The rise of the Nation States in Europe, The Greek War of Independence.

 The Greeks were one of the first people in Europe to seek independence after 1815. Long before Jesus Christ and Muhammad, the Greeks founded the world’s first great civilization base on Athens. But their country was conquered by the Romans and later by the Ottoman Turks. Athens was taken in1456, and Greece became part of this great Moslem Empire for nearly 400 years.

During that period the Turks practiced religious toleration, unlike many European countries at that time. Their Greek subjects were allowed to follow their Christian faith. Indeed, the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church had his cathedral in Constantinople not Athens.

The Greeks were not badly treated by the Turks, but they were heavily taxed and some Greek Children were forced to join the Sultan’s special army of Janissaries. Many of the other people of Europe at that time would have welcomed the relative independence and affluence enjoyed by mass Greek merchants, government official and seamen.

In any case most of the people who called themselves Greeks were not true descendants of the inhabitants of Ancient Greece at all, since many of them were Slav or Albanian in origin. Nor did they speak or write the language of the ancient Creeks.

 

But there were Greeks who wanted to restore to Greece the sprit and the great traditions of the past. A learned man called Korais helped to give the Greeks a new version of their language, which was based on Ancient Greeks and on the everyday language spoken by ordinary people, such as the brigands and herdsmen in the hills and the pirates at the coast. He translated many of the ancient classics of the Greeks writers into this modern Greeks, helping to develop great Greek pride in their past glories.

In 1815 a number of rich Greek helped to found a secret society, the Hetairia Philike (Group of Friend), which had as its aim the achievement of Greek independence and the restoration of Greece to all its former glories. In 1821 the movement had over 20,000 members.

By this time the power of the ottoman Turks in Europe had declined. Greeks, who resented the fact that they were a conquered race. Saw their chance in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. In 1821 a badly organized uprising led by Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, was easily defeated by the Turks in the North.

The first uprising, however was soon followed by a second rebellion in the Morea and the Greek island in the south. Here Greek seamen and pirates controlled the seas and were well able to prevent the sultan from landing troops to come to the rescue of the Turks who were living in the Morea. Many of these Moslems were brutally murdered by the Christian of Greece.

In retaliation the Turks executed the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople on Easter Sunday in 1822. They seized men, woman and children on the island of Chiosa and put them to death in another horrible massacre.

The Turks, unable to overcome the rebels with the  force at their disposal, and hampered by their inability to control the seas, sought the help of Mehemet Ali, the ruler of Egypt. He sent his son Ibrahim Pasha to the rescue with a powerful navy.

Ibrahim Pasha seemed set to accomplish the reconquest of the Morea, but much to the horror of the new Czar of Russia. Nicholas I, and Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, this was accompanied by fresh atrocities and the hint that Greece might be eventually colonized by the Egyptians. However, Canning had no desire to Czar gain a foot hold in Greece, as he would undoubtedly do if allowed to intervene unfettered in the war. So Britain sign the treaty of London with Russia (and also France) in July 1827. These eventually guaranteed Greek Independence although the Allies still envisaged it forming a self-governing nation state within the Turkish Empire.

To implement this decision, they sent a fleet to the area of blocked the area peacefully (ie to prevent Turkish and Egyptians ships supplying their troops there). For some reason, or other, the Turks heavily outgunned, provoked a conflict by opening fire on the Allied ships when they met up with them in Navarino Bay (20 October 1827) Immediately the Allied worship retaliated and sank the Modern fleet.

Ibrahim Pasha was now unable to reinforce or supply his army. Soon Russian and France forces were involved in the war and the Turks were forced to agree peace terms with Russia (treaty of Adrianople 1829). This agreement, in 182 that Greece should become a completely independent state under a German Prince-Otto of Bavaria. The new country was minute in size, Unlike modern Greece it did not include the island of Grete (Greek in 19008) to the north.