Greek History · Chronicle VII of IX
Rumelia
The Greek world under Ottoman rule, and the long road to 1821.
Ottoman ConquestMilitary
Sultan Mehmed II captures Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire and beginning Ottoman rule over the Greek heartland.
After a 53-day siege, Ottoman forces breached the Theodosian Walls. Emperor Constantine XI died in battle. Mehmed II entered Hagia Sophia and made the city his capital, renaming it Konstantiniyye. The event marked the beginning of nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule over most Greek lands.
Ottoman ConquestMilitary
Mehmed II conquers Mystras and the last major Byzantine stronghold in the Peloponnese.
The Despotate of the Morea, ruled by the Palaiologos brothers Demetrios and Thomas, had survived as a Byzantine appanage after 1453. Internal feuds and failure to pay tribute gave Mehmed II his pretext: in the summer of 1460 he marched through the Peloponnese, seized Mystras, Patras, and a string of Frankish-Byzantine castles, and reduced the peninsula to an Ottoman sanjak. Demetrios surrendered and entered Ottoman service, while Thomas fled to Italy with relics of Saint Andrew, where his children carried the imperial title into Western exile.
Ottoman ConquestMilitary
The last independent Byzantine successor state falls to Mehmed II, ending the final remnant of Byzantine imperial rule.
Founded in 1204 by the Komnenoi after the Latin sack of Constantinople, the Empire of Trebizond had endured for two and a half centuries on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea, surviving by tribute, marriage diplomacy, and Genoese trade. In August 1461 Mehmed II combined a land march across Anatolia with a fleet under Kasım Pasha to besiege the city. After a brief defense, Emperor David Komnenos surrendered on terms; he and his family were deported to Adrianople and most were executed in 1463. With Trebizond's fall the last fragment of the medieval Roman state ceased to exist, and the Pontic Greek world entered the Ottoman millet system.
Ottoman ConquestMilitary
The Ottomans capture Euboea from Venice, tightening their control over the Aegean and central Greece.
Negroponte (Chalkis on Euboea) had been a Venetian stronghold and key naval base since the partition of 1204. In July 1470 Mehmed II appeared with an army of around 70,000 and a fleet of more than 300 ships, bridging the Euripos channel with a pontoon to assault the city from both sides. The Venetian relief fleet under Niccolò da Canale failed to break through; Negroponte fell on 12 July and its garrison and Latin population were massacred. The catastrophe stunned Italy, marked the end of Venice's first Ottoman war on disastrous terms, and gave Constantinople undisputed mastery of the central Aegean for a century.
Ottoman-Venetian WarsMilitary
Holy League (Venice, Spain, Papal States) decisively defeats the Ottoman fleet. A major Christian victory, though Greece remains under Ottoman rule.
On 7 October 1571, off the entrance to the Gulf of Patras near Naupaktos (Lepanto), the galleys of the Holy League under Don Juan of Austria met the Ottoman fleet of Müezzinzade Ali Pasha. Six Venetian galleasses broke up the Ottoman line at the outset, and after four hours of close combat almost the entire Ottoman fleet was sunk or captured and Ali Pasha was killed. Some 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed; among the wounded victors was Miguel de Cervantes. Lepanto shattered the myth of Ottoman invincibility at sea and became a touchstone of Counter-Reformation iconography, but the Ottomans rebuilt their navy within a year and Cyprus, lost just before the battle, was never recovered. For the Greeks of the Aegean and the Ionian, Lepanto remained a memory of hope without political deliverance.
Ottoman RuleCultural
Greek post-Byzantine painting reaches a high point in Crete, blending Orthodox iconography with Venetian artistic influence.
Under Venetian rule, Candia (Heraklion) and Chania became workshops where exiled Constantinopolitan masters trained generations of Greek painters in a synthesis of Palaiologan iconography and Italian Renaissance technique. Around 1600 the school produced figures such as Michael Damaskinos, Theophanes Strelitzas, and the young Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who carried Cretan training to Venice, Rome, and finally Toledo, where he became El Greco. Cretan workshops exported icons across the Orthodox world — to Mount Athos, the Ionian Islands, and Russia — and in parallel a vernacular literature flourished, culminating in Vitsentzos Kornaros's epic Erotokritos. The flowering ended only with the Ottoman conquest of the island in 1669.
