Ali Pasha (1741-1822) was born in Albania, at Tepeleni, a town 75 miles north of Janina, of which his father was governor. This "Mahometan Buonaparte," or "Rob Roy of Albania," made himself the supreme ruler of Epirus and Albania, acquired a predominance over the Agas of Thessaly, and pushed his troops to the frontiers of ancient Attica (see Raumer's
Historisches Taschenbuch,
pp. 87-175). A merciless and unscrupulous tyrant, he was also a fine soldier and a born administrator. Intriguing now with the Porte, now with Buonaparte, now with the English, using the rival despots of the country against each other, hand in glove with the brigands while commanding the police for their suppression, he extended his power by using conflicting interests to aggrandize himself. The Venetian possessions on the eastern shores of the Adriatic, which had passed in 1797 to France, by the treaty of Campo Formio, were wrested from the French by Ali, who defeated General La Salsette (1798) in the plains of Nicopolis, and, with the exception of Parga, seized and held the principal towns in the name of the Sultan. Byron speaks of his "aged venerable face" in
Childe Harold
(Canto II. stanza lxii.; see also stanza xlvii.), and of the delicacy of his hand in
Don Juan
(Canto IV. stanza xlv.), and finds in his treatment of "Giaffir, Pacha of Argyro Castro or Scutari (I am not sure which)," the material for stanzas xiv., xv. of Canto II. of
The Bride of Abydos
. Hobhouse (
Journey through Albania