THE GREEK UNIFICATION AND THE ITALIAN

RISORGIMENTO COMPARED*

Whereas the Italians achieved political unity in just over two decades, it
took the Greeks well over a century to attain a unity which is still incomplete ;
and whereas Rome fell relatively easily into the hands of anti-clerical Italians
(whose reverence was for the classical rather than for the medieval city) the
new Rome, Constantinople, never came the way of the Greeks, who had for
their Patriarchate a great veneration. On two occasions, the Greeks might
perhaps have acquired their Holy City—first in 1922, when, if instead of send­
ing forces against Kemalist Angora, they had mounted from Eastern Thrace an
offensive against the Chataldja lines together with an offensive from Ismid,*1
and again in 1923 when, after the disaster in Asia Minor, they had succeeded
in reorganising their army in Western Thrace, the Kemalists at that time being
in great confusion and their military forces in decline. But on both occasions
the Greeks, themselves divided were hesitant, and they ended by accepting the
dictation of France, Great Britain and Italy. These powers let it be known that,
even if a Greek army entered Constantinople, it would not be allowed to stay
there. They themselves had not sufficient forces at the Straits to impede the
Greeks; but they could easily have bombarded Piraeus. Whether they would
have done so is a matter for conjecture. The point, is, however, that the Greeks
even the most adventurous, decided to respect the wishes of the Western
Powers.
In 1922 and 1923, as at many other times, the European political situation
was unfavourable to Greece. But when Rome fell to the Italians, everything
was in their favour. The French troops of occupation had left Rome to fight

* This is a slightly longer version of a lecture which was given by Douglas Dakin on
11 March 1969 in Greek at the School of Philosophy of the University of Thessaloniki,
on the occasion of his receiving an honorary doctorate.
1. Cf. however D. Wälder, The Chanak Affair, London, 1969. D. Wälder, who has an
unrivalled knowledge of the military aspect of the Near East crises of 1922-3 infers
that the Greeks could not have got to Constantinople. Much depends on the importance
one attaches to British military reports on the State of the Greek army.
1
2 Douglas Dakin

the Prussians on the Rhine, only to be defeated at the battle of Sedan. Fortune
had smiled (as it had often smiled) upon the Italians, and all they had to do
was to overcome a feeble Papal army—a victory which cost them only 49 casu­
alties. Once in Rome they were to stay. Rome thus became the capital of a
state of 27 million Italians—indeed of nearly all of those who spoke the Italian
tongue, there being outside its confines only the Italians of Switzerland, of the
Trentino, of the Italian communities of the Eastern Adriatic coast, and the Ita­
lian immigrants scattered throughout the world.
The great and speedy achievement of Italian unification owed much to
the skilful diplomacy of Cavour and his successors, to the sympathies of France
and Great Britain, to their rivalries, and to the policies pursued by Bismarck. This
achievement cost the Italians between 1848 and 1870 not more than 6,000
lives. By way of contrast, the Greek wars of liberation, extending over the
period 1770 to 1923, took a very heavy toll of a population which just before the
final phases of these struggles (say in the year 1912) amounted to under two
and one-half millions. Moreover, when at length Greece succeeded in acqui­
ring territories which contained in 1913 some four and one-half million inhabi­
tants and in 1923 somewhere near seven millions, her very existence was at
least twice in jeopardy—first during the period of World War I and then again
during the 1940s. On both these occasions the sacrifices were enormous. They
constituted, as it were, a surcharge on the costs of liberation. Whereas one
counts the bill of the Italian Risorgimento in terms of thousands, that of the
Greek liberation must be reckoned in hundreds of thousands. Even though
one were to regard Italy’s entry into World War I as the embarkation on a
final war of liberation of the Italians in the Trentino and the Adriatic (the cost
is sometimes reckoned as nearly 700,000), the disparity remains considerable.
It is doubtful however whether one should regard Italy’s participation in the
1914-18 war as a war of liberation. Italy had acquired great power status. She
was out not merely to liberate Italian populations but to acquire better fron­
tiers and expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean. For Greece however the
1914-18 war was a continuation of the Balkan Wars. Her aim was to regain
territories previously won and, in the event of an allied victory, to acquire East­
ern Thrace, the Greek islands of the Aegean, and to liberate, if it were feasible,
Greek populations remaining within the Turkish Empire.
Throughout her struggle for political unity Italy had the advantage of
having a large population concentrated on a terrain which was a geographi­
cal unity—a terrain bounded on three sides by the sea and to the North by the
Alps. The Greeks (if we here to define them as Orthodox Christians speaking
 The Greek Unification and the Italian Risorgimento Compared 3

