If there is such a thing as being on the right side of history, those who supported maintenance of the status quo espoused by the Holy Alliance and traditionalist conservatives were not on it. There were too many people who wanted change. This included Greeks who wanted independence from Ottoman rule.
The Greeks had been under Ottoman rule since the mid-1400s. In Greece, Islamic law applied only to Muslims. The Greek Orthodox Church was allowed to function and Greeks were free to worship as they pleased and to maintain their own culture and language. The Greeks saw the Ottoman Turks as inferior, and they looked back at what they considered the glories of ancient Greece. In the late 1700s the French Revolution inspired among the Greeks a greater yearning for liberty. A revolt against Ottoman rule gave Serbia quasi-autonomy beginning in 1813, and this had encouraged the Greeks. There was a tendency among Greeks to believe that it would be their fellow Orthodox Christians, the Russians, who would free them from Ottoman power. Then in 1814, at the center of a thriving Greek community in Russian-ruled Odessa, Greek exiles laid what they hoped would be the groundwork for an armed uprising inside Greece, and they misleadingly portrayed their group as having the approval of the Russian authorities.
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