Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

The Remarkable Life of the Balkan Napoleon

Quentin Russell, Eugenia Russell

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473877221
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

A fascinating biography of Ottoman Greece and Albania's notorious despot—a major player in the power struggles of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the life of a petty tyrant in an obscure corner of the Ottoman Empire became the stuff of legend. What propelled this cold-blooded archetype of Oriental despotism, grandly known as the Lion of Yanina and the Balkan Napoleon, into the consciousness of Western rulers and the general public? This book charts the rise of Ali Pasha from brigand leader to a player in world affairs and, ultimately, to a gruesome end. Ali exploited the internal weakness of the Ottoman Empire to carve out his own de facto empire in Albania and Western Greece. Although a ruthless tyrant guilty of cruel atrocities, his lavish court became an attraction to Western travelers, most famously Lord Byron, and his military prowess led Britain, Russia and France to seek his alliance during the Napoleonic Wars. His activities undermined the Sultan's authority and ultimately led to the Greek War of Independence. Quentin and Eugenia Russell describe his remarkable life and military career as well as the legacy he bequeathed in his homeland as a nationalist hero and further afield as inspiration for writers and artists of the Romantic movement. "An intriguing tale from the edges of the Empire." —The Armourer

Chapter 1

Historical Background

The Region of Epirus

The historical regional identity of Ali Pasha’s mountainous powerbase existed long before the present national borders. Known as Epirus from the classical period, by Ali’s time it was commonly referred to as part of Albania. When Henry Holland travelled there in 1812 he described it thus:

Albania, as a country, cannot be defined by any strict line of boundary; but it is rather determined in its outline by the language and other characters of the population. The country around Ioannina, and even Acarnania, though inhabited chiefly by Greeks, are often spoken of under this name; and at present, when annexed to the power of an Albanian ruler, not entirely without reason.

Defined by the spread of population, Holland suggested that Albania began in the south at the Suli Mountains (Paramythia), just north of the Gulf of Arta in present-day Greece, and followed a coastal strip until it reached its present border at Montenegro, which strictly speaking excluded Arta and Ioannina, Ali’s capital. The division between north and south was often referred to as Upper and Lower Albania. Today the classical name of Epirus has been resurrected on both sides of the Greek/Albanian border, recognizing the historical region.

Facing the Ionian Sea and the island of Corfu to the west, Epirus is boarded to the east by the rugged Pindus Mountains, a continuation of the Dinaric Alps that form a spine down the centre of the Balkan Peninsula, through Albania and into central Greece. The range rises to over 2,600m (8,600ft) in a series of steep ridges running parallel to the coast, a formidable barrier of over 100km (62miles) to east-west movement between Epirus and Macedonia and Thessaly. From the Pindus to the coast is a high plateau dominated by a further number of smaller parallel ranges, cut by narrow river valleys and gorges. Particularly striking are the Ceraunian Mountains (Çika 2012m) in Albania, the high (Acroceraunian) western range of which isolates the coastal area of Himara, and the Paramythian plateau through the mountains (Koryla 1,658m and Chionistra 1644m) of which the mythical Acharon River cuts its gorge on its journey from the underworld. Lake Pamvotis, on whose shore the region’s largest town, Ioannina, stands, is at an elevation of 460m (1500ft). The northern boundary of Epirus is marked by the Bay of Vlora in modern Albania and the southern by the Ambracian Gulf (or Gulf of Arta) in Greece.

Northern Epirus, today mainly in Albania, is divided from the south by the watershed between the River Vjosa and its tributary the Drino, which flows north into the Gulf of Vlora, and the Arachthos and Thiamis rivers flowing to the south into the Ambracian Gulf and west into the Ionian Sea respectively. The prevailing maritime westerly winds make Epirus the wettest region of Greece, and its mountainous terrain (less than 4 per cent lowland) and poor soils provide a harsh environment mainly suitable for pasture, especially sheep. While the high mountains are the home of brown bears and wolves, the coastal strip provides a slight respite where olives and fruit can be grown, but the river mouths are characterized by wetlands that in historical times were particularly marshy and malarial.