Greek as their mother tongue)2 were not nearly so numerous; what is more,
they were scattered unevenly over the Ottoman Empire; and, in some regions,
were out-numbered by other peoples—by Slavs, Albanians, Jews, Armenians and
the various kinds of Turks. 3 Only in the Peloponnesus, in Continental Greece
as far as the line Jannina - Thessaloniki, and in the Islands were the Greeks a
clear majority. In all these regions they did not however exceed two millions.4
In Macedonia, except in the more southerly and coastal regions, they were
to be found in strength chiefly in the townships which they shared with Turks
and other peoples, or in certain villages scattered among Slav-speaking vil­
lages and Moslem communities. In Thrace they were again to be found in
strength in the towns and they enjoyed a predominance in the coastal areas.
In Constantinople (in the City itself and the surrounding province) they num­
bered 300,000 in a total population of 880,000. Again in strength in the towns
on the Black Sea, they were to be found also in large settlements in Asia
Minor, their total number here being in the region of 1,800,OOO.They formed
substantial colonies in the Danubian principalities, in Bulgaria, in Egypt, Pa­
lestine and North Africa. Outside the Ottoman Empire there were substan­
tial Greek trading communities in Odessa, Buda-Pesth, Vienna, Leghorn,
Marseilles and London. In the year 1800, there were some 400,000 Greeks
in the Hapsburg territories.
The Greeks first achieved political independence in regions where they
were 800,000 strong and in a majority. These regions were of the Peloponnesus,
Continental Greece as far as the Arta-Volos line, and the nearby islands of
the Aegean, the Cyclades. The Western or Ionian Islands were not included.
These seven islands had been established by the Congress of Vienna (1815)
as a theoretically independent state under the protection of Great Britain.
Until 1797 they had been under Venetian domination; and there was no ques­
tion here of expelling the Turk. Had they been independent in fact as well as
in theory, had they been more compact, richer and more densely populated,
they might have become, the 'Piedmont’ of Greece. As it was, however, Greece
had no 'Piedmont’ with which to begin her unification—no 'Piedmont’ to
make alliances with other States, no Piedmontese bureaucracy and diplo-

2. This was not necessarily a Greek definition, but in this context it has validity, since
Greek unification was achieved mainly by Greek-speaking Hellenes.
3. There were also the Vlachs; but these were usually bilingual and frequently more
“Greek” than öfter Greeks.
4. Finlay’s estimate (History, VI, 2) for 1821 is somewhere near the mark; one million
in the Balkans; one million in Crete, Cyclades, Ionian Islands and Constantinople; one and
a half millions in Asia Minor, Cyprus and the Danubian Principalities.
4 Douglas Dakin

