by Lord Byron
It is astonishing how far money goes in this country. While I was in the capital I had nothing to pay by the vizier’s order; but since, though I have generally had sixteen horses, and generally six or seven men, the expense has not been half as much as staying only three weeks in Malta, though Sir A. Ball, the governor, gave me a house for nothing, and I had only one servant. By the by, I expect Hanson to remit regularly; for I am not about to stay in this province for ever. Let him write to me at Mr. Strané’s, English consul, Patras. The fact is, the fertility of the plains is wonderful, and specie is scarce, which makes this remarkable cheapness. I am going to Athens, to study modern Greek, which differs much from the ancient, though radically similar. I have no desire to return to England, nor shall I, unless compelled by absolute want, and Hanson’s neglect; but I shall not enter into Asia for a year or two, as I have much to see in Greece, and I may perhaps cross into Africa, at least the Egyptian part. Fletcher, like all Englishmen, is very much dissatisfied, though a little reconciled to the Turks by a present of eighty piastres from the vizier, which, if you consider every thing, and the value of specie here, is nearly worth ten guineas English. He has suffered nothing but from cold, heat, and vermin, which those who lie in cottages and cross mountains in a cold country must undergo, and of which I have equally partaken with himself; but he is not valiant, and is afraid of robbers and tempests. I have no one to be remembered to in England, and wish to hear nothing from it, but that you are well, and a letter or two on business from Hanson, whom you may tell to write. I will write when I can, and beg you to believe me,
Your affectionate son,
BYRON.
P.S. — I have some very “magnifiques” Albanian dresses, the only expensive articles in this country. They cost fifty guineas each, and have so much gold, they would cost in England two hundred. I have been introduced to Hussein Bey, and Mahmout Pacha, both little boys, grandchildren of Ali, at Yanina; they are totally unlike our lads, have painted complexions like rouged dowagers, large black eyes, and features perfectly regular. They are the prettiest little animals I ever saw, and are broken into the court ceremonies already. The Turkish salute is a slight inclination of the head, with the hand on the heart; intimates always kiss. Mahmout is ten years old, and hopes to see me again; we are friends without understanding each other, like many other folks, though from a different cause. He has given me a letter to his father in the Morea, to whom I have also letters from Ali Pacha.
[Footnote 1: Ali Pasha (1741-1822) was born in Albania, at Tepeleni, a town 75 miles north of Janina, of which his father was governor. This “Mahometan Buonaparte,” or “Rob Roy of Albania,” made himself the supreme ruler of Epirus and Albania, acquired a predominance over the Agas of Thessaly, and pushed his troops to the frontiers of ancient Attica (see Raumer’s ‘Historisches Taschenbuch,’ pp. 87-175). A merciless and unscrupulous tyrant, he was also a fine soldier and a born administrator. Intriguing now with the Porte, now with Buonaparte, now with the English, using the rival despots of the country against each other, hand in glove with the brigands while commanding the police for their suppression, he extended his power by using conflicting interests to aggrandize himself. The Venetian possessions on the eastern shores of the Adriatic, which had passed in 1797 to France, by the treaty of Campo Formio, were wrested from the French by Ali, who defeated General La Salsette (1798) in the plains of Nicopolis, and, with the exception of Parga, seized and held the principal towns in the name of the Sultan. Byron speaks of his “aged venerable face” in ‘Childe Harold’ (Canto II. stanza lxii.; see also stanza xlvii.), and of the delicacy of his hand in ‘Don Juan’ (Canto IV. stanza xlv.), and finds in his treatment of “Giaffir, Pacha of Argyro Castro or Scutari (I am not sure which),” the material for stanzas xiv., xv. of Canto II. of ‘The Bride of Abydos’. Hobhouse (‘Journey through Albania’, edit. 1854, vol. i. pp. 96, 97) describes Ali as
“a short man, about five feet five inches in height, and very fat, though not particularly corpulent. He had a very pleasing face, fair and round, with blue quick eyes, not at all settled into a Turkish gravity. His beard was long and white, and such a one as any other Turk would have been proud of; though he, who was more taken up with his guests than himself, did not continue looking at it, nor smelling and stroking it, as is usually the custom of his country-men, to fill up the pauses of conversation.”
