Tsar Alexander, the vaccillator, died in November 1825, and was succeeded by his son Nicholas I, as strong a character and as active a will as Sultan Mahmud himself.  Nicholas approached the Greek question without any disinclination towards a Turkish war; and both Great Britain and France found an immediate interest in removing a ground of provocation which might lead to such a rude disturbance of the European ‘Balance of Power’.  On July 6, 1827, a month after Athens surrendered, the three powers concluded a treaty for the pacification of Greece, in which they bound over both belligerent parties to accept an armistice under pain of military coercion.  An allied squadron appeared off Navarino Bay to enforce this policy upon the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet which lay united there, and the intrusion of the allied admirals into the bay itself precipitated on October 20 a violent naval battle in which the Moslem flotilla was destroyed.  The die was cast; and in April 1828 the Russian and Ottoman Governments drifted into a formal war, which brought Russian armies across the Danube as far as Adrianople, and set the Ottoman Empire at bay for the defence of its capital.  Thanks to Mahmud’s reorganization, the empire did not succumb to this assault; but it had no more strength to spare for the subjugation of Greece.  The Greeks had no longer to reckon with the sultan as a military factor; and in August 1828 they wore relieved of Ibrahim’s presence as well, by the disembarkation of 14,000 French troops in Peloponnesos to superintend the withdrawal of the Egyptian forces.  In March 1829 the three powers delimited the Greek frontier.  The line ran east and west from the Gulf of Volo to the Gulf of Arta, and assigned to the new state no more and no less territory than the districts that had effectively asserted their independence against the sultan in 1821.  This settlement was the only one possible under the circumstances; but it was essentially transitory, for it neglected the natural line of nationality altogether, and left a numerical majority of the Greek race, as well as the most important centres of its life, under the old regime of servitude.

Even the liberated area was not at the end of its troubles.  In the spring of 1827, when they committed themselves into the hands of their foreign patrons, the Greeks had found a new president for the republic in John Kapodistrias, an intimate of Alexander the tsar.  Kapodistrias was a Corfiote count, with a Venetian education and a career in the Russian diplomatic service, and no one could have been more fantastically unsuitable for the task of reconstructing the country to which he was called.  Kapodistrias’ ideal was the fin-de-siecle ‘police-state’; but ‘official circles’ did not exist in Greece, and he had no acquaintance with the peasants and sailors whom he hoped to redeem by bureaucracy.  He instituted a hierarchically centralized administration which made the abortive constitution of Mavrokordatos