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The Greek Revolution began in the spring of 1821, in the Peloponnese and among the shipowning islands. Hydra, Spetses and Psara — three barren rocks whose people had armed merchant fleets, a tradition of naval service, and a working familiarity with piracy — provided the revolutionary navy.

Chios provided nothing at all, and did so deliberately.

The decision was taken by men who understood their position with complete clarity, and every element of their reasoning was correct. Chios was rich, which made it a prize. It was unarmed, and had been for centuries; there was no Chian military tradition, no armed peasantry, no mountain irregulars, no weapons. It lay seven kilometres from the Anatolian mainland, where Ottoman troops could be concentrated within days. It enjoyed privileges that no other Greek community in the empire possessed and that a rebellion would forfeit permanently. And the Ottoman state held hostages: it was routine for leading Chian families to keep representatives in Constantinople, and on the outbreak of revolt the Porte had demanded additional hostages from the island's notables and had been given them.

So the demogerontes of Chios sent assurances of loyalty to the Sultan, and they meant them.

Individual Chians were in the revolution — there were Chians in the Filiki Etaireia, the revolutionary secret society, and Chian money in the diaspora supported the cause. But the island as a body stayed out, and said so.

In March 1822 that decision was taken away from it.

Antonios Bournias was a Chian expatriate who had served as an officer under Napoleon. Lykourgos Logothetis was the effective leader of revolutionary Samos, a capable and ambitious man running an island that had thrown off Ottoman control and was looking for ways to extend the revolution. Together they mounted an expedition against Chios. Their motives were a compound of genuine revolutionary conviction, a strategic argument that the richest Greek island could not be left in Ottoman hands, and — it must be said — the prospect of considerable plunder and considerable prestige.

The Chian leadership was not consulted. When it learned what was coming, it objected in the strongest terms, and Argenti's documents preserve the pleas: the notables of Chios told the Samians, in writing and in person, precisely what would happen to the island if a rising were provoked. They were disregarded, and they were right.

On 11 March 1822 by the old calendar — the 23rd by the new — Logothetis landed a few thousand Samiots on Chios. A proportion of the island's own population joined them: the young, the poor, and the landless, largely from the northern villages, for whom the arrangement that suited the merchants of Kambos had rather less to offer. The merchant class and the mastic villages, who had everything to lose, remained hostile or simply paralysed.

The small Ottoman garrison withdrew into the Kastro, and the insurgents laid siege to it with no artillery worth the name and no plan for what to do if it did not fall.

It did not fall. The siege dragged on for three weeks. The Samiot force behaved, by most accounts including Greek ones, badly — there was looting of the Turkish quarter and, before long, of Chian property too. Discipline broke down. And the garrison inside the walls could see the sea, and knew what was coming across it.

Because the Ottoman response was decided at the very top, and it was not going to be proportionate. Sultan Mahmud II had answered the outbreak of the revolution in 1821 by hanging the Ecumenical Patriarch, Gregory V, from the gate of the Patriarchate in his vestments on Easter Sunday, and leaving the body there for three days. He was not a man looking for a measured response. And the revolt of the empire's most privileged, most favoured, least oppressed Christian community — at the strategic gateway to Anatolia, within sight of the mainland, on an island that paid the Valide Sultan's income — required an answer that would be seen and understood from Belgrade to Baghdad.