Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

by Eugenia Russell

  Pouqueville had been less impressed. He found that Ali did not measure up to what he had imagined from the stories he had heard. In his Voyage en Grèce (1826–7), he elaborates slightly on his previous accounts, perhaps with the flourishes of hindsight that emphasize Ali’s 60-odd years of age. Ali again greeted them standing:

  He saluted us, embraced M. Bessières, and drawing himself back in a tottering attitude; he let himself fall backward on the corner of a sofa, apparently without having perceived me. A spectre, with a white beard, accoutred in black, who was present, honoured me with a slight movement of the head to intimate that I was welcome.

  Despite the doddery appearance of the corpulent and wrinkled Ali, his Greek secretary lies prostrate on the floor in a state of fear. Pouqueville was excited to see the man who styled himself as a second Pyrrhus, ‘a new Theseus – an aged warrior covered with wounds’, but what he found was someone whose ‘suppleness of the motions of his countenance; the fire of his little blue eyes; impressed on me the alarming idea of deep cunning, united with ferocity’.

  Byron in a note to Childe Harold, called Pouqueville’s account in his Travels of the ‘celebrated Ali’ incorrect. Byron, however, was lavished with attention. Ali entertained Byron and Hobhouse with refreshments and pipes, showed them a mountain howitzer in his apartment, while boasting he also possessed several large cannon, and an English telescope, through which Hobhouse tells us, Ali laughingly explained that the man ‘they saw on the road is the chief minister of my enemy, Ibrahim Pasha, and he is now coming over to me, having deserted his master to take the stronger side’. His genial manner impressed them, while giving little away. He did say, though, that the British Navy had taken Zante (Zakynthos), Cephalonia, Ithaca, and Cerigo (Kythera). Congratulating them upon the news, which had arrived a fortnight before, he said he was happy to have the English as allies, believing they would not undermine his authority like the Russians and French by protecting runaway robbers, for which read insurgents. He went on to profess that he had always been a friend of Britain ‘even during our war with Turkey, and had been instrumental in bringing about a Peace’.

  Despite the opulence of Ali’s court, Cockerell describes Ali, in contrast to his son Mukhtar, as displaying an austere sobriety. Mukhtar had turned from a happy and open youth to a gloomy and ferocious adult, while still leading a dissolute life. Everett paints a picture of the mainly Muslim elite living a life of luxury and depravity while the peasants struggled in abject poverty. Ali was calculated in the image he projected to his Western visitors, playing up the venerable old man, with a manner that Cockerell found ‘so mild and paternal and so charming in its air of kindness and perfect openness’ that the contrast with his reputation is the more chilling. Ushered into his presence Cockerell, ‘remembering the blood-curdling stories told of him, could hardly believe [his] eyes’. Accompanied by George Foresti, who had replaced Leake, they were confronted with Ali, ‘a truly Oriental figure’, seated on a crimson sofa trimmed with gold.

  He had a velvet cap, a prodigious fine cloak; he was smoking a long Persian pipe, and held a book in his hand. Foresti says he did this on purpose to show us he could read. Hanging beside him was a small gun magnificently set with diamonds, and a powder-horn; on his right hand also was a feather fan. To his left was a window looking into the courtyard, in which they were playing at the djerid,13 and in which nine horses stood tethered in their saddles and bridles, as though ready for instant use.

  Later Cockerell visited Mukhtar, who, although he was also in good-humour, was:

  without any of the inimitable grace of his father, which makes everything Ali says agreeable… Mukhtar’s talk was flat… very civil and rather dull. He smoked a Persian pipe brought him by a beautiful boy very richly dressed, with his hair carefully combed, and another brought him coffee; while coffee and pipes were brought to us by particularly ugly ones. On the sofa beside him were laid out a number of snuff-boxes, mechanical singing birds, and things of that sort. The serai itself was handsome in point of expense, but in the miserable taste now in vogue in Constantinople. The decoration represented painted battle-pieces, sieges, fights between Turks and Cossacks, wild men, and abominations of that sort; while in the centre of the pediment is a pasha surrounded by his guard, and in front of them a couple of Greeks just hanged, as a suitable ornament for the palace of a despot.

