Ypsilanti beats the Turks, 1821

This one is a little long; bear with me.

* * *

Spring 1821.

James Monroe is starting his second term as US President. In Paris, it's the Indian summer of the Bourbons. Keats has just died in Rome; Napoleon is dying on Elba. Metternich is conducting the Concert of Europe from Vienna. Moses Austin is leading American settlers into Texas. Liverpool is Prime Minister, always has been and always will be.

And in the Danubian Principality of Moldavia, at the south-eastern corner of Europe, one Alexander Ypsilanti is preparing to lead an insurrection against the Turks.

Ypsilanti was a Phanariot Greek, which is a term that may require some explaining. In 1821, most "Greeks" did not live in Greece. Greek national consciousness barely existed. Any Orthodox Christian who spoke Greek as a first or even a second language could self-identify as "Greek", and millions who had never seen the land called Hellas did just that. This Greek diaspora was thinly but widely spread. There were large Greek populations around all the shores of the Aegean and the Black Sea, with smaller colonies from Astrakhan to Marseilles.

The Phanariot Greeks were a sort of aristocracy within the diaspora. They took their name name from the Phanar district of Istanbul, where they supposedly originated, but they were found all over the Ottoman dominion. (At this time, if you were "Greek", you looked to Istanbul – or Constantinople – as your home city; the small, dusty Ottoman market town of Athens was of historical interest and little more.) In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Phanariots formed a commercial and administrative elite within the Ottoman Empire. They were loyal and efficient servants of the Sultan, and a disproportionate number of high-ranking bureaucrats and provincial governors were Phanariots.

Still with me? Okay, now the Phanariots were particularly prominent in the Danubian Principalities. That's Wallachia and Moldavia, the lands that would one day be Romania. The Principalities were not actually part of the Ottoman Empire, but they were in every way subordinate to it. They paid tribute -- quite a lot of tribute -- to Istanbul, and their rulers served at the pleasure of the Sultans. And those rulers ruled through a thin but broad layer of Phanariot Greek bureaucrats and merchants, spread all across the Principalities. The Phanariots didn't amount to more than a few percent of the population, but they had political, economic and cultural power far out of proportion to their numbers. They were princes and ministers, they controlled the two provinces' external trade (the internal trade was dominated by Jews) and they filled almost all of the higher positions in the Church as well.

The Phanariot Greeks in Romania co-existed uneasily with the native land-owning aristocracy, the Romanian boyars. The boyars viewed the Greeks as alien, but were also vaguely in awe of their sophistication cleverness, and acknowledged them as necessary mediators with the Ottoman power. And by the early 1800s, both groups were maneuvering for greater autonomy from the Porte.

The Ypsilanti were one of the most powerful Phanariot families. Alexander Ypsilanti left Moldavia as a boy for Russia, where he eventually entered upon a very successful career as a soldier. He lost an arm in the Tsar's service at the battle of Dresden, was appointed one of the emperor's adjutants, and attended Alexander I at the congress of Vienna. By 1820 he was a major-general... and president of the Philike Hetaireia, the great Greek conspiracy against the Ottomans.

By early 1821, the Philike had prepared a two-pronged strategy against the Ottoman Empire. First, there would be a Greek uprising in Hellas, in the Pelopponese. Second, more or less simultaneously, there would be an invasion of Moldavia, hoping to either spark a Russo-Turkish war or at least rip the Danubian Principalities out of the Ottoman orbit. This would be accompanied by a native Romanian uprising further south in Wallachia, which would be led by a boyar named Tudor Vladimirescu.

It was an extremely ambitious plan, and one piece of it -- the Greek uprising -- would eventually prove successful. The northern part of the strategy, alaso, would fail.

Oh, Ypsilanti got off to a good start. He crossed the Pruth into Moldavia at the very beginning of spring, caught the local Turks completely by surprise, and soon had thousands of untrained but eager peasant irregulars flocking to his banner.

But then he dithered. Ypsilanti turned out to be an indifferent administrator; he'd started with no cash in hand, and had to raise cash for payrolls and supplied by levying on local merchants. His local allies turned out to be more interested in massacring Turkish civilians than fighting Turkish troops. His Romanian "ally" Vladimirescu announced that he was leading a /Romanian/ insurrection... and that one of its goals was to rid Wallachia of Phanariot misrule!

As for Czar Alexander of Russia...

"Emperor Alexander was pleased to declare that he could consider the undertaking of Prince Ypsilanti only as an effort of the unquiet spirit which characterizes the present times, as well as the inexperience and levity of that young man; but at the same his Majesty has resolved as follows:

1st. Prince Ypsilanti is excluded from the Russian service.
2nd. It is notified to him that his Majesty the Emperor entirely disapproves of his enterprise, and that he is never to expect any kind of support in it on the part of Russia."

