks were so far ahead of others in the race of
improvement, that to them belongs the credit of having first adopted
the extensive use of gunpowder, and of having first brought battering-
trains against fortified places. To his artillery and his musketry it
was that Selim the Ferocious (grandson of that Sultan who took
Constantinople) was indebted for his victories in Syria and Egypt.
Under Solyman the Magnificent (the well-known contemporary of the
Emperor Charles Y.) the crescent is supposed to have attained its
utmost altitude; and already for fifty years the causes had been in
silent progress which were to throw the preponderance into the
Christian scale. In the reign of his son, Selim the Second, this crisis
was already passed; and the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, which crippled
the Turkish navy in a degree never wholly recovered, gave the first
overt signal to Europe of a turn in the course of their prosperity.
Still, as this blow did not equally affect the principal arm of their
military service, and as the strength of the German empire was too much
distracted by Christian rivalship, the _prestige_ of the Turkish
name continued almost unbroken until their bloody overthrow in 1664, at
St. Gothard, by the imperial General Montecuculi. In 1673 they received
another memorable defeat from Sobieski, on which occasion they lost
twenty-five thousand men. In what degree, however, the Turkish Samson
had been shorn of his original strength, was not yet made known to
Europe by any adequate expression, before the great catastrophe of
1683. In that year, at the instigation of the haughty vizier, Kara
Mustafa, the Turks had undertaken the siege of Vienna; and great was
the alarm of the Christian world. But, on the 12th of September, their
army of one hundred and fifty thousand men was totally dispersed by
seventy thousand Poles and Germans, under John Sobieski--"He conquering
_through_ God, and God by him." [Footnote: See the sublime Sonnet
of Chiabrora on this subject, as translated by Mr. Wordsworth.] Then
followed the treaty of Carlovitz, which stripped the Porte of Hungary,
the Ukraine, and other places; and "henceforth" says Mr. Gordon,
"Europe ceased to dread the Turks; and began even to look upon their
existence as a necessary element of the balance of power among its
states." Spite of their losses, however, during the first half of the
eighteenth century, the Turks still maintained a respectable attitude
against Christendom. But the wars of the Empress Catherine II., and the
French invasion of Egypt, demonstrated that either their native vigor
was exhausted and superannuated, or, at least, that the institutions
were superannuated by which their resources had been so long
administered. Accordingly, at the commencement of the present century,
the Sultan Selim II. endeavored to reform the military discipline; but
in the first collision with the prejudices of his people, and the
interest of the Janissaries, he perished by sedition. Mustafa, who
succeeded to the throne, in a few months met the same fate. But then
(1808) succeeded a prince formed by nature for such struggles,--cool,
vigorous, cruel, and intrepid. This was Mahmoud the Second. He
perfectly understood the crisis, and determined to pursue the plans of
his uncle Selim, even at the hazard of the same fate. Why was it that
Turkish soldiers had been made ridiculous in arms, as often as they had
met with French troops, who yet were so far from being the best in
Christendom, that Egypt herself, and the beaten Turks, had seen
_them_ in turn uniformly routed by the British? Physically, the
Turks were equal, at the very least, to the French. In what lay their
inferiority? Simply in discipline, and in their artillery. And so long
as their constitution and discipline continued what they had been,
suited (that is) to centuries long past and gone, and to a condition of
Christendom obsolete for ages, so long it seemed inevitable that the
same disasters should follow the Turkish banners. And to this point,
accordingly, the Sultan determined to address his earliest reforms. But
caution was necessary; he waited and watched. He seized all
opportunities of profiting by the calamities or the embarrassments of
his potent neighbors. He put down all open revolt. He sapped the
authority of all the great families in Asia Minor, whose hereditary
influence could be a counterpoise to his own. Mecca and Medina, the
holy cities of his religion, he brought again within the pale of his
dominions. He augmented and fostered, as a counterbalancing force to
the Janissaries, the corps of the Topjees or artillery-men. He amassed
preparatory treasures. And, up to the year 1820, "his government," says
Mr. Gordon, "was highly unpopular; but it was strong, stern, and
uniform; and he had certainly removed many impediments to the execution
of his ulterior projects."

