Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [146]
A motley horde of Anatolians crossed over the calm sea in an armada of small boats. Ottoman soldiers broke into the island’s capital, and the scene, as the Scot put it, “might be aptly compared to the sack of Tripolitsa. Nine thousand were massacred in a single day. Every Greek they could find was put to the sword, even the inmates of the madhouse, the patients in the hospital, and the deaf and dumb institution.” More than 30,000 Muslims from Asia Minor swarmed into the island, killing and plundering as they went, capturing women and children for the slave markets. By the end of May 1822, 25,000 had been killed and 45,000 taken captive. The huge number of slaves swamped the markets of Constantinople, and many who were not sold easily were simply killed off like old sheep, and their bodies left on the streets to rot.
Yet Gordon still refused to damn one side and condone the other. “Did we write,” he observed, “for the purpose of rendering exclusively odious one nation or party, it would be easy to prolong this catalogue of slaughters, sometimes springing from the systematic cruelty of a barbarous government, but oftener from the blind rage of an infuriated populace.”51 I have concentrated on his account partly because he was an accurate and truthful witness, but also for this rare capacity to judge dispassionately, despite favoring the cause of Greece. But while he could understand the Turkish cruelties, the callous butcheries of the Hellenes were more disturbing to him. Eventually Gordon came to the conclusion that true Greeks of his day had inherited their finer feelings from their ancient ancestors, while those who had been corrupted by Eastern barbarism exhibited its cruelty and treachery.52 This process had begun, he suggested, with the Easterners perverting the Greeks in the age of Alexander the Great. Alexander’s men were already no angels, but “their native vices were aggravated by Oriental softness, and by mingling with subjects still more corrupt than themselves.”53 By this circular logic, the Greeks of his own day had become “like the Eastern nations in every age.”54
If Thomas Gordon became the Clio of the revolution, another Gordon was its Calliope, its muse of eloquence. No individual did more to alert the West to a kind of new crusade in Greece than the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Byron’s pyrotechnic gallop through Western art, philosophy, and history, he first presented Greece as a land of epic struggle. The rebirth of ancient Hellas in a new Greece would usher in a wider, universal revolution:
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust; and when
Can man its shatter’d splendour renovate,
Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate.55
This conflict transcended all the earlier struggles. In Byron’s eyes the obstacle to this new age was Ottoman rule, the infidels “whose turbans now pollute Sophia’s shrine,” and who had made the “path of blood along the West.”56 But his attitude to the East moved beyond the traditional stereotypes. His Turkish Tales, published following the astonishing success of the first canto of Childe Harold, were filled with “noble Turks” such as Hassan in The Giaour (1813) or the unlucky Selim of The Bride of Abydos (also 1813). Although Byron’s tragic characters contained, in their externals, the typical eighteenth-century typology of the Turk, they were more human and vulnerable than any of