Mazower is a fine archaeologist of the unconsidered detail, but I donвЂ™t quite believe his opening anecdote in which Tsar Alexander I confides to his wifeвЂ™s maid of honour that he, like her, is a secret republican. Something of modern Afghanistan pervaded the whole of rural Greece. Even in the least bloody times, for instance, the Ottoman SultanвЂ™s writ never ran over mountainous tracts of the Mani, which stayed in the hands of impressively belligerent Maniots, or areas of the Peloponnese run by ever-shifting alliances of klephts (brigands) and armatoles вЂ“ hereditary Christian chieftains вЂ“ who might be running the place for the Sultan on Monday and declaring a new warlordвЂ™s fiefdom on Tuesday. After the fall of Constantinople and the end of Byzantium in 1453, the territory of what we now call Greece was a mishmash of Turkish administration and no-go areas regularly disrupted by war and uprising. Inspired by the German philosopher HerderвЂ™s Romanticism and stress on language and culture as the elements that form a вЂњnationвЂќ, Greeks had to imagine a country into existence. It was an excitable and ham-fisted move, as so much of the long independence struggle would be in the 1820s, but Emmanouil Xanthos, Athanasios Tsakalof and Nikolaos Skoufas were Greeks of their time, members of an educated diaspora spread from Venice to Constantinople, which had begun to feel strongly the lack of a land to call its own: the deep folk-hurt of nationalism. In the Odessa townhouse, the three obscure GreeksвЂ™ formation of a Filiki Etaireia (Friendly Society) to вЂњgather the select and brave men of the raceвЂќ to work for GreeceвЂ™s liberation was in part an outraged reaction to Metternich. The people who had given the western world its gods and a canon of myths, philosophy, art and democracy were merely Ottoman subjects. At the Congress of Vienna, the Austrian empireвЂ™s foreign minister Klemens von Metternich had denied that the Greeks were вЂњto be found in the catalogue of nationsвЂќ.

MazowerвЂ™s encyclopaedic The Greek Revolution (Allen Lane, ВЈ30) starts by reminding us how imperial Britain, France, Austria, Russia and the Ottomans all took it for granted that GreeceвЂ™s fate was their property. Several heavyweight new books have flocked to this yearвЂ™s bicentenary flag of Greek independence. In the winter of 1814, at number 18, as Mark Mazower puts it, three obscure Greeks, вЂњa commercial clerk, a former student and an artisanвЂќ, took the step that would ignite the Greek struggle for independence and eventually force at least three empires to rethink their ideas of nationhood and the European space. All around, Grecheskaya sweated mercantile urgency, but quietly these former merchantsвЂ™ dwellings sat there, in the confidence they had come first вЂ“ and that one of them had a further significance. Two storeys tall, fronted with full-height Tuscan columns in early 19th-century Russian townhouse style, the houses were set back in shadow behind a small roofed courtyard. In winter the deep snow was shovelled away by hand to get the yellow marshrutkas in and out of the square the rest of the year it was a friendly inferno of crowds, horns and bootleg markets.ДЄ little rigmarole of buildings on its south-east corner fascinated me. When I lived in the Black Sea port of Odessa at the turn of the century, Grecheskaya Ploshchad вЂ“ Greek Square вЂ“ was the city centreвЂ™s marshrutka (minibus) terminus.

Seven warlords of the sea