Veli Pasha and Consul Ongley: A Diplomatic Relationship That Got Too Close

VELÐ PASHA AND CONSUL ONGLEY An Anglo-Ottoman Diplomatic Relationship That Got

Too Close

David BARCHARD

The Cretan Crisis of 1858 and the Twilight of Ottoman Rule In the summer of 1858 a revolt on the island of Crete, then an outlying

province of the Ottoman Empire, briefly caught the attention of Europe. The headline news was fairly straightforward: a liberal reforming Ottoman governor, Veliuttin Rifat Pasha, usually known simply as ‘Veli Pasha’, left the island ignominiously amid the fierce hostility of the Christian population, the active opposition of most of the foreign consuls, and a dispute with the Ottoman officials who had been sent to replace him. His only significant ally, the British Consul, Henry Ongley, departed equally abruptly. Neither man ever revisited the island, so far as is known, on which both of them had spent much of their lives.

Obscure and long-forgotten it may be, but in retrospect the 1858 crisis was a turning point in Crete’s history and points up the general dilemmas faced by the Ottoman Empire as a whole. For the first half of the 19th century, Crete had been an isolated but fairly typical province of the European zone of the Ottoman Empire. After 1858 the gravitational centre of Crete’s social and political life shifted. Newly-emergent Christian Greek commercial families began to dominate the island’s business life. The aspirations of the Christian population rather than the views of Ottoman Vali (governor-general) increasingly defined the viewpoint of foreign consuls on the island. For the next forty years, until the Ottoman withdrawal from the island, the dominant perception of Crete was shaped by philhellenes and Greek nationalists who saw the island as ‘an occupied land’ awaiting eventual liberation.

The upheavals in Crete in 1858 also reflected a more general Ottoman failure not confined to that island alone: the defeat in the wake of the Crimean War of the Tanzimat reformers’ dream of creating a socially and economically progressive multicultural order that could appeal to all Ottoman citizens regardless of their religion and culture. Veli Pasha’s government in Crete was par excellence an energetic attempt to turn this idea into reality.

70 D A V I D B A R C H A R D After his failure, Ottoman political solutions for the Cretan problem were implicitly based instead on what today we would call ‘power-sharing.’

Finally, the crisis also had an international dimension, symptomatic of late Ottoman fragility. The breakdown of Veli Pasha’s authority was initially provoked not by Greek nationalists, but by the Consuls of Austria and France and the rivalry they felt for their British colleague. This happened essentially because in his work as governor of the island, Veli Pasha aligned himself too closely with the British representative on Crete, Henry Ongley, who by 1856 had been Consul there for the previous nineteen years. It was a grave mistake: Ongley was a flawed man with poor judgement. As an ally and partner, he proved to be a source of fatal weakness, not least since there was no prospect of him being able to deliver British political support against the French and Austrian influence.

This article is intended to give a case history, never previously written up, showing how an enlightened and well-intentioned Ottoman Vali1 attempted to introduce the reforms envisaged by the Hattð Hümayun in his province and how his reforms were thwarted by the continental European powers and spurned by nationalist Christians. But it is also a tragic-comic story of how an over-close partnership between a British consul and a Turkish administrator led to disaster for both.

The Arrival of the Governor

On October 3rd 1855, while the Crimean War was still continuing and four months before the promulgation of the Hattð Hümayun, Veli Pasha arrived in Canea on board the “Amalfi”, a Neapolitan steamer. It was more or less exactly four years since he and his father had been removed from the island.

