liberation of Bulgaria fifty years later, the Russian
sword and English public opinion Byron and
Gladstone were the main factors in the Turkish
defeat.
Meanwhile, it had become obvious that the
head of the new Greek state must be a foreigner.
After the failure of the experiment, made by the
Constitution of Epidavros in 1822, of appointing
the Phanariote Greek, Alexander Mavrokordatos,
as President, and of the similar system, elaborated
by the second National Assembly at Astros in
1823, it was realized that no Greek would recognize
another Greek as his sovereign, but that all Greeks
would be willing to accept the scion of some
European Royal family as their ruler. Roumania
(after trial of a native head), Bulgaria and Albania
much later, all sought their Princes from Germany,
that nursery of Balkan monarchs ; whereas the
two Serb states, Montenegro and Serbia, have had
native dynasties. But Montenegro was a Homeric
autocracy, while Greece is a democracy, and a
large part of Serbian history, down to the tragedy
of 1903, was occupied by the feud of the two great
native families, that of Obrenovich and that of
Karageorgevich. There was, indeed, one Greek
16 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
of commanding experience, Count John Capo
d'Istria, and the National Assembly of Troizen
elected him President of Greece for seven years.
But Capo d'Istria's temperament and Russian
training both unfitted him to rule over a country
such as the Greece of 1828, and the latter made
him unpopular with Great Britain and France.
The London protocol of March 22, 1829, involved
his political extinction ; for it provided that the
Greek territory south of the Gulfs of Arta and
Volo should be an hereditary monarchy under a
Christian prince, to be chosen by, but not from,
the dynasties of the three protecting Powers,
Great Britain, France, and Russia, under the
suzerainty of the Porte. The inclusion of this
protocol also in the treaty of Adrianople ensured
its recognition by the Sultan. Another protocol,
of February 3, 1830, was a further advance on the
road to Greek freedom. The results of the late
Russo-Turkish War had convinced Wellington
that the end of Turkey was nigh a foreboding
shared by many European statesmen since his
time, but even now not completely accomplished,
even in Europe, although the Turks now hold in
that to them alien continent little more than
Constantinople and its immediate surroundings.
The corollary of Wellington's conviction was that
it would be useless to place Greece under so weak
a suzerain ; but, since he believed that she would
become a satellite of Russia (as Beaconsfield
equally erroneously believed of Bulgaria in 1878),
ESTABLISHMENT OF KINGDOM 17
his policy was to make her an independent, but
not too large, state. Nearly a century of Balkan
history has proved the folly of this argument.
The real barrier against external intervention
in the Near East consists of a chain of strong
Balkan states, which, however much they may
quarrel among themselves and in that respect
they resemble their rather Pharisaical and
" superior " Western critics, the Great Powers
are united in disliking foreign intervention, be it
Turkish, Austrian, or Russian, as in the past, or
Italian, as in the present or future, in their affairs.
Greeks, Jugoslavs, Bulgarians and Albanians,
mutually detesting each other, are united in
desiring " the Balkan Peninsula for the Balkan
peoples," just as the Iberian Peninsula belongs
exclusively to the Spanish and Portuguese, and
the Italian to the Italians, instead of being treated,
like Greece in the Frankish period, or Africa to-
day, as colonial territory for European exploitation.
But the men of 1830 had not the experience of
1921. Consequently the frontiers of the com-
pletely independent Greek state, which the protocol
of February 3 sought to create and the government
of which it entrusted to a hereditary " Sovereign
Prince of Greece," chosen outside the reigning
families of Great Britain, France and Russia, were
cut down to the mouth of the Spercheios on the
East and to that of the Acheloos on the West,
and, while including Euboea and the Cyclades,
excluded all the other islands and most important
18 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
of all of them, Crete. This last omission cost that
island several insurrections, Greece the expenditure
of large sums upon the relief of Cretan refugees
(which seriously crippled her finances), and Europe
an almost constant annoyance and danger to the
peace of the East in the shape of a " question,"
settled, at last, in 1912-13, after various diplomatic
makeshifts, by the only natural solution union
with the Greek kingdom.
Yet, even in 1830, there was one far-seeing
statesman, who warned Lord Aberdeen, " that he
could imagine no effectual mode of pacifying
Greece without including Candia in the new state."
