This indeed was not unlikely to happen; for the new house of Hellenism had hardly arisen before it became desperately divided against itself.  The vitality of the national movement resided entirely in the local communes.  It was they that had found the fighting men, kept them armed and supplied, and by spontaneous co-operation expelled the Turk from Peloponnesos.  But if the co-operation was to be permanent it must have a central organization, and with the erection of this superstructure the troubles began.  As early as June 1821 a ‘Peloponnesian Senate’ was constituted and at once monopolized by the ‘Primates’, the propertied class that had been responsible for the communal taxes under the Romaic and Ottoman regimes and was allowed to control the communal government in return.  About the same time two Phanariot princes threw in their lot with the revolution—­ Alexander Mavrokordatos and Demetrius, the more estimable brother of the futile Alexander Hypsilantis.  Both were saturated with the most recent European political theory, and they committed the peasants and seamen of the liberated districts to an ambitious constitutionalism.  In December 1821 a ‘National Assembly’ met at Epidauros, passed an elaborate organic law, and elected Mavrokordatos first president of the Hellenic Republic.

The struggle for life and death in 1822 had staved off the internal crisis, but the Peloponnesian Senate remained obstinately recalcitrant towards the National Government in defence of its own vested interests; and the insubordination of the fleet in 1823 was of one piece with the political faction which broke out as soon as the immediate danger from without was removed.

Towards the end of 1823 European ‘Philhellenes’ began to arrive in Greece.  In those dark days of reaction that followed Waterloo, self-liberated Hellas seemed the one bright spot on the continent; but the idealists who came to offer her their services were confronted with a sorry spectacle.  The people were indifferent to their leaders, and the leaders at variance among themselves.  The gentlemanly Phanariots had fallen into the background.  Mavrokordatos only retained influence in north-western Greece.  In Peloponnesos the Primates were all-powerful, and Kolokotronis the klepht was meditating a popular dictatorship at their expense.  In the north-east the adventurer Odhyssevs had won a virtual dictatorship already, and was suspected of intrigue with the Turks; and all this factious dissension rankled into civil war as soon as the contraction of a loan in Great Britain had invested the political control of the Hellenic Republic with a prospective value in cash.  The first civil war was fought between Kolokotronis on the one side and the Primates of Hydhra and Peloponnesos on the other; but the issue was decided against Kolokotronis by the adhesion to the coalition of Kolettis the Vlach, once physician to Mukhtar Pasha, the son of Ali, and now political agent for all the northern Armatoli