Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

by Eugenia Russell

  On the news of his death accounts of Ali’s life proliferated in the West, and something akin to Ali-mania broke out. Once again it was the story of Euphrosyne that captured the imagination first. Within seven months it had been transformed for the stage featuring the theme of the ring as the plot device as Ali Pacha; or the Signet Ring by the American John Howard Payne, who is mostly remembered as the writer of the song, ‘Home Sweet Home’.2 Premiered at the Covent Garden theatre in 1822 to ‘enthusiastic expressions of delight’ Payne was onto a winner, for as George Daniel wrote in the preface, ‘the dramatist acts wisely who avails himself of extraordinary characters and events’ and ‘to have conceived a monster of greater ferocity than Ali Pasha, would have been to have to paint a devil’. Offering a spine-chilling evocation of oriental tyranny and grand spectacle the play became a tourist attraction. Britain was not yet officially involved in the Greek War of Independence and the portrayal of Ali, contrary to the facts, as the obstacle to freedom was a vehicle for arousing philhellenic sentiment. Ali Pacha; or the Signet Ring became one of a flurry of dramas and other works that appeared at the time supporting the cause, with Ali frequently cast as the villain. The Maid of Athens by John Baldwin Buckstone, which followed in 1829, was staged after the Battle of Navarino (1827) and Britain’s official entry into the Greek War of Independence. It therefore gives a more nuanced characterization of Ali, who does not appear on stage, presenting him as a misunderstood tactician who could have saved Greece. The Maid of Athens is a reference to Byron, whose poem to Theresa Macri begins:

  Maid of Athens, ere we part,

  Give, oh! give me back my heart.

  In the play, which also features Byron as a character, the maid is Madeleine, an English girl and daughter of a diplomat. Like the Ali Pasha, the play employs full dramatic licence. By the logic of melodrama the romance plot is concluded with Madeleine marrying Demetrius ‘King of Greece’, the previously unknown son of a Greek slave and Ali Pasha.

  The reassuring portrayal of the death of Ali, the embodiment of the threat of tyranny and oriental despotism, gave the audience hope for the cause of Greek liberty. As the formation of a modern Greek State was becoming a reality, there was a vicarious thrill of danger for theatregoers who could fantasize about the prospect of travel to a land where the mystery of the Orient was still to be found. In music, Orientalist themes were already an established tradition. For the Austrians any such thrill was too real, for the Ottomans were their close neighbours, if diminishing as a threat. Mozart had been happy to absorb Eastern influences and storylines and for Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782) he used fictional caricatures that include janissaries, Albanians, a despotic pasha, and the ever-intoxicating perceived licentiousness of the harem. But one year after Ali’s death, Albert Lortzing from Berlin, turned to real life for inspiration with his first opera, the one-act Ali Pasha von Janina, first staged in 1828. Even though he was depicting almost contemporary events Lortzing remained wedded to Orientalist fantasy rather than any historical perspective, and using a plot resembling Mozart’s, his opera tells of a Frenchman saving the girl he loves from the tyrant Ali’s harem.

  Fig. 55: Mr TP Cook as Zenocles, Ali Pasha’s adversary in Ali Pacha; or the Signet Ring.

