either forgotten or forgiven. The savage disposition and arrogant temper of the Turks, which is often obliterated during the tranquillity of peace, reappeared with terrible severity during these disastrous contests. Not a village in the Morea but bore testimony to the ravages of the Ottoman torch; not a family but mourned a father, brother, or son, cut off by the Turkish sabre, or a daughter or sister carried off to the captivity of the Turkish harems. The Turks had almost as great injuries to avenge; for in the political, not less than the physical world, action and reaction are equal and opposite; and the cruel law of retaliation is the invaria

32, 33.

The first dawn of the Greek revolution ap-
peared in the dubious hostility, and 78.
at last open rebellion, of Ali Pacha.* Insurrection
This celebrated man, at once one of of Ali Pacha.

which he took his name.
* Ali Pacha was born in a little village of Epirus, from
His father, Veli-Bey, having
been despoiled of his share of the little paternal inherit-
ance by his elder brothers, engaged as a private soldier in
one of those bands of nomad adventurers common in Al-
bania, where men became alternately heroes and banditti.

Having risen to command among his comrades, Veli-Bey

re-entered his native village at the head of his band, and

burned his brothers in the house which had been the subpointed Aga of Tebelen, and married the daughter of a ject of contention between them. After this he was apbey, named Chamco, a woman of great beauty, and a savage energetic character, in whose veins some of the blood of Scanderbeg is said to have flowed. She transmitted to her son Ali, who afterward became the pacha, the energy, the passions, and the ferocity of her race.

The court of St. Petersburg made great efforts 76. in the latter part of the eighteenth Repeated in- century to raise the population of surrections of the southern provinces of Turkey the Greeks. against their Ottoman oppressors. With such success were their exertions attended, that more than once the Morea, Albania, and the Isles, were roused into insurrection against the Turks, and for some years the Morea was practically independent. The effect of these insurrections, which were all in the end suppressed, was to the last degree disastrous to the inhabitants of the country, but it produced an inextinguishable and indelible hatred between them and their oppressors. At the pe-ble and unavoidable resource of suffering huriod of its final subjugation by the Turks in manity. The disposition of the Greeks, light, 1717, the Peloponnesus was supposed to con- gay, and volatile as their ancestors in the days tain 200,000 inhabitants, but during the course of Alcibiades, rendered them in a peculiar manof the century many fearful calamities contrib-ner accessible to the influence of these feelings, uted to thin their number. In 1756 a dread- and turned the ardent spirit of anful plague appeared, which carried off one-half cient genius into the inextinguishable Gordon, i. of them. Before they had well recovered from thirst for present vengeance.1 this calamity, the ill-conducted expedition of Orloff in 1770 occasioned still heavier misfortunes, for the inhabitants were excited to rebellion, and after having expelled the Turks at first, they were abandoned by the Russians, and overwhelmed by a horde of Albanians, who exercised unbounded cruelty and rapacity over the whole country for the next ten years. In 1780 these severities produced another insurrection; and the Empress Catherine, by sending her fleet into the Mediterranean, effected a powerful diversion in favor of the Greeks; but they were again abandoned by their allies, the Ottomans renewed their oppression, the plague reappeared in 1781; and such was the devastation produced by these concurring causes, that the inhabitants were reduced to 100,000 souls. Disheartened by these repeated desertions and misfortunes, the Greeks in the next war, which broke out in 1789, refused to move, and the Empress transferred her intrigues to Epirus, where her agents succeeded in stirring Tebelen, put on the dress of the other sex, and placing up an insurrection of the Souliotes, who gained herself at the head of a band of the mountain chiefs of a brilliant victory over ALI PACHA, the Lion of Albania, who were devoted to her by admiration for her Janina, as he was called, while the islanders courage and the influence of her charms, ventured to measure her strength with the enemies of her husband's carried on for some months a brill- house, who contended with her for the command in Tebe1 Gordon, i. iant but fruitless contest with the len. She was defeated and made prisoner; but, like the 30, 31. navy of Constantinople.' Greeks of old, she subdued her conquerors by her charms, These repeated and unsuccessful insurrec- and being ransomed by a young Greek whom she had captivated by her beauty, she re-entered Tebelen, where she tions had produced a more uni- occupied herself for several years in the education of her 77. versal and bitter feeling of exasson Ali and his sister. In one of his first expeditions he peration of the peration in Greece against the Os-Go, coward!" said she, presenting to him a distaff, "that was defeated, like Frederick the Great and Wellington. Greeks and manlis than in any other part of trade befits you better than the career of arms." the Ottoman dominions. Deeds of cruelty had been mutually inflicted, deadly threats interchanged, which could never be treaties whenever circumstances might require it. 8. Russia restored the islands in the Archipelago which she had conquered, stipulating for the inhabitants the same privileges, and for herself the same right of intervention, as obtained in regard to the Principalities. 9. The treaty of Bucharest, in 1812, stipulated that the Servians should have the right of administering their own affairs, upon paying a moderate contribution to the Porte. It was natural and laudable in the Russian government to make these stipulations in favor of their co-religionists in Turkey, especially when subjected to such a ruthless and despotic government as that of the Ottomans; but it was evident what innumerable pretenses for interfering in the internal affairs of Turkey these claims were calculated to furnish. In truth, they inserted the point of the wedge which might at any time split the Ottoman empire in pieces. See the treaties in SCHOELL, Traités de Paix, xiv. 67, 503, 539.

