The Balkans by Mark Mazower

Author:Mark Mazower
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780307431967
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T21:00:00+00:00

Had Russia lent her support, as Ypsilantis had hoped, the Danubian uprising might have heralded the Byzantine imperial renaissance of which the Phanariots dreamed. But in fact the Tsar was anxious to preserve the peace in Europe. “The emperor has highly disapproved of those [means] which Prince Ipsilanti appears to wish to employ to deliver Greece,” wrote Capodistrias to a friend. “At a time when Europe is menaced everywhere by revolutionary explosions, how can one not recognize in that which has broken out in the two principalities the identical effect of the same subversive principles, the same intrigues which attract the calamities of war . . . the most dreadful plague of demagogic despotism.” The rebels were easily crushed by the Turkish army after Romanian peasants refused their support as well. “I am not prepared to shed Romanian blood for Greeks,” stated the Romanian insurgent leader Tudor Vladimirescu. The main consequence of this failure was the collapse of Phanariot influence north of the Danube, and the eventual disappearance of an important center of Greek learning. 12

A month later, as spring ushered in a new fighting season, a second Greek revolt occurred far to the south in the Peloponnese—where the peasantry were mostly Greek-speaking, and where a major insurrection had already taken place at Russian prompting in 1770, with bloody consequences. The eventual success of this rising rather than Ypsilantis’s meant that when a Greek state did emerge, it was not as a new Byzantium spread across Europe and Anatolia, but as a modest little kingdom with a capital eventually based in the small Ottoman market town of Athens. But success was far from assured there either.

At first, all eyes were on the struggle between the Porte and the rebellious and wily Ali Pasha to the north. In the Peloponnese port of Patras, Greeks were still hoping that the Muslim Albanian ruler of Jannina would “win and deliver them” from Ottoman rule. In fact, the local Ottoman authorities feared the same thing. Unwittingly they triggered off the Greek revolt by imprisoning those notables they could find as a preemptive move against Ali’s Christian supporters. Faced with the choice of arrest or rebellion, many Greeks chose the latter and began to attack Muslim settlements. “The cloud of Darkness which overspread the Westward for so many a year, seems now to commence by casting its shadow of desolation and horror in this country,” was how one British onlooker in Macedonia greeted news of the outbreak of revolt. “This revolutionary spirit of independence seems to gain in other parts of Greece also.” Perhaps fifteen thousand of the forty thousand Muslim inhabitants of the Peloponnese were killed by insurgent bands in the first few months; survivors fled to the safety of towns and forts. That summer Greek forces besieged and eventually sacked the provincial capital of Tripolis. “The host which entered it,” recollected one of the Greeks, “cut down and were slaying men, women and children from Friday until Sunday. Thirty two thousand were reported to have been slain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.