increased its possibilities as the Ottoman system decayed.  After Kolokotronis’s victory, the Greeks kept Tripolitza under a close blockade.  Early in October it fell amid frightful scenes of pillage and massacre, and Ottoman dominion in the Peloponnesos fell with it.  On January 22, 1822, Korinth, the key to the isthmus, passed into the Greeks’ hands, and only four fortresses—­Nauplia, Patras, Koron, and Modhon—­still held out within it against Greek investment.  Not a Turk survived in the Peloponnesos beyond their walls, for the slaughter at Tripolitza was only the most terrible instance of what happened wherever a Moslem colony was found.  In Peloponnesos, at any rate, the revolution had been grimly successful.

There had also been successes at sea.  The merchant marine of the Greek islands had suffered grievously from the fall of Napoleon and the settlement at Vienna, which, by restoring normal conditions of trade, had destroyed their abnormal monopoly.  The revolution offered new opportunities for profitable venture, and in April 1821 Hydhra, Spetza and Psara hastened to send a privateering fleet to sea.  As soon as the fleet crossed the Aegean, Samos rid itself of the Turks.  At the beginning of June the rickety Ottoman squadron issued from the Dardanelles, but it was chased back by the islanders under the lee of Mitylini.  Memories of Russian naval tactics in 1770 led the Psariots to experiment in fire-ships, and one of the two Turkish ships of the line fell a victim to this attack.  Within a week of setting sail, the diminished Turkish squadron was back again in the Dardanelles, and the islanders were left with the command of the sea.

The general Christian revolution thus seemed fairly launched, and in the first panic the threatened Moslems began reprisals of an equally general kind.  In the larger Turkish cities there were massacres of Christian minorities, and the Government lent countenance to them by murdering its own principal Christian official Gregorios, the Greek patriarch at Constantinople, on April 22, 1821.  But Sultan Mahmud quickly recovered himself.  He saw that his empire could not survive a racial war, and determined to prevent the present revolt from assuming such a character.  His plan was to localize it by stamping out the more distant sparks with all his energy, before concentrating his force at leisure upon the main conflagration.

This policy was justified by the event.  On March 6 the ‘Philiki Hetairia’ at Odessa had opened its own operations in grandiose style by sending a filibustering expedition across the Russo-Turkish frontier under command of Prince Alexander Hypsilantis, a Phanariot in the Russian service.  Hypsilantis played for a general revolt of the Ruman population in the Danubian Principalities and a declaration of war against Turkey on the part of Russia.  But the Rumans had no desire to assist the Greek bureaucrats who oppressed them, and the Tsar Alexander had been converted by the experiences of 1812-13 to a pacifistic