Such was the situation of Turkey at the moment when her Grecian vassal
prepared to trample on her yoke. In her European territories she
reckoned, at the utmost, eight millions of subjects. But these, besides
being more or less in a semi-barbarous condition, and scattered over a
very wide surface of country, were so much divided by origin, by
language, and religion, that, without the support of her Asiatic arm,
she could not, according to the general opinion, have stood at all. The
rapidity of her descent, it is true, had been arrested by the energy of
her Sultans during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century.
But for the last thirty of the eighteenth she had made a headlong
progress downwards. So utterly, also, were the tables turned, that,
whereas in the fifteenth century her chief superiority over Christendom
had been in the three points of artillery, discipline, and fixed
revenue, precisely in these three she had sunk into utter
insignificance, whilst all Christendom had been continually improving.
Selim and Mahmoud indeed had made effectual reforms in the corps of
gunners, as we have said, and had raised it to the amount of sixty
thousand men; so that at present they have respectable field-artillery,
whereas previously they had only heavy battering-trains. But the
defects in discipline cannot be remedied, so long as the want of a
settled revenue obliges the Sultan to rely upon hurried levies from the
provincial militias of police. Turkey, however, might be looked upon as
still formidable for internal purposes, in the haughty and fanatical
character of her Moslem subjects. And we may add, as a concluding
circumstance of some interest, in this sketch of her modern condition,
that pretty nearly the same European territories as were assigned to
the eastern Roman empire at the time of its separation from the
western, [Footnote: "The vitals of the monarchy lay within that vast
triangle circumscribed by the Danube, the Save, the Adriatic, Euxine,
and Egean Seas, whose altitude may be computed at five hundred, and the
length of its base at seven hundred geographical miles."--GORDON. ]
were included within the frontier line of Turkey, on the first of
January, 1821.

Precisely in this year commenced the Grecian revolution. Concurrently
with the decay of her oppressor the Sultan, had been the prodigious
growth of her patron the Czar. In what degree she looked up to that
throne, and the intrigues which had been pursued with a view to that
connection, may be seen (as we have already noticed) in Eton's Turkey--
a book which attracted a great deal of notice about thirty years ago.
Meantime, besides this secret reliance on Russian countenance or aid,
Greece had since that era received great encouragement to revolt from
the successful experiment in that direction made by the Turkish
province of Servia. In 1800, Czerni George came forward as the asserter
of Servian independence, and drove the Ottomans out of that province.
_Personally_ he was not finally successful. But his example
outlived him; and, after fifteen years' struggle, Servia (says Mr.
Gordon) offered "the unwonted spectacle of a brave and armed Christian
nation living under its own laws in the heart of Turkey," and retaining
no memorial of its former servitude, but the payment of a slender and
precarious tribute to the Sultan, with a _verbal_ profession of
allegiance to his sceptre. Appearances were thus saved to the pride of
the haughty Moslem by barren concessions which cost no real sacrifice
to the substantially victorious Servian.

