The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (17 page)

For the moment, too, the Sultan was left to deal in any way he might wish with the ambitious Governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali. Here,
however, the western European Powers
had interests to protect. During the closing stages of the Napoleonic Wars the British replaced the French as the principal western European traders in the Levant; they therefore showed some
concern over what was happening in Alexandria, Cairo and Beirut. But their needs were relatively straightforward: the maintenance of good order in the ports and free movement of goods. It made
little difference to London merchants that they were carried mainly in Greek-owned vessels. Nor did it matter to foreign traders whether government in Egypt and the Levant was exercised directly by
the Sultan, or by his appointed representative, so long as it was efficient. There was no open conflict between Mahmud and Muhammad Ali during the difficult period of readjustment which followed
the eclipse of French influence in the Levant. So changed was the character of gubernatorial administration that it became customary to speak of Muhammad Ali as the ‘Viceroy of Egypt’.
Yet Mahmud continued to find him dutiful and accommodating: he liquidated the last of the Mamelukes (1811), paid to the Sultan his regular annual tribute, placated the
ulema
, and—at
Mahmud’s request—sent well-trained Bosnian and Albanian troops to suppress rebellions in Arabia.

Ali Pasha in Ioánnina posed a more immediate problem. His diplomatic contacts, first with the French and later with the British, made him a considerable power in Balkan politics. He was
establishing a dynastic authority which, to Halet Effendi, seemed a greater threat to the Ottoman hold on Europe than the Serbian rebellion. In 1820 hit-men sent by Ali to Constantinople sought to
assassinate a personal enemy in a house adjoining the imperial palace. Halet Effendi induced the Sultan to dismiss Ali and his sons from their official posts and to prepare land and sea expeditions
to recover the Epirus and end Ali’s half-century of rule. His autonomous despotate crumbled with astonishing rapidity and by August 1820 Ioánnina was invested, the thriving commercial
centre suffering as much from Ali’s scorched-earth policy as from the rigours of a siege. Even so, for more than a year the old Lion held out in the citadel, fleeing at last to his small
fortified island villa in the Lake of Ioánnina. It was not until the closing days of January 1822 that treachery enabled the local commander to have him slaughtered there. The corpse was
decapitated and Ali’s head exposed outside the Topkapi Sarayi to celebrate the triumph of Mahmud’s armies over a chieftain who had defied the authority of five
Sultans.
⁷

The collapse of Ali’s authority allowed the Ottomans to recover military control of land routes on either side of the central Pindus range, southwards to the Peloponnese. By now this
region was of vital strategic significance. With the imminent fall of the despotate, a new and more serious challenge had begun to threaten Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Ioánnina had never
been simply the lair of an almost sophisticated brigand. Henry Holland, visiting the ‘inland city surrounded by mountains’ in 1812, commented both on the widespread continental
connections of the Greek merchants there, and on the high level of cultural life: ‘The Greeks of Ioánnina are celebrated among their countrymen for their literary habits’, he
wrote, somewhat surprisingly.
⁸
Ali never permitted local communities to take any political initiative, nor was he interested in their spiritual
well-being, whether Islamic or Christian. But, though a Muslim Albanian himself, he had allowed the Greeks to assert their cultural national identity, in so far as it existed in the first decades
of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he had personal contacts with influential Greek emigrants in Vienna during the Congress. In the last resort, in May 1820, Ali called on the Greeks of the
despotate to join him in resisting the Turks. They failed to respond to this appeal. Leading Greek patriots, however, both in the Peloponnese and among emigrant communities abroad, sought to take
advantage of Ali’s protracted last stand. Accidentally, he advanced the timing of the national rebellion: it was no coincidence that the Greek War of Independence began in 1821 while Ottoman
troops were still heavily engaged around Ioánnina.

