Decline of the Ottoman Poiver 171

him his privileges. He was free to exercise his religion, to educate himself as he pleased, to accumulate wealth; however humble his origin, in a system which accounted nothing of birth, he could hold high office in the Government, become dragoman to the Porte, or voyvode of a province, and be addressed by the Sultan himself as " Illustrious Prince." Yet he remained essentially a slave, liable at any moment, by some caprice of greed or suspicion on the part of his master, to be hurled from wealth and power into penury or death.

A system so inherently bad could fail to be fatal only under very peculiar conditions. So long as a succession of great Sultans wielded the sword of the Prophet and led the hosts of Islam to ever fresh conquests, it had worked well enough. The Christian population were well content to be free of the burden of military service ; and the blood-tax (haratcK), with which, each year, they bought the right to exist, supplied the Sultans with the sinews of war. There could be no question of serious disaffection within the Khalif's empire, when outside it the Christian Powers could barely hold their own against his arms. But it is essential to the health of a dominion based upon a militant religion that it should advance. Victory is the evidence of its Divine sanction ; and the moment it begins to recoil the very qualities of fanaticism which gave it strength may prove a source of weakness. The eighteenth century witnessed the rapid crumbling of the Ottoman Power, and the partial ruin revealed the faulty foundation on which it was and is based. The blight of Byzantium had fallen upon the house of Othman; the Commanders of the Faithful no longer themselves rode at the head of their armies; and to the masterful rulers of the type of Mohammad II and Suleiman the Magnificent had succeeded a feeble race, recluses of the harem, the puppets and victims of their own slaves. This atrophy of the central power suffered a system to grow up which proved too strong for the efforts of the few Sultans who had the strength of mind and the will to attempt to arrest the process of decay. The Janissaries, once the mainstay of the Sultan's power at home and of his expeditions abroad, had learned their strength, and played at Constantinople the part of the Praetorians at Rome. As a military force they had become useless; but, whenthe reforming Sultan, Selimlll (1789-1807), attempted to introduce European discipline and drill, they rose in insurrection, held him a prisoner in his palace, and, to prevent his rescue by the ordinary troops, murdered him.

While the Sultan was thus held powerless in his capital, plentiful opportunity was given for the play of individual ambitions among his vicegerents in the provinces. The centralised and effective autocracy, which has been rendered possible in modern Turkey by the telegraph and railways, had never existed in the Ottoman government. The Governors of provinces were left undisturbed, so long as they furnished with tolerable regularity the tribute due hi money or in kind, and an

172 Rise of Pashas to independence

occasional sackful of heads as evidence of their loyal zeal. The vast spaces of the empire made any effective control impossible; and such complaints as penetrated from the outlying corners of the empire to the Palace could easily be met by offending Pashas with bribes judiciously distributed. It thus became easy for unquiet and ambitious spirits to go far towards carving out for themselves within the empire principalities, and even empires, recognising but a nominal subjection to the Sultan and threatening, should the Porte endeavour to assert its sovereignty, to make their independence effective, and so produce the dreaded disruption of the Ottoman Power from within. In 1804, Pasvan Oglu, Pasha of Widdin, had risen in revolt, and the Janissaries settled about Belgrade had joined him. The Porte, in desperation, had armed the Servian rayahs. Turks, Albanians, and Serbs combined had crushed the Mussulman revolt; but the Servians in their turn now used the occasion to strike, under the swineherd Kara George, for their own independence. In spite of the concessions granted in the Treaty of Bucharest, which satisfied neither party, the hostilities dragged on, and only ended in 1817 with the grant of autonomous government to Servia. Meanwhile, Ali, Pasha of Janina, who had helped the Sultan against Pasvan Oglu, was busy building up, by intrigue, by bribes, by violence, the power which, on the eve of the revolution in Greece, had all but made him arbiter of the fate of the whole Balkan peninsula; and in Egypt Mehemet Ali was laying the foundations of the power which ultimately enabled him to measure his strength successfully against the Commander of the Faithful, and, for a time, to rule supreme over an empire which stretched from the Soudan to the Taurus Mountains.

