Abstract
This contribution examines the position of the Habsburg Empire vis-à-vis the Greek Revolution of 1821–1830 with a special focus on policing. It suggests that with its undeniable transnational significance and perceived threat against the status quo after 1815, the Greek Revolution pushed the Austrian state to enforce a variety of police measures to contain this alleged threat. These measures ranged from passport and border control directed towards moving Philhellenes, to monitoring Greek refugees and exiles, and using unofficial agents and consuls abroad to gather information on the rebellious Greeks. The article uses the Austrian police policies towards the Greeks as a vehicle to understand more widely how nineteenth-century policing functioned. Based on policing, the paper thus adds to the intellectual and administrative history of modern statehood.
On 14 March 1821, the governor of the Austrian province of Galicia (nowadays south-eastern Poland and western Ukraine) Ludwig von Taaffe sent a detailed report to Emperor Franz I on the recent uprisings in the contiguous Danubian Principalities. 1 The ways that Taaffe had gathered this information as well as his point of view are indicative of the broader surveillance networks and political priorities of the Habsburg state after 1815. As such, they merit further scrutiny to help shed light upon the inner state dynamics of the Austrian empire. Taaffe thus received reports from the district commissioner of Bukovina, who was even closer to the events, and the Austrian consul in Bucharest, who in turn operated his own spying network across the Principalities. 2 Furthermore, Taaffe took the liberty of informing his sovereign even if, as he underlined, it was still too early to be entirely sure about the validity of the reported occurrences. He chose this course of action due to the alleged imminent dangers that a revolution bordering the Habsburg lands might entail, so that measures could be taken to prevent the spread of trouble at home. 3
As a leading official, judge and politician of Vormärz Austria, Taaffe's words are revealing of the wider mindset of the Austrian and European state and social elites in the aftermath of Napoleon's fall. 4 The victorious Powers at the Congress of Vienna were anxious to prevent future large-scale revolutions and armed conflicts. 5 When the 1820–1821 revolutions broke out soon thereafter in southern and eastern Europe, this triggered the insecurities of the European upper strata, especially given their widely held view of a pancontinental conspiracy aiming to overthrow the new status quo. 6 Even if this attitude was exaggerated, scholars generally agree that liberals and radicals across Europe at the time held transnational contacts and shared ideas to the extent that one may talk about a ‘liberal international’. 7 It cannot be overlooked that such liberals fuelled to a large degree the progressive revolutions of 1820–1821, 1830–1831 and even 1848–1849.
What remains less explored, though, is that their conservative adversaries had their own common ideological connotations, administrative practices, and were in touch across the continent. One could even propose a ‘conservative international’ mirroring equivalent fermentations in the liberal camp. 8 In such a case, Taaffe surely belonged to this side of the political-ideological spectrum, alongside other statesmen and officials such as Metternich. This informal association of conservatives across Europe functioned in parallel with the Holy Alliance, which was, in turn, a more formal partnership of counter-revolutionary Great Powers. 9 The link(s) between these two cross-border networks are not difficult to imagine: they were both formed by conservative policymakers, statesmen and diplomats (ranging from moderates and reactionaries) with the common aim of preventing the return of armed revolution and social turmoil. One can indeed observe that the most prominent members of this ‘conservative international’ were also directing the policies of the Holy Alliance between Austria, Prussia and Russia. This also means, I suggest, that what differentiates the liberal and the conservative international in this specific context is that the conservative one was, at least in part, filled with government officials. They thus formed stricter hierarchies in contrast to the much looser, predominantly intellectual networks of the largely underground liberal movements. 10 These more rigid state hierarchies render the impact of the conservatives upon policymaking and everyday practice clearer. Most notably, these conservatives across borders shaped the ideological background behind the policies of coercion and policing in post-Napoleonic Europe.
