India, had not yet brought him into conflict with European interests, but he was now about to be drawn into the Greek War of Independence and thus into the labyrinth of the Eastern Question. In the last century the population of the Balkan peninsula was con- sidered to be Greek. No educated Christian would have given himself any other name. Now the inhabitants of the part which is still Turkish territory recognise that they have affinities with the surrounding states of Greece, Servia, Bulgaria and Rumania, but are not always sure which In the early nineteenth century the "surrounding states' cited by Sir Charles Eliot were themselves all still under Turkish domination and the process of sorting out the ethnic and linguistic groups had hardly begun. So it was that the revolt which set off the Greek War of Independence was led by an Albanian Muslim and it was a Russian general of Phanariot Greek extraction who invaded the Principalities (see above, p. 32) to raise a quite separate Greek revolt against Turkish rule. Ali Tebelen had made himself Govenor of Epirus by the same sort of process as had brought Mohamed Aly to the Pashalik of Egypt. He fell out with his master the Sultan and in 1820, besieged in Janina by Turkish forces, called his Greek Suliot subjects to his aid. General Ypsilantis, a former aide de camp of the Tsar, aimed to take advantage of Ali Pasha's revolt when he crossed the Pruth in March 1821. His expedition had its roots in the Philike Hetairia, a secret society founded by Greek merchants in 18I4 which aimed at establishing a large Greek state modelled on the Byzantine Empire. By 1821 this society had ramifications among the Greek colonies in Italy, Egypt and Russia. Ypsilantis' was disavowed by the Russians, who deprived him of his army rank and agreed to a Turkish army entering the palities to crush it. But it was immediately followed by a more serious and a different kind of revolt in the In backward area chieftains already practised a primitive kind of self-government and the number of Turks was small. Many of these were savagely massacred in retaliation the Turks hanged the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople. The revolt soon spread to the islands which were socially and economically far in advance of the Morea. Their economy was based on seaborne trade with the Black Sea ports. The Greek islanders were the best sailors in the eastern Mediterranean and the Turkish Reet was unable to dispute their command of the Aegean. Their stronghold was the island of Chios, and 1 Sir Charles Eliot, Turkry in Europe (London, 19oo).