Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

by Eugenia Russell

  In essence Ali operated a system of divide and rule applicable in all his dealings. By showing favouritism across ethnic, religious and class divides he undermined tribal and community loyalties. Through his duplicity and the use of bribery he corrupted the elites, whether beys or agas, armatoli or klephts, religious or community leaders, or merchants.

  Commerce

  Bell’s System of Geography tells us that:

  The commerce of Albania was greatly promoted by Ali Pasha. The exports are grain, timber, oil, tobacco, cotton, and wool; they are chiefly conducted through the gulf of Arta, but the merchants principally reside at Jaoannina. The grain is chiefly sent to the Ionian isles, Italy and Malta; the timber is excellent and grows almost on the shores; the cotton is received through Thessaly, and exported to the German and Italian ports. The only manufactured article of export is the Albanian capote, a large woolen kind of great coat. The chief connections of the coast are with the Greek houses at Trieste, and Maltese house.

  Cotton was a major export of Greece, four-fifths of it exported from Salonika in 1789 according to the Encyclopaedia Britanica (1824), the remainder from ports in Ali’s control: Arta, Butrint and Avlona in Epirus and Volos in Thessaly.

  One community that did well out of Ali were the merchants. There had long been a tradition of commerce within the region but it had been carried out in a hostile environment. The only towns that could flourish were either on the coast or hidden secure within the mountains and out of reach. Until Ali seized them, all the usable ports had been held by foreigners and precarious roads linked them to the prosperous villages of Zagori or across the Pindus to the town of Ambelakia in Thessaly, situated at an altitude of around 450m (1480ft) on the far off slopes of Mt Ossa. The merchants of these villages relied on safe passage for their extensive networks to flourish. The Ambelakians exported their unique red yarns by camel caravan across Epirus, where they were aided by their contacts, and on to important centres throughout Western Europe, even as far as England. As late as 1849 Edward Lear saw camels, ‘ragged and hideous creatures… a great contrast to the trim and well-kept animals of our Arabs… known in our journey through the desert of Suez and Sinai’ straggling along the road from the east coast toward Ioannina. Such enterprises needed security and this Ali could provide. Ali’s seizure of the ports gained him the lucrative control of trade previously in the hands of the Venetians, and eased the flow of merchandise to and from the interior.

  The crown of his achievements was making Ioannina into a thriving commercial and cultural centre. The city already had an illustrious history but it had been eclipsed by the coastal towns such as Parga, Arta and Preveza that had thrived through their connection to Venice. Arta and Preveza continued to flourish as mercantile centres under the French who used them as shipping points for timber for their navy at Toulon. When Ali brought them under his rule, they lost out to Ioannina when he made it his capital. According to Cockerell, the population of Preveza fell ‘from 16,000, to 5,000 at the outside, mostly Turks’. Bell’s Geography calls it ‘now a place of small importance, but pretty well fortified’. Situated within an agricultural plain, Arta, ‘an ill-built but active town with 10,000 inhabitants’, could still rely on cattle, sheep and pigs for export to the Ionian Islands. But Hobhouse observed that while the Greek warehouses continued to trade in cotton, woollen and leather goods, tax revenues were down. Similarly, Trikkala, a city of the plain in Thessaly, though still one of the largest in Greece had, according to Leake, ‘rapidly declined’ since coming under Ali’s government.

  In contrast, Cockerell was impressed with Ioannina’s rapid growth as a bustling market centre:

  The number and richness of the shops is surprising, and the bustle of business is such as I have not seen since leaving Constantinople. We understood that when the vizier first settled at Janina in ’87 — that is, twenty-seven years ago — there were but five or six shops in the place: now there are more than 2,000. The city has immensely increased, and we passed through several quarters of the town which are entirely new.