Ottoman Occupation

In 1479, Vonitsa, the last outpost of the Despotate of Epirus finally fell to the Turks. This defeat meant that all of mainland Greece, apart from a few coastal enclaves held by the Republic of Venice, was in the hands of the Ottoman emperor, Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. In classical times Epirus had been an energetic independent kingdom that under the ambitious Pyrrhus took on the emerging military power of the Roman Republic in a series of battles between 280 and 275 BC. Though he could defeat Rome in battle he was unable to win the war, hence the term ‘Pyrrhic victory’. Eventually Epirus became part of the Roman and then Byzantine empires, but as Byzantine power waned it once again became an independent or semi-independent state, passing between Crusader, Frankish, Byzantine and Serbian domination. The Ottoman armies began their slow march through the Balkans in 1362 when Sultan Murad I transferred his capital to Adrianople (in Thrace), renaming it Edirne. The long war of attrition picking away at Byzantium’s diminishing territories finally came to an end in 1453 when Mehmed took the far greater prize of Constantinople after a fifty-three day siege, the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, dying valiantly in the last-ditch attempt to defend the city walls.

Fig. 4: The Pindus Mountains, photo by Derek Smith.

In Epirus the Turkish vultures had already been circling for some time. To the north the Sanjak of Albania had been established by 1419, stretching as far as south as Argyrocastro (Gjirokastër), and in Epirus itself the major centres of Ioannina (1430) and Arta (1449) were already in Ottoman hands.1 With the fall of Vonitsa began the 400 years or so of Turkish rule, but it was a rule that proved as hard to universally maintain as it was to impose. The mountains of Epirus were ideally suited to those willing to eke out a harsh but independent existence, and the coastal enclave of Himara isolated by the Acroceraunian range and the Zagora region in the high reaches of the Pindus retained an element of autonomy. Similarly remote Suli, hidden within the Paramythian Mountains, became a refuge for those escaping Ottoman rule. In the meantime the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice (commonly referred to as Franks) had retained a territorial presence in the eastern Mediterranean dating from the Crusades and stubbornly tried to hold on to their Greek island and mainland possessions. Venice in particular was keen to maintain its maritime empire, the Stato del Mar, and was unafraid to take the war to the Turks. After the Turks occupied the Peloponnese, at that time referred to as the Morea, Venice tried to regain control on a number of occasions but with little lasting effect.

As a consequence of the Ottoman invasion a majority of the population of Albania converted to Islam, with a significant number of Albanians and Greeks following the Dervish Bektashi Order, a mystical Sufi branch of Islam that came to prominence in the fifteenth century, particularly in the Balkans. The divide between north and south Albania was, and still is, characterized by Catholic Christianity retaining a following amongst the Dheg dialect speakers of Albanian above the line of the River Shkumbin, and Orthodox Christianity being followed by the Tosk speakers and Greeks to the south, and by other minorities such as the Vlachs and Slavs.

The Decline of Ottoman Power and the Rise of the West

The tussles between Venice and the Ottomans became a sideshow in the main thrust of European affairs as the centres of power moved away from the Mediterranean. With the fall of Byzantium and the eclipse of Greek culture, the southern Balkans faded from view in the West. Seen as an isolated backwater it was not until the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the region was thrust back into the mainstream. During this period the conquered lands of Eastern Europe were known as ‘Turkey in Europe’. After a period of dynamic expansion, Ottoman power peaked under Suleyman the Magnificent who took his armies as far west as the walls of Vienna (1529), but failed to take the city. At sea the Ottoman Fleet also suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of Lepanto (1573, modern Nafpaktos), fought near the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, at the hands of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic Mediterranean states. Despite this reversal, the Turks were still able to take Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands from the Knights of St. John (1522), and Cyprus (1570–1) and Crete (1669) from Venice. While the fortunes of its possessions in the Morea continued to go back and forth, Venice stubbornly held on to the Ionian Islands and its strategic outposts in Epirus. The flowering of culture and enterprise that followed in the wake of Suleyman came to an end again at Vienna in 1683 when the invading Ottoman forces were defeated by a combined army of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian League. The aftermath was not only a retreat from Hungary but also the slow decline of Ottoman power over 200 years until the Empire finally broke up after the First World War. In contrast the West embarked on a period of empire building, technological innovation and revolution. The immediate result however, was that the Ottoman’s enemies were joined by Venice and Russia (under Peter the Great) to form another Holy League. For Venice this meant that when peace was signed at the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) it gained much of the Dalmatian coast, and the Peloponnese. From hence on, Ottoman endeavours were no longer expansionist but focused on regaining lost territories.

