Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

by Eugenia Russell

  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 Janissaries

  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.

  Fig. 6: Janissary musketeer (1703) by Caspar Luken.

  Fig. 7: Janissary from Ioannina (1828) by Otto Magnus von Stackelberg.

  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 t
he 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.

  Life in Albania and Greece

  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.