A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878 Part 32

The overthrow of the Spanish Const.i.tution by foreign arms led to a series of events in Portugal which forced England to a more direct intervention in the Peninsula than had yet been necessary, and heightened the conflict that had sprung up between its policy and that of Continental absolutism. The same parties and the same pa.s.sions, political and religious, existed in Portugal as in Spain, and the enemies of the Const.i.tution found the same support at foreign Courts. The King of Portugal, John VI., was a weak but not ill-meaning man; his wife, who was a sister of Ferdinand of Spain, and his son Don Miguel were the chiefs of the conspiracy against the Cortes. In June, 1823, a military revolt, arranged by Miguel, brought the existing form of government to an end: the King promised, however, when dissolving the Cortes, that a Const.i.tution should be bestowed by himself upon Portugal; and he seems to have intended to keep his word. The amba.s.sadors of France and Austria were, however, busy in throwing hindrances in the way, and Don Miguel prepared to use violence to prevent his father from making any concession to the Liberals. King John, in fear for his life, applied to England for troops; Canning declined to land soldiers at Lisbon, but sent a squadron, with orders to give the King protection. The winter of 1823 was pa.s.sed in intrigues; in May, 1824, Miguel arrested the Ministers and surrounded the King's palace with troops. After several days of confusion King John made his escape to the British ships, and Miguel, who was alternately cowardly and audacious, then made his submission, and was ordered to leave the country. King John died in the spring of 1826 without having granted a Const.i.tution. Pedro, his eldest son, had already been made Emperor of Brazil; and, as it was impossible that Portugal and Brazil could again be united, it was arranged that Pedro's daughter, when of sufficient age, should marry her uncle Miguel, and so save Portugal from the danger of a contested succession. Before renouncing the crown of Portugal, Pedro granted a Const.i.tution to that country. A Regency had already been appointed by King John, in which neither the Queen-dowager nor Miguel was included.

[Desertion of Portuguese soldiery, 1826.]

[Spain permits the deserters to attack Portugal.]

[Canning sends troops to Lisbon, Dec., 1826.]

Miguel had gone to Vienna. Although a sort of Caliban in character and understanding, this Prince met with the welcome due to a kinsman of the Imperial house, and to a representative of the good cause of absolutism. He was received by Metternich with great interest, and his fortunes were taken under the protection of the Austrian Court. In due time, it was hoped this savage and ignorant churl would do yeoman's service to Austrian principles in the Peninsula. But the Regency and the new Const.i.tution of Portugal had not to wait for the tardy operation of Metternich's covert hostility. The soldiery who had risen at Miguel's bidding in 1823 now proclaimed him King, and deserted to Spanish soil. Within the Spanish frontier they were received by Ferdinand's representatives with open arms. The demands made by the Portuguese amba.s.sador at Madrid for their dispersion and for the surrender of their weapons were evaded. The cause of these armed bands on the frontier became the cause of the Clerical and Ultra-Royalist party over all Europe. Money was sent to them from France and Austria. They were joined by troops of Spanish Carlists or Apostolicals; they were fed, clothed, and organised, if not by the Spanish Government itself, at least by those over whose action the Spanish Government exercised control. [346]

Thus raised to considerable military strength, they made incursions into Portugal, and at last attempted a regular invasion. The Regency of Lisbon, justly treating these outrages as the act of the Spanish Government, and appealing to the treaties which bound Great Britain to defend Portugal against foreign attack, demanded the a.s.sistance of this country. More was involved in the action taken by Canning than a possible contest with Spain; the seriousness of the danger lay in the fact that Spain was still occupied by French armies, and that a war with Spain might, and probably would, involve a war with France, if not with other Continental Powers. But the English Ministry waited only for the confirmation of the alleged facts by their own amba.s.sador. The treaty-rights of Portugal were undoubted; the temper of the English Parliament and nation, strained to the utmost by the events of the last three years, was such that a war against Ferdinand and against the destroyers of Spanish liberty would have caused more rejoicing than alarm. Nine days after the formal demand of the Portuguese arrived, four days after their complaint was substantiated by the report of our amba.s.sador, Canning announced to the House of Commons that British troops were actually on the way to Lisbon. In words that alarmed many of his own party, and roused the bitter indignation of every Continental Court, Canning warned those whose acts threatened to force England into war, that the war, if war arose, would be a war of opinion, and that England, however earnestly she might endeavour to avoid it, could not avoid seeing ranked under her banner all the restless and discontented of any nation with which she might come into conflict. As for the Portuguese Const.i.tution which formed the real object of the Spanish attack, it had not, Canning said, been given at the instance of Great Britain, but he prayed that Heaven might prosper it. It was impossible to doubt that a Minister who spoke thus, and who, even under expressions of regret, hinted at any alliance with the revolutionary elements in France and Spain, was formidably in earnest. The words and the action of Canning produced the effect which he desired. The Government of Ferdinand discovered the means of checking the activity of the Apostolicals: the presence of the British troops at Lisbon enabled the Portuguese Regency to throw all its forces upon the invaders and to drive them from the country. They were disbanded when they re-crossed the Spanish frontier; the French Court loudly condemned their immoral enterprise; and the Const.i.tution of Portugal seemed, at least for the moment, to have triumphed over its open and its secret enemies.