This was Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who had
been chosen as sovereign of Greece, and who had
at first accepted. By his withdrawal of his accept-
ance Greece lost, and Belgium gained, a wise ruler,
who might have made Athens an Eastern Brussels
and would, in any case, have been a better ruler
than Otho. Fairness to the Greeks demands
that this initial mistake of the Powers should be
held responsible for many of the troubles of the
modern kingdom. If Greece was unable to devote
exclusive attention as her critics, and especially
her English critics, suggested to her internal
affairs, that was largely owing to her unsatisfactory
frontiers and, above all, to the exclusion of " the
great Greek island," whence, in the end, came her
greatest statesman. If she was poor and un-
productive, that was not her fault, but that of the
Powers, who deliberately shut out from her narrow
ESTABLISHMENT OF KINGDOM 19
boundaries the richest Greek lands, leaving to
her the " thin soil " of Attica, but to the Turks
the rich mastic-island of Chios and Thessaly,
(since its annexation in 1881) the granary of
Greece.
Thanks, indeed, to Palmerston and Sir Stratford
Canning (who had been on the spot) the frontiers
of 1830 were enlarged by the final arrangement of
1832 as far as the Gulfs of Arta and Volo, including
the disputed district of Lamia. Greece thus was
no longer deprived of the brave Akarnanians and
of many of those ^Etolians who had borne so
distinguished a part in the war ; she no longer had
to leave to the Turks the strategic pass of Makry-
noros. But both the keys of " Ambrakia's Gulf,
where once was lost the world for woman," the
town of Preveza and the fort of Punta, the site
of the classic Actium, remained in Turkish keeping,
the latter till 1881, the former till 1912. The
Seven Ionian Islands were under a British pro-
tectorate ; Crete had been united in 1830 to the
Egyptian pashalik of Mehemet Ali, as a reward
for his services to his suzerain, and Egyptian it
remained till 1840, when, against the wishes of
the Christian Cretans, who formed the majority
of the population, it was restored to direct depen-
dence upon the Turkish Empire, of which, at the
time of the War of Independence, it had been,
according to the British traveller, Pashley, " the
worst-governed province." Another Greek island,
Samos, which had taken part in the national
20 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
struggle and, when liberated, had been organized
by the future Greek Prime Minister, Kolettes, was
blockaded, and forcibly erected in 1832 into an
autonomous Christian principality a form of
government which existed for eighty years.
Thus the Greece of 1832, which remained un-
enlarged till the Union of the Ionian Islands in
1864, was a torso, thanks to one of those partial
solutions dear to diplomacy but contrary to
nature and history. Still, the Greeks had obtained
what they had lacked for nearly four centuries,
what the Albanians lacked till 1914, what the
Armenians still lack to-day a national home,
small, indeed, but their own. Their small kingdom
became the cynosure of the rich Greek colonies
of Western Europe and Egypt, the nucleus of the
greater Greece that was to be, and which, by the
genius of a great man, was realized four score years
later. For this little Greece some men lived
solitary and laborious lives in order that they
might bequeath to her their fortunes ; and in
the narrow limits of the classic land the Greeks
of the dispersion found a country which inspired
their patriotism. Having gained Greece, they sent
money to adorn it.
Meanwhile, the internal condition of the Greeks
had become chaotic. Capo d'Istria had become
more and more unpopular ; the French Revolution
of 1830 had increased the democratic feeling
against his methods and his family ; and his
culminating error was to employ the Russian
ESTABLISHMENT OF KINGDOM 21
fleet against the " Constitutional Committee " of
the famous " Nautical island " of Hydra, which had
seized the Arsenal at Poros. The sack of Poros by
the presidential troops recalled the Turkish exploits
of the late war, and an affront to the pride of the
famous Mainate clan of the Mavromichalai, of
which Petrobey was the head, led to his assassina-
tion at Nauplia on October 9, 1831, by Constantino
and George, two members of that, family, which,
in our own time, has given a Prime Minister to
Greece. Anarchy followed this savage act of
vengeance, typical of the land of Maina, almost
independent in Turkish days, where, as in modern
Albania, the vendetta was still the popular usage.
