590 Cii. 1 5 • Liberal Challenges To Restoration Europe“legitimate” sovereign of the Greeks. Support for the Greek rebels would
represent a renunciation of the status quo, a principle upon which the
Congress system had been based.
The Greek revolt grew out of a small Greek nationalist movement that
had developed at the end of the eighteenth century. Prince Alexander Ypsi
lantis (1792-1828), a former general in the Russian army, founded a secret
nationalist organization in 1814, the “Society of Friends.” He counted on
the tsar’s support for a Greek uprising. (Russia had encouraged a Greek
insurrection in 1770, one that had been crushed by Turkish forces.) In
1821 Ypsilantis organized a revolt in Turkish Moldavia, hoping that Roma
nians would also rise up against Ottoman domination and that Russia
would aid the cause of the insurgents. But when Romanians did not rebel
and the tsar disavowed the rebels, the Turks crushed the initial Greek
uprising. Several weeks later, further revolts against the Turks broke out in
mainland Greece and on several Aegean islands. The Congress powers,
including Russia, immediately condemned the insurrection.
However, the Greek revolt caught the imagination of writers in Western
Europe. Romantic writers espoused national self-consciousness. Members
of the philhellenic movement (scholars and intellectuals who had become
passionately interested in classical Greece) embraced the Greek revolt as a
modern crusade for Christianity and independence against what they con
Eugene Delacroix’s
Massacre at Chios,