  The population of the city was variously estimated at between 30,000 to 50,000 worshipping as to their religion in the 6 or 7 churches, 2 synagogues, 5 grand tekkes and 16 or so mosques. A series of fairs were held in towns in northern Greece in the summer; in Ioannina there were two large fairs a year and a smaller trade fair once a fortnight. For permanent trading Ioannina had a large covered market, an extensive bazaar, and a string of wooden booths through the intersecting streets where the bustle of business visitors found comparable to Constantinople. Wages, and prices, were among the highest in Greece. Ioannina’s success was such that in 1833 a visitor declared it to be the Manchester and Paris of Roumeli. Cloth came in from Leipzig and even some rare highly esteemed English items could be found, the streets were abustle with artisans and metal-workers, and Greek merchants who travelled as far as Trieste, Genoa, Leghorn (Livorno), Venice and Vienna. Some of these merchants, such as the four Zosimas brothers who were based in Leghorn and Moscow or the Maroutsis family based in Venice, became extremely wealthy and were able to endow the places of their birth with schools and hospitals.

  If the merchants prospered under Ali they still led a precarious existence. His relationship with the mercantile elite was a complex and volatile one. Some of the Greeks who held positions in local affairs and the administration did well out of Ali’s financial and tax dealings, to such an extent that the Muslim merchants complained, saying they were forced to leave Epirus. A memorandum of 1814 states that ‘He drove the agas out of their houses, their homelands, their villages… and he looks after the Christians, God forgive him’. But under Ali nothing was given for free, there was always a quid pro quo, or a payoff for himself. Nicolo Argyri, the Greek whose house in Ioannina was used by various foreign visitors, was one of the merchants who had business in Trieste. Ali regularly took what might be called commercial hostages. He allowed his subjects to travel abroad as long as they left their families behind. As Holland observed, Ali practised a system that never allowed ‘a family to quit his territory, unless leaving behind some principal members of it, and their property also, to be responsible for their final return’. For this reason Ali was particularly displeased that the English ambassador allowed the entire population of Parga to emigrate following the agreement for the sale of their homeland, wanting to limit permission to only sixty families. In more modern times, a similar practice of tying families to a country by keeping some of its members within the boarders at any given time became common practice within the former Soviet bloc. According to Manzour, Ali imposed a further element of control over his citizens by obliging them to seek his permission to marry.

  Nicolo’s impressive residence was built by his father, the wealthy merchant and benefactor Anastasis Argyri Vrettos, who had endowed a hospital capable of treating 150 patients. After his father’s death Ali shamelessly exploited Nicolo’s house for the entertainment of his favoured guests. Cockerell, who made the memorable drawing of the courtyard, described it thus:

  The best room in this mansion was allotted to the English milordi: it was large and lofty, containing on the side next the court two rows of windows, between which ran a projecting cornice; the chimney piece was, according to the fashion of the country, a species of alcove, surmounted by an elegant leafy ornament, and handsomely ornamented with mouldings; whilst the divan was tastefully enough supplied with sofas and cushions of blue cloth.

  If being constantly put upon by Ali was not enough, Nicolo’s life was made even more complex as he was one of Mukhtar’s retainers. In 1810 he was required to serve Mukhtar as his secretary at the siege of Rustschuk, modern Ruse, in Bulgaria during the Russian-Turkish war. Nicolo, who was not of a martial disposition, suffered further by receiving no recompense for either his personal losses or his services.

  The notorious Kyra Frosini incident, which took place in 1801, was an example of the dangers of getting too close to or the demands that could be made by Ali. By the
time Byron arrived in Ioannina eight years later, the story had already become obscured by rumour, but as the Ali Pasha Archives show, the ‘beautiful Ephrosyne’ was more than folklore. Byron and others all claim to have their conflicting information from first-hand sources; Leake of course already knew about it from one of the husbands of the victims. Kyra Frosyni (Euphrosyni Vasileiou) was the real wife of a successful Greek merchant, Demetrios Vasileiou. What the incident reveals is that rumour and suspicion were so rife that anything could be believed about Ali and his family and the raw material from such an event could be moulded to any purpose; to highlight the cruelty and arbitrary nature of Ali’s justice and the corruption and lasciviousness of his court, while in some way preserving Euphrosyne as the victim. Ali could be either the strict preserver of public morals or the lascivious villain, but Mukhtar, renowned by all accounts for his publicly licentious behaviour, was always portrayed as a sexual predator. That the struggles to preserve one’s honour against the advances of members of Ali’s family were known to occur is apparent in a deleted passage in a letter Byron wrote to his mother, retrieved by his biographer Leslie A Marchand, where he decides against telling of the plight of a young Albanian girl caught in such a situation, preferring to cast Ali in a positive light. Euphrosyne was from an important family and moved in elevated circles, but this had its hazards as a letter from her uncle, Archbishop Gabriel VII Gagas of Ioannina, Nafpaktos and Arta, warning her of the risky nature of her private life shows. More is hinted at than spelled out, the archbishop had to be careful in case the letter fell into the wrong hands, but the implication is that she should retain the integrity of a married woman with small children otherwise the consequences could be dire. Whether she was the object of Ali’s or Mukhtar’s affection, the result accords with the rivalry between the two. The situation of Euphrosyne was typical of that between servant and master where the lesser is perpetually dependent on favours in order to procure and maintain advancement. Acceding to the wishes of an unpredictable ruler was a dangerous game. Whether Euphrosyne listened to her uncle, and was powerless to resist, or she was the willing dupe will never be known, but either way it led to her death. Once her possessions were confiscated, including the letter, and having made his point, Ali allowed the archbishop to look after her abandoned children.

