Fig. 4: The Pindus Mountains, photo by Derek Smith.
The historical regional identity of Ali Pasha’s mountainous powerbase existed long before the present national borders. Known as Epirus from the classical period, by Ali’s time it was commonly referred to as part of Albania. When Henry Holland travelled there in 1812 he described it thus:
Albania, as a country, cannot be defined by any strict line of boundary; but it is rather determined in its outline by the language and other characters of the population. The country around Ioannina, and even Acarnania, though inhabited chiefly by Greeks, are often spoken of under this name; and at present, when annexed to the power of an Albanian ruler, not entirely without reason.
Defined by the spread of population, Holland suggested that Albania began in the south at the Suli Mountains (Paramythia), just north of the Gulf of Arta in present-day Greece, and followed a coastal strip until it reached its present border at Montenegro, which strictly speaking excluded Arta and Ioannina, Ali’s capital. The division between north and south was often referred to as Upper and Lower Albania. Today the classical name of Epirus has been resurrected on both sides of the Greek/Albanian border, recognizing the historical region.
Facing the Ionian Sea and the island of Corfu to the west, Epirus is boarded to the east by the rugged Pindus Mountains, a continuation of the Dinaric Alps that form a spine down the centre of the Balkan Peninsula, through Albania and into central Greece. The range rises to over 2,600m (8,600ft) in a series of steep ridges running parallel to the coast, a formidable barrier of over 100km (62miles) to east-west movement between Epirus and Macedonia and Thessaly. From the Pindus to the coast is a high plateau dominated by a further number of smaller parallel ranges, cut by narrow river valleys and gorges. Particularly striking are the Ceraunian Mountains (Çika 2012m) in Albania, the high (Acroceraunian) western range of which isolates the coastal area of Himara, and the Paramythian plateau through the mountains (Koryla 1,658m and Chionistra 1644m) of which the mythical Acharon River cuts its gorge on its journey from the underworld. Lake Pamvotis, on whose shore the region’s largest town, Ioannina, stands, is at an elevation of 460m (1500ft). The northern boundary of Epirus is marked by the Bay of Vlora in modern Albania and the southern by the Ambracian Gulf (or Gulf of Arta) in Greece.
Northern Epirus, today mainly in Albania, is divided from the south by the watershed between the River Vjosa and its tributary the Drino, which flows north into the Gulf of Vlora, and the Arachthos and Thiamis rivers flowing to the south into the Ambracian Gulf and west into the Ionian Sea respectively. The prevailing maritime westerly winds make Epirus the wettest region of Greece, and its mountainous terrain (less than 4 per cent lowland) and poor soils provide a harsh environment mainly suitable for pasture, especially sheep. While the high mountains are the home of brown bears and wolves, the coastal strip provides a slight respite where olives and fruit can be grown, but the river mouths are characterized by wetlands that in historical times were particularly marshy and malarial.
In 1479, Vonitsa, the last outpost of the Despotate of Epirus finally fell to the Turks. This defeat meant that all of mainland Greece, apart from a few coastal enclaves held by the Republic of Venice, was in the hands of the Ottoman emperor, Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. In classical times Epirus had been an energetic independent kingdom that under the ambitious Pyrrhus took on the emerging military power of the Roman Republic in a series of battles between 280 and 275 BC. Though he could defeat Rome in battle he was unable to win the war, hence the term ‘Pyrrhic victory’. Eventually Epirus became part of the Roman and then Byzantine empires, but as Byzantine power waned it once again became an independent or semi-independent state, passing between Crusader, Frankish, Byzantine and Serbian domination. The Ottoman armies began their slow march through the Balkans in 1362 when Sultan Murad I transferred his capital to Adrianople (in Thrace), renaming it Edirne. The long war of attrition picking away at Byzantium’s diminishing territories finally came to an end in 1453 when Mehmed took the far greater prize of Constantinople after a fifty-three day siege, the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, dying valiantly in the last-ditch attempt to defend the city walls.
Fig. 4: The Pindus Mountains, photo by Derek Smith.
In Epirus the Turkish vultures had already been circling for some time. To the north the Sanjak of Albania had been established by 1419, stretching as far as south as Argyrocastro (Gjirokastër), and in Epirus itself the major centres of Ioannina (1430) and Arta (1449) were already in Ottoman hands.1 With the fall of Vonitsa began the 400 years or so of Turkish rule, but it was a rule that proved as hard to universally maintain as it was to impose. The mountains of Epirus were ideally suited to those willing to eke out a harsh but independent existence, and the coastal enclave of Himara isolated by the Acroceraunian range and the Zagora region in the high reaches of the Pindus retained an element of autonomy. Similarly remote Suli, hidden within the Paramythian Mountains, became a refuge for those escaping Ottoman rule. In the meantime the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice (commonly referred to as Franks) had retained a territorial presence in the eastern Mediterranean dating from the Crusades and stubbornly tried to hold on to their Greek island and mainland possessions. Venice in particular was keen to maintain its maritime empire, the Stato del Mar, and was unafraid to take the war to the Turks. After the Turks occupied the Peloponnese, at that time referred to as the Morea, Venice tried to regain control on a number of occasions but with little lasting effect.