Meanwhile the Ottomans recovered themselves and moved north. Ypsilanti's uprising was smashed at the end of June, Vladimerescu's a few weeks later. Ypsilanti was able to escape to Austria, but his great chance had passed; he died in obscurity and poverty some years later (though some romantic Americans would give his name to a new city in the raw young state of Michigan).

But it could have gone very differently.

True, Ypsilanti's uprising was somewhat Quixotic. He crossed the Pruth with just a handful of volunteer troops, no promise of Russian assistance, and no money, and he was relying on native Romanian support that never really materialized. But he got inside the Ottoman decision curve for several weeks, and had the chance to be on the lower Danube before they could respond. The Ottomans were badly distracted at the time -- Ali Pasha's revolt was still going on, over in Albania -- and it was only through unusually heroic exertions that they were able to respond as effectively as they did.

Let's assume a slightly different Ypsalanti -- just as brave and energetic, but smarter, better disciplined, and much better prepared. Hat OTL's Ypsilanti moved quickly enough, he could have presented all the other parties -- Tsar Alexander, Vladimirescu, and the Ottomans -- with a fait accomplit. Alexander did want the Danubian Principalities ripped away from the Ottomans, after all; they were a major source of revenue for the Porte, and losing them would do large and lasting damage to Ottoman finances. Had it looked like Ypsilanti was likely to win, the Czar might well have decided to support his rebellion, at least passively, instead of publicly discrediting him.

Let's handwave [handwave] and say that after a lengthy struggle -- and it would be lengthy; the Ottomans wouldn't give up their tribute easily -- Ypsilanti prevails.

What happens then is... interesting.

Probably there's a _de facto_ independent Romania, possibly still _de jure_ under Ottoman rule (as Serbia was at this time), but paying no tribute. *Romania would walk a very narrow line between the Porte and the Czar; Russia would like to turn the Principalities into puppet states (as happened OTL for a while, from 1827 to the Crimean War), while the Ottomans desperately want their tribute back.

Internally the new state is even more complicated. The Phanariot Greeks now move up to be a ruling caste, and Greek becomes the official language of law and government (which it pretty much was anyhow). However, the Phanariots are too few to rule without the help of the boyars. Making this work will not be easy. Vladimerescu seems to have been an exceedingly narrow-minded nationalist (of the sort that's all too common in Balkan history); it will probably be necessary to dispose of him fairly early on. But this will not make the rest of the boyars any more friendly to the new regime.

-- In fact, I suspect that Phanariot/boyar relationships would be the major fault line in the new state. The Phanariots were decadent and corrupt, but pretty sophisticated. Almost all were literate, and many were quite well travelled. And then of course, they were plugged into a diaspora that stretched from Paris to Persia. So they had books, a wide view of the world, some grasp of broad economics, and access to all sorts of ideas.

The boyars, the native Romanian aristocracy, had none of these things. The boyars of this period were, by and large, dumb as kelp; stubborn, pig-ignorant, xenophobic, and politically retrograde. (There were a few exceptions, but they tended to end up dead.)

On the plus side, /all/ the young Balkan states OTL were internally unstable and subject to the whims of the Great Powers. The Principalities had been so badly ruled for so long that the "throw a few scraps to the peasants" niche was wide open. And Ypsilanti seems to have been a liberal in the best sense; he wanted to be an enlightened prince, encouraging trade and education. Possibly he would have been too idealistic to survive for long, but OTOH he had managed to prosper in the snakepit of the Romanov court.

So. We have a de facto independent Romania about 30 years early, ruled by a liberal Greek prince, by and through a class of Phanariot Greek aristocrats. The Ottomans want their tribute back; the Russians want a puppet Romania (and one that's less likely to spread Enlightenment ideas back into Russia). The native Romanians are restless under alien rule, though they may tolerate it for a time if Ypsilanti brings prosperity.

Meanwhile there may be some interesting knock-on effects around the region, especially on the Greek revolt to the south.

Thoughts?


Doug M.
 
There was no intention of taking over the Principalities. The aim was always to assemble a peasant army and march South to Greece. There is just no possibility that a peasant rabble had any chance of defeating the Ottoman army, no matter what condition it was in or how preoccupied.

Also, the Phanariots were utterly despised by the native population - without Ottoman backing they would have been rounded up and lynched.

But all that aside, the Russians will still crush any such movement should it get anywhere.
 
Hadi Pasha is right,the Eterists had no intention of conquering the two Romanian states,they wanted to establish an army an moved down in the Peloponnese,if they succeeded in establishing said army it would probably still be defeated by the Turks.
 
