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In what is certain to be the standard history for many years to come, David Brewer has captured the period brilliantly, from the ground upthe heroes and villains, the victories, and the tragic defeats. Greece was, as Byron said, a land with a special destiny: Freedoms home, or Glorys grave. The Greek War of Independence is a masterful workthe first comprehensive study in thirty yearsof one of the most heroic and bloody struggles for independence any people has ever waged. This was the revolution of the Romantic Age, inspiring painters, poets, and patriots the world over, fired as much by Lord Byrons ringing words and Delacroixs brilliant paintings as by Greeces seemingly hopeless plight. For nearly four hundred years the Ottoman Turks governed Greece, subjecting the country to crushing and arbitrary tax burdens and its peasants to serfdom; the glories of the ancient past were gone, and under Turkish rule Greece was poor and backward. But inspired by the examples of the American and French revolutions, Napoleons victories, and the Latin American wars of liberation, the Greek people rose up against their Turkish masters in 1821. For twelve brutal yearsa time of terrible violence and bloody massacrethe Greeks and the foreign volunteers who flocked to their cause fought until independence was won in 1833.