  Ioannina was the jewel in Ali’s crown but other towns in the interior also revived their fortunes, particularly those of Ali’s own region of southern Albania. Argyrocastro reached its apogee, growing to 15,000 inhabitants, with its prosperity reflected in the fine domestic architecture of the defensively built mansions that remain today. The people had not lost their taste for feuding, but as Pouqueville tells us, the relative peace brought commerce, and local goods including livestock, handicrafts, fabrics and dairy produce were exported within the Empire. The surrounding vale of Argyrocastro Holland described as thriving agriculturally with corn, maize, rice and tobacco sent to the coast for export. Tepelene, while in many ways as impressive as Ioannina, was never a rival, remaining essentially a military base. If Ali favoured some towns, other commercial centres still struggled. Ali was resentful of any kind of independence and particularly the further away from his heartland. The merchants of Ambelakia still plied their trade with some success until the town was hit by plague in 1813, but this was achieved despite constant harrying and disruptions by Ali’s troops and his imposition of a heavy tax burden of 60,000 piastres. The merchants of Kozani in western Macedonia who had business in Germany abandoned their town when it fell into the hands of Ali, many seeking their fortunes in Constantinople.

  Cultural Revival

  Within Ali’s household there was an ecumenical attitude to education, for, allowing perhaps for some stylistic exaggeration, Finlay tells us ‘the children of Albanian Muselmans might be seen in one antechamber reading the Koran with a learnt Osmanli, while in another young Christians might be studying Hellenic grammar with a Greek priest’. Interesting in itself as a reflection of Ali’s attitude to religion, this situation hints at a growing gulf between the aspirations of the Muslims and the Greeks. The Greeks looked to education to preserve their culture, but also as a means to reassert their national identity. By the late eighteenth century the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire were in the midst of a fever of renewed intellectual activity influenced by their diaspora communities, who in turn were in thrall to the French enlightenment. The scholars and writers of their own Greek enlightenment were often well-travelled and in communication with one another. The far-flung networks of Greek merchants enabled the flow of money and ideas to penetrate into the remotest of regions. The Ionian Islands were a natural reception point for Italian influence, but even in the interior mountain villages there were those eager to study abroad and bring their knowledge home. The connections with diaspora settlements within the Habsburg Empire and Russia were important in the fermenting of the revolutionary and nationalist sentiments of Rigas and the Filiki Eteria. Many of these mountain towns and villages had a strong Vlach presence. The Vlach pastoralists who roamed the mountains far and wide had made the passes their own. Moscopole, for instance, sitting on an important east-west trade route, exploited its prosperity and connections to become the leading Vlach and Greek intellectual centre until its decline after Ali’s attack in 1788.4 Particularly influential were the merchants and intellectuals to the south in the Zagori region, some of whom attained with important positions at Ali’s court. Crucial to this revival was the finance redirected by merchant families into their home areas. Greeks from Delvino residing in Venice were part of a community known as the Brotherhood of Saint Nicholas who supported educational initiatives. The Zosimas brothers from Ioannina were important benefactors, setting up numerous schools and orphanages and sponsoring literary works. Their efforts were so noteworthy that the radical Greek journal Hermes O Logios (September 1819) printed in Vienna, reported that when the youngest brother was received in Moscow by Sophia, the mother of Tsar Alexander, she told him, ‘the benefits which you confer everyday on your countrymen are known to my son and to me; continue them…’ and turning to a company of his fellow Greeks, she added ‘Gentlemen, this is a true ornament of your nation’.

