Battle of Navarino

The naval Battle of Navarino was fought on 20 October 1827, during the Greek War of Independence (1821–32), in Navarino Bay (modern-day Pylos), on the west coast of the Peloponnese peninsula, in the Ionian Sea.

An Ottoman armada, which, in addition to imperial warships, included squadrons from the eyalets (provinces) of Egypt, Tunis and Algiers, was destroyed by an Allied force of British, French and Russian vessels. It was the last major naval battle in history to be fought entirely with sailing ships, although most ships fought at anchor. The Allies' victory was achieved through superior firepower and gunnery.

The central factor which precipitated the intervention of the three Great Powers in the Greek conflict were the Russian Empire's ambitions to expand in the Black Sea region at the expense of the Ottoman Empire and Russian emotional support for the fellow-Orthodox Christian Greeks, who had rebelled against their Ottoman overlords in 1821. Russia's intentions in the region were seen as a major geostrategic threat by the other European powers, which feared the disintegration of the Ottoman empire and the establishment of Russian hegemony in the Balkans and the Near East. This induced Great Britain and France to bind Russia in a joint intervention to secure Greek autonomy in a manner which preserved Ottoman territorial integrity.

The Powers agreed, by the Treaty of London (1827), to force the Ottoman government to grant the Greeks autonomy within the empire and despatched naval squadrons to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to enforce their policy. The naval battle happened more by accident than by design as a result of a manoeuvre by the Allied commander-in-chief, Admiral Edward Codrington, aimed at coercing the Ottoman commander to obey Allied instructions.

The sinking of the Ottomans' Mediterranean fleet saved the fledgling Greek Republic from collapse. But it required two more military interventions, by Russia in the form of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-9 and by a French expeditionary force to the Peloponnese to force the withdrawal of Ottoman forces from central and southern Greece and to secure Greek independence.