  Lurid biography and storytelling came fast on the heels of the swathe of travel memoirs and attempts at serious history published just prior to or after Ali’s death. In E Mackenzie’s Choice Biography: Comprising an Entertaining and Instructive Account of Persons of Both Sexes and All Nations Eminent for Genius Learning Public Spirit Courage and Virtue, published in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1829, Ali’s dubious life sits alongside a hotchpotch of celebrities from Canova and Rossini, to Marie Antoinette and Napoleon, and to virtuous nineteenth century British heroes such as Grace Darling. Ten years later Alexander Dumas (père) took on a similar exercise before embarking on his famous novels, but this time concentrating on the notorious. Dumas published his eight-volume collection of villains, Celebrated Crimes (1839–1840), based on historical records. Sitting alongside such notables as the Borgias, Mary Queen of Scots and the Man in the Iron Mask is ‘Ali Pacha’. As was his usual practice Dumas used a number of collaborators and the lurid relating of the cruelties of Ali’s court owes much to Félicien Malleville. Dumas was interested enough in the story of Ali to use the circumstances of his demise in his later novel, The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), where the death of Ali is used as a plot device and to introduce Orientalist colour into the narrative. Dumas’ father had served in Italy and Egypt under Napoleon and stories of his escapades were another source of useful inspiration. Taking liberties with fact, Dumas has Ali betrayed by Fernand Mondego, a French officer who he had entrusted to plead for mercy from the Turks. Ali’s young daughter, Haydée, witnesses her father’s death and then she and her mother, the ‘beautiful Vasiliki’, are sold by Mondego to slave traders bound for Constantinople. On seeing Ali’s head displayed in front of the imperial gates Vassiliki falls down dead. Haydée is sold on to Sultan Mahmud from whom she is purchased by Edmond Dantès, and then freed. Dantès, alias the Count of Monte Cristo, uses Haydée in an elaborate plot to revenge himself on Fernand, who was responsible for framing him as a Bonapartist traitor, his imprisonment in the Château d’If and stealing his intended bride.

  Fig. 56: Haidée, a Greek Girl (1827) by Sir Charles Eastlake (from Byron, Don Juan).

  The name Haydée is self-consciously borrowed from Byron’s heroine, Haidée in Don Juan, the daughter of a Greek pirate chief.3 Dumas’ heroine mixes a number of Orientalist fantasies. She is referred to as a princess, she is a Christian like her mother but the daughter of the nominally Muslim Ali, a cruel despot (whom she loves), and a product of the harem. A ‘white slave’ she has already experienced a number of masters, and, although they become lovers, placidly accedes to the count’s demands. Educated in at least four languages, including Ancient Greek, her manners are oriental. She flounces amidst cushions on a divan, dressed in the Turkic Greek style, drinking Turkish coffee and eating oriental sweetmeats, and smoking a chibouk, the long-stemmed Turkish tobacco pipe sometimes used for smoking hashish. The mixture of the harem and slavery had an added frisson; Greek slaves had become a cause célèbre when reprisals by the Turks after the Greek uprising of 1822 led to an increased number of Christian slave-girls in the markets of Constantinople and Smyrna. In England, the Quakers used their commercial connections in the Levant to systematically buy them and then set them free. Depictions of the (often beautiful and scantily clad) Greek slave became a dramatic propaganda tool used by artists to promote the cause of Greek liberty.

  Kyra Vassiliki did not die at the sight of Ali’s head in Constantinople, but one memory of her may live on in present-day Istanbul. It is said that a large diamond once worn by her resides in the Topkapi Palace. The Spoonmaker’s Diamond is the largest pear-shaped example at 86 carats (17.2g), but how it came to be in its present resting place is unclear. Although possibly commissioned by either Ali or Mahmud II, some of the tales relating to its appearance rely on fables worthy of the Arabian Nights, including one to do with a fisherman. If it was in Ali’s possession first, it may have passed to Mahmud either as part of Ali’s complicated dealings with the Porte or after his execution, when his possessions and treasure were confiscated. In another version of events it was the ransom paid for Captain Camus de Richemont after Ali’s victory over the French at Preveza. Camus had been sent to Istanbul for questioning but was released through the auspices of Napoleon’s mother, Letizia Romolino, in 1801; they were rumoured to have been lovers. Letizia sent a diamond reputed to have belonged to Marie Antoinette to Preveza as a present for Sultan Selim III. From there it went to Ali in Ioannina. As Camus was freed Ali must have felt bound to honour such an illustrious undertaking by sending it on to the Topkapi Palace. The mysterious allure of Vassiliki lived on as an adornment to a number of depictions of Ali by Western Orientalist artists.

  The continuing Orientalist ap
peal of Ali Pasha was summed up by R Nisbet Bain towards the end of the century in his introduction to the novel, The Last Days of the Janissaries: The Lion of Janina, a Turkish Novel (1854) by the Hungarian writer Morus Jokai. Bain, Jokai’s English translator, commented on the success of the writer in portraying Ali’s dual nature:

  Fig. 57: The Greek Slave by the American sculptor Hiram Powers (1843).