[The policy of Canning.]

The tone of the English Government had indeed changed since the time when Metternich could express a public hope that the three Eastern Powers would have the approval of this country in their attack upon the Const.i.tution of Naples. In 1820 such a profession might perhaps have pa.s.sed for a mistake; in 1826 it would have been a palpable absurdity. Both in England and on the Continent it was felt that the difference between the earlier and the later spirit of our policy was summed up in the contrast between Canning and Castlereagh. It has become an article of historical faith that Castlereagh's melancholy death brought one period of our foreign policy to a close and inaugurated another: it has been said that Canning liberated England from its Continental connexions; it has even been claimed for him that he performed for Europe no less a task than the dissolution of the Holy Alliance. [347] The figure of Canning is indeed one that will for ever fill a great s.p.a.ce in European history; and the more that is known of the opposition which he encountered both from his sovereign and from his great rival Wellington, the greater must be our admiration for his clear, strong mind, and for the conquering force of his character. But the legend which represents English policy as taking an absolutely new departure in 1822 does not correspond to the truth of history. Canning was a member of the Cabinet from 1816 to 1820; it is a poor compliment to him to suppose that he either exercised no influence upon his colleagues or acquiesced in a policy of which he disapproved; and the history of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle proves that his counsels had even at that time gained the ascendant. The admission made by Castlereagh in 1820, after Canning had left the Cabinet, that Austria, as a neighbouring and endangered State, had a right to suppress the revolutionary const.i.tution of Naples, would probably not have gained Canning's a.s.sent; in all other points, the action of our Government at Troppau and Laibach might have been his own. Canning loved to speak of his system as one of neutrality, and of non-interference in that struggle between the principles of despotism and of democracy which seemed to be spreading over Europe. He avowed his sympathy for Spain as the object of an unjust and unprovoked war, but he most solemnly warned the Spaniards not to expect English a.s.sistance. He prayed that the Const.i.tution of Portugal might prosper, but he expressly disclaimed all connection with its origin, and defended Portugal not because it was a Const.i.tutional State, but because England was bound by treaties to defend it against foreign invasion. The arguments against intervention on behalf of Spain which Canning addressed to the English sympathisers with that country might have been uttered by Castlereagh; the denial of the right of foreign Powers to attack the Spanish Const.i.tution, with which Castlereagh headed his own instructions for Verona, might have been written by Canning.

[Canning and the European concert.]

The statements that Canning withdrew England from the Continental system, and that he dissolved the Holy Alliance, cannot be accepted without large correction. The general relations existing between the Great Powers were based, not on the ridiculous and obsolete treaty of Holy Alliance, but on the Acts which were signed at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. The first of these was the secret Quadruple Treaty which bound England and the three Eastern Powers to attack France in case a revolution in that country should endanger the peace of Europe; the second was the general declaration of all the five Powers that they would act in amity and take counsel with one another. From the first of these alliances Canning certainly did not withdraw England. He would perhaps have done so in 1823 if the Quadruple Treaty had bound England to maintain the House of Bourbon on the French throne; but it had been expressly stated that the deposition of the Bourbons would not necessarily and in itself be considered by England as endangering the peace of Europe. This treaty remained in full force up to Canning's death; and if a revolutionary army had marched from Paris upon Antwerp, he would certainly have claimed the a.s.sistance of the three Eastern Powers. With respect to the general concert of Europe, established or confirmed by the declaration of Aix-la-Chapelle, this had always been one of varying extent and solidity. Both France and England had held themselves aloof at Troppau. The federative action was strongest and most mischievous not before but after the death of Castlereagh, and in the period that followed the Congress of Verona; for though the war against Spain was conducted by France alone, the three Eastern Powers had virtually made themselves responsible for the success of the enterprise, and it was the influence of their amba.s.sadors at Paris and Madrid which prevented any restrictions from being imposed upon Ferdinand's restored sovereignty.