The island’s enlightened new Ottoman governor came with very high hopes. The appointment was a home-coming. Veli had been born in Crete and lived there until the age of 28. His eldest child, Ðffet had also been born there 1 In addition to the published sources cited in this article, I have to thank two of Veli Pasha’s descendants for their interest and assistance with this article. The Pasha’s great-grand daughter Mrs Ðffet Sunalp, now of California, and her husband, the late General Halit Sunalp, provided me with several interesting facts, including those of Veli Pasha’s origins (confirmed by written sources) as the grandson of an Orthodox priest on his mother’s side, and how he paid for the building of churches during his time in Crete. Mr Nazmi Akðman helped me with other genealogical information and traditional anecdotes including some about Veli’s reputed friendship with the Empress Eugénie. From Veli Pasha’s great-great niece, Ms Nilüfer Gülek, I was able to glean some details of the Pasha’s reputation across the generations among his kinsmen as “Le beau Véli.” I am also most grateful to Mr Charles Sarrell, for his biographical account of his kinsman, Henry Sarrell Ongley.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 71 around 1849. Though his father was Ottoman Albanian by background, Veli also had close family connections among the Cretan Christians. Veli’s mother, Helena Bolonopoula, was the daughter of a Greek Orthodox priest in the village of Skouloufia between Candia [today’s Iraklion] and Rethymno. Through this side of his family Veli may have been related to one of the main Greek nationalist painters of the 19th century, Constantinos Volonakis. Pandelis Prevelakis reports that Veli’s father, Giritli Mustafa Naili Pasha, did not require his wife to abandon Christianity, but allowed her to worship privately in a small church in the garden: a circumstance which may shed light on Veli’s own liberal attitudes in religious matters.1

With the new governor came an associate destined to become one of Veli’s bitterest opponents. He was Joseph Caporal, a Frenchman who had been in the service of Veli’s family for around a quarter of a century. Originally hired by Giritli Mustafa Naili as a barber, Caporal had evolved over time first into a Cretan official, and then into a family factotum and adviser.2 Caporal had gone with Veli on his embassy to Paris, paid for by Giritli Mustafa Naili. There he had acted as an adviser for the ambassador—no doubt helping plug gaps in the young diplomat’s knowledge of the Western world. But in England and France, Veli’s visible reliance on Caporal provoked smiles and even mockery. Though Caporal came with Veli to Crete, his influence was now waning.3 However his connections in the island, especially in the consulates of France and Austria were strong.

Veli’s own Cretan connections were about to be put to the test. The new governor seems to have assumed that what the islanders most wanted was progress and reorganisation of the kind envisaged by the Hattð Hümayun. He does not seem to have anticipated opposition.

The new Governor spent the obligatory days in quarantine and then took up his official duties on 7th October 1855.

An avant-garde Ottoman Governor

Veli was around 33 years old at the time of his appointment as

governor of Crete. He had grown up as a Cretan, with both Christian and Muslim relatives on the island, but he had been educated in Cairo in the palace of the ruler of Egypt, Mehmet Ali. There Veli had studied alongside Prince 1 Pandelis Prevelakis, Crète Infortunée, Les Belles Lettres, Paris 1975, p. 47. 2 For an early account of Caporal’s “extraordinary influence”, see C.R. Scott, Rambles in Egypt and Candia 1837, p. 253. 3 FO 881/1550 Reports. Condition of the Island 1858-1862, Report of Mr Longworth, pp. 13-14.

72 D A V I D B A R C H A R D Sait, the obese fourth son of Mehmet Ali and Veli’s near contemporary. He been taught French and English as well as Arabic and Persian and also given a naval education.1 His father had evidently had a career of statesmanship and high office in mind for his son.

During their four years after leaving Crete, Veli and his father had both enjoyed meteoric careers in Ottoman service which they can hardly have foreseen when they were plucked out of the island on the orders of the Sultan. Their fate was not exile but rapid preferment.

Veli’s only previous experience before he left Crete had been as a local lieutenant for his father. But in 1851 he was sent as governor to the frontline province of Bosnia where his liberalism and pro-Western attitudes attracted favourable attention.2

A year later, Veli went to Paris as Ottoman ambassador where he remained until June 1855 when he was removed mainly because of the bitter rivalry between Giritli Mustafa Naili Pasha and the much more powerful Mustafa Reþit Paþa, the leading statesman of the Tanzimat period, whose son, Mehmet Cemil, took Veli’s place3.

