Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE PERIOD Adequately to understand the great nineteenth century movements in the Armenian church, one must needs take into account the history of contemporary European politics as reflected at the Sublime Porte. Without this some of the most important events in the history of those movements would be unintelligible, as the fortunes of the Armenian church often varied only because the balance of international politics inclined one way or the other. With the disappearance of Napoleon Bonaparte from the scene of European politics, French diplomacy at the Porte assumed a secondary importance, leaving the field of action to the two great rivals, Russia and Great Britain, respectively the natural enemy and the self-interested patron of the Turk. The history of Turkish politics during the period under consideration is distinctly divided into two parts at the year 1833, the first part being marked by the ascendency of Russian influence at the Porte, the second by the ascendency of British influence. In the thirteenth year of the reign of Sultan Mah- moud II (1808-39) tne Greek War of Independence broke out (1821). After a three-years’ ineffectual struggle, the Sultan appealed (January 16, 1824) to his vassal, Mehemet Ali Pasha of Egypt, who had risen to power since the expulsion of the Frenchfrom that province, and in May, 1825, Ibrahim Pasha, after reducing Crete, landed his father’s well-disciplined army of Egyptians on the Morea. But ere long Europe was roused to the fact that Ibrahim was carrying on a war of extermination; and the British government sought to bring about an understanding between the great powers with the purpose of putting an end to the bloody conflict on the Greek peninsula. Thus shortly after the fall of the Acropolis of A…
