1 Out of Russia In my opinion, the French revolution and Napoleon opened the eyes of the world. Before that the nations did not recognize themselves, and people thought kings were gods on earth and said whatever they did was good. For that reason, it is harder to rule a people today. --Theodoros Kolokotronis, Apomnimonevmata , 49 (The decision has been taken!) --Anthimos Gazis, February 22, 1821 It all started with the defeat of Napoleon. In 1814, after more than two decades of war across Europe, the French emperor was sent into exile on Elba while the victors celebrated and prepared to convene the peace congress in Vienna that would settle the fate of the continent. Czar Alexander I, ruler of Russia and commander of Europe''s largest army, was staying in his mother-in-law''s castle at Bruchsal en route to the Austrian capital when, at the end of a day filled with formal presentations and heavy meals, he enjoyed a quiet tête-à-tête with one of his wife''s maids of honor. "Since you treat me with such kindness, Sire, I owe you my profession of faith," Roxandra Stourdza told him. "In the depth of my soul, I am a republican, I detest courts and have never attached the slightest importance to those distinctions of rank and birth that give me the chills and bore me to death.
But please don''t betray my secret here or I could pay dearly." "No, no," the czar replied with a smile. "Have no fear. And to return frankness with frankness . I think absolutely as you do ." The men he was about to meet in Vienna would have been horrified at the thought that the czar of Russia was a closet republican. The presiding genius of the Congress, Prince Metternich of Austria, saw the threat of subversion everywhere, and regarded monarchy as the chief defense against it. Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, took legitimism so far that he refused to sign the treaty ending the war on the grounds that Napoleon was a usurper.
Between them, these two men were determined to impose a conservative order upon a continent convulsed by the French Revolution. Neither of them had much time for talk of the rights of peoples or nations. Defending the erasure of the centuries-old republic of Genoa from the map of Europe against the evident wishes of its inhabitants, Castlereagh pronounced that "the prejudices of a people" could be taken into account only if "greater objects did not stand in their way." In reality, the czar was no republican either. At Vienna he and his fellow monarchs returned ousted Bourbon monarchs to their thrones, put the Catholic Belgians under the Dutch king, abolished the ancient republic of Venice and dashed hopes that Poland might be resurrected as an independent state. At the same time, he wanted a settlement that would uphold the "sacred rights of humanity," and unlike Metternich, he sought to be liked rather than feared. "That boy is a mass of contradictions," his grandmother, Catherine the Great, is said to have remarked. Having come to the throne in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Alexander insisted that defeating the French required a higher moral purpose.
He fought for constitutional rule in the Ionian Islands and Sardinia; he recognized the Spanish constitution in 1812 and he favored imposing one on the Bourbons in France. His sensitive soul thrilled with the idea that he was destined to bring peace to Europe and he listened to Germany''s leading mystics who told him that he was a kind of messiah and that his defeat of the antichrist Bonaparte would lead the continent under Russian guidance to a spiritual rebirth. This conviction crystallized in his extraordinary scheme for Christian monarchs to band together in a Holy Alliance. At Vienna the czar felt in need of a soulmate, someone who understood his own blend of piety and Enlightened rationalism, a man who would help him, as he saw it, fight for constitutionalism and stand up to Metternich and his more reactionary instincts. He had been impressed by a brilliant young Greek-born diplomat in his entourage, and so he ordered him to join the negotiations: it was thus that the thirty-eight-year-old Ioannis Capodistrias entered the limelight at the Congress, becoming deeply involved in crafting the post-Napoleonic future for Europe (and-years later-the first president of independent Greece). "Two factions are opposing each other all over the world," Metternich said, "the Capodistrias and the Metternichs." The two men were agreed that the coalition of states that had won the war should guarantee the coming peace. But they differed on the nature of that peace and the principles that would help it endure: Metternich believed the radical forces unleashed by the French across Europe must be vigorously combatted and suppressed; Capodistrias felt they should be understood.
