470 Chapter 24The conservative alliance broke apart over the rev-
olutions in the Balkans, where the Ottoman Empire was
slowly disintegrating. Revolutions broke out in Serbia,
Greece, and the Rumanian provinces of Moldavia and
Wallachia (on the border of Russia), but it was the
Greek revolution of 1821–27 that broke the Metter-
nichian alliance (see illustration 24.5). After the Serbs
won autonomy in their revolution, a Greek congress at
Epidaurus declared independence in 1822. According
to the principles of the Troppau Protocol, the great
powers should have supported the legitimate Turkish
government. Metternich was almost alone in favoring
that policy. Romantic philhellenism stimulated a pro-
Greek policy in Britain and France, and for once gov-
ernments agreed with the radical Shelley who wrote:
“We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our reli-
gion, our arts, have their roots in Greece.” Russian pol-
icy was less sophisticated but more adamant: The
Ottoman Empire deserved no help from the Holy
Alliance because it was not a Christian state.
The Greeks won their independence in a long, bru-
tal war that still echoes in Graeco-Turkish enmity.
Greek Orthodox clergymen proclaimed a “war of exter-
mination” against Islamic infidels, leading to the killing
of twenty-five thousand civilians within six weeks; the
sultan proclaimed an Islamic Holy War that produced
forty thousand civilian corpses. Along the way, the pa-
triarch of the Orthodox Church was hanged and his
body thrown into the Bosphorus. This killing did not
end until Britain, France, and Russia broke with Metter-
nich and intervened in 1827. The counterrevolutionary
alliance collapsed (there were no full congresses after
1822) because self-interest had prevailed over doctrine;
ironically, the most conservative state in Europe had
caused this.Autocracy in Romanov Russia
The czar of Russia held enormous power in Metter-
nichian Europe. No monarch had contributed more to
the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte: Napoleon’s Grand
Armée had perished in Russia in 1812, and Russian
troops had occupied Paris in 1814. The czar’s support
had sustained the congress system, and his defection
during the Greek revolution had destroyed it.
Russian internal affairs were less simple. The enig-
matic Alexander I had come to the throne in 1801 at
the age of twenty-four, after the assassination of his fa-
ther, in which Alexander may have been involved. He
was a tall and handsome youth who favored skin-tight
uniforms; he had become overweight by 1815, but his
vanity and his robust sexuality (which ranged from his
sister to religious mystics) put him in corsets instead
of loose-fitting clothes. This same Alexander was
considered the most intelligent monarch of the age by
both Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte (ex-
cepting himself). Alexander held more absolute power
than anyone else in Europe and with it came the oppor-Illustration 24.5
The Greek Revolution.The Greek revolution of 1821–30
(or the Greek War of Independence) was one of the most suc-
cessful nationalist uprisings of the Metternichian era, in part be-
cause philhellenism swept the educated classes in western
countries, encouraging governments to support the Greeks. One
moment of the Greek revolution became especially well-known
in western Europe: the Turkish siege and assault on the Greek
fortress of Missolonghi, which guarded the mouth of the Gulf of
Corinth. Lord Byron, the noted English romantic poet, was de-
voted to the Greek cause and died at Missolonghi in 1824.
Eugène Delacroix devoted one of the most famous paintings of
Romanticism to the battle, “Greece in the Ruins of Missolonghi,”
shown here, in 1826.