The Greek Revolution

A thrilling history of the revolutionary birth of modern Greece.

In the exhausted, repressive years that followed Napoleon's defeat in 1815, there was one cause that came to galvanise countless individuals across Europe and the United States—freedom for Greece.

The Greek Revolution by Mark Mazower recreates one of the most unlikely and significant events in the story of modern Europe. In the face of nearly impossible odds, the people of Greece rose up against Sultan Mahmud II and took on the might of the imperial Ottoman armed forces, its Turkish cavalrymen, Albanian foot soldiers, and the fearsome Egyptians. Despite the most terrible disasters, they held on until military intervention by Russia, France, and Britain finally secured the kingdom of Greece.

Mazower brilliantly brings together the different strands of the story. He takes us into the stories of revolutionary conspirators and besieged towns, itinerant priests and slaves, and defenceless women and children struggling to stay alive amid a conflict of extraordinary brutality. This is a story of how statesmen came to terms with an even more powerful force than themselves—the force of nationalism. Above all, it is a book about how people decided to see their world differently and, at an often terrible cost to themselves and their families, changed history.