matic service, no well-equiped and well-supplied regular army. True, by 1832,

if not before, those regions of Greece which had freed themselves had fashion­
ed the bare rudiments of a western state; and it is therefore not unreasonable
to describe the early Greek kingdom as the 'Piedmont of Greece’.
Otto’s little kingdom had, as a salient of Greek nationalism, one advan­
tage over Piedmont: its Hellenism was much more intense than was the Ita­
lianità of the dominions of the House of Savoy. Those dominions until the
acquisition of Sardinia and Genoa, had been predominantly French-speaking;
and for two decades during the Napoleonic Wars, they had been a colony
of France. Nevertheless after the Vienna Settlement of 1815 the kingdom of
Sardinia-Piedmont had much to offer to the Italian nationalists: its anti-Aus­
trian foreign policy, much facilitated by the resurgence of France, found con­
siderable support in adjacent regions where Italianità, in all its various forms,
began to think in terms of getting rid of Austrian rule. But for the Greek 'Pied­
mont’, that is to say, the kingdom of Otto, circumstances were much less
favourable. Russia, except for brief periods, did not pursue an aggressive anti-
Turkish policy; and when she did she invariably met with opposition from
other great powers. Moreover, although Holy Russia was ever mindful of
the Greek Patriarchal Church, the Tsar and his ministers had no consistent,
and certainly no altruistic, aim of encouraging the pretensions of the govern­
ment of Athens. In the event of collapse of the Ottoman buffer state, Russia
was likely to favour the establishment, not of new Byzantium, but of client
states or autonomies dominated by brother Slavs. Such states would neces­
sarily impede the advance of Hellenism: any Greek expansion outside Crete,
the Eastern Islands and the mainland of Asia Minor must be to the North,
into regions where Slavs and Albanians had pretensions. Thus, there was no
'Lombardy’, no 'Tuscany’, and no 'Madena’, to be acquired by Greece,
unless it were Thessaly and Southern Epirus, both of which were obtained
in 1881. These two acquisitions of moderate extent were indeed gained with
relative ease; but beyond Thessaly lay the illusive prize of Macedonia. Here
the Slavs and Albanians had long been pressing; and in 1878 the province
seemed almost to be within the grasp of Bulgaria, whose liberation Russia
had assisted. Macedonia was certainly no 'Naples’. Nor indeed was Crete.
In both these regions the Turks could concentrate large military forces. True,
the Turkish troops lacked the efficiency of the Austrian army, but, in virtue
of their numbers, they were more than a match for the Greeks, who being
without allies (like the Italians in 1848) met their 'Custozza’ at Domoko in
1897. Not until 1912 was the Greek 'Piedmont’ (by then in uneasy alliance
with the Slavs and vastly improved in military organization) able to inflict
 The Greek Unification and the lyalian Risorgimento Compared 5

heavy defeats in Macedonia and Epirus upon the somewhat disorganised

Turkish forces. But even then the extent of territory overrun hardly matched
Greek aspirations. Not only were the Serbians in possession of soil claimed
by Greece, but the Bulgarians were in occupation of Thrace and Eastern Ma­
cedonia. These same Bulgarians were pressing hard on Thessaloniki, which
the Greeks had entered only in the nick of time; and they had managed,
having displayed great courage and endurance, to reach the outer defences of
Constantinople at Chataldja. So confident was their king, Ferdinand, that
he would conquer the Holy City, that he had ordered a mosaic to be made,
depicting himself riding a white charger to the doors of St. Sophia. But for
once fortune smiled upon the Greeks. The Bulgarians, decimated by cho­
lera, were halted by the Turks. Later, in the hour of their disappointment they
were foolish enough to attack the Greeks and Serbians, who, seizing the ini­
tiative and being indirectly assisted by the Roumanians and the Turks, de­
feated their former ally and together walked off with most of the spoils.
Whereas a few skirmishes had sufficed for the Italians to acquire Um­
bria, the Marches, and the Two Sicilies, battles on a very considerable scale
had been fought by the Balkan Allies of 1912 against the Turks. For the Greeks
moreover there had been war upon the sea. Their task was much more
difficult than that of the Italians, who had merely to ferry a thousand men
across the Straits of Messina. Again when after the first world war the Greeks
advanced into Asia Minor, they became engaged in large-scale military and
naval operations. There was no one else to fight their battles for them:
there was nothing comparable to Königgrätz (Sadowa) which presented Ve-
netia to united Italy .
At no time during their Risorgimento did the Italians have to face mili­
tary problems of the same order as those with which the Greeks were con­
stantly confronted. Once the lesson of Custozza had been learned the Pied­
montese managed to avoid military effort on a scale involving such great sacri­
fices in men and materials as those which the Hellenes were called upon
to make. True, for the Italians there were always great risks. At any moment
the 22 million Italians forming the kingdom of 1861 might have found them­
selves at war with their erstwhile ally France, or with Austria seeking for re­
venge. But owing to the favourable European diplomatic situation and to the
correct appreciation of its nuances by Cavour and his successors, external
threats to Italian unification did not materialise.
The main obstacles to Italian unification were internal. Each of the pro­
vinces eventually incorporated in united Italy had its own historical tradi­
tions, its own system of law and land tenure, its own coinage and customs bar-
6 Douglas Dakin