  Fig. 58: The Greek Slave on display in New York. It caused a sensation in London where Elizabeth Barrett Browning was so moved by the work she penned an impassioned sonnet desiring Art to break up ‘the serfdom of this world’ and show that the East was not grieving alone and the ‘strong’ would be overthrown.

  The hero of the strange and terrible drama, or, rather, series of dramas, unfolded with such spirit, skill, and vividness … is Ali Pasha of Janina, certainly one of the most brilliant, picturesque, and, it must be added, capable ruffians that even Turkish history can produce. Manifold and monstrous as were Ali’s crimes, his astonishing ability and splendid courage lend a sort of savage sublimity even to his blood-stained career, and, indeed, the dogged valor with which the octogenarian warrior defended himself at the last in his stronghold against the whole might of the Ottoman Empire is almost without a parallel in history.

  Fig. 59: Ali Pasha and Vassiliki by Raymond Monvoisin (1832).

  The life of Ali Pasha may have provided numerous colourful episodes to delight European audiences and readers and a comforting feeling of superiority in comparison to oriental barbarism but his real-life exploits were tied into unfolding events in Eastern Europe and Greece in particular, providing useful propaganda material for philhellenes and other European nationalists. His reign and collapse was part of a drama in which European nations, for so long at war, might be forced to act together for an ideal. The confusion as to whom was the enemy for the Greek and Albanian freedom fighters, Ali or the Porte, was overlooked as the effects of his tyranny provided ample examples of brutal injustice to be exploited. The taking of Parga by Ali was an incident that struck a chord with the Romantic idealist and the suppressed political activist alike. When Missolonghi fell to the Turks in April 1826, the plight of the fleeing inhabitants including women and children recalled the fate of Parga in 1819. The story was widely known in France by the 1820s through accounts in the press, Pouqueville’s writings and Madame Dufrénoy’s history of Greece.4 In a land where the cry for freedom still rang out, numerous poems were inspired by the event.5 The radical poet Viennet prefaced his poem on Parga published in 1820 with a defence of liberty:

  But it is in the name of liberty that we support [the Pargians’] cause, because liberty has been profaned under our eyes, the governments must disapprove whatever is solicited in its name, as if liberty meant permissiveness everywhere, as if monarchy was synonymous with despotism… And the degradation of our principles is such that it is impossible to indict the despotism of the Grand Turk and his pashas without being accused of jacobinism.

  Baron d’Ordre’s poem of the same year stressed the exiles’ devotion to freedom:

  Ce people préféra la mort à l’esclavage

  Détruit, mais non vaincu, trahi du tout côté,

  Il s’écriait encore: liberté, liberté!

  This people have chosen death over slavery

  Destroyed yet not defeated, betrayed from everywhere,

  They still cried out: liberty, liberty!

  The Greek war had not broken out yet but by 1827 when the play, Parga: ou, Le brulot, mélodrame en trois actes, a spectacle, by Pierre-Frédéric-Adolphe Carmouche and Adolphe Poujol was performed the resonance of events at Missolonghi with those of Parga were raw. Pouqueville had described the Pargians praying for help from the Virgin, their protector. In the play they were shown as victims of their faith and their love of liberty.

  Outrage and politics were not confined to the page. The moment of embarkation of the Pargians for Corfu was a striking mental image ideal to be put on canvas. The Romantic artist Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault left pencil sketches of the Pargians streaming down from the town on its rocky promontory toward the shore as preparation for a monumental project, the Reddition de Parga, which he never completed. Some are depicted already aboard the boats, others are being carried on shoulders and some bend to kiss their sacred land farewell as a man points to the sky. The conflation of the events at Missolonghi with Parga is evident in a similar unfinished painting attributed to Géricault. Wrongly titled, Scene from the Exodus of Missolonghi, the same scene is repeated in more detail with disregard to Missolonghi being situated on flat land. The townspeople form the same procession to the sea with a youth being carried by an old bishop and their holy images mistakenly represented by the Catholic statue of the Virgin. As the people make for the waiting boats a group of British officers look on. In an allusion to the Pargians’ refusal to leave any of their possessions to the Turks, a man shoots his horse. These same elements appear in a highly finished version by Alphonse-Apollidore Callet from 1827. In L’Embarquement des Parganiotes the procession has reached the harbour, but it is the priest who is carried by two men who points to the sky.