Veli’s rapid rise to such prominence was linked by contemporaries to his father’s position in the Sultan’s government, but almost certainly more than nepotism was involved. His appointment to Paris preceded his father’s first term as grand vizier by more than six months. The timing of this and later appointments suggests that Veli was not simply being advanced by his father but also being groomed by A’ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha, the two Tanzimat statesmen whose influence was in the ascendant as the Crimean War ended. A’ali and Fuad may well have regarded Veli as a promising candidate for eventual high office.4 They themselves had served in Western European capitals at the outset of their careers, and perhaps saw a spell of service there as a form of training.

A’ali and Fuad’s careers had begun as palace scribes. Veli belonged to the second generation of the Westernising process in Turkey, one which reached adulthood after the reforms of Mahmut II and Mustafa Reþit. He

1 FO 195/457 Crete 1854 -1857, Ongley to de Redcliffe, 18 June 1857. For details of Prince Said and his upbringing, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali pp. 90-92. 2 For a contemporary account of Veli’s benign and successful governorship in Bosnia, see Victor Morpurgo, Politique de la Russie en Orient: avenir de la Turquie, Giraud, Paris, 1854, pp. 65-6. It is interesting to see that in both Bosnia and Paris Veli encouraged the building of churches for local Ottoman Christians. 3 For an English account of their rivalry see Adolphus Slade, Turkey and the Crimean War, 1867, 66, 89. 4 Veli’s younger brother Hilmi Paþa had married into Fuat Pasha’s family.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 73

and his contemporaries were much better equipped than their predecessors for integration on easy terms into international high society. Veli and his upcoming contemporaries such as his rivals Mehmet Cemil and Ali Galip, the sons of Mustafa Reþit Paþa , must have looked poised for future greatness as statesmen. As it turned out, none of these particular individuals would attain it. The second and subsequent generations of Tanzimat officials were less distinguished than the first.

Veli’s relatively short time in Paris also left a strong mark on him. He was ambassador there at one of the high points in 19th century Turkish-European relations, when Britain and France went to war with Russia to help the Ottoman Empire stave off the imminent threat of partition. Against this background someone who had moved so recently from the closed world of Crete to the capital, and then on to one of the greatest cities in Europe, might have been expected to cut an odd or even uncouth figure. But Veli in fact made a considerable name for himself in the French capital, though perhaps less as a diplomat than as a handsome young aristocratic gentleman in Parisian society who, as the Times later put it, “peopled Père Lachaise with broken hearts”1 and seems to have been known on both sides of the Channel.2

Veli in 1855 therefore was a very different sort of governor from his father twenty years earlier. Giritli Mustafa Naili, though receptive to Western influences, never had any formal education or travelled to the West. Two travellers’ accounts show the change in personal styles that had taken place over twenty-five years.

Robert Pashley, a strongly Hellenist English lawyer who met Giritli Mustafa Naili Pasha in the 1830s, did indeed regard the governor of Crete as a rare case of an Ottoman Muslim Pasha prepared to receive western visitors on their own terms rather than traditional Islamic-Oriental ones. But at that date, Mustafa Naili wore oriental costume and received his visitor in a room

1 Times 25 September 1858. 2 Contemporary French accounts of Veli during his two spells as ambassador in Paris include La princesse Julie Bonaparte, marquise de Roccagiovine et son temps: mémoires inédites, 1853-1870, ed. Isa Dardano Basso, Rome 1975, p.142 which refers to him as “l'ambassadeur de Turquie Vély-Pacha qui parle fort bien français”; Ernest Hamel, Histoire illustrée du second empire, Librairie de l'Echo de la Sorbonne, Paris 1874; L. (Louis) Thouvenel, Pages de l'histoire du Second Empire d'après les papiers de M. Thouvenel, ancien minstre des affaires étrangères (1854-1866), Plon-Nourrit, Paris, 1903; César Lecat Bazancourt, The Crimean Expedition to the Capture of Sebastopol, London, 1856 For Veli’s attempts to get a church built in Paris for Ottoman subjects of Greek Orthodox faith, see correspondence, quoted in Ross Nicolas, Saint-Alexandre-sur-Seine/Saint-Alexandre-Nevski: l'église russe de Paris et ses fidèles, Editions du Cerf, Paris, 2005, pp. 90-1.