Civil war followed between the late President's
brother, Agostino, the chairman of a triumvirate,
and his colleague, Kolettes, who had been a
physician at the Court of Ali Pasha of Joannina
and represented " Rumelia," as continental Greece
was then called. Finally, the three Powers offered
the Crown of Greece to Prince Otho, the second
son of King Louis of Bavaria. The father was
favourably known in Greece as a Philhellene, the
son, then a lad of seventeen, had been put forward
as a candidate by a travelling professor, Thiersch,
who had acted as his electoral agent among the
Greek notables.
The choice was not fortunate, for what was
wanted was a man of experience ; but it was
argued that Otho, being young, would the more
easily assimilate the ideas of his new environment,
22 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
while the experience of affairs, until he came of
age, would be provided by a Regency of three
Bavarians, Count von Armansperg, Dr. Maurer,
and General von Heideck, of whom the last alone
had had any practical acquaintance with the
people placed under his charge. A treaty between
Bavaria and the three Powers regulated the
terms of Otho's acceptance of the crown. He
was to be King, not " of the Greeks," like King
George, for that would have aroused the sus-
picions of Turkey but " of Greece," which was
declared an independent, hereditary monarchy
under the guarantee of the three not very fairy-
godmothers. If he died childless his younger
brother was to succeed him, but in no case was
the same person to be king of both Greece and
Bavaria. A corps of Bavarians was to organize
a native army ; the Powers guaranteed a loan to
the new kingdom. Such were the auspices under
which the young King landed at his capital of
Nauplia from a British frigate on February 6,
1833. He was young and full of hope ; his advent
was welcomed as a relief from the anarchy of the
previous sixteen months ; and it was felt that
any monarch was better than civil war.
CHAPTER III
BAVARIAN AUTOCRACY (1833-43)
t \HE country which Otho had come to
rule was in no enviable plight. Any land
JL which has had the misfortune to be governed
by the Turks is always devoid of the elements of
material progress ; roads require making, harbours
dredging, and marshes draining ; the only means
of communication are mule-tracks ; broken-down
wooden jetties take the place of piers ; and malaria
scourges regions which in the golden age of anti-
quity nourished flourishing cities. Such as is
Albania to-day (save for the improvements made
by the Austrians and the Italians during the late
war), such was Greece in 1833, with the great
additional disadvantage of having been the theatre
of a bitter racial and religious struggle, followed
by internecine conflicts, for nearly twelve years.
Centuries of subordination to foreign masters had
developed that spirit of intrigue which was innate
in the Byzantine character, while the love of
politics is as inbred in the Greek as is the love of
education. It is always harder to govern a highly
critical and political people than the more stolid
Northern nations, and the heavy Bavarian intellect
23
24 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
was unadapted to deal with the versatile Greek
mentality. The Regency soon set the gossips of
the small world of Nauplia talking ; the discord
between Armansperg and Maurer was enhanced
by the airs which the former's wife gave herself,
and the foreign representatives began to interfere
in internal Greek politics, just as, in the time of the
Obrenoviches, there were Austrian and Russian
parties at Belgrade, and in 1914, at the similar
petty court of Durazzo, the Italian and Austrian
Ministers intrigued with rival Albanian parties.
Consequently, the Regency was not a success ;
it would, indeed, have been a miracle if it had
succeeded.
After disbanding the irregulars always a diffi-
cult problem in the Balkans after the end of a war
the Regency proceeded to the formation of a Greek
Ministry under Spyridon Trikoupes, the historian
of the Revolution and father of the still more
celebrated statesman of the latter part of last
century. The Bavarians committed the mistake
in their internal policy of substituting a highly
centralized bureaucracy for those ancient muni-
cipal liberties which even the Turks had respected.
The kingdom was divided by a paper symmetry
into ten nomarchies, subdivided into forty-two
eparchies, and these last again into demes, of which
the chief, or demarch, was nominated by the
Crown and could be suspended by the Minister
of the Interior. A complicated code and a
theoretical system of education were imposed
BAVARIAN AUTOCRACY 25
upon a country as yet unfit for either, and the
press was manacled by the necessity of depositing
large sums as caution money for its good behaviour.
Now to the Greeks, ever eager " to tell or to hear
some new thing," the newspaper is a necessity
of existence ; so, when the Regency by its severe
press restrictions made it impossible for the
Opposition journals to live, the critical spirit of
the people was deprived of its natural vent and
forced into subterraneous channels.
Upon another palladium of the Greek people
the daring foreigners laid their profane hands.
