been grimly successful.

There had also been successes at sea. The merchant marine of the Greek
islands had suffered grievously from the fall of Napoleon and the
settlement at Vienna, which, by restoring normal conditions of trade, had
destroyed their abnormal monopoly. The revolution offered new
opportunities for profitable venture, and in April 1821 Hydhra, Spetza and
Psara hastened to send a privateering fleet to sea. As soon as the fleet
crossed the Aegean, Samos rid itself of the Turks. At the beginning of
June the rickety Ottoman squadron issued from the Dardanelles, but it was
chased back by the islanders under the lee of Mitylini. Memories of
Russian naval tactics in 1770 led the Psariots to experiment in
fire-ships, and one of the two Turkish ships of the line fell a victim to
this attack. Within a week of setting sail, the diminished Turkish
squadron was back again in the Dardanelles, and the islanders were left
with the command of the sea.

The general Christian revolution thus seemed fairly launched, and in the
first panic the threatened Moslems began reprisals of an equally general
kind. In the larger Turkish cities there were massacres of Christian
minorities, and the Government lent countenance to them by murdering its
own principal Christian official Gregorios, the Greek patriarch at
Constantinople, on April 22, 1821. But Sultan Mahmud quickly recovered
himself. He saw that his empire could not survive a racial war, and
determined to prevent the present revolt from assuming such a character.
His plan was to localize it by stamping out the more distant sparks with
all his energy, before concentrating his force at leisure upon the main
conflagration.

This policy was justified by the event. On March 6 the 'Philiki Hetairia'
at Odessa had opened its own operations in grandiose style by sending a
filibustering expedition across the Russo-Turkish frontier under command
of Prince Alexander Hypsilantis, a Phanariot in the Russian service.
Hypsilantis played for a general revolt of the Ruman population in the
Danubian Principalities and a declaration of war against Turkey on the
part of Russia. But the Rumans had no desire to assist the Greek
bureaucrats who oppressed them, and the Tsar Alexander had been converted
by the experiences of 1812-13 to a pacifistic respect for the _status
quo_. Prince Hypsilantis was driven ignominiously to internment across the
Austrian frontier, little more than a hundred days