Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

by Eugenia Russell

  Although Ali’s propensity for despotic behaviour was a cliché of the folk tales, the recollection of exactly how he acquired land became a matter of dispute even within living memory. After Greek independence the new Greek state laid claim to all Turkish owned land as state property. In the wrangles that followed, a legal battle with the residents of Desphina, a village of 200 inhabitants south of Delphi, ensued which illustrated Ali’s technique of land appropriation. Desphina, in its upland location, had been favoured under Turkish rule as being allowed an element of self-administration and a low tax burden. The Greek State claimed that after Ali extended his rule into Livadia, in 1815 the villagers sold their private land to him. Ali used his classic methods, making economic demands through his agents on the villagers and demanding extra tithes. In Desphina’s case he wanted triple the amount of grain harvest that had previously been reserved for the Sultan, thus marking it out for himself as a chiflik. The villagers claimed that Ali used violent means to seize Christian property contrary to Ottoman law, which recognized their special status. When his agents had failed to make any headway, he had brought four village elders to Ioannina by force, throwing two of them into prison. Here, before they died, they had replied to his threats saying they could only speak for themselves, not for the whole village. The villagers claimed that on this basis if any sale had been agreed it would have been invalid because the elders did not represent the other villagers. Ali had therefore arbitrarily seized the land and imposed the triple tithe. What was more, on Ali’s death the Sultan himself returned their property and rights to them, recognizing as free any chiflik where Ali had seized land from either Turk or Christian. The villagers won their case.

  Typical produce from Ali’s Chifliks

  Wheat

  Barley

  Rye

  Oats

  Corn

  Millet

  Beans

  Olives and olive oil

  Grapes

  Hempseed

  Saffron

  Cotton

  Flax

  Freshwater fish

  Hay

  Mulberries

  Melons and watermelons

  Oranges and lemons

  Figs

  Pears

  Ali as a Ruler

  Ali’s harsh exactions on villagers had a debilitating effect on much of the countryside. Travellers noted the desperate state of many of the villages through which they passed. There was an air of decline and desertion in some places. This was partly attributed by Hughes on his journey through the country to a recent outbreak of the plague. When Byron and Hobhouse visited Zitza on their way to visit Ali in Tepelene, they were accompanied by Spyros Kolovos whose function on the trip Hobhouse describes in his diary as being partly ‘His Highness Inspector of Villages’. Byron and Hobhouse were put up and entertained in the local monastery. For Byron, Zitza was the most beautiful place he had seen. Entranced by its magic he wrote in Childe Harold:

  Monastic Zitza! from thy shady brow,

  Thou small, but favour’d spot of holy ground!

  Where’er we gaze, around, above, below,

  What rainbow tints, what magic charms are found!

  But Kolovos was not with them to enjoy the scenery. He used the opportunity to assess with the headman of the village the revenues due and then make a report to Ali. While they were in discussion one of the poor priests came to complain that they had rated the place too high. Zitza, populated solely by Greeks, only consisted of about 150 houses and 4 churches but paid 13,000 piastres in tax, which as Hobhouse states (expanding in his Journey) left them ‘hardly sufficient remaining out of the produce of their labour to support themselves and children’. The village, located in Byron’s idyll in a peaceful landscape where ‘flocks play’, was described by Hobhouse as being on rich soil and blessed with ‘numerous flocks’. The village was famous for its local wine and produced corn, meat, fleeces and skins, but it was all sold, even the milk, to pay the tax. Hobhouse continues:

  They were starving in the midst of abundance; their labour was without reward, their rest without recreation; even the festivals of their Church were passed over uncelebrated, for they had neither the spirits nor the means for merriment.