It was necessary to cope with the problem of the
Orthodox Church now that there was a free Greek
kingdom, for obviously it would be unwise to allow
the head of that Church, the (Ecumenical Patriarch,
who was practically the prisoner of the Sultan in
the Phanar at Constantinople, to exercise supreme
authority over the ecclesiastical affairs of the
independent Greek state, especially as in the
Near East the barrier between the spiritual and
the temporal authorities is slender ; for, if few
Eastern politicians are religious men, nearly all
Eastern churchmen are politicians. It was natural,
then, that, in 1833, a decree, signed by thirty-four
bishops, should proclaim the Orthodox Church
within the Greek kingdom to be independent,
and governed by a synod of five prelates, to be
named by the King. This declaration of ecclesias-
tical independence would in itself have called
down the thunders of the Patriarch, for the
26 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
Patriarchs have yielded nothing in ambition, but
only in the means of gratifying it, to their Western
rivals, the Popes. But the reformers did not stop
there. They provided for the reduction of the
superabundant hierarchy to ten, arguing that
one bishop apiece was adequate provision for the
ten nomarchies. Struck with the large number
of monasteries, whose inhabitants were mostly
picturesque, but idle, peasants, rather than
meditative theologians or leisurely scholars, en-
gaged in research, they suppressed and nation-
alized (like the Italian Government in 1873) all
religious houses inhabited by less than six monks.
Vested interests naturally rallied to the side of
the Patriarch ; and the monks saw in this measure
the work of foreigners and schismatics, who
governed in the name of a Roman Catholic King
and were engaged in a conspiracy against monas-
ticism. The Bavarians in this were only following
the policy of that great Byzantine Emperor,
Nikephoros Phokas a policy which made him
unpopular and would make foreigners doubly so.
Not till 1850 did the Patriarch recognize in a
" Synodal Tome " the independence of the Ortho-
dox Church in Greece ; not till 1852 was complete
peace restored. Since then two events have
further diminished his authority : the erection of
the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, which raised up
a formidable rival against him in Macedonia ; and
the Greek victories of 1912-13, which led to the
annexation of many Turkish districts, containing
BAVARIAN AUTOCRACY 27
Orthodox sees, 1 to the Greek kingdom. Thus,
Sofia on the one hand and Athens on the other
alike gained at the expense of the Patriarch, who
is likely in the future, except for his historic name
and long traditions, to be less important than the
Metropolitan of Athens. So, in the last days of
the Greek Empire, the little strip of territory
round Constantinople, to which it had shrunk,
was really less important than the Byzantine
" Despotat " of Mistra in the South of the Morea,
which was theoretically only an appanage of it.
A revolt of the mediaeval land of Maina, where
every man's tower was his castle and the Bavarian
policy of pulling down the towers was regarded
as an infringement of that individual liberty,
which the Turks had not crushed, completed the
difficulties of the well-meaning Germans, who had
undertaken to put Greece in order. Maurer was
recalled, and while he issued his Apologia pro vita
sud in the shape of his big book on " the Greek
people," his more fortunate rival, Armansperg,
governed it without further restraint from any one.
In 1834 Athens became the capital of Greece,
and Nauplia, with its beautiful gulf and picturesque
Venetian walls, descended to the rank of a pro-
vincial town. There had been three competitors
for the honour and profit of being the Greek Royal
residence Nauplia, which was indicated by
considerations of economy and vested interests ;
Corinth, which could point to its central situation,
1 Not yet, however, definitely regulated. Infra, p. 145.
28 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
its twin seas to be connected in 1893 by the
present canal and the ample expanse of building-
land afforded by the Isthmus ; and Athens, which
was, for historic reasons, the only possible capital
of modern Greece, as was Rome of modern Italy,
until such time so the dreamers of " the Great
Idea " thought as it should please Providence
to drive the Turk from Constantinople and replace
there those who, in those early days long before
the birth of Bulgaria and the treaty of San Stefano,
seemed to themselves and to many others his
only heirs. But the fine modern city which we
know to-day, with its marble houses and its suburbs
gradually creeping down to form with its busy
port a single town, is very different from the
combination of noble classic monuments and
sordid ruins the results of the war which greeted
Otho on December 13, 1834. Prior to the war,
after the twenty years' exceptional tyranny of
Hadji Ali, its governor in the last quarter of the
eighteenth century, Athens had been described
as " happy and beautiful," occupied with local
politics and education. But it had not yet
recovered. The Piraeus, now one of the busiest
harbours of the Levant, then consisted of three
wooden shanties, and at Athens the King had to
live at first in a one-storied house, similar to those
which in our time served as the residences of
eminent personages at the Montenegrin capital.