Canning is invested with a spurious glory when it is said that his action in Spain and in Portugal broke up the league of the Continental Courts.

Canning indeed shaped the policy of our own country with equal independence and wisdom, but the political centre of Europe was at this time not London but Vienna. The keystone of the European fabric was the union of Austria and Russia, and this union was endangered, not by anything that could take place in the Spanish Peninsula, but by the conflicting interests of these two great States in regard to the Ottoman Empire. From the moment when the Treaty of Paris was signed, every Austrian politician fixed his gaze upon the roads leading to the Lower Danube, and anxiously noted the signs of coming war, or of continued peace, between Russia and the Porte. [348] It was the triumph of Metternich to have diverted the Czar's thoughts during the succeeding years from his grievances against Turkey, and to have baffled the Russian diplomatists and generals who, like Capodistrias, sought to spur on their master to enterprises of Eastern conquest. At the Congress of Verona the shifting and incoherent manoeuvres of Austrian statecraft can indeed only be understood on the supposition that Metternich was thinking all the time less of Spain than of Turkey, and struggling at whatever cost to maintain that personal influence over Alexander which had hitherto prevented the outbreak of war in the East. But the antagonism so long suppressed broke out at last. The progress of the Greek insurrection brought Austria and Russia not indeed into war, but into the most embittered hostility with one another. It was on this rock that the ungainly craft which men called the Holy Alliance at length struck and went to pieces. Canning played his part well in the question of the East, but he did not create this question. There were forces at work which, without his intervention, would probably have made an end of the despotic amities of 1815. It is not necessary to the t.i.tle of a great statesman that he should have called into being the elements which make a new political order possible; it is sufficient praise that he should have known how to turn them to account.

CHAPTER XV.

Condition of Greece: its Races and Inst.i.tutions--The Greek Church--Communal System--The aegaean Islands--The Phanariots--Greek Intellectual Revival; Koraes--Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece with the French Revolution and Napoleon--The Hetaeria Philike--Hypsilanti's Attempt in the Danubian Provinces; its Failure--Revolt of the Morea: Ma.s.sacres: Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople--Att.i.tude of Russia, Austria, and England--Extension of the Revolt: Affairs at Hydra--The Greek Leaders--Fall of Tripolitza--The Ma.s.sacre of Chios-- Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822--Dissensions of the Greeks--Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid--Ibrahim conquers Crete and invades the Morea--Siege of Missolonghi--Philh.e.l.lenism in Europe--Russian Proposal for Intervention--Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander: Accession of Nicholas--Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg-- Anglo-Russian Protocol--Treaty between England, Russia, and France--Death of Canning--Navarino--War between Russia and Turkey--Campaigns of 1828 and 1829--Treaty of Adrianople--Capodistrias President of Greece--Leopold accepts and then declines the Greek Crown--Murder of Capodistrias--Otho, King of Greece.

[Greece in the Napoleonic age.]

Of the Christian races which at the beginning of the third decade of this century peopled the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the Greek was that which had been least visibly affected by the political and military events of the Napoleonic age. Servia, after a long struggle, had in the year 1817 gained local autonomy under its own princes, although Turkish troops still garrisoned its fortresses, and the sovereignty of the Sultan was acknowledged by the payment of tribute. The Romanic districts, Wallachia and Moldavia, which, in the famous interview of Tilsit, Napoleon had bidden the Czar to make his own, were restored by Russia to the Porte in the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, but under conditions which virtually established a Russian protectorate. Greece, with the exception of the Ionian Islands, had neither been the scene of any military operations, nor formed the subject of any treaty. Yet the age of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic wars had silently wrought in the Greek nation the last of a great series of changes which fitted it to take its place among the free peoples of Europe. The signs were there from which those who could read the future might have gathered that the political resurrection of Greece was near at hand. There were some who, with equal insight and patriotism, sought during this period to lay the intellectual foundation for that national independence which they foresaw that their children would win with the sword.

[Greece in the eighteenth century.]

The forward movement of the Greek nation may be said, in general terms, to have become visible during the first half of the eighteenth century.