  All visitors to Ali were intrigued by how he had attained his position, and where he had come from, and various accounts of his life were a common feature of the travel books, often repeating the same tales. In essence it was a story of a climb from disinherited obscurity to power by way of banditry and cunning. Hughes was told of the days when Ali had ‘not where to lay his head’ and how his mother possessed ‘all the martial qualities of an Amazon’. Once enough power was amassed, Ali was able militarily to take on increasingly larger opponents, while always appearing to serve his ultimate master, the Sultan; whether distinguishing himself against the Austrians and Russians, or the Bosnian rebel Osman Pazvantoğlu (Paswan Oglou), but at arm’s length from the seat of power in Constantinople. As Byron put it in a nutshell:

  Ali inherited 6 dram and a musket after the death of his father … collected a few followers from among the retainers of his father, made himself master, first of one village, then of another, amassed money, increased his power, and at last found himself at the head of a considerable body of Albanians.

  The truth was of course more complex, but a rags-to-riches tale was the pleasingly more satisfying. There was even a rumour that he had overcome his destitute state by discovering a pot of gold hidden under a tree, which enabled him to hire his first followers. The story, attested by Guillaume de Vaudoncourt but doubted by Pouqueville who says it was invented by the Greek scholar Psalidas, was too good to leave alone, and it became part of the repertoire of Ali tales.

  Fig. 20: Ali’s second son Veli (1825) by Louis Dupré.

  Ali told Byron to consider him as a father whilst he was in Turkey, while he looked on him as a son. Byron and Hobhouse stayed four nights. The scent of the forbidden lurks in their accounts. Byron was open about his homosexual desires in letters to friends and homosexuality was a further mysterious element in the mix of Ali’s personality. Byron had intimated that one of his reasons for undertaking his tour was to inquire into the praiseworthy nature of sodomy from ancient times onwards and he made no secret of his affairs with local boys while in Greece. Hobhouse notes in his Diary that Ali looked ‘a little leeringly’ at Byron. He then showered Byron with gifts of sweets as for a child and requested that he visit ‘often, and at night when he was more at leisure’ and by implication, on his own. Peter Cochran suggests that the discrepancy between the number of meetings recorded by Byron and Hobhouse raise the possibility that Byron indeed saw Ali on his own and was probably entertained by his Ganymedes. At Tepelene, one of Ali’s doctors, a Frank and native of Alsace,14 the son of an eminent physician from Vienna, informed them that Ali’s body was unscathed and that within groups with a lack of females ‘pederasty… was openly practised’.

  In contrast to Ibrahim Manzour, who stressed the dangers of travel amidst the savage inhabitants of Albania along ‘bad roads that are both dangerous and disagreeable’, the hospitality of Ali and his son Veli impressed Byron enough for him to write in his notes on Childe Harold that the difficulties of travelling in Turkey had been greatly exaggerated. In fact Byron preferred Turkey, as he calls it, to Spain and Portugal. It should be remembered that he had special treatment, always being looked after with guards and his every requirement being catered for. Ali gave him a bodyguard of forty men to escort him through the dangerous passes. Byron then went on to stay with Veli Pasha in the Peloponnese on his way to Athens and was treated even more generously as a brother. In a letter to Hobhouse from Patras on his way to Athens and to Francis Hodgson from Athens, he boasts of having received a stallion from ‘the Pacha of the Morea’, Veli, who ‘received him with great pomp, standing, conducted me to the
door with his arm around my waist, and a variety of civilities, invited me to meet him in Larissa [in Thessaly] and see his army’. Other travellers agreed with Manzour, attesting to dangers and discomforts real enough.

