The revolt that began in the Peloponnese in March 1821 was accompanied from the outset by the destruction of civilian communities on both sides. Insurgent forces killed much of the Muslim and Jewish population of the Morea, most notoriously at the capture of Tripolitsa in September 1821; Ottoman authorities executed the Ecumenical Patriarch and killed and imprisoned Greeks in Constantinople and elsewhere in reprisal, and in 1822 the punishment of Chios killed and enslaved the great bulk of an island population of about 100,000, an event that became a European cause through Delacroix's painting. Ibrahim Pasha's Egyptian expedition of 1825-28 devastated the Morea and deported captives to Egypt. Intervention by Britain, France and Russia, and the destruction of the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at Navarino in 1827, secured Greek independence, recognised in 1830 and settled in 1832. The war established the pattern of reciprocal expulsion that recurred through the Balkan secessions of the following century.
Greek insurgents and Ottoman and Egyptian forces destroyed and expelled each other's civilian communities during the war that created the Greek state
Ottoman registers for these provinces are incomplete; the standard anchor is the Capodistrias census of 1828, which counted about 753,000 people in liberated Greece after seven years of killing, famine and flight. Working backwards, historians put the pre-war population at roughly 900,000, including some 40,000 Muslims in the Peloponnese, almost all of whom were killed or expelled by 1822.
No side counted. The lower bound aggregates the more conservative modern readings of the principal episodes - the killings at Tripolitsa in 1821, the reprisals in Constantinople, Smyrna and Cyprus, the destruction of Chios in 1822 and the campaigns in the Morea - while the upper bound follows nineteenth-century consular and journalistic estimates, which were often produced by partisans of one side. Deaths from famine and epidemic during the eight years of war are additional and were never estimated at all.
Contemporary consular despatches, insurgent and Ottoman correspondence and the accounts summarised by Britannica document massacres of civilians by both sides, the enslavement of women and children from Chios, the burning of towns and villages and the destruction of mosques and churches.
Greece, Bulgaria, Egypt