Travellers in Albania during the first half of the XIX century

 Lida MIRAJ

Abstract: Coloniae Juliae Augustae Dyrrachinorum, the most strategic city in the Adriatic coast, one of two principal gates of Christian diffusion into Balkans (the other is Salona), was a main centre of a province, part of a large region, often named Dysrrahia always within the limits of the Macedoine Province. 

In the late-antique period, a series of large-scale works were carried out, including the construction of basilicas, villas, the round forum or macellum, the chapel in the amphitheatre, the sewer system, etc.

Often, during the excavations for the new construction of the city, are discovered fragments of these villas decorated with frescos, mosaics, etc.  One of the interesting mosaics, excavated years ago, is Roman Polychrome one with the floral motives and the inscription: MARTINIA. It decorated a villa where one of the rooms paved with mosaics has an apse.

Another mosaic is composed with the figure of Orpheus which is surrounded by both animals and vegetations. Around this principle ‘icon’ the mosaic is composed by geometrical and floral motives. After that city began the new type of life and the new construction, although both paganism and Christianity faced difficult cultural chooses in both the third and the fourth centuries.

One of the very interesting Early Christian constructions is the chapel adapted on the structures of the amphitheatre. There are not data about the precise date of the abandonment of amphitheatre, but of course this happened in the second half of IV century, after the earthquake of 345/346 A.D.

The chapel is mostly known for the VI^th century mosaics on the walls. These mosaics are composed with eikons in three panels, on the two different and quite perpendicular walls, under the sloped construction of the amphitheatre’s vomitorium that was part of the nave.

The other monument is the Early Christian Basilica, dated in the V^th or VI^th century, dedicated to Saint Michael and located in Arapaj, a village 6 kilometres south-east of Dyrrachium city.  This Basilica is known for the beautiful and very special mosaic. The surface of the mosaic is 54 m², situated at the side funerary or martyrodom. This polychrome mosaic is composed with two emblems: one with Eucharistic scene, and the other with Bucolic scene.

The mosaics discovered in Durres are very fine examples of the Early Christian period and demonstrate the importance of the city as the principal gate into Balkans.

Keywords: Early Christian, Dyrrachium, Durrës, Roman Empire, Albanian Cultural Heritage.

The historian and journalist, Jill Lepore wrote:

“Getting too close to your subject is a major danger,

but not getting to know her well enough is just as likely.”¹.

The major period of foreign travel­lers in Albania occurred in connection with the Napoleonic Wars,² (1796-1815), and even more under the sub­sequent rule of Ali Pasha of Tepelenë, the Albanian ruler from southern Albania, known by Sultan as the Pas­ha of Trikalla and Ioannina³. The Na­poleonic Wars,⁴ abruptly canceled all bookings on the ‘Grand Tour’⁵. Tra­vellers became more snobbish than ever. Meanwhile the social organiza­tion of the Albanians increased the confusion. Albania fell into hands of local tribal chieftains. One such chief, Mehmet of Bushat, founded a dynasty around 1760 that ruled upper Albania from Scutari (Shkodra) for several generations. At the beginning of the 18^th century, Epirus was governed by three pashas, whose respective head­quarters were at Ioannina, Delvina, and Paramythia, although many dis­tricts enjoyed practical independence. Ali Pasha was in power from 1788, when he was recognized by the Otto­man Porte as ruler of the Pashalik of Janina, to 1822, when he was taken down by Sultan Mahmud II’s forces, following a two-year violent struggle. He became an Albanian ruler known by the Sultan as a Pasha of Trikalla and Ioannina.⁶ Centered in Ioannina, Ali Pasha carved out his own territory, which stretched from the Adriatic to the Aegean, from Elbasan in the north to Trikkala to the south of Pindus Mountains. Shkodra and Ioannina were important economic, political, and cultural centers. The Venetians, on the other hand, needed good relati­ons with all of the Albanian pashas for their survival. The same happened with the French after their arrival in Corfu on June 27, 1797⁷. In 1797 the extravagant Ali Pasha of Tepelena – the vezir nicknamed by Byron ‘The Ottoman Napoleon’ – brought Butrinti under his control. Though the entrance to Butrinti appears to have been forti­fied, the city now primarily functioned as a source of good fishing and hun­ting, not the least for the vezir himself and his international guests.

The first concrete impact of the French Revolution upon the Balkans came with the signing of the Campo Formio Treaty,⁸ following Napoleon’s Italian campaign⁹. Two years previo­usly, after the Treaty of Campo For­mio, France had annexed all the pos­sessions of the Venetian republic, and thus turned into a Balkan power, although Dalmatia, the Ionian islands and a few outposts on the Epirus coast like Butrinti were to change hands several times for the next two decades. The complicated fortunes of war meant that western Europeans began visiting the Ottoman Empire either as representatives of the Great Powers or simply as travellers, since the ‘Grand Tour’ in France and Italy was no lon­ger possible¹⁰.

The first period of French rule in the Ionian Islands lasted from June 1797 to March 1799. The French ge­neral, Antoine Gentili,¹¹ looking to expand French power on the Albanian coasts, met Ali Pasha ‘on the ruins of Butrinti’, a place that was quite deser­ted and where the historian of the ex­pedition, Arno, had seen only a Tur­kish man and only one Albanian¹². Ali Pasha proposed to anchor his ships in Corfu Bay and also to reside in Butrinti, but the General refused these proposals¹³.

Throughout his career, Ali demon­strated great skill in playing off the religious and class differences among his subjects and enemies against one another. Until the Greek rebellion la­unched by the Philiki Etairia in March 1821, Mahmud II, who had succeeded Selim III in 1806, and the Porte admi­nistration had dismissed the old orga­nization as inconsequential. Accor­ding to them, the chief obstacle pre­venting the restoration of Ottoman authority in the Balkans was Ali Pas­ha. In contrast, Ali had realized the significance of the Greek revolutiona­ry movement and had begun to explo­re possible cooperation with it. As the Sultan advanced preparations for a frontal assault on Ali’s stronghold in the town of Ioannina in southern Epirus, the Pasha underwent an op­portunistic conversion to Hellenism¹⁴.

In Ottoman Europe the vast bulk of the population – probably around 80 per cent of the total – remained Christian. Even where Islam made inroads into the countryside, it rarely carried the Turkish language along with it: Bosnian Muslims still spoke their native Slavic; Ali Pasha of Ioan­nina spoke Albanian and Greek but not Turkish. He had a Greek Christian wife, for whom he was reputed to ha­ve built a chapel¹⁵. He was the most formidable and durable Sultan’s diso­bedient provincial governors in the early nineteenth century. The venera­ble looking but ruthless Albanian whose reach extended from his base in Ioannina as far east as the Vardar River and as far south as the Gulf of Corinth. In the course of his lengthy struggle with the Porte, and amid complex double-dealings with British and French diplomats, Ali contempla­ted using the Greeks¹⁶.

In 1782 the Hungarian, Karl Gottlieb von Windisch (1725-1793), (who only signs with his last name) published an article in the Hungarian Review under the title ‘Die Klementiren in Smyrmien’. He writes about Kelmendi tribe, north Albani­ans, who moved to Slovenia in 1737 and 1738 and established the villages of Nikinc and Hrtkovc, near the river Sawa. They chose to immigrate to those regions which were under Austrian rule, to escape the Ottoman occupation¹⁷.

Thomas Hope (1769-1831) was a British painter who traveled thro­ughout the Mediterranean towards the end of the 18^th century. During his travel he composed hundreds of drawings of landscapes, monuments and national costumes of Albania, Greece, Asia Minor, and Syria, which are preserved in the Benaki Museum, in Athens¹⁸.

Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul, called Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier (1752-1817), member of the Académie Françoise and French am­bassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1784 until the fall of the French mo­narchy. He lived at the end of 18^th century and the beginning of 19^th and traveled to the Balkans. On his way to Greece, he painted Albanian landsca­pes and Albanians dressed in national costumes¹⁹.

In 1797, following the collapse of the Republic of Venice, its dominions were divided between the Habsburg Empire and France. During the end of 18^th century and the beginning of the 19^th, the French, the British and the Russians agonized over control of the Mediterranean. At the same time, all three regarded the Ottoman lands as a potential annex of influence²⁰.

The Italian fellow, Saverio Scrofani (1756-1835), traveled in Greece between 1794 and 1795 and published his memoirs in three volu­mes, and they were translated from Italian into French, in 1801²¹. In the same year, Charles Sigisbert Sonnini (1751-1812) published a book in two languages, French and German, about his travels in Greece and Turkey, in­cluding Albania, where he went on orders from Louis XVI²².

For much of the 18^th century, the intellectuals’ dreams of political emancipation rested – as Voltaire’s did – upon an enlightened despot co­ming to their rescue, a Platonic philo­sopher-king, a modernizer, in the mold perhaps of Catherine the Great or Joseph II. The Russians remained a source of potential aid, notably during the 1806-1812 Russo-Turkish war, which brought Russian troops south of the Danube, and made it look as if ‘Grandfather Ivan’ would liberate Balkan lands. However, it was the French Revolution which first sugges­ted that emancipation might come thro­ugh the action of the masses themselves. The toppling of the French monarchy, the rise of Bonaparte and above all, his invasion of Ottoman Egypt in 1798, radicalized the political thought of Balkan Christian intellectuals²³. The first two decades of the ninete­enth century were turbulent years throughout Europe, with the uphea­vals caused by the Napoleonic wars and their after­math; they were also years of social upheaval for Ottoman society, as the ideas of the Enlighten­ment crept in. Disruptive forces were felt within, while Russia, the British and the French vied for influence and posses­sions in the Mediterranean. The mer­chant class contended with a grea­ter share of political power.

It was this period that Dimo Stephanopoli (1749-1821) a Corsican cavalry officer, botanist and naturalist, descended from Mani, and his nep­hew, Nicolo Stephanopoli, visited Epirus and Mani. As botanist, Dimo is credited with the discovery of helmin­thohorton, an alga reputed to combat helminthiasis. He was also descended from the last Greek emperor of the Trebizond Empire, and when Louis XVI recognized this fact, Stephanopoli added Comnenos to his surname (Démétrius Stephanopoli de Comnène). Officially, the purpose of their journey was to collect sea flora and in search of medicinal herbs, but in reality, they intended to collect in­formation on the inhabitants’ political inclinations, on behalf of Bonaparte. They left Paris in 1797 and traveled through Italy to visit the Morea. In Milan, Dimo met Napoleon²⁴, who hired him to travel from Ancona to Corfu, and after meeting with the French general, Gentile he had to stay for a time and gather information about the political situation. Also, he had to gauge different opinions people expressed about the French position. Bonaparte mentioned that he would pay the travel expenses for both Dimo and his nephew.

After accepting this task, Dimo Stephanopoli arrived first in Corfu and then in the Morea. In Corfu, he met with Ali Pasha to gain permission from Gentile to use his three ships around Corfu’s waters. After a visit to Preveza, ruled by the French, Dimo returned to Corfu and from there he went back to France. He met Bonaparte again, and reported about Albania, Rumelia, and the Morea, and that the inhabitants were waiting for him to grant their independence. In the end, he informed Napoleon that Butrinti (Small site with a fortress and some families six miles from Corfu), Parga (forty miles from Corfu, and with 300 families), Preveza (seventy miles from Corfu with 14 000 inhabi­tants and a small fortress) and Vonica (a small city near Arta) were still un­der French rule²⁵.

After their return, Dimo and Nicolo Stephanopoli composed re­ports with their observations and im­pressions. The account of their voyage written by Antoine Serieys, professor at the Prytanée, was based on these memoirs. Aside from historical and cultural information, undoubtedly of great importance, especially regarding Mani before the Revolution, the texts present extraordinary stylistic and nar­rative interest. Two identical editions were published simultaneously in London and Paris²⁶.

According to Ali’s secret service, French general, Gentile, was working to create a military base near the Vivar, a zone with a strategic interest. When Ali discovered this fact, the alliance and all relations with France were broken²⁷.

Early in 1803 Ali Pasha sent word to the British embassy in Constantinople/Istanbul requesting that the British send to him an emissa­ry, so that he might be given advice regarding the best course of action vis-à-vis the impending resumption of war between Britain and France. This petition resulted in a visit from William Hamilton, the secretary of the British embassy²⁸. The attention of the British Foreign Office was thus direc­ted to the Albanian potentate, and at the beginning of 1804, John Philip Morier (1776-1853), a member of a Huguenot family settled in England, was sent out to Albania, the Morea, and the adjoining countries in the ca­pacity of British Resident and Consul-General, with instructions to impress upon the governors of those districts the indispensable expediency of em­ploying to resist the plans of France, and of not allowing themselves to be deceived by any attempt by the French Government to deny the exis­tence of such plans. Morier was also directed to employ every means to obtain the most precise information concerning the state of the country, the military means of repelling invasi­on, and the disposition of the inhabi­tants. After having an audience with the pasha of the Morea, Morier plan­ned to carry out the main purpose of his mission, which was, a diplomatic visit to Ali Pasha. Soon after his arri­val, he found himself acting as media­tor between the Russians and Ali out of necessity and of endeavoring to hold together these two ill-suited alli­es. At the beginning of 1806, Morier returned to Ioannina from a visit to Salonica and Constantinople, and fo­und the French Consul-General, Pouqueville installed in Ali’s capital. Morier did not doubt that his appoin­tment was a measure already planned between the pasha and the French, who had obtained a firman from the Porte for that purpose. Ali assured Morier that Pouqueville had made no proposals of nature. Morier was incli­ned to suspect, and that he was merely charged with the superintendence of commercial concerns. At a further audience held a day or two afterwards, Ali further confirmed to Morier that Napoleon had sent him a verbal mes­sage offering him any assistance in men and ammunition that he might require, if he would permit a landing on his coast from Otranto for the pur­pose of attacking Corfu²⁹.

The Prussian diplomat, Jakob Ludwig Salomon Bartholdy (1779-1825), traveled in Morea and Greece in 1803 and 1804 and wrote a book about his travels. The book was tran­slated from German into French and published in Paris in 1807³⁰. From his drawings and the description of Ali Pasha’s wars, which were copied from the book of the British traveller, William Eton,³¹ in his Survey of the Turkish Empire, it appears that Bartholdy might have visited Ioannina. He drew three Albanian figures: an Albanian soldier in Morea, an Albanian lady in Athens, and an Albanian young lady in Lithada³².

Balthasar de la Motte Hacquet (1739-1815), French descent, the Carniolan physician and professor of anatomy in Laibach (now Ljubljana), traveled throughout Austrian Empire, including travels in the eastern part of Adriatic Sea. He published a book, with two volumes, about Illyria and Dalmatia³³.

At the beginning of 1806, an omi­nous change began to take place in the attitude of the Porte towards Great Britain and Russia, her partners in the Triple Alliance formed in 1798 to re­sist the schemes of Napoleon. This change in attitude was a result of the battle of Austerlitz and the Peace of Pressburg (1805), since, in that treaty, Dalmatia was handed over to France, and the Napoleonic Empire was bro­ught into the immediate neighborhood of Turkey, as the Reis Effendi (the Ottoman Foreign Minister) was re­minded by Talleyrand’s letter with its politely veiled threat.  John Philip Morier’s mission ended in 1806. His youngest brother, David Richard Morier (1784–1877),³⁴ also a diplomat that had accompanied John Philip, in November 1807 wrote a letter to George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary (1807-1809) and described him the new policy³⁵.

The officer of the British Crown, writer, topographer engineer and di­plomat, the young and energetic Lt. Col. William Martin Leake (1777-1860), who received his training at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich (London), was named as a British agent to renew a political fri­endship with Ali Pascha.³⁶ In 1804 he was entrusted with the task of sur­veying and collecting information about the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire and he travelled from 1804 to 1810. Leake’s first trip to the region was in December 1804 when he journeyed through southern Albania, describing Vlora, Kanina, Saranda, Delvina, Gjirokastra, Tepelena, Kardhiq, Finiq, Himara and Ksamil. The second great Albania trip, in June 1805, took him from Macedonia to Devoll, Korça, Voskopoja, Berat, Apollonia, Këlcyra and Përmet. He continued touring Albania and Greece until February 1807.

Captain William Martin Leake had been on a military mission to Ali Pasha during the period of Morier’s consulship and had given the former useful advice regarding the fortificati­on of his country. Towards the end of 1807, Leake was instructed to ap­proach Ali and to ask him whether, in the event of the Ottoman Government being driven out of Europe, he was willing to assert his independence; if his answer was in the affirmative, Leake was to promise him the naval assistance of Great Britain against the menacing power of France and Russia. Being aware that the Pasha was surrounded by agents of the French Government, Leake concluded that even if he should be favorable disposed towards the British, Ali would not enter into any written communication without the greatest secrecy, and therefore thought it im­portant to gain his confidence by con­vincing him that the same caution would be observed on his part³⁷. Lea­ke’s reports are extremely full and informative, and his description of Epirus is invaluable to any study of the area. The first volume of his book begins with the description of Vlora, where he arrived by boat on Decem­ber 9, 1804, and describes the coasts. He landed in Tepelena and saw the people wearing Albanian costumes. He visited Feniki (Phoinike) and des­cribed its history as the capital of Epirus. Captain Leake then arrived at Preveza in February 1809, and from that time until about March 1810, he made either Preveza or Ioannina his headquarters. Leake mentions that Hadrianopolis was constructed during the reign of Hadrian and that, in the seventh century, a bishopric center might have been located in the ruins in Drinopoli and ancient Fanota in mo­dern Kardhiqi. He describes in his book the Albanian coasts: Himara, Nivicë, Lukovë, Piqeras, Qeparo, Vuno, Dhërmi, Dukat, and Pilur. He also writes that he visited Butrinti and, in January 16, left Saranda for Corfu. In that period, Butrinti was known as a place where boar and other games could be caught for replenishing ships’ stores, and was occasionally visited by tourists from Corfu, either for hunting or to see the ruins. After staying five months in Corfu, he trave­led to Etoli and Akarnani and returned to Preveza on June 22. He stayed in Korça for a while, and from there, he went to Berat and then to Voskopoja. The visits to Amantia, Byllis, Apollonia, and the monastery of Ardenica were brief³⁸.

