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As the Sultan’s empire weakened to the point where it seemed in danger of imminent collapse, the great powers intervened increasingly in its affairs – ostensibly to protect the Christian minorities but in reality to advance their own ambitions in the area. European embassies were no longer content to limit their contacts to the Ottoman administration, as they had done previously, but took a hand directly in the empire’s politics, supporting nationalities, religious groups, political parties and factions, and even interfering in the Sultan’s appointment of individual ministers to promote their own imperial interests. To advance their country’s trade they developed direct links with merchants and financiers and established consuls in the major trading towns. They also began to issue passports to Ottoman subjects. By the middle of the nineteenth century as many as one million inhabitants of the Sultan’s empire were using the protective powers of the European legations to escape the jurisdiction and taxes of the Turkish authorities. Russia was the most active in this respect, developing its Black Sea commerce by granting passports to large numbers of the Sultan’s Greeks and allowing them to sail under the Russian flag.¹²

For the Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire, Russia was their protector against the Turks. Russian troops had helped the Serbs to gain autonomy. They had brought Moldavia and Wallachia under Russian protection, and liberated the Moldavians from Turkish rule in Bessarabia. But the Russians’ part in the Greek independence movement showed how far they were prepared to go in their support of their co-religionists to exert their hold over Turkey’s European territories.

The Greek revolution really began in Russia. In its early stages it was led by Greek-born Russian politicians who had never even been to mainland Greece (a ‘geographical expression’ if ever there was one) but who dreamed of uniting all the Greeks through a series of uprisings against the Turks, which they planned to begin in the Danubian principalities. In 1814 a Society of Friends (Philiki Etaireia) was set up by Greek nationalists and students in Odessa, with affiliated branches established soon thereafter in all the major areas where the Greeks lived – Moldavia, Wallachia, the Ionian islands, Constantinople, the Peloponnese – as well as in other Russian cities where the Greeks were strong. It was the Society that organized the Greek uprising in Moldavia in 1821 – an uprising led by Alexander Ypsilantis, a senior officer in the Russian cavalry and the son of a prominent Phanariot family in Moldavia that had fled to St Petersburg on the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war in 1806. Ypsilantis had close connections to the Russian court, where he had received the patronage of the Empress Maria Fedorovna (the widow of Paul I) from the age of 15. Tsar Alexander I had appointed him his aide-de-camp in 1816.

There was a powerful Greek lobby in the ruling circles of St Petersburg. The Foreign Ministry contained a number of Greek-born diplomats and activists of the Greek cause. None was more important than Alexandru Sturdza from Moldavia, a Phanariot on his mother’s side, who became the first Russian governor of Bessarabia, or Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Corfu nobleman who was appointed Russia’s Foreign Minister jointly with Karl Nesselrode in 1815. The Greek Gymnasium in St Petersburg had been training Greek-born youths for military and diplomatic service since the 1770s, and many of its graduates had fought in the Russian army against the Turks in the war of 1806–12 (as did thousands of Greek volunteers from the Ottoman Empire, who fled to Russia at the war’s end). By the time Ypsilantis planned his uprising in Moldavia, there was a large cohort of Russian-trained, experienced Greek fighters on which he could count.