The Greek rebellion and its consequences shaped Mahmud’s policies, directly or indirectly, for the remaining eighteen years of his reign. Yet the Greek awakening took the Sultan and his
viziers by surprise.
⁹
Until the end of the eighteenth century there had been little awareness of any Hellenistic heritage among those subjects of the
Sultan who spoke the Greek language—almost one in four of the total population of the empire. Officially, the Patriarchate in Constantinople sought to maintain the traditional status of the
Orthodox Church as a recognized
millet
, and so too did the wealthy Phanariot aristocracy. But commercial links with France, and in particular with Marseilles, had
helped to spread the ideas of the French Revolution on both the mainland and the islands of modern Greece. Greeks who had lived in France encouraged an ideal of Hellenism which stemmed from
Classical Greece and had nothing in common with the nostalgic longing of Orthodox believers for the resurrection of a Byzantine Christian society. In combating these dangerous ideas, successive
Sultans could therefore count on support from the Patriarchate. In 1798 a ‘Paternal Exhortation’, circulated in Constantinople in the name of Patriarch Anthimos of Jerusalem, emphasized
the role of the Sultan as God’s chosen protector of Christian life and denounced the ‘teachings of these new liberties’ as the work of the Devil. ‘The Almighty Lord’,
it explained, ‘puts into the heart of the Sultan of these Ottomans an inclination to keep free the religious beliefs of our Orthodox faith and, as a work of supererogation, to protect them,
even to the point of occasionally chastising Christians who deviate from their faith, in order that they may have always before their eyes the fear of God.’
¹⁰

Such ultra-conservative teaching, though effective at the heart of the Empire, carried little weight with the Hellenizing communities in Wallachia and Moldavia, who looked for support from Tsar
Alexander I and from his Corfiot adviser, John Capodistrias. This was unrealistic. Despite Alexander’s genuine religious zeal, the Tsar would not back any conspiratorial body and
Capodistrias, knowing that Alexander had no wish ‘to set the cannon moving again’, treated all approaches from Greek revolutionaries with extreme caution.
¹¹
Nevertheless it was in the rapidly growing Russian port of Odessa that, in 1814, three Greek merchants founded (or, possibly, revived) a secret ‘Society of
Friends’,
Philiki
Hetairia
, to support the liberation of the Balkan peoples from Ottoman rule. Three years later, with the connivance of Russian consular authorities, the
Philiki Hetairia
moved its headquarters to Constantinople. Soon it could count on the support of the principal Greeks in the Mani, on the sympathy of Metropolitan Germanos (Bishop of Old
Patras), on the chiefs of certain Christian bandit groups (
klephts
) in the Peloponnese, and on some distinguished Phanariot officers serving in the Russian
army. In
March 1821 it was one of these officers who sought to set the Balkans ablaze. General Alexander Ypsilantis, an aide-de-camp of the Tsar, led a handful of Greek patriots from across the Russian
frontier in a raid on Bucharest and Jassy.

Ultimately Ypsilantis’s raid proved a tragic failure, for the general wrongly counted on the rapid spread of national revolutions against the Sultan throughout Ottoman Europe, a crusade of
Orthodoxy which the Tsar would enthusiastically lead. Ypsilantis proposed an alliance with Milo
s̆
Obrenovi
ć
, who in the spring of 1815 had led a second Serbian rebellion
against the local tyranny of Janissary commanders and gained considerable autonomy for Serbia from Sultan Mahmud, who saw in Milo
s̆
a shrewdly competent vassal. The wily
Milo
s̆
, hoping for recognition as hereditary Prince of Serbia, had more to lose than to gain by supporting Ypsilantis against the Sultan. The
peasantry of Moldavia saw no reason to exchange remote Ottoman sovereignty for a more immediate Greek-Russian rule, and they therefore remained hostile to Ypsilantis’s appeals, while the Tsar
disowned his aide-de-camp almost immediately. Within three months the Ottoman forces had restored order in the two Danubian Principalities, and Ypsilantis was a fugitive in Austria.

Yet the ill-considered raid had grave repercussions for the Sultan. In the Peloponnese it precipitated the war of independence, symbolically dated from the blessing accorded by Metropolitan
Germanos on 25 March to a sacred banner in the monastery of Aghia Lavra. More immediately, the raid led to a panic reaction in Constantinople. The Ottoman army was campaigning, not only against Ali
Pasha in Epirus, but also—with little credit—against the Persians along the ill-defined border between Mount Ararat and Lake Van. Mahmud feared lest, at this moment of Ottoman weakness,
the Turks should lose Stamboul and Pera. On the last day of March 1821 the British embassy noted the issue of an order for every ‘Turk’ in Constantinople to procure arms and keep them
in his home in case the Greeks should attempt to seize the city by insurrection.
¹²
At the same time, the Janissary barracks made weapons available for
over 12,000 men of the Corps, should they be needed.