74 D A V I D B A R C H A R D

furnished along traditional eastern lines although Pashley was struck by the fact that the governor stood up to receive him and when bidding farewell.1

Twenty years later Veli had left all this far behind. When he met Europeans as the Ottoman Governor of Crete, he did so pretty much as a fellow European, sporting the Grand Cordon of the Légion d’Honneur as well as the rank of mushir or marshal of the Ottoman Empire.

The American writer, Bayard Taylor, who visited Veli in 1857 in Canea remarked of him that:

“His costume, except the fez, was entirely European and he is the first

Oriental I have seen who wears it [European dress] naturally and gracefully.”2 At this date it was still remarkable that a Turkish governor sat in a

rocking chair rather than cross-legged on a divan when receiving visitors. This was part of a life-style now consciously arranged along European

aristocratic lines rather than Middle Eastern ones. Bayard Taylor describes a visit as a dinner guest to the Pasha’s house in Halepa in 1857:

“He has a country-house handsomely furnished in the most luxurious

European style, the walls hung with portraits of prominent living sovereigns and statesmen. On the dinner table was an epergne of pure gold, two feet long and eighteen inches high; the knives, forks and spoons were also of the same metal. He had an accomplished French cook, and offered us beside the wine of Crete, Burgundy, Rhenish, and Champagne. He drank but sparingly however, and of a single kind. After dinner, I had a long conversation with him on the state of the Orient, and was delighted to find a Turk in his position imbued with such enlightened and progressive ideas. If there were nine men like him, the regeneration of the East would not be so difficult. One man, however—unless he fills the very highest administrative position—is almost powerless.”3 But of course one aspect of modern life was not yet accessible to a

young Ottoman grandee. Veli’s wife and children lived in separate quarters, still known as a ‘harem.’ None of them seems to have been around during his dinner with Bayard Taylor.

Veli, like other Tanzimat visitors to the West, had spent his time in Paris studying administration and technology with a view to applying reforms and innovations inside Turkey and also, apparently, visiting England, for which, despite his personal contacts with the French Imperial family, he was to show a distinct preference. 1 Robert Pashley, Travels in Crete, John Murray, London, 1838, pp. 173-174. 2 Bayard Taylor, Travels in Greece and Russia, New York 1866, p. 94. 3 Bayard Taylor, Travels, p. 99.


The Nature of the Problem: Crete in 1856 When Veli arrived in Crete, ‘backwardness’ rather than Greek

nationalism appeared to him as the main hurdle to be overcome. In the mid-19th century Crete had been an Ottoman province for 187 years, a relatively short time compared to most of the Empire’s provinces, but during that time the island’s social and administrative structures had been thoroughly Ottomanised. In many ways, as William Miller noted1, the set-up in Crete closely resembled that of lands in the Ottoman Balkans, and particularly that of Bosnia where Veli had been governor three years earlier. Like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Crete contained an indigenous Muslim minority speaking the local vernacular.

Throughout the 19th century, Crete had a history of its own quite distinct from that of either Greece or Turkey or the straggling Vilayet of Rhodes (Cezayðr-ð Bahri-ð Sefid) which included most of the other Ottoman islands from the Aegean Archipelago to Cyprus. While the islands of the Aegean archipelago were cultural and economic backwaters Crete had been for centuries a significant international trading centre for olive oil and other crops, and was in direct contact not only with Constantinople and Athens but also with northwest European commercial centres. This fact gave it a small foreign merchant community with a history stretching back to the rule of Venice and the late Middle Ages. The leading figures among these western traders doubled as consuls for the Christian powers, though not always their own countries.

