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In 1827 the Greeks were at an end.
Their uprising against the Sultan had already lasted six years.
But he had found a powerful ally.
Mehmed Ali Pasha, of all people, his renegade governor of Egypt, had put his army and fleet on the march for the offer to add the Peloponnese to his sphere of influence.
Unlike the Ottoman troops, the army of the virtually independent Egyptian viceroy was well trained and armed.
Despite all the emotional and material support that the Greeks received from the European public, their defeat seemed only a matter of time.
Stations of the Greek nation-state
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The Greek uprising against the Ottoman rule lasted from 1821 to 1827 and devastated large parts of the country.
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Delacroix's painting "The fall of Greece on the ruins of Missolunghi" (1826) became the symbol of the Philhellenes.
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In 1828 the Russian diplomat Ioannis Kapodistrias was elected Greece's first president.
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On October 9, 1831, Kapodistrias was shot dead by two clan leaders in his capital, Nafplion.
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The Wittelsbacher Otto, who arrived in Greece in 1833, lost the throne after two revolutions in 1843 and 1862.
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The Danish Glücksburg dynasty was not happy either.
In 1913 Georg I was murdered.
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The "great idea" of uniting all Greeks in a large empire modeled on Byzantium provoked large and small wars.
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For decades the Cretan Eleutherios Venizelos (1864-1936) was the leading politician.
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In the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Greece was able to roughly reach its present size.
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During the First World War, the conflict between the pro-German king and Venizelos almost led the country into civil war.
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The attempt to occupy large parts of Turkey in 1919 ended in disaster.
A million Greeks had to flee.
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In the thirties Ioannis Metaxas (2nd from right) ruled the country dictatorially.
It was still able to repel Mussolini's attack.
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But Greece had nothing to oppose the Blitzkrieg of the German Wehrmacht in 1941.
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The partisan struggle culminated in a civil war between national and communist groups from 1944 to 1949.
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After the end of the war, Andreas Papandreou (left) and Konstantin Karamanlis shaped the country for decades.
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Between 1967 and 1974 a military junta under Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos exercised a brutal dictatorship.
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The intervention of the junta in Cyprus led to the Turkish invasion and the overthrow of the military.
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An almost accidental encounter turned the tide.
On October 20, 1827, a combined Anglo-French-Russian squadron sailed into the Bay of Navarino in the southwest of the Peloponnese.
Opposite him was the Egyptian-Turkish fleet in position.
What was intended as a show of force turned into a bloody battle with a few rifle shots.
Mehmed Ali's ships were destroyed within a few hours.
The Greek revolution had triumphed.
That this came about was not least thanks to Ibrahim Pascha, who, as the son of Mehmed Ali, commanded the 25,000-strong Egyptian expeditionary force.
Because he was fully committed to the scorched earth strategy.
The news of the atrocities committed by the Muslim troops met with a great response from the public in Europe, which in turn put the governments of the Holy Alliance under pressure.
Ibrahim Pascha (1789-1848) commanded the Egyptian expeditionary force in Greece
Source: picture alliance / imageBROKER
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Basically, the uprising that broke out in Greece in 1821 was a breach of the principles that the Congress of Vienna had decreed after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815: Austria, Russia, Prussia and later also France had come together to secure the restored and legitimate regimes of Europe .
England had remained aloof, but as the leading naval power it was inevitably drawn into the conflict that the revolution sparked in the western Levant.
Internationally, it was shaped by the front position between the tsarist and the ailing Ottoman Empire, which the naval powers England and France jumped at, as they viewed the Russian striving for the Bosporus and Dardanelles with suspicion.
For the Austrian State Chancellor Metternich, however, the entire European system that he had built as a bulwark against the revolution was put to the test.
Sir Edward Codrington (1770-1851), Commander in Chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet
Source: Getty Images
For this reason, the bourgeois public in Europe saw the Greek revolt as a blow to the restoration of the Holy Alliance.