This article isolates a part of this conservative world after 1815 that focuses on Austria. Based on the fact that most of the conservatives discussed here were state officials, the article links the study of this conservative international to the history of policing against radicals and subversives. Studying political policing this way also serves as a contribution to the history of modern state formation. Since the early modern fiscal-military state, policing remains one of the key aspects of modern statehood and, as such, it functions as a main vehicle to understand statehood as a whole. 11 In its early modern understanding (which arguably extended well into the nineteenth century), at least the police in Central Europe is closely linked to Polizey, meaning more broadly ‘good governance’. 12 Such good governance implied safeguarding both against domestic sedition (revolutionaries and agitators) and supposedly chaotic conditions abroad, which could potentially undermine internal stability (such as in the Ottoman lands during the Greek Revolution). During the early nineteenth century, at the crossroad between the early modern and the (conceptually narrower) modern definition of policing, a ‘police state’ entailed security measures both domestically and abroad. In this sense, the notion of an order that good governance entailed, was arguably a major premise behind the intervention in the Ottoman Empire and the Battle of Navarino: in their understanding, the Great Powers intervened to (re)establish order and stability in a part of the world, where the Sultan could not. 13
These conceptual and practical connotations of policing apply even more for post-Napoleonic Europe given the aforementioned state insecurities and the supposed need for a strengthened security apparatus after 1815. I thus use Austria and the Greek Revolution of 1821–1830 as means to shed light upon policing and state formation. There are good reasons for such a choice. On the one hand, during the early- and mid-nineteenth century, among all Great Powers, the Habsburg Empire had developed political police activity – also transnationally – that was even denser than that of Russia and Prussia. 14 On the other hand, the Greek War of Independence, as the Greek Revolution is also known, distinguishes itself from every other nineteenth-century revolution thanks to its decade-long course, the international philhellenic mobilization and the Great Power clashes that were ignited. 15 This means that Austria, too, and its officials perceived the Greek Revolution as a unique security threat both at home (the crossing Philhellenes) and abroad (the belligerent Greeks themselves). The Austrians, I maintain, felt compelled to combat the transnational dimension of the Greek Revolution by exploiting their whole array of surveillance and policing techniques. This demonstration of security measures below works as my compass to help me navigate amidst the complex structures of nineteenth-century Austrian statehood.
To achieve my aims, I first examine the Austrian monitoring and policing measures vis-à-vis the Philhellenes and Greek fugitives and exiles on Austrian soil (borderlands or mainland). Second, I discuss the security information networks abroad epitomized in the activity of the Austrian diplomats and consuls in the belligerent Greek lands. The dissimilar character of these ‘policing actors’ reveals the complexity that characterized policing. Not only police officials stricto sensu (who were employed at the Police Aulic Service [Polizeihofstelle]), but also members of the diplomatic and consular services, are analysed. To be sure, the Austrian diplomats and consuls never held exclusive police and intelligence duties, but only occasionally gathered information about subversive groups. However, when they did so, they could arguably be considered as part of the wider Austrian policing mechanism and hence their inclusion in this study. 16 Nonetheless, for reasons of comprehensiveness, further aspects of their activity (mediation, humanitarianism) are briefly explained as well, so that their policing role can be put in context.
In any case, diplomats and consuls surely interacted with other administrative sections including the police services. The exact ways of this interaction and even information exchange are not always clear: much communication took place through the official correspondence between the State Chancellery (the then-Foreign Ministry and Metternich's main seat and source of authority) and the Police Aulic Service. Yet, much information must have also been disseminated through more informal channels: interpersonal and local networks; confidants; and ad hoc contacts between seemingly irrelevant state services. Due to their inherently unofficial nature, it becomes difficult to trace the exact route of information in these cases. This route is left to be reassembled usually based on fragmented and scattered archival evidence, which, as it will become evident, mirrors the largely ad hoc function of nineteenth-century states in general.
