Since the fourteenth century, Greece had been a territory of the Ottoman Empire. The rise of revolutionary nationalism in Europe fueled a Greek independence fight that started in 1821. Poets and painters praised Greece as a source of European culture and rallied mass support for its fight against a Muslim empire. Nationalists in Greece got help from fellow Greeks who went into exile, as well as from numerous Western Europeans who admired old Greek culture. The Treaty of Constantinople of 1832 established Greece as an independent state.