Among the solvent forces which threatened the stability of the Ottoman empire, however, the more or less successful efforts of ambitious Pashas to take advantage of the weakness of the central authority were not the most important. More significant were the first stirrings of the racial movement, which, in the east of Europe especially, was destined to play so large a part in the historic drama of the coming age. The Greeks of the Morea, urged on by the promises of Russian agents, had risen in 1774, only to find themselves abandoned to the fury of the Mussulmans when it suited the policy of the Empress Catharine to make peace with the Porte. But the new spirit, of which this abortive rising had been the expression, survived and developed, encouraged by the very improvement in the general condition of the Greek population which resulted from the relaxation of the tyranny of the central power. In their village communities, which the Turks had suffered to survive, the Greeks had the elements of the vigorous local life which suited their genius; in the Orthodox Church they possessed the organisation necessary to bind them together in the sense of a common nationality. Long before the outbreak of the insurrection the wealthy island communities of the Aegean and the Adriatic, though nominally forming part of the

Movements towards racial independence 173

Ottoman empire, had enjoyed a practical independence tempered only by the obligation to send to Constantinople an annual tribute in money and in sailors to man the imperial navy. Their armed trading-brigs — carrying from 20 to 30 guns, and some nearly as large as frigates — many of which, since the Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji, had sailed under the Russian ensign in order to secure the privileges conceded in the Straits and the Black Sea, were destined to play a decisive part in the struggle for independence.

In the Morea and on the mainland there was indeed no such practical autonomy as in the islands; but here too the weakness of the administration had suffered a spirit of independence to grow up which asserted itself in the only way open to it — brigandage. In the wild society of the Balkan peninsula public opinion, so far as it could be said to exist, had nothing but admiration for robbery under arms, which among the Orthodox rayahs was surrounded by a religious and patriotic halo when directed against the Mussulman oppressors. Thief (klephf) and hero (palikar) became in popular parlance all but interchangeable terms; and the barbarous exploits of famous bandits were celebrated by the peasants in a thousand songs and legends. Nor had the attitude of the Ottoman Government tended to discourage this point of view. The difficulty of maintaining order suggested to the Sublime Porte the expedient of setting a thief to catch a thief ; and it was only necessary for a brigand chief to become sufficiently powerful and wealthy to ensure his being made a Pasha, if a Mussulman, or, if a Christian, to be taken into the pay of the Government as a captain of the militia (armatoli) established to police the mountain districts. The famous Ali of Janina himself, who lived to be courted by Napoleon and patronised by the British Government, began his strange career as an outlaw and a robber ; and of the wild leaders, who afterwards adorned and disgraced the national revolt of the Greeks, the greater number had been trained in his service.

Into this savage and unquiet society had early been borne echoes of the revolutionary turmoil in France. Ali Pasha, a tricolour cockade tacked to his turban, babbling of Liberty and Fraternity to a commissioner of the French Republic, while keeping an eye on the Ionian Islands, was indeed no more serious than Ali drinking to the health of the Theotokos, with an eye on the dominion of Greece. But Janina was not the only road by which ideas from the outside world penetrated into the fastnesses of Hellas. On the educated Greeks of the Dispersion the influence of the Revolution was profound; and it gave a new stimulus to the efforts already being made to preserve and reconstruct the glorious traditions which the main body of the race had all but lost. The national problem was, moreover, not as yet complicated by those sectional jealousies which have since made the Macedonian Question the despair of Europe. Whatever the elements which in the course of ages

174 The Hellenic movement: its literary side

had gone to make up the population of Greece, the Orthodox Church had absorbed them into herself and made them the inheritors, if not of Hellas, at least of the Empire of Byzantium. In the Danubian principalities, it is true, the oppressions of the Greek hospodars and their agents had made the name of Greek stink in the nostrils of the Rouman peasantry; but in the south of the peninsula Bulgar, Kutzo-Vlach, and Orthodox Albanian, had not yet learned the virtue of racial, as distinct from religious, hate ; and, Greeks by creed, they felt themselves also Greeks by nationality. Rhigas, whose stirring revolutionary songs did so much to rouse in Greece the passion of revolt, and whose execution in 179-1 made him the proto-martyr of the new Hellenic nationality,was a Vlach who had found his inspiration in Paris.