As a consequence of the Ottoman invasion a majority of the population of Albania converted to Islam, with a significant number of Albanians and Greeks following the Dervish Bektashi Order, a mystical Sufi branch of Islam that came to prominence in the fifteenth century, particularly in the Balkans. The divide between north and south Albania was, and still is, characterized by Catholic Christianity retaining a following amongst the Dheg dialect speakers of Albanian above the line of the River Shkumbin, and Orthodox Christianity being followed by the Tosk speakers and Greeks to the south, and by other minorities such as the Vlachs and Slavs.
The tussles between Venice and the Ottomans became a sideshow in the main thrust of European affairs as the centres of power moved away from the Mediterranean. With the fall of Byzantium and the eclipse of Greek culture, the southern Balkans faded from view in the West. Seen as an isolated backwater it was not until the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the region was thrust back into the mainstream. During this period the conquered lands of Eastern Europe were known as ‘Turkey in Europe’. After a period of dynamic expansion, Ottoman power peaked under Suleyman the Magnificent who took his armies as far west as the walls of Vienna (1529), but failed to take the city. At sea the Ottoman Fleet also suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of Lepanto (1573, modern Nafpaktos), fought near the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, at the hands of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic Mediterranean states. Despite this reversal, the Turks were still able to take Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands from the Knights of St. John (1522), and Cyprus (1570–1) and Crete (1669) from Venice. While the fortunes of its possessions in the Morea continued to go back and forth, Venice stubbornly held on to the Ionian Islands and its strategic outposts in Epirus. The flowering of culture and enterprise that followed in the wake of Suleyman came to an end again at Vienna in 1683 when the invading Ottoman forces were defeated by a combined army of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian League. The aftermath was not only a retreat from Hungary but also the slow decline of Ottoman power over 200 years until the Empire finally broke up after the First World War. In contrast the West embarked on a period of empire building, technological innovation and revolution. The immediate result however, was that the Ottoman’s enemies were joined by Venice and Russia (under Peter the Great) to form another Holy League. For Venice this meant that when peace was signed at the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) it gained much of the Dalmatian coast, and the Peloponnese. From hence on, Ottoman endeavours were no longer expansionist but focused on regaining lost territories.
The peace was short-lived. The Ottomans retook the Morea (1715), but despite this success, lost the ports of Preveza and Parga in Epirus to Venice and were still unable to take the Ionian Islands from them. But by now even Venice’s star was beginning to fade. An era of exploration had opened up the world and the scramble for new opportunities for wealth and empire building led to a struggle by the Atlantic facing states for control of the trade routes to the Orient. While on land much of central Europe was dominated by Habsburg and Russian imperial ambitions and Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East remained under Ottoman influence, the conflicts of the Atlantic maritime powers demanded an ever-larger canvas on which to be played out. France and Britain, the increasingly dominant forces, were not content to confine their rivalry to North America or India but sought to spread their influence into the Mediterranean. Naval supremacy here depended on the control of bases from which to maintain a fleet and islands such as Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus that formed a chain from west to east became key strategic locations. The Venetian Ionian Islands, which included both Corfu off the Albanian coast and Kythera at the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese, and their other small land bases on the Greek coast were now not only a thorn in the side of the Ottomans but of great interest to any power with expansionist ideas towards the Levant. Russia too increasingly had designs on the Mediterranean. The creation of its Black Sea Fleet by Catherine the Great’s favourite, Prince Grigory Potemkin, meant that it was inevitably going to resist being hemmed-in in its base at Sebastopol in the Crimea. By the end of the century the eastern Mediterranean was a backwater no more but a major region of interest to what were to become known as the Great Powers, the powers who would attempt to partition the world over the course of the next two centuries.2
For Ali Pasha, born in the midst of the eighteenth century, his career was to be defined by the struggles and shifting alliances of the European powers and the internal divisions within the Ottoman Empire. His rise from obscurity to a despot courted by the Great Powers and dangerous to the Sultan was intimately woven into the story of Ottoman decline. Warfare was an almost constant state of affairs, interspersed by numerous short-term peace treaties during which the belligerents could take a breather, like boxers, and count their territorial gains and losses. Two major wars, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years War (1754–63) created two counter blocs. During the first conflict, Britain, allied to Austria, sought to pursue its war against France and Spain in the colonies (the Americas and India), while its enemies, allied to Prussia, fought a European war. Although in the second war allegiances changed, Prussia with Britain, Austria with France, Spain and Russia, the outcome for Britain was the same, an expansion of its empire and increase in the power of its navy.
The Ottoman Empire was not directly involved in these wars, but its fragile European borders were threatened along the Danube. Both Habsburg Austria and the Romanov Tsars of Russia took advantage of the periods of peace from the larger European conflicts to pursue an aggressive policy towards Turkey. Austria’s endeavours however mainly benefited the Romanovs who bolstered their ambitions with a claim to a dynastic and religious right to authority within the territories of the former Byzantium. Sophia, the daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, the despot of the Morea and younger brother of the last emperor, had married Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow. Her grandson was the first tsar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible. Citing this distant connection, the Romanov tsar, Peter the Great, inserted ‘King of Greece’ amongst his titles. The Russians also claimed leadership of the Orthodox Church. Catherine the Great, who inherited the throne by marriage, was an admirer of Peter and an Orthodox convert. She took seriously the notion that Russia should rule over her fellow believers in occupied Turkey and harboured notions of taking Constantinople, the spiritual centre of Orthodoxy and the seat of the patriarch of the Greek Church.
