Millet Legacies in a National Environment: Political Elites and Muslim Communities in Greece, 1830s-1923

In winter 1820/21 the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II sought to destroy Ali Pasha, the Muslim warlord who controlled much of the present-day Albania and mainland Greece. This was part of Mahmud’s efforts to restore the depleted authority of the Ottoman central government which had been challenged by the politics of various disloyal warlords who operated in the Balkans and the Near East. Since the Sultan’s military campaign would engage a substantial portion of the Ottoman imperial armies, this presented a chance not to be missed by the Philikē Etaireia (Friendly Brotherhood), a secret organisation founded in 1814 in Odessa which recruited widely among the Greek-speaking world with the aim of overthrowing the Ottoman rulers from the ‘Motherland’ through an armed and coordinated revolt. The sporadic outbursts of violence in Peloponnesus in March 1821 assumed the form of an all-out revolt with a successful outcome. The heavily outnumbered Ottoman army withdrew to its coastal fortresses after vicious fighting which was marked by atrocities on both sides. (Excerpt, Introduction, 1st paragraph).