Captain Leake was clearly the most suitable agent that Great Britain could send to Ali, and among the Leake papers is a George Canning’s letter (dated October 21, 1808), appo­inting him special envoy to the Pasha’s Court, and placing him in charge of the supply of artillery and stores intended for use against the French³⁹. He was the best informed of the early writers on Albania, when arrived in Ioannina in 1809 as British representative at the court of Ali Pasha. Anglo-French rivalry for Ali’s support in the unstable political envi­ronment of the eastern Mediterranean was mirrored in a personal hostility between Leake and the French repre­sentative at Ioannina, François Pouqueville. He later also wrote at length about the area though much less reliably⁴⁰.

Actually, among those who did not immediately benefit from the altered politics of the eastern Mediterranean was the French physician to the Commission on the Sciences and Arts, François Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville (1770-1838), a member of the scientific commission that ac­companied Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. Poor health forced him and two other officials to return to France, but on his way back to France, on No­vember 25, 1798, he was captured by pirates and sent to Navarino in the Peloponnese, where he was impriso­ned and held for ransom by the Turks. He visited Tripoli, Patras, Argos, Nauplia and Albania before he was removed to Constantinople, where he was again given a good deal of fre­edom but was held for over two years before being permitted to return to France⁴¹. Thanks to his knowledge of medicines, Pouqueville gained the favor of Mustafa Pasha and then his freedom in 1801, but Mustafa Pasha was vague concerning the conditions of Pouqueville’s release. His three companions at the time of his capture remained with the pirates longer and were not so well treated, but they too eventually arrived in Constantinople and were freed. They put their notes at his disposal, and Pouqueville wrote his observations concerning the cus­toms and curiosities of Albania, Greece and Turkey. It was in prison that he began writing his first travel memoirs, which were dedicated to Napoleon and published, in Paris in 1805, the three-volume edition: Voyage en Morée, à Constantinople, en Albanie et dans plusieurs autres parties de l’Empire othoman pendant les années 1798, 1799, 1800 et 180142. The book, translated into German, English and Italian, was ex­ceptionally successful and attracted the attention of the French go­vernment, which appointed him as consul general in Ioannina, to the co­urt of Ali Pasha Tepelena, where he served for ten years. Traveling to Ioannina in September of 1806, he described his travels from Sazan Is­land to Borshi, Lukovë, Nivicë, Delvina, and Muzina. He arrived at Ioannina on March 19, 1807. He re­mained in Epirus from 1806 to 1815, had a close personal relationship with the ‘Lion of Janina’ and was able to travel widely in the region. Later he traveled extensively through Albania. Describing Durrës, he mentions both the luxury of the city in antiquity and the destruction⁴³. He further mentions that the French consulship in this im­portant city had existed since 1640 and the trade from it was approxima­tely 30% with France and 70% with Spain. Pouqueville then describes a number of archaeological sites, such as the ruins of Dodona, the Venetian fortress and the ruins of Butrinti, and the ancient cities of Apollonia and Byllis⁴⁴. Pouqueville also took note of all British travellers who visited Ali Pasha, observing with a degree of jea­lously, the new connections that pasha was forming with England rather than France⁴⁵.

The Venetian policy of sowing di­vision among the local governments of Albania was reversed, and everyt­hing was done to encourage the growth of Ali’s power even to the extent of allowing his ships to naviga­te the Adriatic and thus to begin his attacks on the independence of the Christian Khimariots on their rocky promontory. For a time, Ali appeared to welcome the assistance of the French Republic, and committed him­self to projects of a treasonable nature against his sovereign; but when at length the Sultan broke with Bonaparte over the Egyptian question, Ali decided that it was more in his interest to show himself a loyal and enthusiastic subject of the Sultan, and thus turned against the French⁴⁶.

A peace treaty was signed between Great Britain and Turkey on January 5, 1809, but by September Ali was growing nervous, although Sir Robert Adair, the British Plenipotentiary and Ambassador at Constantinople, assu­red Leake that he had no intention of leaving the pasha to cope single-handed with France, and on October 13, in a letter marked ‘private’, he writes that Ali has been insinuating that his services have been inadequa­tely rewarded. Leake’s retirement from Ali’s Court in 1810 appears to have been rather sudden and unexpec­ted. Mr. G. Foresti, a young Greek, and son of Spiridion Foresti, the for­mer British consul in the Ionian Is­lands, succeeded him⁴⁷.

Angelo Masci (1758-1821) was the Italian Arbëresh jurist and scholar. In 1807, his best-known work Discor­so sull’origine, costumi, e stato attua­le della nazione Albanese was pu­blished in Naples. Using mostly clas­sical works as sources, Masci grouped Illyrian, Macedonian and Epirote into one language family, which he consi­dered the Ursprache of Albanian, but didn’t name and identify it. His work influenced Conrad Malte-Brun,⁴⁸ who republished it with the title Essai sur l’origine, les moeurs et l’état actuel de la nation albanaise in his Annales des voyages, de la géographie et de l’histoire. In turn, Malte-Brun’s es­says partially influenced Giuseppe Crispi,⁴⁹ who wrote the first mono­graph on the Albanian language, however, unlike Masci, Malte-Brun and Crispi identified that language family with Pelasgian. In his book Masci discusses the origins, costumes and present situation of the Albanian nation and his book was reprinted 40 years later⁵⁰. Travels in Albania are not mentioned concretely, however from the contents of the book one may suppose that he visited Albania before writing it.

The British scholar, Edward Dodwell,⁵¹ after traveling throughout southeastern Europe, returned in London and he published a book there in two volumes which consisted of 1100 pages and numerous illustrati­ons. His book is particularly important for classical archaeology. Traveling from Venice to Greece, he stayed in Albania. He was in Durrës, Kruja, Vlora and other coastal cities included Acroceraune mountains. He was in Himara in May 26, and after that he left for Corfu. From Corfu, he visited Parga, Preveza, and the ruins of Nicopolis. He as early as 1804 had paused on Corfu and had drawn the landscapes of the island and the views to Butrinti. In his book he includes views of Albanian cities, such as Valona, Kruja, Durazzo, including Acroceraunian landscapes as well as Albanians dressed in national costu­mes⁵².

According to Caterina Beschi Spestieri, all the illustrations in Dodwell’s book are by Simone Pomardi, a painter who accompanied Dodwell on his trip. Pomardi himself published a book after Dodwell’s with different drawings and different notes that he took during their travels⁵³.

Another British scholar, Guillaume de Vandoncourt, traveled in Albania in 1807. In his book he describes Albanian folk costumes and states that, in his opinion, they derive from Roman military dresses⁵⁴.

One of the most prominent foreign travellers to Albania was the well-known Romantic British poet, George Gordon – Lord Byron (1788-1824). He was approximately 21 years old when he set out on a grand tour of the Mediterranean in 1809. Because of the Napoleonic wars he could not follow the conventional ‘Grand Tour’, but instead he sailed with his ever-protective friend John Cam Hobhouse,⁵⁵ from Falmouth to Lisbon, Malta, Greece, Albania and Turkey. His visit to Albania in the autumn of that year made a lasting impression on him and is reflected in the second canto of the poem ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, that catapulted him to fame as a writer in 1812⁵⁶.

In marble-paved pavilion, where a spring/Of living water from the center rose,/Whose bubbling did a genial freshness fling,/And soft voluptuous couches breathed repose,/Ali reclined, – a man of war and woes./Yet in his lineaments ye cannot trace,/While gentleness her milder radiance throws/Along that aged venerable face. /The deeds that lurk beneath and stain him with disgrace.

Byron’s Childe Harold (1812) Canto II, Stanza 62.

It was Lord Byron who consolida­ted a growing fashion for Albanian travel. Attracted by the possibility of meeting Ali Pasha, he went to Ioannina with john Cameron Hobhouse in October 1809. They fi­nally encountered Ali farther north, in Tepelenë, and Byron wrote proudly, With the exception of Major Leake… no other Englishmen have ever ad­vanced beyond [Ioannina] into the interior’. Byron’s fantasy of Albania, as one of the world’s wild places, has been the mainstay of most English travel writing about the country ever since: Land of Albania! Let me bend mine eyes/On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!

(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 2, lines 338-339)

The publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold in 1812, and their instant success, placed Albania firmly on the imaginative map of Europe.

In the four cantos of the autobio­graphical Childe Harold’s Pilgrima­ge, he memorialized this trip and further travels with a complete serio­usness that is puzzling in one so full of life and good humor in his letters.  His style of travel was luxurious, and he was prepared for any hardship. Sailing from Preveza to Patras on a ship pro­vided by Ali Pasha, he lay down on deck amidst the chaos of a storm and the struggles of incompetent sailors, wrapped himself in his Albanian ca­pote, and went to sleep. In canto II of Childe Harold, he portrays the much-admired Albanians as ‘noble savages’, and, in accompanying notes, he favo­rably compares Albania to Scotland, its inhabitants to Scottish Highlanders, and the scenes a Highland novel by Walter Scott.

‘The Albanians in their dresses (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold worked cloak, crimson velvet gold laced jacket & wait coat, silver moun­ted pistols & daggers), the Tartars with their high caps, the Turks in their vast pelisse and turbans, the soldiers & black slaves with the horses, the former stretched in groups in an im­mense open gallery in front of the pa­lace, the latter placed in a kind of clo­ister below it, two hundred steeds rea­dy caparisoned to move in a moment, couriers entering or passing out with dispatches, the kettle drums beating, boys calling the hour from the minaret of the mosque, altogether, with the singular appearance of the building itself, formed a new & delightful spec­tacle to a stranger”⁵⁷.

John Cameron Hobhouse or Lord Broughton was educated at Westminster School and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he founded the Whig Club and an Ami­cable Society. It was at Cambridge that he met and became an intimate friend of the poet Lord Byron, with whom he travelled in 1809-1810 to Albania, Greece and Turkey, in parti­cular to Janina (Ioannina) and as far north as the court of Ali Pasha in Tepellenè (Tepelenë)⁵⁸. Hobhouse later became a member of parliament, served as secretary for war in the ca­binet of Earl Grey in 1832 and held positions in later governments. The memoirs of his travels to Albania with Byron (whom he does not mention) were published in the volume A Jour­ney through Albania and Other Pro­vinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople during the Years 1809 and 1810, London 1813⁵⁹.

Both Byron and Hobhouse were delighted by the fineness and exoti­cism of Eastern clothes. An entry in Hobhouse’s diary shows him getting up at ten o’clock and trying on ‘Alba­nian suits’, while Byron writes to his mother telling her that he has bought some ‘very ‘magnifique’ Albanian dresses’.

Byron and Hobhouse had been assigned a fine apartment in the pala­ce. They noticed English carpets in the rooms used in winter, whilst the long gallery reminded them of the top story of an English inn. The day after they arrived, they were received by Ali Pasha, Byron, having dressed for the occasion ‘in a full suit of staff uniform with a very magnificent saber & c’. The state room was paved with marble, with a fountain in the center. Scarlet ottomans were placed around the walls. The Vizier, in his late sixti­es, ‘very fat, & not tall, but with a fine face, light blue eyes and a white beard’, paid Byron the compliment of receiving him standing, then invited him to sit down on Ali Pasha’s right. The polite small talk began with the question of why Byron had left his country at such an early age.

Why was this powerful despot so attentive to Lord Byron? Ali Pasha was a devious, sophisticated potentate, intent on playing his own diplomatic power games with the British and French, as well as with the Turks. He may have imagined that Byron could be useful in his delicate maneuvers. At this juncture his interests coincided with English policy in the Ionian Isles, which was aimed at dislodging the French. Captain Leake had informed him that Byron came of an important aristocratic family. He may have ove­restimated his political influence. Besides, to this elderly and self-indulgent tyrant, Byron’s person was evidently irresistible.

Hobhouse noted how he looked a little leeringly at Byron, asking how he could have had the heart to leave his mother. Caressingly he told the young man that he could tell he was well born because he had ‘small ears, curling hair, & little white hands’. He had observed already the peculiarity of Byron’s ears, which had almost no lobes. Ali Pasha was effusive about Byron’s looks and clothes and told him to regard him as a father while he was in Turkey. ‘Indeed’, Byron told to his mother, ‘he treated me like a child, sending me almonds & sugared sher­bet, fruit & sweetmeats 20 times a day. He begged me to visit him often, and at night when he was more at lei­sure’. That first meeting ended with coffee and Turkish pipes.

Byron saw Ali Pasha three more times. It has been suggested that Ali Pasha made a conquest of Byron. This is unlikely. Byron was not susceptible to older men. But he was certainly responsive to the flattery of such a powerful figure and held by the fero­cious strength of will behind Ali Pas­ha’s urbanity of manner: ‘he is a re­morseless tyrant, guilty of the most horrible cruelties, very brave & so good a general, that they call him the Mahometan Buonaparte’. There was a horrid fascination in Ali’s most un-English practice of impaling and then roasting his enemies.

Even in the early weeks of Byron’s travels he was referring to them as a pilgrimage. A pilgrim’s journey it had now indeed become as he explored both his inner nature and the landsca­pe and history, psychology and poli­tics of other countries in Europe and the East. Captain Leake in Ioannina was aware of his propensity to turn aside ‘from the contemplation of nea­rer objects and from the conversation of those about him, to gaze with an air distrait and dreamy the distant moun­tains’. This impression may have been romanticized by hindsight, but there is evidence that Byron’s poetic travelo­gue Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was gestating at this time.

On October 22, while they were still in Tepelena at Ali Pasha’s palace, Hobhouse recorded: ‘Byron is all this time engaged in writing a long poem in the Spenserian stanza’. Byron him­self gives an official starting date of October 31, by which time they had returned to Ioannina. He had now em­barked on his own more ambitious counterpart to Hobhouse’s journals, a verse narrative written ‘amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe’. These scenes are filtered through the tormented sensibility of the young traveller, originally named ‘Childe Burun’, responsive to yet alienated from his surroundings by some un­disclosed and undisclosable wron­gdoing. This was to be a pilgrimage of the divided self.

But while Byron was describing his journeys he was also, at Hobhouse’s insistence, covering his tracks. In Albania, as regards his re­cords for posterity, there was loss as well as gain. On one of their stops while they were on their travels, a pile of manuscript sheets fell out of Byron’s portmanteau. Hearing that this was an account of Byron’s early life, presumably including reminis­cences of his love for Eddleston, the wary Hobhouse persuaded him to burn it. “For’, he warned, ‘if any sud­den accident occurs they will print it, and thus injure your memory’. Later, Byron appears to have regretted this destruction, telling Thomas Moore that the loss of the manuscript had been ‘irreparable”.

In early November Byron and Hobhouse were traveling south again, heading towards Greece, with an en­larged entourage. Besides Fletcher and Andreas Zantachi, his Greek in­terpreter, he now acquired an Albani­an servant, Vassily, assigned to him in Tepelena by Ali Pasha, and a young Muslim, Dervish Tahiri, one of the guards of forty or so Albanian soldiers whom Ali Pasha had directed to ac­company Byron and his party to pro­tect them from the robbers in the regi­on.

Fletcher, on the contrary, was tur­ning out to be a burden. He was not a resilient traveller. Ali Pasha had pro­vided an armed galliot to take them by sea from Prevesa to Patras. The crew was incompetent. A storm drove them off course.

‘Fletcher yelled after his wife, the Greeks called on all the saints, the Mussulmen on Alla, the Captain burst into tears & ran below deck telling us to call on God, the sails were split, the mainyard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in, & all our chance was to make Corfu, which is in possession of the French, or (as Fletcher pathetically termed it) ‘a wa­tery grave’’⁶⁰.

As a memory of Byron’s visit, the well-known painter, Thomas Phillips, produced later, on 1914, the portrait of the poet dressed in Albanian costume entitled: ‘Byron in Albanian dress’, residing in the Gallery of Portraits, in London. It is strange that Pouqueville laughed with Byron and Broughton and wrote several letters to General Donzelot on October 9 and November 15, 1809. In these letters he mentions facts about the ‘so called lords’ who ‘ware Albanian dresses’⁶¹. John Cam Hobhouse, Lord Byron’s companion on the trip, published memories on his journey through Albania and other provinces of the Turkish Empire⁶². He described Nicopolis and mentioned that a number of archaeological ob­jects found in this city Ali Pasha had given to the British officer in Ioannina, Col. William Martin Leake⁶³.

Ali’s power on the mainland of Albania continued to grow, in July 1810, he felt strong enough to forge a ‘firman’ from the Porte, appointing his son, Mukhtar, to the government of Berat and Valona, in place of Ibrahim Pasha, the existing governor, and an old rival.

During the first two decades of the 19^th century Ioannina comprised a regional economic, administrative, military and cultural center. It was inhabited by an ethnically and religio­usly diverse population consisting predominantly, but not solely, of Greek, Albanian, and Turkish sub­jects-all Ottomans⁶⁴.