Ottoman-Venetian WarsMilitary
After a 21-year siege, Crete falls to the Ottomans, ending Venetian rule on the island.
The Cretan War (1645-1669) saw the Ottomans overrun the island within two years except for Candia (modern Heraklion), whose harbour and Sammicheli walls held out for one of the longest sieges in history. Successive Venetian, papal, and French expeditions kept the city supplied by sea while the besiegers, directed from 1666 by Grand Vizier Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed, dug an intricate system of mines and trenches. After Louis XIV's last French contingent withdrew in 1669, Captain-General Francesco Morosini negotiated honourable terms: the garrison and most of the population were evacuated to Venice and the Ionian Islands, taking icons, manuscripts, and Cretan artists with them. Venice retained only the offshore fortresses of Souda, Spinalonga, and Gramvousa; the long flowering of Venetian Crete ended, and the refugee diaspora reshaped Ionian and Italian Greek culture for the next century.
Ottoman-Venetian WarsMilitary
Venetian bombardment hits the Ottoman powder magazine inside the Parthenon, causing catastrophic damage to the monument.
During the Morean War, the Venetian commander Francesco Morosini swept up from the Peloponnese and besieged Ottoman-held Athens. The garrison fortified the Acropolis and used the Parthenon — still largely intact after twenty-one centuries — as a powder magazine. On the evening of 26 September 1687 a mortar shell fired from the Hill of the Muses ignited the store: the explosion blew out the long sides of the temple, hurled columns and sculptures across the rock, and killed roughly 300 defenders. Morosini's Swedish lieutenant Otto von Königsmarck went on to attempt to remove the western pediment as a trophy; the lifting tackle slipped and the figures shattered on the marble floor. Venetian occupation of Athens lasted only into 1688, but the explosion left the Parthenon a ruin and made it the visual emblem of the modern condition of classical Greece.
Ottoman RulePolitical
The Ottomans retain the Peloponnese after defeating Venice, restoring direct rule over the Morea.
Signed on 21 July 1718 in the Serbian town of Požarevac, the treaty closed the Austro-Venetian-Ottoman war that had begun in 1714. Habsburg arms had won crushing victories at Petrovaradin (1716) and Belgrade (1717) under Prince Eugene of Savoy and gained northern Serbia, the Banat of Temesvár, and Lesser Wallachia, but Venice had to accept the loss of the Kingdom of the Morea, conquered by the Ottomans in 1715, along with its last footholds on Crete and in the Aegean. For the Peloponnesian Greeks, the brief twenty-eight-year Venetian interlude ended in a return to Ottoman administration that would last until the Revolution of 1821; for the Republic of Venice, Passarowitz marked the definitive end of its Levantine empire.
Pre-Revolutionary PeriodMilitary
Greek uprising in the Peloponnese, supported by Russian forces during the Russo-Turkish War. Brutally suppressed.
Encouraged by Catherine the Great's Greek Plan, the brothers Alexei and Fyodor Orlov sailed a Russian squadron from the Baltic into the Mediterranean and landed a small force at Mani in February 1770. Local kapetanioi raised the Peloponnese and briefly captured Mistra, Kalamata, and parts of Arcadia, while a separate revolt flared in Crete and the Aegean. The Ottoman counter-attack relied chiefly on irregular Albanian troops, who defeated the rebels at Tripolitsa in April and embarked on years of plunder remembered as the Albanikon. The Russians won a spectacular naval victory at Çeşme in July 1770 and held the Cyclades for several years, but withdrew at the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774). The Orlov Revolt left the Peloponnese devastated, taught Greek leaders to mistrust foreign promises, and seeded the Klepht and armatole networks that would rise again in 1821.
Greek EnlightenmentPolitical
Revolutionary intellectual and precursor of the Greek Revolution is executed by the Ottomans in Belgrade.
