Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0145/01450.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 33KB | 516 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01450}
$Pretitle{287}
$Title{Greece
Chapter 1B.   The War of Independence, 1821-29}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{greek
military
greece
war
political
powers
army
greeks
system
otto}
$Date{1986}
$Log{Figure 4.*0145001.scf
}
Country:     Greece
Book:        Greece, A Country Study
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1986

Chapter 1B.   The War of Independence, 1821-29

     The crucial element in the evolution of a successful rebellion against
the Porte was clearly the empire's own internal collapse. Although an
independence movement had been growing for sometime, the Greeks considered
themselves too weak to take on the Ottoman Empire alone. They tried to
coordinate their efforts with revolts by Serbs and Bulgarians. The effort
failed, but uprisings in the Peloponnesus coincided with an invasion of the
Danubian principalities by the Greek rebel, Alexander Ypsilantis, in the
spring of 1821. The rebellion spread rapidly, and on March 25 (Easter Day)
Germanos, bishop of Old Patrai, officially proclaimed the revolution, throwing
the church's formidable symbolic force on the side of the rebels.

     Leaders came from the lower clergy, klephts and armatoloi, pirates and
merchant captains, and irregular troops all over the mainland. Neither the
church, the landowners, nor the merchant class, generally prosperous under
the empire, had associated themselves with the independence movement prior to
the outbreak of hostilities, but they were moved to join the rebellion because
of its obvious popular support.

     After the initial rash of violence the war settled into a long, drawn-out
contest of endurance. Almost immediately the Greek rebels set up three
regional assemblies to govern the liberated areas. And just as quickly
internal conflicts between the new institutions and among political factions
emerged, plaguing the rebellion for the duration of the war and beyond. A
constitution, strongly influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution, was
written in 1822, but attempts to establish a central government failed to
resolve the factional strife. During much of 1823 and 1824 a virtual civil war
undermined the war against the Turks. The situation was extremely complex
and confused, and historians still debate what the actual issues were. There
were a number of competing groups and ideologies involved, and frequently
shifting coalitions among them complicated the political atmosphere.

     As in any revolutionary period there were conflicts over the strategy
and tactics of fighting the war and over the nature of the postrevolutionary
system. To some extent these two sets of issues overlapped. There was a
fundamental difference between those who wanted to pursue the war using the
traditional klephtic methods of guerrilla war and relying on religious fervor
as the motivating force and those, especially those educated in the West, who
preferred the European model, using regular armies and set-piece tactics,
motivated by a conscious nationalism. The former, known as the "military"
party (headed by the klephtic leader Theodore Kolokotronis), also hoped to
retain the basic oligarchical structure of society, substituting themselves
for the Ottoman authorities while maintaining the central role of the church.
The rival "civilian party", or Westernizers, wanted to transform Greece into a
secular, liberal, constitutional state. Regional rivalries exacerbated the
situation.

     The European powers, meanwhile, looked upon the Greek rebellion as a
threat to the balance of power, only recently reestablished by the Congress
of Vienna after the Napoleonic wars. The demise of the Ottoman Empire would
leave a vacuum, and it was obvious that there would be three rivals to fill
it: Russia, Britain, and France. Until mid-1823, therefore, the powers
maintained strict neutrality. By then the three powers' commercial interests
in the region had begun to suffer. Simultaneously, the Greek rebellion caught
the imagination of many of the European intellectual elite, who agitated for
support of the effort and in many cases went to Greece to fight (most notably
British poet Lord Byron, who died of fever in 1824). The rebellion had shown
surprising strength, but it was clear that foreign intervention would be
required to tip the balance.

     Between 1823 and 1825 the three powers maneuvered to place themselves in
the best position to guarantee influence beyond the war. As it became
increasingly obvious that the powers would eventually intervene, rebel
factions, or parties, tied to the powers grew up, further complicating the
internal situation. The turning point came in 1825 with the sultan's request
for aid from Egypt, a tributary state. Because Egyptian control of the
Peloponnesus was unacceptable to the powers, they began the process of
negotiating an end to the war, recommending an autonomous status for Greece
within the Ottoman Empire. In 1827 when the Turks, flushed with a series of
recent military successes, refused mediation, a joint naval force dispatched
by the three powers destroyed the Turco-Egyptian fleet in the Bay of Navarino.
Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, acting in his self-appointed role as protector of
Orthodox Christians, declared war on Turkey, and a Russian army pushed to the
outer defenses of Constantinople. By the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople Russia
compelled Turkey to recognize the independence of Greece, but Crete and
Thessaly, though claimed by the Greeks, were left in Turkish hands.

     To counter Russia's claim to be sole protector of Greece, Britain forced
a renegotiation of the border settlement, spelled out in the first London
protocol in 1829. Of greater significance, the European powers also gave
Greece their formal recognition. Greek leaders protested that 80 percent of
the nearly 4 million Greeks in the Ottoman Empire had been left under Turkish
rule, and Greece's pro-Russian president, John Kapodistrias, rejected the
settlement. Kapodistrias, who had made domestic enemies by his attempts to
disarm the kelphts and to centralize the republic's government, was
assassinated in 1831, plunging the country into anarchy.

     The European powers convened once again and in the second London
protocol, agreed to in 1831, declared Greece a monarchy under joint British,
French, and Russian protection. It was further decided that a foreign monarch
was required to avoid identification of the executive with one of the native
factions. Although somewhat rankled by the degree of foreign dominance
inherent in these protocols, many Greeks, recalling the violent end of
Kapodistrias' presidency, nevertheless yielded to the terms.

The Kingdom of Greece

Otto I, 1831-62

     The "protecting" powers gave the Greek crown to Otto, the 17-year-old
younger son of the king of Bavaria. Until he reached the age of majority,
however, the direction of the Greek government fell to a regency council
headed by Count Joseph von Armansperg. The Greek Westernizers' vision was
put into place. The new state was designed to be thoroughly European, at least
in its institutional structure. The regents imposed a complicated judicial
code, modeled on that of Bavaria, ignoring a long history of customary law.
They replaced the traditional decentralized forms of local government,
inherited from the Ottoman period, with a modern, centralized bureaucracy that
the Greeks considered alien and unworkable. The Orthodox church was declared
to be "autocephalous," or independent, in 1833, though in practice it was
firmly subordinated to the state, and the Roman Catholic Otto was named its
head. Tax collection was efficient, and the taxes were no less burdensome than
they had been under the Turks. The capital was moved from its original site in
Navplion to Athens in 1834.

     Armed irregulars continued to cause trouble in the early years, and
efforts to incorporate them into a Bavarian-style army were disappointing.
Many returned to the traditional practice of brigandage and somet