Like so many subsequent revolutionary agitations, the Hellenic movement, which culminated in an armed national uprising, received its first impulse from a propaganda purely linguistic and literary. To the enthusiasts of the Greek revival the first step towards gathering up the broken threads of the national tradition seemed to be to make the modern Greeks familiar with the great monuments of their heroic past. The Church preserved for them the memory of the Orthodox empire; but a new force was necessary to carry the national imagination back, behind " the grandeur that was Rome " to " the glory that was Greece," and substitute for the national style of Romans (JRoumaioi) the forgotten name of Hellenes. But the Greek language mirrored very accurately the heterogeneous constitution of the Greek race. The Hellenic foundation survived, but overlaid with elements representing each succeeding wave of barbarism which had swept over and left its jetsam on the soil of Greece. To the peasant of the Morea,as to the townsman of Athens, the Greek of the literary masterpieces of antiquity was an unknown tongue; and, if this is no longer the case, the change is due to the conscious linguistic revolution which is for ever associated with the name of Adamantios Korais. He too,like Rhigas,had studied at Paris; and he made it his life's mission to interpret to his fellow-countrymen the Hellenic literature which he had there learned to love and admire. What Luther's Bible did for Germany, the English Bible for England, the Welsh Bible for Wales, that Korais did for modern Greece by his translations of the Classics into a language which was, as it were, a compromise between the patois still used in ordinary conversation and the stately language of the originals. His success proved once for all that, where rivalry of races is in question, literary monuments are factors not to be ignored by far-seeing statesmen. The effort was grotesque enough when, with the name of Hellenes, the pupils of Ali of Janina assumed the style and affected the attributes of Homer's heroes; but the fiction appealed to the imagination of a Europe which knew only, and knew familiarly, the Greece of Plato and of Pericles. It gave an impetus to the wave of Philhellenism which did so much to

1812-5] Turkey, Russia, and the Congress of Vienna 175

solve the practical question of the liberation of Greece from Ottoman misgovernment; and it supplied to the infant State, born after so much travail, a language and a tradition which linked it consciously with an inspiring past.

Of the extent and importance of this racial and religious movement inside the Ottoman empire European statesmen, until the eve of the War of Independence, had little idea. There was, however, in the situation revealed between the Peace of Bucharest and the opening of the Congress of Vienna enough to alarm those interested in avoiding a renewed rupture between Russia and Turkey, and to suggest to them the expediency of bringing the integrity of the Ottoman empire under the guarantee of the treaties established by the Congress. That this was not accomplished was due, in the first instance, to the obstinate pride of the Porte itself. The privileges granted to the Servians under the Treaty of 1812 had been left, perhaps purposely, vague and ill-defined; the Ottoman Government interpreted them according to its own ideas; and Russia complained, with reason, that the continued oppressions of the Turkish officials constituted a breach of the treaty. But this was not all. By two secret articles annexed to the Treaty of Bucharest, Russia, in exchange for the demolition of the forts at Kilia and Ismailia on the Danube, was to obtain permanent possession of the road from the Black Sea to Tiflis through the valley of the Phasis, the use of which had been granted to her by the Porte in order to facilitate the Russian operations in the war with Persia. These articles the Sultan had refused to ratify; and the relations of the two countries had come to be fixed by the public treaty only. Russia, however, refused to evacuate the territory in question, and not only laid claim to almost all the highlands between the Caspian and the Black Sea acquired by conquest or by concessions from chiefs claiming sovereignty, but aimed at acquiring the lowlands of the Black Sea littoral, which Turkey asserted to be hers by long possession and undoubted right. As Sir Robert Liston pointed out, the crisis need never haVe arisen ; for Russia might well have evacuated a position which she could always take again should occasion arise. Unfortunately the Sultan had backed his demand with a threat of war; Russia, refusing to be bullied, had replied by extending her pretensions; and at the period of the Congress of Vienna matters had reached a deadlock. In vain the British Government urged upon the Porte that the European guarantee of the integrity of Turkey must depend upon the settlement of these outstanding questions, " since it is impossible to guarantee the possession of a territory the limits of which are not fixed." It was proposed that the matters at issue should be settled by the joint intervention of Austria, France, and Great Britain. To this the Emperor Alexander gave a provisional assent; but the Sultan remained obdurate; and, in the hurry of the close of the Congress, after Napoleon's return from Elba, the whole question was