in the national service.  The fighting lasted from November 1823 to June 1824, and was followed by another outbreak in November of the latter year, when the victors quarrelled over the spoils, and the Primates were worsted in turn by the islanders and the Armatoli.  The nonentity Kondouriottis of Hydhra finally emerged as President of Greece, with the sharp-witted Kolettis as his principal wire-puller, but the disturbances did not cease till the last instalment of the loan had been received and squandered and there was no more spoil to fight for.

Meanwhile, Sultan Mahmud had been better employed.  Resolved to avert stalemate by the only possible means, he had applied in the course of 1823 to Mohammed Ali Pasha of Egypt, a more formidable, though more distant, satrap than Ali of Yannina himself.  Mohammed Ali had a standing army and navy organized on the European model.  He had also a son Ibrahim, who knew how to manoeuvre them, and was ambitious of a kingdom.  Mahmud hired the father’s troops and the son’s generalship for the re-conquest of Peloponnesos, under engagement to invest Ibrahim with the pashalik as soon as he should effectively make it his own.  By this stroke of diplomacy a potential rebel was turned into a willing ally, and the preparations for the Egyptian expedition went forward busily through the winter of 1823-4.

The plan of campaign was systematically carried out.  During the season of respite the Greek islanders had harried the coasts and commerce of Anatolia and Syria at will.  The first task was to deprive them of their outposts in the Aegean, and an advanced squadron of the Egyptian fleet accordingly destroyed the community of Kasos in June 1824, while the Ottoman squadron sallied out of the Dardanelles a month later and dealt out equal measure to Psara.  The two main flotillas then effected a junction off Rhodes; and, though the crippled Greek fleet still ventured pluckily to confront them, it could not prevent Ibrahim from casting anchor safely in Soudha Bay and landing his army to winter in Krete.  In February 1825 he transferred these troops with equal impunity to the fortress of Modhon, which was still held for the sultan by an Ottoman garrison.  The fire-ships of Hydhra came to harry his fleet too late, and on land the Greek forces were impotent against his trained soldiers.  The Government in vain promoted Kolokotronis from captivity to commandership-in-chief.  The whole south-western half of Peloponnesos passed into Ibrahim’s hands, and in June 1825 he even penetrated as far as the mills of Lerna on the eastern coast, a few miles south of Argos itself.