Monitoring mobility and policing dissidence in the Austrian lands
The context of the Mediterranean revolutions of 1820–1821 allows us to better understand not only the revolutionary phenomenon per se, but also the priorities of the Austrian police policy too. The Austrian attitude vis-à-vis the Greek Revolution remained understandably coloured by the slightly earlier Piedmontese and Neapolitan revolutions as well as by the broader Habsburg security considerations in Italy. Since his first visit to Milan, Metternich had remarked that Italian mail and agitators should be surveilled without interruption. 17 Even if Habsburg rule remained solid in Lombardy and Venetia for the period under consideration, Austrian state actors nevertheless remained vigilant against potential threats. 18 Following Metternich's concerns, censorship and interference with mail correspondence became institutionalized through a system of interception stations or ‘post-lodges’ both within and beyond the Austrian borders. 19 Moreover, aiming to limit illegal transborder mobility, the Habsburg Empire signed a number of extradition treaties from the late 1810s to the 1830s with Sardinia, the Holy See, Tuscany, Modena and Parma, which targeted criminals, army deserters and smugglers. 20
It was above all in the aftermath of the 1820 Neapolitan Revolution, when police authorities in Milan and Vienna intensified their investigations against radical fugitives, alongside Austrian diplomatic and military measures in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies. 21 Yet, these forms of transnational policing also had their limits, which were dictated by the sovereignty anxieties of the smaller Italian states. At the Congress of Verona in 1822, Metternich attempted to advance his plan of an Italian League. This meant the formation of a commission to investigate revolutionary plots staffed by officials from all the Italian states and with jurisdiction across Italy, which was similar to the Frankfurt Investigation Commission in the German confederation. 22 However, the Sardinian and Tuscan representatives to the congress, and especially the papal nuncio, interpreted this gesture as an effort to increase Austrian influence in the peninsula at their expense and rejected Metternich's proposal. His alternative suggestion of a multilateral Italian postal union under Austrian direction had also met with failure. 23 In the 1820s, police cooperation across Italy still left much to be desired, despite the vitality of this area for Austrian interests.
Against this backdrop of single-state and interstate security policies, the Greek Revolution broke out, when the Neapolitan one was not just over yet. When it comes to Austria's Italian provinces, the most direct impact of the Greek-Ottoman conflict was the arrival of fugitives and political exiles. They set foot mainly in Venice and Trieste, and they also arrived in non-Habsburg Italian cities such as Rome or Naples. 24 Most Greek(-speaking) arrivals in Venice came from either western Greece or the British-controlled Ionian islands. The latter was more often than not forced to leave for having opposed the colonial authorities wishing to support the Greek cause. Having long-standing bonds with the former Venetian Republic, such oppositionists sailed northwards towards what used to be their capital city. 25 They also hoped that the long-standing Greek-orthodox community of Venice would welcome and provide for them. 26 Antonio Martinengo, a prominent liberal nobleman from Zakynthos, disembarked in Venice after deciding to spend his time of exile there, following his trial and conviction for championing a more liberal regime at home. 27 The Venetian police was understandably suspicious of his presence, and the police director ordered a secret investigation on his future aims and whereabouts. The fact that Martinengo was well-connected with the Greek-orthodox community of the city as well as the fellow Greek-orthodox Russian consul was surely a cause for attention for the nervous Venetian police officials. However, in a manner not uncommon for the class reflexes of nineteenth-century state officials, Martinengo was eventually deemed to be relatively harmless due to his advanced age and aristocratic background. 28
Such Greek ‘nationals’ aside, the moving Philhellenes formed a second group that appeared regularly in police files. State concerns regarding the monitoring of their mobility across borders is just one episode of the wider wish of early nineteenth-century states to enforce stricter territorial controls on mobility. Keeping mobility monitored was a key aspect of statehood at that time, regardless of the levels of success of this effort. 29 The main tools through which mobility could be regulated were border controls and passports, which appeared regularly in the policing of philhellenes too. Be them either young students or (retired) army officers in search of employment or enrichment, police officials or consuls followed them keenly.
