A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Stirrings of Revolt 591

sidered Turkish oppression of the birthplace of Western civilization. The
English poets Byron and Shelley took up the cause of Greek indepen­
dence. Shelley, who called the poet the “unacknowledged legislator of the
world,” also supported Irish independence from Britain.
The Greek insurgents massacred thousands of Turks in 1821, but it was
the brutal Turkish repression of the Greeks that caught the attention of
Western conservatives and liberals alike. In 1822, the Turks massacred the
entire Greek population of the island of Chios, after having executed a year
earlier the patriarch of Constantinople in his ecclesiastical robes on Easter
Sunday. The French romantic painter Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) cele­
brated the Greeks’ struggle for national sovereignty in his painting The
Massacre at Chios (1824), p. 590. The British government also had come to
the view that peace could best be maintained by the creation of an
autonomous Greek state. In 1827, Britain, France, and Russia signed the
Treaty of London, threatening the Turks with military intervention if they
did not accept an armistice. When the Turks refused, a combined naval force
destroyed the Turkish fleet at Navarino.
Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1828 and occupied the
Balkan territories of Moldavia and Eastern Wallachia. However, military
obstacles and the self-interested disapproval by Britain and France of Russian
plans for dismembering the Ottoman Empire forced Russia to agree to the
Treaty of Adrianople (1829). Moldavia and Wallachia became protectorates
of Russia, further pushing back the Ottoman Empire’s European territories
and expanding Russian influence in the Balkans. In 1832, the Greeks finally
gained independence. The treaty between Britain, France, Bavaria, and Rus­
sia placed Greece under the “guarantee” of “protecting powers” and selected
a young Bavarian prince to be king of Greece (Otto I, ruled 1833-1862).

The Decembrist Revolt in Russia

At his succession to the throne after the assassination of his autocratic

father in 1801, Tsar Alexander I seemed liberal and idealistic. Scarred by the
hatred between his father, Tsar Paul, and his grandmother, Catherine the
Great, and by the assassination of Paul, Alexander had at least been aware of
the plot. Because he was somewhat familiar with Enlightenment thought,
some Russian liberals welcomed Alexander’s accession to the throne, seeing
him as a potentially charming reformer. He surrounded himself with a com­
mittee of advisers who advocated reform and began his reign by granting
amnesty to thousands of people condemned by his father, relaxing censor­
ship, abolishing torture injudicial investigations, and allowing more Russians
to travel abroad. During the Napoleonic Wars, Tsar Alexander had taken
steps to make his regime more efficient, including the creation of a council
of state, the formation of centralized ministries directly responsible to the
tsar, and the organization of local governments. Yet, an enormous social,
economic, and legal gulf separated the Russian aristocracy from the millions