which recognized only distinctions of religion, they were singled out by name – arnavud – and in 1730 the emperor ordered all Albanians, both Muslims and Christian, to be expelled from Istanbul. Such measures simply intensified the problem in the provinces, increasing brigandage and crime, and slowly the government’s attention turned there too. After the long mid-century war with the Russians, when Albanian troops served the sultan in the Peloponnese, they continued plundering the Greek lands, until Sultan Abdul Hamid I, backed by his reforming admiral Gazi Hasan Pasha, decided to take action against them.20
To the French consul in Salonica at the time, they were more than a mere irritant. In fact, the stakes for the empire itself could not have been higher. As he wrote to Paris:
All men of sound sense here hope that the Capudan Pasha follows the example of Topal Osman Pasha who … covered Albania in rivers of blood on the orders of Sultan Mahmoud in 1731. Without this it is to be feared that this nation, which is very numerous and very poor at the same time, will abuse her habit of bearing arms and become powerful and dangerous for this Empire. All the open cities of Rumelia are exposed to its devastations, which could lead it to the gates of Constantinople, if some ambitious man knows how to profit from the number, the courage and the natural discipline of this nation.
Thus in 1779, the Ottoman admiral led a force of more than thirty thousand men against them. En route to the Peloponnese, in an operation impressive for its speed and brutal decisiveness, he personally decapitated two leading land-owners, and shot dead their main rivals: thirty-four heads were despatched to Constantinople and their lands were handed over to members of the Evrenos and other loyalist families. Hasan Pasha also gave the green light for Turks and Greeks to take whatever action they pleased against any Albanians they found: killing them was not a crime. Continuing his march, he executed all the Albanians he encountered, setting fire to a monastery where others were hiding and offering five sequins for every Albanian head brought him. In Salonica the governor expelled more than four thousand within five days, including several hundred in his own entourage, and permitted only a few long-time residents to stay.21
This was only a temporary remedy, however, and it did nothing to reconcile the Albanians to Ottoman rule. Many of them were Muslims, but their shared religion could not override the contempt they now felt for the Turks. ‘The Albanians do not any longer recognize the authority of the Grand Seigneur,’ wrote an observer a few years later, ‘nor by extension that of the pasha of Salonica whom they regard as an odious enemy.’22 In 1793 the pasha of Shkodra defeated an Ottoman army, captured several senior officers, and sent them back with their beards shaved to show his disdain for the sultan. In Salonica itself, they were soon causing trouble again. When the pasha attempted to arrest a known troublemaker called Alizotoglou in 1793, his house turned out to contain more than 150 of them, amply supplied with food and arms. The pasha, having called on ‘all true Muslims’ to come to his aid, used cannons to fire on Alizotoglou’s house, but his opponent only left the city after taking hostages for his security, and threatening defiantly to return with 2000 men if an official pardon was not forthcoming. A decade later, yet another edict had to be issued ordering local officials to clear the city of ‘an unknown number of Albanians and others belonging to the same category who are not fulfilling any service, without any proper occupation and who are gathering incongruously.’23
And, just as the French consul had predicted, much more powerful Albanian leaders did become a genuine threat to the empire. At the start of the nineteenth century Mehmed Ali, an Albanian soldier from Cavalla, became ruler of Egypt, founder of a royal dynasty, and creator of a short-lived empire in Africa and the Arab lands. Closer to home there was Ali Pasha – the ‘Muslim Bonaparte’ as Byron called him – who ruled the entire west coast of the Balkans from his Jannina stronghold. His writ ran almost to the gates of Salonica and nearby monasteries found he provided more effective protection against brigands than the city’s governor himself, supplying them with small handwritten notes written in ‘extremely bad Greek’ on ‘a small square piece of very dirty paper’, which threatened any Turk who maltreated the monks with execution. Here was an Albanian pasha building his own state and offering protection for the region’s Christians whose safety the sultan could no longer guarantee. There could be no clearer illustration of how fragile the authority of the Ottoman state had become.24
Prisoners and Slaves
The incessant struggles waged between the Ottomans and the Venetians, the Habsburgs, Russians and Persians, left their mark on the city in other ways. In August 1715, after the Venetians were driven out of the Peloponnese, six thousand Ottoman troops ‘dispersed into the regions of Larissa and Salonica, causing much harm along the road to the inhabitants of the country.’ The head of the city’s janissary corps was told to scour the area for ‘evil-doers’ and to imprison any he found. When more than one hundred Venetian deserters were rumoured to be making their way there, the town governor was so alarmed at the potential for disorder that he arranged for them to be seized and sold back to their commanding officers. Every campaign brought problems of this kind. In September 1769 – during the war with the Russians – it was reported that ‘the countryside was filled with deserters, ragged, killing.’25
For war also meant booty, prisoners and slaves. As Busbecq noted in the sixteenth century, ‘slaves constitute the main source of gain to the Turkish soldier’. Edward Browne, the travelling son of Sir Thomas Browne [author of the Religio Medici], was moved ‘by the pitiful spectacle of Captives and Slaves’ when he passed through northern Greece in 1668, men like the polyglot Hungarian Sigismund, a learned man who spoke ‘Hungarian, Sclavonian, Turkish, Armenian and Latin’ and had served a Turk, a Jew and an Armenian before being manumitted. French and Venetian consuls tried to get imprisoned or enslaved prisoners of war released and helped others escape: in 1700 the consulate gave a list to Paris of ‘all the soldier deserters, French, Italians, Spaniards etc., Catholics, Huguenots and infidels’ he had sent on to Marseilles. The Alsace man redeemed by another French consul in 1792, or the deserter who fled his master and made his way to Cavalla were among the dozens of fortunate individuals who were thus returned to Christendom many years after failed campaigns had first brought them to the Ottoman lands.26
The fog of war enshrouded this human traffic in a penumbra of legal uncertainty. Two Hungarians sold in the Larissa market in 1721 had to be released on the emperor’s orders after it turned out that they were not captured in battle but had merely been seized by some enterprising janissaries while about their master’s business. Moreover, peace treaties often stipulated that prisoners of war were not to be sold. ‘I learned ten days ago that in Larissa there are two Venetians, prisoners of some Albanians, who are negotiating their sale,’ writes the Venetian consul in 1739. ‘I immediately sent a trustworthy man there to the kadi with a letter informing him that they are Venetians and that according to the terms of the peace they cannot be sold as slaves. The kadi read the letter, imprisoned the Albanians and gave up the two men into my care.’
But because so many of the sultan’s troops saw the acquisition of slaves as their right, official orders were often ignored and the problem of illegal enslavement persisted, complicating efforts by the Ottoman state to organize prisoner exchanges. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74, with a large number of Ottoman troops in Russian captivity, the sultan ruled that all Russian prisoners still in Ottoman hands should be released. Only those ‘Muslims willingly staying in Russia and embracing Christianity’ and ‘those Christians willingly embracing Islam in My supreme empire’ were to be exempt. One year on, however, few of the ‘Russians, Poles, Moldavians, Vlachs and Moreotes’ in Turkish hands