  Ali was forever blurring the line between government official and brigand as it suited him. All Albania was required to pay a tenth to the Sultan, of which Ali took a quarter. On top of this, the village being his chiflik, he took half its earnings plus labour and, in common with several other villages nearby, protection money on demand. Even in his official capacity his requirements could be arbitrary. Troops or retainers could be quartered on villagers at any time and as an extra burden villagers were required to provide horses for travellers, which only the Westerners offered to pay for. To add to their material discomfort, the presence of Ali always loomed over them, for as Hughes recounts, he had a small serai, or palace, near the monastery, to which a granary was attached to contain their produce.

  Fig. 47: A view of ‘monastic Zitsa’ (photography Derek Smith).

  Ali’s rapaciousness was in part a method of control, wearing down all opposition, but an undesired consequence was the devastating effect on the distribution of population. The verdict in James Bell’s A System of Geography (1832) on the sanjak of Delvino was that the ‘tyranny of Ali Pasha has left it in many places a desert’. As a result of his attempts to subdue and tax the Vlach and Sarakatasan pastoralists of the Pindus, hundreds or thousands of families fled to Thessaly and Macedonia where they found grazing on the eastern slopes of Mt Vernion, Mt Olympus, and as far as the Rhodope and Pirin Mountains in Thrace and Bulgaria. In central Macedonia his suppression of the rural population had a different result; they fled to the towns. Edessa, which Ali took in 1792, experienced an increase in population after his army had looted and plundered the neighbouring villages. When he made the village of Techovo (Karydia) into his chiflik the inhabitants deserted en masse to Edessa where they settled in the district of Techovtiki, named after their home. On the other hand Ali could force people to move if he wished. At the opposite end of his domain, at Saranda, the main port for the Delvino district, after he had taken control of the Himara coast, he built a small fort in 1801 and a new village to house farming communities from the neighbouring plain. These farmers were required to cultivate the depopulated area around the destroyed town of Nivitsa in Hamara whose survivors had been sent to his farms near Trikkala. Ali then took a third of the produce of the vacated land for himself.

  Offering protection from government tax collectors to divert money into his own coffers or against the marauding activities of the klephts were two of his usual tactics for financing his regime. Some of his other schemes reveal his complex relationship with the Orthodox Church. In accordance with Ottoman practice the Church itself was supposedly exempt from tax. Even so a priest and a relation of Kolovos who was accompanying Byron and Hobhouse on their journey was going to petition the vizier to explain why he had defaulted on his protection payment. Ali took cuts from local clerics, such as a ‘chanter’s fee’ offered to him on occasion of the ordination of a bishop. Holland tells us that Archbishop Polycarp of Larissa, an Albanian by birth, owed his position to Ali’s favour. Having his man in position was a way of ensuring there would be no trouble, for the diocese was a lucrative one and a significant amount of its revenue was diverted into the coffers of Ali, his son Veli, as pasha of Thessaly, and to Constantinople. Despite these exactions, the clergy was dependent on Ali and prepared to be his ally. Correspondence in his archive reveals evidence of the priesthood pleading on his behalf to officials in Constantinople against the ‘lies’ of his enemies. Letters to Ali from his subjects are full of Oriental obsequious expressions of loyalty, while his replies are short, terse and factual. Ali may have wanted to underline his connection with his subjects by referring to them as ‘My own…’ but his terseness maintains his awareness of his authority.

  Byron was not always in poetic raptures about everything he saw,
and in a moment of down to earth sympathy he recounted to his mother how for women in the countryside life could be harsh:

  their women are sometimes handsome also, but they are treated like slaves, beaten & in short complete beasts of burthen, they plough, dig & sow, I found them carrying wood & actually repairing the highways. The men are all soldiers, & war & the chase their sole occupations, the women are the labourers, which after all is no great hardship in so delightful a climate.

  Byron rather spoils his observation with his last throwaway comment, perhaps always feeling the need to end on an upbeat note for his mother. His sentiments are echoed by Hughes, who also could not resist attesting to the beautiful sunburnt features of the women. Near to Delvinaki, Hughes saw:

  women returning from the toils of agriculture with hoes, spades, and other implements of husbandry in their hands: one poor creature had two infants tied in a kind of bag over her shoulders. Almost all the cultivation of the ground in this district is left to women, whilst the men are absent during greatest part of the year in Constantinople, Adrianople, Saloniki, and other large cities, where they carry on the trades of butchers and bakers.

