estimates of the casualties vary, the Turkish, Muslim Albanian and Jewish population of the Peloponnese had ceased to exist as a settled community. Some estimates of the Turkish and Muslim Albanian civilian deaths by the rebels range from 15,000, 20,000 or more out of 40,000 Muslim residents to 30,000 only in Tripolitsa. Massacres of Turkish civilians started simultaneously with the outbreak of the revolt. Historian George Finlay claimed that the extermination of the Muslims in the rural districts was the result of a premeditated design and it proceeded more from the suggestions of men of letters, than from the revengeful feelings of the people. William St. Clair wrote that: "The orgy of genocide exhausted itself in the Peloponnese only when there were no more Turks to kill." Central Greece In Athens, 1,150 Turks, of whom only 180 were capable of bearing arms, surrendered upon promises of security. W. Alison Phillips noted that: A scene of horror followed which has only too many parallels during the course of this horrible war. Vrachori, modern day Agrinio, was an important town in West-Central Greece. It contained, besides the Christian population, some five hundred Muslim families and about two hundred Jews. The massacres in Vrachori commenced with the Jews and soon Musulmans shared the same fate. Aegean Islands There were also massacres towards the Muslim inhabitants of the islands in the Aegean Sea, in the early years of the Greek revolt. According to historian William St. Clair, one of the aims of the Greek revolutionaries was to embroil as many Greek communities as possible in their struggle. Their technique was "to engineer some atrocity against the local Turkish population", so that these different Greek communities would have to ally themselves with the revolutionaries fearing a retaliation from the Ottomans. In such a case, in March 1821, Greeks from Samos island had landed in the Chios and attacked the Muslim population living in that island. The crews and passengers of Turkish ships captured by Greek cruisers were often put to death: two Ηydriot brigs captured a Turkish ship laden with a valuable cargo, and carrying a number of passengers. Among these was a recently deposed Sheikh-ul-Islam, or patriarch of the Orthodox Muslims, who was said to be going to Mecca for pilgrimage. It was his efforts to prevent the cruel reprisals which, at Constantinople, followed the news of the massacres in Peloponnese, which brought him