Battle of Navarino - Aftermath

Aftermath

Despite the celebrations, the Sultan still disposed of a total of around 40,000 troops in central and southern Greece, entrenched in powerful fortresses. The final liberation of Greece was still far off, unless the Porte could be induced to accept the Treaty of London.

The Sultan, however, refused to concede defeat in Greece. On the contrary, his response to the Navarino disaster was to raise the stakes dramatically, in effect challenging Russia to decide the whole issue on the battlefield. A few weeks after the battle, in a symbolic gesture, he proclaimed jihad (holy war) against the European powers in his claimed role as khalifa (caliph, or spiritual leader) of all Muslims. More concretely, he closed the Bosporus to international shipping, a move certain to provoke Russia, whose entire Black Sea trade had to pass through the Straits. He also revoked the Convention of Akkerman, signed with Russia the previous year.

The Sultan also ordered his vassal Muhammad Ali not to withdraw his army from the Peloponnese. But the Allies despatched envoys to Alexandria to demand that the Egyptian prince do precisely that. This left Muhammad Ali in a dilemma. On the one hand, as an experienced statesman, he knew that with the Great Powers backing Greek autonomy, the game was up in the Peloponnese. On the other, he was reluctant to be seen as betraying his overlord, especially now that he had declared jihad, and also to inflict on his son Ibrahim the humiliation of a forced withdrawal. So he played for time, engaging the Allies in lengthy but inconclusive negotiations, in the hope that in the meantime the Sultan would himself reach an agreement with the Allies that would permit Ibrahim a face-saving departure.

But any chance of a negotiated settlement disappeared with Russia's long-expected declaration of war on the Porte in April 1828, starting the 11th Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829) and signalling the ultimate failure of British diplomacy. With the Tsar himself present in nominal command (actual command was in the hands of veteran career-soldier Count Wittgenstein), a Russian army of 100,000 men, supported by the Black sea fleet, swept aside the Ottoman forces in the Romanian Principalities, crossed the Danube, and laid siege to Silistra, Varna and Shumla, the key Ottoman-held fortresses in Rumelia (Bulgaria). But despite substantial Russian successes by land and sea (including the capture of the crucial seaport of Varna), the 1828 campaign ended inconclusively. Silistra and Shumla remained in Ottoman hands because of their fierce defence, and the main Russian army was obliged to withdraw to Russian territory by supply shortages and disease.

Meanwhile, in Paris, a more liberal government under the Vicomte de Martignac took office in January 1828, after an election in which the Bourbon kingdom of France's tiny electorate of 74,000 mainly aristocratic voters turned against the ultra-conservative faction. Eager to court popularity, de Martignac announced in April 1828 that, in view of the failure of diplomatic efforts, France would despatch an expeditionary force of 13,000 elite troops to expel the Egyptian and Ottoman forces from the Peloponnese. The news was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the Parisian public. As urgent preparations began in France's Mediterranean ports, Ibrahim Pasha told his father that he felt confident he could repel the French. But since the sinking of his expensive modern fleet, Ali had lost all appetite for military confrontation with the Great Powers. Ibrahim's motley force of Egyptian peasants and Albanian mercenaries, he felt sure, would stand no chance against the French professionals, who were largely officered by battle-hardened veterans of Napoleon's army. Ali now engaged in serious negotiations with Codrington, who had been despatched by London to Alexandria to try to forestall the French intervention. In August, Ali agreed terms with Codrington for the withdrawal of his forces from the Peloponnese. Ibrahim initially refused to comply with his father's evacuation orders, but gave way shortly after the French troops landed in Navarino Bay at the end of August, to a jubilant reception by the Greeks. The Egyptians finally left in October 1828, a year after the naval battle. The French proceeded to clear the remaining Ottoman garrisons in the Peloponnese, which offered only token resistance, by the end of 1828. In the subsequent months, Greek forces regained control of central Greece in a lightning campaign.

For the 1829 campaign on the Danube, Tsar Nicholas dismissed the ailing Wittgenstein and handed the Russian command to his more aggressive compatriot, Count von Diebitsch, who succeeded in capturing Silistra and then surprised the Ottomans with a high-speed drive for the Ottoman capital Constantinople (Istanbul), bypassing Shumla and routing an Ottoman army sent to intercept him. In September 1829, with the Russian army camped just 40 miles from his palace, the Sultan was forced to capitulate. By the Treaty of Adrianople, he conceded a long list of Russian demands, one of which was acceptance of Greek autonomy as defined in the Treaty of London. However, Tsar Nicholas and his ministers were careful to refrian from the more extreme demands advocated by Russian nationalists, such as a Russian military occupation of the Straits or annexation of the Romanian principalities, that would risk war with Great Britain and Austria. As a consequence, London and Vienna were relieved that the outcome was not worse and reluctantly acquiesced in Russia's strategic gains.

However, the Sultan's acceptance came too late to save Ottoman sovereignty over Greece. Buoyed by the Ottoman disasters on land and sea, and their own military successes, the Greeks refused to accept anything less than full independence. Finally, at the London Conference of 1832, the Allies dropped their policy of Ottoman suzerainty and accepted Greek independence, but insisted that the new state should be a monarchy not a republic. Later that year, the Sultan was forced by the Allied powers to sign the Treaty of Constantinople (1832) formally recognizing the new Kingdom of Greece as an independent state. The latter's territory, however, was restricted to just those regions from which Ottoman forces had been expelled, namely the Peloponnese, the Cyclades islands of the Aegean Sea and central Greece. Many regions with an ethnic-Greek majority (Thessaly, Epirus, part of Macedonia and Thrace, the remaining Aegean islands, Crete and Cyprus), remained under Ottoman rule.

The disastrous secession of Greece was by no means the end of the Sultan's tribulations. Ironically, the gravest threat to the Ottoman empire's integrity that emerged was not from Russia, but from Egypt. Having lost his fleet and the hereditary fiefdom promised to his son, Muhammad Ali now demanded as compensation that Ibrahim be appointed wali (viceroy) of the Ottoman province of Syria (which included modern Syria, Lebanon and Palestine). When the Sultan refused, Muhammad Ali sent an army under Ibrahim into Syria in 1831. Swiftly defeating the local Ottoman forces and overrunning the province, Ibrahim crushed an Ottoman army in Anatolia and prepared to march on Constantinople. He was forced to stop by the intervention of Britain and France, which, however, obliged the Porte to grant Ibrahim control of not only Syria, but also the island of Crete and of the Hijaz region of Arabia. His rule was characteristically oppressive and sparked a series of indigenous revolts, notably the Palestinian Arab revolt of 1834. In 1839, the Sultan launched a military attempt to oust him, but the Ottoman army was again routed by Ibrahim, who again invaded Anatolia. At this critical juncture, the exhausted Mahmud II died and was succeeded by his teenage son, Abdulmecid I. Faced with the spectre of the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, the British and Austrian navies intervened directly in the Levant by blockading the Nile Delta coast and forced Ali to withdraw his forces from Syria (1840). In return, the Allies obliged the young Sultan to grant Ali an unprecedented hereditary vice-regency over Egypt. The dynasty that Ali founded ruled Egypt until the nationalist/military coup of 1952. But de facto independence from the Ottomans was soon replaced by de facto rule from Whitehall. After the construction of the Suez Canal in 1869, which instantly became the main shipping-route to British India, successive British governments decided that Egypt was simply too strategic to be left to its own devices and imposed a military protectorate over the country. British troops were stationed in Egypt from 1875 to the end of the Second World War in 1945 and Ali's successors were reduced to puppets of British imperial policy.