Robert William Smart, early 19th Century, and Henry Pyall (1795-1833), after Sir John Theophilus Lee

The Battle of Navarino took place on the 20th October 1827 in Navarino Bay off the west coast of the Peloponnese peninsula, in the Ionian Sea where a combined British, French and Russian force defeated the joint Ottoman and Egyptian fleet. The central factor which precipitated the intervention of the three European powers during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832), was Russia's ambition to expand in the Black Sea region at the expense of the Ottoman Empire and to support the fellow Orthodox Christian Greeks, who had rebelled against their Ottoman overlords in 1821. The British were forced to intervene, fearing that an unrestrained Russia would dismantle the Ottoman Empire altogether and establish Russian hegemony in the Near East. France joined the other two powers in order to restore her leading role in European affairs after her defeat in the Napoleonic Wars.