Between mid-1821 and early 1822, the Austrian border authorities, police officials, consuls and diplomats regularly sent reports to the central police headquarters in Vienna regarding wandering military men, who tried to reach Greece. The Italian ports provided frequent embarking points en route to adventure, and the Austrian consuls in Genova and Livorno as well as the authorities in Trieste had eyes open for such individuals. 30 Most usual cases included former or even current members of the Prussian, Swiss, or Badenese and Wurttemberg military. 31 Alternatively, albeit less often, they could be merchants, who nonetheless were associated with the army (arms dealers, etc.) and hoped to make a fortune in Greece. 32 The smuggling of illegal war ammunition, such as cannons or rifles, through the Austrian ports aimed to help the Greek rebels thus alarmed the authorities, who sought to persecute the offenders. 33 Either category was simply dealt with suspicion by the authorities as potential troublemakers or at least vagabonds, who had to be driven out of Austrian soil as soon as possible. 34 Such an attitude was not unexpected. The southwest German states saw the flourishing of Philhellenism also as a mean of expression of local progressive claims. 35 Prussia happened to be the country that sent the most armed German philhellenes to fight in Greece. 36 Lastly, Switzerland was a constant thorn on Austria's back when it came to hosting foreign political agitators.
Finally, the Austrian censors had a keen eye for the incoming and outgoing Greek-related correspondence despite language difficulties. 37 Through this way, the Austrian police could observe the ties between influential Philhellenes and Greek fighters both within and beyond Austria. Usual police suspects were, among others, the Bavarian university professor Friedrich Thiersch, the French lieutenant Julius Bollee, the Triestine trade magnate Ioannis Rallis and native Greek fighters such as Emmanuel Pappas in Macedonia. 38 These policies held at least some degree of effectiveness. The information that was gathered through censorship enabled Austria to come to terms with the Bavarian government and effectively obstruct the recruitment of Thiersch's German legion, which aimed to cross Europe and join the fighting in Greece in the summer of 1821. 39 More meticulous policemen kept an archive of philhellenic news articles and compared them with conservative papers such as the Österreichischer Beobachter in order to cross-check the validity of reported news and thus offer their superiors accurate information. 40
In other cases, when individuals or groups seemed less politically motivated and instead more in need of actual humanitarian assistance, the Austrian state was less suspicious and more willing to help. When it came to actual refugees – usually families – who reached the Dalmatian or Italian coasts desperate to escape from extensive war violence, the local communities and officials were more often than not compassionate. Moved by his Christian and humanitarian principles, Metternich sent a note not only to the border and police authorities in Venice, Trieste, but also to those in Galicia and Bukovina, to care for these poor souls. The sole precondition was that the beneficiaries must have played no part in the revolutionary events of their homelands. 41 Quite interestingly, this order also included Jews, who, too, had entered the empire from the Danubian principalities. 42 Similar instructions were issued for penniless Ionian refugees arriving in Venice in the summer of 1821. 43 Of course, Austrian magnanimity had its limits as well. After a certain point, not just the Triestene but also the Transylvanian authorities started imposing restrictions upon the arrival of refugees. 44 Their actions were not that much politically motivated but were, above all, driven by sanitary and logistical concerns. 45 Therefore, most of the burden for the 3,000 Greek refugees that ultimately set foot in Trieste around 1821–1823 fell upon the shoulders of their fellow Greek-orthodox community of the city and other local charitable organizations, even if this activity took place under discreet police supervision. 46
Save the logistical limitations of the Austrian authorities per se, if one does a closer reading of these state orders in their timely context, then the connotations become clearer. The Greek Revolution distinguishes itself also as a religious war, which was contrary to the other revolutions of the same time. Alongside its widespread brutality, it allowed the Great Powers to coin and implement their right for humanitarian intervention. 47 The rise of humanitarian beliefs and an early tolerant attitude vis-à-vis war refugees thus affected the Austrians too, regardless of their conservative mindset and formal neutral position towards the Greek cause. 48 Besides, this humane worldview with strong religious roots cuts across the political spectrum of the time. Liberals and conservatives alike were shocked by the atrocities of the Greek-Ottoman war. In this case, the earlier, eighteenth-century notions of policing associated with good governance and the benevolent nature of the absolutist state are also relevant. This wider concept of policing was responsible for the good order of society in general, which included taking care of the destitute and the needy as well. In this transitionary phase known as Sattelzeit (ca. 1750–1850), earlier and modern concepts of policing coexisted. This meant that the police could carry both progressive and repressive elements at the same time. 49
‘Policing’ the Greek Revolution abroad (I): Agents and pirates
When it came to measures abroad, the main challenge around 1821–1822 remained the gathering of effective intelligence on the revolutionaries and the containment of turmoil only within the belligerent Greek lands thereafter. In addition, save the potential of a renewed uprising in Italy, the possible disruption of the Austrian commerce in the Levant was the main challenge that policymakers in Vienna faced regarding the Greek Revolution. 50 This danger rendered a discreet security and information network across the Aegean and the Ionian basin necessary. The problem was that the rules created by the Congress of Vienna had only limited application in the Ottoman Empire. 51 The local Powers dealt with the Greek crisis in the 1820s (and also with subsequent ones in the Near East) by envisaging new formulas of intervention and techniques of control, including policing piracy and the right to intervene based on humanitarian principles. 52 In the field of policing and intelligence broadly conceived, Greece in the 1820s offers a first-rate witness to how Great Powers build mechanisms of control and information gathering amidst power vacuums, when state institutions are paralyzed or non-existent and everyday authority is exercised by local warlords.