In 1806, Danish archaeologist and philologist, Peter Oluf Brønsted (1780-1842)⁶⁵ and his friend Georg Hendrick Carl Koës⁶⁶ (1782-1811), set out on a grand European tour that finally led them to Greece and Albania⁶⁷. Along their way, they tra­veled through Germany, and took part in Goethe’s wedding festivities⁶⁸. These young enthusiasts met in Rome in 1809 some other young intellectu­als, architects, artists and traveled together to Greece and Albania. The team was composed by two Danes, two Germans, the architect Johann Carl Christoph Wilhelm Joachim Haller von Hallerstein (1774-1817)⁶⁹ from Nürenberg, the landscape painter Jacob Linckh (1786-1841) from Württemberg, and an Estonian baron with artistic interests, Baron Otto Magnus von Stackelberg (1786-1837) from Tallinn. They arrived in Greece in July 1810 and after that Brønsted met in Athens the British architects Charles Robert Cockerell⁷⁰ (1788-1863) and John Foster⁷¹ (1786-1846)⁷².

The British architects and friends of Brøndsted, Charles Robert Cockerell and John Foster, traveled in southern Europe and the Levant. They excavated in Athens and its surroun­dings as well as the Temple of Athena at Aegina⁷³. Charles Robert Cockerell drew Ali Pasha in his palace, repre­senting him with an authoritarian look and imposing stance⁷⁴.

The young people started Xeneion, a fraternity of antiquarians, whose hallmark was ‘enthusiasm for Greece, ancient literature, and the fine arts’. They all reached Corfu in late July 1810 and on August 25, they arrived at Prevesa. Two days later, they visi­ted the ruins of Nicopolis. On August 30, they left for Patras and arrived in Athens on September 14. In Greece Brøndsted met and Lord Byron. In a letter to Francis Hodgson on January 20, 1811, Byron noted: ‘I have con­tracted an alliance with Dr. Brøndstedt of Copenhagen, a pretty philosopher as you’d wish to see…’. In another letter to John Cam Hobhouse on March 5, 1811, he wrote: ‘I am at pre­sent out of spirits having just lost a particular friend; poor dear Dr. Brønstedt of Copenhagen (who lost half his rixdollars by our cursed bom­bardments) is lately gone to Copenhagen; we used to tipple punch and talk politics…’⁷⁵.

In the winter of 1811-1812 Brøndsted excavated on the island of Kea, and in the spring of 1812, he was working at Aegina and Salamis. In June, he joined Haller in his excavati­ons of the temple of Apollo near Phigalia (Bassae). Brøndsted, accom­panied by his friend, the count of Capodistrias, Nicolo de Lunzi, reached Preveza on December 12, 1812, and met there with Ali Pasha⁷⁶. Brøndsted spent January and half of February of 1813 in Ioannina, the ca­pital of Ali’s pashalik, and from there, he returned to Denmark. He wrote of his interviews with Ali Pasha, attemp­ting “to represent him himself such as he saw him” and his manuscript is preserved in the Royal Library of Copenhagen (folder KB NKS 341c)⁷⁷.

The Danish scholar described Ali Pasha as an ‘extraordinary old man’ and the apartment in which he found the pasha as ‘of middling dimensions, but very lofty, and richly decorated in the Turkish style, without being over­charged. The ceiling oval, or rather inclined in the elliptic form, was pain­ted in deep celestial blue, with a number of stars in relief, gilt and of various sizes’⁷⁸. Ali, after saluted in the Turkish fashion-of bowing the head, and bringing the right hand to his breast, invited his guests to sit, and asked Brøndsted for his name, coun­try, what the object of his travels was, all while proposing to communicate without an interpreter. Brøndsted des­cribed Ali’s smoking of a nargileh and his dress, comparing him to Ulysses. During their discussion, Ali asked him about the Danish monarchy, how far to the north it extended, and where Norway began; he was especially inte­rested in the Icelandic volcano of Hekla, as he was not sure if this island belonged to Denmark, or England. Ali expressed his wish to see a volcano, such as Etna or Vesuvius, but not Hekla, which was too far away.

Another point of their discussion, according to Brøndsted, was the anci­ent monuments, and Ali mentioned to him that other visitors had given a large sum of money to his son Veli Pasha of the Morea for permission to excavate. Ali was happy that Brøndsted was ‘well skilled in old stones’ and proposed to visit the anci­ent sites of Albania. Ali added that “…if you have a mind to excavate so­me parts in Albania, I will furnish you with as many people as you wish for nothing; but it is to be understood that I will have my share of the marbles, and precious things that we find…”⁷⁹. Brøndsted records that Ali mentioned his displeasure with lord Elgin. Two days after this discussion with Ali, Brøndsted and, Nicolo de Lunz visited the ruins of the ancient city of Nicopolis. Ali asked the Danish ar­chaeologist about the details of fortifi­cations, while admiring the fine ma­sonry, the small and great theaters, and other objects. He also asked Brøndsted where they might begin an archaeological excavation. Brøndsted proposed to excavate in two areas in the interior of the city, which he belie­ved had been temples. Ali assisted in this small excavation. Together they found three fine square marble slabs that the Danish archaeologist descri­bed as part of the ancient pavement of the building. Pasha placed the slabs with great care upon a type of rol­ling/sedan-chair (chaise roulante) and covered them with straw, so they co­uld be conveyed to Prevesa. They also discovered two insignificant bronze medals, and Ali gave one to the archa­eologist and pocketed the other him­self, laughing at this “augmentation of his treasury”⁸⁰. Brøndsted wrote notes about the ruins of Nicopolis, and in them, he mentions that a large quanti­ty of marble columns and other mo­vable building materials from the ru­ins had been dragged away during previous years on the orders of Ali to be used for the building of the two palaces of the Pasha and for mosques in Prevesa⁸¹.

The German painter and Brøndsted’s friend, Carl Haller von Hallerstein visited Nicopolis in the summer of 1810. In August 1810, he drew views of Preveza and Nicopolis⁸². Carl Haller died very yo­ung in 1817, in the valley of Tempe, where he had been hired by Veli Pasha, the son of Ali, to construct a bridge⁸³. His portrait, drawn by Otto Magnus von Stackelberg on Zakynthos in 1814, is preserved in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, in München.

In 1815, Jean Baptiste Joseph Breton (1777-1852), translated and published in Paris the book of the German scholar Belsazar Hacquet (1739–1815) focused on the ethno­graphic observations of inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula that includes thirty-two hand-colored lithographs to illustrate Hacquet’s studies⁸⁴.

There are three British fellows, Henry Holland⁸⁵, Thomas Smart Hughes⁸⁶, and Robert Townley Parker⁸⁷ that traveled in Albania du­ring the first half of the second decade of the 19^th century and published bo­oks about their travels.

Holland’s book has 552 pages in a large format, and at the very begin­ning of it, he describes the Albanian people dressed in their national cos­tumes. Landing in Prevesa, in 1812, the young traveller wrote: ‘Entering these regions, the scene is suddenly shifted, and you have before your eyes a new species of beings, with all those gaudy appendages of oriental charac­ter and scenery which have so long delighted the imagination in the tales of the East. The uniform habits of the Turk, derived from his religion and other circumstances, render this chan­ge almost as remarkable in the first Turkish town you may enter, as in those much further removed from the vicinity of the European nations’⁸⁸. After Prevesa or Nicopolis, he visited, Arta and Pesë Puset (Five Wells) and then arrived in Ioannina. After Ioannina, he traveled to Salonica and before returning to Albania, as he had promised Ali Pasha. In February 1813, he met Ali Pasha in Preveza. Following that visit, he went to the fortress of Suli and met Mouctar Aga, ‘a fine-looking man, between 50 and 60, of pleasing manners and much politeness’⁸⁹. Ali pasha proposed him twice to stay as his personal physician and suggested him to travel to the north of Ioannina. Holland accepted this suggestion and began a trip that included Gjirokastra, Tepelena, Gradishtë (where he visited the ruins of Byllis), Pojan (where he drew the column of the temple in Shtyllas), and Vlora (where visited the mine of bi­tumen in Selenicë). Holland’s profes­sion as a physician gave him a certain objectivity; the fact that he was Ali’s doctor perhaps made him unduly sympathetic to his patient. Ali’s go­vernment has been seen as beneficial, notwithstanding the faults and evils of despotism. The Albanians were proud of him and serve him gladly; the Greeks served him out of fear, habit or interest, while the Turks, that enjoyed no particular privilege or interest, were not so prone towards Ali. Hol­land contrasts Ali’s artifice and cru­elty with his temperance and geniality, his political intelligence with his ina­dequate education⁹⁰. In his last mee­ting with Ali Pasha, on April 7, Holland mentions that Ali accompa­nied him to the entrance gate and kis­sed him on both cheeks⁹¹ .

As mentioned above, Reverend Thomas Smart Hughes left England, being the traveller tutor of Robert Townley Parker a young boy and later became Member of Parliament for Preston 1837-1857.

For about two years, the two yo­ung men travelled through Spain, Italy, Sicily, Greece and Albania, the Mediterranean countries, ‘those thea­tres of the most interesting events re­corded in the annals of history’. They visited Sicily at the end of 1812. The­re, in Messina, they met a number of Albanians and afterward traveled with them to Zante, the Morea, Patras, Argos, and Corinth.

Hughes began the Albanian part of his journey in Preveza which at the time marked the border between Albania and Greece and continued on to Arta and Janina (Iôannina). They arrived in Preveza on December 27, 1813, and visited Nicopolis, to see the quarries of marble and limestone being used for the Ali Pasha’s fortres­ses in Preveza and Arta. The Albania he describes is thus primarily Epirus, the realm of Ali Pasha Tepelena, of whom he leaves us a good biography. From Janina, he then provides us with a detailed account of his excursion to the north of Albania (in modern terms, actually the south of Albania), i.e. to Libohova, Gjirokastra, Kardhiq, Tepelena, Berat, Këlcyra, Përmet, Konitsa and back to Janina. They stayed in Ioannina from January 1813 to May 1814, where they became ac­quainted with the local elite and were given the chance to converse with Ali Pasha several times. During the stay there, they were accompanied by the architect and antiquity smuggler Charles Robert Cockerell, who sket­ched the views of the city that sup­plemented Hughe’s works. At Ioannina they met with the British lieutenant-colonel, Richard Church⁹², who proposed to visit Ali Pasha in Litharica. In the mid-January 1814, Hughes and Parker continued their travels, visiting the ruins in Dodona, and Derviçan, before the returning back to Ioannina. Hughes stayed five months in the city and met Ali Pasha several times. He commen­ted on Ali Pasha’s seraglio in the Castle: “The serai stood in an open space, near the south-east angle; a vast irregular pile of building, surro­unding nearly three sides of a large court. The effect of its architecture and decorations were very striking at a distance; but less so on a closer in­spection, when the coarseness of its work and the perishable nature of its materials impressed upon the mind ideas only of barbarous magnificence and ephemeral power”.

The results of this extensive Medi­terranean journey were published in the two-volume book⁹³.

Hughes, traveling and writing a lit­tle later than Holland, is slightly less enthusiastic about Ali, who is first mentioned in a hostile fashion when Hughes is in Greece⁹⁴. In his pu­blished book is a drawing of Cockerrell with some Albanians in 1812-1813⁹⁵.

There are interesting travel account memories of the French general, wri­ter and military historian, Frédéric Guillaume de Vaudoncourt (1772-1845)⁹⁶. Vaudoncourt casts his net widely, serving Napoleon in several campaigns, including the Hundred Days of 1815, and writing about them. Walton’s translation refers to the author enigmatically as being in the Italian service, not mentioning the fact that after Waterloo he had been con­demned to death by the restored French monarchy. Vaudoncourt had served in the Balkans, helping Ali Pasha to fortify Preveza in 1807, but his book is clearly not very accurate. His portrait of Ali balances praise with blame. There is a long and rather tedious account of road journeys thro­ugh Ali’s domains, which by their very nature would not seem to derive from personal experience⁹⁷.

Cultivated man and freedom fighter, General Frédéric Guillaume de Vaudoncourt left his Memoirs for his activity in fifteen years (Quinze années d’un proscrit), in which he traces with talent his atypical itinerary, that of a soldier of the Republic become general of Napoleon, continuing his liberal quest across the continent. He is the author of a very large number of military works, including his memories on the Ionian Islands and the life of Ali Pasha. His book is translated into English by William Walton⁹⁸ with the title Me­moirs on the Ionian Islands including the life and character of Ali Pasha⁹⁹.

The commercial relations of Durazzo/Durrës and the Republic of Venice, under Ottoman occupation, are described in a book written by Giovanni Antonio Maria Morana, the Venetian Consul in Durrës. This book is published in Venice in 1816¹⁰⁰. He had published earlier another book about the commercial reports of Aleppo and other sites of Siria and Palestina with the Republic of Venice, when he has been Venetian Consul there¹⁰¹.

George Stockli, the British painter, visited Albania in 1818 and painted a number of landscapes and cities’ landscapes¹⁰². Another important tra­veller of adventure in this period is Adolphe Cerfbeer, known as Ibrahim Manzour Effendi¹⁰³, who became a commandant in the service of Ali Pasha. In 1813, he went in Skopje, where he lived in the house of Suleyman Pasha, who protected him. While there, he became friends with Suleyman’s son, Ibrahim, and because of him changed his name to Ibrahim. He stayed there for less than a year. After traveling around the region, he arrived in Ioannina and became a commandant in the service of Ali Pasha for three years, from June 1816 to the end of July 1819. Eight years later he published a book with his memoirs. In the second part of the book he provides geographical des­criptions of Albania and descriptions of Albanians¹⁰⁴.

In 1817, because of an agreement signed between the British diplomat Sir. Robert Liston (1742-1836)¹⁰⁵ and the Porte, it is decided that a commis­sioner from the Porte should be sent to Ioannina, to work with a commissio­ner Sir Thomas Maitland (1759–1824)¹⁰⁶. As Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands, Thomas Maitland played the chief part in an affair which brought intense odium upon himself and upon the name of Great Britain. Ali Pasha soon after­ward sent a deputy to Corfu, to inform Maitland that the Ottoman commissi­oner had arrived to Ioannina. After an interview with this deputy, Maitland considered it necessary to reinforce the garrison of Parga in order to pre­vent any attempt by Ali to surprise the fortress. In pursuance of the intention of the treaty, Maitland sent Mr. Joseph Cartwright (1789? -1829)¹⁰⁷, the British Consul at Patras, to Ioannina in the post of British Commissioner, who was in fact merely a passive agent of Ali Pasha. Towards the end of 1817, Maitland had an interview with the Pasha, as a result of which another English Commissioner and other Turkish and Ionian agents, were sent to Parga in April¹⁰⁸. Sir Thomas Maitland traveled in Albania in March 13, 1819, and visited Butrinti accom­panied by the French painter Louis Dupré (1789-1837)¹⁰⁹. Dupré pu­blished portraits of Ali Pasha and his grandsons in his book of 1825¹¹⁰. Another book of traditional Albanian Costumes was published in 1822 by the English marine painter Joseph Cartwright. After being Consul at Patras, he served on Corfu in the Bri­tish Navy and from there he may have traveled and visited Ali Pasha.

The British painter, Hugh William Williams (1773-1829)¹¹¹, traveled in Italy, Albania and Greece in 1819. A year later, he published in London a book in two volumes about this trip and described virtually everything he saw, having an interest in the monu­ments of foreign cultures¹¹². The book is illustrated with his engravings and in the second volume included an Al­banian fighter in national costume. Ten years later, in 1829 he published the two-volume album (Album with selected views from Greece) with se­lected views of the countries he visi­ted. In the pages facing engravings on Albanian theme, Williams published verses from ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, which mention Albania and Albanians.

A cooperative venture, in 1818, under the command of Captain William Henry Smyth (1788-1865) surveyed the whole of the eastern Adriatic seaboard¹¹³. The resulting published charts, the Chart of the Channels of Corfu with the Adjacent Coast of Albania, published in 1825, and the massive Austrian/Naples atlas: Idrografia Generale del Mare Adriatico also of 1825, remained standard works for the first half of the 19^th century¹¹⁴. The great Carte Physi­que Historique de la Greece of Comte Guilleminot (Royal Geographical So­ciety), published in 1826, incorporated a series of small scale detailed maps of harbors including Butrint. Despite its small size, this map, utilizing in­formation from Francis Pouqueville, is a fine piece of cartography, and is still probably the most attractive map of Butrint produced before Arthur Lukis Mansell’s work. It was repro­duced in 1829 in Weiss’s Carte der Europaeischen, Türkey (Royal Geographical society Europe)¹¹⁵. Commander Arthur Lukis Mansell produced a survey map of Corfou and the Albanian coast, published in 1865 as Channels of Corfou with the adja­cent coast of Albania; it replaced Smyth’s earlier chart¹¹⁶.

Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863), born in London, was a British architect, archaeologist and writer who is remembered for his works of Georgian architecture in Britain and for his role in the excavation of the temples of Aegina and Bassae. From 1810 to 1817 he travelled extensively in Greece, Albania, Turkey and Italy. In 1819, he was leading architect of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London and in later years was made President of the Royal Institute of British Archi­tects. It was in January 1814, during his travels in Greece, that he ventured northwards to Albania (that began in Preveza) to visit the realm of Ali Pasha, where he made several vivid sketches¹¹⁵.

John Heaviside Clark (1771–1863) was a Scottish aquatint engraver and painter of seascapes and landscapes. He was also known as Waterloo Clark, because of the sketches he made on the field directly after the Battle of Waterloo. One of his paintings, dated in 1818, has a Soldier of Albania¹¹⁸. Clark exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy between 1801 and 1832. He was the author of A practical essay on the art of Colouring and Painting Landscapes, with illustrations, published in 1807, and A practical Illustration of Gilpin’s Day, with thirty colour plates, in 1824¹¹⁹, based on monochrome studies representing different times of day by William Gilpin¹²⁰.

