Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

by Eugenia Russell

  Over the winter of 1797–8 duty called once again along the Danube. This time Osman Pazvantoğlu was the problem causing the Sultan grief. The rebel governor Pazvantoğlu was carving out his own state with its capital in Vidin, in modern Bulgaria, and an army variously estimated as from 50,000 to 100,000 men had been dispatched under the Grand Admiral Hüseyin Küçük to take the city and capture the renegade. Ali was reluctant to show himself to the French as subservient to the Sultan but his enemies at the capital would make the most of his non-compliance to an official decree. Ali tried to absent himself from having to take to the field in person by using his position of dervendji-pasha to require the people of Karpenisi in the southern Pindus to write to the patriarch of Constantinople informing him that they were in fear of bandits if Ali left them unprotected. This ruse evidently did not work. According to Pouqueville, Ali took 20,0002 of his Albanians to the front, where it is suggested that he needed a show of force to protect himself from assassination. In the event, Ali distinguished himself in the conflict, but overall the campaign ended in failure, and as was the way of things, Pazvantoğlu was forgiven by Selim III and made a pasha; for his part Ali was rewarded with the title Aslan, the Lion, by the Porte. This seems a more likely scenario for his acquiring the title Aslan than the massacring of the Himariotes as is suggested in some sources. The campaign against Vidin took place in February 1798, so Ali may not have even been present in Epirus during the attack on Himara; Mukhtar had been left in charge at Ioannina. The French were angered by Ali’s involvement against Pazvantoğlu, whom they were also grooming, and Ali in return was disappointed in their lack of financial and military support. They had even gone so far as to offer him the crown of Albania once they had taken the Morea, but it was soon evident this was not going to happen. With relations soured, both sides underwhelmed by each other’s commitment, it was expedient that on his return home he now felt duty-bound to heed the Sultan’s call to drive the French out of Epirus.

  ln June 1798 the French took Malta. The next step was their long-held objective of Egypt, precipitating war with the Ottomans. Two weeks later the army disembarked at Alexandria pushing Epirus to the sidelines. The siege of Vidin lasted until August, so Ali was still on the Danube at this time. Mukhtar had been keeping Ali informed of subversive activities by the French, including the dispersal of leaflets and tricolour cockades designed to incite revolt, particularly amongst the Suliotes. Ali attained special dispensation from the Sultan to return home to deal with matters while still keeping the lines of communication open with the French. One version of events has it that he offered to throw in his lot with the French in return for the Island of Santa Maura (Lefkas), the ex-Venetian dependencies on the mainland and the right to place a garrison on Corfu. If true, the commander-in-chief of the French forces on Corfu, General Louis François Jean Chabot, unsurprisingly turned down his offer. His course of action was made clear with the declaration of war in September. The accounts of Hughes and Pouqueville suggest he gained a commission to deal with French aggression through his agents at Constantinople, implying some underhand lobbying, but it would obviously have been in the Porte’s best interest for him to take authority in a time of war as the most powerful pasha in the region and guard the Empire’s western border. The version of events given by Ali’s hagiographer Haxhi Shehreti in the Alipashiad is that the Porte was so slow to react that he took it on himself without official sanction to mobilize over 20,000 troops against an impending French invasion.

  Having assembled his forces, he did not wait for the French to make the first move. Encamped before Butrint and with little feeling for his previously professed friendship, he lured the unfortunate Rose, temporarily in charge at Corfu, to a meeting at Filates, near Igoumenitsa, where he was promptly taken prisoner, tortured and then sent to Ioannina in irons. That Rose fell into Ali’s trap was in part due to his naive trust in Ali’s loyalty. Ali evidently had given the impression that he had thrown in his hand with the French and his manoeuvres were to counter any approach by the Turks or Russians. Rose apparently gave little away as Ali adopted the same tactic on the French sub-lieutenant of Butrint. Whether Ali gained much from these methods, the lightly defended Butrint soon fell, and with Igoumenitsa, the main port of access to Corfu, in his hands he turned on Preveza. General Chabot, who was at Butrint, thought it more expedient to cut his losses and retreat to Corfu. Ali’s approach was made easier by his old adversary Georgios Botsaris, who allowed his troops passage through Suliote territory in return for a payment. Many of the inhabitants had already fled to the nearby islands leaving the town to be defended by La Salchette’s garrison and the townspeople’s pro-French civic militia, some Ionian islanders and 60 Suliotes under Captain Christakis, numbering around 700 in all. The French decided to make their line of defence the narrow isthmus from which direction any landward approach has to be made rather than the town walls. They hastily built entrenchments and fortifications close by the ancient city of Nicopolis which overlooks the plain before the town, but to no avail. Ali’s superior force, which included his own Greeks and Suliotes, outnumbered them ten to one. On 12 October, Ali watched the ensuing battle, during which Mukhtar led a cavalry charge, positioned on a hill above Nicopolis. Hughes records that he built a small serai there on the same spot on which the Emperor Augustus had watched his victory over Anthony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium fought out in the bay. Under the weight of such odds the town fell, a victory in part eased by the counter-propaganda of Metropolitan (Archbishop) Ignatios of Arta, an agent of Ali’s, who undermined the resolve of the defending Greeks.