After 1821, Austria and other regional Powers such as the British in the Ionian Islands or the Papal States dispatched several unofficial agents in Greece, made use of their consuls as information agents and intercepted revolutionary correspondence. 53 In the Austrian case, the young Styrian lieutenant Anton Prokesch (later von Osten) became Metternich's unofficial emissary in the Greek lands, only to be elevated to the rank of ambassador to Greece later on (1834–1849). 54 Prokesch's reports and correspondence provide an invaluable source on the Greek revolution and extend far beyond the narrower Austrian state interests. 55 Following Prokesch's and others’ point of view, over the years of fighting, the main problem came to be not the spread of revolution but the chronic upsetting of the Austrian trade routes in the Aegean by the Greek pirates and privateers. 56 These sea bandits were often plundered under the endorsement of the Greek revolutionary government and because of that, the policing activity of foreign Powers against _________ (missing object) has been repeatedly misread as a reactionary political affirmation. 57
Such an example comes from Antonio Bassano and Agostino Fapone. They were two southern Italians, who, according to police reports, were involved in piracy across the Ionian sea, while flirting with the Italian revolutionary movement and the Carbonari too. 58 Alongside their band, they were not much different from the other southern Italian and Balkan bandits and pirates of the time. 59 Yet, their superficial attraction of liberal ideas – even for the sake of material profit or simply plundering – was enough to make the police authorities nervous. 60 The ways they were surveilled are again indicative of the wider Austrian information-gathering methods in the belligerent south-eastern Europe. The Austrian ambassador in Istanbul Rudolph von Lützow collected data on Bassano in collaboration with the consul in Patras. Later on, they sought the support of the Ottoman navy to track down those allegedly liberal-minded pirates. In turn, the Ottoman admiral (Kapoudan pasha) responded favourably to the Austrian request and ordered the provincial governor of Albania to trace and apprehend these sea bandits. 61
It is not eventually clear whether actual measures were taken and it is likely that Bassano and Fapone kept raging havoc throughout western Greece amidst the general lawlessness of the 1820s. Nevertheless, this coordination between the Austrian diplomatic and consular services, and the Ottoman authorities, which in other cases included the official and unofficial agents of the Italian states as well, is revealing of how information was circulated in post-Napoleonic Balkans. 62 What is also noteworthy from the Bassano-Fapone case is that the distinction between political and criminal motives is very unclear. Because of this ambiguity, the labelling of Austria as an ideologically anti-hellenic actor in the 1820s is at least problematic. Wishing to protect its maritime interests, Austria expanded its armada in the Aegean from 5 to 17 warships between 1821 and 1827 as a mean of persecuting pirates. 63 Similar policies were followed by the British, French and Russian squadrons in the same waters, which later destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at Navarino.
To the extent that Austrian state representatives of whatever nature strove to actively contain an alleged kind of political agitation abroad, one can refer to transnational political policing even of a broad and unconventional kind. The recurrent ambivalence and difficulty, in this case, to define what exactly constitutes policing based on more conventional western vocabulary does not mean that this non-Western setting at the time should be dismissed as simply backward. Even if the Greek revolutionary elite had emphasized their alleged bonds with Western Europe, the broader societal realities in the region classified Greece as part of the wider Ottoman world. 64 One should therefore turn to the particular formulas developed to combat certain illicit practices that took into account the general Ottoman background and specific revolutionary context. Among these formulas and measures, one should pay special attention to the activity of consuls.
