Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina Page 2
After Byron, Edward Gally Knight, a poetic imitator of Byron, traveller, activist for Greek liberation and later an MP, followed close in his footsteps. Sir Henry Holland, physician, was there between 1812 and 1813, at the same time as the Danish archaeologist Peter Oluf Brønsted whose excavating party in Greece had included the architect, Charles Robert Cockerell. Cockerell visited Epirus with the scholar, the Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes. His Travels in Sicily, Greece, and Albania (1820) was illustrated with drawings by Cockerell and translated into French and German. Another acquaintance of Cockerell’s received by Ali Pasha was the French painter Louis Dupré who made a tour of Greece with three other English travellers in 1819, who also acted as his patrons and publishers. Dupré is particularly admired for his paintings of individuals and their costumes and weapons. An exception to the norm was Ibrahim Manzour, soldier of fortune and author, and convert to Islam otherwise known as Samson Cerfbeer de Médelsheim, born in Strasbourg. He wrote his own Mémoires of life at Ali’s court from his experience as his military advisor from 1814 to 1817. Edward Everett was the first American to visit Ali’s court in the early summer of 1819. A fervent philhellene and activist in the Greek cause, he travelled to Epirus during his tour of Europe and Turkey on completion of his studies at Göttingen University in Germany, he went on to become a diplomat, President of Harvard and a Secretary of State.
François Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville (1770–1838): French physician, diplomat, writer, explorer and ardent philhellene. A fierce critic of Ali Pasha and those who accepted his hospitality, such as Lord Byron, he had declared Napoleon as the forerunner of the Greek freedom movement as early as 1805. He met Thomas Hughes in Ioannina and the two men became close friends and travelled Greece together. His writings on geography and topography were the basis for the work of many later French geographers and are comparable to that of Leake. His philhellenic writings were extremely influential and inspired painters such as Ary Scheffer and Francesco Hayez. Pouqueville was the recipient of the Order of the Redeemer of Greece.
Fig. 2: The artist crossing the Pindus Mountains from Ioannina to Trikkala in 1819 by Louis Dupré from his Voyage â Athènes et â Constantinople (1825).
William Martin Leake FRS (1777–1860): Brilliant topographer, military officer and traveller to the Greek lands. During his early military career he served in the West Indies. Later he acted as a land surveyor for the Royal Artillery within the Ottoman Empire, which gave him the opportunity to develop a deep interest in antiquities and topography. He was the first to record measurements of the Peloponnese for the purpose of creating accurate maps. His unique approach included an interaction between the physical reality of his day and his knowledge of Ancient Greek literature, especially the geographer Pausanias. Upon his retirement from the Army in 1815, Leake pursued his scientific interests further and helped establish the Royal Geographical Society. His highly regarded Topography of Athens was a groundbreaking work and his detailed and extensive travel writings continue to be studied as a valuable record of the period.
Lord George Gordon Byron (1788–1824): Author of The Lament of Tasso, Prometheus, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Giaour, Manfred, The Siege of Corinth and the dramatic work Cain. He was seen as the embodiment of the Romantic ideal, hence the phrase Byronic hero. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw in ‘his eyes the open portals of the sun’. Byron was probably the most famous amongst the many philhellenes discussed in this book and much of his work was influenced and defined by Greece. When Byron died in Missolonghi the news spread like dynamite all over Europe and America, shocking public opinion and giving strength to the Greek fight for independence.
John Cameron ‘Cam’ Hobhouse (Lord Broughton, 1786–1869): Radical politician, author and close friend of Byron’s from their Cambridge years. He accompanied Byron on his travels and recorded his experiences in A Journey through Albania, and other provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople during the years 1809 and 1810. He wrote notes for the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold and upon completion in 1818 Byron dedicated the entire poem to him in a long literary address that stressed that Hobhouse was ‘a friend often tried and never found wanting’.
Sir Henry Holland FRS (1788–1873): Physician, traveller and writer. He travelled to Iceland and the Mediterranean and his travel writings gained him much attention. His expedition to Iceland took place in 1810 in the company of fellow-physician Richard Bright and the mineralogist and geologist George Mackenzie. They took the smallpox vaccine to Iceland and later Holland wrote a thesis on the diseases of Iceland in Latin for Edinburgh University. He served as consultant physician to several Prime Ministers, including George Canning, Physician in Ordinary to Queen Victoria and President of the Royal College of Physicians, while also giving medical advice to his cousin, the novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Gaskell.
Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes (1786–1847): Important theologian, thinker and scholar of Greek. Hughes travelled through Greece with Charles Robert Cockerell, RA, who illustrated his well-known record of their journey Travels to Greece and Albania. Subsequently he authored several notable theological works and continued the History of England by David Hume and Tobias Smollett, producing volumes 14–21. Hughes wrote passionately about Greek freedom, especially after the Massacre of Chios. Hughes is the author of the poem Belshazzar’s Feast, which inspired the apocalyptic vision of John Martin’s eponymous painting.