Born in Thessalian Velestino around 1757, Rigas served as secretary to Phanariot princes in the Danubian principalities and absorbed the radical politics of the French Revolution while in Vienna. There he printed maps of a future Hellenic Republic stretching from the Danube to Crete, the celebrated Thourios war-hymn, and a draft constitution modelled on the Jacobin charter of 1793 but extended to all Balkan peoples. In December 1797 Austrian police, anxious to preserve relations with the Porte, arrested him at Trieste with seven companions. Handed to the Ottomans, they were strangled in the Nebojša Tower of Belgrade fortress in June 1798 and their bodies thrown into the Danube. Rigas's writings circulated underground for the next generation and made him the first martyr of the Greek national movement and a hero across the Balkans.
Pre-Revolutionary PeriodPolitical
A secret society is founded in Odessa to prepare and coordinate a pan-Hellenic uprising against Ottoman rule.
On 14 September 1814 three young Greek merchants — Nikolaos Skoufas of Arta, Athanasios Tsakalov of Ioannina, and Emmanuil Xanthos of Patmos — met in the Black Sea port of Odessa and bound themselves by oath to liberate the Greek nation. Modelled on Italian Carbonarism and the Freemasons, the Filiki Eteria used elaborate degrees of initiation, hand signs, and secret correspondence to recruit through the Greek diaspora and within the Ottoman Empire. By 1820 it counted thousands of members across Russia, the Danubian Principalities, the Peloponnese, and the islands, including merchants, klephts, kapetanioi, and Phanariots, and had named the Russian-service general Alexandros Ypsilantis as its leader. Its agents prepared the simultaneous uprisings that broke out in the Principalities and the Morea in spring 1821.
Greek War of IndependencePolitical
Revolution breaks out in the Peloponnese and other regions on 25 March (traditional date).
Alexandros Ypsilantis crossed the Pruth into the Danubian Principalities on 22 February 1821, but his Sacred Band was crushed at Dragatsani in June. The decisive front opened in the Peloponnese: by mid-March kapetanioi like Theodoros Kolokotronis, Petrobey Mavromichalis of Mani, and Archbishop Germanos of Patras had raised the banner of revolt, traditionally said to have been blessed at the monastery of Agia Lavra on 25 March. Within weeks the countryside of the Morea was in Greek hands and the Ottoman garrisons were besieged in their citadels. Independent risings followed in central Greece, on Hydra, Spetses, and Psara — whose merchant fleets gave the rebellion command of the seas — and across the Aegean. The First National Assembly at Epidaurus in January 1822 issued a Declaration of Independence and a provisional constitution, formally proclaiming the modern Greek state.
Military
Greek forces capture the administrative center of the Peloponnese.
Tripolitsa, capital of the Morea Eyalet, was the seat of the Ottoman pasha and the residence of the leading Muslim and Jewish families of the Peloponnese. Theodoros Kolokotronis encircled it from spring 1821, blockading supply routes from his mountain camps. After negotiations broke down, irregular Greek bands stormed the walls on 23 September; the sack that followed left thousands of civilians dead and emptied the city of its Muslim and Jewish populations. The fall of Tripolitsa secured the interior of the Peloponnese for the Revolution, freed Greek forces to besiege the remaining coastal fortresses, and provided the captured artillery and money that sustained the rebel government — but its violence also hardened European public opinion that would soon hear of similar Ottoman atrocities at Chios.
Religious
The Ecumenical Patriarch is executed in Constantinople in reprisal for the uprising, shocking Orthodox communities.
On Easter Sunday, 22 April 1821, Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople was hanged from the central gate of the Phanar Patriarchate by order of Sultan Mahmud II — even though he had publicly excommunicated the rebels and condemned Ypsilantis's rising. He was 75 years old and had been Patriarch three times. His body was left for three days, then dragged through the streets and thrown into the Bosporus, where it was recovered by Greek sailors and taken to Odessa, where Tsar Alexander I gave it a state funeral. Pogroms against Phanariots, leading clergy, and merchants in the capital followed for weeks. The execution turned the Russian and European Orthodox public against the Porte, complicated St Petersburg's neutrality, and made the Patriarchal gate — left walled up to this day — a permanent symbol of the price of the Greek Revolution.
