Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina Read online

LVI He pass’d the sacred Haram’s4 silent tower,

  And underneath the wide o’er-arching gate

  Survey’d the dwelling of this chief of power,

  Where all around proclaim’d his high estate.

  Amidst no common pomp the despot sate,

  While busy preparation shook the court,

  Slaves, eunuchs, soldiers, guests, and santons5 wait;

  Within, a palace, and without, a fort:

  Here men of every clime appear to make resort.

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  LVII Richly caparison’d, a ready row

  Of armed horse, and many a warlike store,

  Circled the wide extending court below;

  Above, strange groups adorn’d the corridore;

  And oft-times through the Area’s echoing door,

  Some high-capp’d Tartar spurr’d his steed away:

  The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Moor,

  Here mingled in their many-hued array,

  While the deep war-drum’s sound announced the close of day.

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  LXII In marble-paved pavilion, where a spring

  Of living water from the centre rose,

  Whose bubbling did a genial freshness fling,

  And soft voluptuous couches breathed repose,

  ALI6 reclined, a man of war and woes:

  Yet in his lineaments ye cannot trace,

  While Gentleness her milder radiance throws

  Along that aged venerable face,

  The deeds that lurk beneath, and stain him with disgrace. 550

  LXIII It is not that yon hoary lengthening beard

  Ill suits the passions which belong to youth;

  Love conquers age -- so Hafiz7 hath averr’d,

  So sings the Teian,8 and he sings in sooth --

  But crimes that scorn the tender voice of truth,

  Beseeming all men ill, but most the man

  In years, have mark’d him with a tiger’s tooth;

  Blood follows blood, and, through their mortal span,

  In bloodier acts conclude those who with blood began. 560

  From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II, published in 1812.

  Fig. 14: Ali Pasha hears the pleas of a supplicant (1813) by Charles Robert Cockerell.

  On the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, Byron later remarked, ‘I woke up to find myself famous’. The poem’s overnight success made the young Lord George Gordon an instant celebrity, and as a consequence of its international fame promoted the mystique of a hitherto obscure Albanian warlord, Ali Pasha. Its narrative follows the journey of a dissolute and disenchanted youth who seeks escape through exotic travel, a theme that was perfectly timed to tap into the growing Continental tastes for romanticism and Orientalism. It was not a work of pure fiction though, but an imaginative retelling of the author’s own adventures, interspersed with meditations arising from his new experiences. One such key moment, the dramatic and evocative description of Byron’s alter ego Childe Harold’s arrival at Ali’s court, gave the European reading public a tantalizing glimpse into a hidden world, and forever linked Ali with Byron both in life and the imagination. This fanciful version of the real-life, and at the time unlikely, meeting of the rising star of the Romantic Movement and a Balkan petty despot is conjured up in dreamlike language reminiscent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, with its vivid portrayal of the Mongol emperor’s paradise palace.9 It was at Tepelene that Ali had built his own version of paradise, a lavish palace or seraglio, and it was here that Byron and his old Cambridge friend ‘Cam’ Hobhouse were invited to meet him, in 1809. Hobhouse kept his own diary of the journey and his account, with its description of Ali, was published a year later, filling out the prosaic details.10

  When Byron and Hobhouse met Ali Pasha he was by then an established potentate in the Oriental fashion, and as a pasha of three tails, the highest rank, commonly given the title of vizier. Although Byron relished the notion of being a pioneer in travelling to such a remote region as Albania, and it is true that Ali’s court would be relatively inundated with Western visitors following in his footsteps, he and Hobhouse were not the first Westerners to pay Ali court. Ali’s growing clout and reputation had made him of great interest to the ‘powers’ (Britain, France, Austria and Russia) as well as of concern to the Sultan. The French had established diplomatic relations since 1797, and François Pouqueville, who would have a profound influence on French writers and politics, was their ambassador there from 1806 to 1815. Britain, concerned with this French influence, responded by making its own representations, and from 1801 onwards had formal relations. Captain William Leake was their man in Ioannina, Ali’s capital. Leake was well travelled and knowledgeable with a military man’s interest in topography and ancient history. His own meticulous accounts of his experiences, Travels in Northern Greece, were not published until 1835, by which time Ali’s name was well known. Leake’s description of Tepelene, on a bluff above the River Vjosë (Aoos) with its palace ‘one of the most romantic and delightful country-houses that can be imagined’, while accurate, would not linger in the imagination to challenge Byron. Reality and romance would be in continuous tension in the recording of all that surrounded Ali. In his diary, Hobhouse records his first impression of Tepelene as ‘ill-looking and small’.

