supplies ran out.  An attempt of his vanguard to break through again towards the north was bloodily repulsed, and he barely succeeded two days later in extricating the main body in a demoralized condition, with the loss of all his baggage-train.  The Turkish army melted away, Dramali was happy to die at Korinth, and Khurshid was executed by the sultan’s command.  The invasion of Peloponnesos had broken down, and nothing could avert the fall of Nauplia.  The Ottoman fleet hovered for one September week in the offing, but Kanaris’s fire-ships took another ship of the line in toll at the roadsteads of Tenedos before it safely regained the Dardanelles.  The garrison of Nauplia capitulated in December, on condition of personal security and liberty, and the captain of a British frigate, which arrived on the spot, took measures that the compact should be observed instead of being broken by the customary massacre.  But the strongest fortress in Peloponnesos was now in Greek hands.

[Footnote 1:  Including a strong contingent of Moslem Slavs—­Bulgarian Pomaks from the Aegean hinterland and Serbian Bosniaks from the Adriatic.]

In the north-west the season had not passed so well.  When the Turks invested Ali in Yannina, they repatriated the Suliot exiles in their native mountains.  But a strong sultan was just as formidable to the Suliots as a strong pasha, so they swelled their ranks by enfranchising their peasant-serfs, and made common cause with their old enemy in his adversity.  Now that Ali was destroyed, the Suliots found themselves in a precarious position, and turned to the Greeks for aid.  But on July 16 the Greek advance was checked by a severe defeat at Petta in the plain of Arta.  In September the Suliots evacuated their impregnable fortresses in return for a subsidy and a safe-conduct, and Omer Vrioni, the Ottoman commander in the west,[1] was free to advance in turn towards the south.  On November 6 he actually laid siege to Mesolonghi, but here his experiences were as discomfiting as Dramali’s.  He could not keep open his communications, and after heavy losses retreated again to Arta in January 1823.

[Footnote 1:  He was a renegade officer of Ali’s.]

In 1823 the struggle seemed to be lapsing into stalemate.  The liberated Peloponnesos had failed to propagate the revolution through the remainder of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Government had equally failed to reconquer the Peloponnesos by military invasion.  This season’s operations only seemed to emphasize the deadlock.  The Ottoman commander in the west raised an auxiliary force of Moslem and Catholic clansmen from northern Albania, and attempted to reach Mesolonghi once more.  But he penetrated no further than Anatolikon—­the Mesolonghiots’ outpost village at the head of the lagoons—­and the campaign was only memorable for the heroic death of Marko Botzaris the Suliot in a night attack upon the Ottoman camp.  At sea, the two fleets indulged in desultory cruises without an encounter, for the Turks were still timid and incompetent, while the growing insubordination and dissension on the Greek ships made concerted action there, too, impossible.  By the end of the season it was clear that the struggle could only definitively be decided by the intervention of a third party on one side or the other—­unless the Greeks brought their own ruin upon themselves.