THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE 1821 TO 1833 BY W.ALISON PHILLIPS 1897

118 TUB WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE
numberless motives of personal ambition or jealousy,
these were divided also by sharply contrasted principles
of policy, which were sure, sooner or later, to produce
a conflict between them. On the one side were the
Phanariots, and such of the Greeks as had received a
European training, and who desired to see Greece established
as a constitutional State on the European
model. These were supported also by the islanders,
whose commercial enterprise had brought them into
contact with European ideas. On the other side were
the bishops, primates, and military chiefs, whose sole
idea was to sit in the seat from which they had expelled
the Turks;
to wear fine weapons and gorgeous clothes,
to play the Pasha, to pay nobody and take from all;
and, finally, to live on terms of good fellowship with
the common people, sharing their pleasures, their customs,
their 1
superstitions, and their faith.
For the present, indeed, at the beginning of the
year 1823, the party of the primates made common
cause with that of the islanders and Constitutionalists
against the military chiefs, whose power now overshadowed
every other authority in Greece. West
Hellas, it is true, was still held for the Government by
Mavrocordatos, though with a weak hand; but, in
East Hellas, Odysseus now reigned with undisputed
i
Prokesch, i. 275.