Serf.a.ge had then disappeared; the peasant was either a free-holder, or a farmer paying a rent in kind for his land. In the gradual and un.o.bserved emanc.i.p.ation of the labouring cla.s.s the first condition of national revival had already been fulfilled. The peasantry had been formed which, when the conflict with the Turk broke out, bore the brunt of the long struggle. In comparison with the Prussian serf, the Greek cultivator at the beginning of the eighteenth century was an independent man: in comparison with the English labourer, he was well fed and well housed. The evils to which the Greek population was exposed, wherever Greeks and Turks lived together, were those which brutalised or degraded the Christian races in every Ottoman province. There was no redress for injury inflicted by a Mohammedan official or neighbour. If a wealthy Turk murdered a Greek in the fields, burnt down his house, and outraged his family, there was no court where the offender could be brought to justice. The term by which the Turk described his Christian neighbour was "our rayah," that is, "our subject." A Mohammedan landowner might terrorise the entire population around him, carry off the women, flog and imprison the men, and yet feel that he had committed no offence against the law; for no law existed but the Koran, and no Turkish court of justice but that of the Kadi, where the complaint of the Christian pa.s.sed for nothing.

This was the monstrous relation that existed between the dominant and the subject nationalities, not in Greece only, but in every part of the Ottoman Empire where Mohammedans and Christians inhabited the same districts. The second great and general evil was the extortion practised by the tax-gatherers, and this fell upon the poorer Mohammedans equally with the Christians, except in regard to the poll-tax, or haratsch, the badge of servitude, which was levied on Christians alone. All land paid t.i.the to the State; and until the tax-gatherer had paid his visit it was not permitted to the peasant to cut the ripe crop. This rule enabled the tax-gatherer, whether a Mohammedan or a Christian, to inflict ruin upon those who did not bribe himself or his masters; for by merely postponing his visit he could destroy the value of the harvest. Round this central inst.i.tution of tyranny and waste, there gathered, except in the districts protected by munic.i.p.al privileges, every form of corruption natural to a society where the State heard no appeals, and made no inquiry into the processes employed by those to whom it sold the taxes. What was possible in the way of extortion was best seen in the phenomenon of well-built villages being left tenantless, and the population of rich districts dying out in a time of peace, without pestilence, without insurrection, without any greater wrong on the part of the Sultan's government than that normal indifference which permitted the existence of a community to depend upon the moderation or the caprice of the individual possessors of force.

[Origin of modern Greece Byzantine, not cla.s.sic.]

[Slavonic and Albanian elements.]

Such was the framework, or, as it may be said, the common-law of the mixed Turkish and Christian society of the Ottoman Empire. On this background we have now to trace the social and political features which stood out in Greek life, which preserved the race from losing its separate nationality, and which made the ultimate recovery of its independence possible. In the first outburst of sympathy and delight with which every generous heart in western Europe hailed the standard of h.e.l.lenic freedom upraised in 1821, the twenty centuries which separated the Greece of literature from the Greece of to-day were strangely forgotten. The imagination went straight back to Socrates and Leonidas, and pictured in the islander or the hillsman who rose against Mahmud II. the counterpart of those glorious beings who gave to Europe the ideals of intellectual energy, of plastic beauty, and of poetic truth. The illusion was a happy one, if it excited on behalf of a brave people an interest which Servia or Montenegro might have failed to gain; but it led to a reaction when disappointments came; it gave inordinate importance to the question of the physical descent of the Greeks; and it produced a false impression of the causes which had led up to the war of independence, and of the qualities, the habits, the bonds of union, which exercised the greatest power over the nation. These were, to a great extent, unlike anything existing in the ancient world; they had originated in Byzantine, not in cla.s.sic Greece; and where the scenes of old h.e.l.lenic history appeared to be repeating themselves, it was due more to the continuing influence of the same seas and the same mountains than to the survival of any political fragments of the past. The Greek population had received a strong Slavonic infusion many centuries before. More recently, Albanian settlers had expelled the inhabitants from certain districts both in the mainland and in the Morea. Attica, Boeotia, Corinth, and Argolis were at the outbreak of the war of independence peopled in the main by a race of Albanian descent, who still used, along with some Greek, the Albanian language. [349] The sense of a separate nationality was, however, weak among these settlers, who, unlike some small Albanian communities in the west of the Morea, were Christians, not Mohammedans.

