Over a thousand ‘philhellenes’, Italians, French, English, Scots, Irish, Germans, Swiss, Poles, Scandinavians, Americans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarians and others (but not Russians, much to Capodistrias’s chagrin 53) came to assist the Greeks in their struggle, including a unique celebrity, Lord Byron, with some of his greatest romantic poems referring to the Greek cause (Childe Harold, Don Juan and others).
#I AM MOTION SICKNESS LYRICS FREE#
Greek committees sprung up in various parts of Europe and the US, starting with Spain and Switzerland, concluding with the London Greek Committee (1823) and the Paris Greek Committee (1825), all of which were engaged in fund-raising, writing pamphlets, securing funds, foodstuffs, medicine, arms and ammunition, as well as paying ransom to free enslaved Greeks (a Russian prerogative). What made the difference with the uprising of the Serbs in previous decades and the more recent rebellions for political rights in Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, Piedmont and Sardinia (1820–21) was that the Greek uprising had become a cause célèbre, giving rise to an impressive wave of what came to be known as ‘philhellenism’. 45Ĭontrary to the aloofness of the powers, bar Russia, European and American public opinion had been on the Greek side almost from the beginning. 44 Realizing that Alexander was unflinching, he left the Russian service a year later (August 1822), though his resignation was not accepted (he went on indefinite leave and settled in Geneva).
43 Capodistrias did his best to make him change his mind and went as far as suggesting the expulsion of the Ottomans from the Danubian principalities.
As he put it to Capodistrias in August 1821: ‘If we reply to the Turks with war … the Paris directing committee will triumph and no government will be left standing.… At all costs we must find means to avoid war with Turkey’. 42 The Tsar, finding no support for war outside Russia, concluded, in the interests of European stability, not to go to war for the Greek cause. Castlereagh wrote him a personal letter, in which he acknowledged that the atrocities committed by ‘the Turks’ ‘made humanity shudder’, but that the Greeks were in effect Carbonari representing the spirit of insurrection and threatening the whole of Europe. Metternich and Castlereagh put pressure on the Tsar by addressing his worst fears. There was also a small anti-war party, headed by Nesselrode, which feared that Greek emancipation would lead to similar calls on the part of Poles, Ukrainians and other subject peoples in Russia. Capodistrias was the natural leader of the war party and tried to convince the Tsar to take military steps against the Ottomans. 40 It comprised many high-ranking Russian officials, including ambassadors Stroganov, Lieven (in London) and Pozzo di Borgo (in Paris), and famous commanders from the Napoleonic wars, such as generals Kiselev, Ermolov and Diebitsch. 39 In Russia a war party took shape and clamoured for intervention. On the other hand, the Congress system and the Holy Alliance stood for the support of legitimate authority against rebels and the Tsar, for all his sympathy for the Greeks, was against their independence. For Alexander and the Russians, Orthodoxy and historical tradition justified coming to the support of the Greeks, as fellow Orthodox Christians. Russia, nearer to the scene and attached to its co-religionists, was in a quandary. The Greek case provided the springboard for the emergence of the concept of humanitarian intervention and had a bearing on the evolution of international norms and rules of conduct in instances of humanitarian plights in at least six ways. Even several jurists opposed to the notion of humanitarian intervention condoned this one case on humanitarian or moral grounds. The assessment of publicists from the 1830s until the 1930s is that that this was a humanitarian intervention even though humanitarian motives were not the only motives. Key events were the Treaty of London (the first of humanitarian reasons in a treaty) and the naval battle of Navarino. The massacres of Christians and the ‘barbarization rumour’ (the eviction of all the Greeks from Europe) and the strong wave of philhellenism across Europe and North America, which identified itself with the Greeks, made Britain, Russia and France intervene though initially they were unwilling to so for no tangible interest were at stake. This chapter examines its diplomatic history with emphasis on the role of Britain (Canning) and Russia. The intervention of Britain, Russia and France in the Greek War of Independence is regarded as the first armed intervention on humanitarian grounds.
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