ey were hard masters, but their conquered
subjects throve by commerce and industry.

The Greeks, as to character, were not religious like the Turks, but
quicker witted. What religion they had was made up of the ceremonies and
pomps of a corrupted Christianity, but kept alive by traditions. Their
patriarch was a great personage,--practically appointed, however, by the
Sultan, and resident in Constantinople. Their clergy were married, and
were more humane and liberal than the Roman Catholic priests of Italy,
and about on a par with them in morals and influence. The Greeks were
always inquisitive and fond of knowledge, but their love of liberty has
been one of their strongest peculiarities, kept alive amid all the
oppressions to which they have been subjected. Nevertheless, unarmed, at
least on the mainland, and without fortresses, few in numbers, with
overwhelming foes, they had not, up to 1820, dared to risk a general
rebellion, for fear that they should be mercilessly slaughtered. So long
as they remained at peace their condition as a conquered people was not
so bad as it might have been, although the oppressions of tax-gatherers
and the brutality of Turkish officials had been growing more and more
intolerable. In 1770 and 1790 there had been local and unsuccessful
attempts at revolt, but nothing of importance.

Amid the political agitations which threw Spain and Italy into
revolution, however, the spirit of liberty revived among the hardy Greek
mountaineers of the mainland. Secret societies were formed, with a view
of shaking off the Turkish yoke. The aspiring and the discontented
naturally cast their eyes to Russia for aid, since there was a religious
bond between the Russians and the Greeks, and since the Russians and
Turks were mortal enemies, and since, moreover, they were encouraged to
hope for such aid by a great Russian nobleman, by birth a Greek, who was
private secretary and minister, as well as an intimate, of the Emperor
Alexander,--Count Capo d'Istrias. They were also exasperated by the
cession of Parga (a town on the mainland opposite the Ionian Islands) to
the Turks, by the treaty of 1815, which the allies carelessly
overlooked.

The flame of insurrection in 1820 did not, however, first break out in
the territory of Greece, but in Wallachia,--a Turkish province on the
north of the Danube, governed by a Greek hospodar, the capital of which
was Bucharest. This was followed by the revolt of another Turkish