In the neo-humanist spirit, the International of the Philhellenes got intoxicated by the supposed rebirth of the ancient Hellenes and thus roused against censorship and authorities.
However, the princes were not immune to such emotions either.
Ludwig I of Bavaria had sent a military mission to support the Greeks.
It was chic to get involved in philhellenic associations.
Aristocrats did not want to be considered barbarians either.
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In this sense, England, France and Russia had agreed in London at the beginning of July 1827 on an armistice, which provided for an autonomous Greece under the suzerainty of the Sultan.
Edward Codrington, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet, was commissioned to implement this in cooperation with French ships, which were also joined by a Russian detachment.
Sultan Mahmud II, however, rejected the request and signified Ibrahim - with the imminent victory in mind - to destroy the last nests of resistance.
The Egyptian immediately got to work.
“Flying columns crossed Messenia and Arcadia;
the previously spared villages went up in flames, 60,000 fig and 25,000 olive trees were cut down, the livelihood of future generations was destroyed in advance, ”wrote the German historian Karl Mendelssohn Bartholdy in his great“ History of Greece ”.
Requests from the allies to put an end to it, Ibrahim evaded, claiming to be absent.
The Allies drove into the narrow bay of Navarino in battle lines
Source: Getty Images
Codrington then ordered his fleet to enter the bay of Navarino, ancient Pylos, on October 20 for a show of force.
The Allies had 26 ships, including ten ships of the line and twelve frigates, with a total of 1270 cannons.
Ibrahim's fleet consisted of 82 units with around 2,000 guns, but the ships were smaller, the guns outdated, and the crews inexperienced.
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Codrington's instructions to the admirals and captains have repeatedly been disputed.
Was the Brit up for a fight or did he just want to impress the opponent?
“The Allied fleet should not fire a cannon until the signal is given.
If a Turkish vehicle should allow itself a shot, it should be shot at and immediately destroyed ... If there is a general battle ... remember the words of Lord Nelson (who defeated Napoleon's 1st fleet at Trafalgar in 1805; d. Ed.) : No captain can be better at his post than when his ship is facing an enemy ship. "
The battle took place in a very confined space
Source: Wikipedia / Public Domain
At least that sounded like a good deal of belligerence.
When around 2:30 p.m. a British boat asked a Turkish fire to move away, shots were fired.
Several English people died.
The Allies struck back immediately.
In a confined space, a salvo from their modern artillery was often enough to put an enemy ship out of action.
After two and a half hours, Ibrahim had lost a ship of the line, twelve frigates, 22 corvettes and 25 other ships.
Prisoners were not taken.
The Allies counted 172 dead and 470 wounded, Egyptians and Turks lost around 6,000 men, including all recruits from the new Egyptian military schools.
Nevertheless, it initially looked like a Pyrrhic victory.
Because the Egyptian-Turkish army remained intact and fought back brutally, while Codrington's ships had to retreat to their bases to repair and replenish supplies.
But his work of destruction now also hit Ibrahim, as he was hardly able to supply his troops over the winter, especially since his fleet was destroyed.
Most of the Egyptian-Ottoman fleet was destroyed
Source: Wikipedia / Public Domain
The tsar's armies took care of the rest.
In 1828 he declared war on the Sultan, whose battered army had no chance against the Russian troops.
The Ottomans owed it only to English and French pressure that Nicholas I stopped the march on Istanbul and concluded the Peace of Edirne.
In it the Sultan had to agree to the London Treaty of 1827, but to the effect that Greece - the Peloponnese, the mainland up to the height of Volos – Arta and some Aegean islands - should not become autonomous, but sovereign.
Since Codrington was celebrated as a hero in public, the government in London decided inevitably to award him the Grand Cross of the Order of Bath and not to condemn him for duping a strategic ally against the Tsar.
But the biggest loser was in Vienna.
Metternich realized that his Holy Alliance and its principles had been crushed over a conflict on the southeastern edge of Europe.
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This article was first published in 2018.