  In retrospect it seems strange that it was not until Byron and Hobhouse had left Ali and returned to Vostitsa, on the Gulf of Corinth, that they realized to their surprise the enmity between the Greeks and Turks. Hobhouse wrote in his journal, ‘We have observed the professed hatred for their masters to be universal among the Greeks.’ Until then, under the spell of Ali, they had thought Albania and Greece to be tranquil provinces of the Empire. It too dawned on them that their visit, oiled as it was by the wheels of British diplomacy, was not as innocent as they thought. Perhaps they had been used; unaware of British imperialist designs they were only too eager to go as supplicants to Ali’s court. The Romantic Ali would be the image that Byron would portray in verse, even if in reality he knew more.

  An ambiguity remains in Byron’s vision of Albania and Greece. When he realized that he and his alter ego, Harold, were travelling through an enslaved culture under Turkish will, he was already indebted to the hospitality of the masters. The revulsion and admiration he feels for Ali and the brutality of bandit law are never resolved. In Childe Harold (1812) on the one hand he wallows in Ali’s bloody deeds, only then to remember, ‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!’ and the ‘Spirit of Freedom!’, and ‘the scourge of Turkish hand’ that holds the populace enslaved.

  Though Byron’s sympathies shifted, he never totally gave up his feeling for the Turks, even during the Greek War of Independence. For Hobhouse too, the situation was complex; the Suliotes are bandits not freedom fighters, whose songs commemorated robbing exploits (Byron’s song beginning ‘Tambourgi, tambourgi’ is punctuated by ‘Robbers all at Parga!’). Again, it was only when the Suliotes came in on the Greek cause of liberty that perceptions changed.

  In Byron’s view he had been an explorer, almost another Columbus, bringing back riches from an exotic and faraway land. As he wrote to Henry Drury in 1810:

  Albania indeed I have seen more than any Englishman (but a Mr. Leake) for it is a country rarely visited from the savage character of the natives, though abounding in more natural beauties than the classical regions of Greece… where places without name, and rivers not laid on maps, may one day when more known be justly esteemed subjects for the pencil and pen.

  When not in poetic mode, Byron was an accurate observer, as later travellers attest. Edward Lear backs up Byron’s account of Albanian singing and is more outraged by the use of women as pack animals and general drudges by their menfolk, set to employment ploughing, digging, sowing and repairing the highways. Byron’s description of Albania in the notes to Childe Harold impressed the mountaineer Bill Tilman, who served with the partisans in the Second World War and wrote When Men and Mountains Meet (1946). Paddy Leigh Fermor commented on Byron’s accurate eye for women’s costume in Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966), when he found little changed. But it was the poetic Byron that was the one that mattered, and had the more profound influence.

  Although the Europeans at Ali’s court reported their personal experience, they were drawn to reinforcing the Westerner’s stereotypical view of the East. From Pouqueville onwards, who despite his position was more concerned with Ali’s appetites, atrocities and scheming than his administration and place within the international context, they played up the otherness, with the result that Ali becomes an all purpose caricature of the Oriental despot, with all the expected vices and contradictions. Byron took Pouqueville’s Ali and sprinkled magic dust on him, with the result that, despite his basis of authenticity, his Albanian excursion in Childe Harold had more in common with the fictitious writings of Chateaubriand, something he was loath to concede. François-Auguste-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, his political opposite, diplomat and founding figure in French romanticism, had visited America and the East; he only got as far as Corfu before heading south to Greece and the Levant in 1806–7. His subsequent travel writings were fanciful and his two works of literature Atala (1801) and René (1802) about the Native Americans, although purporting to have the air of veracity were not based on actual experience. Atala and Childe Harold are both works of exile and disillusion, the events of which explore the exotic, taking place on the edge of civilization. In Atala it was commonly believed that Chateaubriand was extolling the virtues of the ‘noble savage’, although he denied this, and Byron’s Albanians too have the same primitive qualities. Byron’s visit to Ali was a pivotal moment in his life; he began Childe Harold only a week after. And he had read Chateaubriand, a debt Chateaubriand felt Byron never acknowledged. The result is that the Ali episode gives off the air of exotic adventure despite its basis in fact. Because of the fame of Childe Harold, in European eyes Ali becomes a character inhabiting another world, rather than a real person, something which later narratives did little to dispel.