riers, and its own dialect not easily understood by the inhabitants of other
provinces. The south was backward, poor and squalid. Lombardy, the home
of industrious peasants, was a garden studded with flourishing cities and
townships. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was a traditional home of culture
with an outlook vastly different from that of other regions. Turin was a
northern-type city, not very distinguishable from Paris.
In all the provinces, as in the provinces and states of Germany, local
patriotism was strong. Consequently, despite the existence of a common Ita­
lian literary language and a national consciousness, the positive urge to uni­
fication was not, except upon the part of individuals and groups, either in­
tense or singleminded. The first Napoleon, while momentarily imposing on
the Italian peninsula a uniform system of law and a uniformity of heavy
taxation, had not created political unity; nor had he inspired a longing for it.
And when at length the idea of unity found some support, the variants of the
idea and the diversity of the aims of its supporters were considerable.
The idea itself derived from many sources—from the European Enlighten­
ment, from the commercial ambitions of the growing middle classes, from
historical and literary sentimentality, from the example of the Greeks and of
the Latin Americans, from a love of conspiracy, from economic discontent
and from sheer politics. The supporters stressed, each one according to his
fancy, or his class, or to his position, some particular aspect of the idea. Hence
the plans put forward were numerous, the actions proposed conflicting, but
in the end a divided yet energetic minority (the majority consisted of conser­
vatives of all classes and of the lower orders which were ignorant and apathe­
tic) managed somehow to achieve, if not a common aim, at least a central­
ised, united Italy which (largely owing to the part played by Piedmont) was
a constitutional monarchy, the constitution being that which Carlo Alberto
had granted to his subjects in 1848.
The Greek liberation movement in its ideological and internal aspects,
while displaying some of the characteristics of the Italian Risorgimento, was,
in several ways, very different. True, there was the same diversity of ideo­
logical origins. Like the Italians, the Greeks were heirs to the European En­
lightenment; they were spectators of the French Revolution; and, even more
than the Italians, they placed some hope in the call to the oppressed peoples to
throw off their shackles. Although they had never come under the heel of Na­
poleon, Napoleon’s name was a legend among them, and was all the more
respectable for being a legend only. Again, the Greek middle classes were
growing at an ever increasing pace. Social and economic discontent was rife.
Like the Italians, the Greeks had a long history of conspiracy behind them.
 The Greek Unification and the Italian Risorgimento Compared 7

