Celebrated Crimes, Vol. 7:

MP3 Audio CD. Celebrated Crimes, Vol. 7:

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