  Byron’s poetic antennae were sensitive to a different reality and alert to the making of a legend, one growing in the telling there and then. Ali’s life had already been committed to verse in the Alipashiad by his court poet, Haxhi Shehreti (Hatzi-Secharis, Hatzi-Sechris or Hadji Seret), a work Leake analysed in his Travels, and visitors were honoured in Ali’s presence with war-songs about his victories over the Suliotes. Through Byron’s eyes this inflated heroic vision of Ali, Albania and Greece became the raw material for an Oriental dream. Byron was also sympathetic to other resonances. His descriptions and meditations chimed in with universal, grass roots notions of liberty and nationalism that were taking hold all over Europe. In Britain, memories of the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 were still fresh. Rob Roy McGregor, whose exploits were fictionalized by Sir Walter Scott in 1817, was a prototype of the Romantic outlaw and freedom fighting folk hero. A legend too in his lifetime, he was moulded into a cultural icon of the nineteenth century. The tragically heroic defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Scottish clans at Culloden, which finally put an end to rival claimants to the British crown, only added to this myth-making. The stories around Ali, ambiguous and malleable, provided new source material for the outlaw turned hero, or tyrant turned freedom fighter, and Byron was particularly sensitive to the Romantic appeal of these contradictions.

  Because of his turbulent family background Byron had spent his early childhood growing up in relatively humble circumstances in Aberdeenshire. As a Radical, he would have had little sympathy with the absolutism of the Stuart pretenders to the British throne, but he was descended on his mother’s side from King James I of Scotland, and the history of his ‘Ill starr’d, though brave’ ancestors who were ‘destined to die at Culloden’, was all around him. His poem Lachin y Gair (1807) recalls the mountains of his youth where:

  my young footsteps in infancy, wander’d:

  My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid;

  On chieftains, long perish’d, my memory ponder’d,

  As daily I strode through the pine-cover’d glade;

  With such thoughts in mind he found in Albania a second home. The rugged Epirote Mountains immediately struck a chord, being ‘Caledonian, with a kinder climate’, and the independence and feuding of the Albanian families reminded him of the humbled Scottish clans. The right to wear their highland dress, the kilt, had only been restored to them six years before his birth, so when he wrote, ‘The Albanese struck me forcibly by their resemblance to the Highlanders of Scotland, in dress, figure and manner of living’, there was an added poignancy. These foreign highlanders inhabiting their ‘glens’ dressed in warlike attire that consisted of a ‘
kilt’, or fustanella, recalled the lost highland glory. Even the Bristol born Hobhouse succumbed to this Caledonian nostalgia; the Gulf of Arta, reminding him of Loch Lomond. A few years later, Sir Henry Holland (from Cheshire), who went on to study medicine at Edinburgh University, also made the connection. He visited Albania between 1812 and 1813 and in his subsequent account put the size of population at less than 2 million with ‘the superficial extent of Ali Pasha’s dominions not differing greatly from that of the sister kingdom’ of Scotland.

  Ali already had a ferocious reputation. Byron and Hobhouse were not totally ignorant of this before they set off for his territories, but they were young; Byron was only 21, and somewhat politically naive. They had decided to visit Ali seemingly as the result of a last-minute whim while on a stopover in Malta, a port of call on their Grand Tour. As the usual itinerary for such an enterprise was no longer available due to Napoleon’s occupation of Italy, they had taken a circuitous route via Portugal and Spain, with the intention of making for Constantinople and the Levant instead; wanderings that would provide the raw material for Childe Harold. Britain’s treaty with the Ottomans in 1799 had opened up the option of visiting the Balkans on the way, and in particular Greece, the authentic birthplace of classical civilization. Albania was a further detour.