Turkey’s problem was not only maintaining its borders, but also its internal peace. The Porte, the Ottoman government in Constantinople, was caught between efforts to reform and modernize while it struggled to maintain its grip on its volatile regions. Despite indecisive engagements with Austria or Venice, it had become evident that the Ottoman Army was no match for the new infantry and artillery of the West. The Empire sought aid from France on a number of occasions but military reform met with strong resistance. The janissary corps openly revolted with the consequence that Sultan Ahmed III was deposed in 1730. In 1799 Sir William Eton published A Survey of the Turkish Empire, his findings on the state of the Ottoman Empire. A former diplomat in Russia and Turkey he had gathered information as to the intentions of Catherine and the internal situation in the Balkans. His report underlined Ottoman decline, with the army in particular disarray, being seditious and mutinous and refusing all reform:
their armies are encumbered with immense baggage, and their camp has all the conveniences of a town, with shops etc. for such was their ancient custom when they wandered with their hordes. The cavalry is as much afraid of their own infantry as of the enemy; for in a defeat they fire at them to get their horses to escape more quickly. In short, it is a mob assembled rather than an army levied.
As for the artillery, it was chiefly brass, and although with ‘many fine pieces of cannon’ they were ignorant of how to use it ‘notwithstanding the reiterated instruction of so many French engineers’. Other munitions were old. Musket-barrels were ‘too heavy’ not being made of the latest soft iron and the art of making sabres forgotten with the only good blades being ‘ancient’. The Turkish Grand Fleet ‘consisted of not more than seventeen or eighteen sail of the line in the last war [Russo-Turkish war of 1787–92], and those not in very good condition; at present their number is lessened’.
Sultan Selim III’s attempt to introduce European discipline into the Turkish Army by abolishing the janissaries managed to incite mutiny, which he was only able to appease by consenting to continue their pay during their lifetimes. He ordered however that there would be no more recruitment into the janissaries. Selim ultimately failed and like Ahmed he was overthrown and assassinated by order of his successor, Mustafa IV, in 1808. Mustafa came to his own abrupt end almost immediately, ousted and executed by another reformer, Mahmud II. This chaos and weakness at the centre allowed strong regional leaders to set themselves up in opposition to the Sultan, while smaller bands, such as the Suliotes of Epirus, were able to remain a law unto themselves in their mountain strongholds. Catherine saw in these internal weaknesses and the numerous ethnic and religious divisions an opportunity to be exploited.
The Ottomans were the first power to maintain a standing army. Although their military success had relied heavily on their cavalry they also had a long-established method of using captured prisoners as mercenaries. To maintain an infantry force young boys were recruited from the conquered in the form of a tax, the Devshirme; a percentage of male children. Taken initially from mainly Christian youths in the Balkans, particularly Greece and Albania, the recruits were instilled with religious devotion to Islam and loyalty to the Sultan. The more able were then enrolled into the palace to be trained as administrators and officials in the state bureaucracy, while the remainder became soldiers or maintained order. The most famous of these conscripts were the janissaries. An elite corps formed in the mid fourteenth century they became recognized as the best-trained and most effective soldiers in Europe. The janissaries operated as a close-knit brotherhood associated with the religious order of the Bektashi Dervishes and subject to strict rules including celibacy. In the late sixteenth century such restrictions were relaxed and by the early eighteenth century the original method of recruitment was abandoned. By then they had become a powerful political force within the state and the growing weakness of the Sultans resulted in granting them increased privileges. Despite the rank and file frequently being left without pay when the government was in financial difficulties, the opportunities for the officers to enrich themselves made enrolment into their ranks desirable. Growing corruption and meddling in government administration, the engineering of palace coups and their resistance to the adoption of European methods meant they eventually became a liability. Their end (the Auspicious Incident) came in June 1826 when they again rebelled against modernization. On their refusal to surrender, Mahmud II finally crushed them by having cannon fired into their barracks in the capital. Most of the mutineers were killed, and those who were taken prisoner were executed. The remaining janissaries were imprisoned or fled into exile.
As central authority weakened, regional leaders saw their opportunity to take advantage of local circumstances. Muhammad (Mehmet) Ali Pasha, the Albanian commander of the Ottoman Army in Egypt, rose to power after the retreat of Napoleon in 1801, finally declaring himself Khedive of Egypt and the Sudan with the reluctant acknowledgement of the Porte; an action that led to the founding of modern Egypt. The Balkans too was fertile ground for provincial governors to stake a claim for independent rule. The Bushatli family created a semi-autonomous pashalik in Scutari (Shkodra) in northern Albania, Osman Pazvantoğlu, a Bosnian mercenary, took control of Vidin on the Danube (Bulgaria) and set up a rebel state and Ismail Pasha ruled a semi-autonomous personal domain around Serres in northern Greece. Pazvantoğlu was a friend of the Greek poet and political thinker Rigas Feraios, who was an intellectual inspiration behind Greek unrest. Wealthy Greek families associated with the Phanar district of Constantinople, hence Phanariotes, had attained such a significant role within the Empire and in the Danube provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia, today’s Romania, that the Ottoman government was obliged to create two principalities with local Phanariotes appointed as princes of autonomous vassal states. Russia, with its borders on the principalities, was ready to exploit any discord between them and the Porte. Russia had had agents working in Greece since the time of Peter the Great, stoking the fires of discontent and promising that Russia would defeat the Turks and liberate the Greek Christians, who hoped this would lead to the restoration of the Byzantine Empire. Catherine developed a strategy to take Constantinople by the back door by exploiting unrest in the Morea. Conditions here had been generally good during the early eighteenth century, and the Greeks were even willing to help the Turks retake their territory lost to the Venetians in 1715, but by the 1760s things had deteriorated, with land tenure being increasingly unequally distributed between the Greeks and their masters.