"This war has not been fought by sovereigns but by nations," he told an interlocutor shortly after his arrival in Vienna. "Since Napoleon has been tumbled from power, one has forgotten the interest of nations and been concerned solely with the interest of princes." One reason for Capodistrias''s sensitivity to the power of nationalism was that he hailed from the Ionian Islands, where a largely Greek-speaking population had been ruled by the Venetians for centuries before enjoying a brief period of self-rule under joint Russian-Ottoman occupation. Founded in 1800, during the Napoleonic Wars, the so-called Septinsular Republic was effectively the first independent Greek state in modern times, only nominally subservient to the Ottoman sultan. Capodistrias''s father, a member of the Corfiot aristocracy, had helped craft its constitution before the son took over the task of making it work, a task that brought him into contact with a range of Greek patriots including bishops, scholars, merchants, and armed fighters who had fled the Ottoman mainland for the safety of the islands. After the French dissolved the Septinsular Republic, Capodistrias left his native island of Corfu and entered Russian service, but he retained his contacts with these men and shared their dreams of freedom. When the czar summoned him to Vienna in 1814, Capodistrias openly wondered whether his ties to the Greeks might not be problematic. "I respect your feelings for your fatherland and for Greece," Alexander reassured him.
"And it is because I know how you feel that I wish to have you close by. Nothing could be more appropriate nor more useful than that the Greeks have you near me as their advocate." Russo-Ottoman antagonism had been building up for more than half a century. Even during their common struggle against the French, the two empires had gone to war, barely patching things up on the eve of Napoleon''s invasion of Russia in 1812. The last thing the other powers wanted after Napoleon''s defeat was more discord, and Metternich and Castlereagh sought to get Sultan Mahmud II to join them in Vienna at the Congress so that his differences with Russia could be settled peacefully. But the sultan refused--remaining adamantly opposed to any European intervention, however well intended, in his own internal affairs for the next decade and more. His refusal meant that the great powers could not bring the Ottoman lands within the territorial guarantee they planned to provide for the European political settlement; the next best solution, from the British and Austrian viewpoint, was to ensure no official discussion of the Ottoman Empire in Vienna at all. Metternich did his best to keep the subject off limits.
His police blocked the emissaries of subject peoples of the Ottoman Balkans from coming to Vienna. They also attempted to suppress a pamphlet by a German professor that called for Europe''s armies to drive the Turks out of Europe. But the Austrians could not prevent a good deal of talk of Christian solidarity with the Serbs, the Greeks, and others. Reports of "scenes of carnage" in Ottoman Serbia were reaching the capital. As for the Greeks, their supporters were in Vienna in force, seeing the Congress as a chance to bring their plight to the attention of Europe. There were salons and memoranda and speeches. Exiled archbishops pleaded for Russian assistance. Richard Church, a British army officer who had trained Greek fighters in the Ionian Islands, told anyone who would listen about the "free men" ready to "defend their liberty against the Turks.
" Russians in the imperial delegation sympathized. Their empire had been expanding southward at Ottoman expense for decades and they were happy to use Orthodox solidarity as a reason to continue: their army had seen off Napoleon and was not likely to be checked by the sultan''s. Austrian secret police reported that the Russians were speaking like "Masters of the Universe": "They inflame the Greeks again and make them hope for their resurrection . The Greeks abandon themselves to these ideas . Several leading figures speak of the liberation of Epiros, Morea, and a Greek fatherland which Russia will ensure is reborn." The truth of the matter was that, whatever the Greeks dreamed the czar would do for them, their liberation came a long way down his list of priorities. In Vienna, Alexander''s overriding priority was to hold together the wartime coalition that had defeated Napoleon. He understood that none of his partners shared the Russian receptiveness to the cause of the fellow Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman lands, and his basic view therefore was that the peace Congress was not the right place to help the Greeks.
When Capodistrias b.