If you had been in place of the Poet Lord Byron, how would you have contributed in the Greek war of Independence?
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Answer:
==>> Lord Byron fought on behalf of the Greeks against the Ottoman empire in the Greek war of independence. He provided financial assistance to the Greek rebels and wrote in favour of Greek independence. He even used his own money to form a battalion of Greek rebel soldiers called the Byron Brigade.
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Answer:
Back in London in February 1812, Byron made his first speech in the House of Lords, a humanitarian plea opposing harsh Tory measures against riotous Nottingham weavers. The following month the first two cantos of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” were published, and Byron found himself famous. He was forced to leave England in 1816 as a result of a scandal involving an incestuous relationship with his half sister. He settled in Geneva, Switzerland, along with friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (who had eloped with Shelley) and Godwin’s 17-year-old stepdaughter Claire Clairemont, with whom Byron had begun an affair in England.
By 1819 Byron had grown fat and gray, and was wallowing in sexual promiscuity when a chance meeting with 19-year-old Countess Teresa Guiccioli (married to a man nearly three times her age) reenergized the poet. Byron followed the separated countess to Ravenna, Italy, and won the friendship of her father and brother, who initiated him into the secret society of the Carbonari with its revolutionary aims to free Italy from Austrian rule.
Byron went with them to Pisa in November 1821, after they had been expelled from Ravenna for taking part in an abortive uprising. In the process, he left his daughter Allegra (who had been sent to him by Claire, her mother) to be educated in a convent near Ravenna, where she died from a fever the next April. At the end of September, Byron moved to Genoa, where the young countess’ family had found asylum, but by this time Byron was in search of new adventure and Greece’s war of independence had begun under the leadership of the Ypsilantis brothers.
A separate Greek rebellion was being led by Mavrokordátos in Missolonghi, located in a swampy lagoon on the northern coast of the Gulf of Corinth. Following an ancient pattern that endures in the Balkan Peninsula to the present day, Demetrios Ypsilantis and Mavrokordátos were unwilling to combine their forces against the common enemy. Instead they became bitter political adversaries. Ironically it was only the swift defeat by the Turks of the rebellion in Thrace and Macedonia that alleviated the bloodletting between Greeks that erupted in those regions. Byron made efforts to unite the various factions and took personal command of a brigade of Suliote soldiers, reputedly the bravest of the Greeks. “I came here to join a nation, not a faction,” he wrote angrily in his journal.
Byron had entered into this adventure with his eyes wide open, and numerous Greek historians have commended his political realism. “No stranger,” declared the eminent George Findlay, “estimated the character of the Greeks more correctly.” Nonetheless, knowing that his own writings had helped kindle European enthusiasm for the Greek cause, Byron felt honor-bound to join the fight.
Noted Byron scholar Paul Trueblood has written that “it was only the healthy cynicism of Byron’s view of human nature in general and the Greek character in particular, coupled with his longer view of the ultimate good that kept him from turning in disgust from the whole project.” In spite of factionalism, intrigue and military ineptitude (as well as an ill-starred passion for his handsome Greek pageboy, Loukas), Byron acquitted himself well as a military man by all accounts, displaying a strong practical grasp of leadership. Condemned throughout the world as a hedonist, Byron willingly lived a Spartan existence in miserable conditions with the troops he subsidized and trained.
In 1829 Turkey accepted the Treaty of Adrianople, recognizing Greek autonomy. The fledgling republic was abolished three years later, when President Capo d’Istria was assassinated and the same Western powers that helped liberate Greece helped turn it into a monarchy. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Greece fought to expand its boundaries to include the Greek-speaking population of the Ottoman Empire, until it reached its present territorial configuration in 1947.
“Die I must,” said Byron on his deathbed. “Its loss I do not lament; for to terminate my wearisome existence I came to Greece. My wealth, my abilities, I devoted to her cause. Well, there is my life to her.” In 1969, 145 years after his death, a memorial to Byron was placed on the floor of Westminster Abbey. He might well have appreciated the assessment rendered at that time by Paul Trueblood that “Byron’s death at Missolonghi accomplished more for Greece’s unity and liberation than all his utterances and actions.”
Today nearly every Greek town has its Odos Vyronos, or Byron Street, and memorials and statues glorifying the English expatriate are commonplace throughout the country. Eyes brighten and tones are reverential when Greeks speak of “Lordos Viron,” and his name continues to be popular for Greek sons.