At this time, Georgios Papazolis, a Greek officer in the Russian Army, was friendly with Count Grigori Orlov, one of Catherine’s favourites at court. He persuaded Orlov that the Greeks were ready to rise up, and a plan was hatched to back Russia’s fellow Orthodox followers against Turkey. Papazolis was the author of Teaching and Interpretation of the Order of War, a manual he managed to circulate in Greece, and about 1765, he and his agents began to prepare the ground for rebellion. When Russia again went to war with Turkey in 1769 Catherine agreed to the creation of another front, and Papazolis’ brother Theodore was put in command of a small Russian force heading for the Mani Peninsula. The Mani Peninsula had never been fully subdued by the Turks and was seen as a favourable starting point to ignite a revolt. The Russian Baltic Fleet under Orlov’s brother, Alexi, reached Mani with British connivance, refitting and taking on supplies at Portsmouth. Unfortunately for Catherine and her advisors they over-estimated the Greeks’ willingness to fight in another Russo-Turkish war. Both sides expected greater support from each other. The Rebels, a small force of around 1,400 men mustered by the Greeks augmented by a few troops from the five ships supplied by the Russians, were soon defeated by the Sultan’s Albanian irregulars who proceeded to run amok among the population even after peace was signed. They were only finally removed ten years later by the Sultan’s forces in combination with the Greek chieftains. Though the uprising was a failure the Russian Fleet defeated the Ottoman Fleet at the Battle of Chesme off Chios. The failure of the revolt damaged Russian prestige amongst the Greeks who would look to other allies to achieve liberation.
At the end of hostilities between Russia and Turkey, the subsequent Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji (Küçük Kaynarca) in 1774, which did nothing for the Greeks, granted Catherine a vague protectorate over all Orthodox subjects in the Ottoman Empire, giving her a further excuse to champion the cause of the Serbs and Greeks in the Balkans ultimately for her own ends. So when her grandson was born in 1779, inspired by Potemkin she named him Constantine, with the intention that he was to be brought up as a Greek prince destined to rule Constantinople. Her ‘Greek Plan’ was to partition the Ottoman Empire between the Russian and Hapsburg empires followed by the resurrection of the Byzantine Empire centred in Constantinople. Her provocations incited a new war with Turkey in 1787. With the Morea still suffering under the depredations of the Albanians and an increase in brigandage, her renewed invitation to the Greeks of the Morea to take part fell on deaf ears. The Suliotes of Epirus were to be more responsive, but by now it would be Ali Pasha who had to be reckoned with.
The impetus given by the Revolution to French ambitions meant that their most successful general, Napoleon Bonaparte, too would have his eyes on former Venetian territories and ultimately the Ottoman’s important Eyalet of Egypt. As a result of Napoleon’s successful campaigns against the Austrian forces in Italy, Venice fell into French hands. Although the Hapsburgs lost significant territories in the subsequent Treaty of Campo Formio, the Austrians gained Venice, while the Ionian Islands and Preveza were transferred to French rule, becoming the French Departments of Greece. Napoleon informed the French Directory, the committee that ruled Revolutionary France, that the islands ‘are more important to us than all Italy put together’ and the French foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, that they would ‘make us masters of the Adriatic and the Levant’. Napoleon believed he would see the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in his lifetime and the occupation of the islands was a major stake in securing a ‘share of it for ourselves’. Napoleon wanted to ruin Britain by cutting it off from its sources of wealth in the East. To this end his plan was to strike at Egypt, cut a canal at Suez through to the Red Sea, and create a new sea route to India. In 1798 he set out for Egypt taking Malta from the Knights of St John on the way. Although Napoleon’s land army was successful his navy came up against Nelson, who defeated it at the Battle of the Nile. With their forces overstretched the French abandoned Egypt in 1801. Napoleon’s failure created the opportunity for Muhammad Ali Pasha who, seen as a liberator, had the support to loosen Ottoman authority and set up a semi-autonomous region.
French eastward expansionism forced Sultan Selim III to reconsider his foreign policy. France, that had hitherto been an ally, was now a threat, whereas Russia, so long an enemy was now a potential ally. After Catherine’s death (1796) her successor Paul was eager for rapprochement with Turkey to offset French ambitions. Britain also became concerned to preserve Ottoman integrity as a buffer between France and its Asian territories. Franco-Russian relations would veer dramatically from hostility to friendship and back again but initially Russia and Turkey, joined by the British, allied to throw Napoleon out of the Ionian Islands. The Turks allowed the Russians right of transit through the Turkish Straits and a joint Russo-Turkish Fleet under Admirals Fyodor Ushakov and Cadhirbey (Kadir bey), blessed by the patriarch of Constantinople, took first Kythira, then Corfu in 1799. They established the Septinsular Republic comprising the islands, while the mainland ports, Preveza, Vonitza, and Butrint, became vassals of the Sultan under the protection of the tsar. A ‘Byzantine Constitution’ was drawn up which gave the Greeks a limited amount of self-government.