Mutual exas

Turks,

Veli-Bey died young; but his widow Chamco, who was endowed with a masculine energetic spirit and indomitable courage, resolved to preserve for her children, by intrigue, the force of arms, and the influence of her beauty, which was still at its zenith, the power which her She left her retreat in husband had acquired in Tebelen.

Ashamed of his defeat, Ali fled from his paternal home,

discovered a hidden treasure in the ruins of an old chateau, where he had taken refuge for the night, enrolled thirty banditti under his standard, with whom he pillaged the adjacent country. Surprised by the troops of Courd Pacha of Albania, he was brought into his presence in order to be beheaded; but his youth and beauty softened the heart of the ferocious chief, who pardoned him, and restored him to his mother in Tebelen. He then married the daughter of Delvino Emine, an alliance which at once gratified his love and forwarded his ambition. In consequence of it, he was secretly engaged in the first efforts of the Greeks to achieve their independence in 1790, when they reckoned on the support of Russia. This attempt, however, proved abortive, and it led to Ali's father-in-law being strangled by the Turks. He was succeeded in the pachalic of Delvino by the Pacha of Argyro-Kastro, to whom he gave his sister Chainitza in marriage. She, however, was enamored of Soliman, her husband's younger brother; and Ali having advised his sister to poison her husband, in order that she might espouse the object of her affection, and she having refused to do so, he insti

command of an army of forty thousand men,
with which he approached Albania; but the
reduction of that province proved not so easy
as he had expected: and when the Greek rev-
olution broke out, he had already been two
years engaged in ceaseless hostilli- 1 Lac. iii. 92,
ties with its indomitable mountain- 94; Lam. vii.
eers.1
343, 345.

the most heroic, the most tyrannical, and the most cruel of modern times, had, at the bead of his brave and faithful, but half-savage Albanians, long maintained a doubtful neutrality, but real independence, with the Porte, and it was the extreme difficulty with which he was at last subdued which opened the eyes of Europe most effectually to the decline of the Ottoman power. He preserved a studious neutral- GREECE, which rendered itself immortal in ity between the Sultan and the rebellious vas- ancient story, and is, perhaps, des 79. sals and indomitable mountaineers; with thirty tined to be hardly less memorable in Statistics thousand disciplined Mussulmans under his or-modern events, is a country of extreme- of Greece. ders, and yet maintaining a secret correspond-ly small dimensions compared to the great figence with the discontented Greeks, he render- ure it has made in human affairs. Including ed himself an object of importance to, and was the Cyclades, its entire population, in 1836, courted by, both parties. He turned his hostil- was only 688,000 souls; its superficies 2470 ity, at the instigation of the Porte, against the square geographical leagues, or 21,430 square Souliotes, who had taken up arms in favor of the miles; being less than Scotland, and not half Russians, and reduced them to subjection with the size of Ireland. The density of the popu great slaughter; and on occasion of the con-lation is only thirty-one to the square mile; flicts of the Sultan with the janizaries, he advanced to the gates of Adrianople at the head of eighty thousand men. Such was his influence at this time with the Divan, that his two sons, Veli and Mouctar, were appointed to im-vantages of its situation for maritime purposes, portant commands in the Morea; while he himself, secure in his inaccessible fortress in the lake of Janina, revolved in his mind dark schemes of conquest and independence. At length the Sultan, having received intelligence of his designs, and dreading his daily increasing power, summoned him to Constantinople to answer some charges preferred against him; and upon his refusal to obey the summons, he prepared, with all the energy of the Ottoman character, to reduce him to submission. Chourchid Pacha, a neighboring satrap, received the gated Soliman himself to murder his brother, which he did, and Ali made over his sister to him over the dead body of her husband.