Amongst the different travellers and visitors of Albania were two British painters, Henry Cook (1819-1890) and Captain George de la Poer Beresford (1826-1865)¹²¹. Henry Cook drew the triangular fortress, near Butrinti, in 1820 and two views from Shkodra Lake. In the text written in his paintings he copied the lines of Byron about Albanians¹²².  Captain George de la Poer Beresford drew, among twelve other sketches, the Vivari Channel and fortress¹²³.

In 1821, the high Porte mounted a campaign to crush Ali and sent troops against him to Ioannina. Ali’s defen­ses in Epirus were finally breached in early 1822. He met his death at the hands of a fellow vizier in February 1822. He was killed on the island in the Lake of Ioannina, in a cell of the monastery of Saint Panteleimon, near the place called Five Wells and, on the order of the Sultan the ‘Rebel’s head’ was sent to Constantinople, while eve­rything else He possessed was bur­ned¹²⁴.

French Baron, Louis-Auguste-Félix de Beaujour (1765–1836), gra­duated in diplomacy and military stu­dies, was one of the first travellers who took a trip through the Ottoman Empire for a specifically military pur­pose, and he published a book with two volumes, afterward with the des­cription of the frontiers and principal defended sites either natural or con­structed.  He visited southern Albania and Ali Pasha’s Palace after the death of Ali Pasha. He admired archaeology and antiquities very much, but becau­se of war he was obliged only to do some military researches. He wrote his memories and was afraid that United Kingdom might use his studies for the military aim. So, his book, with two volumes, was published much later in Paris. The memories, about Albania and Ali Pasha, are in the third book of the first volume. He described the topography, the physical geography, mountains, and rivers, in each city or village of the Ottoman Empire. He began his trip in Greece and continued into Albania. For his visit to Durrës, he provides a brief description of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey¹²⁵.

Baron Otto Magnus von Stackelberg (1787-1837), the French painter from Alzasa, traveled through different countries of Europe and in 1825 he visited Albania. In an album he with thirty colored engravings, two of them are from Albania: ‘Albanian officer’ and ‘Albanian Janissary’¹²⁶.

Scottish political figure and writer, David Urquhart (1805-1877), travel­led to Greece in 1827 with Lord Cochrane to champion the Greek cau­se in the war of independence there, and in 1831 he was appointed to Sir Stratford Canning’s mission to Constantinople to settle a border dis­pute between Turkey and Greece. When arrived in Greece, the text of the protocols of London had confir­med the independence of the country. From Albania had come news of the revolt. In such conditions he left Argos to go to Ioannina and described the land of Pirros, Scanderbey and Ali Pasha. In November 1831 David Urquhart sailed from Corfu to Saranda and visited Gjirokastra, Tepelena, Berat and Kavaja. After getting lost along the Erzen River and being saved by a Vlach shepherd. He stayed for some time days in Durrës, as a friend of the governor, and later he visited Shkodra. David Urquhart was the author of six books. Of Albanian inte­rest is his two-volume, The Spirit of the East, Illustrated in a Journal of Travels through Roumeli during an Eventful Period, London 1838. His descriptions of Albania reveal a stag­nant country languishing under the weight of a decaying Ottoman Empire¹²⁷.

The Italian fellow, Carlo Grassini, published a book about the history of Ali Pasha with 3 portraits¹²⁸.

William Purder, a Scotish painter traveled in Albania and except the prepared illustrations for the works of Lord Byron, he painted the Ali Pas­ha’s Palace in Tepelena that is the only evidence of this building¹²⁹.

Sir William Allan (1782-1850) was a distinguished Scottish historical painter known for his scenes of Russian life. He became president of the Royal Scottish Academy and was a Royal Academician. Lord Byron in a Turkish Fisherman’s House after swimming across the Hellespont, is a painting that he made in 1831. It was mentioned that he made some pain­tings with subjects from Albania¹³⁰.

The young British fellow, Benjamin D’Israeli¹³¹, is another tra­veller who made a three year trip (1928-1931) to Spain, Malta, Albania (by which he meant southern Epirus), Greece and the Middle East¹³². He left England on August 1830 and, after visiting Spain and Malta, he arrived in Corfu on 10 October, where he met with a Bey of Vlora¹³³. In an energetic letter to his father, dated in October 25, 1830, he recorded his impressions of “this savage land of anarchy” and his vast enjoyment of ‘the now obso­lete magnificence of Oriental Life’. Much of the letter subsequently pas­sed into his novel Cantarini Fleming (1832). D’Israeli was so inspired by him, he sailed from Corfu in Ioannina the next day and met William R. Meyer, the British Consul in Albania, to whom he had a recommendation letter¹³⁴. On the morning of the fourte­enth accompanied by six armed hor­semen, he arrived in Arta¹³⁵. There he visited Kalio Bey, the Albanian Governor, ‘smoking an amber mo­uthed chibouque, drinking coffee’¹³⁶. He described Arta as a town that was once as beautiful as its location, but was in ruins – whole streets had been razed to the ground and, with the ex­ception of the Consulate House, which had been rebuilt since, scarcely a tenement was not a shell. Not only was Arta like this, but Ioannina con­sisted of ruined houses, mosques with only their minarets standing, and stre­ets utterly raised according to D’Israeli. He described the great heart of the city as a sea of ruins. Arches and pillars, isolated, and shattered here and there jutted forth, breaking the uniformity of the desolation, and turning the horrible into the pictures­que. D’Israeli describes the great ba­zaar, itself a small town, as having been burnt down only a few months after the death of Ali Pasha. D’Israeli mentioned in a letter to his friend, Edward Lytton Bulwer, that, at Ioannina he had spent ten of the most extraordinary days of the life¹³⁷, and he described the Albanians as ‘costu­me loving people’¹³⁸.

Much of what D’Israeli saw and experienced in southern Albania was used in the Scanderbeg novel, ‘The Rise of Iskander’, that he wrote in Bath two years after the Albanian to­ur. His letters from Albania convey the sense of awe he felt at entering the divan of the Great Turk. He actually is the last traveller in the period of Ali Pascha, although some years latter of his death.

Heinrich Christoph Gottlieb Stier (1825-1896) was a German historian and philologist, who published studies on Albanian language, although are not data that he visited Albania.  His writings include historical and mostly educational writings, which occasional­ly also extended to the fields of philosophical science, philology and architecture. One of his studies, published in 1853, is about the Alba­nians in Italy and their litera­ture¹³⁹ and a year later another study about Indo-European origin of Alba­nian langua­ge, published in the same review¹⁴⁰.