  Fig. 30: Louis-Auguste Camus de Richemont directing the building of a trench at the Battle of Nicopolis (1894) by Felician Myrbach.

  Over the next few days the French garrison and its Greek defenders were massacred, some of them it was said in Ali’s presence as he entered the town. According to Pouqueville, Ali was unable to prevent this wholesale slaughter by his troops, which does not entirely square with subsequent events. The following day Ali had 300 Greeks killed in front of him. Some defenders who had escaped to the mountains foolishly returned on the promise of an amnesty; 170 of them were then summarily executed by the sword at the Salora customs. Those that survived were marched to Ioannina where Ali organized a grand reception for his victorious troops. Many of the prisoners died on the way but those that made it walked at the head of the procession holding the cut and salted heads of their companions while they were jeered at and pelted with stones by the city’s pro-Ottoman residents. The women and young girls were, as the Alipashiad proudly attests, ‘sold… at Ioannina like negro slaves’. Pouqueville put the surviving French total at 200, in other words most of the French force, undermining the notion that they were slaughtered along with the Greeks. Nine of the captured French grenadiers, La Salchette and two officers were then sent in chains to Constantinople for questioning, along with the heads of the executed prisoners for the acknowledgement of the Sultan in a job well done. One of the officers, the commander of the French engineers, Louis-Auguste Camus de Rhichemont, had been spared through the personal intervention of Mukhtar, who had been impressed by his bravery. The surviving officers were joined by Rose, and sent to the Castle of the Seven Towers, the Yedikule fortress in Constantinople. There they met Pouqueville who had been taken prisoner by Barbary pirates as he was returning from Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt after the Battle of the Nile. Rose’s condition was too far gone and he died of his wounds despite Pouqueville’s attempt to save him. Richemont did survive and wrote an account of the engagement. He was ransomed in 1801, possibly through the auspices of Napoleon’s mother.

  The massacre at Preveza became a notorious event, remembered in song as witnessed by Byron on his arrival at the Salora customs, and with repercussions that would influence Greek nationalism. Some Suliotes fought with Ali and Byron was more taken with their warlike braggadocio than that it was there that the 170 were executed. Preveza itself was left in ruins, the property of the
Greeks seized by Ali and redistributed amongst his Albanians. The remaining population was dispersed into the surrounding countryside where they were set to work in the marshy land around the Ambracian Gulf. Hughes estimated that the population had fallen from 16,000 to 3,000 when he visited and that Ali, in contrary fashion, continued to despoil the town and oppress its inhabitants while at the same time making it his naval depot, the ‘Portsmouth of Albania’, and a favourite residence. Ali next turned to Vonitsa on the opposite shore of the Ambracian Gulf. This time the town fell without a fight, the inhabitants surrendering after the intervention of Archbishop Ignatios on Ali’s behalf.

  Fig. 31: Lieutenant Richemont taking down an Albanian horseman.

  Fig. 32: Being shown the severed head of a French soldier by Ali’s men by Felician Myrbach (1894).

