At Constantinople the news of the insurrection excited both consternation and rage.  Instant death to the Christians was the universal cry.  The Mussulmans seized the Greek patriarch, an old man of eighty, while he was performing a religious service on Easter Sunday, hanged him, and delivered his body to the Jews.  The Sultan Mahmoud was intensely exasperated, and ordered a levy of troops throughout his empire to suppress the insurrection and to punish the Christians.  The atrocities which the Turks now inflicted have scarcely ever been equalled in horror.  The Christian churches were entered and sacked.  At Adrianople the Patriarch was beheaded, with eight other ecclesiastical dignitaries.  In ten days thousands of Christians in that city were butchered, and their wives and daughters sold into slavery; while five archbishops and three bishops were hanged in the streets, without trial.  There was scarcely a town in the empire where atrocities of the most repulsive kind were not perpetrated on innocent and helpless people.  In Asia Minor the fanatical spirit raged with more ferocity than in European Turkey.  At Smyrna a general massacre of the Christians took place under circumstances of peculiar atrocity, and fifteen thousand were obliged to flee to the islands of the Archipelago to save their lives.  The Island of Cyprus, which once had a population of more than a million, reduced at the breaking out of the insurrection to seventy thousand, was nearly depopulated; the archbishop and five other bishops were ruthlessly murdered.  The whole island, one hundred and forty-six miles long and sixty-three wide, was converted into a theatre of rapine, violation, and bloodshed.

All now saw that no hope remained for Greece but in the most determined resistance, which was nobly made.  Six thousand men were soon in arms in Thessaly.  The mountaineers of Macedonia gathered into armed bands.  Thirty thousand rose in the peninsula of Cassandra and laid siege to Salonica, a city of eighty thousand inhabitants, but were repulsed, and fled to the mountains,—­not, however, until thousands of Mussulmans were slain.  It had become “war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt.”  No quarter was asked or given.

All Greece was now aroused to what was universally felt to be a death struggle.  The people eagerly responded to all patriotic influences, and especially to war songs, some of which had been sung for more than two thousand years.  Certain of these were reproduced by the English poet Byron, who, leaving his native land, entered heart and soul into the desperate contest, and urged the Greeks to heroic action in memory of their fathers.

     “Then manfully despising
        The Turkish tyrant’s yoke,
      Let your country see you rising,
        And all her chains are broke. 
      Brave shades of chiefs and sages,
        Behold the coming strife! 
      Hellenes of past ages
        Oh, start again to life! 
      At the sound of trumpet, breaking
        Your sleep, oh, join with me! 
      And the seven-hilled city seeking,
        Fight, conquer, till we’re free!”