Notes

• Lepore, Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography, The Journal of American History, 88,1 (June 2001) p. 129.
• See A.Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, New York 2008).
• See E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: diplomacy and orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1999.
• This series of wars lasted between 1792 and 1815 during which France fought against shifting alliances of other European powers and established a brief French hegemony over most of Europe. The revolutionary wars, which may, for convenience, be considered to have been concluded by 1801, were originally undertaken to defend and then to spread the fruits of French Revolution. With Napoleon’s rise to ab­solute power, France’s aims in war re­verted to simple aggrandizement of in­fluence and territory.
• The’Grand Tour’ was the traditional trip of Europe, undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means in an effort to broaden their ho­rizons and learn about language, archi­tecture, geography, and culture in an experience. It served as an educational rite of passage. The custom flourished from about 1660. The French Revolution in 1789 marked the end of the Grand Tour for in the early nineteenth century, railroads totally changed the face of tourism and travel across the continent in the 1840s and was associated with a standard  The term Grand Tour was introduced by the Roman Catho­lic priest and a travel writer, Richard Lassels (in France, Lascelles) (c. 1603–1668) in his book Voyage to Italy, pub­lished posthumously in Paris in 1670 and then in London. Lassels was a tutor to several of the English nobility and travelled through Italy five times. In his book, he asserts that any truly serious student of architecture, antiquity and the arts must travel through France and Italy, suggesting that all ‘young lords’ make what he referred to as the ‘Grand Tour’ in order to understand the realities of the world. In his introduction he listed four areas in which travel will benefit them: the intellectual, the social, the political and the ethical (by drawing moral instruction from all that the trav­eller sees). See Lassels, R., Voyage to Italy, Paris, 1670; Trease, G., The Grand Tour, Yale University Press, 1991.
• Ali Pasha of Tepelenë (1740-1822), one of the most colorful of the Ottoman rul­ers, known as the ‘Lion of Ioannina’, was a key figure in Epirus at that time. He was one of several over mighty sub­jects who challenged the Porte early in the nineteenth century. Born in 1740 and famed for his ruthlessness, he was quick to rise the Ottoman ranks and by 1788 was Pasha of Ioannina. He was of the Toskë’s tribe, and his ancestors had for some time held the hereditary office, bey of Tepelenë. His father, a man of mild and peaceful disposition, was killed when Ali was fourteen years old, by neighboring chiefs who seized his territories. His mother, Hanko, a woman of extraordinary character, thereupon formed and led a brigand band, and strived to inspire the boy with her own fierce and indomitable temper, with a view to avenge and the recovery lost property. In this wilderness school, Ali proved an apt pupil. A hundred ta­les, for the most part probably mythical, are told of his powers and cunning dur­ing the years he spent among the moun­tains as a brigand leader.In 1787 he took part in the war with Russia and was rewarded by being made pasha of Trikkala in Thessaly and ‘dervendgi-pasha’ of Rumelia. It now suited his policy to suppress his former allies, and to begin persecution of both the klephts and armatoli. His power was already considerable; and in 1788 he added to it be securing his nomination to the pa­shalik of Ioannina by his characteristic tricks. Taking advantage of the war against Napoleon, he attempted to con­quer the ex-Venetian coastal territories of Epirus. In 1797, Napoleon destroyed the republic of Venice and occupied the Ionian Islands (which he afterwards called ‘the key to the Adriatic’) as well as the Venetian possessions on the mainland of Albania with French garri­sons. In 1798, acting within an Anglo-Russian and Turkish alliance, Ali Pasha seized Butrinti from the French. With Butrinti lost, it was not long before the French abandoned Corfu, leaving the allies to declare the Ionian Islands an independent entity. The joint Turkish and Russian expedition against the Io­nian Islands in 1799 completed the work of expelling the French from the neighborhood of Albania; but to Ali’s mortification, not only was a joint Turk­ish and Russian protectorate in 1800 imposed on the Ionian Islands, but also the mainland towns of Parga, Preveza, Vonitza and Butrinti, which had been formerly subject to Venice, and which Ali had hoped would be handed over to his sway as a reward for his loyalty, were placed under the direct suzerainty of the Turkish Government and were accorded certain special privileges. A period of convoluted diplomacy be­tween Russia, Turkey, France and Britain followed, and by 1807 the Ionian Islands were back under French control Diplomats from both France and Britain were assigned to Ali Pa­sha’s court to try to secure his alle­giance. François Pouqueville was the French consul, accompanied at a later stage by Louis Dupré; John Morier and Colonel William Martin Leake formed the British mission. Leake went to ex­traordinary lengths to keep the Pasha’s favor, including presenting him with 800 cannon balls and various other arms. British cannon that can still be found in the castle of Butrinti were al­most certainly part of Leake’s gift. Alt­hough Ali Pasha did not spend much time in Butrinti, preferring his capital of Ioannina, the French and British diplo­mats all visited Butrinti and have left wonderful descriptions of the settle­ment and area. Dupré’s painting of Ali Pasha on Lake Butrinti was made dur­ing a picnic and hunt in 1819. Leake, who had a particular passion for antiq­uities, kept private notebooks on the ar­chaeology of the area which, on his re­tirement, he published in four volumes. In this period Butrinti was still im­portant fishery but was occupied throughout the year only by a custom official and a handful of fishermen. In 1814, much to Ali Pasha’s annoyance, the British took control of the Ionian Is­lands. In response, Ali Pasha built a cas­tle at the mouth of the Vivari Channel as a demonstration of his resistance to the British dominion over the islands. On February 24, 1822, he was executed on the island in a cell of the monastery of Saint Panteleimon. See Grassini, C., Storia di Ali Tepelen, Bascià di Iannina, Milan 1829.
• On May 1, 1797, Napoleon declared war and on May 12, Venice surren­dered. The last commander of Venice in Corfu was Charles Avrilios Widmann. The Venetians were incapable of de­fending their colonies. Napoleon had the advantage to take over all of the colonies. He also sent the Corsican Commander Enselm Gentili. On June 27, the French fleet arrived in Corfu, which was being welcomed with en­thusiasm, as Gentili declared that the French had come to establish Democ­racy. The temporary Town Hall, which was established as the greatest authori­ty, consisted of all the social classes and religions. Eight committees were creat­ed with executive powers: 1) Public Security, 2) Health, 3) Provisions, 4) Commerce and Art, 5) Economical, 6) Police, 7) Public Education and 8) Mili­tary. The 5th of July saw the Tree of Freedom planted in the square of Corfu and the flag of Saint Marc (of the Vene­tians) was burned and replaced by the 3coloured flag, symbol of the equality and brotherhood’s liberty. On 6th of Ju­ly, the Libro D’Oro was also burned as well as the aristocratic diplomas, titles and emblems. After that, the nobles were being accused of the disaster of the Tree. On 1st of November 1797, the adjutant of Napoleon, Evgenios Beauharnais, arrived in Corfu and, dur­ing the same day, the annexation of the island to the French Democracy was announced by the temporary Town Hall. Napoleon ordered the administra­tive division of the islands. The prefec­ture of Corfu included the islands of Paxos and Antipaxos, Othoni, as well as Vouthroto and Parga of the mainland. Corfu was under the French rule from 1797 to 1814. See H. Rose,, ‘Napo­leon and Sea Power’,Cambridge His­torical Journal 1 (2) (1924), pp. 138–157.
• TheTreaty of Campo Formio was signed on October 18, 1797 (27 Vendémiaire, Year VI) near Campo Formio, a village near Udine, then in Venetia, by Napoleon Bonaparte and Philipp, Count von Cobenzl (1741-1810) as representatives of revolution­ary France and the Austrian monarchy.The treaty marked the victorious con­clusion to Napoleon’s campaigns in Ita­ly, the collapse of the First Coalition, and the end of the first phase of the French Revolutionary Wars. The treaty generally ratified the preliminary Peace of Leoben, signed at the conclusion of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign. Bonaparte signed for France, Count Cobenzl for Austria. Austria ceded its possessions in the Low Countries (the present-day Belgium) to France and se­cretly promised France the left bank of the Rhine, pending later ratification by the estates of the Holy Roman Empire. The republic of Venice, invaded despite its attempts to maintain neutrality, was dissolved and partitioned; all Venetia E of the Adige, as well as Istria and Dalmatia, passed to Austria; the present provinces of Bergamo and Brescia went to the newly founded Cisalpine Republic; the Ionian Islands went to France. See Lefebvre, The French Revolution, Volume II, from 1793–1799 , Columbia University Press, New York, 1964, pp. 199-201.
• In autumn 1792, several European powers formed theFirst Coali­tion against France (1792-1797). The Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) were a series of conflicts fought principally in Northern Italy between the French Revolutionary Army and a Coalition of Austria, Russia, Piedmont-Sardinia, and a number of other Italian states. See G. Lockhart,, Napoleon Buonaparte, London 1927.
• Tom J. Winnifrith, Badlands ~ Borderlands. A History of Southern Albania / Northern Epirus, London 2002, p. 113.
• On 26 May 1797, Napoleon ordered his fellow Corsican, the general de divi­sion, Antoine Gentili, to begin prepara­tions for a military occupation of the Ionian Islands. The ships flew the Vene­tian flag of St. Mark, since Gentili was ostensibly merely the representative of the new, pro-French Provisional Munic­ipality of Venice, and the expedition in­tended to avoid possible secession of the colony from the metropolis. In reali­ty, Napoleon instructed Antoine Gentili to encourage the local inhabitants to pursue independence, by reminding them of the glories of Ancient Greece; the scholar Antoine-Vincent Arnault was sent along as observer for Napoleon and a political advisor and propagandist. See Moschonas, ‘Τα Ιόνια Νησιά κατά την περίοδο 1797-1821’, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Έθνους, Τόμος ΙΑ′: Ο ελληνισμός υπό ξένη κυριαρχία, 1669–1821 (Athens 1975), pp 382–402. (‘The Ionian Islands in the period 1797-1821’, History of the Greek Nation, Volume XI: Hellenism under foreign rule, 1669–1821).
• Boppe, Napoleoni dhe Ali Pasha, Tirane, 1999, pp. 7-8.
• See M. Glenny, The Balkans 1804-1999. Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, London, 2000), pp. 27-28. See also Skiotis, D. N., ‘Ali Pasha’s Last Gamble’, Hellenism and the Greek War of Liberation (1821-1830): Continuity and Change, Thessaloniki, 1976, p. 97. (Greek Revolution broke out because the Ottomans mistakenly decided to humble the one man-Ali Pasha-who could have prevented it).
• Mazower, The Balkans. From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day, London, 2001, pp. 58, 70.
• Ibidem, p. 90.
• Gottlieb von Windisch,, ‘Die Klementinern in Syrmien’, Ungrisches Magazin oder Beyträge zu ungrischen Geschichte, Geographie, Naturwissen­schaft und der dahin einschlagenden Litteratur (Pressburg, Bratislava 1782) pp. 77-89. See also J. Kastrati, Historia e Albanologjisë, Tirana, 2000, pp. 404-407.
• Gottlieb von Windisch, op. cit., pp. 278-279.
• A De Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pitto­resque de la Grèce, Paris,1782, 1809, 1822); Idem, Voyage pittoresque dans l’Empire Ottoman, en Grèce, dans la Troade, les Îles de l’Archipel et sur les cotes de l’Asie Mineure, Paris, 1842.
• Paxinou, Western eyes on Jannina. Foreign narratives of a city recorded in texts and images (1788-1822), The City in the Muslim World. Depictions by Western Travel Writers, (Edited by Mohammad Charipour and Nilay Özlü), 2015, pp. 143-168.
• Scrofani, Voyage en Grece, fait en 1794 et 1795, Paris et Strasbourg, 1801.
• Sonnini, Voyage en Gréce et en Turquie fait par ordre de Louis XVI, Paris, 1801. Charles-Sigisbert Sonnini was traveling in the Middle East during the reign of Louis XVI, who held the French throne from 1774 to 1793. He published his travels, in French, be­tween those two dates and after that made other publication on his discovery of the manuscript. The manuscript itself was translated into English and pub­lished sometime late in 1799 and was available around 1800. The manuscript was found interleaved in a copy of Sonnini’s Travels in Turkey and Greece and purchased at the sale of the library and effects of the late Right Hon. Sir John Newport, in Ireland, whose family arms are engraved on the cover of the book. This book had been in the possession of the family for more than thirty years – along with a copy of the firman of the Sultan of Turkey, granting to C. S. Sonnini permission to travel in all parts of the Ottoman do­minions.
• The emergence of Balkan nation-states after 1830 whittled away Patriarchal power further. Self-governing peoples in south-eastern Europe could not toler­ate (any more than the Russians had done in the seventeenth century) the supreme religious direction of their citi­zens remaining in the hands of an Ot­toman government official. ‘The east­ern church is everywhere joined to the state, never being separated from it, never divided from the sovereigns since Byzantine times, and always subordi­nated to them’, wrote one partisan of the new Church of Greece, which was formed in Athens in 1833 – without the approval of the Patriarch in Constantinople. Others followed suit: the Bulgarians (even before they had gained an independent state) won a church of their own in 1870 – the so-called exarchate – after a long quarrel with the Patriarch over the need for priests who could conduct services in Slavonic. The following year, an auto­cephalous Romanian church was estab­lished. A draft law National Assembly in Ankara in 1921-the logical culmina­tion of the same process. A separate Al­banian orthodox church followed in 1929. Only the Serbs went the canoni­cal route and obtained Patriarchal au­thorization in 1879 to set up a church of their own. Each of these acts resulted in rupture with the Constantinople Patriar­chate, which saw its flock gradually dwindling; in each case, the Patriar­chate was eventually obliged to bow to new political realities. In exactly a cen­tury, the Patriarch’s flock shrank dra­matically from the entire Orthodox population of the Balkans and Anatolia to a few tens of thousands of believers, mostly in Constantinople itself. The most powerful, wealthiest and success­ful Christian institution of the Ottoman Empire was virtually destroyed by the rise of Christian nation-states. See M. Mazower, cit., pp. 81-85, note pp. 44-51.
• Bonaparte, N., (1769-1821), a French general, was first consul and then em­peror of the French and carried out many reforms that left a lasting mark on the institutions of France and of much of western Europe. According to Davies, like Hitler and Stalin, Napoleon was a foreigner in the land which came to dominate. He was born at Ajaccio in the island of Corsica on August 15, 1769, one year after Louis XV had bought the island from Genoa. A reader of Voltaire and of Rousseau, Napoleon believed that a political change was im­perative, but as a career officer he seems not to have seen any need for radical social reforms. His driving pas­sion was the military expansion of French dominion. The Revolutionary legacy for Napoleon consisted above all in the abolition of the ancient régime’s most archaic features— ‘feudalism’, seigneurialism, legal privileges, and provincial liberties. No matter how aris­tocratic his style became, he had no use for the ineffective institutional abuses of the ancient régime. A series of wars erupted between 1792 and 1815 in which France fought against shifting al­liances of other European powers and that produced a brief French hegemony over most of Europe. The political map of Europe, which had been so compli­cated before 1796, was now greatly simplified. Napoleon abdicated on June 22, after his final defeat at Waterloo on June 16-18, 1815, and the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the person of Louis XVIII shortly thereafter. On Oc­tober 15, 1815, Napoleon disembarked in Saint Helena with those followers who were voluntarily accompanying him into exile. See Norman Davies, A History, Oxford, 1996, p. 725.
• Frashëri, „Dimo & Nicolo Stephanopoli”, Diturija, nr. 7, (1927), pp. 241-250. See also L. Skëndo, Udhëtarët e huaj në Shqipëri gjer në fund të shekullit XIX, Tiranë, 1999, re­published in 2012, (Prepared for the publication from L. Malltezi and Sh. Delvina) pp. 32-39.
• Stephanopoli, N. Stephanopoli, Voyage de Dimo et Nicolo Stephanopoli en Grèce pendant les annés 1797-1798. D’après deux missions, don’t l’une du gouvernement français, et l’autre du général en chef Buonaparte, rédigé par un des professeurs du Prytanée, avec figures, plans et vues levés sur les lieux. Paris, de l’imprimerie de Giullemertet an VIII, 2 vol., London, 1800. See also A Boppe, op. cit., p. 10.
• Koçollari, Spiunazhi nëpër shekuj… Sigurimi, Tiranë, 2000, p. 50.
• E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte. Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pa­sha’s Greece, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1999, p. 105.
• Boppe, op. cit. pp. 9-10.
• Bartholdy, Voyage en Grèce fait dans les années 1803 et 1804, Paris, 1807.
• Eton, A Survey of the Turkish Empire. In Which Are Considered I. Its Government … II. the State of the Provinces … III. the Causes of the Decline of Turkey … IV. the British Commerce with Turkey … with Many Other Important Particulars, London, 1801.
• Frashëri, J. Bartholdy, Diturija, nr. 12 (1927), pp.361-365. See also L. Skëndo, op. cit. pp. 91-92.
• See also B. de la Motte Hacquet, L’Illyrie et la Dalmatie ou Moeurs, usages des leurs habitants (Translated from German into French), Paris, 1815.
• In January 1804, at age 20, David Richard Morier was appointed secre­tary to the political mission sent by the British government to Ali Pasha, to the Turkish governors of the Morea and other provinces, with a view to counter­acting the influence of France in south-east Europe. In May 1807 he was or­dered to take entire charge of the mis­sion, but the continuing rupture of dip­lomatic relations between England and the Ottoman Empire defeated his nego­tiations.
• W. Baggally, Ali Pasha and Great Britain, Oxford, 1938, pp. 20-30.
• Leake, W. L., was a British military officer and classical scholar specialising in reconstructing the topography of an­cient cities. Captain Martin William, a military missionary in Istanbul in 1799, was in Egypt in 1800 and later he was near Ali Pasha till 1810. He was a founding member of the Royal Geographical Society and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1815. After his retirement in 1815, he devoted the rest of his life to topographical and classical studies. He first published in 1835, the accounts of his four extensive journeys across Greece between 1804 and 1810. Using the form of a trave­logue, Leake discusses the contempo­rary Greek and Turkish culture and provides detailed descriptions of an­cient archaeological sites and geogra­phy. Leake’s precise observations and detailed descriptions were influential in shaping the study of classical topogra­phy, with these volumes providing val­uable information for the ancient sites and contemporary culture of the region. Volume 4 contains the conclusion of his fourth journey between 1809-1810. See William Martin Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, 4 vols. (London 1835).
• Skëndo, op. cit. p. 31.
• M. Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, 4 vol., London, 1835, pp. 95-105. (Reprinted in Amsterdam 1967); Idem, Researches in Greece, London, 1814. See and L. Skëndo, op. cit., pp. 113-119.
• W. Baggally, op. cit., p. 37.
• Menta, Literature of Travel and Exploration. An Encyclopedia, (Jennifer Speake ed.), Volum 1, A to F, New York & London, 2003, pp. 9-10.
• He spent two years in prison in Istanbul and returned to France in 1801.
• Pouqueville, Voyage en Morée, à Constantinople et en Albanie et dans plusieurs autres prties de l’Empire Othoman, pendant les années 1798, 1799, 1800 et 1801, Paris, 1805. This book was translated later in Italian (Viaggio in Morea a Constantinopoli ed in Albania, non che in molte altre parti dell’Impero Ottomano negli anni 1798-1801) and was published in Milan in 1816 and in Torino in 1829. See also Pouqueville, Travels in Epirus, Albania, Macedonia and Thesaly, London, 1820; Idem, Travels in Southern Epirus, Acarnania, Aetolia, Attica and Peloponnesus, or the Morea, etc. in the years 1814-1816, London, 1822; Idem, Geschichte der Wiedergeburt Griechenlands 1740 bis 1824. Deutsch herausgegeben von I. P. von Horthald, Heidelberg, 1824-25). See and L. Nadin, op. cit. p. 66.
• …….Our course lay first south-east until we came off Durazzo, the ancient Dyrrachium and Epidamnus, a port and fortress memorable in various periods of history, particularly for the opera­tions in its vicinity between Cæsar and Pompey, previous to the decisive action of Pharsalus. There the Albanian coast runs southward to the entrance of the bay of Valona [Vlora], where the Sirocco, or south-east wind setting in strong, we came to anchor under the protection of Saseno [Sazan], an island lying before it. The wind threatening to continue for some time, as it generally does in winter in the mouth of the Adriatic, we passengers landed in a small sandy bay on the north-east part of the island, the only spot where it is accessible. Knowing it to be uninhabit­ed we carried on shore an old sail, with which we constructed a sort of tent. We had also on shore our Tartar and a Wallachian of Epirus, whom Aly had sent along with him, to serve as our guide and interpreter when we should land in his territories. We soon, howev­er, discovered that we were not alone in Saseno. Smoke rose up in several plac­es, and in a little time appeared a num­ber of Albanians in arms, observing us with keen attention. The strangers were shepherds from the adjoining coast, who are in the habit of transporting to the island large numbers of sheep and cattle in winter. Intercourse being opened with them through our inter­preter, we procured some sheep for our­selves and for the people on-board the privateer; and a fire being kindled the Albanians with admirable dispatch fit­ted one of the sheep for the spit. In the night the south-east gale grew tempes­tuous with heavy rain and long and viv­id lightning; well reminding us of the Ceraunian or thunder-stricken moun­tains in our near vicinity. It was with the greatest difficulty that our vessel kept her place…… The English translation of Pouqueville’s, Travels in Epirus, Albania, Macedonia, and Thessaly, cit., pp. 7-66.
• Ibidem, 34-35.
• Boppe, op. cit., pp. 74-75.
• W. Baggally, Ali Pasha and Great Britain, Oxford, 1938, p. 8.
• Leake arrived in Malta from Ioannina on his return to England in 1810. He was granted a pension of 600 pounds a year, and he was only thirty-three years old. See. J. W. Baggally, cit, pp. 43-44.
