The present penultimate volume of my entire work deals with the period from Ibrahim's landing in the Peloponnese, early February 1825, to the Battle of Navarino, October 8/20, 1827, or - if we may be a bit more flexible - to the arrival of Kapodistrias in Greece, early January 1828.

This period is the most critical, the most dramatic, and the most complex of the Great Struggle for Independence. It constitutes a complete chronological set, during which the struggle of the Greeks for their independence is renewed, with greater intensity both in the Peloponnese and in Central Greece, and their efforts to achieve it intensify to the utmost limits of human endurance.

In the Peloponnese, the superficial outlook of the political leadership towards the obvious new dangers that would come from Egypt, its criminal slowness in making and executing the necessary decisions and measures, the delay in the immediate confrontation with the Egyptians right after their landing on the Messinian peninsula, the arrogance of the Greeks in front of their opponents trained in European military tactics, the inept supreme leadership of the army headed by the naval commander Kyriakos Skourti, as well as the various inherent weaknesses in political and military organization, were the fatal sins and shortcomings that dragged the Greeks, especially the Peloponnesians, weary from the civil war, into their initial failures in conflicts, which brought them down from the clouds and crushed their morale.