the Christian population there. Turkish soldiers looted churches, murdered priests, men, women and children and mutilated their bodies, cutting off their noses, ears and heads, while their officers looked on. Thousands of terrified civilians fled into neighbouring Bessarabia, presenting the Russian authorities with a massive refugee problem. The violence even spread to Constantinople, where the patriarch and several bishops were publicly hanged by a group of janizaries on Easter Sunday 1821.
As news spread of the atrocities, causing ever-stronger Russian sympathy for the Greek cause, the Tsar felt increasingly obliged to intervene, despite his commitment to the principles of the Holy Alliance. As Alexander saw it, the actions of the Turks had gone well beyond the legitimate defence of Ottoman sovereignty; they were in a religious war against the Greeks, whose religious rights the Russians had a duty to protect, according to their interpretation of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji. The Tsar issued an ultimatum calling on the Turks to evacuate the principalities, restore the damaged churches, and acknowledge Russia’s treaty rights to protect the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects. This was the first time any of the powers had spoken out on behalf of the Greeks. The Turks responded by seizing Russian ships, confiscating their grain, and imprisoning their sailors in Constantinople.
Russia broke off diplomatic relations. Many of the Tsar’s advisers favoured war. The Greek revolt had spread to central Greece, the Peloponnese, Macedonia and Crete. Unless the Russians intervened, they feared that in these regions it would be repressed with similar atrocities to those in the principalities. In 1822 Ottoman troops brutally crushed a Greek uprising on the island of Chios, hanging 20,000 islanders and deporting into slavery almost all the surviving population of 70,000 Greeks. Europe was outraged by the massacre, whose horrors were depicted by the French painter Eugene Delacroix in his great masterpiece
Such ideas were widely shared by high officials, army officers and intellectuals, who were increasingly united in the early 1820s by their Russian nationalism and at times by an almost messianic commitment to the Orthodox cause. There was talk of ‘crossing the Danube and delivering the Greeks from the cruelties of Muslim rule’. One leader in the southern army called for a war against the Turks to unite the Balkan Christians in a ‘Greek Kingdom’. The pro-war lobby also had supporters at the court, where the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance were more strictly recognized. The most enthusiastic was Baroness von Krudener, a religious mystic who encouraged Tsar Alexander to believe in his messianic role and campaigned for an Orthodox crusade to drive the Muslims out of Europe and raise the cross in Constantinople and Jerusalem. She was dismissed from the court and ordered by the Tsar to leave St Petersburg.13
Alexander was far too committed to the Concert of Europe to give serious consideration to the idea of unilateral Russian intervention to liberate the Greeks. He stood firmly by the Congress System established at Vienna by which the great powers had agreed to resolve major crises through international negotiation, and realized that any action in the Greek crisis was bound to be opposed. By October 1821 a European policy of international mediation over Greece had already been coordinated by Prince Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister and chief conductor of the Concert of Europe, together with the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh. So when the Tsar appealed to them for support against Turkey, in February 1822, it was agreed to convene an international congress to resolve the crisis.
Alexander called for the creation of a large autonomous Greek state under Russian protection, much like Moldavia and Wallachia. However, Britain feared that this would be a means for Russia to advance its own interests and intervene in Ottoman affairs on the pretext of protecting its co-religionists. Austria was equally afraid that a successful Greek revolt would set off uprisings in parts of central Europe under its control. Since Alexander prized the Austrian alliance above all, he held back assistance to the Greeks, while continuing to urge collective European action to help them. None of the powers would support the Greeks. But two things happened in 1825 to change their minds: first, the Sultan called in Mehmet Ali, his powerful vassal in Egypt, to put down the Greeks, which the Egyptians did with new atrocities, giving rise to an ever-growing wave of pro-Greek sympathy and ever-louder calls for intervention in liberal Europe; and then Alexander died.
The new tsar – the man responsible, more than anyone, for the Crimean War – was 29 when he succeeded his brother to the Russian throne. Tall and imposing, with a large, balding head, long sideburns and an officer’s moustache, Nicholas I was every inch a ‘military man’. From an early age he had developed an obsessive interest in military affairs, learning all the names of his brother’s generals, designing uniforms, and attending with excitement military parades and manoeuvres. Having missed out on his boyhood dream of fighting in the war against Napoleon, he prepared himself for a soldier’s life. In 1817 he received his first appointment, Inspector-General of Engineers, from which he derived a lifelong interest in army engineering and artillery (the strongest elements of the Russian military during the Crimean War). He loved the routines and discipline of army life: they appealed to his strict and pedantic character as well as to his spartan tastes (throughout his life he insisted on sleeping on a military campbed). Courteous and charming to those in his intimate circle, to others Nicholas was cold and stern. In later life he grew increasingly irritable and impatient, inclined to rash behaviour and angry rages, as he succumbed to the hereditary mental illness that troubled Alexander and Nicholas’s other older brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, who renounced the throne in 1825.14
More than Alexander, Nicholas placed the defence of Orthodoxy at the centre of his foreign policy. Throughout his reign he was governed by an absolute conviction in his divine mission to save Orthodox Europe from the Western heresies of liberalism, rationalism and revolution. During his last years he was led by this calling to fantastic dreams of a religious war against the Turks to liberate the Balkan Christians and unite them with Russia in an Orthodox empire with its spiritual centres in Constantinople and Jerusalem. Anna Tiutcheva, who was at his court from 1853, described Nicholas as ‘the Don Quixote of autocrats – terrible in his chivalry and power to subordinate everything to his futile struggle against History’.15
Nicholas had a personal connection to the Holy Land through the New Jerusalem Monastery near Moscow. Founded by Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s, the monastery was situated on a site chosen for its symbolic resemblance to the Holy Land (with the River Istra symbolizing the Jordan). The ensemble of the monastery’s churches was laid out in a sacred topographical arrangement to represent the Holy Places of Jerusalem. Nikon also took in foreign monks so that the monastery would represent the multinational Orthodoxy linking Moscow to Jerusalem. Nicholas had visited the monastery in 1818 – the year his first son, the heir to the throne, was born (a coincidence he took to be a sign of divine providence). After the monastery was partially destroyed by fire Nicholas directed plans to reconstruct its centrepiece, the Church of the Resurrection, as a replica of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, even sending his own artist on a pilgrimage to make drawings of the original, so that it could be rebuilt on Russian soil.16
None of Nicholas’s religious ambitions were immediately obvious in 1825. There was a gradual evolution in his views from the first years of his reign, when he upheld the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance, to the final period before the Crimean War, when he made the championing of Orthodoxy the primary goal of his aggressive foreign policy in the Balkans and the Holy Lands. But from the start there were clear signs that he was determined to defend his co-religionists and take a tough position against Turkey, beginning with the struggle over Greece.
Nicholas restored relations with Kapodistrias, whose active support for the Greek cause had forced him to