Within the limits that their thraldom prescribed, they enjoyed a kind of po­
litical life in which intrigue and finesse were to be reckoned as virtues. They
had a picture of and some illusions concerning their pre-Christian past: like
the Italians they had learned from the travellers to have respect for and even
pride in, their classical ruins; and they had experienced a literary renaissance.
They spoke a language which was closer to ancient Greek than the Italian
dialects were to Latin. Indeed, where language was concerned they had some
advantage over the Italian Nationalists. The Greek demotic language was
fairly uniform. The small Greek trader from Constantinople or Smyrna, the
Greek sailor from the islands, the Greek métayer from Macedonia or Thes­
saly had no difficulty in conversing with a tradesman in Attica or a peasant
farmer in the Morea.
The uniformity of the Greek language had been in part preserved by
the Greek Church which had survived the downfall of the Byzantine Empire.
The Greek liturgy was conducted in a language which was much more intel­
ligible to the Greek peasant than was the Latin of the Roman Church to the
unlettered Italian. Moreover, everywhere in the Greek homelands within the
Ottoman Empire, the Greek Church had maintained schools where even the
Slav-speaking Orthodox could acquire a knowledge of Greek, which was the
cultural and the commercial language of the Levant. Indeed, the long use of
Greek for trading purposes was perhaps of even more importance than the
influence of the Church in preserving lingual uniformity. Through trade, the
Greek communities, the majority of which were in coastal areas, had kept
in touch with one another. The comings and goings of the Greek traders made
the Greek less a provincial than the Italian. Whether the Greek came from
Smyrna or Jannina, from Candia or Thessaloniki, he was above all a Greek.
The Italian on the other hand was first and foremost a Venetian, a Neapoli­
tan, a Tuscan, Sicilian, or Sardinian. He did not trade primarily with other
Italians. Each Italian trading state had its own national trade. Between each
Italian State there was a relatively little trade; and two of them, Genoa and
Venice had overseas Empires. By way of contrast the Greek traders handled
much of the internal trade of a large dominion; they handled also through
their ships and through their communities in other countries a large propor­
tion of its external trade. One may say indeed that Greece had a commercial
Empire before she had a nation state. Because the Greeks lived and traded
within the confines of a large political unit and under the rule of a common
oppressor they had acquired prior to their unification a form of unity which
had been denied to the provinces of the Italian peninsula.
The Italians, although for the most part under foreign rulers, had expe-
8 Douglas Dakin

rienced no common oppressor of alien faith. Only for a brief period in mo­
dern times, only during the time of Napoleon, had the whole of Italy been
overrun and even then no attempt had been made to create a single state. In
the Greek lands, however, the Christian peoples had been ruled for centuries
by men of different faith. But what is equally important is that the Turks,
from the very outset had tolerated the existence of the Greek Orthodox Church
and had even given it a privileged position within the Empire. This Church,
which included non-Greek-speaking Christians, formed a kind of theocracy,
the hierarchy of which in its upper ranks was Greek, the bishops, whatever
their racial origins, thinking of themselves as Greek. True, there existed
nationalist and separatist tendencies within the Church, especially among the
lower clergy ; and these movements were to assume considerable importance
when, during the nineteenth century, the Slav-speaking regions began to de­
velop a nationalist outlook. But the very existence of this theocracy preserved
for the Greeks, and eventually for the Slavs, their national identity. Indeed
so closely knit was the national existence of the Greeks with their Church
that in their liberation movement there was no hostility to the Greek Patri­
archate comparable to that which the Italians displayed towards the Papacy.
True, there were conflicts. On the one hand, men like Rhegas and Koraës
were anti-clerical, as were some of the Phanariots and westernised Greeks.
On the other hand, most of the higher clergy disapproved of the activities of
the Etairists ; and the Patriarch himself opposed the movement towards a
Greek national, autonomous Church within liberated Greece. Such a Church
was eventually established by the Bavarian Regency. But this action was re­
gretted by most Greeks, ev en by those within the Kingdom. Here nevertheless
was one of the great problems of the whole Greek liberation—a problem
vastly different from the Roman question, which was chiefly question of
whether the Pope needed to retain, in order to fulfil his spiritual duties in the
world at large, a temporal power extending over the whole Roman City and
its environs. The Greek problem was less simple : it could be argued with some
force that the aims of Hellenism might be better served by preserving in­
tact the Ottoman Empire, in order that the Patriarchate might, as the sur­
vivor of the Byzantine Empire, become the precursor of the new. This ideal (it
is one form of the Greek Megale Idea) conflicted with the nationalist idea of
gathering in the Orthodox, Slavs as well as Greeks, into a national Kingdom
ruled from Athens, or even from Constantinople itself. As time went on, the
development and reorientation of Serbian nationalism (the Serbs had formed
a de facto independent state nearly two decades before the Greeks), together
with ethnic-linguistic nationalism in Roumania and Bulgaria, rendered the
 The Greek Unification and the Italian Risorgimento Compared 9