  To assess whether Thomas Hughes was correct in his statement that ‘the three greatest men produced in Turkey during the present age, have all derived their origin from Albania… the late celebrated Vizir Mustafa Bairactar,15 Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt, and, the greatest of them all…’ Ali Pasha, we shall have to look behind the myth.

  1 Mt Tomorr; the highest peak in Southern Albania (2,416m/7,927ft) and a highly visible landmark.

  2 Aoös (Greek), Vjosë, Vjosa (Albanian) flows from Greece into Albania where it is joined by the Drino near Tepelenë.

  3 Tepelenë, the site of Ali Pasha’s palace.

  4 Harem, the women’s quarters in the palace reserved for wives, concubines and slaves.

  5 Muslim monk or hermit often regarded as a saint; in Albania specifically a dervish, usually a Sufi who has taken vows of poverty and austerity, and particularly of the Mevlevi order known for their ‘whirling’ dance.

  6 Ali Pasha.

  7 Fourteenth century Persian poet whose verses celebrating love, wine and nature are traditionally treated as allegoric by Sufis.

  8 Anacreon, a Greek lyric poet (c.582–c.485BC) from Teos in Asia Minor, famous for his drinking and love songs and poems.

  9 Completed in 1797 but not published till 1816.

  10 Apart from unauthorized English editions becoming widely available, within ten years extracts from Childe Harold were translated into Portuguese (1812), then Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Polish and Hungarian; Hobhouse’s Travels in Albania and other provinces of Turkey in 1809 and 1810 went through a number of revisions and editions.

  11 Short fur-lined jacket like those worn by the Hussars.

  12 Refers to the Sublime Porte, the central government of the Ottoman Empire.

  13 A combat game involving a horseman throwing a blunted spear at an opponent.

  14. Peter Cochran suggests this was Ibrahim Manzour, but there is no evidence he was in Epirus until 1814.

  15 Alemdar Mustafa Pasha, grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire (d.1808) who overthrew Mustafa IV and instated Mahmud II against the will of the janissaries.

  Chapter 3

  Ali Pasha’s Life: The Rise

  In his Travels, Thomas Smart Hughes summarized the problems of attempting a coherent biography of Ali Pasha:

  The earlier parts of this wild romantic history never can be very accurately and authentically described, since they rest almost entirely upon oral traditions, or accounts which have been compiled from those traditions after a long intervening time: and though I have perused probably fifty of such records, yet I never met with two that agreed with each other, either in the relation of facts or the development of motives.

  Hughes was astute enough to acknowledge the difficulty of making sense of a mass of exaggerated and half-remembered tales without external evidence, but this did not deter many of his contemporaries. The wider range of sources available today, including official archives, has provided alternative scenarios and some firmer background detail to set against the traditional accounts. Modern schol
arship has accessed Venetian and Ottoman records that help in hazarding a chronological reconstruction of Ali’s life and the workings of his court. The inability of the early biographers to disentangle fact from fiction and their reliance on the sensational and the lurid may have diminished their value, but they did have the advantage of meeting Ali in person, so their first-hand experience cannot be dismissed out of hand.

  Ali’s life was certainly one of extremes. He had lived on the edge, yet could be beguiling and full of good humour in person during his latter years. His guests were as much enthralled by the fairytale nature of his court and the frisson of being in the presence of a capricious despot as by his exhibitions of cruelty. A dreamlike quality appears to hang over Ali and his court, even when reality burst through with a jolt, and it was easy to fall back on the melodramatic stereotype; the tyrant flaunting his power and wealth, made the more intriguing by his colourful rise from barbaric obscurity to bandit king. Despite their air of studied objectivity, his Western observers could not help but be seduced into fitting him into an already accepted mould, unable to rationalize his contrary nature. That he was a wily old fox they all agreed but were apparently naive enough not to imagine that Ali might be manipulating his image for his own ends. The philhellenic Pouqueville was no admirer and happy to emphasize Ali’s misdemeanours for his audience, others may have been more cautious but the stories were too good and the Oriental veneer too enticing to be completely let go.