‘Policing’ the Greek Revolution abroad (II): Consuls
The activity of European consuls in the Ottoman Empire dates back to the sixteenth century when merchants gained a privileged status through their actions as commercial agents of their governments in the Levant. 65 In the nineteenth century, contemporaries were aware of the special role of consuls in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states and their extended legal and commercial jurisdiction in the region. 66 These low-level diplomatic actors frequently advanced the ‘soft’ power of their states (education, religion, trade) instead of engaging directly in high politics. 67 Yet, they could acquire considerable regional influence, especially in times of turmoil such as the 1820s or after 1848. 68 Thus, the reports of these ‘agents of information’ in the Mediterranean often contained valuable data on, among other things, educational, social, health and religious affairs, 69 although their multifarious activity has not received much credit so far. 70
The Habsburg Empire began attributing increasingly greater significance to its consuls in the Ottoman Empire and Greece during the nineteenth century. 71 Vienna resisted relying only on ill-trained merchants for consular services in the area and had its consuls obtain a good knowledge of the local languages and conditions in addition to their legal education. 72 This development mirrored the greater politicization of the consular office throughout the century and Vienna's pragmatic need for more active representatives on the ground. 73 Competent and well-trained experts across the Eastern Mediterranean were crucial, given the political and financial significance of that region for Austria. Understandably, it was in the Ottoman Empire and in Greece that the largest Habsburg consular contingent by far was already actively reporting to the foreign ministry before 1848 when all other consulates still reported to the trade ministry. 74
The consuls, who were not even required to be Austrian citizens, were traditionally focused on protecting Austrian trade interests and taking care of the Austrian subjects in the consul's immediate vicinity. 75 It must be noted at this point that careers in the diplomatic and consular services were most often different and the personnel that manned them had a diverse background. The local origins of most consuls, at least in the period under consideration, was one of the most important factors, which differentiated them from the diplomats. Yet, none of them could operate alone. To fulfill their duties, the consuls in particular had to rely on the consulate's personnel plus various unofficial agents, who could be either closely or loosely linked to the consulate.
Thus, in the early nineteenth century, the local consuls (or at times vice-consuls) had a chancellor (director) of the consulate and one or more interpreters (dragomans) under his orders. These interpreters were natives, usually Greek Catholics, Armenians and Jews, who were fluent in Italian plus the most common local language (most often Greek or Turkish) and their dialects. Through their service, these individuals assumed the capacity of ‘protégé’ and enjoyed the judicial and political protection of the Power they served. 76 The consuls used these individuals and groups on the spot to acquire information, target specific individuals or act as mediators amidst turbulent conditions.
Save the privileged role of Austria as protector of the Balkan Catholic Christians since the seventeenth century, Vienna assumed further responsibilities in the Orient after the annexation of the Venetian territories in 1797. These factors, along with the eruption of the Greek Revolution, led to the reorganization of the consular network in the Orient in 1822 and its closer central control by Vienna. 77 The challenges and chaos that the Greek Revolution unleashed in the Aegean basin in the 1820s left ample space for the Austrian consuls to exercise their mediating skills and rise to the level of prominent local figures given the common absence of more trustworthy and stable state institutions.
The consuls were thus, by definition, multitaskers, who assumed various duties in their immediate vicinity. Policing was one of them and hence at least part of their examination in this context. At times, ‘diplomatic’ representation and humanitarian aid were also among their tasks, and these cannot be separated strictly from policing and intelligence gathering when they appeared. In principle though, when consuls worked to collect information and monitor the activity of suspects of potentially dangerous individuals, they were engaged in policing in broadly defined terms.