Fig. 8: ‘The plumb-pudding in danger: or state epicures taking un petit souper’ (1805) by cartoonist James Gillray: William Pitt, the British Prime Minister and Napoleon Bonaparte carve up the world.
Napoleon set to work to try and split the allies over the islands while encouraging discord in the Sultan’s Christian provinces, especially in janissary-dominated Serbia, Moldavia and Wallachia. In 1807, the French, who were now friends with Russia after the Treaty of Tilsit, succeeded in having the islands ceded back, but despite their efforts they could not hold on to them. The British chipped away at them one by one between 1809 and 1814. In 1815 they became the United States of the Ionian Islands under British protection until 1864, when they were handed over to the kingdom of Greece. The battle for the islands and the old Venetian ports would play a major role in the story of Ali Pasha.
For the Ottomans the Napoleonic Wars upset the balance of power in the Mediterranean, the manoeuvrings for strategic advantage between Britain and France eventually leading to Britain emerging as the leading nation. Egypt continued to be difficult to control and remained semi-autonomous and in the Balkans, Serbia and the Danube provinces remained vulnerable in the north. Turkey in Europe was beset with instability and power struggles. The growth of ideas of nationalism as a consequence of the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution fermented revolt in Serbia and in the southern Balkans; in the meantime, lawlessness and brigandry were a way of life.
The disruption of the Ottoman invasion had a significant effect on the local population, the repercussions of which continued to be felt in Ali’s lifetime. Maintaining the early dynamism of invaders while transforming into a government of occupation and then into a harmonious state for all its population proved to be a problem the Turks never solved. Originally the Sultan held supreme power both as head of state and also as the caliph, the leader and protector of the Muslim world. Although people of ‘the Book’, followers of those religions that were founded on the Bible, were not persecuted, conditions became less favourable towards them. In certain regions this led to wholesale conversion to Islam. The Greek heartlands remained staunchly Orthodox Christian but further north into Albania the people saw it as more expedient to change faith. Deforestation and over-farming made life increasingly difficult. Those who could not stomach the new regime and had the means fled abroad, mainly to Italy, but many Greeks found a welcoming refuge with their fellow Orthodox in Russia. The Ottomans recognized the rights of other faiths to retain their religious practices and laws. This meant that minorities formed their own millets across the Empire to look after their affairs. In Europe the Rum Millet (Roman nation) comprised a variety of ethnic groups and languages all united by their Orthodox faith, with its religious and political head the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople and dominated by Greeks.
By the time of Ali, the Sultans had become victims of a system that fostered court intrigue and isolation within the Topkapi palace complex at Constantinople, where political power was in the hands of the grand vizier and the council known as the Sublime Porte. Local power was delegated to local governors who exercised varying degrees of autonomy. The Empire was divided into eyalets or pashaliks, areas ruled over by a pasha of the three tails whose ceremonial staff was decorated with feathers. The Eyalet of Rumeli or Rumelia took in most of the Balkans and was governed from Monastir, modern Bitola, in the Former Republic of Macedonia. The Morea formed its own eyalet with its capital at Tripolitza. Eyalets were further divided into sanjaks, ruled by a bey, and then timars (fiefs). Throughout the century the complicated administrative areas of Greece and Albania were constantly shifting. Control of Ioannina moved from the Sanjak of Thessaly, ruled by a pasha at Tirhala (Trikkala), to its own direct government appointee, Mehmet ‘Kalo’ Pasha, in the latter half of the century. Military organization and law and order operated on a number of levels, from the elite janissaries to local policing.
Central control was hindered by the lack of technical advances. Communications in many areas had not been improved for years, neither had modes of transport. Piracy at sea meant merchants were unwilling to risk their goods to shipping while land transport was still medieval in practice. The mountainous terrain of the Balkans inhibited movement and banditry added a further impediment. The main artery into Albania from the capital was still the old Roman road, the Via Egnatia, which ran from Constantinople via Thessalonika, Monastir, Ochrid, Elbasan and Tirana to Durazzo (modern Durrës) on the Adriatic, and on to Rome. To reach Ioannina from Thessaly involved crossing the wild mountain passes of the high Pindus range. These routes were still treacherous 100 years later as Edward Lear witnessed when he crossed back and forth in 1848–9. Passing through a narrow defile on the road from Ochrid to Elbasan he records:
Beyond this… the road was perhaps more dangerous, and our progress still slower; at the narrowest point we encountered some fifty laden mules, and a long time was consumed in arranging the coming and going trains, lest either should jostle and pitch into the abyss beneath. At another sharp turning lay a dead ox skinned, filling up half the track (the edge of that track a sheer precipice of sixty or eighty feet in depth), and by no measures could we cause our horses to pass the alarming object; nor till our united strength had dragged the defunct to a niche in the rock, could we progress one foot’s length. At a third cattivo passo [bad pass] a projecting rock interfered with the sumpter horses’ idea of a straight line; and, lo! down went all the baggage, happily to no great distance, but far enough to occasion a half hour’s delay in readjusting it.
To the south the best land route from Epirus to Athens, and the one taken by Lord Byron in 1809, was to cross into the Peloponnese and follow the coast to Corinth, and then into Attica.
