nning than the Turks could show; and this made the European
nations slow of helping them. In this year, 1821, a Greek captain
plotted to set fire to the arsenal at Constantinople, murder the Sultan
in the confusion, and begin a great revolt of all the Greeks living at
Constantinople. The plot was found out, and terribly visited, for
thousands of Christian families, who had never even heard of it, were
slain in their houses, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, an aged man,
whom everyone loved and respected, was also put to death. Not only were
the Christians massacred at Constantinople, but in most of the other
large cities of Turkey, and only in a few were the people able to escape
on board the Greek merchant ships. These ships carried ten or twelve
guns, were small, swift, and well managed, and little fire-ships were
sometimes sent by them into the Turkish fleet, which did a great deal of
damage.

[Picture: The Acropolis, restored]

The slaughter of so many Christians had only enraged instead of
terrifying the others; and a Greek prince named Mavrocordato brought an
army together, which took several cities, but unhappily was as cruel as
the Turks themselves in their treatment of the conquered. However, they
now held Argos, met there, and made Mavrocordato their President in 1822.
Ali Pasha of Yanina was reduced and shot by the Turks that same year; and
Omar Pasha, who had been sent against him, had a great deal of desperate
fighting with the Suliots and other Albanian Greeks, but at last he was
driven back through the mountains with terrible loss.

Another horrid deed of the Turks did much to turn men's minds against
them. There were about 120,000 Christians in the island of Scio, who had
taken no part in the war, and only prayed to be let alone; but two Greek
captains chose to make an attack on the Turkish garrison, and thus
provoked the vengeance of the Turks, who burst in full force on the
unhappy island, killed every creature they found in the capital, and
ravaged it everywhere. Forty thousand were carried off as slaves, and
almost all the rest killed; and when these horrors were over, only 1800
were left in the place.

The cruelty of the Turks and the constancy of the Greeks began to make
all Europe take an interest in the war. People began to think them a
race of heroes like those of old, and parties of young men, calling
themselves Philhellenes, or lovers of Greece, came to fight