Dr. (afterwards Sir Henry) Holland, in his ‘Travels in the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thessaly, and Greece in 1812-13’, pp. 125, 126 (1815), gives an account of his first interview with Ali:
“Were I to attempt a description of Ali, I should speak of his face as large and full; the forehead remarkably broad and open, and traced by many deep furrows; the eye penetrating, yet not expressive of ferocity; the nose handsome and well formed; the mouth and lower part of the face concealed, except when speaking, by his mustachios and the long beard which flows over his breast. His complexion is somewhat lighter than that usual among the Turks, and his general appearance does not indicate more than his actual age … The neck is short and thick, the figure corpulent and unwieldy; his stature I had afterwards the means of ascertaining to be about five feet nine inches. The general character and expression of the countenance are unquestionably fine, and the forehead especially is a striking and majestic feature. Much of the talent of the man may be inferred from his exterior; the moral qualities, however, may not equally be determined in this way; and to the casual observation of the stranger I can conceive from my own experience, that nothing may appear but what is open, placid, and alluring. Opportunities were afterwards afforded me of looking beneath this exterior of expression; it is the fire of a stove burning fiercely under a smooth and polished surface…. The inquiries he made respecting our journey to Joannina, gave us the opportunity of complimenting him on the excellent police of his dominions, and the attention he has paid to his roads. I mentioned to him generally Lord Byron’s poetical description of Albania, the interest it had excited in England, and Mr. Hobhouse’s intended publication of his travels in the same country. He seemed pleased with these circumstances, and stated his recollection of Lord Byron.”
Dr. Holland brought back to England a letter to Byron from Ali (see
Letter to Moore, September 8, 1813).
A further account of Ali, together with a portrait, will be found in Hughes’s ‘Travels in Sicily, etc.’ (pp. 446-449). He again (1813) “asked with much apparent interest respecting Lord Byron.” At the close of the Napoleonic struggle, the interest of this country was excited by the resistance of Parga to his arms, especially as, during the late war, the Pargiotes had received the protection of Great Britain. After the fall of Parga (1819), Ali’s power roused the jealousy of the Sultan, and it was partly in consequence of his open defiance of the Porte, that insurrections broke out in Wallachia, and that Ypsilanti proclaimed himself the liberator of Greece. The Turkish troops, under Kurchid Pasha, gradually overpowered Ali, and, at the end of 1821, shut him up in his citadel of Janina. In the following January he surrendered, and was at first treated with respect. But on February 5, 1822, Ali was informed that the Sultan demanded his head. His answer was to fire his pistol at the messenger. In the fray that followed he was killed. Another and better account (Walsh’s ‘Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England’, p. 62) says that he was stabbed in the back as he was bowing to the departing messenger, who had solemnly assured him of the Sultan’s pardon and favour. His head was cut off, sent to Constantinople, and fixed on the grand gate of the Seraglio, with the sentence of death by its side. Recently fresh interest has been aroused in Ali by the publication of Mr. Bain’s translation of Maurus Jókai’s semi-historical novel ‘Janicsárok végnapjai’, under the title of ‘The Lion of Janina’ (1897).]
[Footnote 2: Veli Pasha was the son of Ali by a daughter of Coul Pasha, the governor of Berat, in whose army Ali had served as a young man. He was married (1798) to a daughter of Ibrahim Pasha, who had succeeded Coul Pasha in the p
ashalik of Berat. The war with Ibrahim, to which Byron alludes, ended in his defeat, and the transference of his pashalik to Ali. Veli, at this time Vizier of the Morea, resided at Tripolizza, when he was visited by Galt, who describes him as sitting
“on a crimson velvet cushion, wrapped in a superb pelisse; on his head was a vast turban, in his belt a dagger encrusted with jewels, and on the little finger of his right hand he wore a solitaire which was said to have cost two thousand five hundred pounds sterling. In his left hand he held a string of small coral beads, a comboloio which he twisted backwards and forwards during the greater part of the visit.” “In his manners,” says Galt, “I found him free and urbane, with a considerable tincture of humour and drollery”
(‘Life of Byron’, p. 83). Hobhouse (‘Journey through Albania, etc.’, vol. i. p. 193) says,
“The Vizier, for he is a Pasha of three tails, is a lively young man; and besides the Albanian, Greek, and Turkish languages, speaks Italian — an accomplishment not possessed, I should think, by any other man of his high rank in Turkey. It is reported that he, as well as his father, is preparing, in case of the overthrow of the Ottoman power, to establish an independent sovereignty.”