A lady-in-waiting of Queen Amalia the daughter
of the Grand-duke of Oldenburg, whom Otho
BAVARIAN AUTOCRACY 29
brought back as his bride from his European tour
two years later has left a graphic description of
the conditions of social life at Athens in the early
years of its transformation into a Royal residence.
Material progress was rapid, perhaps too rapid ;
for, if the Bavarians drained the poisonous marshes
and laid out the road to the Piraeus, which became
the favourite promenade of the Court, they
sacrificed not a few mediaeval churches in their
zeal for building a modern city. We may, at
least, be thankful to the King of Bavaria, that the
terrible suggestion of imitating the Florentine
Dukes of Athens in the fifteenth century and
erecting his son's palace on the Akropolis, was
abandoned. A spot was chosen out of range of
a bombardment from the sea as the King of
Bavaria expressed it a calculation falsified in
December, 1916. But ignorance of an Eastern
climate caused the construction of wide and
shadeless thoroughfares, instead of the narrow
and shady lanes of Turkish Athens, regardless of
that scourge of this waterless city, the dust, which
modern macadam has done something to diminish.
Among the prominent creations of those early
years was the foundation of the University, at
first lodged in a modest house at the foot of the
Akropolis, and later transferred to the present
fine building, in which, in 1912 that Annus
mirabilis of modern Greece was celebrated,
amidst a concourse of scholars from all over the
world, its seventy-fifth anniversary. It was pro-
30 A HISTORY OF THE GREEK PEOPLE
phesied by that shrewd old chieftain, Koloko-
trones, as he pointed first to the University, then
to the Palace, that the day would come when
" this house will eat up that one " a prophecy
fulfilled at the revolution of 1862. For, if the
Athens University has produced some remarkable
scholars, it has also produced many politicians,
who have increased that intellectual proletariat
which does not tend towards the stability of
Governments in democratic Southern countries.
There have been two occasions in our own time
when the University students have overthrown
Cabinets by their hostile demonstrations ; but it
must be set down as a compensation for this draw-
back that the University has provided " the Great
Idea " with some of its most fervent apostles.
The Macedonian, Thracian, Cretan and Asiatic
Greeks who studied at Athens returned to their
homes not only with their diplomas as lawyers,
doctors or teachers, but with the patriotic resolve
to work for the union of " the outer Greeks " with
the Greek kingdom. If the University shook
the throne of Otho, it has also dismembered the
Turkish Empire. As a powerful dissolvent of
Turkish rule, it has a place in Greek history, besides
that to which its scientific achievements entitle it.
Even after Otho attained his majority in 1835,
Armansperg, now " Arch-Chancellor," retained
influence till his policy, become more and more
autocratic, provoked such continual complaints
that, in 1837, the King appointed another Bavarian,
BAVARIAN AUTOCRACY 31
Herr von Rudhart, to take his place, but with the
more modest title of Prime Minister and Minister
of Foreign Affairs. Armansperg had enjoyed the
support of Great Britain ; his successor's brief
term of power was embittered by the opposition
of the British Minister. Nothing can be worse
for the political development of a young country
than the dependence of its Cabinets upon foreign
Legations. But Athens, in the days of Otho,
was the diplomatic cockpit of the three Powers,
and " English," "French," and "Russian" parties
flourished under the respective leadership of
Mavrokordatos, Kolettes and Kolokotrones.
An attempt was now made to Hellenise the
Cabinet, only one place in which was given to a
Bavarian ; but the King counteracted the popu-
larity which he would otherwise have obtained
from this concession to public opinion, by acting
as his own Prime Minister and presiding over the
Cabinet Councils, while what was practically a
privy council of Bavarians stood between him and
his Ministers. For the criticism, which, under the
usual constitutional practice, would have been
diverted to the Premier, was inevitably focussed
on the person of the King, who was regarded, like
King Constantine eighty years later, as the party
chief of a cabal. Other causes contributed to