  Malta, liberated from the French in 1800, was quickly becoming key to British interests and shipping in the Mediterranean. Here they met Spyridon and George Foresti, father and son, Greeks from Zante, one of the Ionian Islands, and both in the service of the British Government. Spyridon had acquired a dashing reputation when, as Assistant to the English Consul at Zante, he had single-handedly boarded The Grand Duchess of Tuscany, shot and overpowered the pirate who had captured her and salvaged £80,000 worth of cargo. With the islands back in the hands of the French, he was now the exiled English resident in Corfu, apparently with time on his hands. Idling on Malta as yet undecided as to their next move, it was Spyridon who seems to have been largely responsible for Byron and Hobhouse visiting Albania and Ali.

  Foresti showed them the sights, all the while beguiling them with stories of Ali, who was at this time friendly towards Britain. Napoleon had apparently sent Ali a snuffbox with his picture on it. Byron wrote to his mother that Ali thought ‘the snuffbox was very well, but the picture he could excuse, as he neither liked it nor the original’. Hobhouse’s diary records that Foresti told them of ‘some curious passages from the wars of the Suliotes written in Modern Greek’ in which,

  Three hundred women flung themselves over a cliff. The son of the chief Suliote being taken before the son of Ali Pacha in Ioannina, the young Pacha addressed him with, ‘Well, we have got you and we will now burn you alive’ – ‘I know it,’ replied the prisoner, ‘and when my father catches you he will serve you in the same manner.’

  Within six days, in late September, Byron and Hobhouse were aboard The Spider and under sail bound for Preveza, with letters of introduction to ‘Captain Leake’ at Ioannina and to Ali’s court. The exact motives and circumstances of Foresti in diverting Byron towards Ali are murky and will be examined later.

  On arrival at a newly built barrack at Salora, the tiny port and custom depot of Arta, Byron was regaled by songs from the Albanian guards. One song eulogized the taking of the nearby port of Preveza from the French (and its Greek defenders), while extolling the name of Ali. Hobhouse tells us that when Ali’s name came round in a song it was dwelt on and roared out with particular energy. This event had taken place eleven years earlier, but the material found its way into Childe Harold, where Byron paraphrased the war-songs sung by the victorious dancing Suliotes:

  Remember the moment when Previsa fell,

  The shrieks of the conquered, the conqueror’s yell;

  The roofs that we fired, and the plunder we shared,

  The wealthy we slaughtered, the lovely we spared.

  I talk not of mercy, I talk not of fear;

  He neither must know who would serve the Vizier;

  Since the days of our prophet, the crescent ne’er saw

  A chief ever glorious like Ali Pasha.

  These were the very same Suliotes he had heard about killing themselves rather than surrender to Ali. The song goes on to glorify Ali’s eldest son, ‘Dark Muchtar’ in Byron’s phrase, who with his horsemen was at this time distinguishing himself campaigning on the Danube against the Russians.

  Thomas Hughes who travelled through Greece between 1813 and 1814 with the architect and archaeologist Charles Cockerell records in his own Travels that songs of Ali Pasha’s exploits were commonplace. As he sailed through the Gulf of Corinth toward Epirus, he was introduced to Ali in song by the sailors on his boat who ‘struck up one of those wild national airs… [which] turn generally upon the exploits and adventures of Ali Pasha or some other modern hero’. Byron’s telling of the taking of Preveza avoids the ferocity of Ali’s attack and the mutilation of the executed prisoners. These dark deeds had been reported to Napoleon and published by Captain JP Bellaire in 1805, but he judiciously does not mention the beheading of the Greeks in front of Ali or the pyramid of skulls. Byron was receiving a swift education in the shifting alliances of Albanian politics. As he noted ‘some daring mountain-band’ would challenge Ali’s power and ‘from their rocky hold / Hurl their defiance’, but they would not yield; they could always be bought for gold however. Indeed, adaptability was a necessary virtue of survival. As Edward Lear noted of his host when lodging in Himara many years later (1848); a Greek ‘palikar’, he had had an adventurous history as ‘one of the Khimariotes taken by Ali Pasha as hostages, and was long imprisoned at Ioannina; he was also in the French-Neapolitan service, and more lately, one of Lord Byron’s suite at Missolonghi’ during the Greek War of Independence.