narrower, nationalist Hellenism of Athens more practical politics than the

Ecumenical Hellenism of the Patriarchate and its supporters. This was cer­
tainly true of the regions where the Slavs were pressing. But in Asia Minor,
where there were thousands of Greeks, there was no challenge from the
Slavs. Here then was a dilemma. Either these Asia Minor Greeks must re­
main, along with those in Constantinople, a privileged theocracy within the
Turkish Empire (being hostages, as it were, for the good conduct of the Greek
nationalist state), or Greece must expand into Asia Minor, and endeavour
to unite European and Asiatic Greece by gaining control of Constantinople
and the Straits.
Although the two forms of Hellenism were basically antagonistic to one
another, the conflict was predominantly theoretical. In practice Constanti­
nople and Athens were able to arrive at working arrangements. Not that these
arrangements resulted from a Greek propensity for compromise and mode­
ration: they were the results of the restraints imposed upon the nationalists
of Athens by the sheer physical difficulties of embarking upon a policy of ex­
pansion—the sparsity, dispersal, and poverty of the Greek people, the con­
sequent weakness of their military forces, and, above all, the pressure from the
European powers which, from their various standpoints, worked towards
the preservation of the Turkish Empire and which consequently laid restrain­
ing hands on Greece. So great indeed were the difficulties when viewed from
Athens in the way of an expansive policy, that it is not surprising that many
otherwise realistic Greeks sought refuge in the dreams of reaching Byzanti­
um, not by force of arms, but by hellenising the Turkish Empire.
Apart from these obstacles to unification there existed for the Greeks,
as for the Italians, other difficulties which were also a legacy of the past. For
the Italians, the legacy consisted of that self-sufficient provincialism, which
to many had more to offer than national unity: for the Greeks the legacy
was one of deep-rooted hostility to secular and central institutions. This
produced a political instability which in part explained the failure, of or at
least the delay in, providing the means for the uninterrupted pursuit of Hel­
lenism. Whether indeed a more constant pursuit would have made much dif­
ference to the result (so unfavourable were external circumstances) is a
matter for speculation. What however is perfectly clear is that more stable gov­
ernment enabled Greece to fight successfully, and reap great benefits from
the Balkan Wars. What is also perfectly clear is that the feuds in Greek po­
litical life engendered during the first world war produced the greatest disaster
in Greek history since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Just when the pro­
mised land seemed to be in sight, the Greeks, divided politically, were unable
10 Douglas Dakin

either to manoeuvre on the complex diplomatic front or to produce a suffi­

cient military effort that would have left nothing to chance. The Italians, too,
owing to their political divisions were to suffer many military and diplomatic
defeats, but on each occasion there was less at stake.

But Greece, as on all occasions, bore her cross bravely. She gathered in
her children, not by conquering the soil on which for centuries they had la­
boured, but by receiving them—a million or more —within the then existing
national homeland. No nation has achieved so much as Greece on this oc­
casion. With the help of friendly powers and of the League of Nations, she
transformed the moment of disaster into her finest hour. For her many sacri­
fices she was to reap great rewards. The new populations brought with them,
if very little money or possessions, intelligence and skills. The process of as­
similation was—and never can be—all plain sailing; but eventually the two
populations—the indigenous Greeks and the Greeks from other homelands—
eventually settled down. After all they had a common language, a common
religion, a common heritage of great antiquity. In a sense they were more a-
like than were the Sicilians to the northern Italians. Together they trans­
formed Macedonia and Western Thrace. They made, and are still making,
of Northern Greece a 'Lombardy’ and 'Tuscany’—a garden, a land of cities,
and a centre of culture and learning of which the University of Thessaloniki,
the Society of Macedonian Studies, and the Institute for Balkan Studies are
shining examples.

Birkbeck College, London DOUGLAS DAKIN