Examples, however, are thrown away upon a people utterly degraded by
long oppression. And the Greeks were pretty nearly in that condition.
"It would, no doubt," says Mr. Gordon, "be possible to cite a more
_cruel_ oppression than that of the Turks towards their Christian
subjects, but none _so fitted to break men's spirit_." The Greeks,
in fact (under which name are to be understood, not only those who
speak Greek, but the Christian Albanians of Roumelia and the Morea,
speaking a different language, but united with the Greeks in spiritual
obedience to the same church), were, in the emphatic phrase of Mr.
Gordon, "the slaves of slaves:" that is to say, not only were they
liable to the universal tyranny of the despotic Divan, but "throughout
the empire they were in the habitual intercourse of life subjected to
vexations, affronts, and exactions, from Mahometans of every rank.
Spoiled of their goods, insulted in their religion and domestic honor,
they could rarely obtain justice. The slightest flash of courageous
resentment brought down swift destruction on their heads; and cringing
humility alone enabled them to live in ease, or even in safety."
Stooping under this iron yoke of humiliation, we have reason to wonder
that the Greeks preserved sufficient nobility of mind to raise so much
as their wishes in the direction of independence. In a condition of
abasement, from which a simple act of apostasy was at once sufficient
to raise them to honor and wealth, "and from the meanest serfs gathered
them to the caste of oppressors," we ought not to wonder that some of
the Greeks should be mean, perfidious, and dissembling, but rather that
any (as Mr. Gordon says) "had courage to adhere to their religion, and
to eat the bread of affliction." But noble aspirations are fortunately
indestructible in human nature. And in Greece the lamp of independence
of spirit had been partially kept alive by the existence of a native
militia, to whom the Ottoman government, out of mere necessity, had
committed the local defence. These were called _Armatoles_ (or
Gendarmerie); their available strength was reckoned by Pouqueville (for
the year 1814) at ten thousand men; and, as they were a very effectual
little host for maintaining, from age to age, the "true faith militant"
of Greece, namely, that a temporary and a disturbed occupation of the
best lands in the country did not constitute an absolute conquest on
the part of the Moslems, most of whom flocked for security with their
families into the stronger towns; and, as their own martial appearance,
with arms in their hands, lent a very plausible countenance to their
insinuations that they, the Christian Armatoles, were the true _bona
fide_ governors and possessors of the land under a Moslem Suzerain;
and, as the general spirit of hatred to Turkish insolence was not
merely maintained in their own local stations, [Footnote: Originally,
it seems, there were fourteen companies (or _capitanerias_)
settled by imperial diplomas in the mountains of Olympus, Othryx,
Pindus, and Œta; and distinct appropriations were made by the Divan for
their support. _Within_ the Morea, the institution of the
Armatoles was never tolerated; but there the same spirit was kept alive
by tribes, such as the Mainatts, whose insurmountable advantages of
natural position enabled them eternally to baffle the most powerful
enemy.] but also propagated thence with activity to every part of
Greece;--it may be interesting to hear Mr. Gordon's account of their
peculiar composition and habits.

"The Turks," says he, "from the epoch of Mahommed the Second, did not
(unless in Thessaly) generally settle there. Beyond Mount Œta, although
they seized the best lands, the Mussulman inhabitants were chiefly
composed of the garrisons of towns with their families. Finding it
impossible to keep in subjection with a small force so many rugged
cantons, peopled by a poor and hardy race, and to hold in check the
robbers of Albania, the Sultans embraced the same policy which has
induced them to court the Greek hierarchy, and respect ecclesiastical
property,--by enlisting in their service the armed bands that they
could not destroy. When wronged or insulted, these Armatoles threw off
their allegiance, infested the roads, and pillaged the country; while
such of the peasants as were driven to despair by acts of oppression
joined their standard; the term Armatole was then exchanged for that of
Klefthis [_Kleptæs_] or Thief, a profession esteemed highly
honorable, when it was exercised sword in hand at the expense of the
Moslems. [Footnote: And apparently, we may add, when exercised at the
expense of whomsoever at sea. The old Grecian instinct, which
Thucydides states so frankly, under which all seafarers were dedicated
to spoil as people who courted attack, seems never to have been fully
rooted out from the little creeks and naval fastnesses of the Morea,
and of some of the Egean islands. Not, perhaps, the mere spirit of
wrong and aggression, but some old traditionary conceits and maxims,
brought on the great crisis of piracy, which fell under no less terrors
than of the triple thunders of the great allies.] Even in their
quietest mood, these soldiers curbed Turkish tyranny; for, the captains
and Christian primates of districts understanding each other, the
former, by giving to some of their men a hint to desert and turn
Klefts, could easily circumvent Mahometans who came on a mission
disagreeable to the latter. The habits and manners of the Armatoles,
living among forests and in mountain passes, were necessarily rude and
simple: their magnificence consisted in adorning with silver their
guns, pistols, and daggers; their amusements, in shooting at a mark,
dancing, and singing the exploits of the most celebrated chiefs.
Extraordinary activity, and endurance of hardships and fatigue, made
them formidable light troops in their native fastnesses; wrapped in
shaggy cloaks, they slept on the ground, defying the elements; and the
pure mountain air gave them robust health. Such were the warriors that,
in the very worst times, kept alive a remnant of Grecian spirit."

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