After the outbreak of the war, as the Ottomans believed, the Greek army was indeed not their opponent.

After the Battle of Marmara, the Greek navy suffered heavy losses, and the king carried out an emergency mobilization to collect all the armed merchant ships that could be used for battle, but it was still not the opponent of the Ottoman navy built by relying on strong strength, this was not a fair contest, one was Greece with a population of about one million, and the other was the Ottoman Empire with a population of 50 million.

By shrinking its navy and relying on offshore fortifications, Greece was barely able to protect its shores at sea. But on land there is no way.

Declaring war on the Ottoman Empire was not only the will of the king, but also the will of all the powerful local Greek factions, because the Ottoman Empire cut off the sea on which they depended. If there were local factions in Greece that were reluctant to go to war, it was the two regions of Epirus and Thessaly in the north, not that the Ottoman blockade policy did not affect their survival, but that once the war began, they would be under most of the pressure.

At this time, Greece, compared with later Greece, was only about half of the country, and only occupied the southern part of Epirus, the region of Thessaly and the south of it, which meant that once the war started, Epirus and Thessaly would become the front line of the ground war, and the whole of Greece would not be able to confront the Ottoman Empire, let alone two small local powerhouses. So they were against the war before, in the National Assembly, and there were endless arguments. Finally, after the rest of the country and the king pledged to support both places with all their army forces, they agreed to declare war on the Ottoman Empire.

In fact, even if they get these promises, the Greeks are not optimistic about relying on their own strength to be able to fight against the Ottoman Empire, they hope that the intervention of the European powers, do not declare war with the Ottoman Empire, they will directly lose the Black Sea trade, compared to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands are more dependent on the sea trade Greece, this means slowly dying, once the war is declared, they may still be like the period of the War of Independence, with the support of the European powers, and finally may break the blockade of the Ottoman Empire, as for victory, At this time, even the most optimistic Greeks had no confidence.

The two northern districts hoped to be able to rely on the power of all of Greece to hold the Ottoman army at the border, and then wait for the intervention of the European powers. It is a pity that the promises of other places are good, but whether and when they can be achieved is not something that the two regions can decide.

As a result, after the start of the war, the Ottoman army of 40,000 marched straight in, from the northern Macedonian region, the Thracian region, and even the Albanian region into northern Greece.

The representatives of the two districts were very dissatisfied with the National Assembly, and urged the king every day to coordinate the dispatch of troops from the districts. The king demanded immediate support from the neighboring regions of Western Greece and Central Greece, but the wait-and-see attitude of the two regions was evident under various pretexts. Local factions, to put it bluntly, are warlords, and of course warlords will have the idea of preserving their strength, and in the face of major rights and wrongs, they are prone to play their own petty calculations.

As a result, the poor Epirus was only appointed for eighteen days, and Thessaly lasted only five more days, when the king's army had already been dispatched and had just entered Central Greece.

The Epirus and Thessaly factions signed an agreement with the Ottoman Empire, and when the Ottoman Empire protected their interests, they once again declared their allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan.

But this is not the case, and nationalism is spreading throughout Europe. Through the War of Independence, Greek nationalism was further strengthened, and the identity of the "Greek" has taken root in the hearts of new generations over the course of a decade or so. In the past, local factions were constrained by the interests of the central government, but for many locals, because they could also enjoy this kind of protection, they acquiesced to this status quo, and even some local intellectuals openly preached that local autonomy was the spirit of Greek tradition, and that Greece, as the center of world civilization, did not need to learn their system from Western Europe.

But this time, this act of capitulation of the local factions caused the indignation of the whole of Greece, and even their own intellectual elite turned their backs on them, and no one was left to wash the ground of this status quo of division and separation.

The surrender of the two northern districts made the representatives of the other four districts angry and drove them out of the National Assembly.

Then the four districts began to seriously discuss the coordination of joint defense, and everyone ostensibly recognized that the king was the commander of all armies, but all of them did not agree to surrender military power and let the king take unified command, and in all kinds of strife, the front line continued to rout.

Most of Western and Central Greece was captured by the Ottoman army. At this time, the resistance was left in the Peloponnese, Athens and Evia. Among them, the northwestern part of the Peloponnese Peninsula belongs to Western Greece, and the island of Evia belongs to Central Greece, and the joint resistance of the four regions has not yet ended, but in fact only the Peloponnese and Athens are the backbone of the resistance.

