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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.
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