  Parga, to the north of Preveza, had long been a place of refuge for fugitives from Turkish rule and was thus of particular annoyance to any ruler of Epirus. Backed by a steep mountain its territory formed a small enclave two or three miles round the city. With a population of up to 4,000, Parga was always considered an important military outpost for the Ionian Islands, and particularly in respect of Corfu for which it was termed ‘the Ear and the Eye’. Immediately after the fall of Preveza, Ali wrote to the Pargians, ‘Learn men of Parga, the victory of this day and the fate of Prevesa’. Offering an olive branch and a promise allowing them the form of government they desired ‘as fellow subjects of my sovereign’, he proposed a parley. Ali’s first entreaty was ignored. He persisted, leaving out mention of subjugation to the Turks but urging the inhabitants to murder the French garrison. The Pargians replied on 16 October that Ali’s tyrannical actions, their love of liberty and their sense of honour meant they had to turn down his offer. The strong defences of the town and the citizen’s resolve made Parga a particularly vexing problem that would become another of Ali’s fixations. In the meantime, since his harassment of Missolonghi in the late 1770s, Ali had had his eyes on the region of Aetolia-Acarnania lying to the southeast of Vonitsa. Having been unable to gain control through interference in its governance, he saw a chance to move his troops into the province, known as Karli-Eli in Turkish, while forcing the region’s civil administrator and tax collector to seek refuge in the citadel at Vonitsa. This act of intimidation brought a reaction from the Ottoman government who pre-empted any further aggression by granting the entire sanjak of Karli-Eli minus the sub-district of Missolonghi as a private royal domain to Mihrişah Valide Sultan, the mother of Selim III and co-regent, forcing Ali to back down from a direct confrontation with the Porte. The province was administered on behalf of the Valide Sultan by Yusuf Agha, a cousin of her treasurer. Leake tells us that Ali made frequent presents to Mihrişah and Yusuf in order to keep on good terms.

  Santa Maura, the closest of the Ionian Islands separated from the mainland by a narrow channel, became a more legitimate object of desire. But international events were to thwart Ali as he was on the brink of seizing the island. Napoleon’s attempt on Egypt had forced Turkey to join the Second Coalition led by Britain and Austria into an alliance with Russia. Ali’s actions had made the Porte anxious, and as a Russian-Turkish Fleet made its way to take the islands from the French it was made clear that Ali should be sidelined. Unsure of the welcome he might receive and of his objectives the government refused to send troops to Ali for any attack on island defences. Ali was on the point of negotiating another surrender with the local inhabitants who were ready to revolt against the French garrison when the Russian squadron arrived. Barely a month had passed since the fall of Preveza and Admiral Fyodor Ushakov3 was laying siege to the island and citadel of Corfu; the Pargians decided this was a good time to put themselves under Russian protection, and the French garrison, vulnerable to attack from the sea by the Russians and by Ali on land, had decided it was better off in Corfu leaving the town undefended. Once the Russians had taken Zante they offered Parga their protection, and the Russian admiral sent a Russo-Turkish force to take charge of the city. Napoleon, who was still in Egypt, must have been blissfully unaware of events as he was still writing to his officers in December urging them to cultivate good relations with Ali.

  After a year of fighting the Russo-Turkish force took Corfu, ending the French occupation of the Ionian Islands. Ali, with his son Veli and Ibrahim Bey of Avlona were obliged to assemble a large land force to join the siege. Their part in the Siege of Corfu was largely of a diversionary nature but Ali’s involvement increased his reputation to such an extent that it was widely reported that Rear Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson himself, only recently victorious over the French Fleet at the Battle of the Nile, sent his congratulations. In 1800, the seven islands were formed into the independent Septinsular Republic, a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire paying a triennial tribute but under the protection of both powers and with a ‘Byzantine’ Constitution acceptable to the Porte. It had been important to the Porte for Ali to gain the mainland dependencies before any intervention by Russia. As a result the former Venetian possessions were ceded to Turkey on condition that their religious freedom should be honoured, there should be no extra taxation, they continued to be governed by their own laws and customs and that no Muslim acquire property or settle amongst them, apart from the Turkish governor. Civil unrest on the islands after the change of rule, in the Turkish view stirred up by Russian agents, gave the Russians the excuse to increase their garrison putting the new Republic under their de facto military occupation. Despite the removal of foreign powers from the mainland, Ali was unable to exert direct influence over the ports. The situation as regards to Parga was ambiguous. The Pargians preferred to deal directly with the Porte than fall to Ali so with Suliote aid they resisted his menaces for a further six months while a deputation was sent to Constantinople where, through the minister for the Ionian Islands at the Divan, they procured a Voivode (governor) to be sent as protection. When Britain and France briefly made peace in 1802 this arrangement was endorsed in the Treaty of Amiens. Any designs Ali had for further conquest had to be put on hold and the governor of the mainland dependencies, Abdoulah Bey, refused to satisfy Ali’s demands allowing him to take possession of Parga. Britain’s peace with France was short-lived and on resumption of hostilities in 1803 Ali approached the British Embassy at the capital requesting that an emissary be sent from Britain to him at Ioannina to give advice on how he should proceed. When the first official British contact with Ali, William Hamilton, arrived he made his usual promises of assistance during the coming conflict.