Neighbourhood, commerce, ident.i.ty of religion and similarity of local inst.i.tutions were turning these Albanians into Greeks; and no community of pure h.e.l.lenic descent played a greater part in the national war, or exhibited more of the maritime energy and daring which we a.s.sociate peculiarly with the h.e.l.lenic name, than the islanders of Hydra and Spetza, who had crossed from the Albanian parts of the Morea and taken possession of these desert rocks not a hundred years before. The same phenomenon of an a.s.similation of Greeks and Albanians was seen in southern Epirus, the border-ground between the two races. The Suliotes, Albanian mountaineers, whose military exploits form one of the most extraordinary chapters in history, showed signs of Greek influences before the Greek war of independence began, and in this war they made no distinction between the Greek cause and their own. Even the rule of the ferocious Ali Pasha at Janina had been favourable to the extension of Greek civilisation in Epirus. Under this Mohammedan tyrant Janina contained more schools than Athens. The Greek population of the district increased; and in the sense of a common religious antagonism to the Mohammedan, the Greek and the Albanian Christians in Epirus forgot their difference of race.

[The Greek Church.]

[Lower clergy.]

[The Patriarch an imperial functionary.]

[The Bishops civil magistrates.]

The central element in modern Greek life was the religious profession of the Orthodox Eastern Church. Where, as in parts of Crete, the Greek adopted Mohammedanism, all the other elements of his nationality together did not prevent him from amalgamating with the Turk. The sound and popular forces of the Church belonged to the lower clergy, who, unlike the priests of the Roman Church, were married and shared the life of the people. If ignorant and bigoted, they were nevertheless the real guardians of national spirit; and if their creed was a superst.i.tion rather than a religion, it at least kept the Greeks in a wholesome antagonism to the superst.i.tion of their masters. The higher clergy stood in many respects in a different position.

The Patriarch of Constantinople was a great officer of the Porte. His dignities and his civil jurisdiction had been restored and even enlarged by the Mohammedan conquerors of the Greek Empire, with the express object of employing the Church as a means of securing obedience to themselves: and it was quite in keeping with the history of this great office that, when the Greek national insurrection at last broke out, the Patriarch Gregorius IV.

should have consented, though unwillingly, to launch the curse of the Church against it. The Patriarch gained his office by purchase, or through intrigues at the Divan; he paid an enormous annual backsheesh for it; and he was liable to be murdered or deposed as soon as his Mussulman patrons lost favour with the Sultan, or a higher bid was made for his office by a rival ecclesiastic. To satisfy the claims of the Palace the Patriarch was compelled to be an extortioner himself. The bishoprics in their turn were sold in his ante-chambers, and the Bishops made up the purchase-money by fleecing their clergy. But in spite of a deserved reputation for venality, the Bishops in Greece exercised very great influence, both as ecclesiastics and as civil magistrates. Whether their jurisdiction in lawsuits between Christians arose from the custom of referring disputes to their arbitration or was expressly granted to them by the Sultan, they virtually displaced in all Greek communities the court of the Kadi, and afforded the merchant or the farmer a tribunal where his own law was administered in his own language. Even a Mohammedan in dispute with a Christian would sometimes consent to bring the matter before the Bishops' Court rather than enforce his right to obtain the dilatory and capricious decision of an Ottoman judge.

[Communal organisation.]

[The Morea.]

The condition of the Greeks living in the country that now forms the h.e.l.lenic Kingdom and in the aegaean Islands exhibited strong local contrasts.

It was, however, common to all that, while the Turk held the powers of State in his hand, the details of local administration in each district were left to the inhabitants, the Turk caring nothing about these matters so long as the due amount of taxes was paid and the due supply of sailors provided. The apportionment of taxes among households and villages seems to have been the germ of self-government from which several types of munic.i.p.al organisation, some of them of great importance in the history of the Greek nation, developed. In the Paschalik of the Morea the taxes were usually farmed by the Voivodes, or Beys, the Turkish governors of the twenty-three provinces into which the Morea was divided. But in each village or township the inhabitants elected officers called Proestoi, who, besides collecting the taxes and managing the affairs of their own communities, met in a district-a.s.sembly, and there determined what share of the district-taxation each community should bear. One Greek officer, called Primate, and one Mohammedan, called Ayan, were elected to represent the district, and to take part in the council of the Pasha of the Morea, who resided at Tripolitza. [350] The Primates exercised considerable power. Created originally by the Porte to expedite the collection of the revenue, they became a Greek aristocracy. They were indeed an aristocracy of no very n.o.ble kind. Agents of a tyrannical master, they shared the vices of the tyrant and of the slave. Often farmers of the taxes themselves, obsequious and intriguing in the palace of the Pasha at Tripolitza, grasping and despotic in their native districts, they were described as a species of Christian Turk. But whatever their vices, they saved the Greeks from being left without leaders. They formed a cla.s.s accustomed to act in common, conversant with details of administration, and especially with the machinery for collecting and distributing supplies. It was this financial experience of the Primates of the Morea which gave to the rebellion of the Greeks what little unity of organisation it exhibited in its earliest stage.