Hadi Pasha is right,the Eterists had no intention of conquering the two Romanian states,they wanted to establish an army an moved down in the Peloponnese,if they succeeded in establishing said army it would probably still be defeated by the Turks.

It would have been defeated if the Ottomans had done nothing at all. How did anyone expect to march an army of peasants from Rumania to the Peloponnese? They would all have died on the way.
 
Internally the new state is even more complicated. The Phanariot Greeks now move up to be a ruling caste, and Greek becomes the official language of law and government (which it pretty much was anyhow). However, the Phanariots are too few to rule without the help of the boyars. Making this work will not be easy. Vladimerescu seems to have been an exceedingly narrow-minded nationalist (of the sort that's all too common in Balkan history); it will probably be necessary to dispose of him fairly early on. But this will not make the rest of the boyars any more friendly to the new regime.

-- In fact, I suspect that Phanariot/boyar relationships would be the major fault line in the new state. The Phanariots were decadent and corrupt, but pretty sophisticated. Almost all were literate, and many were quite well travelled. And then of course, they were plugged into a diaspora that stretched from Paris to Persia. So they had books, a wide view of the world, some grasp of broad economics, and access to all sorts of ideas.

The boyars, the native Romanian aristocracy, had none of these things. The boyars of this period were, by and large, dumb as kelp; stubborn, pig-ignorant, xenophobic, and politically retrograde. (There were a few exceptions, but they tended to end up dead.)

On the plus side, /all/ the young Balkan states OTL were internally unstable and subject to the whims of the Great Powers. The Principalities had been so badly ruled for so long that the "throw a few scraps to the peasants" niche was wide open. And Ypsilanti seems to have been a liberal in the best sense; he wanted to be an enlightened prince, encouraging trade and education. Possibly he would have been too idealistic to survive for long, but OTOH he had managed to prosper in the snakepit of the Romanov court.

So. We have a de facto independent Romania about 30 years early, ruled by a liberal Greek prince, by and through a class of Phanariot Greek aristocrats. The Ottomans want their tribute back; the Russians want a puppet Romania (and one that's less likely to spread Enlightenment ideas back into Russia). The native Romanians are restless under alien rule, though they may tolerate it for a time if Ypsilanti brings prosperity.

Meanwhile there may be some interesting knock-on effects around the region, especially on the Greek revolt to the south.

Thoughts?


Doug M.

Interesting ideea, but i really don't agree with your comparison between the native and greek upper classes, the remark about the romanian boyars being "dumb" is especially exagerated. Although backward, almost all the boyars in this period sent their sons to schools in France , and thus set the conditions for the formation of a modern and native upper class. They understood that political modernization was urgent (although completely neglecting social modernization).

As Abdul said, the Phanariote Greeks were despised by both native lower classes (taxation) and upper classes (rivalry); for most of the Phanariote period their whole power was based on the Ottoman armies stationed on the Danube. And i really don't buy the thing about the Romanian principalities being better administrated by Ypsilantis and other Phanariotes. Greece as an example had a great Phanariote influence in it's ruling class and the country was in chaos for decades after it's independence, and even at the start of ww1. Romania was still better off than Greece regarding stability and economical development. Don't try and paint the Phanariotes as educated liberal modernizers, they were an ultraconservative oligarchy, very similar to the existing Romanian one only that they had no hopes of earning the loyalty of the population because they were alien... heck even the Romanian aristocracy had trouble keeping the population under order.

PS: Greek was never really that popular in the principalities. Romanian was the most popular language although usually written in the Slavonic alphabet. Russian or Turkish had imo as much influence at the court as Greek.
 
Abdul, leading an army down to Greece was a long-term goal. The immediate goal was to distract the Ottomans and, if possible, cripple them by taking the Principalities out of the Empire.

Note that the first wave of Greek rebellion was not yet nationalistic in the modern sense. The Philike didn't want a small independent Greek state; they wanted all the Greeks in the Empire to be "free". This was a vague and probably unattainable goal, which is why it quickly got whittled down to a regional rebellion, but in 1821 a Greek-ish state in Romania still seemed like a plausible goal.

You're right to say that the native population despised the Phanariots. This was probably the rebellion's greatest weakness. But they also hated the Turks. And if Ypsilanti had been able to score some military victories, they'd likely have thrown their lot in with the Greeks, at least for the nonce. Note that most of the "Phanariots" in Romania were really native born; there were some tens of thousands of Greeks, all were bilingual and many had been in the country for generations.

Daniel, no, I'm really not exaggerating. At this time only a small minority of the boyars sent their sons to France. That became much more common a generation or two later, but we're talking 1820, not 1848. (There were a fair number of French-educated boyars taking part in the revolution, but they were men in their twenties, not their fifties.) Once you got out of Bucharest and Jassy/Iasi, most of the boyars were still illiterate; in fact, that was true past the middle of the century.