  From correspondence sent by Veli, who was in Adrianople at the time, to Ali, it is apparent that Veli thought Haxhi Shehreti was incapable of representing Ali’s best interests at the Porte, referring to him as both a ‘friend’ and a ‘fool’. In his Alipashiad Haxhi Shehreti suggests that Ali’s actions against the towns in French hands were undertaken on behalf of the Sultan to put down Greek insurrection. As the towns were not under Turkish rule and that Turkey was at war with France this seems an unnecessary extra justification. The towns were though a source of increasing Greek nationalist sentiment encouraged through French interference. The Suliotes had received money, munitions and supplies from French ships through Parga. These activities were aimed at weakening the Ottoman Empire. Exchanging French influence on the Christian population of Epirus for Russian was no great improvement, but while they were allies supplies were cut off and the Porte seeing an opportunity obliged Ali to finally bring the Suliotes down. Learning from previous mistakes, Ali realised that a direct assault on Suli was impossible and he initiated a slow war of attrition. With his allies the Tsiparis family of Margariti he blockaded Suli with a ring of twelve fortresses, with one at Gliki guarding the only road in. This was slow and dangerous work as Suliote sharpshooters picked off his men. During construction an estimated third of Ali’s troops deserted. While his investment of Suli was progressing Ali was keeping an eye on other matters. In 1802, another of his slow-burning campaigns finally paid off when he took Del
vino after seven years of intermittent fighting that Leake said left the surrounding villages in ruins. Now he had Epirus under one control from Arta to Avlona and Tepelene. Suli was the only blemish in his complete mastery of the region.

  The Suliotes themselves were in some state of disarray. Georgios Botsaris had been persuaded or bribed to join Ali’s camp, taking with him some valuable munitions. Fotos Tzavelas, the son of his old comrade Lambros, was now the leader of the Suliotes. Georgios did not survive the war, he was said to have died of a broken heart when his son and 200 of his followers were cut to pieces by his erstwhile comrades in the mountains. While Ali received imperial supplies and could call on the support of his surrounding pashas, including that of the lukewarm Ibrahim of Berat, mustering an army of around 20,000 men, increasingly the Suliotes were becoming starved and exhausted. He finally attacked in autumn 1803 leaving nothing to chance. The main body of Suliotes were assembled at the stronghold of Kungi, just above Suli village, where with their situation becoming more desperate and short of food and ammunition it was decided that those who wanted to surrender could. Ali, realizing that his soldiers were also wearying of the fight, saw a chance to take the leaders alive as hostages and expel the Suliotes from their stronghold. Through the auspices of Veli an arrangement was made with Fotos Tzavelas for the Suliotes to surrender. A monk known as Last Judgement Samuel, who was in charge of the magazines, took control of the faction that preferred death to capitulation, and with the knowledge of Fotos, he waited with five companions until Ali’s troops came to take the arsenal and then when all were inside he put a match to it. Once the Suliotes agreed to abandon their homeland, the four villages were destroyed, and the survivors numbering around 4,000, were packed off to find refuge in Parga and the Ionian Islands. A few put their trust in Veli and remained. That Ali and Veli were not always in accord is shown in an outspoken letter to his father: ‘And regarding the arrival of your highness to these parts [Suli], I don’t find it appropriate because you have a long shadow and they are afraid and don’t come out; that is how I see it and may your years be long. Your slave, Velis’. Veli had shown himself to be more of the diplomat, seeking common ground rather than conflict. In Holland’s assessment: ‘… His military reputation is below that of Mouctar Pasha, but in political sagacity, he is considered to be greatly his superior’.