• Malte-Brun, C., (1775-1826) was a Dano-French geographer and journal­ist. He is best remembered for coining the name for the geographic region Oceania (Océanie) around 1812. Malte-Brun’s geography treatise, Géographie mathématique, physique et politique de toutes les parties du monde, is in 6 vols, was written with the other geographer, Edme Mentelle (1730-1816) and published between 1803 and 1812.
• Crispi G., (1781–1859) was an Italian philologist and priest of Arbëresh de­scent. One of the major figures of the Arbëresh community of Sicily of that era, he wrote a number of works on the Albanian language. Crispi’s best-known work is Memorie sulla lingua Albanese, first published in 1831 in Palermo. Partially influenced by Conrad Malte-Brun’s studies, it consti­tutes the first monograph on the Alba­nian language. Crispi considered Alba­nian closely related to Pelasgian, Phrygian, Macedonian and ‘proto-Aeolian’. The monograph influenced other Arbëreshë authors like Giuseppe Schiro, who first possibly used it as a point of reference in his 1834 paper Rapporti tra l’Epiro e il Regno delle due Sicilie.
• Masci, Discorso sull’origine, costumi e stato attuale degli Albanesi nel Regno delle Due Sicilie, Naples 1807, 2^nd ed. 1847.
• The well-known archaeologist Edward Dodwell (1776-1832) was elected an honorary member of Berlin’s Royal Academy in 1816, Dodwell had been educated at Cambridge, toured France and Germany, and lived in Rome and Naples. Writing extensively on Greek antiquity, he made three tours of Greece, where he produced hundreds of drawings, recording in particular the Athenian Acropolis and the city walls of Argos. He also collected coins and discovered or acquired many valuable artefacts, notably bronzes and vases.
• Dodwell, A classical and topograph­ical tour through Greece during the Years 1801, 1805 and 1806. 2 Vols., London, 1819.
• In the spring 1994, with a grant to the Deutches Archäologisches Institut in Berlin, I met a Greek scholar, Caterina Spetsieri Beschi Spestieri, the wife of the well-known Italian professor of ar­chaeology in Rome and Florence, Luigi Beschi. Caterina was writing a research paper of Pomardi and kindly informed me of Pomardi’s works. Among the many descriptions of villages with Al­banians, and such, I enjoyed very much the detailed description of the wedding ceremony of two Albanians in Athens. Many thanks for Caterina Spetsieri Beschi, who gave me this information. I published an article, many years ago, in Albanian newspapers. See L. Miraj, „ ‘Simon Pomardi për shqiptarët: Fragmente nga libri”, Viagio nella Grecia negli anni 1804, 1805 e 1806’, „Zëri i Popullit”, Tiranë, 10. 12. 1995, p. 10.
• de Vandoncourt, Memoirs on the Jonien Islands, etc., London, 1816, p. 317.
• Hobhouse, J. C., ennobled much later, in 1856, as 1^st Lord Broughton de Gyfford (1786-1869), was an English politician and diarist. L. Byron, Selected letters and journals in one vol­ume, from the unexpurgated twelve vol­ume edition, (Edited by Leslie A. Marchand), London, John Murray, 1982, pp. 41-42. J. C. Hobhouse, A journey through Albania and other provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the years 1809 and 1810, London, 1813.
• The publication of Childe Harold in 1812, with its portraits of the venerable but sinister Ali Pasha, the wild but beautiful mountains of Epirus and their romantic but dangerous inhabitants, was an instant success and deservedly so. See Tom J. Winnifrith, cit., p. 113.
• See F. Maccarthy, Life and Legend, London, 2002, p. 103.
• See J. C., Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople during the Years 1809 and 1810, London, 1813, re-edited asA Journey through Albania, New York, 1971, pp. 101-113. In his book he describes his meeting with the formidable Ali Pasha of Tepelena in October 1809 and in­cludes an account of the pasha’s life.
• Byron and Hobhouse were given a sumptuous send-off from London by Charles Skinner Mathews, ‘a most splendid entertainment’ to which they did ‘ample justice’. They arrived in the Cornish port of Falmouth by June 21, 1809, lodging at Wynn’s Hotel. The original plan to take the Malta packet was abandoned when the ship for Malta was delayed for several weeks. Instead, they decided to sail to ‘that there Portingale’, as Byron’s Nottinghamshire servants called it, taking the Princess Elizabeth to Lisbon. They were depart­ed on July 2, 1809, and arrived at the mouth of the Tagus after a journey of four and a half days. From Lisbon they made an expedition out to Cintra, a vil­lage set in a mountain range some fif­teen miles north of the city. After their ‘gentle Gallop of four hundred miles without intermission’ from Lisbon they reached the port of Cadiz on July 29. The next day, at Puerto Santa from Lisbon they reached the port of Cadiz on July 29. Passing Cape Trafalgar and glimpsing the coast of Africa, they landed in Gibraltar on August 4, 1809. Byron was observed in Gibraltar by John Galt, a Scotsman. Galt sailed on the ship, the Townshend packet that took Byron to Sardinia. When the ship reached Cagliari on the southern tip of Sardinia Byron and the ship’s captain rode out into the country. On August 20, they embarked for Malta, still in the Townshend packet, sailing past the southern coast of Sicily. By noon on 31 August, they were approaching Malta harbour. On the recommendation of the Governor of Malta, Hobhouse orga­nized their passage on the British war­ship Spider which was escorting a con­voy of British merchant ships to Preve­sa in Albania. On the morning of Sep­tember 23, 1809, as they travelled up the channel between Cephalonia and Zante, Byron and Hobhouse had their first sight of the Ancient Greece of their imagination. Byron was a guest in the Monastiry of Zitsa in Epir. He praised the region’s wines and beauties. The place is mentioned in Childe Harolds’s Pilgrims and was a place visited by many other English travellers due to the fame that received from the poem. They sailed up the west coast of Greece towards Albania and landed at Prevesa on September 29. Albania was a more truly foreign country, remote on ac­count of its mountainous terrain, the re­puted ‘savage character’ of its natives and it’s eruptive and complicated poli­tics. Sir Alexander Ball, the Governor of Malta, had provided an introduction to William Leake. It seems that Leake had alerted Ali Pasha to the young Eng­lishmen’s arrival. Ali Pasha himself was not in Ioannina, and Byron and Hob­house were presented to two of Ali Pa­sha’s grandsons, Hussein Bey and Mahmout Pasha. At the time, Ali was seventy-five miles to the north, at Tepelena settling grudges, but before he left, he had prepared accommodations for the Englishmen and invited them to come and join him if they wished. Byron and Hobhouse travelled in 1809 from Preveza to Ioannina, the court of Ali Pasha, passing en route the remains of Ali’s enemies hanging from trees at the outskirts of town. Byron greatly admired the panache of Ali’s Albanians, the magnificence of his court, and the whole exotic scene. In Ioannina, a week after leaving Ali, Byron began the nar­rative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that was, between other po­ems, to make Byron famous.
  1810. Byron was to be away from England for two years. Hobhouse was with him for the first year, returning home from Greece in July 1810. For the time they were together it is Hobhouse who pro­vides the factual details of their travels. Hobhouse too was a rising literary fig­ure, though he was never to approxi­mate the fame of Byron, a disparity that sometimes led to tensions between them. He intended to write a travel book on his return, the book that be­came A Journey through Albania, and Byron slyly noted the ‘wordy prepara­tions’ for this task, the ‘100 pens two gallons Japan Ink and several vols best blank’ paper for recording his impres­sions. Against Hobhouse’s conscien­tious narrative Byron’s letters stand in brilliant counterpoint. See Maccarthy, Byron, Life and Legend, London, 2002, pp. 89-125.
• See F. Maccarthy, cit., pp. 104-106.
• de Vandoncourt, op. cit. 78, note p. 18.
• C. Hobhouse , A Journey Through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople During the Years 1809-1810, London, 1813; Idem, Travels in Albania, 2 Vol., London, 1858; Lord G. Byron, Byron ed. by J. J. McGann. (The latest edition of Childe Harold and Don Juan), Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Frashëri, „John C. Hobhouse”, Diturija, nr. 9, 10, 11 (1927), pp. 321-329. See also L. Skëndo, op. cit., pp. 58-67.
• See Paxinou, Western eyes on Jannina. Foreign narratives of a city recorded in texts and images (1788-1822)’, The City in the Muslim World. Depictions by Western Travel Writers, (Edited by Mohammad Charipour and Nilay Özlü), 2015, pp. 143-168.
• Danish archaeologist, Peter Oluf Brøndsted, was born in Fruering near Aarhus in Denmark and studied theolo­gy and philology at the University of Copenhagen. In the winter of 1811-1812 Brønsted conducted excavations on the island of Kea. He also dug on Aegina and Salamis and then, with Haller, excavated the Temple of Apollo in Bassae (Arcadia). In September 1812, he travelled to Zante (Zakynthos) to see the tomb of his friend Kows, who had died on the island of pneumonia. His companion thereafter was the fif­teen-year-old Count Nicolo de Lunzi, son of the Danish consul on Zante. On 12 December 1812, on their way back to Denmark, Brønsted and Lunzi stopped over in Preveza, which at the time was the southern border of Albania, to visit the tyrant Ali Pasha of Tepelena. Brønsted returned to Copenhagen with Lunzi in 1813 and was made professor of Greek and phi­lology at the university. In 1818 he served as Danish envoy to the Holy See in Rome and helped buy antiquities for the king of Denmark. He was in Sicily and the Ionian Isles in 1820-1821 and in London in 1826 to study the Elgin Marbles. From 1828-1832 he lived in Paris where he oversaw the publication of his major work “Voyages dans la Grèce accompagnés de re­cherches ar­chéologiques” (Paris 1826-1830), also printed in German as “Reisen und Untersuchungen in Griechenland” (Paris 1826-1830) and returned to Copenhagen where he was appointed director of the museum of antiquities (Møntkabinettet). In 1842, he became rector of the University of Copenhagen but died soon thereafter in a riding accident. Brøndsted provides a good account of the Lion of Janina in his edition, Reise i Graekenland i Aarene 1810-1813 (Journey to Greece in the Years 1810-1813) (Copenhagen 1844). The English-language version of this account, ‘Interviews with Ali Pacha of Ioanina in the Year 1812,’ was first published in1999 by the Danish Institute in Athens.
• Kows, G. H. C., the Danish philologist studied classical philology, writing pio­neering works of textual criticism on ancient Greek works, including Homer, whose work he demonstrated to be by more than one writer (Specimen obser­vationum in Odysseam criticarum, acc. commentatio de discrepantiis qui­busdam in Odyssea occurrentibus, Copenhagen 1806). He visited Paris in 1806 with his friend Peter Oluf Brøndsted and there two years. After that they went together to Italy. Both were zealously attached to the study of antiquities and the tastes and interests they held in common led them, in 1810, to join an expedition to Greece with Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, Carl Haller von Hallerstein, the German painter Jakob Linckh, and the then Aus­trian consul in Greece George Christian Gropius. He died of pneumonia in Athens in 1811, when he was only 29 years old.
• See P. O. Brøndsted, Interview with Ali Pacha of Joanina, in the Autumn of 1812; with Some Particulars of Epirus, and the Albanians of the Present Day. Edited with an introduction by Jacob Isager, The Danish Institute at Athens, Athens, 1999, pp. 34-77. (Ali of Tepeleni, a man who by his extraordi­nary qualities, as well as by his crimes, exercised during more than half a cen­tury, an unbounded influence over the finest provinces of Greece, and upon the recent events which have changed the face of those countries, once so beautiful, and even still so interesting — was, unquestionably, one of the most remarkable personages in the vast Ottoman Empire, the downfall of which prepared for a century past, has only been delayed to our days by the reciprocal jealousy, and the want of en­ergy and moral dignity in the rulers of Europe. This man, whom history will, doubtless, distinguish as a kind of phys­iological phenomenon, descended from a Musselman family of Albania, if not of obscure at least of middling rank. Notwithstanding innumerable obsta­cles, he established himself as the abso­lute despot over the finest European provinces of the Turkish Empire, and a population of two million inhabitants. Daring, and fertile in resources, he knew how to support his usurpations, and his crimes, by an army of about thirty-five thousand men — excellent troops, at least for carrying on war in those regions, and against the Turks, — and by all those means which immense treasures supply in every country, but more particularly in Turkey.
  1. Ali Pacha, the most consummate Alba­nian of his time, alone knew how to solve a problem extremely difficult — that of uniting under his banners a peo­ple the most savage and the most ma­rauding in Europe, divided before his days into a thousand distinct and inde­pendent tribes, who plundered and murdered each other without ceasing. He alone was the first who knew how to overawe them all, to terminate their particular feuds, and to subjugate them all beneath his sceptre of iron, so that it would be strictly true to say — that Ali Pacha, for the last twenty years of his long career, was the sole robber in his states, and that there was more personal security in travelling there than in most of the southern countries of Europe. Af­ter all, it appears to me, that a single privileged plunderer is better than a multitude of subaltern tyrants, not only for travellers, but also for the inhabit­ants of any country whatever; at least some arrangement can be made with one only, but there is no stipulating with a host of petty plunderers; besides, des­potism, though in its nature monstrous and sterile, still occasionally produces something good, whilst anarchy, the pest of all social order, never brings forth anything profitable whatsoever. This truth, I fear, must serve as a conso­lation, not only beyond the Adriatic, but even elsewhere. Thus, it was that Ali Pacha, his exploits and his family were, during my stay in Greece, one of the principal themes of the popular songs, which we often heard and in almost all the provinces of Greece and Epirus; from Taygetus to Olympus and the Ac­roceraunian mountains as far as Carystos in Euboea.
  2. If I had seen Ali Pacha on my first arri­val in Greece, I should not have known, perhaps, either to have comprehended him well, or to have drawn any ad­vantage from it for my own medita­tions. But I saw him on my return from a stay of three years in that interesting country, when I had but too well learnt to understand the great influence of that extraordinary person throughout the whole of Greece. Speaking then, with some facility, the modern Greek, I had occasion to converse with him during several days without the aid of an inter­preter and even under circumstances sufficiently piquantes and, I own, I was then struck with the originality of the man. I will attempt here to give some parts of these conversations, preceding them by a few brief observations on the Albanians of the present day, and on the life of Ali Pacha, up to the period I saw him at Prevesa, towards the end of the year 1812.
  3. It is indubitably an effect of the ex­traordinary talents of Ali Pacha, that this race of men, singularly active, bold and warlike, have, in the last half centu­ry, been converted from a people of robbers and semi-savages into a nation of warriors, who play in the present day a remarkable, and even brilliant part amongst the tribes inhabiting the vast Ottoman Empire. For the renown of the Albanians for bravery causes them to be sought after by the Turkish govern­ments, even from the remotest provinc­es, for the purpose of enrolling them amongst their troops, or in their guards, and as the Swiss were formerly, and still are in many countries of the west; so, in the present day, the Albanians are established in the Levant, not only in several provinces of European Turkey, but, also, in Asia-Minor, in Syria, in Egypt, and elsewhere.
  4. These successes have rendered up, so to express it, the Albanians of our time to the historic page; and several English travellers have lately devoted them­selves to research on the origin of this people. These researches, besides being very difficult from the deficiency of all national literature of those tribes, do not enter in the plan of this work. I merely observe that, from a careful comparison of the migrations of the Middle Ages into those countries, with the present id­iom of the Albanians, it would, accord­ing to my idea, result that the present inhabitants of Epirus are descended from a mixture of the natives (before and during the establishment of the an­cient Greeks in Epirus) with the Illyrian tribes, who came from the north, as by degrees the provincial Roman govern­ment, emanating from Constantinople, fell into decadency. I should even be­lieve that the beginning of the emigra­tion of the
  5. Illyrians into Epirus dates from an epoch much earlier, that is from the dreadful destruction of Epirus by the Roman army, after the conquest of Macedonia by Aemilius Paulus.
  6. On leaving Prevesa for the interior of Albania, I had with me an Albanian of the Vizier’s guard, who had been or­dered by the latter to attend me, wher­ever I chose to go, and to be careful to my interest. This soldier was called Dimo of Argyrocastro, a fine coura­geous young man, and equally intelli­gent as faithful. I afterwards dismissed him at Sajades, perfectly satisfied with his services. As he was a Christian and spoke the Greek very well, I often con­versed with him of the Pacha’s actions, and of the events in Albania, which he was well acquainted with. His two first campaigns had been made against the troops of Ali, but having been taken prisoner at the capture of Argyrocastro, his native place, he obtained the Pa­cha’s pardon and entered into his ser­vice. This gallant young man often re­counted to me, without the smallest re­serve, all the horrors which had been perpetrated at the capture of Argyrocas­tro, by the soldiers of the conqueror. The whole of his family, his mother, his two sisters, and his eldest brother, had been massacred in the sacking of the town: his uncle was beheaded eight days after, by order of the Vizier. Above all, he spoke with an emotion, truly touching, of the deplorable fate of his mother and his two sisters — whom he tenderly loved. Who would not have imagined that horrors like these which had filled the soul of this honest man with bitterness and sorrow, would at the same time have filled it with an uncon­querable hate against the tyrant — the principal cause of so many losses? I was much astonished to observe quite the contrary. The disasters of his coun­try, and of his family, had so struck and bewildered his imagination, that he ra­ther accused the obstinacy and mad perseverance of his countrymen, than the Pacha’s cruelty, as the cause of them. In short, the fall of Argyrocastro had fully persuaded him that the Vizier was invincible and had a just title to the domination over the whole of Albania. A little time after, he kissed the blood-stained hand of the destroyer of his country and became his man. He spoke of all this with tears in his eyes, but with the sincerest resignation, evidently confounding the will of heaven with that of the Pacha! It may easily be con­ceived that, in my then situation it was not for me to combat this gross confu­sion in the head of a worthy and honest young man, who served me so well.
  7. It is, especially, from the study of the dialects of the Skipetarik (as the Alba­nians themselves term their idiom) that elucidations might be looked for on the subject, and it would be very important for the history of this people, that the in­teresting researches, commenced by Colonel Martin Leake were continued. In other respects, there is not much in­ducement to study an idiom, which of­fers absolutely nothing resembling an appearance of literature; since the Skipetarik or language of the Albanians is completely oral, and they are obliged to make use of Greek characters in writ­ing it.
  8. Every Christian Albanian who has en­joyed any education understands the modern Greek, often better than his na­tive langue. All literary instruction, in the religious and other schools, is con­veyed in modern Greek, except with some tribes, who for many centuries have embraced Islamism, to which, by the by, they do not adhere very strictly. Notwithstanding the total change in the political relations which anciently sub­sisted between the two people; in gen­eral, the moral affinity of the Albanians with the Greeks of our days yet bears much resemblance to those of the Epi­rotes with the ancient Greeks. For the Greeks are still their instructors in eve­rything that regards civilization, or re­lates to the resources, feeble and poor, without doubt, of a cultivated state in this country. The absolute defect of at­tempts to elevate the language in ques­tion to the rank of a written language, or at least, to make of it a depository of opinions and of individual ideas, — a defect so sensibly felt amongst a race of men, consisting of more than a million individuals, in constant intercourse, po­litical or otherwise with two great na­tions (the Greeks and the Turks), each of which possesses a literature of its own — this moral phenomenon evi­dently announces a peculiarly remarka­ble absence of perception and of ideas, a great sterility of mind; it also appears to me that a disposition of the intellec­tual faculties to civilization, a certain aptitude of the soul or rather, according to the phraseology of a modern system, the organ of perfectibility, forms the in­estimable prerogative of the Greek as opposed to the Albanian; and if, after the manner of the ancients, I may here avail myself of a comparison I would say — that the latter resembles the for­mer as the wolf resembles the dog of a certain species. The Albanian is pru­dent, dexterous, and active in all the or­dinary relations of life, in all the combi­nations and affairs which do not exceed his intelligence; he is faithful, sure and persevering in the service of him who has known how to recognize his at­tachment, and that in a manner which surpasses belief; but he is deep, cun­ning, dissimulating and cruel as a tiger towards his enemies.
  9. These traits seem to me the most na­tional and the most universal in respect to the character and physiognomy of this people in general. What can be done with them, particularly in war, has in our days been put in dreadful evi­dence by Ali Pacha, the most perfect model of the Albanian that ever existed, and, if I may so express it, the flower of Albanism.
  10. We have lately seen that head fall bleached with years of crime and charged with the execrations of thou­sands of his victims amongst the Greek population of his states; — but it was not the crimes of Ali Pacha that con­ducted him to his fate, — that, indeed, would have been consoling to humani­ty, — unhappily quite the reverse, for it was the well combined, and constantly followed system of his offences which had elevated him, by degrees, to the power of a formidable oriental despot; one sole vice ruined him — his ava­rice; for that was the true cause of the catastrophe of Ali Pacha. It rendered him blind to such a degree, that, when shut up in the Castle of Joanina with a handful of his faithful followers, he still nourished the mad hope of extricating himself, without opening his treasures to the Greeks and the Albanians, who were equally capable of saving or sell­ing him for gold.
