The Greek Revolution of 1821

The story of how constitutional democracy eventually overcame Ottoman imperialism...

After the last of Napoleon’s armies were defeated in 1815, the crowned heads of Old Europe thought they were at last done with revolution.
 
True, faraway Latin America was still fighting for independence from Spain. But the domestic politics of the great European powers were stable.
 
The monarchs of Europe – Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria – created a region-wide system of surveillance and armed intervention to prevent or else crush democratic activism in future. 
 
The revolutionary genie was well and truly back in the bottle. Or so they thought…

The Great Powers had taken their eye off the ball. Which is to say, they’d taken their eye of the Mediterranean.
 
Fixated on preventing another revolution in France, they forgot the more ‘peripheral’ countries of southern Europe. 
 
But this was where the next wave of revolution would break, on the shores of the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, and the Aegean. 
 
In 1820, constitutional revolutions against absolute monarchy were launched in Spain, Portugal, and Italy.
 
With some difficulty (and much violence) these uprisings were put down by the intervention of French and Austrian armies.
 
But then Greece, under the rule of the Ottoman Empire since the fifteenth century, launched its own revolution on this day in 1821.

Whereas the other revolutions in southern Europe had been clear-cut challenges to ‘legitimate’ European monarchs endorsed by Christian churches, the Greek revolutionaries were fighting a war of independence against the Muslim rulers of the Ottoman Empire, the old enemy of ‘Christendom’.
 
Soon enough, it was apparent that the reactionary lords of Europe had no choice but to let the Greeks have a go at toppling their Ottoman rulers. 
 
In fact, Russia – the fanatical lynchpin of counterrevolution in Europe – was directly involved in sponsoring some of the Greek rebels, who began the Revolution by invading the Ottoman-ruled Balkans from Russian territory. 
 
To ‘sell’ the Greek Revolution to conservative Europe, insurgent Greek elites presented it as an Orthodox Christian crusade against Muslim rule. 
 
In this version, the Greek cause was a conservative religious war rather than a popular revolution. 
 
But on the ground in Greece, the reality was very different.

In practice, the Greek revolutionaries were a motley coalition including plebeian bands of rural horsemen and peasant rebels in the Peloponnese mountains, led by guerrilla captains like Theodoros Kolokotronis.
 
The Greeks also improvised a navy of their own from the merchant sailors of the Aegean islands.  
 
And many of these Greek revolutionaries weren’t interested in restoring a pre-Ottoman Christian monarchy.
 
Influenced by the ideas of the American and European revolutions, they wanted a constitutional government based on popular sovereignty. 
 
And internationally, too, the Greek Revolution became a lightning rod for radicals and revolutionaries across Europe.
 
A “Philhellene” solidarity campaign developed, sending financial aid and hundreds of volunteer soldiers to support the Greek war effort. 
 
The Philhellenes were motivated by Classicist dreams of recreating Ancient Greece but also modern political ideals of constitutional government.
 
Their most famous volunteer, Lord Byron, died in Greece, creating a wave of sympathy for the Greek cause.