Greek War of Independence

Between 1821 and 1829 Greek insurgents fought to free themselves from the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled most Greek lands since the fifteenth century. After early successes, the revolt came close to defeat when Egyptian forces arrived to crush it, but intervention by Britain, France and Russia turned the tide. The result was the first independent Greek state of modern times, recognised in 1830 and given a Bavarian prince as king. Greeks mark 25 March as Independence Day in its memory.

Greek territory, apart from the Ionian Islands, had fallen under Ottoman control in the decades around the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and later uprisings had all failed. In the early nineteenth century, ideas from the Enlightenment and the example of the French Revolution fed a growing national movement. In 1814 three Greeks founded a secret society, the Filiki Eteria ("Society of Friends"), in Odessa, a centre of the Greek merchant community in Russia, to prepare a revolt. It planned simultaneous risings in the Peloponnese, the Danubian Principalities and Constantinople.

Under its leader Alexander Ypsilantis, the society struck first in the Danubian Principalities, crossing the Prut river in late February 1821, but that campaign was soon crushed. In the Peloponnese the Maniots declared war on 17 March, and within weeks the Greeks held the countryside while Ottoman garrisons clung to fortresses. In September 1821 Greek forces under Theodoros Kolokotronis took Tripolitsa, the Ottoman provincial capital, and its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were massacred. Greek fleets, using fire ships, kept Ottoman reinforcements from arriving by sea. Uprisings in Crete, Macedonia and central Greece were put down.

Violence against civilians was committed by both sides. In 1822 an Ottoman force landed on the island of Chios, where around 25,000 people were killed and some 45,000 enslaved, an event that horrified Europe. In Constantinople the Ecumenical Patriarch, Gregory V, was among those put to death. Meanwhile, rivalries among Greek leaders erupted into two successive civil wars. Estimates of total civilian deaths in the war vary greatly, from 230,000 to 600,000 Greeks and around 25,000 Muslims.

Unable to suppress the revolt, Sultan Mahmud II turned to his powerful vassal Muhammad Ali of Egypt, who sent his son Ibrahim Pasha with a modern army. Ibrahim landed in the Peloponnese in February 1825 and overran most of it by the end of the year. The town of Missolonghi fell in 1826 after a long siege, and in June 1827 the Acropolis of Athens surrendered. The revolution seemed close to collapse.

Across Europe, educated opinion sympathised with the Greeks as heirs of classical antiquity. Volunteers known as philhellenes joined the fight, most famously the poet Lord Byron, who died of fever at Missolonghi in 1824. In July 1827 Britain, France and Russia signed the Treaty of London, demanding an armistice. When the Ottomans refused, their combined fleets entered the bay of Navarino, and on 20 October 1827 they destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet anchored there. A French expeditionary force landed in 1828 and oversaw the Egyptian withdrawal from the Peloponnese, while the Russian Empire went to war with the Ottomans and forced them to accept Greek autonomy in the Treaty of Adrianople.

A London protocol of February 1830 made Greece fully independent under the protection of the three powers. Ioannis Kapodistrias, who had led the Greek government from 1828, was assassinated in 1831. In 1832 the powers chose Otto of Bavaria as the first king, and a treaty that year fixed the northern frontier on a line from Arta to Volos. The new state held about 800,000 people, less than a third of the Ottoman Empire's Greeks, and for the next century Greece sought to bring the rest within its borders.

Our 1815 map shows the Greek lands still inside the Ottoman Empire. By the 1878 map an independent Greece appears at the southern end of the Balkan peninsula.