  To make ends meet the population had to be readily adaptable, often leading a double life. When this proved too much, the road of the klepht beckoned.

  In an effort to be fair to Ali or to try and see something more than the caricature despot, some writers tried to put Ali’s rule in a context while looking for the positives. As Cockerell explains:

  As for Ali Pasha’s government, one has to remember what a chaotic state the country was in before he made himself master of it. The accounts one gets from the elders make it clear what misery there was. No stranger could travel in it, nor could the inhabitants themselves get about. Every valley was at war with its neighbour, and all were professional brigands. All this Ali has reduced to order. There is law — for everyone admits his impartiality as compared with that of rulers in other parts of Turkey — and there is commerce. He has made roads, fortified the borders, put down brigandage, and raised Albania into a power of some importance in Europe.

  To weigh against the semblance of stability Ali had achieved, all descriptions of him include the words despot and tyrant. That Ali made improvements was accepted, but they were achieved with a heavy hand; he had brought order, if not law, by ruthless means. Ali’s conquests were maintained only by a constant military presence. A string of fortresses kept vigil over Suli, in one of which at Kiafa was a fortified serai, and in the nearby village of Castriza thirty houses quartered thirty soldiers. Order was further maintained by a punishment regime that was often harsh and public. Byron had considered writing a tale based on the stoning of a pregnant 16 years old Turkish girl following an edict by Ali forbidding relations with a Christian, but he found it too terrible to relate. The mutilated remains of the priest Euthemos Blakavas that they had witnessed hanging in Ioannina, were posted there to send out a warning. In Ali’s interpretation of justice he was obliged to subdue the robber bands that infested the country and this he undertook ‘with the greatest severity; they were burnt, hanged, beheaded, and impaled’. Many of the harassed peasantry were sympathetic and in this he was aided and abetted by the local population. But Blakavas was not a thief. His band that threatened the Ioannina road to Thessaly across the Pindus was part of a general insurrectionist movement. In Ali’s interpretation he would have had no alternative than to come down hard. When the band was defeated, his son Mukhtar ‘cut to pieces a hundred of them on the spot’, but the ringleaders were taken, for it would be necessary to make Blakavas an example. The outrage of Western writers at Ali’s barbarism must be tempered with the knowledge that in Britain the last public display of murderers in a gibbet after hanging took place in 1832, until when theft was also a capital offence; burning at the stake was abolished in 1790, hanging carried out in public until 1868 and beheading and quartering for treason only abolished in 1870. Britain was not an exception, public executions by guillotine where carried on in France until 1939. The last men to be actually hung, drawn and quartered in Britain were five members of the Cato Street Conspiracy (1820) who attempted to murder the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and members of his cabinet. Part of the problem was a matter of scale; Ali employed these harsh measures not merely to make the country safe for merchants and travellers, but to deter others who had revolt on their minds and to encourage others to turn them in.

