the
mastery of the Mediterranean. England had fortified herself in Cefalonia
and Zante, France in Corfu, and interest centred on the opposite mainland,
where Ali Pasha of Yannina maintained a formidable neutrality towards
either power.

The career of Ali marked that phase in the decline of an Oriental empire
when the task of strong government becomes too difficult for the central
authority and is carried on by independent satraps with greater efficiency
in their more limited sphere. Ali governed the Adriatic hinterland with
practically sovereign power, and compelled the sultan for some years to
invest his sons with the pashaliks of Thessaly and Peloponnesos. The
greater part of the Greek race thus came in some degree under his control,
and his policy towards it clearly reflected the transition from the old to
the new. He waged far more effective war than the distant sultan upon
local liberties, and, though the elimination of the feudal Turkish
landowner was pure gain to the Greeks, they suffered themselves from the
loss of traditional privileges which the original Ottoman conquest had
left intact. The Armatoli, a local Christian militia who kept order in the
mountainous mainland north of Peloponnesos where Turkish feudatories were
rare, were either dispersed by Ali or enrolled in his regular army. And he
was ruthless in the extermination of recalcitrant communities, like
Agrapha on the Aspropotarno, which had never been inscribed on the
taxation-rolls of the Romaic or the Ottoman treasury, or Suli, a robber
clan ensconced in the mountains Immediately west of Ali's capital. On the
other hand, the administration of these pacified and consolidated
dominions became as essentially Greek in character as the Phanariot regime
beyond the Danube. Ali was a Moslem and an Albanian, but the Orthodox
Greeks were in a majority among his subjects, and he knew how to take
advantage of their abilities. His business was conducted by Greek
secretaries in the Greek tongue, and Yannina, his capital, was a Greek
city. European visitors to Yannina (for every one began the Levantine tour
by paying his respects to Ali) were struck by the enterprise and
intelligence of its citizens. The doctors were competent, because they had
taken their education in Italy or France; the merchants were prosperous,
because they had established members of their family at Odessa, Trieste,
or even Hamburg, as permanent agents of their firm. A new Greek
_bourgeoisie