CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE

BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

IN EIGHT VOLUMES

ALI PACHA

CHAPTER I

The beginning of the nineteenth century was a time of audacious
enterprises and strange vicissitudes of fortune. Whilst Western Europe
in turn submitted and struggled against a sub-lieutenant who made
himself an emperor, who at his pleasure made kings and destroyed
kingdoms, the ancient eastern part of the Continent, like mummies which
preserve but the semblance of life, was gradually tumbling to pieces,
and getting parcelled out amongst bold adventurers who skirmished
over its ruins. Without mentioning local revolts which produced only
short-lived struggles and trifling changes of administration, such as
that of Djezzar Pacha, who refused to pay tribute because he thought
himself impregnable in his citadel of Saint-Jean-d'Acre, or that of
Passevend-Oglou Pacha, who planted himself on the walls of Widdin as
defender of the Janissaries against the institution of the regular
militia decreed by Sultan Selim at Stamboul, there were wider spread
rebellions which attacked the constitution of the Turkish Empire and
diminished its extent; amongst them that of Czerni-Georges, which raised
Servia to the position of a free state; of Mahomet Ali, who made his
pachalik of Egypt into a kingdom; and finally that of the man whose
history we are about to narrate, Ali Tepeleni, Pacha of Janina, whose
long resistance to the suzerain power preceded and brought about the
regeneration of Greece.

Ali's own will counted for nothing in this important movement. He
foresaw it, but without ever seeking to aid it, and was powerless
to arrest it. He was not one of those men who place their lives and
services at the disposal of any cause indiscriminately; and his sole
aim was to acquire and increase a power of which he was both the guiding
influence, and the end and object. His nature contained the seeds
of every human passion, and he devoted all his long life to their
development and gratification. This explains his whole temperament; his
actions were merely the natural outcome of his character confronted
with circumstances. Few men have understood themselves better or been on
better terms with the orbit of their existence, and as the personality
of an individual is all the more striking, in proportion as it reflects
the manners and ideas of the time and country in which he has lived, so
the figure of Ali Pacha stands out, if n