The influential Austrian consul in Athens Georg Christian Gropius is a fine example of a multitasker, who, among others, was involved in policing too. Therefore, the concise portrayal of his entire activity is essential and his policing and surveillance activity must be put in context. Besides, Gropius merits further study because his case is representative of the wider techniques and fields of intervention of the Austrian, and in general European, consuls during the Greek Revolution. 78
Born in 1776 in Räbke of northern Germany, Gropius studied engraving and served as a private tutor to the children of Wilhelm von Humboldt in Paris. Through Humboldt's circle, he became acquainted with the Prussian diplomat Jakob Salomon Bartholdy, whom Gropius accompanied on a trip to Greece in 1803. While Greece was just a passing destination for most of the European noble youths conducting the Grand Tour, Gropius remained there for the rest of his life. Initially, he was captivated by the antiquities of Thessaly, Attica and the nearby islands. Becoming thus part of the European romantic movement, Gropius began corresponding with patrons of the arts across Europe such as Lord Aberdeen, for whom he collected and shipped antiquities from Athens. 79 Likewise, he got in touch with other British travellers in Athens (Leake, Dodwell, Gell and Byron), who used their influence to secure his appointment as the British consul in Thessaly around 1811. 80 Gropius cultivated close relations with the local Ottoman pasha, although he resided in Thessaly only intermittently since he kept travelling across Roumeli, the Peloponnese and Istanbul. It was then that he had probably come into contact with the Austrian ambassador Ignaz Stürmer, who in 1816 entrusted him the title of the Austrian consul in Athens and in eastern Greece more generally. 81
It is unclear when Gropius ceased to provide exclusive consular services for Britain, but in any case, it was usual at that time for certain individuals to hold multiple consular titles at once. In Athens, Gropius organized the staff of his consulate: he employed a German as his chancellor (G. Hesse) and filled the remaining posts of secretaries and interpreters with educated native Greeks (Ioannis Tatlikaras, Dimitrios Zografos and Dimitrios Kyriakidis). These Greeks were later strongly involved in the Greek Revolution, which obscured their agency between servants of Austria and Greek revolutionaries. However, Gropius’ double role still benefited him as it strengthened his bonds with the Greeks. 82
By the outbreak of the Greek Revolution, Gropius was fluent in Greek, had an almost two-decade, first-hand experience of Greek affairs, including a reputation that was second to none as a collector of antiquities and art dealer across Europe. After 1821, he used his connections and ingenuity to advance Austria's goals in the area, while trying to maintain a rudimentary order and protect the ancient relics in Athens, which changed hands multiple times in the 1820s. From a humanitarian point of view, Gropius had often taken personal care to safeguard Christian groups in Athens, Chios, Crete and Roumeli. Moreover, he had repeatedly advised the Greek rebels not to undertake venturesome military operations to avoid the meaningless loss of life. 83 Moreover, Austrian (and more widely European) observers maintained a sharper eye for Muslim atrocities and often downplayed the Greek ones in spite of their actual existence. 84 Due to his unusual familiarity with Greek and Ottoman affairs, Gropius presented a partial exemption to this rule of Orientalist thinking. This applied to both his perception of Muslims and his respective actions. For instance, in 1822, he mediated the signing of a treaty for the protection and safe passage of the Muslims in the Acropolis to Smyrna. Yet, this diplomatic success was quickly overshadowed when the Greeks slaughtered the Turks after the latter exited the Acropolis, an event that few European newspapers reported. 85
Gropius’ political positioning is also worthy of attention to the extent that it relates to policing. As a skilled mediator, he tried to attract Greek revolutionary leaders such as Petrobey Mavromichalis into favouring Austria, while his regular contacts with Ottoman commanders earned him, somewhat unfairly, the reputation of being pro-Turkish. 86 In spatial terms, Gropius moved continuously between Athens, Nafplio and Aigina, and he struggled to preserve a balance between his Greek and his Ottoman contacts. 87 His acceptance of the Greek cause became apparent after he effortlessly continued to serve as consul following the establishment of the Greek state. The elderly consul continued to express occasionally his opinion about Greek politics, but he mostly remained absorbed in archaeology until his timely death in Athens in 1850. 88 As an experienced observer of the Greek-Ottoman war in his lifetime, Gropius reported frequently on the Greek rebels (including Petrobey Mavromichalis), the Philhellenes, their political affiliations and their whereabouts, as well as the potential threat they represented for Austria. Whenever Gropius directed his reports towards the above issues, then, it can be argued, he turned into a de facto part of the Austrian policing mechanism. This assertion can be extended, of course, to the other members of the Austrian consular service and even to the other Powers, which were active in the region too.