  With increased stability and trade, Ali’s rule further opened up the region to outside influence. Ioannina already had a growing intellectual class with links to Venice and Italy, but it was enhanced as a cultural centre. Education for the Greeks of Epirus, funded by donations from successful local merchants, was generally in a better state than elsewhere in Greece. Schools often led a chequered existence under Ali. While not actively encouraging education, his ambivalence allowed it to prosper, perhaps valuing anything that could further his own ends. His capital possessed a number of schools and libraries. Two of the schools were usually referred to as academies or colleges while the others would be grammar or elementary schools. Some dated as far back as the seventeenth century, such as the Epiphaniou (1647) and Gioumeios (later Balaneios) schools (1676), and the prestigious Maroutseios School, founded in 1742. In 1797 the Maroutseios School was refounded and renamed the Kaplaneios School, when its benefactors, the Maroutsis family, ran into financial difficulties following the French occupation of Venice where they had business interests. Its new sponsors were the Kaplanis brothers. Students from the school went on to study abroad and on return make a significant contribution to Greek learning. Intellectual life had existed outside Ioannina too, particularly at Moscopole, where The New Academy or Greek Academy, had its own printing press, established there from around 1700, with a number of scholars from Ioannina as teachers. One teacher, Theodore Kavalliotis, was a native of the town who returned after studying mathematical and philosophical sciences at the Maroutseios School. Despite Ali’s destruction of the city in 1788, a new school was established at the end of the century, funded by Simon Sinas, an Austrian aristocrat, diplomat and banker whose father came from the city, with the scholar and priest Daniil Moschopolitis, a student of Kavalliotis, who had published the first lexic
on of the four native languages, Vlach, Greek, Bulgarian and Albanian, becoming headmaster in 1802. In Konitsa there was also a Greek school flourishing by the end of the 18th century run by a graduate of the Gioumeios School in Ioannina. During Ali’s rule it closed briefly until it was reopened by Kosmas Thesprotos, a student of Psalidas.

  Hobhouse and Byron met some of these teachers; a schoolmaster of Arta with sixty pupils was one who praised Ali saying he ‘had civilized and improved all the country, which he had conquered’. Most books available were translations of works sent from the diaspora printing presses, which passed through Arta and on their way to Ioannina. Byron was impressed with the cultural life of Ioannina, which he said was universally acknowledged amongst the Greeks as surpassing Athens in ‘wealth, refinement, learning, and dialect of its inhabitants’. In addition to the Epiphaniou and Gioumeios schools he mentions that there was free education available in modern Greek, with reading and writing, taught to 300 boys in a school run by Valleno and funded by the Zosimas brothers. Athanasios Psalidas, who, when they met him, ran the Kaplaneios School with 100 pupils, giving instruction in French, Latin, Italian and Ancient Greek, already had a reputation as a major figure of the Greek enlightenment. He had continued his education in Poltava in Russia (now the Ukraine) and Vienna, where he published his first work, Real bliss, in 1792, a philosophical treatise written in both Greek and Latin, and dedicated to Catherine the Great. Forced out of Vienna after being interrogated by the police for his liberal and French revolutionary sympathies he returned to Ioannina to become a progressive teacher. He introduced a controversial modern curriculum that included scientific experiments, a matter of consternation in conservative quarters. The abrasive Psalidas was fond of berating foreigners for their countries’ part in the Fourth Crusade which devastated Constantinople, on the correct pronunciation of Classical Greek and their practice of removing antiquities, and failure to help Greece achieve her proper status in the world. In return the haughty foreigners were perhaps unfair on Psalidas, who provided the school with books and equipment, coming as they were from privileged backgrounds. Hobhouse was surprised that Pslidas possessed only a small library for a distinguished scholar, and Cockerell was less impressed, admitting only that he was ‘… for this country, a learned man. Besides Greek, he speaks Latin and very bad Italian, but as far as manners go he is a mere barbarian’. Edward Everett somewhat agreed, casting doubt on the notion of his ‘perfect’ knowledge of so many languages.