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

SIEGE OF MONEMVASIA 53
Perched on an inaccessible rock,
it could not be taken
by storm; but the place was insufficiently provisioned,
and the hope of relief from the sea was cut off by the
arrival of a Greek squadron. The garrison were soon
reduced to the most desperate straits;
but a practical
hint of what they might expect, if they surrendered,
had been given them by the besiegers, and they were
determined to resist to the uttermost. For the Greeks,
thinking to intimidate them, had brought ashore some
wretched prisoners,
men and women, whom they had
captured on the high seas,
had led them before the
walls, and there butchered them in cold blood.
After
this object lesson in the methods of their enemies, famine
alone could persuade the Mussulmans to surrender.
Soon their food stores were all exhausted; and for a
while they subsisted on vermin and the seaweed
scraped from the rocks; but soon this, too, was no
more to be obtained; and now, from time to time,
gaunt and fierce-eyed bands of warriors would issue
from the fortress in furious sorties, drive back the besiegers,
and drag in the bodies of their slain enemies,
the last ghastly sustenance suggested by their despair.
At this point, Prince Demetrius Hypsilanti, who
had recently been appointed commander-in-chief in the
Morea, interposed.
Prince Demetrius, whose arrival
in Greece had been greeted with unbounded delight,