Under Ottoman rule land could still be held in private, particularly smallholdings and land in more marginal areas; land given to religious foundations or put aside for charitable purposes, whether Muslim or Christian, was also respected. But newly conquered territory was seen as a potentially valuable resource for the Empire and a source of revenue. Land in Europe taken during Ottoman expansion, usually from those who had resisted invasion, was redistributed and given to key members of the military, particularly non-salaried cavalrymen (Sipahis) and janissaries, as compensation for military service, and to high-ranking slaves (kuls) of the Sultan to be managed as personal fiefdoms. This land reverted back to the Sultan when the occupier moved on or died, to be distributed anew. Taxes were gathered by the proprietor and a few days’ labour a year was required from the peasants. Once the Empire ceased expanding, from the sixteenth century onwards, this relatively benign system fell into decline as the military class began to turn inwards on the Empire carving it up into private, hereditary landholdings, which a weakened administration was forced to recognize. By the time of Ali, most land was held under this new chiflik system, with the peasants reduced to serfs, no longer free to work for their own monetary gain, but labouring under the rule of a feudal lord for many days a week while a larger percentage of their harvest was seized. This oppressive rule caused many peasants to migrate from chiflik controlled areas, which in Greece meant into the mountains where Ottoman authority was tenuous.
The armatoli were the Greek militia given the responsibility of keeping order in inhospitable regions plagued by banditry. Their opponents were known as klephts, from the Greek for thief. Originally the klephts were merely brigands who tormented travellers and raided villages, but after the Ottoman invasion many of those who retreated to the mountains to retain their independence took on the klephtic life. The numbers grew over the centuries so that they were able to maintain a warlike lifestyle that included raiding and highway robbery, blurring the line between resistance to Ottoman authority and plain lawlessness.
Fig. 9: Warrior of Sellaida (1825) by Louis Dupré.
In charge of the armatoli was a captain assisted by a second in command, usually a relative, and a number of section leaders. The captain often succeeded to or inherited his territories, which he was then allowed to run as a personal fiefdom with the effect that self-aggrandizement often led to a regime of extortion and violence being foisted on the local peasantry. This was perhaps hardly surprising as the captains were often drawn from individuals that had already achieved notoriety as a klepht, their reputation obliging the authorities to give them amnesty and then turning their talents to attempting to control the brigand groups operating in the region. As the links between the armatoli and the klephts were therefore close, this had mixed results. There was in fact little difference in organization between the armatoli and the klephts. The rank-and-file soldiers, the palikaria trained daily with their weapons, particularly developing skills of marksmanship with their prized weapon, the kariofili, a long musket. Like their enemies, the klephts, the armatoli had to match them for physical endurance and resilience to hunger and thirst. They also used similar guerrilla tactics, employing swift mobility and the ambush, often under cover of darkness. When under attack however the armatoli could throw up improvised forts, and if need be resort to swordplay. The more the authorities were unable to contain the activities of the klephts so their mystique grew, creating a heroic model of freedom that would be romanticized and have important consequences in the Greek War of Independence. The existence of so many armed and experienced fighters would also enable the Greeks to become a more formidable fighting force when the time came.
In areas where the Muslim population was small, particularly in the Peloponnese, Christians were able to hold on to or even eventually acquire property rights. This could be achieved by circumventing Ottoman legal proceedings or in lieu of services rendered in keeping the mountain passes safe. The system of communal administration of the Greek provinces was less successful in the north of the Peloponnese. The redistribution of population, with mountain areas being reoccupied, meant that certain districts maintained a form of independence from the Ottoman administration, developing their own social organization based around family and clan ties. In Thesprotia in western Epirus two tribes of Albanian origin stubbornly held on to their semi-autonomous way of life, the Muslim Tsamides or Chams, a south Albanian sub-group, and particularly the inhabitants of the mountainous area of Suli. The historic core of Suli consisted of four villages and their linked families, the heads of which formed a council. Renowned for their fighting prowess, the Suliotes ranks were swelled during the eighteenth century by disaffected Greeks drawn to the remoteness of their wild refuge, and a further seven villages were added lower down the mountain, forming a frontier zone from which the inhabitants would retreat in times of trouble. The code of these independently minded and warlike people was summed up by George Finlay as: ‘Depredation they honoured with the name of war, and war they considered to be the only honourable occupation for a true Suliot.’ Classified by the Turks as Greeks, they spoke both Albanian and Greek. The mountain regions enjoyed their degree of autonomy at a price. It was a harsh environment, and the communities, who relied heavily on sheep husbandry for their survival, were obliged to protect themselves and their flocks from raids and the arbitrary acts of the Ottoman provincial governors by going well-armed. With the addition of marginalized Greeks, the constant surplus of able-bodied men meant it that was a small step to the formation of a warrior society. Amongst the Albanians this long-standing expediency of resorting to warfare as a way of life encouraged them to take up arms for a living. They became the most renowned mercenaries within the Empire, offering their services to pashas or Sultan alike, and increasingly taking power from the janissaries. For others in Albania and Greece banditry was an expedient alternative.