Veli, in his father’s struggle with the Sultan, betrayed Prevesa to the
Turks. He was executed in 1822, and is buried at the Silivria Gate of
Constantinople.
[Footnote 3: For “monastic Zitza,” see ‘Childe Harold’, Canto II. stanza xlviii., and Byron’s note.]
[Footnote 4: See ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’, canto i.]
[Footnote 5: William Martin Leake (1777-1860) received his commission as second lieutenant in the artillery in 1794, became a captain in 1799, major in 1809, and lieutenant-colonel in 1813. His professional life, up to 1815, was spent abroad, chiefly at Constantinople, in Egypt, or in various parts of European Turkey. In 1808 he had been sent by the British Government with stores of artillery, ammunition, and Congreve rockets, to Ali, Pasha of Albania, and he remained at Preveza, or Janina, as the representative of Great Britain, till 1810. During his travels he collected the vases, gems, bronzes, marbles, and coins now placed in the British Museum, and in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. At the same time, he accumulated the materials which, during his literary life (1815-59), he embodied in numerous books. Of these the more important are — ’The Topography of Athens’ (1821); ‘Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor’ (1824); ‘An Historical Outline of the Greek Revolution’ (1825); ‘Travels in the Morea’ (1830); ‘Travels in Northern Greece’ (1835); ‘Numismata Hellenica’ (1854-59). As a diplomatist he was remarkably successful; but his reputation mainly rests on his topographical works. With his antiquarian labours Byron would have had little sympathy; but Leake was also a warm-hearted advocate of the Christian population of Greece against their Turkish rulers.]
[Footnote 6: The battle of Actium (B.C. 31) was fought at the entrance of the Gulf of Arta, and Nicopolis, the city of victory, the ‘Palaio-Kastro’ of the modern Greek, was founded by Augustus on an isthmus connecting Prevesa with the mainland to commemorate his triumph. Leake (‘Travels in Northern Greece’, vol. i. p. 175) identifies Actium with Punda ([Greek (transliterated: aktae], “the head of a promontory”) on the headland opposite Prevesa (see ‘Childe Harold’, Canto II. stanza xlv.).]
[Footnote 7: “Upon Parnassus going to the fountain of Delphi (Castri) in 1809,” writes Byron, in his ‘Diary’ for 1821 (‘Life’, pp. 99, 100),
“I saw a flight of twelve eagles (H. says they were vultures — at least in conversation), and I seized the omen. On the day before I composed the lines to Parnassus (in ‘Childe Harold’), and, on beholding the birds, had a hope that Apollo had accepted my homage. I have at least had the name and fame of a poet during the poetical part of life (from twenty to thirty); — whether it will ‘last’ is another matter.”
(For the lines to Parnassus, see ‘Childe Harold’, Canto I. stanzas lx.-lxii.) To this journey belongs another incident, recorded by Byron.
“The last bird I ever fired at was an eaglet, on the shore of the Gulf of Lepanto, near Vostizza. It was only wounded, and I tried to save it, — the eye was so bright. But it pined, and died in a few days; and I never did since, and never will, attempt the death of another bird.”]