while in England it is three hundred-a fact
speaking volumes as to the oppressive nature
of the Turkish government. Owing to the
benignity of the climate, however, and the ad-

it is extremely fruitful, and yields an amount
of produce far beyond what could have been
anticipated from its scanty population; for its
value amounted, within the straits of Ther-
mopylæ, in 1814, to 60,000,000 piastres, or
£3,000,000 nearly. This amount, which must
be considered very large, when the extreme
scantiness of the population and mountainous
nature of the greater part of the soil is taken
into account, is mainly owing to the genial
warmth of the sun, which ren-
ders rocky slopes, which in north-
ern Europe would produce only 72, 85; Malte
furze or heath, capable of bearing Brun, vii. 874;
rich crops of grapes, maize, and Gordon's
Greece, i. 73.

The Sultan having afterward become suspicious of Se-olives,2 lim, Pacha of Delvino, Ali's steady friend and protector, and his designs having come to the knowledge of Ali, he resolved to make his own fortune by the ruin of his benefactor. For this purpose he invited Selim to his house, murdered him as he was drinking a cup of coffee, and sent his head to Constantinople. For this signal service he was rewarded with the pachalic of Thessaly. He there soon accumulated great treasures by every species of extortion and oppression, with the fruits of which he bought the pachalic of Janina, in one of the richest and most delicious valleys of Epirus, where he constructed an impregnable fortress, amassed immense treasures, and collected a formidable army. He aided the Porte with these forces in suppressing the insurrection of the Souliotes, but still preserved in secret his old connection with the Greeks, and often drank in private to the health of the Virgin. Yet, still keeping up his system of hypocrisy, he marched with twenty thousand men against the Pacha of Widdin, who had declared for the Greeks, and destroyed him at the very time when he was encouraging in his palace the poetry of the Greek Rhigas-the Tyrtæus of the modern war of independence. During one of his expeditions, his eldest son, Mouctar, being intrusted with the government in Janina, excited the jealousy or suspicions of Ali by an intrigue with a beautiful young Greek named Euphrosyne. Having sent his son off on a distant expedition, Ali surrounded in the night the house of Euphrosyne, and seized her, with fifteen other young women, her companions, who were all thrown into the lake. His wife Emine threw herself at his feet to implore the lives of some of them; instead of according it, he discharged a pistol at the wall so near her, that she fell down dead of fright at his feet. Soon after, he was seized with such admiration for a young Greek girl of twelve years of age, whose village he had delivered to the flames, that he brought her to his harem, espoused her, and inspired such a passion, though five times her age, in her youthful breast, that she remained faithful to him in all his subsequent misfortunes.-Biographie Universelle, Supplement, i. 172 (Ali

Pacha); and LAMARTINE, Histoire de la Restauration,

vii. 337, 345.

2 Pouqueville, Grèce en 1814,

the country.

Though so limited in extent, and deficient in inhabitants, however, Greece is ex- 80. tremely defensible in a military point Defensible of view, and second to none in diffi- nature of culty of subjugation by an army with the artillery and carriages of modern warfare. The mountains are extremely steep, covered with forests, sharp-pointed stones, or brakes of thorny plants, and intersected by numberless deep ravines, the beds of winter torrents. Their chains are so numerous, and intersect each other in so many directions, that it is quite impossible to get through the country without passing over some of them. The roads, good enough as long as they pass over the little plains-for the most part the bottoms of ancient lakes, with which the country abounds-become mere rugged paths the moment they enter the hills, bordered by precipices, and continually open to a plunging fire from above, where the enemy may be placed, often unseen, in prickly thickets or rugged cliffs. An invading enemy must either weaken itself at every step by detachments, or expose itself to have its communications cut off by the inhabitants, who retire before its advance into sequestered caverns and monasteries of solid construction, placed in accessible situations, and against which cannon can rarely be brought to bear. To transport artillery or heavy equipages is a prodigious labor, rendered the more toilsome, as the bridges

