Armatoli and Klephts
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 dervend
ji-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.
Dervendji-pasha (derbendler basbugu)
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.
Epirus and the Wider World
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’.
Chapter 2
The Creation of a Legend
Fig. 13: Engraving by Edward Finden taken from a drawing by William Purser for The Life and Works of Lord Byron (1833).
The sun had sunk behind vast Tomerit,1
And Laos2 wide and fierce came roaring by;
The shades of wonted night were gathering yet,
When, down the steep banks winding warily,
Childe Harolde saw, like meteors in the sky,
The glittering minarets of Tepalen,3
Whose walls o’erlook the stream; and drawing nigh,
He heard the busy hum of warrior-men
Swelling the breeze that sigh’d along the lengthening glen.
Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina Page 5