These two districts have always been the most powerful power in Greece, as early as the ancient Greek period, the Athenian League and the Spartan League were based on the two places, each with hundreds of thousands of people and tens of thousands of troops, but unfortunately in modern times, the population of the two places has declined, the population of Athens used to be only 200,000, in recent years, the king encouraged industry, attracted immigrants, so that the population of Athens increased to 300,000.

Therefore, the Athenian region was the most powerful, and the king took advantage of his position to form an army of 20,000 men, while the Peloponnesian local forces only had an army of just over 10,000.

The wisest option, now the Peloponnese should actively support the king, putting their own armed forces under the command of the king, so that it will be easier to encircle the remaining lands. Unfortunately, the Peloponnese still refused to allow the king to command their local armies. The reason is very simple, after occupying Central and Western Greece, the next step of the Ottoman army must be to attack Athens first, to attack the Peloponnese, it must pass through the Isthmus of Corinth, without capturing Athens, it is impossible for the Ottoman army to reach this isthmus. This isthmus is a natural danger that the Spartans defeated the invincible Persian army in the Greco-Persian Wars.

The defeat in the war made the Peloponnesian local power even more paranoid and emboldened, and they even began to doubt the king's ability. They believed that the king should be held responsible for the loss of Central and Western Greece. Because according to the circumstances of the war, the king's army was the first to withdraw. On the contrary, the local armed forces persisted to the end, after all, the people were protecting their families and land. In the light of this situation, the Peloponnesian delegates stated that they could not put their local armies under the command of forces that refused to fight to the end for the Peloponnese.

Zhou Chenggong did not deny the retreat of China and Western Greece, and the government army was the first to retreat, and it was on his orders. Zhou Chenggong did have the idea of eradicating local factions with the help of the Ottoman Empire at first, but that was at the beginning; After seeing the reality that the Ottoman army was indeed stronger than the Greek army, in the battle to defend Central and Western Greece, the government army fought quite hard, excluding 13,000 troops and suffering more than 3,000 casualties. However, the overall strength gap is too large, the Ottoman army has increased to 80,000, which is almost one-tenth of the entire Greek population, and it is almost difficult to stop the other party in the case of similar technical level, equipment level, and even the Ottoman army is slightly better. So Zhou Chenggong finally ordered a retreat to preserve the living force.

It's not that he is selfish, he still understands the truth that there are no eggs under the nest, and it is necessary to eradicate local factions, but he can't lose the whole of Greece because of this. So the Peloponnesian accusations are not justified, but they are also true.

Zhou Chenggong was too lazy to cross the border, and it was the right thing to organize the defense of Athens. After this period of political operation, the remaining Central and Western Greek forces were willing to accept the reorganization of the king, and their armies in the northwestern Peloponnese and on the island of Evia were all withdrawn to Greek territory to be reorganized, and then defended Athens under the king's banner.

The integration of local factions allowed Zhou Chenggong's army to recover to 20,000 men, but the gap was still obvious compared to the Ottoman army.

But during this time, Zhou Chenggong was not idle in diplomacy, and after the outbreak of war, he quickly launched diplomatic actions. France and Russia were willing to support Greece and provided a large amount of military assistance, and in addition to providing a large amount of weapons assistance, they also sent some "retired officers" to Greece as advisers in their personal names. Especially in Russia, there were a large number of Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast in ancient times, and during the Eastern Roman Empire, when Greek was the official language, the Black Sea coast was under the rule of Eastern Rome, and the Eastern Roman Empire fell only a few hundred years ago, so there were a large number of Greek expatriates who believed in Greek Orthodoxy on the Black Sea coast.

Many of these expatriates had served in the Russian army, and many even held Russian aristocratic titles, such as the leaders of the Society of Friendship who led the Greek uprising. For example, Epsilandis, who took the lead in organizing the uprising, worked in the Russian diplomatic service for a long time.

The arrival of these "volunteers" greatly strengthened the strength of the Greek army, bringing the total strength of the Greek army to 30,000 people, although there was still a big gap compared with the number of the Ottoman army, but relying on the favorable terrain to gradually block the Ottoman army with a longer and longer front.

However, at this time, the Ottomans still considered victory to be assured, and they only had to face each other for a few months after waiting for supplies and new reinforcements to arrive, because the Greek terrain was too complicated, which made it temporarily difficult to transport supplies.

Zhou Chenggong was not satisfied with the first successful situation of blocking the attack of the Ottoman army, in fact, he had been planning a counteroffensive, and a news that he had been waiting for for a long time finally came, the Manchu Empire sent troops!