Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

by Eugenia Russell

  My friends, Captain Bogia [Botsaris] and Captain Giavella [Tzavelas], I, Ali Pasha, salute you, and kiss your eyes, because I well know your courage and heroic minds.

  It appears to me that I have great need of you, therefore I entreat you immediately, when you receive my letter, to assemble all your heroes, and come to meet me, that I may go to fight my enemies. This is the hour and the time that I have need of you. I expect to see your friendship, and the love which you have for me. Your pay will be double that which I give to the Albanians, because I know that your courage is greater than theirs; therefore I will not go to fight before you come, and I expect that you will come soon.

  This only, and I salute you.

  The captains cautiously took the bait, perhaps only to test Ali’s intentions. Botsaris replied saying he could not muster enough followers but that Tzavelas would join his army with seventy men as a sign of friendship. After at first being put in the frontline, their suspicions were confirmed when Tzavelas and his men were surprised and seized, some killed on the spot and the rest put in chains and sent to Ioannina. Ali then marched on Suli. Botsaris was already waiting for him. Following the usual Suliote stratagem he had retreated and was dug in with provisions on Mount Tripia, the four villages abandoned and the wells soured. Ali took personal charge aided by Mukhtar, by then pasha of the two tails, and a number of vassal chiefs; and in his train, Tzavelas. Various means were then tried, including the threat of death by flaying alive, to persuade Tzavelas to betray his kinsmen, but to no avail. Tzavelas was then offered his freedom and overlordship of Suli if he could get the Suliotes to submit. Tzavelas agreed, but he was required to hand over his 12 years old son, Fotos, in exchange as surety. Once safe in the mountains Tzavelas sent Ali a letter:

  Ali Pasha, I am glad I have deceived a traitor; I am here to defend my country against a thief. My son will be put to death, but I will desperately revenge him before I fall myself. Some men, like you Turks, will say I am a cruel father to sacrifice my son for my own safety. I answer, if you take the mountain, my son would have been killed, with all the rest of my family and my countrymen; then I could not have revenged his death. If we are victorious, I may have other children, my wife is young. If my son, young as he is, is not willing to be sacrificed for his country, he is not worthy to live, or to be owned by me as my son.

  Advance, traitor, I am impatient to be revenged. I am your sworn enemy. Captain Giavella.

  Fotos was taken to Ioannina. Eton’s dragoman claimed he was a witness when the boy answered Veli Bey’s assertion that he was waiting orders from his father to roast him alive by saying, in true playground manner, that he was unafraid because his father would do the same to Veli’s father if he got hold of him. The Suliotes continued the struggle undeterred and in time-honoured fashion the women joined the fight under the command of Moscho, Tzavelas’ wife. After making no headway in penetrating the high strongholds and some of his support beginning to waiver Ali was forced to cut his losses. He released Fotos and his other hostages, paid a ransom for the liberty of his own prisoners and signed a truce. Yet another campaign into Suliote territory had proved futile and costly, his troops driven back near to the outskirts of Ioannina by the Suliotes and their allies and the number of his Albanian troops killed counted in the thousands as to the less than 100 Suliotes. Eton was a well-connected and well-travelled observer resident at the time in Moscow and Constantinople. His account of the war is the earliest published and written soon after the events; its stories embellished on by later writers to become part of the Suliotes folklore. Eton’s quotations from letters give it the air of veracity but his mistaken and colourful account of the death of Ali’s son Mukhtar in one engagement throws an element of doubt on the details. If the exact details are in doubt, the result was not. For Ali it was a humiliation he would not forget.

  Fig. 28: ‘Suli’, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania… by Edward Lear.

  Correspondence from Ali’s archive places Veli’s wedding in around August of 1794. One of Ali’s patrons, Spyridon Golemis, could not attend, so he wrote in apology to Ali in July sending two boxes ‘of a few sweets’ as a wedding gift. He expressed great joy at the news, implying a relationship of genuine affection between Ali and Veli. The sources reveal that Ali’s relationship with Mukhtar was less cordial. Soon after or on his wedding Veli was given the title of pasha. Assuming Veli was not taking another wife, and there is no indication he did so, this was the marriage made to cement good relations between Ali and Ibrahim of Berat.