Conclusion
The revolutionary Greeks kept appearing in Austrian and European police files in the later 1820s too. After the fall of Messologhi in the spring of 1826 and the massacre that followed, Europe experienced a resurgence of the philhellenic movement. 89 This led to renewed bans of philhellenic organizations and money gathering in the Habsburg lands. 90 A year later, after the battle of Navarino, Metternich shared his fears with the police chief Sedlnitzky, for a potential uprising in Italy subsequent to the continuous turmoil in Greece and the Russo-Ottoman war of 1828–1829. 91 Yet, these were rather sporadic incidences of mistrust against the Greeks. The bulk of attention towards the Greek question comes mainly from 1821–23. In these years, Metternich's close friend and advisor Friedrich von Gentz noted that the fate of the Congress of Vienna system would not be decided in Spain or Latin America, but in south-eastern Europe. 92 Metternich himself took the Greek Revolution more seriously than what is commonly attributed to him, and upon retirement, he wrote a brief treatise on the matter, which remain hitherto unpublished. 93
Most of the aforementioned statesmen and thinkers were also at the top of administrative hierarchies. By definition, their personal views mobilized considerable human and material resources towards the direction of crushing revolutions, or at least limiting their impact, and towards the monitoring of their participants. The police measures that they initiated epitomized the material and practical outcome of this conservative thinking. Thus, in short, policing functioned largely as the executor of this conservative mindset, which, in turn, legitimized such suppressive practices. Terribly afraid of revolutionary violence as they had experienced it after 1789, Metternich, Prokesch, Gropius and others were determined to use policing against the revolution in order to avoid incurring such bloodshed again. Following the legacies of the late Enlightenment, they believed they acted in the direction of good governance and an orderly society, which was allegedly absent in the Ottoman lands during the Greek Revolution. 94 The threat to order, in their understanding, went beyond the belligerent territories to the extent that the Philhellenes and other revolutionary sympathizers could potentially destabilize the European internal security. As potential or actual trouble, such elements had to be contained through a series of police measures either at home or abroad. These measures ranged from information gathering regarding Greek refugees in Venice or Trieste, to monitoring Philhellenes on the move, and trying to contain Greek pirates revolutionaries in the Ionian and Aegean seas.
This conservative policymaking process and counter-revolutionary policing were later criticized by contemporaries and future scholars, who accused Austria of being a reactionary ‘police state’. 95 Save the fact that the very term has its own intellectual trajectory, it is often forgotten that this ‘police state’ (stemming from the Polizey tradition) laid the foundations for key aspects of statehood in general. These features appear intensively in the Austrian police policies vis-à-vis the Greek Revolution and the Philhellenes. Border and passport controls, which were among the fundamentals of modern territoriality, were just one such element. Another was the extensive diplomatic and consular network, which supplied the central government with information on, among others, subversive movements and individuals. To be frank, diplomats and especially consuls were never assigned exclusive ‘police duties’, but their occasional intelligence and information-gathering activities can (and should) be considered an ad hoc part of the wider official and unofficial Austrian policing mechanism. The third pillar was the usually informal, para-state agents or ‘emissaries’ such as Prokesch in the 1820s, who tended to become attached to the official diplomatic networks abroad. Finally, in the ad hoc initiatives of ‘police information’ exchange among Austria, the Ottoman Empire and the Italian states, one can detect the nascence of modern police collaboration.
To conclude, the decade-long Greek Revolution with its undeniable transnational dimension has functioned as a useful lens for the analysis of the aforementioned administrative features of statehood. As such, it is clear that the Greek War of Independence proved to be pivotal not only for the emergence of the modern Greek state and the development of modern liberalism, a fact that is now undisputed. 96 Next to these, it can be seen as being equally significant for the formation of conservative state practices regarding policing and in general policymaking.