Greek War of IndependenceMilitary
Ottoman forces massacre tens of thousands on Chios. The event shocks Europe and inspires Delacroix.
Wealthy Chios, famed for its mastic and shipping, had at first stayed clear of the Revolution; in March 1822 a Samian expedition under Lykourgos Logothetis forced its uneasy participation. Ottoman forces sent by Kara Ali landed on 11 April and, on the sultan's orders, embarked on the systematic destruction of the island. Of perhaps 120,000 inhabitants, around 25,000 were killed, 45,000 enslaved, and the rest scattered as refugees to Syros, Trieste, Marseille, and London. In June, Konstantinos Kanaris avenged the massacre by detonating a fireship beside Kara Ali's flagship in the harbour of Chios, killing the admiral and 2,000 men. The atrocity galvanised European philhellenism: Eugène Delacroix's Le Massacre de Scio (1824) and Victor Hugo's poem L'Enfant grec turned Chios into the iconic image of Christian suffering under Ottoman rule.
Greek War of IndependencePolitical
Revolutionary leaders revise the provisional constitution and attempt to centralize authority during the war.
The Second National Assembly met from late March to mid-April 1823 in the Peloponnesian village of Astros, on the slopes above the Argolic Gulf. About 240 delegates produced the Law of Epidaurus, a revised constitution that abolished the regional senates of the Morea, Western Greece, and Eastern Greece, concentrated executive power in a five-member committee, and made the legislature a single national chamber. The reform was a victory for the political party of Mavrokordatos and the islander shipowners over the Peloponnesian military chieftains around Kolokotronis, who saw their local authority curtailed. The friction unleashed at Astros would erupt later that year into the first of two Greek civil wars, even as Egyptian intervention was being prepared in Cairo.
Greek War of IndependencePolitical
The famous philhellene poet dies, galvanizing European support for the Greek cause.
Lord Byron — the most famous poet in Europe — sailed from Genoa as agent of the London Greek Committee in summer 1823, carrying loans, military stores, and the prestige of his name. He landed at Missolonghi on 5 January 1824 and worked to mediate between Mavrokordatos's government and the unruly Suliote bands, fund a brigade of 500 men, and plan an attack on Lepanto. He never marched: a fever caught in the marshes around the lagoon, aggravated by repeated bleeding from his physicians, killed him on 19 April 1824, on his thirty-seventh birthday. His heart was buried at Missolonghi, his body returned to England. Byron's death made the Greek cause an emotional cause in every European capital, helped secure the second London Loan, and turned a swampy lagoon town into the moral capital of philhellenism.
Greek War of IndependenceMilitary
Egyptian forces under Ibrahim intervene on behalf of the Ottomans, threatening the survival of the Revolution.
Sultan Mahmud II, unable to subdue the rebellion with his own armies, called on his powerful viceroy in Egypt, Mehmed Ali, in exchange for the governorships of Crete and the Morea. Mehmed Ali's adopted son Ibrahim Pasha trained a Nizam-i Cedid army on French models under Colonel Sève (Süleyman Pasha) and shipped it across the Aegean from Crete. Ibrahim landed at Modon (Methoni) on 24 February 1825 with around 10,000 disciplined infantry, regular cavalry, and a strong artillery train; within months he had taken Navarino and Tripolitsa, broken Kolokotronis at Trikorfa, and reduced most of the Peloponnese to scorched-earth campaigning. The Greek Revolution, exhausted by two civil wars, came close to collapse and was saved only by the joint European intervention that began with Navarino in 1827.
Greek War of IndependenceMilitary
Heroic exodus and fall of the city after a long siege. Immortalized in Greek national memory.