At the local level, elements of the pre-existing Byzantine military system had been retained by the Ottomans. In areas that had high levels of brigandage or in regions that were difficult for the Ottoman authorities to govern due to the inaccessible terrain, some Greeks were allowed to keep their privileges of self-policing and a degree of autonomy as a condition of accepting Ottoman rule. Banditry became the scourge throughout the Balkans and particularly in the mountainous regions of Macedonia, Epirus and Thessaly. The bandits, known as klephts, by all accounts terrorized the countryside in time-honoured fashion; murdering, raping and pillaging. As the Christian klepht targeted the wealthy, which meant the Turk or Ottoman foreigner, the tax collector, the well-living primate or priest and the successful merchant, they came to be idolized, unlike their Muslim counterparts, as an expression of protest by the poor Christian peasantry. Given their inability to impose law and order, the Turks found it expedient to continue the local irregular militias requiring them to guard the roads and passes and allowing them to collect taxes. These Christian armatoli were organized in administrative districts known as armatolikia within the Ottoman system and responsible to local governors. During the eighteenth century there were around seventeen armatolikia. Ten of them were located in Thessaly and the eastern regions of central Greece, four of them in Epirus, Acarnania, and Aetolia, and three in Macedonia. The increase in numbers of dispossessed and warlike Albanians throughout Rumeli after the invasion was a challenge to the armatoli and to the military authority of the Ottomans where the use of their supreme weapon, their cavalry, was restricted.
The local governors often found it to their advantage to employ a thief to catch a thief, but as there was a high turnover of governors, the one-time armatoli could find himself next day a klepht and vice versa, blurring the distinction between them. Roles and allegiances reversed as the situation demanded while all the while the delicate status quo was maintained, with the Ottoman authorities progressively finding it more difficult to distinguish peacekeeper from lawbreaker. As both groups began to bond under a common Greek identity and mutual antipathy to their foreign conquerors, the abuses and independence of the armatoli lead to the Ottomans increasingly seeing them as a threat to their authority. In consequence, in order to decrease their power and numbers, the Turks took direct control, appointing a government official, the dervendji-pasha, authorized to protect the mountain passes and supplied with his own troops. This policy was successful in reducing numbers and, according to Finlay, local communities even preferred to pay for exemption from such obligations. This paved the way for Albanian mercenaries to be employed and, in areas with a large Muslim population, it was possible to give command to Albanians rather than Greeks. In 1740 Suleyman of Argyrocastro was appointed as pasha of Ioannina and dervendji-pasha with strict orders not only to curb the power of the armatoli, but to watch over the Greeks who were suspected of intriguing with the Russians. Suleyman achieved this by exploiting the greed, internal jealousies and feuds of the armatoli captains, aided by the people who suffered at their hands, and introducing Muslims into Christian districts to weaken their organization. This policy was continued by Kurt Pasha who succeeded him for fifteen years as pasha of Ioannina and dervendji-pasha, and then around the time the Russians invaded the Morea, as pasha of Berat and dervendji-pasha. The powers of dervendji-pasha gave him the pretext to reduce pay as well as numbers. When Russia was given the right to protect Christians within the Ottoman Empire after the peace of 1774, these measures were increased. The post of dervendji-pasha was one Ali would succeed to in 1787 with the same obligations.
Fig. 10: Separated by a narrow strip of water the people of Corfu inhabit a different Italianate world: Carnival in the early nineteenth century with onlookers from the mainland in fustanellas.
The dervendji-pasha, or governor of the passes, was a highly influential position within the Ottoman administration in Greece and Albania. From the beginning of the eighteenth century the Porte had made various efforts to deal with the problem of banditry in the mountains, particularly by the klephts, and the growing insubordination of the armatoli. Eventually, in an effort to bring the Greek and Albanian paramilitaries into the system of government the post of dervendji-pasha was created in 1761 with jurisdiction over all law enforcement and with the intention of neutralizing both the bandits and the armatoli. The dervendji-pasha was given power to maintain his own small official army. First under Kurt Pasha and then Ali Pasha, the post’s potential for wielding both military and political power was realized. Ali’s holding of the office from 1787 to 1820 was an important step in his road to power.
Fig. 11: The Abduction of a Herzegovenian Woman (1861), a typically overwrought depiction of Turkish/European relations as depicted by Czech artist Jaroslav Čermák, simultaneously giving its audience the required amount of disgust and titillation.
Although Epirus was regarded by foreigners as an unknown and exotic backwater, it was not cut off from outside influences or the world. Outside the Ottoman Empire there had long been trade links through Italy and into Europe and the ties of emigration went as far afield as Paris, Moscow or the Crimea. Increasing contact meant that the Western fascination with the Orient was matched by a yearning for Western ideas and goods within the Empire, particularly by its European subjects. The end of the eighteenth century was dominated by the fallout from three defining events in European and World history: the American colonies’ successful achievement of independence from Britain (1783), the French Revolution (1789) and the rise of Napoleon. These were significant not only for their political outcomes but also as embodiments of the ideas engendered by the intellectual and cultural movements of the time. The ideas of liberty that were the driving force behind these events had a profound influence on Turkey’s disenchanted communities that were becoming more aware of their ethnic identities and nascent nationalism. The realities of life were complex but the propaganda and media of the day, as now, dealt in stereotypes. In the West the Turk was often viewed with a mix of terror and admiration. The Oriental was seen as capricious, lazy and cruel, but also as chivalrous, brave and noble, and untainted with the base dealings of money and gain; these latter dirty necessities being in the hands of the Turks’ non-Muslim subjects, mainly the Greeks, Jews and Armenians, who were tainted by such activities.