Introduction
Anyone lucky enough to travel through the beautifully rugged mountain landscape of north-western Greece and southern Albania will soon be aware of numerous grey and forbidding fortifications dotting the landscape. Enquiries will reveal them to be, often as not, associated with a notorious local ruler known as Ali Pasha. The first time I heard this name was as a child holidaying in Greece. When our party was visiting Ioannina, then well off the tourist map, we took the short boat trip to the little island of Pamvotis, on the lake by which the city stands. At a little taverna, a traditional travelling musician serenaded us with the story of Ali’s exploits, and the mystery of his name and its association with the place of his dramatic death, must have left as deep an impression on me as his deeds have on the local landscape. Ioannina, once Ali’s capital, is full of his memory, and his reputation continues, as both hero and villain, in tales associated with local landmarks and in folk song. Ali is so ingrained into the fabric of the local culture that throughout the region it feels as though his ghost is following you around.
This region, once ancient Epirus, is split between modern Greece and Albania. Classical antiquities are less conspicuous here than in the Greek heartlands further south, but there is still a wealth of history to be seen: Byzantine, Crusader and Venetian. Then a void appears in the story, for the shadow of the Ottoman Empire falls across the land, and time seems to stand still. For almost 500 years Epirus is under the ‘dead hand’ of the Sultan’s rule in Constantinople, and it is the almost timeless and larger than life Ali who emerges to fill this historical gap.
Ali Pasha lived around 200 years ago during the long period of Ottoman decline. Surprisingly, considering his obscure origins, Ali left more than just a mark on his native land. His exploitation of the Empire’s weakness at this time brought him to the attention of the Western Powers and through travellers’ tales and poetic fantasizing his exploits became the sensational matter of popular imagination and culture. For those of us in the West this period can be reconstructed within the framework of our conceptions of the Napoleonic wars and romanticism. For the descendants of those Europeans living under what was referred to as ‘the Ottoman yoke’ this is an enigmatic and different past, messy and contradictory, as defined as if crossing a border. Never has the quote, ‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ been more true.1 For the overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian Greeks memories of Muslim Turkish occupation are bitter, and felt to be best forgotten. The Albanians too, both Christian and Muslim, were only too glad to gain independence and rid themselve
s of Turkish rule. Consequently, with the consciously nationalist creation of modern identities much of this Ottoman related legacy has been cleansed away and, with it, Ali’s memory too has been anaesthetized by being consigned to legend and folklore.
Fig. 3: Ioannina and the lake, photo by Derek Smith.
It is the purpose of this book to reimagine Ottoman Greece and Albania and its complex relationship with the rest of Europe, and to restore Ali Pasha to the prominence he once held, as a major player in the power struggles of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe.
In 1834 two young English adventurers, John Saville, Earl of Mexborough, and Alexander William Kinglake, arrived at Semlin, a town at the confluence of the River Sava with the Danube. The two old Etonians were on their way eastward to make a tour of the Levant, which today we might refer to as the eastern Mediterranean. Kinglake subsequently used the raw material from this trip as the basis for an idiosyncratic and fancifully ironic travel book, Eothen or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, which provides a window into the mindset of a certain type of nineteenth century traveller. What is interesting about Semlin is that at that time it stood at the border between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, and it marked not only a physical barrier but a mental watershed, for it was here, in central Europe, that the pair prepared to leave the sights and sounds of familiar life, where the women went unveiled, to cross from ‘wheel-going Europe’ into the ‘Splendour and havoc of the East’.
Semlin was the German name for what is today the modern suburb of Zemun, absorbed by its neighbour across the Sava, the city of Belgrade, and despite it being no more than a ‘cannon shot’ from its castle to the opposite bank, Kinglake reports that there was ‘no communion’ between the two sides. Belgrade’s own fortress was garrisoned by Turkish troops under the command of a local pasha. Although Serbia had gained semi-independence it still remained under the nominal rule of the Ottoman Empire. The border crossing therefore represented the fault line between two empires and two cultures. This transition into what was known as ‘Turkey in Europe’, was underlined by forced passage through the town’s Quarantine Establishment (Lazaretto), for, according to Kinglake, the lands of the Ottoman Empire were almost perpetually in the grip of ‘the Plague’, marked by the flying of a yellow flag. Those returning into Austria-Hungary would also have to endure a fourteen-day stay in the ‘odious Lazaretto’. Kinglake was writing for effect and his heightened reminiscences must be taken with a pinch of salt, but the threat of plague was real enough. When the nonsense poet and landscape painter, Edward Lear, arrived in Thessaloniki in 1848 on route to Mt Athos, he encountered the plague first-hand; the city so in its grip that he was obliged to take a more adventurous and circuitous route through the Ottoman Balkans by way of Macedonia, Albania, Epirus and Thessaly!