The peace was short-lived. The Ottomans retook the Morea (1715), but despite this success, lost the ports of Preveza and Parga in Epirus to Venice and were still unable to take the Ionian Islands from them. But by now even Venice’s star was beginning to fade. An era of exploration had opened up the world and the scramble for new opportunities for wealth and empire building led to a struggle by the Atlantic facing states for control of the trade routes to the Orient. While on land much of central Europe was dominated by Habsburg and Russian imperial ambitions and Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East remained under Ottoman influence, the conflicts of the Atlantic maritime powers demanded an ever-larger canvas on which to be played out. France and Britain, the increasingly dominant forces, were not content to confine their rivalry to North America or India but sought to spread their influence into the Mediterranean. Naval supremacy here depended on the control of bases from which to maintain a fleet and islands such as Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus that formed a chain from west to east became key strategic locations. The Venetian Ionian Islands, which included both Corfu off the Albanian coast and Kythera at the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese, and their other small land bases on the Greek coast were now not only a thorn in the side of the Ottomans but of great interest to any power with expansionist ideas towards the Levant. Russia too increasingly had designs on the Mediterranean. The creation of its Black Sea Fleet by Catherine the Great’s favourite, Prince Grigory Potemkin, meant that it was inevitably going to resist being hemmed-in in its base at Sebastopol in the Crimea. By the end of the century the eastern Mediterranean was a backwater no more but a major region of interest to what were to become known as the Great Powers, the powers who would attempt to partition the world over the course of the next two centuries.2

The State of Play during Ali Pasha’s Life

For Ali Pasha, born in the midst of the eighteenth century, his career was to be defined by the struggles and shifting alliances of the European powers and the internal divisions within the Ottoman Empire. His rise from obscurity to a despot courted by the Great Powers and dangerous to the Sultan was intimately woven into the story of Ottoman decline. Warfare was an almost constant state of affairs, interspersed by numerous short-term peace treaties during which the belligerents could take a breather, like boxers, and count their territorial gains and losses. Two major wars, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years War (1754–63) created two counter blocs. During the first conflict, Britain, allied to Austria, sought to pursue its war against France and Spain in the colonies (the Americas and India), while its enemies, allied to Prussia, fought a European war. Although in the second war allegiances changed, Prussia with Britain, Austria with France, Spain and Russia, the outcome for Britain was the same, an expansion of its empire and increase in the power of its navy.

The Ottoman Empire was not directly involved in these wars, but its fragile European borders were threatened along the Danube. Both Habsburg Austria and the Romanov Tsars of Russia took advantage of the periods of peace from the larger European conflicts to pursue an aggressive policy towards Turkey. Austria’s endeavours however mainly benefited the Romanovs who bolstered their ambitions with a claim to a dynastic and religious right to authority within the territories of the former Byzantium. Sophia, the daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, the despot of the Morea and younger brother of the last emperor, had married Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow. Her grandson was the first tsar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible. Citing this distant connection, the Romanov tsar, Peter the Great, inserted ‘King of Greece’ amongst his titles. The Russians also claimed leadership of the Orthodox Church. Catherine the Great, who inherited the throne by marriage, was an admirer of Peter and an Orthodox convert. She took seriously the notion that Russia should rule over her fellow believers in occupied Turkey and harboured notions of taking Constantinople, the spiritual centre of Orthodoxy and the seat of the patriarch of the Greek Church.

Turkey’s problem was not only maintaining its borders, but also its internal peace. The Porte, the Ottoman government in Constantinople, was caught between efforts to reform and modernize while it struggled to maintain its grip on its volatile regions. Despite indecisive engagements with Austria or Venice, it had become evident that the Ottoman Army was no match for the new infantry and artillery of the West. The Empire sought aid from France on a number of occasions but military reform met with strong resistance. The janissary corps openly revolted with the consequence that Sultan Ahmed III was deposed in 1730. In 1799 Sir William Eton published A Survey of the Turkish Empire, his findings on the state of the Ottoman Empire. A former diplomat in Russia and Turkey he had gathered information as to the intentions of Catherine and the internal situation in the Balkans. His report underlined Ottoman decline, with the army in particular disarray, being seditious and mutinous and refusing all reform:

Fig. 5: Suliotes in traditional costume (1824–1825) by Eugène Delacroix.

their armies are encumbered with immense baggage, and their camp has all the conveniences of a town, with shops etc. for such was their ancient custom when they wandered with their hordes. The cavalry is as much afraid of their own infantry as of the enemy; for in a defeat they fire at them to get their horses to escape more quickly. In short, it is a mob assembled rather than an army levied.

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 Ottom...