Historically Crete was not only important as an agricultural and commercial centre, but also as by far the best potential naval centre in the eastern Mediterranean, because of its deep water, all-weather anchorage at Suda Bay. In the Dark Ages and the early modern period, Crete had repeatedly been a pirate stronghold from which attacks on the coasts of Greece and Anatolia could be mounted. Had the politics of the early 19th century worked out differently, the island could just as easily have served as a major Mediterranean naval base for Britain, Russia, or France. Russian control of Cretan waters would probably have implied dominance over Constantinople as well.

This is probably why Crete was excluded from the new Kingdom of Greece by the Great Powers in 1828 after the Greek War of Independence, The Duke of Wellington, British prime minister at the time, seems to have

1 William Miller, The Ottoman Empire and its Successors, Cambridge, 1936 pp. 358-9.


feared that as part of Greece, the island would become either a stepping-stone for Russian naval ambitions in the Mediterranean or relapse into piracy.

So Crete remained part of the Ottoman Empire, even though between 1830 and 1840 it was not ruled from Istanbul but from Egypt. It was a time of administrative continuity for the island under the uninterrupted government of Giritli Mustafa Naili Pasha.

Under the pasha’s rule, the economic life of the island, and in particular the olive oil trade, steadily revived. So did the fortunes of the island’s Christians. The ascendancy of the Muslim Beys or landowners may have been waning before the Greek War of Independence. Certainly the Beys never fully recovered from the blows they suffered during it. Mustafa Naili introduced the system of monopolies for sales of staple products which formed the basis of the economic revival of Mehmet Ali’s Egypt. Albano-Egyptian rule thus made matters worse for the Beys while it helped a new class of Christian merchants, some of them in-comers from the Ionian islands, to emerge.

The growing preponderance of the Cretan Christians was reflected in the island’s changing demographic balance.

The Island’s Demography in the 1850’s

The 19th century in Crete opened with the Muslim Cretans1 in a condition of social, and economic ascendancy, and relative demographic strength. Though sources are sketchy, it appears that on the eve of the Greek War of Independence, Muslims in Crete accounted for just over two fifths of the population. Thereafter they faced a steady decline in both influence and numbers.

The Cretan Muslim population may have entered the war as a community of up to 150,000, but they were reduced to less than half that number by the siege and illness during the war, a fact which one would not suspect from Greek accounts of the island during its unhappy years in the 1820’s.2

By the 1830’s and 1840’s, though legally they were still a ruling caste, the Cretan Muslims seem to have perceived very clearly the precariousness of their situation and the possibility of their eventual eviction.

1 Cultural, religious, and political boundaries overlapped in 19th century Crete and the words “Mussulman” and “Turk” are interchangeable. Ongley in Crete use the word ‘Turk’ in cases where the general sense is ‘Muslim.’ Later Canea consuls almost always used “Christians” and “Mussulmans” or Muslims—a practice which I follow here as it best conveys the nature of the conflicts. 2 The Christian population seems to have fallen by about 21% during the War of Independence, while the number of Muslims dropped by 60%, thus setting the scene for events during the remainder of the century.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 77 Though they still made up about 30% of the total population of the

island, including foreigners, their share was shrinking. In 1858, according to British Foreign Office figures, the Cretan Muslims totalled 68,000 and the Christians 150,231 out of a total of 221,265 inhabitants. The British naval surveyor, Captain Spratt, estimated the Muslims at about 70,00 in a population of 210,00. Some Greek sources claimed a much higher total population—300,000, of which only 20% was Muslim. Over half the Muslims, 39,784 or 58.5% lived in the towns; while only 7,181, fewer than 5%, of Cretan Christians did. However it is likely that many of the 2,650 inhabitants listed as ‘foreigners’ in 1858 were also ethnic and religious Greeks, either Hellenes from the mainland or Ionians still under British protection. Cretan Muslims would remain an overwhelming majority in the towns until the end of Ottoman rule but from the late 1850s the Christian middle class of the towns was expanding and acquiring greater political influence.1