  11. The circumstances that led to the fate of the modern tyrant of Epirus, absolutely remind me of those which preceded the fall of the last unworthy tyrant of an­cient Macedonia — Perseus, whose sordid avarice caused, accordingly to Plutarch, the good fortune of Aemilius Paulus and his Romans; just as the blind obstinacy of Ali Vizier lately af­fected that of Courshid Pacha and his Turks, who were too feeble to chain the old royal tiger of the Albanians, if this vice, his domestic demon, his veritable Kakodaemon had not come to their aid.
  12. After the two interesting narratives given us by Mr. Holland and Mr. Pouqueville, I should not be able to re­late anything new on the life of Ali Pa­cha. I shall merely proceed to enumer­ate some facts of it, amongst the most remarkable and the most adopted to display the character of that surprising man, since to represent him himself such as I saw him, is my principal de­sign here.)
• He visited Goethe again in September 1818 and was very happy to see the ‘old eagle’ again and to discuss with him a topic of common interest: Greek art. See J. Isager, “Introduction’, in Peter Oluf Brøndsted, Interview with Ali Pacha of Joanina, in the Autumn of 1812, with Some Particulars of Epirus, and the Albanians of the Present Day , the Danish Institute at Athens, Athens, 1999, p. 20.
• Hallerstein studied architecture at theCarlsakademie in Stuttgart and then at the Berliner Bauakademie  under  David Gilly.He was then engaged in 1806 as a royal building inspector in  He visited Rome in 1808 to study its early Christian archi­tecture. In June 1810 he accompa­nied Jakob Linkh (1786–1841), Peter Oluf Brøndsted (1780-1842), Otto Magnus  von Stackelberg (1787–1837) and  Georg Kows (1782-1811) to Athens, via  Naples, Corfu and Corinth. In 1811 in Athens, he met the English archi­tects Charles Robert Cockerell  and  John Foster (1758-1827), with whom he studied Athens’s ancient buildings. In 1811 he, Linkh and von Stackelberg discovered the temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina, a part of whose scul­ptures are in the Munich Glyptothek as a result. In the same year, the German architect, Johann Carl Christoph Wilhelm Joachim Haller von Hallerstein (with Gropius, Linckh, Stackelberg, Bröndsted and Foster) excavated the ruins of the temple of Apollo in Bassae, whose relief frieze was taken to the British Museum by Charles Robert Cockerell. Sadly, Haller’s drawings were lost at sea. (See William Bell Dinsmoor, ‘The Temple of Apollo at Bassae’, Metropolitan Museum Stud­ies 4.2 (March 1933), p. 205. Later he led yet more excavations on Ithaka and in the ruins of the theatre on Milos. See von Hallerstein, H. H.,Und die Erde gebar ein Lächeln, d. erste dt. Archäologe in Griechenland Carl Haller von Hallerstein 1774 – 1817, Süddeutscher Verlag, München, 1983.
• Cockerell, C., is a highly successful British architect, archaeologist and writer who is remembered for his works of Georgian architecture in Britain and for his role in the excavation of the temples of Aegina and Bassae. He was architect of the Ashmolean Museum and Taylorian Institute (1839-1842) in Oxford. He had a great interest in an­tiquity and showed at the Royal Academy restoration of classical build­ings, and also writing on the subject, and discovering the reliefs from the temple of Phigalia, now in the British Museum. From 1810 to 1817 he trav­elled extensively in Greece, Albania, Turkey and Italy. In 1819, he was lead­ing architect of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London and in later years was made President of the Royal Institute of British Architects. It was in January 1814, during his travels in Greece, that he ventured northwards to Albania (that began in Preveza) to visit the realm of Ali Pasha, where he made several vivid sketches.
• JOHN Foster, Junior was an English architect, born and based in Liverpool, his buildings were generally in the Greek Revival style, his main works were public buildings and Anglican churches. In succession to his father, he was Surveyor to Liverpool Corporation (1824-35). John Jr. displayed three de­signs at Royal Academy of Arts, in 1805 a design for a Mausoleum, in 1806 a design for a National Museum and in 1807 a Public Library or National Gallery. In 1809 with Peter Oluf Brøndsted travelled in the eastern Mediterranean. During 1810–11 with Charles Robert Cockerell and the German archaeologists Haller and Linckh, participated in the archaeological exca­vation of the temples at Aegina and Bassae.
• On Peter Oluf Brøndsted see Bodil Bundgaard Rasmussen, ed., ‘Peter Oluf Brøndsted (1780-1842), A Danish Classicist in His European Context’, Acts of the Conference at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Let­ters, Copenhagen, 5-6 October 2006, Historisk-filosofiske Skrifter 31, Copenhagen, 2008. On Haller von Hallerstein see Klaus Frässle, Carl Haller von Hallerstein 1774-1817, PhD diss. Albert Ludwigs Universität zu Freiburg, 1971; see also H. Bankel, ed., Carl Haller von Hallerstein in Griechenland, 1810-1817: Architekt, Zeichner, Bauforscher/im Auftrag der Carl Haller von Hallerstein Gesellschaft, exh. Cat., Berlin, 1986. On Otto Magnus von Stackelberg see Gerhart Rodenwaldt, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg: Der Entdecker der griechischen Landschaft, 1786-1837, Hrsg. Vom Deutschen Archäologischen Institut , Munich, 1957; Baroness Natalie von Stackelberg, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg: Schilderung seines Lebens und seiner Reisen in Italien und Griechenland, nach Tagebüchern und Briefen…..Mit einer Vorrede von Kuno Fischer, Heidelberg, 1882; Carl Hoheisel, Otto Magnus Freiherr von Stackelberg, als Mensch, Künstler und Gelebrter. Eine biographische Skizze, Riga, 1864. On his collections see Catalogue d’une riche collection d’antiquités…..de méailles….de pein­tures, …de feu… le baron O. M. de Stackelberg , Dresden, 1837. On Charles Robert Cockerell see Pieter B. F. J. Broucke, „The Archaeology of Ar­chitecture: Charles Robert Cockerell” in Southern Europe and the Levant, 1810-1817, New Haven, 1993; Samuel Pepys Cockerell ed., Travels in South­ern Europe and the Levant, 1810-1817: The Journal of C. R. Cockerell, R. A., London, 1903). See also Charles Robert Cockerell, The Temples of Jupiter Panhellenius at Ægina, and of Apollo Epicurius at Bassæ, near Phigaleia in Arcadia, London, 1860; Samuel Pepys Cockerell ed., Travels in Southern Europe and the Levant, 1810-1817: The Journal of C. R. Cockerell, R. A., Edinburgh, 1904.
• Cockerell, Travels in Southern Europe and the Levant 1810-1817. The Journal of C. R. Cockerell, ed. by G. Hunt with a biographical sketch, London, 1823.
• Hudhri., Shqipëria dhe Shqipëtarët në Vepra të Piktorëve të huaj, Tiranë, 1987, p. 40.
• Isager, J., ‘Introduction’, in P. O. Brøndsted, Interviews with Ali Pacha, op.cit., p. 20.
• The French expedition to Egypt, under Bonaparte, and the consequent hostili­ties of the Porte against France, led Ali to take possession of Prevesa, (the most important point upon the terra firma, which was still, as an ancient Venetian dependency, occupied by the French). Towards the end of the year 1798, with a force numerically superior, he gained a victory over the French near the ruins of ancient city of Nicopolis; he took the town of Prevesa and sent to Constantinople as many heads as he could cut off, from the French and the Greeks, who had fought against him.
• Ibidem, 13-23.
• O. Brøndsted, op. cit., p. 55.
• Ibidem, 63.
• Ibidem, 68-77.
• Ibidem, 79-81.
• The Serail of Ali Pasha in Prevesa, View of the ruins of Nicopolis, View from the great theatre towards the Is­land of Leukas, and Part of a wall in Nicopolis (Aug. 28^th, 1810) are all pre­served in the Bibliothèque Nationale Universitaire de Strasbourg. See also H. Bankel, Carl Haller von Hallerstein in Griechenland 1810-1817. Architekt, Zeichner, Bauforscher. Im Aufträg der Carl Haller von Hallerstein Gesellschaft, Berlin, 1986.
• Isager, op. cit., p. 20.
• Hacquet, L’Illyrie et la Dalmatie, ou Moeurs, usages, et costumes de leurs habitans et de ceux des contrées voi­sines, Paris, 1815.
• Sir Henry Holland (1788-1873) was British traveller, physician and writer. He studied medicine in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Holland was a passionate traveller from an early age. After com­pleting a first touring attempt in Iceland, he travelled to Greece, arriv­ing in Ioannina in November 1812, re­turning several times until April 1813. The Holland described the city of Ioannina itself, as well as commenting on its society. In his preface, Holland recognized the impact of previous trav­ellers and focused on the supplemental nature of his own observations. His narrative was sober, and, without omit­ting ancient history and archaeology altogether, he focused rather on con­temporary issues and literature. While in Ioannina, he offered his medical ser­vices to Ali Pasha and his sons, gaining their trust and being given the oppor­tunity to converse with the ruler on nu­merous occasions. He wrote a detailed biography of Ali Pasha and a fascinat­ing account of his meeting with the ty­rant, as well as a description of his journey from Ioannina (Janina) to Tepelena. See Holland, H., Travels in the Jonian isles, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia, etc. during the Years 1812 and 1813, London, 1815.
• Hughes, R. TH. S., (1786-1847) was a Cambridge scholar of ancient Greek and Latin, cleric, historian and travel writer. In December 1812, after gradu­ating with a B.A. (1809) and a master’s degree (1811), he accepted the post of travelling tutor for the wealthy young Robert Townley Parker of Cuerdon Hall, Lancashire. See Thomas Smart Hughes, Travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania, Illustrated with engravings of maps scenery plans &c. 1^st, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1820, 2^nd ed. London, 1830.
• Parker, R. T., (1793-1879) was a Un­ionist Member of Parliament for the United Kingdom House of Commons constituency of Preston. In 1812 with his tutor, Thomas Smart Hughes, they travelled in Spain, Italy, Sicily, Greece, and Albania.
• Holland, op. cit., pp. 69-79.
• Ibidem.
• See Tom J. Winnifrith, cit., pp. 116-117.
• Frashëri, „Henry Holland”, Diturija, nr. 12 (1927), pp. 361-365. See also L. Skëndo, op. cit. pp. 68-74 and Boppe, op. cit., p. 84.
• Church, S. R., (1784–1873),was a mili­tary officer in the British Army and general in the Greek army during the last stages of the Greek Revolution after 1827 and elected politician in Greece, member of the Greek Parliament in 1843, member of the Greek Senate. In the summer of 1809, he sailed with the expedition sent to occupy the Ionian Is­lands. Here he increased the reputation he had already gained by forming a Greek regiment in British pay. It in­cluded many of the men who were af­terwards among the leaders of the Greeks in the War of Independence. Church commanded this regiment at the taking of the island of Santa Maura (Lefkada), on which occasion his left arm was shattered by a bullet. During his slow recovery he travelled in northern Greece, and Macedonia, and to  In the years of the fall of Napoleon (1813 and 1814) he was present as British military repre­sentative with the Austrian troops until the campaign which terminated in the expulsion of Murat from Naples. He drew up a report on the Ionian Islands for the congress of Vienna, in which he argued in support, not only of the reten­tion of the islands under the British flag, but of the permanent occupation by Britain of Parga and of other formerly Venetian coastal towns on the main­land, then in the possession of Ali Pa­sha of Ioannina. After the Treaty of Tilsit, where Napoleon granted the Czar his plan to dismantle the Ottoman Em­pire, Ali Pasha switched sides and allied with the Britain in 1807; a detailed ac­count of his alliance with the British was written by Sir Richard Church. His actions were permitted by the Ottoman government in Constantinople. Ali Pa­sha was very cautious and unappeased by the emergence of the new Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II and his despotic Turkish yoke in the year 1808. See Lane Poole Stanley, Sir Richard Church, London, 1890.
• The results of this extensive Mediterra­nean journey were published in the two-volume Travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania, London 1820. The two-volume account of their travels, illus­trated with plates from the drawings of the architect Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863), was first published in 1820. Volume 1 traces the journey from Gibraltar, through Sicily, to many im­portant classical sites in Greece. Vol­ume 2 begins in Epirus, moves through Albania, and covers the return to England via Italy and France. Hughes notes important historical events that took place at each location and de­scribes the local legends, habits and customs. He quotes freely from other travel writers of the time, as well as from ancient authors and inscriptions encountered on the tour. Included also are anecdotes which render this account vivid and readable, allowing the au­thor’s personality and opinions to re­veal themselves. A second edition of this work, covering 1,024 pages, was published in 1830. Hughes began the Albanian part of his journey in Preveza which at the time marked the border be­tween Albania and Greece and contin­ued on to Arta and Janina (Iôannina). The Albania he describes is thus pri­marily Epirus, the realm of Ali Pasha Tepelena, of whom he leaves us a good biography. From Janina, he then pro­vides us with a detailed account of his excursion to the north of Albania (in modern terms, actually the south of Albania), i.e. to Libohova, Gjirokastra, Kardhiq, Tepelena, Berat, Këlcyra, Përmet, Konitsa and back to Janina. See S. Hughes, Travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania (1813-1814), London, 1820, and 2^nd ed. in 1830.
• Ibidem, 117.
• Ibidem.
• De Vaudoncourt, F. F. G., after having served the Republic, then the Empire in the army of the Kingdom of Italy (1805-1814), he engaged with energy in the European liberal revolutions, in particular in that of Piedmont where he commanded in chief the army constitu­tional (1821), then in Spain where he attempted an insurrection against the French royal army. On June 18, 1806, he took command of the field artillery park of the French army in Italy, and command of the Place de Pavie. In 1807, he went to the beys of Bosnia and the pashas of Scutari (Shkodër) and Jannina, succeeded in thwarting an English expedition, in creating two im­portant fortresses in Janina and Prevesa, and yet, despite the series of services rendered, he gets no advancement. The distinguished services he rendered dur­ing this campaign earned him the rank of brigadier general, the title of baron of the Kingdom of Italy and an endow­ment in Tiro. See and ‘Biographie uni­verselle et portative des contempo­rains’, Dictionnaire Historique des hommes vivants et des hommes morts depuis 1788 jusqu’à nos jours, qui se sont fait remarquer par leurs écrits, leurs actions, leurs talents, leurs vertus ou leurs crimes. Publiés sous la direc­tion de MM. Rabbe, Vieilh de Boisjolin et Sainte-Preuve, Paris, 1836, pp. 846-847.
• Tom J. Winnifrith, cit., pp. 114-115.
• Walton, like all the other English writ­ers named previously, gets a mention in the Dictionary of National Biography, although his principal area of expertise seems to have been Latin America.
• de Vaudoncourt, F. F. G., Memoirs on the Ionian Islands, Considered in a Commercial, Political, and Military Point of View; in Which Their Ad­vantages of Position Are Described, as Well as Their Relations with the Greek Continent, including the Life and Character of Ali Pacha, the Present Ruler of Greece (Translated from the Original MS. by William Walton) (London 1816).
• A. M. Morana, Saggio delli commerciali rapporti dei Veneziani colle ottomane scale di Durazzo ed Albania e con quelle d’Aleppo, Siria e Palestina, Venezia, p.181.
• Idem, Relazione del Commercio d’Aleppo ed altre scale della Siria, e Palestina, Venezia, 1799.
• Hudhri, op. cit., p. 288.
• de Médelsheim, A. C., (ca. 1777-1826), was born in Strasburg, and while in the service of France, he was sent to Egypt with letters for Bonaparte, but he was captured at sea by the British and was sent to Palermo, before being freed to leave for Paris. There, he was persecut­ed as a monarchist, and in 1803 he went to Istanbul, where he enrolled in the new army of Sultan Selim III. He mar­ried soon after becoming Muslim and changing his name to Ibrahim Manzour. In 1810, he returned to Paris, but did not stay there long. From 1814-1817, he was at the court of Ali Pasha Tepelena in Janina where he served as a military advisor. In later years, under his Muslim name, he published an ex­tensive French-language history of the deposed Ali Pasha, based in good part on his personal experience, the 512-page ‘Mémoires sur la Grèce et l’Albanie pendant le gouvernement d’Ali-Pacha’ (Memoirs of Greece and Albania during the Rule of Ali Pasha), Paris, 1827. He committed suicide in Paris in 1826 and, as such, did not live to see the book for which he is remem­bered by posterity. In the said work, Cerfbeer has left us an interesting, but by no means flattering description of the Albanians as he encountered them. See E. Jacques, Edwin, The Albanians: An Ethnic History from Prehistoric Times to the Present, McFarland & Co., North Caroline, 1995, p.215. See and Elsie, Biographical Dictionary of Albanian History, I. B. Tauris, 2013.
• Manzour, Mémoires sur la Grèce et l’Albanie pendant le Gouvernement d’Ali-pacha, Paris, 1827. See also L. Skëndo, op. cit. pp. 104-109 and Midhat Šamić, Les voyageurs français en Bosnie a la fin du XVIII siécle et au début du XIX et pays tel qu’ils l’ont vu, Paris, 1960, pp. 160-161.
• The distinguished diplomat spoke ten languages fluently and had held senior appointments in Madrid, Stockholm and Washington.
• Lieutenant-General Thomas Maitland was a British soldier and co­lonial gov­ernor. He also served as a Member of Parliament for Haddington from 1790–96, 1802–06 and 1812–13. He was made a Privy Councillor on November 23, 1803. Maitland served as Governor of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) during 1805 to 1811. In early 1812, Arthur Wellesley, Earl of Wellington began the campaign that resulted in his victory at the Battle of Salamanca on July 22. Maitland was appointed governor of Malta during 1813–1824, where he became known as ‘King Tom’ by the Maltese. He also served as Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian islands during 1815 to 1823, while the islands were a British protec­torate between 1814 and 1864. The seat of administration was at Corfu. See C. W. Dixon, The Colonial Administrations of Sir Thomas Maitland Longmans, London, 1939.
• Cartwright, J., worked for the navy in a civilian capacity. When the Ionian Is­lands came into the possession of the British, sometime after the Treaty of Paris in 1815, he was appointed pay­master-general of the forces at Corfu, a position he held for some years. The nature of his post gave him many op­portunities for making sketches of those islands and the neighbouring coast of Greece. On his return to England, he published a volume entitled Views in the Ionian Islands, and from then on devoted himself to art, and especially to painting marine subjects and naval en­gagements. He exhibited many pictures at the Royal Academy, the British Insti­tution, and the Society of British Artists, and obtained a great reputation in his particular field. In 1825 he was elected a member of the Society of British Art­ists. See Joseph Cartwright, Selected Costumes from Albania and Greece, London, 1822; Idem, Views from Ionian Islands, London, 1821.
• W. Baggally, op. cit. p. 66.
• Dupré, was especially noted for his travels inGreece and the Ottoman Em­pire and his numerous paintings with Orientalist and Philhelene themes. His visit to Greece was on the very eve of the Greek War of Independence.
• Dupré, Voyage à Athènes et a Constantinople, ou collection de por­traits, de vues et de costumes Grecs et Ottomans. Peints sur lieux, d’après na­ture, lithographiès et coloriès. Accom­pagné d’un texte orné de vignettes, Paris, 1825.
• Williams, H. W., worked in watercolor from the early 1790’s and organized exhibitions in Edinburgh from 1800. In 1809 he was a founding member of the Associated Artists in London, exhibit­ing with them and with a similarly named group in Edinburgh until 1816. He painted for some years highland landscape, and in 1811–12 he published six large engravings of scenes in the north, while many of his early topo­graphical drawings appeared in the ‘Scots Magazine’. In 1816, the Scottish landscape painter set off on a two-year Grand Tour that included a short stay in Ioannian Islands; it changed his life. He published a two-volume account of his travels in 1820, written in the form of letters, and dedicated to John Thomson (1778–1840) of Duddingston, the avowed intention of the work was not to enter into disquisitions upon archae­ology and history, but to describe the countries, scenery, and peoples as they appeared to him. The illustrations were engraved by Lizars from original draw­ings by the author. In 1822 Hugh William Williams held an exhibition of watercolors, also the result of his tour, which attracted much attention and was greatly applauded by the critics of the day. Depicting as they did the splendid ruins and famous scenes of Greek his­tory, they fell in with the taste of the time, and the catalogue teems with quo­tations from the classics and the great English poets. Between 1827 and 1829 his ‘Select Views in Greece’ appeared in numbers, each containing six plates. Although he painted a few oil pictures, his principal and more characteristic work was executed in watercolor, which he handled in broad washes of transparent color over a carefully drawn pencil design. In the National Gallery of Scotland, he is represented by be­tween twenty and thirty typical exam­ples and, in the historical collection at South Kensington by five drawings, three of which are dated before 1807, and represent his earlier style. Hugh William Williams was an original member of the Associated Artists in Watercolor (1808), and an associate of the Royal Institution, Edinburgh; but towards the end of his life, he took a great interest in the proposed amalgam­ation of the Scottish Academy and the artist associates of the institution, an ar­rangement which was completed a month after his death.
• W. Williams, Travels in Italy, Greece and Ionian Islands, London, 1820.
• Admiral Smyth, W. H., (1788–1865) was an English naval of­ficer,hydrog­rapher, astronomer and numismatist, noted for his involvement in the early history of a number of learned societies, for his hydrographic charts, for his as­tronomical work, and for a wide range of publications and translations. A lunar mare was named Mare Smythii in his honour. His obituary in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical So­ciety noted: As President of the Astro­nomical Club, he was always genial & courteous, ever keeping things in happy order, and by his ready wit and flow of humour compelling the maintenance of good fellowship. He used to fill his pockets with new half-pennies to dis­tribute to any children he met in his dai­ly walks. Whatever he did, he did it with his might. See and O. J. Gilkes, cit., p. 22, Fig 4.
• Ibidem, Fig. 5 and 6.
• Ibidem, Fig. 9.
• Ibidem, Fig. 8.
• Cockerell, Travels in Southern Europe and the Levant, 1810-1817, op.cit., pp. 232-245.
• Soldier of Albania, plate 26 in the book The Military Costume of Turkey. Illus­trated by A Series of Engravings, from Drawings made on the Spot. (London 1818).