  Despite Ali’s setback in Suli, his standing at Constantinople was significant. In response to a plea from the pasha of Negroponte (Euboea) Ali was able to use his influence to effect a reversal of the death penalty imposed on him. Ali’s position of strength had been attained by force within an environment of lawlessness but it now was vital to maintain the peace in order to keep his coffers filled. Villagers complained to him of raids by klephts, often from neighbouring villages, and Suliotes stealing sheep. By offering protection to towns and villages in return for declarations of loyalty he could increase his network of control over an ever-expanding area, planting his representatives and negotiating terms and tax arrangements as need be. Typically letters addressed to Ali from his supplicants are full of obsequious and flattering phrases reflecting the power relationship between them. The people of Kokosi in Thessaly wrote to Ali in 1794 on behalf of ‘Platini, Scourpi, Koffi, and the rest of the villages’, beginning, ‘Your most glorious, sublime, prosperous pasha, our lord, we your servants… kneel in front of your highness, and we kiss your noble hand, and footprints…’. They go on to request the prolonged stay of one of Ali’s boluk-bashis (officers) with his men to protect them from bandits. In response his letters are terse and factual. Similarly on his becoming pasha of Ioannina, the villagers of Kato Soudena asked to be put under his protection in return for payment, and pointedly everyone signed the letter with a promise. Protection was not only from bandits. Although he was officially a representative of the government, Ali offered protection from the Sultan’s tax collectors too, diverting funds that otherwise would have gone to the state for modernization, particularly to the army, or from other persons in authority. By ceding their village to Ali communities could put themselves under his jurisdiction. As Kostas Mitsou, a notable of Dervenditsa (Anthochorion near Metsovo) in the Pindus wrote in his diary, ‘In the year 1795… Ali Pasha made us slaves and took our village as a ciftlic’, and for this plus a yearly tribute he undertook to pay their local taxes to Trikkala, but not those to the Porte. Ali further interfered with the collection and disposal of government tax revenue through the bribery of officials or the allocation of tax collecting duties to his family and followers. According to Finlay the higher ranks of the Orthodox Church colluded with Ali in as much as the bishops were willing to act as his tax collectors, hence the comment by Kir Petros to Leake about the Bishop of Ioannina.

  Not all communities were cowed. Sometimes roles were reversed and Ali would pay to bring a community into his realm or villages would threaten to breakaway, as in 1802 when the villagers of Chebelovo complained that Ali was showing favouritism to their neighbours. If a community was discontented with Ali’s rule it could seek recourse in the Ottoman kadi courts and in neighbouring imperial authorities, or even directly in Constantinople itself. The political intrigues of the Imperial Court meant that his position as dervendji-pasha could never be totally assured and so he kept the wheels oiled at central government through his connections at the capital. In 1797 Stefanos Misiou, one of his lobbyists in the Phanariot elite, informed him that there was a rival bid for the control of the passes. Misiou advised him to make a higher offer to the Treasury and to seek better relations with the local communities who paid him tax, as complaints would give the authorities the excuse to give the post to his rival. In 1798 Ali’s power was felt as far as Veroia, a regional centre in Macedonia, and in 1799 he was formally granted the governorship of Thessaly to rid the region of bandits
, followed by all of Rumeli. The area that Ali controlled and that which was formally recognized as his were not exactly coterminous, but by shows of force he was able to exert pressure to extract taxes beyond the strict confines of his borders. By 1803 several villages in the district of Florina, also in western Macedonia were concluding agreements regarding taxes and dues to be collected. From correspondence with the Divan Efendi at Constantinople it is known that his tax-collecting powers eventually stretched as far north as Prilep, in the centre of the modern Republic of Macedonia, through the ruse of using false identities as a tax-farmer.1