[Northern Greece. The Armatoli and the Klephts.]

On the north of the Gulf of Corinth the features of the communal system were less distinct than in the Morea. There was, however, in the mountain-country of aetolia and Pindus a rough military organisation which had done great service to Greece in keeping alive the national spirit and habits of personal independence. The Turks had found a local militia established in this wild region at the time of their conquest, and had not interfered with it for some centuries. The Armatoli, or native soldiery, recruited from peasants, shepherds, and muleteers, kept Mohammedan influences at a distance, until, in the eighteenth century, the Sultans made it a fixed rule of policy to diminish their numbers and to reduce the power of their captains. Before 1820 the Armatoli had become comparatively few and weak; but as they declined, bands of Klephts, or brigands, grew in importance; and the mountaineer who was no longer allowed to practise arms as a guardian of order, enlisted himself among the robbers. Like the freebooters of our own northern border, these brigands became the heroes of song. Though they plundered the Greek as well as the Mohammedan, the national spirit approved their exploits. It was, no doubt, something, that the physical energy of the marauder and the habit of encountering danger should not be wholly on the side of the Turk and the Albanian. But the influence of the Klephts in sustaining Greek nationality has been overrated. They had but recently become numerous, and the earlier organisation of the northern Armatoli was that to which the sound and vigorous character of the Greek peasantry in these regions, the finest part of the Greek race on the mainland, was really due. [351]

[The aegaean Islands.]

[Chios.]

In the islands of the aegaean the condition of the Greeks was on the whole happy and prosperous. Some of these islands had no Turkish population; in others the caprice of a Sultana, the goodwill of the Capitan Pasha who governed the Archipelago, or the judicious offer of a sum of money when money was wanted by the Porte, had so lightened the burden of Ottoman sovereignty, that the Greek island-community possessed more liberty than was to be found in any part of Europe, except Switzerland. The taxes payable to the central government, including the haratsch or poll-tax levied on all Christians, had often been commuted for a fixed sum, which was raised without the interposition of the Turkish tax-gatherer. In Hydra, Spetza, and Psara, the so-called nautical islands, the supremacy of the Turk was felt only in the obligation to furnish sailors to the Ottoman navy, and in the payment of a tribute of about 100 per annum. The government of these three islands was entirely in the hands of the inhabitants. In Chios, though a considerable Mussulman population existed by the side of the Greek, there was every sign of peace and prosperity.

Each island bore its own peculiar social character, and had its munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions of more or less value. The Hydriote was quarrelsome, turbulent, quick to use the knife, but outspoken, honest in dealing, and an excellent sailor. The picture of Chian life, as drawn even by those who have judged the Greeks most severely, is one of singular beauty and interest; the picture of a self-governing society in which the family trained the citizen in its own bosom, and in which, while commerce enriched all, the industry of the poor within their homes and in their gardens was refined by the practice of an art. The skill which gave its value to the embroidery and to the dyes of Chios was exercised by those who also worked the hand-loom and cultivated the mastic and the rose. The taste and the labour of man requited nature's gifts of sky, soil, and sea; and in the pursuit of occupations which stimulated, not deadened, the faculties of the worker, idleness and intemperance were alike unknown. [352] How bright a scene of industry, when compared with the grime and squalor of the English factory-town, where the human and the inanimate machine grind out their yearly mountains of iron-ware and calico, in order that the employer may vie with his neighbours in soulless ostentation, and the workman consume his millions upon millions in drink.

[The Greeks have ecclesiastical power in other Turkish provinces.]

The territory where the Greeks formed the great majority of the population included, beyond the boundaries of the present h.e.l.lenic Kingdom, the islands adjacent to the coast of Asia Minor, Crete, and the Chalcidic peninsula in Macedonia. But the activity of the race was not confined within these limits. If the Greek was a subject in his own country, he was master in the lands of some of his neighbours. A Greek might exercise power over other Christian subjects of the Porte either as an ecclesiastic, or as the delegate of the Sultan in certain fixed branches of the administration.

The authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople was recognised over the whole of the European provinces of Turkey, except Servia. The Bishops in all these provinces were Greeks; the services of the Church were conducted in the Greek tongue; the revenues of the greater part of the Church-lands, and the fees of all the ecclesiastical courts, went into Greek pockets. In things religious, and in that wide range of civil affairs which in communities belonging to the Eastern Church appertains to the higher religious office, the Greeks had in fact regained the ascendancy which they had possessed under the Byzantine Empire. The dream of the Churchman was not the creation of an independent kingdom of Greece, but the restoration of the Eastern Empire under Greek supremacy. When it was seen that the Slav and the Rouman came to the Greek for law, for commercial training, for religious teaching, and looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople as the ultimate judge of all disputes, it was natural that the belief should arise that, when the Turk pa.s.sed away, the Greek would step into his place. But the influence of the Greeks, great as it appeared to be, did not in reality reach below the surface, except in Epirus. The bishops were felt to be foreigners and extortioners. There was no real process of a.s.similation at work, either in Bulgaria or in the Danubian Provinces. The slow and plodding Bulgarian peasant, too stupid for the Greek to think of him as a rival, preserved his own unchanging tastes and nationality, sang to his children the songs which he had learnt from his parents, and forgot the Greek which he had heard in the Church when he re-entered his home. [353]

In Roumania, the only feeling towards the Greek intruder was one of intense hatred.

[The Phanariot officials of the Porte.]

[Greek Hospodars.]

Four great offices of the Ottoman Empire were always held by Greeks. These were the offices of Dragoman, [354] or Secretary, of the Porte, Dragoman of the Fleet, and the governorships, called Hospodariates, of Wallachia and Moldavia. The varied business of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the administration of its revenues, the conduct of its law-courts, had drawn a mult.i.tude of pushing and well-educated Greeks to the quarter of Constantinople called the Phanar, in which the palace of the Patriarch is situated. Merchants and professional men inhabited the same district. These Greeks of the capital, the so-called Phanariots, gradually made their way into the Ottoman administration as Turkish energy declined, and the conquering race found that it could no longer dispense with the weapons of calculation and diplomacy. The Treaty of Carlowitz, made in 1699, after the unsuccessful war in which the Turks laid siege to Vienna, was negotiated on behalf of the Porte by Alexander Maurokordatos, a Chian by birth, who had become physician to the Sultan and was virtually the Foreign Minister of Turkey. His sons, Nicholas and Constantine, were made Hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia early in the eighteenth century; and from this time forward, until the outbreak of the Greek insurrection, the governorships of the Roumanian provinces were entrusted to Phanariot families. The result was that a troop of Greek adventurers pa.s.sed to the north of the Danube, and seized upon every office of profit in these unfortunate lands. There were indeed individuals among the Hospodars, especially among the Maurokordati, who rendered good service to their Roumanian subjects; but on the whole the Phanariot rule was grasping, dishonest, and cruel. [355] Its importance in relation to Greece was not that it h.e.l.lenised the Danubian countries, for that it signally failed to do; but that it raised the standard of Greek education, and enlarged the range of Greek thought, by opening a political and administrative career to ambitious men. The connection of the Phanariots with education was indeed an exceedingly close one. Alexander Maurokordatos was the ardent and generous founder of schools for the instruction of his countrymen in Constantinople as well as in other cities, and for the improvement of the existing language of Greece. His example was freely followed throughout the eighteenth century. It is, indeed, one of the best features in the Greek character that the owner of wealth has so often been, and still so often is, the promoter of the culture of his race. As in Germany in the last century, and in Hungary and Bohemia at a more recent date, the national revival of Greece was preceded by a striking revival of interest in the national language.

[Greek intellectual movement in the eighteenth century.]

The knowledge of ancient Greek was never wholly lost among the priesthood, but it had become useless. Nothing was read but the ecclesiastic commonplace of a pedantic age; and in the schools kept by the clergy before the eighteenth century the ancient language was taught only as a means of imparting divinity. The educational movement promoted by men like Maurokordatos had a double end; it revived the knowledge of the great age of Greece through its literature, and it taught the Greek to regard the speech which he actually used not as a mere barbarous patois which each district had made for itself, but as a language different indeed from that of the ancient world, yet governed by its own laws, and capable of performing the same functions as any other modern tongue. It was now that the Greek learnt to call himself h.e.l.len, the name of his forefathers, instead of Romaios, a Roman. As the new schools grew up and the old ones were renovated or transformed, education ceased to be merely literary. In the second half of the eighteenth century science returned in a humble form to the land that had given it birth, and the range of instruction was widened by men who had studied law, physics, and moral philosophy at foreign Universities. Something of the liberal spirit of the inquirers of Western Europe arose among the best Greek teachers. Though no attack was made upon the doctrines of the Church, and no direct attack was made upon the authority of the Sultan, the duty of religious toleration was proclaimed in a land where bigotry had hitherto reigned supreme, and the political freedom of ancient Greece was held up as a glorious ideal to a less happy age. Some of the higher clergy and of the Phanariot instruments of Turkish rule took fright at the independent spirit of the new learning, and for a while it seemed as if the intellectual as well as the political progress of Greece might be endangered by ecclesiastical ill-will. But the attachment of the Greek people to the Church was so strong and so universal that, although satire might be directed against the Bishops, a breach with the Church formed no part of the design of any patriot. The antagonism between episcopal and national feeling, strongest about the end of the eighteenth century, declined during succeeding years, and had almost disappeared before the outbreak of the war of liberation.

