"... for the greatest miracle of all was surely the outcome of the war itself," writes Mark Mazower (professor of history at Columbia University in New York) on page 460 of his voluminous (573 pages) study of the Greek Revolution that began in 1821 and ended in July 1832 when the Ottoman Sultan Mahmut II officially recognised the Kingdom of Greece. It was the beginning of the Ottoman-Greek and after 1923 Turkish-Greek relationship, which cannot be called entirely unproblematic up to this day.
Five years earlier, things looked extremely bad for the Greek insurgents. The Ottoman commander-in-chief Ibrahim Pasha, son of Mehmet Ali Pasha, ruler of Egypt and founder of the Egyptian royal family, had reconquered almost all of the mainland of Greece and was about to conquer the islands of Hydra and Spetses, bases of Greek naval power, consisting mainly of pirates and privateers, which would most likely have meant the end of the revolution.
Fate, however, wanted otherwise. On October 20, 1827, the combined Ottoman and Egyptian fleets were routed in Navarino Bay, present-day Pylos, by a Franco-Anglo-Russian fleet commanded by Admiral Codrington. The Russian squadron was commanded by the Dutchman Lodewijk, Count van Heiden, the only Dutch naval hero from Drenthe, who earned his spurs in Russian service. According to tradition, he would be Berend Botje from the well-known children's song, but this aside.
In his well-known, lively style of writing, Mazower presents us with an extremely detailed picture of the beginning and course of the Greek revolution, which began with the invasion of Walachia by Prince Alexander Ypsilantis on February 22, 1821. An invasion that soon failed because the Russian Tsar was unwilling to support the uprising.
In the following March a number of local uprisings broke out in the Morea (Peloponnese), which grew into the revolutionary struggle out of which the Kingdom of Greece would eventually arise, something that the insurgents had not initially envisaged, according to Mazower. For most of the rebellion's leaders, wealthy landowners, such as the Deliyannis family, or former brigands, such as Theodoros Kolokotronis and other warlords, the main concern was power and self-enrichment. Mazower thoroughly does away with the heroic status accorded to men like Kolokotronis, Petros Mavromihalis and Odysseus Androutsos, to name just a few, in later nationalistic Greek historiography. During the war, Greek warlords sometimes fought each other more often and more eagerly than the Ottomans. Shocking are the stories of Greek gangs, 'irregulars' Mazower calls them, who plunder Greek villages and towns, as shocking as the massacre or enslavement by the Greeks of a large part of the Muslim population in the Peloponnese. The massacre on Chios in April 1822, an event that had repercussions throughout the whole of Europe, shows that the Ottomans were just as worse.
In addition to these horror stories, he also describes heroic deeds, such as the sinking of the Ottoman flagship off Chios by Admiral Kanaris and the tenacious defence of Messolonghi (1825/26), with the valiant, if partly unsuccessful, desperate attempt of the defenders, accompanied by women and children, to break through the lines of the besiegers. It shows the book as a well balanced study.
Mazower discusses the role of Greek intellectuals, often educated abroad, such as Adamantios Koraïs and Alexandros Mavrokordatos vis-a-vis that of followers of the Filiki Etairia, founded by Greeks in Odessa, who, according to the intellectuals, were going way too fast because the time for a revolt was not yet ripe in their eyes. Mavrokordatos understood that the battle could never be won without the support of the European Great Powers and that this required an representative Greek government, something to which the landowning elite and warlords basically were opposed. That something like such a government eventually emerged, although it was usually quite powerless, is a small miracle in itself.
The role of Philhellenism in Europe and America is extensively discussed as well as its influence on the course of the war. The death of Lord Byron in Messolonghi, not by a bullet, but by malaria, sent a shock wave through Europe. Mazower also writes about the connections of Philhellenism with the liberal pursuit of parliamentary democracy in Europe and abolitionism, the struggle for the abolition of slavery in the US and European colonies. It's not for nothing that the subtitle reads '1821 and the Making of Modern Europe'. This makes The Greek Revolution a particularly rich and important study, which in terms of depth and quality will not soon be surpassed in its kind, I believe. An absolute necessity for anyone with an interest in the history of Modern Greece and Europe.
Mark Mazower, The Greek Revolution. 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe. Penguin Random House UK, 2021.
