United States or Venezuela ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
It is incredible that the Iliad and the Odyssey should ignore the existence of Dorians in Peloponnesos, if there were Dorians not only dwelling but ruling there at the time when the poems were written.
In the other direction, however, rebellion was spreading northward from Peloponnesos to continental Greece. Galaxídhi revolted in April, and was followed in June by Mesolonghi a prosperous town of fishermen, impregnably situated in the midst of the lagoons at the mouth of the Aspropotamo, beyond the narrows of the Korinthian Gulf.
With the Russians in the Balkan Peninsula, the center of their dominions upon the Danube with the Scythian hordes in the South ready to do their bidding and with scattered Slavonic tribes from Macedon to the Peloponnesos gravitating toward them, what might they not do? No more serious danger had ever threatened the Empire of the East.
He could not keep open his communications, and after heavy losses retreated again to Arta in January 1823. In 1823 the struggle seemed to be lapsing into stalemate. The liberated Peloponnesos had failed to propagate the revolution through the remainder of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Government had equally failed to reconquer the Peloponnesos by military invasion.
Cox, who can see in the whole narrative nothing but a solar myth. There certainly was a time when the Dorian tribes described in the legend as the allies of the Children of Herakles conquered Peloponnesos; and that time was certainly subsequent to the composition of the Homeric poems.
The invasion of Peloponnesos had broken down, and nothing could avert the fall of Nauplia. The Ottoman fleet hovered for one September week in the offing, but Kanaris's fire-ships took another ship of the line in toll at the roadsteads of Tenedos before it safely regained the Dardanelles.
Now Homer knows Achaians, Argives, and Pelasgians dwelling in Peloponnesos; and he knows Dorians also, but only as a people inhabiting Crete. When these poems were written, Greece was not known as Hellas, but as Achaia, the whole country taking its name from the Achaians, the dominant race in Peloponnesos.
A Russian fleet appeared in the Mediterranean, raised an insurrection in Peloponnesos, and destroyed the Turkish squadron in battle. The Russian armies were still more successful on the steppes, and the Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji not only left the whole north coast of the Black Sea in Russia's possession, but contained an international sanction for the rights of the sultan's Orthodox subjects.
The garrison of Nauplia capitulated in December, on condition of personal security and liberty, and the captain of a British frigate, which arrived on the spot, took measures that the compact should be observed instead of being broken by the customary massacre. But the strongest fortress in Peloponnesos was now in Greek hands. In the north-west the season had not passed so well.
Word Of The Day