Confirmation of the rising against the Ottomans in the Peloponnese was conveyed to the Porte by Lord Strangford, the British ambassador,
in a dispatch drafted by his
consul in Patras.
¹³
The news seems almost to have unhinged Mahmud. He was convinced that he was the intended victim of an Orthodox Christian
conspiracy, backed by the Russians. He at once sought a
fetva
from the
ş
eyhülislâm
proclaiming a Holy War against Greek Christians. But the
ş
eyhülislâm
was a man of probity. He discussed the crisis with the Ecumenical Patriarch, the septuagenarian Gregorius V, and, to his credit, refused the Sultan’s request, a courageous act which almost
certainly hastened his supercession before the end of the year and his eventual execution. Gregorius returned from his meeting with the
ş
eyhülislâm
hoping for a compromise.
Already, seven Greek bishops had been imprisoned on the Grand Vizier’s orders. On Palm Sunday the Patriarch issued a solemn Anathema, signed by himself and twenty-two other prelates, formally
condemning the
Philike
Hetairia
and excommunicating Ypsilantis and his principal agents; all ‘prelates and priests’ were commanded to ‘concur with the Church’
in opposing the rebellion under penalty of suspension, dispossession and, ultimately, ‘the fires of hell’.
¹⁴

Ten years later Mahmud might have shown wiser statecraft, exploiting the formal Anathema to divide his enemies. But, as an Ottoman official told Strangford a few weeks later, the Sultan
experienced ‘a fit of violent anger and indignation’ over the following days, becoming convinced of the Patriarch’s complicity. Had not Gregorius been born in the same village as
Germanos of Patras, and had he not befriended the rebel Metropolitan when the two dignitaries were both in Constantinople five years earlier? There seemed no doubt to the Sultan that Gregorius was
corresponding with insurgent leaders in the Mani and had received letters from Ypsilantis. The news that Greek and Serbian families, technically under the Patriarch’s guardianship, had fled
the city and boarded ships sailing to Russia, appears finally to have sealed Gregorius’s fate.

On Palm Sunday the Anathema was printed and published. On the following Saturday afternoon—10 April by the Orthodox calendar, 22 April by the Gregorian calendar of Western Europe—the
Patriarch was officiating at the Liturgy preceding the Solemn Easter Vigil when armed soldiery burst into the patriarchal church, in the Phanar district of Stamboul. As the service ended, they
seized the Patriarch and the
officiating bishops and priests, still in their robes, and threw ropes around their necks. Gregorius was dragged to the gate of the Phanar
quarter, hanged from the staple above the entrance, and allowed slowly to choke to death. For three days his body was left suspended from the gate, his hastily-elected successor having to push it
aside before going to the palace to seek confirmation from the Sultan of the dignity bestowed upon him. Three other bishops and two eminent priests were hanged elsewhere in Stamboul. To humiliate
the Orthodox Christians even further, the Sultan finally ordered Gregorius’s body to be handed over to a group of Jews, who dragged it by the legs ‘through a very dirty market’
and cast it, weighted with stones, into the waters of the Golden Horn. ‘It is impossible to carry anger, indignation and cruelty to a higher pitch’, commented Bartolomeo Pisani: as
Strangford’s principal dragoman he was the ambassador’s chief informant about all that was happening in the city during this terrible Easter week, when inflamed mobs roamed the streets,
looting Greek churches and even destroying the patriarchal throne.
¹⁵

‘The Councils of this Empire are now directed by a spirit of relentless fanaticism from which the most dreadful results may be expected,’ Strangford reported to the Foreign
Secretary, Castlereagh, three days after the Patriarch’s execution. But the ambassador’s mood soon changed. Unlike his Russian and Austrian colleagues, he was consistently sympathetic
to Sultan Mahmud. He explained to Castlereagh that the Greeks were being punished as rebels, not as Christians; that ‘the Greek clergy were the principal agents and promoters’ of the
rebellion; and that the Sultan had brought troops into Constantinople to check the wrath of the mob, whose mood Strangford likened to the anti-papist Gordon rioters in London half a century before.
Three months after the Patriarch’s execution, Strangford was insisting that earlier reports had been much exaggerated: ‘Out of a number of 76 churches and chapels in the city and
neighbourhood of Constantinople, but one was utterly destroyed and only 13 injured or plundered by the mob.’ As evidence that all was now in order, the ambassador commented on the
‘disarming’ of Turkish children: ‘Little miscreants under seven years of age, and armed with daggers and pistols, had till now the privilege of robbing, shooting and stabbing with
impunity,’ he explained.
¹⁶