Ali Pasha

“ He was succeeded by Abdallah Pasha, who was the treasurer of Ali Pasha; he continued about three years, and was put to death. To him succeeded Seyd Pasha, son of Suliman Pasha the elder, who, at the end of about three years, was also put to death. To these last who had thus succeeded and murdered one another, succeeded Daoud, the present Pasha, who to avoid a like fate with his predecessors, cut off every man about him who could possibly afford him any umbrage ”

“ Ali Pasha, the dey of Algiers, was one of those savage characters who, on the coast of Barbary, are very appropriately distinguished by the appellation of great men. In the history of mankind, it is curious to observe how, in the various conditions of society, different descriptions of men rise to the surface, where they remain until a moral revolution, altering their specific gravity, obliges them to sink into oblivion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The crier has again proclaimed Daoud as Pasha, and Saleh Beg his kaimacam or representative, till he recovers. Some say the Pasha of Aleppo is dead of the plague; some, that he is not coming, and that this entrance of the Pasha of Mosul and a famous Arab chief, was only a plot of theirs to get Bagdad into their own hands. What is true, what is false, it is now utterly impossible to tell, or what the result will be; but should Ali Pasha, if he is alive, be now sufficiently powerful to advance and attempt to dispossess this man, we may expect dreadful scenes. ”

“ Are the hearts which they bear and the tales which they tell,"
he felt that he was at last in the land most likely to fire his natural genius, and to permit of his satisfying the imperious [Pg 28] want which his observing mind constantly experienced of resting upon reality and upon truth. The terrible Ali Pasha of Yanina was especially the type which attracted his notice. "Ali Pasha," says Galt, "is at the bottom of all his Oriental heroes. His 'Corsair' is almost the history of Ali Pasha." ”

“ For this enterprise they selected as general a man, whose successful career was calculated to inspire his troops with confidence and his enemies with fear. This was Ali Pasha, an Albanian, who had distinguished himself whilst governor of Hungary by his successes, the chief of which was his decisive victory over Sforzia Palavicini and the Bishop of Fünfkirchen. He was summoned from his distant command on the Persian frontier, and the greatest hopes were excited by his appearance in Constantinople. ”

“ The end of this man, Ali Pasha, may be briefly told. He had become independent, disregarding the authority of the Sultan, and a menace to the State. Accordingly an army was despatched to Janina, and a fleet to make a descent on the coasts of Epirus. Ali, in spite of his great age, exhibited great energy, and prepared to resist, but his fatal avarice stood in his way. With his enormous treasures he could have secured the fidelity of his troops, but he could not make up his mind to deal liberally with his defenders, and most deserted. ”

“ Swoboda from a Bohemian, who is physician to Ali Pasha, in which he desired to communicate to all the Franks, that Ali Pasha had given the strictest orders to his soldiers not to molest one of them. To a certain extent this manifests good intentions; but we have had too much experience of the powerlessness of governors at such times to restrain their soldiers, to have much confidence in man: our confidence is in Him who will and does watch over us for good. ”

“ They are the prettiest little animals I ever saw, and are broken into the court ceremonies already. The Turkish salute is a slight inclination of the head, with the hand on the heart; intimates always kiss. Mahmout is ten years old, and hopes to see me again; we are friends without understanding each other, like many other folks, though from a different cause. He has given me a letter to his father in the Morea, to whom I have also letters from Ali Pacha.
Footnote 1:
Ali Pasha (1741-1822) was born in Albania, at Tepeleni, a town 75 miles north of Janina, of which his father was governor. ”

“ Still bent on obtaining Parga, he sent a special mission to London, backed by a letter from Sir Robert Liston, the British ambassador at Constantinople, calling the attention of the government to the “pasha’s supereminent qualities” and his services against the French. After some hesitation it was decided to evacuate Parga and hand it over to the Ottoman government, i.e. Ali Pasha. ”

“ He spoke in terms of high admiration of his own sovereign; and indeed Mohammed Ali seems to have the faculty of creating a strong attachment for himself in all his officers. The governor said that if the Pasha could live twenty years longer, he would make Egypt more civilized and more prosperous than it has ever yet been; but added, that he stood all alone, and greatly needed some one who could be a second self to him. ”

“ After having received the most sympathetic welcome in Europe, and above all, in London, during a period of seventeen months, Midhat Pasha yielded to the Sultan Abdul Hamid’s invitation and returned to Turkey, thereby disregarding the wise advice given him by his friends both at home and abroad, but declaring that he would sooner die in his own country than in a foreign land. ”

“ Midhat Pasha was in receipt of the most alarming news from his friends at Constantinople, and also from abroad; he was told that his life was in great danger. His only reply was: “I have no reason to be alarmed nor to fly from Turkey. I have laboured for the good of my country, and I have nothing with which to reproach myself; if others see reason to blame me, I am always ready to reply before a tribunal.” He took no further steps than to write a letter to the Grand Vizier, protesting 199against the baseness of Ahmed Midhat Effendi, Editor of the Terdjumani Hakikat. ”

“ Now it was a servant, guilty of absence without leave, who was bound to a stake in the presence of his sister, and destroyed by a cannon placed six paces off, but only loaded with powder, in order to prolong the agony; now, a Christian accused of having tried to blow up Janina by introducing mice with tinder fastened to their tails into the powder magazine, who was shut up in the cage of Ali’s favourite tiger and devoured by it.
The pasha despised the human race as much as he hated it. ”

“ The troops in the barracks of Tash‐Kishla and Kumuch‐Suyou had already received their orders from Redif Pasha, the commander of the corps d’armée of Constantinople, and had been so posted as to blockade all approaches by land. The fleet of ironclads under the personal command of Kaiseli Ahmed, the captain Pasha, had taken the same precautions by sea, so that nothing remained but to disarm the sentinels and corps de garde along the immediate approaches to the Palace. ”