  In 1796 Kara Mahmud Bushati of Scutari invaded Montenegro once more, but this time with the approval of the Porte so as to bring the fractious tribes under control. When he was killed in battle at Krusi, one of his territories, the sanjak of Ochrid, temporarily passed to Mukhtar, formalizing the spread of Ali’s influence in the north. The extension of Ali’s territory north and eastwards did not tempt him to move his centre of operations. Ali was relatively secure within his own mountain homeland and with his acquisition of the natural regional centre of Ioannina, he became part of an international network. The stability he brought helped the town become more cosmopolitan and his increased importance attracted a growing number of foreigners to his court. The French already had consuls at Arta and Preveza when, according to Vaudoncourt, Ali tried to approach Louis XVI as a precautionary counter to protect him against his enemies at Constantinople, with no success. Once he was firmly established though, he was strategically well placed to take advantage of the forthcoming political manoeuvrings of Britain, France and Russia. By 1794, according to the Russian Consul General at Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Cezzar Pasha of Damascus (who later helped in the defeat of Napoleon in Egypt), Mahmud Bushati Pasha of Scutari and Ali Pasha of Tepelene were regional governors who had usurped authority and the Porte could do little about it. Ali’s weakness was his inherited problem of the Venetians who hemmed in Epirus from the sea, controlling the ports and the Ionian straits. They had obtained an agreement from the Porte in 1788 that allowed no Turkish vessels access and no gun emplacements within a mile of the coast. These constraints were a hindrance to the trade of Epirus as well as to Ali’s military ambitions. But Venice’s star was on the wane. The Treaty of Jassy, concluded between Russia and Turkey in 1792, allowed Greeks to sail under the Russian flag, laying the foundation of Greek shipping and opening up trade with the Crimea. Events then changed even more dramatically to the west in Europe. Revolution in France was followed by the arrival of the French on Ali’s doorstep as the dominant force. Eton’s dragoman informant of the events in Suli was an interpreter sent on business to Ali Pasha in Ioannina by the French consul of Salonika, Esprit-Marie Cousinéry, a philhellene and supporter of Greek independence. Here he met de Lassale, the consul of Preveza, or as Davenport calls him ‘a shipwright’, and the discussions turned understandably to developments in France and the revolution. Lassale’s mission was to obtain timber from Epirus for the French Navy, and in the words of the dragoman, ‘revolutionizing that country’. The policy of the French was to turn Ali against the Porte and make him the ‘successor of Pyrrhus’. Lassale offered French assistance with arms and ammunition if Ali could subdue Suli and Himara. Lasalle’s further involvement was short; he met an unhappy end, shot by one of Lambros’ captains on the streets of Preveza.

  From 1792 the French Republic was at war with much of Europe, and by 1794 their forces were making ground in Italy under their dynamic young general, Napoleon Bonaparte. The Republic of Venice fell to Napoleon in 1797 and by the Treaty of Campo Formio the possession of the Ionian Islands and the neighbouring ports of Arta, Preveza, Vonitsa, Parga, Igoumenitsa and Butrint were transferred to France. French eyes were then turned to the mainland. These outposts, and the islands beyond, for so long a thorn in the flesh of the Ottomans, were prizes that Ali coveted to consolidate his own position, and he was prepared to manoeuvre in whichever way necessary to get them. Panagiotis Aravantinos, the nineteenth century historian of Epirus, claimed that Ali had already surreptitiously obtained the governorship of Arta under the false name of ‘Mustafa’, a person who never existed, holding it from 1796 until his death. In the meantime the French established garrisons under the command of General Antoine Gentili and a small naval force at Corfu. When General La Salchette and 280 grenadiers marched into Preveza with the aura of liberators the people gave the troops a warm welcome. The British may have derided Napoleon as that ‘Corsican upstart’ but his famous victories meant that he became an idol to many who saw him as a potential liberator, a notion he was happy to encourage. His charisma was such that even German intellectuals imagined him as an almost Christlike figure riding at the head of his army, a man of destiny, or as Friedrich Hegel put it, ‘the world-spirit on horseback’, an idea that travelled to the uncowed clans of the Mani Peninsula in the Peloponnese who took to praying to his portrait alongside that of the Virgin Mary, while the klephts of Epirus flocked to the banner of his Ionian regiments. The advance of the French armies was seen by many of the subjugated people of Europe as a march of freedom. In Vienna, inspired by the idealism of the French Revolution, Rigas Feraios was agitating for a pan-Balkan revolution and printing pamphlets on political reform and ‘the Rights of Man’. Caught up in the euphoria of the moment the townsfolk of Preveza called their transfer to France as the ‘First Year of Liberation’. Rigas was on his way to Venice to ask for support from Napoleon when he was apprehended by the Austrian authorities. Napoleon in turn was more interested in Egypt and ultimately the route to India. Although the Ionian Islands were merely stepping stones within this grand plan, Greek liberation would help dismember the Ottoman Empire. So as Napoleon fantasized about becoming liberator of Greece, French agents set to work stirring up revolutionary sentiment.

