Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny. David Crane

withdrawal of Reshid in the west, Turkish initiative and energy were exhausted. Their troops still held on to Patras at the western end of the Gulf and to Modon and Coron – the old ‘Eyes of Venice’ – in the south-west. Up in the north, Greek resistance, isolated and exposed, had all but collapsed. In Attica, though, the former pupil of Ali Pasha, Odysseus Androutses, held Athens. In western Greece the heroism of Missolonghi had saved the town for even greater fame. At sea Ottoman and Greek fleets seemed as bent on avoiding each other as anything else. And in the Peloponnese – or the Morea as it was more usually known – the original heartland of the revolution, the Greeks did what Greeks have always done best when freed of external threat, and turned on one other.

      Even through the dangers and triumphs of 1821–2, the divisions among the Greek leaders were never far below the surface, and by the middle of 1823 the country was sliding inexorably towards civil war. To the enthusiastic Philhellenes of Europe and America, it might seem that Greece had found itself the heirs to Demosthenes and Epaminondas, and yet even after a National Constitution and Government were established at Epidaurus on 13 January, with an executive and legislature and all the trappings of modern statehood, real power remained in the hands of local factions bent on turning the rebellion to their own narrow profit.

      The politics of revolutionary Greece were so riddled by family and regional loyalties and feuds that no coherent picture is possible, but there were four main factions that dominated this struggle for power: the military capitani who won the first battles of the conflict; the great island families, grown powerful on the rich pickings of the Napoleonic War, who controlled the Greek fleets; the landlords or ‘primates’ of the Morea who had exercised such influence under the Turks; and the educated Phanariots and Greeks of the diaspora who had flooded in at the beginning of the revolution.

      The social and economic realities which lay behind these divisions were real enough to hold serious consequences for the future of Greece, but to most foreigners and natives allegiances were more a matter of personalities than politics. In Athens, Odysseus Androutses governed eastern Greece with an Ali Pasha-like selfishness which made him a law to himself, but in western Greece and the Morea all those antagonisms that the successes of 1822 had exposed, the divisions between civilian and military, between constitutionalist and brigand, between Phanariot and native Greek, embodied themselves most vividly in the destructive rivalry of the two men who had presided over disaster and triumph at Peta and Dervenakia, Alexander Mavrocordato and Theodore Colocotrones.

      It would be difficult to imagine two leaders more opposed in their backgrounds, aspirations or personalities. A descendant of the great Phanariot families that had governed in the Danubian provinces through the eighteenth century, ‘Prince’ Alexander Mavrocordato as he was styled, was living in impoverished exile in Italy – and teaching Mary Shelley Greek – when the rebellion broke out in the spring of 1821.

      Among the first volunteers to sail from Marseilles to join the cause, Mavrocordato was perhaps its only leader who not only spoke but understood the languages and the ‘language’ of European diplomacy and Philhellenism. Among the native commanders of the rebellion Colocotrones or Petro Bey might invoke the shade of Epominandas or the principles of the nation state when it suited their purposes, but their Hellenism and liberalism were the thinnest of veneers on a narrow feudalism which had nothing in common with the modern and centralized Greece of which Mavrocordato dreamed at Epidaurus.

      It is perhaps perverse to dismiss the career of the first President of Modern Greece as a failure, but because of this fundamental difference of vision Mavrocordato was never as successful a leader as his talents and meteoric rise had seemed to promise. At the first congress of 1821 he had been elected to the Presidency of the Assembly and then the country, and yet even in this moment of triumph, the determination of the old primates and captains to hold on to power guaranteed that while the Constitution might be written in his image Greece would still be run in theirs.

      With the military failure of Mavrocordato at Peta any last hope of a stable and powerful central government was dealt a fatal blow, but the fact is that with his western frock coat, spectacles and principles he was always going to be at a disadvantage in a country locked in a ruthless and savage war. To the Greeks who had fought at Tripolis and Dervenakia there was inevitably something alien in his western skills, and it is a sobering feet about the way Greece still sees its revolution that while there is only one statue in the whole country to the most civilized of its leaders, it is difficult to find anywhere – from Tripolis to the old Parliament building in Athens – where the hawk-like features of Theodore Colocotrones do not glower down from under a ‘classical’ helmet on a nation only too happy to sacrifice political integrity to glamour.^*

      Avaricious and violent, corrupt, bold, cynical and charismatic, the fifty-year-old Colocotrones was everything as a military leader that the cosmopolitan and haplessly civilian Mavrocordato could never be. ‘It would be impossible for a painter or novelist to trace a more romantic delineation of a robber chieftain,’ the Philhellene soldier and great historian of the war, Thomas Gordon, wrote of Colocotrones,

      tall and athletic, with a profusion of black hair and expressive features, alternately lighted up with boisterous gaiety, or darkened by bursts of passion: among his soldiers, he seemed born to command, having just the manners and bearing calculated to gain their confidence.⁴

      Along with this air of authority, with the physical strength and presence so essential to any klepht leader, went a history to match. Born under a tree in the hills of Messenia on the Easter Monday of 1771, Colocotrones came from a long line of Turk-haters who had slid between policing the mountains as armatoles and living off them as bandits in the central Morea.

      It was always his proud boast that in four hundred years of occupation his family had never once succumbed to Ottoman rule, and at the age of only fifteen Colocotrones himself fell naturally into the brigand life which had already killed his father and thirty-three of his nearest kin.

      After twenty years of indiscriminate banditry against Greek and Turk alike, he was forced into exile in the Ionian Isles, but when the revolution broke out in 1821 he was ready again to resume his old life with a new and expanded brief. Present at the fell of Kalamata in the first days of the uprising, his influence and guerrilla talents soon gained him command of the troops besieging Tripolis, and victory there and at Dervenakia the following year gave him the plunder and prestige to make him the most powerful man in the Morea.

      It was a position he exploited entirely for his own ends. He was not interested in the fate or even the idea of a Greece beyond the Peloponnese. To Colocotrones the war was about wealth and power, not about nationhood or any of the other battle cries of Philhellenism. In April 1823 he used the threat of his soldiers to have himself and Petro Bey elected to the Presidency and Vice Presidency, but it was a gesture of contempt for the position Mavrocordato had once held and not an endorsement of the political process. His authority, like his vision, was that of a chieftain, and by the middle of the year the rump of the government that he had usurped had fled from his vengeance to the safety and irrelevance of the islands.

      It was this political situation, with the two-year-old nation only weeks from civil war, with feudal warlords in control of their private fiefdoms in the Morea and eastern Greece, with western Greece in chaos, the government in exile and Mavrocordato fled for his life to the island of Hydra, which greeted Byron when he landed at Argostoli.

      From on board the Hercules he had pointed out the distant coastline of the Morea with all the excitement of a man reliving his youth, but it was not long before the reality that lay behind the shimmering image was brought rudely home. ‘The instinct that enables the vulture to detect carrion from far off,’ Trelawny wrote of their arrival, ‘is surpassed by the marvellous acuteness of the Greeks in scenting money.

      The morning after our arrival a flock of Zuliote refugees alighted on our decks, attracted by Byron’s dollars. Lega, the steward, a thorough miser, coiled himself on the money-chest like a viper. Our sturdy skipper was for driving them overboard with hand-spikes. Byron came on deck in exuberant spirits, pleased with their savage aspect and wild attire, and, as was his wont, promised a great deal more than he should have done.⁵