he Moslem combatants enlisted Christian
Armatoli, and all continental Greece was under arms. By the end of the
summer Ali's outlying strongholds had fallen, his armies were driven in,
and he himself was closely invested in Yannina; but with autumn a deadlock
set in, and the sultan's reckoning was thrown out. In November 1820 the
veteran soldier Khurshid was appointed to the pashalik of Peloponnesos to
hold the Greeks in check and close accounts with Ali. In March 1821, after
five months spent in organizing his province, Khurshid felt secure enough
to leave it for the Yannina lines. But he was mistaken; for within a month
of his departure Peloponnesos was ablaze.

The 'Philiki Hetairia' had decided to act, and the Peloponnesians
responded enthusiastically to the signal. In the north Germanos,
metropolitan bishop of Patras, rallied the insurgents at the monastery of
Megaspelaion, and unfurled the monastic altar-cloth as a national
standard. In the south the peninsula of Maina, which had been the latest
refuge of ancient Hellenism, was now the first to welcome the new, and to
throw off the shadowy allegiance it had paid for a thousand years to
Romaic archonts and Ottoman capitan-pashas. Led by Petros Mavromichalis,
the chief of the leading clan, the Mainates issued from their mountains.
This was in April, and by the middle of May all the open country had been
swept clear, and the hosts joined hands before Tripolitza, which was the
seat of Ottoman government at the central point of the province. The
Turkish garrison attacked, but was heavily defeated at Valtetzi by the
tactical skill of Theodore Kolokotronis the 'klepht', who had become
experienced in guerrilla warfare through his alternate professions of
brigand and gendarme--a career that had increased its possibilities as
the Ottoman system decayed. After Kolokotronis's victory, the Greeks kept
Tripolitza under a close blockade. Early in October it fell amid frightful
scenes of pillage and massacre, and Ottoman dominion in the Peloponnesos
fell with it. On January 22, 1822, Korinth, the key to the isthmus, passed
into the Greeks' hands, and only four fortresses--Nauplia, Patras, Koron,
and Modhon--still held out within it against Greek investment. Not a Turk
survived in the Peloponnesos beyond their walls, for the slaughter at
Tripolitza was only the most terrible instance of what happened wherever a
Moslem colony was found. In Peloponnesos, at any rate, the revolution had