Missolonghi, on the marshy north shore of the Gulf of Patras, had repulsed two earlier Ottoman sieges before Reşid Mehmed Pasha closed in during April 1825 and was joined by Ibrahim's Egyptians in early 1826. Around 10,500 inhabitants and defenders, cut off by a tight blockade and reduced to eating leather and rats, resolved on a mass breakout. On the night of 10-11 April 1826, the so-called Exodus, some 3,000 fighting men with their families attempted to cut their way through the besiegers; only a few hundred reached the mountains, while those left in the town blew up the powder magazine of the bishop's house rather than surrender. The fall horrified European opinion: it inspired Solomos's hymn The Free Besieged, was depicted in Delacroix's Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, and tilted British, French, and Russian governments toward armed mediation, which followed the next year.
Greek War of IndependenceMilitary
Allied British-French-Russian fleet destroys the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet, turning the tide of the war.
After the Treaty of London (July 1827) bound Britain, France, and Russia to mediate Greek autonomy by force if necessary, their squadrons gathered off the southwestern Peloponnese to halt Ibrahim's campaign. On 20 October 1827 Vice-Admiral Edward Codrington led 27 ships, including 11 ships of the line, into Navarino Bay where 78 Ottoman, Egyptian, and Tunisian vessels lay at anchor in a horseshoe formation. A Turkish fireship opened fire on a British boat sent under flag of truce; within four hours the allied broadsides had sunk or burned about 60 enemy ships and killed roughly 6,000 men, against around 180 allied dead. Navarino was the last great battle fought entirely under sail and the only one in which a European fleet engaged an Ottoman one without a formal declaration of war. It crippled Ibrahim's logistics, forced Egyptian evacuation of the Peloponnese in 1828, and made Greek independence inevitable.
Greek War of IndependencePolitical
Kapodistrias assumes office as Governor of Greece and begins building the institutions of the emerging state.
Born in Corfu in 1776 and a former Foreign Minister of Tsar Alexander I, Ioannis Kapodistrias was elected Governor (Kyvernitis) of Greece for seven years by the Third National Assembly at Troezen. He landed at Nafplio on 7 January 1828 and moved his capital to Aegina, finding a state of about 800,000 ruined and starving people, no treasury, and rival warlords. In three years he established a national bank (the Phoenix), introduced a uniform currency, founded an orphanage and the first agricultural school on Aegina, organised the regular army around General Church and Admiral Miaoulis, expelled Ibrahim from the Peloponnese with French help under General Maison, and pushed the northern frontier as far as Arta and Volos. His autocratic methods, however, alienated the Mavromichalis clan of Mani, two of whom assassinated him on the steps of Saint Spyridon in Nafplio on 9 October 1831.
IndependencePolitical
Britain, France, and Russia recognize Greek independence.
Signed in London on 3 February 1830 by the three Protecting Powers, the Protocol upgraded the autonomous Greek principality envisaged by the Treaty of Constantinople (1829) into a fully sovereign state and made Greece the first new nation-state recognised by post-Napoleonic Europe. The borders ran from the Achelous on the west to the Spercheios on the east, leaving Thessaly, Epirus, Crete, and Macedonia under Ottoman rule, and the new state was placed under a hereditary, non-Greek monarchy whose ruler had to be acceptable to all three Powers. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the Powers' first nominee, accepted in February but resigned in May after Kapodistrias and Russian diplomats objected to the narrow borders and uncertain loan guarantees, leaving the throne open until the choice of Otto of Bavaria in 1832.
IndependencePolitical
Final borders are set and Bavarian Prince Otto becomes the first King of Greece.
On 7 May 1832 the three Protecting Powers and Bavaria signed the Convention of London, offering the Greek crown to the seventeen-year-old Otto, second son of King Ludwig I, with a guaranteed loan of 60 million francs. The Treaty of Constantinople of 21 July 1832 then committed the Sublime Porte to recognise Greek independence and to pay an indemnity of 40 million Turkish piastres in exchange for sovereignty over Thessaly, Epirus, and the islands east of a line drawn through the Maliac Gulf to the mouth of the Achelous. Otto landed at Nafplio on 6 February 1833 with 3,500 Bavarian troops and a regency council of his father's ministers, who governed in his name until his majority in 1835. Their arrival closed the Ottoman period of Greek history and inaugurated the Bavarian regime that would shape the institutions, the new capital at Athens (1834), and the political fault lines of the modern Greek kingdom.
14 more entries, to 1832