  Fig. 29: ‘Kimara’, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania… by Edward Lear.

  Rather than the policy of the Venetians, who fostered good relations with the pashas of Delvino and had supported local independently minded groups such as the Suliotes and Himariotes as buffers to protect their coastal enclaves, the French sought to make friendly advances towards the rival pashas to sow discord within the Empire. Ali saw an opportunity in this new situation. Professing a mutual hatred of the Venetian aristocracy that had ruled the Ionian Islands he immediately opened secret communication with Napoleon, then still in northern Italy. As relations between France and Turkey were verging on open war, this was tantamount to treason. The French proved so anxious to appease him in order to facilitate their own agenda against Turkey, that Ali was able to persuade them to help him put an end to the independence of the Himariotes once and for all. Gentili reported back that Ali was full of admiration for Napoleon and the French. Ali made a fuss of the deputation to Ioannina, even bestowing a wife on a member of the party, the young adjutant general Rose, and in exchange for a tricolour cockade and promises of friendship agreed to dispatch supplies in return. Rose’s marriage was a grand affair during which a ballon aerostatique was released from a fairground and if the girl was Ali’s illegitimate daughter as was suggested, their friendship was more than formal. In a secret meeting with Gentili, Ali was more forthright, asking for armaments, military technical assistance and access for warships in the waters around Corfu. As a result of his charm offensive, in the spring of 1798 Gentili agreed to connive with Ali in ferrying a body of his Albanians from Arta through the straits by night in contravention of the treaty that had stood between the Venetians and the Porte to launch a surprise attack on Nivitza (Nivice), the most prosperous town on the coastal littoral between Butrint and Avlona. The fact that men from Himara were employed in the Neapolitan Army that fought against Napoleon may have influenced Gentili’s decision. Landing Ali’s troops in the bay at Lukova to the north they outflanked the town which commands the entrance to the narrow valley routeway into Himara from the landward side. His force attacked Nivitza and its neighbour Agios Vasili, a mile to the north, on Easter Sunday wh
en the inhabitants were at prayer, taking the town and other villages, reducing them to ruins, and ravaging as far north as Himara itself. Six thousand unarmed civilians were said to have been slaughtered, some by roasting alive and impalement, and the rest of the population were sent to Ali’s farms near Trikkala, their land then divided up to be cultivated by his planted population of Saranda. Ali left a small square fortress at Agios Vasili guarding the entrance to Himara and to keep an eye on the remaining population of Nivitza. With the Himariote league destroyed and the whole of Himara from the important fisheries of Saranda to the castle and harbour at Porto Palermo, he had possession of the coast as far as Avlona and a region encircling the pashalik of Delvino. Ever aware that his actions would be reported at court he made sure that his agents in Constantinople put a favourable spin on his conquest to reassure the Porte it was done to subjugate the infidels; and as a safeguard he duly paid a feudal tribute to the government.