Political Life in Crete Before 1856

Against this background, the danger of expulsion from the island felt by the Cretan Muslims after 1830 was not imaginary. There was a Cretan Committee in Athens working for the union of the island with Greece, while the Mussulmanoi were isolated both from the Ottoman mainstream and their Albano-Egyptian rulers. Christian rule in Crete might easily lead—as it had already done in the Peloponnese—to the eviction of the Cretan Muslims, a point which Christian insurgents in 1841 had been quick to deny2. Despite later demonisation of the Pasha and his rule in nationalist accounts, Giritli Mustafa Naili’s policies rested on an aspiration for Muslim-Christian convergence. He seems to have believed that the way to survival for the Ottoman Empire was to create a partnership of Muslim landowners and 1 FO 881/1462, A.S. Green, Memorandum Relative to the Isle of Candia 1821-1862, September 26 1866; T.A.B. Spratt, Travels and Researches in Crete, London 1865, pp. 49-50. See also Lily Makrakis, Elevtherios Benizelos, 1864-1910, M.I.E.T, Athens, 2001, pp. 48-9, n. 65. 2 See for example the denial of this printed in The Times for Monday 7 June 1841. A declaration signed by the insurgent leaders, A. Chaeretis and C. Bourdoumakis tells the Muslims “the Cretans do not desire to drive out nor do any injury to the Ottoman inhabitants of that country, but that on the contrary they may continue to reside in the country, which gave them birth and enjoy their property, as well as the same rights and privileges such as the Christians themselves enjoy, without any exception." The distinction between “Cretans” and “Ottomans” is nevertheless ominous. “Such o countrymen! such are our sentiments. Do not allow yourselves to be deceived by those whose interest it is to see both you and ourselves disappear from the land of Crete, the dear country of our birth.”


Christian business classes1. He certainly aimed at retaining the support of the Christian majority on the island and preventing a confrontation between the Christians and the Ottoman authorities and sometimes did to the disadvantage of the indigenous Muslim population. When the Pasha was removed from the island, Consul Ongley remarked : “The removal of Mustapha Pasha is viewed with great regret by the Christian population of the Island but the Turks in general are glad of it.” 2.

Like his father, Veli Pasha was well aware of the precariousness of Ottoman power on the island. But, as events would prove, he underestimated just how fragile it was.3

Consul Ongley

Veli’s closest ally, and apparently almost his only confidante, during the 33 months of his governorship would be the British Consul in Crete, Henry Sarell Ongley. Both men already knew each other well. Ongley was about 53 years old. He came from a family which had played an active part in the Levant Company, before its disbandment in 1827 and whose members continued to be close to the consular and diplomatic world throughout the twentieth century, one of them serving as ambassador to Turkey in the 1970’s. Ongley himself was a trader who, among other things, had the monopoly on the import of coal tar soap into the island.4 In 1855, Ongley had been in Crete as British Consul for eighteen years.

Ongley’s despatches reveal a distinctive and not entirely appealing personality in their author. His intentions may have been good but he often put his worst face forward. He was over-sensitive to personal slights and these often eclipsed other events for him. If, for example, the Consul of France galloped past him at high speed, forcing him off the path, he would report the fact to London.5 Worse still, he had a marked tendency to make unsubtle recommendations in his reporting and to steer his readers clumsily towards conclusions which sound unduly personal and read more like special pleading than analysis. He thus sometimes exacerbated precisely the suspicions he was trying to dispel. Above all, he was trouble-prone.

