Balkan Nationalism and the Fragmentation of Ottoman Europe

The Greek war of independence broke out in March 1821, with uprisings led by figures such as Theodoros Kolokotronis and organized by the Filiki Eteria ("Society of Friends"), a secret society founded among the Greek diaspora in Odessa in 1814. Ottoman repression could be extraordinarily brutal, as in the 1822 massacre of Chios, while European philhellenism, embodied by figures such as Lord Byron, generated intense popular sympathy for the Greek cause. Unable to crush the revolt alone, Sultan Mahmud II called on his nominal vassal Muhammad Ali of Egypt for help, but the tide turned decisively when Britain, France, and Russia jointly destroyed the combined Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino on 20 October 1827. The Treaty of Adrianople (1829) and the London Protocol of 1830 together forced Ottoman recognition of full Greek independence — the first successful territorial dismemberment of a Balkan nation from the Ottoman Empire, and a model that later Balkan nationalist movements would follow.