In January 1822 Haiti’s president Jeanne-Pierre Boyer sent a letter to a group of Paris-based intellectuals working to rally support for the Greek Revolution. Boyer connected the Haitians’ recent successful struggle against colonial tyranny with the Greeks’ own fight against slavery and despotism. In the revolutionary Greeks, Boyer saw “the descendants of ancient Hellenes,” the children of Leonidas, and the heirs of Miltiades. He registered his intention to offer monetary assistance — while also noting the financial restrictions placed on newly independent Haiti.

The Haitian letter of support has, a little inaccurately, often been seen as the first formal recognition of the Greeks’ fight for independence. One myth still circulating in Greece even claims that Haitian soldiers joined the pro-Greek “philhellenic” legions. Yet Boyer’s references to the ancient world, and the parallels he drew between Greece and Haiti point to two key features of this moment: the mobilizing role of a particular version of classical antiquity and the wider transnational revolutionary context in which both events may be understood.

The Greek Revolution was far from a singular event. It accommodated different and, sometimes, conflicting political languages associated with Western, Ottoman, and indigenous political traditions. The revolutionaries’ ideas blended secular and Christian ideals; some even saw this as a redemptive millenarian battle in which the end of Ottoman control would coincide with the restoration of the Byzantine empire or — in more extreme versions — the Second Coming.