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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: ORC-PAI |
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OTTO , king of Greece (1815-1867), was the second son of Louis I., king of Bavaria, and his wife Teresa of Saxe-Altenburg. He was born at Salzburg on the 1st of June 1815, and was educated at Munich. In 1832 he was chosen by the conference of London to occupy the newly-erected throne of Greece, and on the 6th of February 1833 he landed at Nauplia
capital of independent Greece. Otto, who was not yet eighteen, was accompanied by a council of regency composed of Bavarians under the presidency of Count Josef Ludwig von Armansperg (1787-1853), who as minister of finance in Bavaria had succeeded in restoring the credit of the state at the cost of his popularity. The task of governing a semi-barbarous people, but recently emancipated, divided into bitter factions, and filled with an exaggerated sense of their national destiny, would in no case have been easy; it was not facilitated by the bureaucratic methods introduced by the regents. Though Armansperg and his colleagues did a good deal to introduce system and order into the infant state, they contrived to make themselves hated by the Greeks, and with sufficient reason. That the regency refused to respond to the demand for a constitution was perhaps natural, for the experience of constitutional experiments in emancipated Greece had not been encouraging. The result, however, was perpetual unrest; the regency, too, was divided into a French and a Russian party, and distracted by personal quarrels, which led in 1834 to the recall by King Louis of G. L. von Maurer and Karl von Abel, who had been in bitter opposition to Armansperg. Soon afterwards the Mainotes were in open revolt, and the money obtained from foreign loans had to be spent in organizing a force to preserve order. On the 1st of June 1835 Otto came of age, but, on the advice of his father and under pressure of Great Britain and of the house
capital was not the least, exceeded the resources of the exchequer, and the state was only saved from bankruptcy by the continual intervention of the powers. Though King Louis, as the most exalted of Philhellenes, received an enthusiastic welcome when he visited Greece in the winter of 1835, his son's government grew increasingly unpopular. The Greeks were more heavily taxed than under Turkish rule; they had exchanged government by the sword, which they understood, for government by official regulations, which they hated; they had escaped from the sovereignty of the Mussulman to fall under that of a devout Catholic, to them a heretic. Otto was well intentioned, honest and inspired with a genuine affection for his adopted country; but it needed more than mere amiable qualities to reconcile the Greeks to his rule.In 1837 Otto visited Germany and married the beautiful and talented Princess Amalie of Oldenburg. The union was unfruitful, and the new queen made herself unpopular by interfering in the government. Meanwhile, at the instance of the Swiss Philhellene Eynard, Armansperg had been dismissed by the king immediately on his return, but a Greek minister was not put in his place, and the granting of a constitution was still postponed. The attempts of Otto to conciliate Greek sentiment by efforts to enlarge the frontiers of his kingdom, e.g. by the suggested acquisition of Crete in 1841, failed of their object and only succeeded in embroiling him with the powers. His power rested wholly on Bavarian bayonets; and when, in 1843, the last of the German troops were withdrawn, he was forced by the outbreak of a revolutionary movement
With the grant of the constitution Otto's troubles increased. The Greek parliament, like its predecessors during the War of Liberation, was the battleground of factions divided, not by national issues, but by their adherence to one or other of the great powers who made Greece the arena of their rivalry for the control of the Mediterranean. Otto thought to counteract the effects of political corruption and incompetence by overriding the constitution to which he had sworn. The attempt would have been perilous even for a strong man, a native ruler and an Orthodox believer; and Otto was none of these. His prestige, moreover, suffered from the " Pacifico incident " in 185o, when Palmerston caused the British fleet
refuge
Bamberg
See E. A. Thouvenel, La Grece du roi Othon (Paris, 189o) ; G. L. von Maurer, Das griechische Volk, &c. (1836) ; C. W. P. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, " Die Verwaltung Konig
Konig
Leipzig
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