And no, I'm not exaggerating their general backwardness and xenophobia either. The boyars were so retrograde that the Russian occupation a few years later would actually help modernize and liberalize them; the Principalities' first great reformer and liberalizer was Count Kiselev, the Russian general in charge of the occupation. As of 1821, though, the boyars were still firmly and enthusiastically premodern.

You're right to say that the Phanariots weren't liberal modernizers, and you make a good point WRT post-revolutionary Greece. However, (1) while the Phanariots weren't liberals, they were at least much more educated, sophisticated, and modern in their thinking than the boyars; and (2) at least some of them /were/ liberals, and Ypsilanti was one such.

As to the Greek-Romanian comparison, note that Greece went through a decade of very destructive war, and was politically even more immature and backward than Romania to begin with. (Which is saying something.) Romania at least had a native aristocracy, however dull; Greece just had local chieftains and Big Men. All the drawbacks of aristocracy, with none of the benefits.


Doug M.
 
Nicolae Constantin Golescu is sometimes called "the first modern Romanian". He was born in 1810, and sent abroad to study in Switzerland in 1827. Twenty years later, Golescu would be the elder statesman (at not-quite-forty!) of Romania's Class of '48.

The first wave of Romanian journals and literary societies started popping up around 1830, which suggests that Golescu was not alone. But at the time of Ypsilanti's rebellion, ten years earlier... nothing.

Also: for a few years, Romania had a group that modelled itself on Italy's Carbonari. Drawn mostly from the lower ranks of the boyars, they approached one of the native princes in the 1820s and suggested a moderate-to-conservative constitution guaranteeing various political rights. To the boyars, of course; nothing for the peasants.

They were promptly exiled and, in a couple of cases, disowned by their families. ("Constitution"!? What are we, French?)

As to Greek not being popular in the principalities: well, in addition to being the language of administration, and of international trade and business, it was still the official language of religious liturgy. And Greek monasteries still owned something like ten percent of all the land. So, at least until 1828, it was certainly more important than Russian.


Doug M.
 
Yes i must admit i was describing more the situation of the late 1830s than that of the early 1820s not realizing how much change was going on during such a brief period of time.

However, i don't see Greek becoming a dominant language in Romania under any circumstances, even if the lands of the church were vast, and the language of the administration was Greek (although i must admit this
part is completely new to me... ), the two principalities were largely lingustically homogenous and the latin derived language spoken there survived for too long (and actually expanded within the two states) for it to be relatively suddenly replaced by Greek.

I don't want to come off as an ignorant nationalist, and say that the Greeks, Russians and Turks are responsible for everything wrong with the countries at that time, since that is not all true. Constantin Mavrokordatos
(to name only one) introduced needed reforms and had a succesful reign, relative to the sad situation the states were in. Kiseleff also gave the first "constitution" of the Principalities and so on... but i still see no way of a Greek ruling class absorbing, or at least heavily influencing Romanian culture which was sustained by millions of people in the Danubian Prinicipalities. And ofcourse, the Phanariotes didn't simply vanish after 1822, a lot of them formed the most prestigious Romanian families of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Ghica, Cantacuzini, Rosetti etc) but no one doubted their "Romanian-ness".

As a comparison i want to talk about the Romanians that ARE part of Hellenic culture:

Greek culture succesfully and ireversably absorbed the very large population of Southern Vlachs/Romanians but that was done more because of the fact that the Vlach populations were not concentrated enough (excepting the Pindus region)and because they were the only population with which they shared a common religion and similar culture; at a time when statehood was becoming more and more desirable. So Greek culture was prefferable and much more suitable for the common man to accept. A Greek state suposedly meant protection from Slavic or Muslim rule. Likewise the Southern Romanians went to the exact same church as the Greeks themselves and did not have a tradition of different Orthodox churches like the Slavs had and autonomous like the Principality Romanians had. The situation in the principalities was very different than that of the other populations that were Hellenized.

*Note the thing about the Vlachs happened much later in the 19th century but i thought it provided an example where circumstances can favour assimilation.
 

Keenir

Banned
in any event, the history and divergence demonstrates a fine effort. you've done well, friend.

its an interesting idea.
 
However, i don't see Greek becoming a dominant language in Romania under any circumstances, even if the lands of the church were vast, and the language of the administration was Greek (although i must admit this
part is completely new to me... ), the two principalities were largely lingustically homogenous and the latin derived language spoken there survived for too long (and actually expanded within the two states) for it to be relatively suddenly replaced by Greek.

That's not what he said, what he said was "Greek becomes the official language of law and government (which it pretty much was anyhow)". The official language doesn't need to have anything to do with the most widely spoken one, and for most of human history it didn't.
 
Top