  Despite any doubts, Byron delighted in the novelty of Albania, liked the Albanians and in a letter to his mother is full of admiration for the Albanian troops, the ‘best in the Turkish service’ and much taken with everything Turkish. Byron’s attitude to things foreign was open. He made a point of not being biased towards Britain, taking everything on merit, and was disappointed with his servant Fletcher for complaining about everything, from the accommodation, the modes of transport, the food and drink, to the lack of tea! Hobhouse did not share Byron’s wholehearted enthusiasm. In his diary he relates that foreigners were not welcome in Epirus, noted the subservience of the local Greeks and the arrogant behaviour of the Turks who happily let off their guns at whoever displeased them. At the same time he introduces his audience to what became the familiar tropes of Orientalist art and literature: the luxury and colour, the chaos and the squalor, the secretive latticed windows of the houses, the bustle of the bazaar.

  Fig. 15: The Palace of Ali Pasha at Ioannina from The Life and Works of Lord Byron illustrated by JD Harding, 1835.

  Their first encounter with the ferocity of Ali’s rule was on entering his seat of power at Ioannina, where they were sickened by the sight of an arm and part of the right side of a body hanging from a tree. A reminder that Ali’s

  dread command

  Is lawless law; for with a bloody hand

  He sways a nation, turbulent and bold:

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  Their first impression was that these were the remains of a robber. Although in his Diary Hobhouse says the sight made he and Byron ‘a little sick’, in his Travels he shows a certain amount of restraint in condemning this spectacle of Eastern barbarity by commenting that it was only fifty years previously that such a sight would have been common within Temple Bar in London. Only later were they made aware it was a part of the unfortunate Euthemos Blacavas, an insurrectionist Greek priest beheaded five days earlier. If it was Blacavas, who had led a nationalist revolt in Thessaly in the spring of the previous year, it had been some time since he was captured, tortured and then executed. Anyone who had read Pouqueville’s rather gloomily gothic account of his own first audience with Ali would have been prepared for such macabre sights. On his second meeting, Pouquev
ille passed two freshly severed heads stuck on poles adorning the courtyard of the audience chamber. These had not been there the day before, but went unremarked by the mingling clients and petitioners awaiting their turn. Byron’s poetic account is more impressionistic and circumspect, hinting that such dark deeds ‘lurk beneath’, and prophetically that through the stain of Ali’s ‘bloody hand’, ‘bloodier acts conclude those who with blood began’.

  Fig. 16: The house of Nicolo Argyris in Janina (1813) by Charles Cockerell, where most of the notable British visitors lodged. Hughes refers to the plate that illustrates his book as a ‘beautiful and accurate view’.

  Byron’s likening of Albania with Scotland recognizes perhaps more than a superficial similarity of topography and clan structure, but of poverty and disadvantage well away from the effete world of the court of George III and the Regency. Byron the outsider, not entirely welcome in his own land, was happy to embrace fellow outsiders in a way that other well-bred travellers were not. The examples of Ali’s cruelty were another matter. From the reports these acts would appear as though they were something unique to the East. By twenty-first century standards Ali’s behaviour was appalling, and seemed shocking to many of his visitors, but the superiority of the Westerners towards what they saw as Oriental despotism would give the impression that they were coming from a world that was totally unused to such things. Yet, in Britain ‘Butcher’ Cumberland, George III’s uncle, had not got his nickname for nothing in the aftermath of Culloden (1745–7), it had not been long since the French revolutionaries had displayed their own taste for bloodletting in the dark days of the Terror (1793–4), or the atrocities committed by both sides in the Dos de Mayo Uprising and the Peninsular War (1808–14), so unflinchingly depicted by Francisco Goya in his series of prints The Disasters of War (undertaken between 1810 and 1820).