Intervention in Greece

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This new European power bloc was put to the test by the Greek War of Independence, which began six years after its formation, triggered their intervention against the Ottoman occupiers. Considerable funds were raised in Britain for the Greek side, inspired by the widespread academic and artistic interest in classical Greece, and thus the idealized association of the ancient Hellenes with their modern heirs.

In July of 1827, the European powers agreed to impose autonomy for Greece. On 8 October, a joint Russian-British-French naval fleet under Admiral Edward Codrington attacked and destroyed the Turkish-Egyptian fleet at Navarino, on the coast of the Peloponnese.

The battle, ironically, happened by mistake; the allied fleet had only intended to make a show of force, but the Turks fired first and were almost completely annihilated. The destruction of the Ottoman fleet decisively weakened Turkey’s status as a naval power and dramatically increased the standing of Russia as a Mediterranean naval power. The maritime engagement represented a stunning body blow to Ottoman military might at a time when the far-flung empire could ill afford to lose its sea routes. Navarino was in some ways the beginning of the end, or a sign that the end was inevitable for the Ottoman Empire.

Immediately after the battle, 14,000 French expeditionary troops landed on the Peloponnese to maintain order. In February 1830, the Great Powers recognized the independence of Greece, then a fraction of its present size and with its capital not in Athens but in the Peloponnesian town of Nafplio. Yet since there were no polished diplomats among the rough-and-tumble Greek brigand bands – themselves similar in many ways to those that would emerge 70 years later in Macedonia – a king had to be imported. In 1832 thus arrived from Germany Prince Otto I, who would assume the throne of Greece.