Navarino: The Battle the Greeks Didn't Fight

The decisive battle of the Greek War of Independence was fought without the Greeks. On 20 October 1827, in the Bay of Navarino on the southwestern coast of the Morea, the combined squadrons of Great Britain, France, and Russia destroyed the Turkish–Egyptian fleet in a single afternoon. No Greek fleet took part; no Greek commander gave an order. Yet this engagement, more than any action of the seven-year insurgency, is what made Greek independence a fact. The national narrative has never quite known what to do with Navarino, and its embarrassment is instructive — for the battle exposes, in one concentrated event, who actually decided the outcome of the Revolution and on what terms the new state entered the world.

A rebellion nearly extinguished

To measure what Navarino changed, one must first measure how the war stood in October 1827. It stood at the edge of extinction. Since 1825 Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptian expeditionary army had been methodically reconquering the Morea; St. Clair records that his troops “were permitted and encouraged to burn all the Greek towns and villages through which they passed” (That Greece Might Still be Free, p. 238), and Ibrahim had vowed to reduce the whole peninsula. Missolonghi had fallen in 1826, Athens in 1827. The Greek civil wars of 1824–25 had already consumed much of the insurgency’s strength from within. By the autumn of 1827 the counterinsurgency had nearly finished its work; the rebellion, as a military proposition, was dying. Whatever was going to save it would not be Greek arms.

An afternoon’s work

What saved it arrived under three foreign flags. Michael Herzfeld compresses the event into a single sentence:

“a British, French, and Russian naval force under the British Admiral Codrington defeated a combined Turkish-Egyptian fleet and thereby effectively confirmed the victory of the Greek cause.”

— Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece

The allied squadrons had entered the bay to enforce an armistice the Porte had refused; a skirmish escalated, and the enforcement became annihilation. Koliopoulos and Veremis render the verdict of the guns without ornament: “In the ensuing battle, the European admirals obliterated the fleet of their opponents” (Modern Greece: A History since 1821, p. 25). Ibrahim’s army remained ashore in the Morea, but it was now an army without a navy, cut off from Alexandria and Constantinople; its campaign of reconquest was finished as surely as if it had surrendered. The military problem of the Greek Revolution — a problem the insurgents had proved unable to solve — was solved for them, by professionals of three empires, in a few hours.

The same historians draw the corollary that the national memory prefers to leave undrawn: the famous battle, they write, at once opened the way to Greek independence and attached Greece to the security system overseen by the great European powers. Deliverance and dependency arrived on the same tide. The state that would be signed into existence in London three years later — by the ambassadors of the same three powers, with no Greek signature on the document — was born inside their security architecture because it had been born of their broadsides. Navarino did not merely rescue the Revolution; it fixed the terms of the rescue.

Could it have ended otherwise?

The scholarship is unusually unanimous that it could not. Gregory Jusdanis, surveying the improbability of the whole enterprise, states the condition of success plainly:

“Crucial to their success was the involvement of the superpowers of the time: England, France, and Russia.”

— Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, p. 36

Each of those powers, he notes, was playing its own strategic game over the decaying Ottoman Empire; philhellenic sentiment supplied the music, but the fleets sailed on interest. Stathis Kalyvas, writing the standard one-volume account of modern Greece, is blunter still:

“As soon as the Greek rebellion petered out, Greece was rescued by the Great Powers”

— Stathis N. Kalyvas, Modern Greece: What Everyone Needs to Know, p. 201

Rescued: the word is Kalyvas’s, and it is exact. The insurgency had raised the question of Greece; it could not answer it. The answer was written at Navarino in gunsmoke and countersigned in the London Protocol, which the powers then imposed on the reluctant Ottomans. Between the rebellion that petered out and the state that emerged stands, indispensably, the intervention — without which the sources give us no reason to expect anything but Ibrahim’s completed reconquest.

None of this dishonors the men and women who fought and endured from 1821 to 1827; their tenacity kept the Greek question alive long enough for the powers’ interests to converge on it, and that was itself an achievement. The point is narrower and historiographical. A national epic requires that the nation win its own war; the schoolbook Navarino therefore shrinks to a fortunate epilogue, a friendly assist to a victory already earned. The documentary record shows the reverse: a rebellion at the point of extinction, a battle fought entirely by foreign fleets, and an independence that arrived as a component of other people’s foreign policy. The Greeks did not fight the battle that freed Greece — and the state it created would spend the next century discovering what it meant to owe its existence to the security system of its rescuers.