Plate XXVI

Soldier of Albania

The Albanian soldier entertains a very nice sense of honour; a blow, even amongst themselves, being revenged by immediate death. For military trans­gression, he is never beaten; the only punishments, in use, being either hang­ing or beheading. The Albanians have long been ranked as the best troops in the Turkish armies, in which, indeed, they are on all occasions considered as the ‘serdenguetchy’, or forlorn hope.

Scanderbeg, who is the hero of so many romances, was a native and prince of a district of Albania; assisted by his brave countrymen, he threw off the Turkish yoke, and resisted the whole weight of the Ottoman power, then at its zenith, for the space of twenty three-years; af­ter his death, his sepulchre was violated by the conquerors of his country; and a certain proof of his valour may be in­ferred, from the circumstance of the Janissaries having worn his bones en­chased in bracelets. The Albanian have frequently proved powerful opponents to the Russian troops, and such is the love of glory inherent in them, that when they contemplate a long interval of tranquillity in their own country, they enrol themselves in the service of the Pachas of any of other parts of the Turkish dominions, for the purpose of gratifying their military ardour.

• Bryan,’Clark, John Heaviside’, Graves, Robert Edmund (ed.). Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (A–K). I (3rd ed.), George Bell & Sons, London, 1886.
• Gilpin, W., (1724-1804) was an English artist, Anglican cleric, schoolmaster and author. He is best known as one of those who originated the idea of the picturesque. He is known as a big trav­eller. See Michael Symes, William Gilpin at Painshill (London 1994).
• DE LA POER BERESFORD, G., was the Irish army official. Very little is known of his studies, career and per­sonal life. In 1855, at the age of thirty, he published a series of lithographs with views of southern Albania and Epirus. Beresford probably visited the region, which was formerly part of Ali Pasha’s territory, as member of a mili­tary mission. The drawings of the al­bum were done by Beresford himself. The plates, some of which show rare subjects, are accompanied by explana­tory texts on the incidents which took place in the region.
• Cook, Recollection of a tour in the Ionian Islands, Greece and Constantinople (London 1853). See al­so F. Hudhri, op. cit., p. 212.
• de la Poer Beresford, Twelve Sketches in Double-tinted Lithography of Scenes in Southern Albania by Captain G. de la Poer Beresford, London, 1855. See also F. Hudhri, Shqipëria dhe Shqipëtarët në Vepra të Piktorëve të huaj, Tiranë, 1987, p. 203 and N. Ceka, Butrint A Guide to the city and its Monuments, London 1999, p. 23, fig. 8, 9
• An official report of the death of Ali by Khurshid Pasha (who succeeded Ismail Pasha Bey as Turkish Commander-in-Chief) to Sir Thomas Maitland is dated in April 7, 1822. See also Baggally, J. W., cit., pp. 90-91.
• A. F., De Beaujour, Voyage militaire dans l’Empire Ottoman ou description de ses frontiers et de ses principales de­fenses, soit naturelles, soit artificielles, Paris, 1829, pp. 288-330. See also M. ŠAMIĆ, op. cit., p. 141 and L. Skëndo, op. cit., pp. 110-119.
• M. von Stackelberg, Costume et usage des peuples de la Grèce mo­derne, Paris, 1828.
• Urquhart, The spirit of the East, 2 vol. 2^nd ed., London, 1839. See also L. Skëndo, op. cit., pp. 159-169.
• Grassini, Storia di Ali Tepelen, Bascià di Iannina, Milano, 1829.
• Hudhri, op. cit., p. 285.
• Ibidem, p. 201. See and A. Rosin, Kennedy, The subject paintings of Sir William Allan (1782–1850), University of Edinburgh, 1994.
• Benjamin D’Israeli (1804–1881) count of Beaconsfield was politician, writer, and well-known British prime minister. The Conservative government under D’Israeli had come to power in 1874. Benjamin D’Israeli’s achievement in becoming prime minister was seen by many as a sign of British enlightenment concerning Jews. D’Israeli had long criticized the ‘splendid isolation’ policy of his predecessor Gladstone. He demonstrated the new spirit behind British foreign policy. In 1875 he pur­chased the Suez Canal shares of the khedive of Egypt. The following year he arranged a series of magnificent cel­ebrations in India, culminating in the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Em­press of India. See B. Disraeli, Cantarini Fleming. A Psychological Auto-Biography,1832; Lefteris Stavros Stavrianos, The Balkans, 1815-1914, New York, 1963, p.401 and Stiven Beller, A very short in­troduction, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 15-16.
• Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield’s Letters, 1830-1852, London,1887; D. Sultana, B. Disraeli, in Spain, Malta and Albania, 1830-32. A Monography, London, 1976; J. A. W. Gunn, J. Mattheuws, D. M. Schurman and M. G. Wiebe, eds., Benjamin Disraeli Letters, vol.I: 1815-1834, Toronto, 1982, pp. 162-175.
• This Bey was, perhaps, Ismail Bey or Beqir Bey. See Ibidem, p. 164, note 3.
• Ibidem, p. 165.
• Ibidem. Letter to his father, Isaac, from Prevesa, dated in October 25.
• Ibidem, p. 166
• Ibidem, p. 179. Letter to Edward Lytton Bulwer, from Costantinople, dated De­cember 27, 1830: ‘…. I certainly passed at Yanina ten of the most ex­traordinary days of my life, and often wished that you had been my compan­ion’.
• After this visit to the ‘Grand Vezir’, he published an article in The Court Jour­nal. See B. D’Israeli, „‘A visit to the Grand Vizier’”, The Court Journal, 92 (29 January 1831), pp. 66-67. With two other companions: James Clay and George Meredith, on 18 October, he hired a yacht, ‘as the only mode of travel for the interesting sea, where eve­ry headland and bay is the site of some­thing memorable, and which is studded with islands which demand a visit’, and he eventually arrived in Nauplia. From there, he then sailed first to Athens and later to Constantinople, where he stayed for Christmas. See Idem, 173, the letter to Benjamin Austen, dated in Novem­ber 18.
• Heinrich Christoph Stier, „‘Die Al­banesen in Italien und ihre Literatur’”, Allgemeine Monatsschrift für Wissen­schaft und Literatur (1853), pp. 864-874.. Idem, „‘Ist die albanesische Spra­che eine indogermanische?’”, Allge­meine Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft und Literatur (1854).
• Idem, „‘Ist die albanesische Sprache eine indogermanische?’”, Allge­meine Monatsschrift für Wissen­schaft und Literatur (1854).

 

Bibliography

Books

BAGGALLY, J. W., Ali Pasha and Great Britain, Oxford, 1938.

BANKEL, H., ed., Carl Haller von Hallerstein in Griechenland, 1810-1817: Architekt, Zeichner, Bauforscher/im Auftrag der Carl Haller von Hallerstein Gesellschaft, exh. Cat., Berlin, 1986.

BARTHOLDY, J., Voyage en Grèce fait dans les années 1803 et 1804, Paris, 1807.

BELL, D. A., The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, New York, 2008.

BELLER, Stiven, Antisemitism. A very short introduction , Oxford University Press, 2007.

BOPPE, A., Napoleoni dhe Ali Pasha, Tiranëm 1999.

BRØNDSTED, P. O., Interview with Ali Pacha of Joanina, in the Autumn of 1812; with Some Particulars of Epirus, and the Albanians of the Present Day. Edited with an introduction by Jacob Isager, The Danish Institute at Athens, Athens, 1999.

BRYAN, M., ‘Clark, John Heaviside’, Graves, Robert Edmund (ed.), Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (A–K), I (3rd ed.), George Bell & Sons, London, 1886.

CEKA, N., Butrint A Guide to the city and its Monuments,London, 1999.

COOK, H., Recollection of a tour in the Ionian Islands, Greece and Constantinople , London, 1853.

COCKERELL, C., Travels in Southern Europe and the Levant, 1810-1817 . The Journal of C. R. Cockerell, R. A., London, 1903, reprint London, 1999.

DE BEAUJOUR, L. A. F., Voyage militaire dans l’Empire Ottoman ou description de ses frontiers et de ses principales defenses, soit naturelles, soit artificielles, Paris, 1829.

DE CHOISEUL-GOUFFIER, A., Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, Paris 1782, 1809, 1822.

Idem, Voyage pittoresque dans l’Empire Ottoman, en Grèce, dans la Troade, les Îles de l’Archipel et sur les cotes de l’Asie Mineure, Paris, 1842.

DE LA MOTTE HACQUET, B., L’Illyrie et la Dalmatie ou Moeurs, usages des leurs habitants (Translated from German into French), Paris, 1815.

DE LA POER BERESFORD, G., Twelve Sketches in Double-tinted Lithography of Scenes in Southern Albania by Captain G. de la Poer Beresford, London, 1855.

DE VANDONCOURT, G., Memoirs on the Ionian Islands, Considered in a Commercial, Political, and Military Point of View; in Which Their Advantages of Position Are Described, as Well as Their Relations with the Greek Continent, including the Life and Character of Ali Pacha, the Present Ruler of Greece (Translated from the Original MS. by William Walton), London, 1816.

DISRAELI, B., Lord Beaconsfield’s Letters, 1830-1852, London,1887.

DISRAELI, B., FLEMING Cantarini, A Psychological Auto-Biography,1832.

DIXON, C. W., The Colonial Administrations of Sir Thomas Maitland Longmans, London 1939.

DODWELL, E., A classical and topographical tour through Greece during the Years 1801, 1805 and 1806. 2 Vols, London, 1819.

DUPRÉ, L., Voyage à Athènes et a Constantinople, ou collection de portraits, de vues et de costumes Grecs et Ottomans. Peints sur lieux, d’après nature, lithographiès et coloriès. Accompagné d’un texte orné de vignettes, Paris, 1825.

ELSIE, R., Biographical Dictionary of Albanian History, I. B. Tauris, 2013.

ETON, W., A Survey of the Turkish Empire. In Which Are Considered I. Its Government … II. the State of the Provinces … III. the Causes of the Decline of Turkey … IV. the British Commerce with Turkey … with Many Other Important Particulars, London, 1801.

FLEMING, K. E., The Muslim Bonaparte: diplomacy and orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1999.

GLENNY, M., The Balkans 1804-1999. Nationalism, War and the Great Powers , London 2000.

GRASSINI, C., Storia di Ali Tepelen, Bascià di Iannina, Milan, 1829.

GUNN, J. A. W., MATTHEUWS, J., SCHURMAN, D. M., AND WIEBE, M. G., eds., Benjamin Disraeli Letters, vol.I: 1815-1834, Toronto 1982.

HACQUET, B., L’Illyrie et la Dalmatie, ou Moeurs, usages, et costumes de leurs habitans et de ceux des contrées voisines, Paris, 1815.

HOBHOUSE, J. C., A journey through Albania and other provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the years 1809 and 1810, London, 1813.

Idem, Travels in Albania, 2 Vol., London, 1858.

HOLLAND, H., Travels in the Jonian isles, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia, etc. during the Years 1812 and 1813, London, 1815.

Lord BYRON G., Byron (ed. by J. J. McGann), The latest edition of Childe Harold and Don Juan, Oxford University Press, 1986.

HUDHRI, F., Shqipëria dhe Shqipëtarët në Vepra të Piktorëve të huaj, Tiranë, 1987.

HUGHES, TH. S., Travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania (1813-1814) (London 1820) and 2^nd ed. in 1830.

ISAGER, J.,             „Introduction”, in P. O. Brøndsted, Interviews with Ali Pacha, Athens, 1999, p. 20.

IDEM, „Introduction”, in Peter Oluf Brøndsted, Interview with Ali Pacha of Joanina, in the Autumn of 1812, with Some Particulars of Epirus, and the Albanians of the Present Day, the Danish Institute at Athens, Athens, 1999.

KASTRATI, J., Historia e Albanologjisë, Tirana, 2000.

KOÇOLLARI, I., Spiunazhi nëpër shekuj… Sigurimi, Tiranë, 2000.

LEAKE, W. M., Travels in Northern Greece, 4 vols., London, 1835. (Reprinted in Amsterdam 1967).

IDEM, Researches in Greece, London, 1814.

LEFEBVRE, G., The French Revolution, Volume II, from 1793–1799, New York, Columbia University Press, 1964.

LOCKHART, J. G., Napoleon Buonaparte, London, 1927.

MACCARTHY, F. Byron. Life and Legend , London, 2002.

MANZOUR, I., Mémoires sur la Grèce et l’Albanie pendant le Gouvernement d’Ali-pacha Paris, 1827.

MIDHAT Šamić, Les voyageurs français en Bosnie a la fin du XVIII siécle et au début du XIX et pays tel qu’ils l’ont vu, Paris, 1960.

MAZOWER, M., The Balkans. From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day, London, 2001.

MENTA, S., Literature of Travel and Exploration. An Encyclopedia, (Jennifer Speake ed.), Volum 1, A to F, New York & London, 2003.

MORANA, G. A. M., Relazione del Commercio d’Aleppo ed altre scale della Siria, e Palestina ,Venezia, 1799.

IDEM, Saggio delli commerciali rapporti dei Veneziani colle ottomane scale di Durazzo ed Albania e con quelle d’Aleppo, Siria e Palestina, Venezia, 1816.MOSCHONAS, N., ‘Τα Ιόνια Νησιά κατά την περίοδο 1797-1821’, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Έθνους, Τόμος ΙΑ′: Ο ελληνισμός υπό ξένη κυριαρχία, 1669–1821, Athens 1975.

PAXINOU, R., Western eyes on Jannina. Foreign narratives of a city recorded in texts and images (1788-1822), The City in the Muslim World, Depictions by Western Travel Writers, (Edited by Mohammad Charipour and Nilay Özlü), 2015.

POUQUEVILLE, Ch., Travels in Epirus, Albania, Macedonia, and Thessaly, London, 1822.

IDEM, Voyage en Morée, à Constantinople et en Albanie et dans plusieurs autres prties de l’Empire Othoman, pendant les années 1798, 1799, 1800 et 1801, Paris, 1805.

ROSIN, A., Kennedy, The subject paintings of Sir William Allan (1782–1850), University of Edinburgh, 1994.

SCROFANI, S., Voyage en Grece, fait en 1794 et 1795, Paris et Strasbourg, 1801.

SKËNDO, L., Udhëtarët e huaj në Shqipëri gjer në fund të shekullit XIX, Tiranë, 1999, republished in 2012) (Prepared for the publication from L. Malltezi, and Sh. Delvina).

SKIOTIS, D. N., ‘Ali Pasha’s Last Gamble’, Hellenism and the Greek War of Liberation (1821-1830): Continuity and Change, Thessaloniki, 1976.

SONNINI, Ch., Voyage en Gréce et en Turquie fait par ordre de Louis XVI, Paris, 1801.

STAVRIANOS Lefteris Stavros, The Balkans, 1815-1914, New York, 1963.

SULTANA, D., B. Disraeli in Spain, Malta and Albania, 1830-32. A Monography , London, 1976.

STEPHANOPOLI, D., STEPHANOPOLI, N., Voyage de Dimo et Nicolo Stephanopoli en Grèce pendant les annés 1797-1798. D’après deux missions, don’t l’une du gouvernement français, et l’autre du général en chef Buonaparte, rédigé par un des professeurs du Prytanée, avec figures, plans et vues levés sur les lieux, Paris, de l’imprimerie de Giullemertet an VIII. 2 Vol., London 1800.

TOM J. Winnifrith, Badlands ~ Borderlands. A History of Southern Albania / Northern Epirus, London, 2002.

URQUHART, D., The spirit of the East. 2 vol. 2^nd ed., London, 1839.

VON HALLERSTEIN, H. H., Und die Erde gebar ein Lächeln, d. erste dt. Archäologe in Griechenland Carl Haller von Hallerstein 1774 – 1817 , Süddeutscher Verlag, München, 1983.

VON STACKELBERG, O. M., Costume et usage des peuples de la Grèce moderne, Paris, 1828.

Articles and studies

FRASHËRI, M., „John C. Hobhouse”, Diturija, nr. 9, 10, 11 (1927), pp. 321-329.

IDEM, „J. Bartholdy”, Ibidem, nr. 12 (1927), pp.361-365.

IDEM, „Stephanopoli Dimo & Nicolo”, Ibidem, nr. 7 (1927) 241-250.

IDEM, „Henry Holland”, Ibidem, nr. 12 (1927) pp. 361-365.

LEPORE, J., „Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography”, The Journal of American History, 88,1 (June 2001), p. 129.

MIRAJ, L., „‘Simon Pomardi për shqiptarët: Fragmente nga libri Viagio nella Grecia negli anni 1804, 1805 e 1806”‘, Zëri i Popullit, Tiranë 10. 12. 1995, p. 10.

ROSE, J. H., „Napoleon and Sea Power”, Cambridge Historical Journal , 1 (2) (1924), pp. 138–157.