Travellers coming back from the East to Western Europe were always subjected to stays in quarantine. This reflected a difference in attitude; whereas Europeans thought plague was something that could be controlled, the Ottomans were fatalistic, attributing it to an act of God. Differences in religion were compounded with the feeling that, with advances in science and technology, Europe was becoming increasingly ‘enlightened’ while the Orient was already backward. Not until 1838 did Ottoman reforms impose their own quarantine, but this was partially as a way to restrict European influence. Such impediments emphasized the crossing from one world to another. Ironically, even a visit to Greece, the birthplace of European civilization, necessitated such a shock to the system for the unprepared. Hans Christian Andersen, the children’s author, records in his own Eastern travel memoir, A Poets Bazaar, how on arrival in the Bay of Piraeus in 1841, the passengers were obliged to spend three days on board ship in quarantine before setting foot in Athens. Southern Greece, which had only been officially liberated from Ottoman rule since 1832, was not yet ‘westernized’. This ambiguity of place in the Balkans influenced the way western travellers reacted to the local population, imbuing them with vices and virtues, often indiscriminately, depending on their own cultural prejudices. On his return journey, Andersen endured a further ten days in the prison-like quarantine quarters in Orsova, today on the Romanian bank of the Danube.
Since the Ottoman conquests of the fifteenth century, the Orient, then, had begun in Eastern Europe, and once there, you were in a land, Lear said, without pots and pans; a land where one sat on the floor to eat; a land of Turkish carpets, pashas, whirling dervishes, long nargile pipes, minarets, seraglios and camels; a land of The Arabian Nights peopled by European subjects. Since the translation from the Arabic of The One Thousand and One Nights at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the European imagination had been fired by Romantic visions of Eastern exoticism.2 As the Ottoman Empire became less of a threat, its power eclipsed by the rise of its European rivals, this interest increased, so much so that ‘Orientalism’ became a fashion. Since the Second World War, the spread of westernization and its consequences have tarnished this romance, but for those of Kinglake’s contemporaries who found Western manners stifling they would have shared his delight in being ‘free from the stale civilization of Europe’. As Lord Byron had discovered, twenty-five years previously, to be ‘free’ was just a short hop across the Adriatic from Italy to ‘Albania’, where he was able to indulge his fantasies, while in the process becoming a celebrity. His fictionalized memoirs in verse of his Grand Tour, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages, were the publishing sensation that in the process introduced Ali Pasha to a wide audience.
With a little help from Byron, the colourful Ali dazzlingly emerged from the obscurity of a little known Ottoman backwater on Europe’s doorstep, to hold its leaders and public in thrall. Even though the continent was busy tearing itself apart during what is loosely termed the Napoleonic wars, his sideshow fulfilled all Orientalist preconceptions; he was Ali Pasha, ‘Aslan’, the Lion of Ioannina, the epitome of the Oriental despot, fascinating and loathsome in equal measure. Fortuitous to emerge just at the right time in world affairs, and in the right place, he was both distrusted and courted. For a quixotic moment he held centre stage, seemingly indispensable to the schemes of the warring parties, only to disappear into the shadows again.
The contemporary view of the East, as a place both fearful and exotically enticing, so clouded the picture of Ali Pasha, that, even during his own lifetime, he is as elusive as any typical folklore hero, a Robin Hood or William Tell. Despite the marks left by the harsh experience of his uncompromising rule, his greatest legacy at first appeared to be to the world of the imagination; even when his moment was passed his fame lingered on in Europe throughout the nineteenth century. When the Balkans were finally freed from Turkish rule in the next century interest in their Ottoman history waned. For Western visitors to Greece, the classical past was more relevant; a past the locals were only too happy to promote. In the meantime, much of Ali’s territory was, until recently, well off the tourist trail. Recent events in Albania and improvements in communications have made Ali’s physical legacy accessible, and the Ottoman world of Turkey in Europe is distant enough to safely revisit. Modern conservation of the monuments of this period has helped to bring this past back to life. This renewed interest makes it possible to attempt a more dispassionate and hopefully objective unravelling of his true story from the fiction and an assessment of his impact. Present preoccupations with events in the Middle East make it a prescient time to look back on the political and cultural antecedents of the relationship between East and West.
Ali Pasha’s story is entertaining in itself, with many anecdotes that have been embellished along the way, but it is nothing more than that unless put into a context. To establish the larger picture, his geographical and historical positioning gives a perspective on why Ali Pasha became so famous in his lifetime and infamous afterwards. From the tales about him it appears as though he emerged fully formed from the mountain mist. The conditions that allowed a former bandit leader to become the de facto ruler of nearly all Ottoman Albania and Greece, for much
of the time thumbing his nose at the authority of the Sultan, were of their time and place, but they have modern parallels. The context helps us gain a view as to whether Ali’s success as a political manoeuvrer was in part due to being in the right place at the right time, expediency, or skill, comparable to a modern-day Afghani warlord or a precursor of the archetypal Middle Eastern ruler, a Saddam Hussein of Iraq or a Bashar al-Assad of Syria, adept at playing off competing powers to maintain his position.3 Ali’s territorial expansion gained him a formidable military reputation, earning comparisons with the great General Napoleon himself; he was the ‘Muslim Bonaparte’ according to Lord Byron. This reputation as a war leader and wily diplomat was built largely on reports coming back to Europe from Western visitors to his court at Ioannina. These stories were the fuel for the legend.