Chapter 24

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."