were nearly all broken down, and never re- | of Pharsalus; then crossing the bleak and still stored. The Turkish government never think of repairing any thing. Add to this, that every straggler is destroyed by the armed peasants, whose ordinary mode of life, and endurance of privations, make them excellent guerrillas. By the possession of the sea, these difficulties, as in the early part of the Persian invasion, may be overcome; but the skill and courage of the Greek sailors gave them the command of that element; and the Turks, never at home in naval warfare, were distinguished by nothing but cowardice and incapacity in their 1 Gordon, i. maritime contest with the islanders of the Archipelago.1

58, 59.

A celebrated English traveler has left the 81. following account of the celebrated Clarke's de- land of Hellas: "The last moments scription of of this day were employed in taking Greece. once more a view of the superb scenery exhibited by the mountains of Olympus and Ossa. They appeared upon this occasion in more than usual splendor, like one of those imaginary alpine regions suggested by viewing a boundary of clouds, when they terminate the horizon in a still evening, and are gathered into heaps, with many a towering top shining in fleecy whiteness. The great Olympian chain, and a range of lower eminences to the northwest of Olympus, form a line which is exactly opposite to Salonica; and even the chasm between Olympus and Ossa, constituting the defile of Tempe, is hence visible. Directing the eye toward that chain, there is comprehended in one view the whole of Pieria and Boeotia, and with the vivid impressions which remained after leaving the country, memory easily recalled into one mental picture the whole of Greece. In this imaginary flight the traveler enters the defile of Tempe from Pieria, and as the gorge opens toward the south, he sees all the Larissæan plain; this conducts him to the plain of Pharsalia, whence he ascends the mountains south

more elevated region, extending from those
mountains toward Lamia, he has Mount Pindus
before him, and, descending into the plain of
the Spherchius, passes the straits of Thermo-
pylæ. Afterward, ascending Mount Eta, he
beholds, opposite to him, the snowy point of
Lycorea, with all the rest of Parnassus, and the
towns and villages at its base; the whole plain
of Elatina lying at his feet, with the course of
the Cephissus to the sea. Passing to the sum-
mit of Parnassus, he looks down upon all the
other mountains, plains, islands, and gulfs of
Greece, but especially the broad bosom of
Citharon, Helicon, Parnes, and of Hymettus.
Thence roaming into the depths, and over all
the heights of Euboea and of Peloponnesus, he
has their inmost recesses submitted to his con-
templation. Next resting upon Hymettus, he
examines, even in the minutest detail, the whole
of Attica to the Sunian promontory; for he
sees it all, and the shores of Argos, Lecyon,
Corinth, Megara, Eleusis, and Athens. Thus,
though not in all the freshness of its original
colors, yet in all its grandeur, doth GREECE
actually present itself to his mind's eye; and
may the impression never be obliterated."'
What a list of names! what magic 1 Clarke's
in their very sound! And was it Travels, vii.
surprising that the resurrection of 475, 477.
a country fraught with such recollections thrill-
ed like the sound of a trumpet through the
heart of Europe?

"Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honied wealth Hymettus yields;
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain-air ;
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare;
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair."*

* BYRON, Childe Harold.

CHAPTER XIV.

GREEK REVOLUTION-BATTLE OF NAVARINO-ESTABLISHMENT OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE.