Fig. 12: James Gilray’s view of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign as the French cavalry, on a donkey, engage with the heroic-looking Pasha of Rhodes in 1799.
The Enlightenment thinking that underscored these revolutionary movements did not go unheeded in Greece. Rigas Feraios was a political thinker and writer from Thessaly, heavily influenced by French ideas, who was prepared to take action to back his radical views. In 1793 he went to Vienna where he published pamphlets setting out his views on human rights and government. In an effort to seek aid from Napoleon in support of a pan-Balkan uprising against the Ottomans he was betrayed and captured in Trieste on his way to Venice by the Austrian authorities, then allied to Turkey, and handed over to the Ottomans, who had him tortured and executed. As a consequence he became a Greek national hero. Adamantios Korais, a humanist scholar and educator from Smyrna who lived for many years in exile in Paris was also highly influential in spreading Enlightenment ideals in Greece. The Italian and then French occupied Ionian Islands and westward facing Epirus were well-placed to absorb such influences and the contemporary accounts attest to the ideas of Rigas and Korais being circulated.
A further aspect of the Enlightenment for the Westerner spurred on by the desire for individual experience was foreign travel. For the aristocracy and those of sufficient means from northern Europe, and particularly Britain, this meant embarking on the Grand Tour. It was deemed edifying for the young to be exposed to the culture of the classical world and the Renaissance first-hand. From the late seventeenth century young men, often accompanied by a tutor and following planned itineraries, headed south to France and Italy to study history and art, and take in the latest in fashionable society. The outbreak of the French and Napoleonic wars in Europe put an abrupt halt to such undertakings. With the tour that usually culminated in the cultural delights (and otherwise) of Italy now being off limits, new itineraries were needed and Portugal and Corsica became destinations for a few. Fortuitously, when Napoleon invaded Egypt and the Ottomans warmed towards Britain new horizons were opened up. This had particular appeal for those educated within a system that laid such great emphasis on the Classics (Latin and Greek) for the superior civilization of ancient Greece, not only on the Greek mainland but in Turkey itself, could now be observed first-hand.
From the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century an influx of dilettantes, academics, artists, writers, travellers and eccentrics descended unto the barren plains of Greece to pick over the marble bones of the past in the hope of finding some meaningful connection with Homer and Thucydides. The Levantine Lunatics, as Lord Byron termed them, many of them British, but also Germans, French and other Westerners, went on to paint, record and loot the past. Marbles, such as those made famous by Lord Elgin, pilfered or otherwise from classical sites, made their way into the country houses and museums of Europe. Byron, although critical of his contemporaries, was in many ways one of them, the difference being that he made a point of appreciating the here and now, the reality of the Oriental present as opposed to the classical past, and embracing the people who lived there even if they were regarded as debased specimens by his fellow travellers. Byron was in the forefront of Greek travel and his writings brought the Oriental and revolutionary Greece to the public’s notice. Many of his fellows were more ostentatiously philhellene, or lovers of everything Greek, but few were to achieve martyrdom like Byron in the cause of Greek freedom. Those that trod the same paths also left memoirs and journals, in fact there was an outpouring, for as well as the valuable academic works and new discoveries, everyone thought their own experience worth sharing, until the ‘Greek travels’ as an idiom became played out.
Although Enlightenment thinking was crucial to the spread of notions of political and personal liberty it created a reaction that expressed itself through what has been termed the Romantic Movement and romanticism. Though many of the so-called Romantics were loathed to attach themselves to any kind of label the European public was ready to idolize artists and thinkers, as well as politicians and soldiers, who expressed the often-conflicting emotions associated with the movement. The two greatest artistic heroes of the age, Beethoven and Byron, began as supporters of revolution, but their politics became ambiguous as idealism turned sour with the Reign of Terror (1793–4) and the French Republic’s greatest general, Napoleon Bonaparte, crowning himself as Emperor in 1804. Both Byron and Beethoven were early admirers of Napoleon. On learning of Napoleon’s elevation to the laurel crown, Beethoven famously scratched out his name from the title page of his just completed Eroica (3rd) Symphony, and rededicated it to his long-standing patron in Vienna, the Bohemian aristocrat Joseph Franz Maximilian von Lobkowitz. As France exported the revolution outside its borders, threatening the old regimes and monarchies of Europe, Beethoven remained true to the ideals of liberty, but under Napoleon these French ambitions had turned from liberating the people of Europe to empire building. Byron, an aristocrat himself, mirrored the opposing forces in his own personality. As much as he advocated freedom, especially personal freedom, he was prone to hero worship and to idolizing individuals and types, eager to find similar Napoleonic qualities in others. Napoleon and Byron, remote from one another in distance but linked by fame, were to play a major role in Ali Pasha’s life. When Byron set sail for Epirus he was bringing with him a complex of attitudes and misconceptions that would begin the shaping of Ali’s legend.
1 Ottoman provinces, eyalets or viyalets, where divided into sanjaks and then further subdivided into timars (fiefs).
2 The term ‘Great Power’ was first used by Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, in 1814, in reference to the Austrian Empire, France, Prussia, Russia and the United Kingdom. It was hoped the five could establish a formula for peace after the Napoleonic Wars based on the ‘Balance of Power’.