[Footnote 8: Rear-Admiral Sir Alexander John Ball (1757-1809), who belonged to a Gloucestershire family, entered the navy, inspired by ‘Robinson Crusoe’. A lieutenant in 1778, he distinguished himself with Rodney in 1782 (post-captain, 1783; rear-admiral, 1805), and at the battle of the Nile, when he commanded the ‘Alexander’. Nelson had no liking for Ball until the latter saved the dismasted ‘Vanguard’ from going on shore by taking her in tow. Henceforward they were friends, and Nelson spoke of him as one of his “three right arms.” By his skill in blockading Valetta (1798-1800), Ball was the hero of the siege of Malta, and (June 6, 1801) was created a baronet for his services, and received the Order of Merit from Ferdinand IV of Naples. When Byron met him, Ball was “His Majesty’s Civil Commissioner for the Island of Malta and its Dependencies, and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Order of St. John.” S.T. Coleridge, who was with him as secretary from May, 1804, to October, 1805, wrote enthusiastically of him in his letters, and in ‘The Friend’ (3rd edit., vol. i. essay i., and vol. iii. pp. 226-301). But his picture of the admiral would have been more definite had he remembered the spirit of the remark (quoted in ‘The Friend’) which Ball once made to him:
“The distinction is just, and, now I understand you, abundantly obvious; but hardly worth the trouble of your inventing a puzzle of words to make it appear otherwise.”]
[Footnote 9: Hussein Bey, then a boy of ten years old, son of Mouctar Pasha, the eldest son of Ali, in after years (1820-22) remained faithful to his grandfather, when his father, uncles, and cousin had gone over to the Sultan, and held Tepeleni for Ali in his last struggle against the Turks. Mahomet Pasha, son of Veli Pasha, second son of Ali, though only twelve years old, was already in possession of a pashalik. In Ali’s contest with Turkey, he betrayed Parga to the Sultan, and persuaded his father to surrender Prevesa. He was, however, rewarded for his treachery by execution, and is among the five members of his family who lie buried at the Silivria Gate at Constantinople (Walsh’s ‘Narrative’, p. 67).]
132. — To his Mother.
Smyrna, March 19, 1810.
DEAR MOTHER, — I cannot write you a long letter; but as I know you will not be sorry to receive any intelligence of my movements, pray accept what I can give. I have traversed the greatest part of Greece, besides Epirus, etc., etc., resided ten weeks at Athens, and am now on the Asiatic side on my way to Constantinople. I have just returned from viewing the ruins of Ephesus, a day’s journey from Smyrna. I presume you have received a long letter I wrote from Albania, with an account of my reception by the Pacha of the Province.
When I arrive at Constantinople, I shall determine whether to proceed into Persia or return, which latter I do not wish, if I can avoid it. But I have no intelligence from Mr. Hanson, and but one letter from yourself. I shall stand in need of remittances whether I proceed or return. I have written to him repeatedly, that he may not plead ignorance of my situation for neglect. I can give you no account of any thing, for I have not time or opportunity, the frigate sailing immediately. Indeed the further I go the more my laziness increases, and my aversion to letter-writing becomes more confirmed. I have written to no one but to yourself and Mr. Hanson, and these are communications of business and duty rather than of inclination.
Fletcher is very much disgusted with his fatigues, though he has undergone nothing that I have not shared. He is a poor creature; indeed English servants are detestable travellers. I have, besides him, two Albanian soldiers and a Greek interpreter; all excellent in their way. Greece, particularly in the vicinity of Athens, is delightful; — cloudless skies and lovely landscapes. But I must reserve all account of my adventures till we meet. I keep no journal, but my friend Hobhouse scribbles
incessantly. Pray take care of Murray and Robert, and tell the boy it is the most fortunate thing for him that he did not accompany me to Turkey. Consider this as merely a notice of my safety, and believe me,
Yours, etc., etc.,
BYRON.
[Footnote 1: It was at Smyrna that the two first cantos of ‘Childe Harold’ were completed. To his original MS. of the poem is prefixed the following memorandum: —
”Byron, Ioannina in Albania.
Begun October 31st, 1809;
Concluded Canto 2d, Smyrna,
March 28th, 1810.
— BYRON.”]
133. — To his Mother.
Smyrna, April 9, 1810.
Dear Mother, — I know you will be glad to hear from me: I wish I could say I am equally delighted to write. However, there is no great loss in my scribbles, except to the portmanteau-makers, who, I suppose, will get all by and by.
Nobody but yourself asks me about my creed, — what I am, am not, etc., etc. If I were to begin explaining, God knows where I should leave off; so we will say no more about that, if you please.
I am no “good soul,” and not an atheist, but an English gentleman, I hope, who loves his mother, mankind, and his country. I have not time to write more at present, and beg you to believe me,