ALTHOUGH the Greeks had for four centuries

Elements

resurrec- 督

tion.

groaned under the dominion of the 1. Osmanlis, and the heel of conquest remaining had perhaps crushed them with more of Grecian severity than any other nation in Europe, yet they had preserved the elements of nationality, and kept alive the seeds of resurrection more entirely than any other people. Amidst all the severities of Turkish rule they had retained the great distinctive features of nationality, their country, their language, their religion. As long as a nation preserves these, no matter how long the chains of servitude may have hung about it, the means of ultimate salvation are not lost, the elements of future independence exist. The very severity of the Ottoman rule, the arrogance of their Turkish masters, the difference of language, religion, manners, laws, between the victors and the vanquished, had tended to perpetuate the feelings of the subjugated people, and prevent that amalgamation with their oppressors which, though it softens at the time the severity of conquest, does so only by preventing its chains from being ever thrown off. They had lost all-all but the sense of oppression and the desire of vengeance. Notwithstanding the oppressive government and boundless exactions of the Recent favor- Turks, the Greeks in some places able circum- had come to enjoy a very high de

2.

stances in the condition of Greece.

"The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece,
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all except their sun is set."*

The Turkish pachas never set their feet in these
blessed abodes of industry and freedom. Se-
cretly afraid of the naval strength of the Greeks,
and aware that their sailors constituted their
own entire maritime power, the sultans of Con-
stantinople had long commuted their right of
dominion for a fixed annual tribute, which was
collected by themselves, and, being regularly
paid, took away all pretext for further intru-
And thus the islands of Greece had
sions.
long been remarked by travelers as a sort of
oasis in the social desert with which they were
surrounded, and as making manifest the general
Turkish oppression by exhibiting the
happiness which man could reach in Greek Re-
those blessed spots when emancipated volution, i.
35, 36.
from its influence.1

1 Gordon's

As a natural consequence of this extraordinary and sudden influx of material 3. prosperity, there had arisen in the Recent spread islands of Greece, and even in some of information, of the principal towns of the con- and passion for tinent, an ardent thirst for knowl- independence. edge, and an anxious desire to be readmitted into the European family, to which they felt they belonged by religion, language, and rec

Crushed and trodden under foot by the Asiatics, their hearts were still European; ruled in their bodies by the Mussulmans, their souls were free with the Christian. The mosque was seen in the cities, but the monastery still stood erect in the mountains. The Crescent flamed in the eastern, but the Cross was arising in the western sky. To assuage the thirst for knowledge which arose with an extended intercourse with foreign nations, and a rapid increase in the means of purchasing it, there had sprung up schools in many of the principal cities of Greece, and translations of several of the best modern works had already been printed in the Greek tongue. They incredibly augmented the general fervor. newly-instructed Greeks found to their astonishment that they were the descendants of a people, inhabited a country, and spoke a language celebrated beyond any other in the literature of western Europe, and from the genius of which nearly the whole illumination of the world had sprung. The image of ancient free

gree of prosperity, and various cir-ollections. cumstances had contributed in the early part of the nineteenth century to increase in them to a great extent the material sources of national strength. The islanders of the Archipelago had come to engross the whole coasting trade of the Levant; their traffic was carried on in 600 vessels, bearing 6000 guns, and manned by 18,000 seamen.* Hydra and Ipsara, the chief seats of this flourishing commerce, had become large towns, strongly fortified, containing each 30,000 inhabitants on their barren rocks, the refuge, like the sand-banks on which Venice was built, of independence in the hour of disaster; while the beautiful fields of Scios, peopled by 80,000, exhibited every feature of a terrestrial paradise. Fanned by the charming breezes of the Archipelago, illuminated by its resplendent sun, surrounded by a placid sea, which reflected its azure firmament, and was checkered by the white sails of innumerable barks -these islands seemed to realize all that the fancy of the poet had figured of the abodes of the blessed:

* This trade had augmented in the most surprising manner, and been attended with extraordinary profits, in consequence of the Continental blockade during the last ten years of the war, and the vast commerce which was carried on through Turkey into Hungary, and all the centre of Europe, which had come to exceed £3,000,000 of exports from Britain.

* BYRON, Don Juan, Canto iii.

The

"Outre les Ecoles déjà fondées à Salonique, au Mont Athos, à Chio, à Smyrne, à Kydonie, à Bucharest, à Jassy, et même à Constantinople, où se rendaient des professeurs formés dans les meilleures écoles d'Allemagne et de France, il y avait dans les villes un peu considérable de la Grèce, des lycées, des gymnases, des bibliothèques, et jusque dans beaucoup de villages, des écoles d'enseignement mutuel, malgré la répugnance de la Porte Ottomane et même, dit-on, du clergé Grec."-Annuaire Historique, iv. 378.