  The Ottoman system of justice was not based around capital punishment. Many criminal offences, even those as serious as murder and sexual impropriety, were dealt with by the imposition of fines according to the culprit’s means. It was a system open to corruption, and by the eighteenth century open to abuse by local elites. By this time it was also on the decline and as the Empire moved into troubled times the recourse to other methods became more common. What shocked Western visitors as much as anything else was the scale of the barbarity and the tortuous methods used that guaranteed a slow lingering death. To put down revolt in Bosnia in 1809 and Serbia from 1804 the authorities impaled the rebels. Two hundred rebels were impaled in Belgrade in 1814, and in 1821 after the Greek uprising, revolutionaries and civilians alike were tortured and impaled; even the Patriarch Gregory V in Constantinople was taken on the orders of the Sultan directly from celebrating the Easter Liturgy and hung in full vestments for two days from the main gate of the patriarchate compound. Though Ali appeared to take a sadistic pleasure in ensuring his victims suffered in as humiliating and painful way as possible. Sometimes offenders were merely sent to prison, at Ioannina perhaps, but Ali also had more secure places of internment, such as the formidable mountaintop castle at Klissura (Këlcyrë). Here, Hughes observed some of Ali’s ‘state prisoners… wretched victims of his tyranny and suspicion’. A poor Greek from Lepanto was one who had been arbitrarily seized from his bed at night and then, after having served eighteen months in Ioannina, was banished to Klissura, ‘where he had remained two years without even knowing the crime from which he suffered’. Another prisoner was a young black eunuch who had knifed one of Ali’s pages and had become impossible to restrain. Imprisonment was another means of extracting money. Leake was informed that Ali kept a Jew in prison in Ioannina under threat of losing his head until he paid up forty purses. Ali’s informers would let him know of any suspected improprieties, real or imaginary, going on in the villages so that he could impose cautionary fines, the proceeds of which went straight into his pockets. Despite the threat of such treatment, law and order continued to be difficult to maintain. When Hughes arrived at the dilapidated and hostile village of Ostanitsa (Aidonochori), he found that another traveller had discovered that four of Ali’s soldiers had been murdered only a few days previously.

  Nevertheless the consensus was that Ali’s methods increased the safety of travellers, and with his improvements to the infrastructure, bettered the lot of some of its inhabitants, whilst also bringing in revenue for his coffers and prestige to his person. Bad roads and a lack of bridges had hamstrung the countryside for years. This was not just a restriction on movement; it aided the activities of the brigands and contributed to the general state of anarchy. Ibrahim Manzour claimed that the changes made meant that European travellers ‘in the last ten years of the reign of Ali Pasha… could travel in complete security’. Things may have improved but ‘complete security’ sounds like wishful thinking on Manzour’s part. An armed guard was deemed necessary to accompany Byron on his trip from Arta to Ioannina, because despite official efforts some bandits still operated. When Holland made his journey from Ioannina north to Tepelene he was provided with a passport and stern instructions that all his needs would be catered for. He writes that the instructions dictated that he was to be received as if Ali ‘were present in person; that I should be supplied with horses wherever I required them; and that every house should be open to me. It concluded by the singular threat, “if you do not all this, the snake will eat you”’. In part these improvements were for Ali’s own purposes, he
had his own resting places, or small seraglios, along the routes of his journeys, easing his progress around the country. Better roads also meant his troops could move more swiftly to deal with trouble. Travel further afield remained arduous. To reach Thessalonika from Ioannina was an eight day journey in 1820.

  As well as roads Ali built a canal to bring ships part way from Arta to Ioannina and his new roads and bridges were complemented by the draining of swamps. Near Delvinaki, Holland describes how a swamp or lake had recently been drained and turned to ‘rich and profitable cultivation’. The road and causeway over the swampy marshes between Preveza and Arta were, according to Hughes, the best he had found in Greece, and as good as an English turnpike; the handiwork of an Italian doctor, Ali’s surveyor of highways, who found it easier to ‘mend roads than constitutions’. Ali’s meanness meant that the causeway was only partially paved, leaving Hughes in doubt as to which ‘would first sink into oblivion, the pasha or his road’. Improvements had been made on the Arta to Ioannina road from around 1800, and despite the attempts at paving in some parts, Hobhouse found it tolerable for horses. Tolls of four paras were extracted at roadside osteria, or inns with an arch or adjoining barrack. This seemed to only apply to the Greek ‘passengers’ in his party when taking an overnight stop. By way of a backhanded apology for Ali’s harsh reprisals, Hobhouse seems to accept that the means justified the end by saying that Ali ‘by many wholesome regulations has acted the part of a good and great Prince, without perhaps a single other motive than that of his own aggrandizement’.