blowing up the janissaries in their barracks at Constantinople.
Turkey seemed almost to have weathered the storm when she was suddenly
overborne by further intervention on the other side.

Tsar Alexander, the vaccillator, died in November 1825, and was succeeded
by his son Nicholas I, as strong a character and as active a will as
Sultan Mahmud himself. Nicholas approached the Greek question without any
disinclination towards a Turkish war; and both Great Britain and France
found an immediate interest in removing a ground of provocation which
might lead to such a rude disturbance of the European 'Balance of Power'.
On July 6, 1827, a month after Athens surrendered, the three powers
concluded a treaty for the pacification of Greece, in which they bound
over both belligerent parties to accept an armistice under pain of
military coercion. An allied squadron appeared off Navarino Bay to enforce
this policy upon the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet which lay united there,
and the intrusion of the allied admirals into the bay itself precipitated
on October 20 a violent naval battle in which the Moslem flotilla was
destroyed. The die was cast; and in April 1828 the Russian and Ottoman
Governments drifted into a formal war, which brought Russian armies across
the Danube as far as Adrianople, and set the Ottoman Empire at bay for the
defence of its capital. Thanks to Mahmud's reorganization, the empire did
not succumb to this assault; but it had no more strength to spare for the
subjugation of Greece. The Greeks had no longer to reckon with the sultan
as a military factor; and in August 1828 they wore relieved of Ibrahim's
presence as well, by the disembarkation of 14,000 French troops in
Peloponnesos to superintend the withdrawal of the Egyptian forces. In
March 1829 the three powers delimited the Greek frontier. The line ran
east and west from the Gulf of Volo to the Gulf of Arta, and assigned to
the new state no more and no less territory than the districts that had
effectively asserted their independence against the sultan in 1821. This
settlement was the only one possible under the circumstances; but it was
essentially transitory, for it neglected the natural line of nationality
altogether, and left a numerical majority of the Greek race, as well as
the most important centres of its life, under the old regime of servitude.

Even the liberated area was not at the end of its troubles. In the spring
of 1827, when they committed themse