  In Italy the cause of freedom had a different appeal. After the defeat of Napoleon the old order had been restored and Italy was divided under the rule of Austria and the House of Savoy. The plight of Parga and its close proximity provided a popular analogy for poets and artists yearning for their own freedom from foreign domination. Ugo Foscolo, born in Zante, was living in exile in London when he wrote his description of the fall of Parga, Narrazione della fortune e della cessione di Parga, published in 1821 during nationalist uprisings in Naples and Piedmont. It was immediately suppressed for being subversive. The preface for the 1850 edition outlined its militant revolutionary character. Foscolo’s purpose was to expose the new doctrine of the Right of Nations for what it was; a false claim of legitimacy that allowed modern diplomats to carry out deadly acts of tyranny. Sharing the mixed Italian heritage of the Ionian Islands, Foscolo knew Dionysios Solomos and Andreas Kalvos, the Ionian poets of Greek nationhood. Solomos’ verses became the words to the Greek national anthem. The poet Giovanni Berchet also turned to the theme of Parga. I Profughi di Parga (1821) appeared in Il Conciliatore, a periodical with contributions from members of the Federati, revolutionaries dedicated to ridding Italy of the Austrians. Berchet had to flee from the Austrian authorities in 1823 and join the Italian exiles in London. Translated into French by Fauriel, the poem appeared in London the following year. In the final part of the poem Berchet made an impassioned attack on British foreign policy. He saw Parga’s fate as a symbol of the small nation at the mercy of a larger and more powerful one and yet again Britain’s actions had unjustly snuffed out another Liberal cause. The last words of the Pargians became a rallying call to all of Europe: ‘Time will bring our revenge, and God will endorse it, He who strengthens the spirit of Europe’. These verses became the battle cry of the Italian revolution and were sung across Italy.

  The artist Francisco Hayez lived in Austrian-held Milan. He was an associate of fellow Italian patriots and radical intellectuals including Rossini and Verdi and the poets Leopardi and Manzoni. Working under Austrian censorship, Hayez made oblique reference to current affairs in a number of his paintings and he knew that Parga would be analogous to a situation every Italian would immediately recognize. He made three versions of the Parga incident. The earliest from 1831, The Refugees of Parga, focuses on the usual scene of the Pargians preparing to leave but with the added detail of the Turks making their way into the town perched on its rock. His 1832 version has echoes of Géricault and Callet but with emphasis on the Pargians pleading to God, an anonymous people of martyrs and heroes caught between the shore and the stretching sea with the infidels approaching in the distance. In Boat with Greek Fugitives the Pargians have set out into the unknown. Here the fragile storm-tossed boat is the universal symbol of Romantic iconography used to symbolize the fate of the entire Greek nation caught in the storm of r
evolution and fighting against overwhelming odds. Hayez’s contemporaries saw his work as important in the forging of national identity and promoting the patriotic ideal. Giuseppe Mazzini, a leader of the Risorgimento movement for Italian unification, singled out The Refugees of Parga, praising its theme as an analogy to the state of Italy.

  Parga was matched in the European consciousness by the drama and idealization of Suli and the Suliotes. Ali’s massacre of the Suliotes in 1804 was immortalized in verse, drama and various paintings. Worthy of a mere footnote in Canto II of Byron’s Childe Harold, by 1825 it had become a five-act tragedy, The Martyrs of Souli or the modern Epirus, written by Louis Jean Népomucène Lemercier. In 1828, Victor Hugo was content with an account in verse, The Pasha and the Dervish (Un jour Ali passait), in which as Ali is out riding he is harangued for his deeds by a dervish who foretells that his fate is catching up with him, he is a ‘dog accurst’:

  Fig. 60: The Refugees of Parga (I profughi di Parga) by Francesco Hayez (1831).

  for Janina makes

  A grave for thee where every turret quakes,

  And thou shalt drop below

  To where the spirits, to a tree enchained,

  Will clutch thee, there to be ’mid them retained

  For all to-come in woe!