“ The peasants are a fine-looking, strong-bodied race of men; but many of them are met blind of an eye. This is attributed to the reluctance to be soldiers for the glory of the Pasha. But Mohammed Ali was not to be thus tricked, and he raised a regiment of one-eyed men. In other instances they are said to have knocked out the fore-teeth to avoid biting a cartridge, or to have cut off a joint of the first finger to prevent their drawing a trigger. Even thus they are not able to escape the cunning Pasha. But this shows the natural horror of the conscription ”

“ The Grand Vizier immediately set out for the Palace and was received in audience, when he explained to his Majesty that the affairs of State could not be managed by men not worth more than from fifty to five hundred piasters, and that if radical changes were not made, [Pg 72] certain ruin would be the outcome. The Sultan appreciated this earnest communication, and ratified the appointment, as Grand Vizier, of Ali Pasha, the son of the boy who had played at state affairs in a village of Asia Minor. ”

“ Ibrahim Pasha is, however, a man of some force of character, and has a mind more fit, it is said, for the department of a soldier than that of a statesman. He has for many years led the armies of his father Mohammed Ali, and, in many contested fields, he has won laurels which do [89] not fall on the head of every general. The regions of Upper Egypt, the plains of Arabia, the land of Palestine, the interior of Asia Minor, not to mention Greece and the Isles, have felt the desolation caused by his troops. ”

“ Wonderfully Tacitean is a later comment of the Pasha—an Armenian by birth. He told Senior that the Pasha could never forget or forgive that he had seen his master in the day of his humiliation. So intolerable was the thought that Mehemet Ali made two secret attempts to kill his faithful servant. "He wished me to die, but he did not wish to be suspected of having killed me." In my recollections of Lord Cromer, in an earlier chapter, I have told a story of one of Mehemet Ali's removals of inconvenient servants which is well worth recalling in this context. ”

“ The fact is, that these poor down-trodden Arabs had, unknowingly, adopted one of our own texts, “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” Gordon Pasha was kind to them, and when he passed his word he would keep it, whether it clashed with the interests of the Khedive or not. He was the only man as a governor whom they trusted as children would their father, and who never forfeited their confidence. All his actions were summed up in the words justice, truth, and duty.
A wit’s a feather,
A chief’s a rod,
An honest man’s the noblest work of God. ”

“ Shiftless housewives lolled with unkempt hair on the housetops; women of the harem looked out of the little mushrabieh panels in the clattering, narrow bazaars.
Just at their feet was a mosque—one of the thousand nameless mosques of
Cairo. It was the season of Ramadan, and a Friday, the Sunday of the
Mahommedan—the Ghimah.
The "Two" were Donovan Pasha, then English Secretary to the Khedive, generally known as "Little Dicky Donovan," and Captain Renshaw, of the American Consulate. There was no man in Egypt of so much importance as Donovan Pasha. ”

“ Goodnight, effendi. If you, effendi, are poor, it is well; no man will desire your life. Then you can be a slave, and have quiet nights. If you are rich, effendi, remember my brother. Good-night, effendi. May sacrifices be yours . . . and My Lady says good-night." Kingsley gave her a gold-piece and went down to Foulik Pasha.
As they steamed away Kingsley looked in vain to the house on the shore.
There was no face at window or door, no sign of life about the place.
"Well, my bold bey," said Donovan Pasha to him at last, "what do you think of Egypt now?"
"I'm not thinking of Egypt now." ”

“ It has not been given to many to make pen and pencil notes of the ladies of a Pasha's harem, yet twice when in Asia Minor did I come across them as fugitives hastening on before the Russian advance. On the first occasion the impression conveyed was that of a travelling menagerie, so closely were those fair ones packed in a long gilded diligence-like conveyance, the sides of which were closely latticed, while the Pasha—at other times no doubt "a lion amongst the ladies"—was now at large, riding sedately at the rear. ”

“ The Pasha sank down into one of the wicker chairs scattered hospitably beneath the horse-chestnut trees, and thought how happy a man he was to have a fountain of the period of Sultan Ahmed III, and a garden so full of April freshness, and a view of the bright Bosphorus and the opposite hills of Europe and the firing West. How definitely he thought it, I cannot say, for the Pasha was not greatly given to thought. Why should he be, as he possessed without that trouble a goodly share of what men acquire by taking thought? ”

“ He has been very just, and good to them all, but the more he allows them to do as they please the further their hearts are from him. They say, ‘Oh, let him go on collecting beetles and birds. We don’t want him.’ The Pasha is very happy when he travels, and is able to collect things, and does not trouble himself about the men. ”

“ If it was true that he was friend to Abdalla, then his fate was in the hand of God, not theirs. They all had heard of little Donovan Pasha, whom Ismail counted only less than Gordon Pasha, the mad Englishman, who emptied his pocket for an old servant, gave his coat to a beggar, and rode in the desert so fast that no Arab could overtake him.
“Call off your terriers, effendi,” said Dicky again in French; for Renshaw was restive under the hands that were laid on his arm, and the naboots that threatened him. “My friend here is American. He stands for the United States in Egypt.” ”

“ Carry this ring the Khedive gave to me—he will know it. Do not be denied his presence. Say that it is more than life and death; that it is all he values in the world. Once admitted, say these words: 'Donovan Pasha knows all, and asks an audience at midnight in this palace. Until that hour Donovan Pasha desires peace. For is it not the law, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Is not a market a place to buy and sell?'"
Four times did Dicky make the Arab repeat the words after him, till they ran like water from his tongue, and dismissed him upon the secret errand with a handful of silver. ”