Greek War of Independence
The Filiki Eteria (Society of Friends) was founded in 1814 in the Russian Black Sea port of Odessa by three Greek merchants, at the very moment the Congress of Vienna was redrawing Europe's borders. It built a clandestine revolutionary network across the Greek diaspora and the Ottoman Balkans, drawing on Greek commercial capital, the protection afforded by Russian co-religionist sympathy, and the Romantic philhellenism then sweeping educated Western opinion. The uprising broke out in 1821 in the Danubian Principalities and the Peloponnese. It was extraordinarily brutal on both sides, marked by massacres of Muslim and Christian civilians alike, and it laid bare the Ottoman state's central structural dilemma: military reform to suppress the revolt required modern troops, but the janissaries violently obstructed reform, while provincial autonomy and fiscal weakness left the Porte dependent on the over-mighty governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, whose intervention in 1825 nearly crushed the Greeks. It was external pressure that proved decisive. In 1827 a combined British, French, and Russian fleet annihilated the Ottoman-Egyptian navy at Navarino, and the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-1829 forced the Sultan to concede. The Treaty of Adrianople (1829) and the London Protocol (1830) established an independent Greek kingdom. For the empire the war confirmed that great-power intervention on behalf of its subject nationalities, not internal rebellion alone, was the mechanism by which it would be progressively dismantled.
- Year: 1821 CE
- Category: Political
