Some Damned Thing in the Balkans - Part II
The escalation of the Greek Crisis in early 1822 saw the matter extend from one which European powers observed from afar, to one in which it began to be increasingly clear in Vienna, St. Petersburg and London that an intervention would be needed, a state of events which caused enormous alarm in Paris and suggested to Talleyrand, for the first time since Aix, that the Napoleonic peace might be legitimately threatened.
Sympathy for the Ottoman was virtually nonexistent with the European public but Napoleon and, to a greater extent Talleyrand, were hesitant to immediately upend the current order in the East. Napoleon had mused with Alexander of Russia whether they should co-partition the Turkish realm in two at the height of Russo-French cooperation in the spirit of Erfurt, but the circumstances of 1822 were very different. Constantine, Francophile as he was, very understandably believed that the Russian position near the Balkans meant that it would boil down to a three-way settlement between Austria, Russia and Britain on how to intervene in favor of the Balkan Christians, with the events of April 1822 spurring this along as news of the Athens Massacre, in which close to four thousand men, women and children were slaughtered by Ottoman troops throughout the city over the course of six days, arrived in the West. It was now more than clear that the Ottoman position was wholly untenable, and that Christian Europe would be forced to make their move.
It was Metternich, the wily Austrian Foreign Minister, who saw in the chaos in Greece and Serbia the most immediate opportunity for a redrawing of the map and a renewal of Austrian prestige after the debacles of 1814. Russia's interests in Orthodox Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia were obvious, and their wily, arch-reactionary Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode was not shy in making it clear that Russia would not hesitate to enforce her demands and will upon other powers in this regard. Critical, then, were the interests of Lord Liverpool, who saw in Greece the opportunity of leveraging the intense Philohellenism of present-day British upper society - in particular the educated elite - in restoring British prestige. It was also the case that liberal Britain, perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, sympathized with Greek revolutionaries and their principles, rather than merely seeing territorial concessions.
Liverpool, acting as his own Foreign Secretary, thus met in Zagreb Metternich and Nesselrode in late June 1822 to chart a potential course forward, with news of Egypt's Mohammed Ali crushing a revolt in Crete fresh in the public mind. The Congress of Zagreb produced little in the way of resolution, as merely dusting off the old Greek Plan and implementing it was resisted by Britain, which was loathe to cede so much influence to Russia in one go; the "Kingdom of Dacia" and "New Byzantine Empire" that the plans called for would essentially project St. Petersburg's power all the way into the Mediterranean, and Britain was adamant that only a neutral candidate was acceptable for both thrones, pressing further for the South Slav lands of Serbia and Bosnia to be united under an independent crown - possibly the followers of Prince Karadorde - rather than be annexed by the Austrian Empire. The reaction to this by Metternich and Nesselrode was, to say the least, incredibly enthusiastic, and negotiations soon began between Vienna and St. Petersburg bilaterally to draw up plans for direct intervention.
A further problem lay, then, in Napoleon's fury in being excluded from these talks. While Aix did not formally declare France as a hegemon of Europe with absolute veto on foreign affairs, the outcome of multiple coalition wars nonetheless in practice meant that excluding France from grand decisions on the fate of a major corner of Europe were impractical at best and a grievous insult at worst. At Napoleon's behest Talleyrand, reluctantly, lodged a formal complaint with Nesselrode over "a lack of consultation over the course of events to come;" he cannily excluded a request from the Tuileries to note the "Franco-Ottoman alliance" still remained in effect. In reality, Napoleon was not about to go to war with Austria and Russia on behalf of the Ottomans; but if there was to be a grand partitioning of the Ottoman realms, then Napoleon was keen to make sure that France's interests were defended and that it received its taste.
Another Congress was thus planned for late in 1822 or early 1823, once Britain realized that Russia and Austria were entirely willing to go it alone and that Russian forces were mobilizing to occupy the Danubian principalities whose
de facto suzerainty they had already acquired and perhaps cross the Danube come spring to launch an offensive towards the Balkan Mountains and Constantinople beyond them; the Eastern Crisis, even as Greek forces squabbled internally and the Ottomans were able to fend off most rebellious elements rather easily through most of the year, looked closer to triggering general war than ending anytime soon.