[Koraes, 1748-1833.]

[The language of Modern Greece.]

The greatest scholar of modern Greece was also one of its greatest patriots. Koraes, known as the legislator of the Greek language, was born in 1748, of Chian parents settled at Smyrna. The love of learning, combined with an extreme independence of character, made residence insupportable to him in a land where the Turk was always within sight, and where few opportunities existed for gaining wide knowledge. His parents permitted him to spend some years at Amsterdam, where a branch of their business was established. Recalled to Smyrna at the age of thirty, Koraes almost abandoned human society. The hand of a beautiful heiress could not tempt him from the austere and solitary life of the scholar; and quitting his home, he pa.s.sed through the medical school of Montpellier, and settled at Paris. He was here when the French Revolution began. The inspiration of that time gave to his vast learning and inborn energy a directly patriotic aim. For forty years Koraes pursued the work of serving Greece by the means open to the scholar. The political writings in which he addressed the Greeks themselves or appealed to foreigners in favour of Greece, admirable as they are, do not form the basis of his fame. The peculiar task of Koraes was to give to the reviving Greek nation the national literature and the form of expression which every civilised people reckons among its most cherished bonds of unity. Master, down to the minutest details, of the entire range of Greek writings, and of the history of the Greek language from cla.s.sical times down to our own century, Koraes was able to select the h.e.l.lenic authors, Christian as well as Pagan, whose works were best suited for his countrymen in their actual condition, and to ill.u.s.trate them as no one could who had not himself been born and bred among Greeks. This was one side of Koraes' literary task. The other was to direct the language of the future h.e.l.lenic kingdom into its true course. Cla.s.sical writing was still understood by the educated in Greece, but the spoken language of the people was something widely different. Turkish and Albanian influences had barbarised the vocabulary; centuries of ignorance had given play to every natural irregularity of local dialect. When the restoration of Greek independence came within view, there were some who proposed to revive artificially each form used in the ancient language, and thus, without any real blending, to add the old to the new: others, seeing this to be impossible, desired that the common idiom, corrupt as it was, should be accepted as a literary language. Koraes chose the middle and the rational path. Taking the best written Greek of the day as his material, he recommended that the forms of cla.s.sical Greek, where they were not wholly obsolete, should be fixed in the grammar of the language. While ridiculing the attempt to restore modes of expression which, even in the written language, had wholly pa.s.sed out of use, he proposed to expunge all words that were in fact not Greek at all, but foreign, and to replace them by terms formed according to the natural laws of the language. The Greek, therefore, which Koraes desired to see his countrymen recognise as their language, and which he himself used in his writings, was the written Greek of the most cultivated persons of his time, purged of its foreign elements, and methodised by a constant reference to a cla.s.sical model, which, however, it was not to imitate pedantically. The correctness of this theory has been proved by its complete success. The patois which, if it had been recognised as the language of the Greek kingdom, would now have made Herodotus and Plato foreign authors in Athens, is indeed still preserved in familiar conversation, but it is little used in writing and not taught in schools. A language year by year more closely approximating in its forms to that of cla.s.sical Greece unites the Greeks both with their past and among themselves, and serves as the instrument of a widening h.e.l.lenic civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. The political object of Koraes has been completely attained. No people in Europe is now prouder of its native tongue, or turns it to better account in education, than his countrymen. In literature, the renovated language has still its work before it. The lyric poetry that has been written in Greece since the time of Koraes is not wanting, if a foreigner may express an opinion, in tenderness and grace The writer who shall enn.o.ble Greek prose with the energy and directness of the ancient style has yet to arise [356]