1 Allan Cunningham Eastern Questions in the 19th Century, London, 1993, Volume II, p.174. Cunningham’s interpretation of the Pasha’s thinking seems to rest on remarks by Sir Adolphus Slade which I have so far been unable to locate in Slade’s own works. 2 FO 195/307 Ongley to Palmerston, 21 October 1851. 3 La Vérité sur les Evénements à Candie, pp. 53-54. 4 Soap was one of the main by-products of olive oil. 5 See for example, FO 195/457, p. 267, Ongley to Bulwer, March 9 1857.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 79 Ongley’s early dispatches in the 1830s suggest that initially he, like his

predecessors, at that time viewed Giritli Mustafa Naili Pasha, from a prudent distance with some awe. During the 1841 crisis on the island he had an open dispute with the governor. But as the years advanced the two became distinctly friendlier and by the time of his sudden removal from Crete, Mustafa Naili seems to have known the English consul well enough to share relatively unguarded thoughts with him, admitting in October 1851, for example, that he did not know what his fate in Istanbul would be on his removal to the capital.1

The troubles visited on Ongley and Veli Pasha during the latter’s governorship were the culmination of regular scraps between Ongley and the French and Austrian consuls on the island which then went back more than a decade and a half. London officials reading the despatches from Crete in the spring of 1858 perhaps recalled earlier complaints against Ongley over the years. In June and July 1841 for example Rifat Pasha had written on behalf of the Ottoman authorities alleging irregular activities by the consul. As in 1858, these complaints were evidently inspired by Joseph Caporal and the French and Austrian consuls on Crete. On this earlier occasion, the British Consul had been summoned to Istanbul to answer these charges but managed to acquit himself of them. 2

19th century Canea was a very small town. Its foreign consuls were a minute community within it, who often got on each other’s nerves or affronted each other’s dignity. At times when their governments were amicable and cooperating relatively easily, the consuls on Crete engaged in bellicosity towards each other, but even against this background, the tensions between Caporal and Ongley seem to have been exceptional.

In both Paris and London, ministers were well aware of the possibilities of these confrontations. In 1856, no doubt partly because of what was happening in Crete, the French Foreign Ministry issued a printed circular letter instructing its consuls in the Orient3 to work together and not get over ardent in competition with the English when advising the local pashas. The document was passed on to the Foreign Office and circulated to Ongley and other consuls. But, in Canea, at least it, failed to sooth things.4

1 FO 195/307, 10 October 1851. 2 Ponsonby Papers, Durham University Library, 22 June 1841, and 12 July 1841. The row between the consuls coincided with the insurgency of the same year. For an indication that on this occasion too, bad advice from Ongley to Mustafa Naili Pasha may have played a part in causing events on the island go awry, see The Times for Wednesday 5 July, 1841. 3 i.e. the Ottoman Empire and the rest of the Middle East. 4 FO 160/74 1856 Instructions from London to Tripoli and Crete.

80 D A V I D B A R C H A R D Veli Pasha, who must have watched these goings-on over many years,

would have been well advised to maintain an even distance between the consuls on his return as governor. Instead he broke with Caporal and quickly developed personal and professional links with Henry Ongley including financial ones. It is difficult to say whether this partiality for Ongley was based mainly on personal sympathy, Ongley’s ability to act as a banker, or a desire to cultivate the British as the leading great power of the day1. Whichever was the case, within a few months of the new governor’s arrival a fierce animosity had developed between him and the French Consul, Chatry de La Fosse, who had been on the island since 1848. “Mr Chatry de la Fosse has such a personal hatred to the Pasha that he eagerly seizes on every opportunity to thwart and annoy him,” Ongley wrote to his Ambassador in January 1857.2

Veli’s Reform Programme

Within a month of his arrival on the island, the new governor-general was hard at work on improvements and reforms intended to create a 19th century modern society in Crete. His conceptions of how to transform Crete were those of a modern administrator, or at least someone who had seen a modern state at close quarters, but his modus operandi inevitably had to be that of a latter-day Enlightenment ruler introducing changes from above by himself.

Veli was aware from the outset that his available powers and resources would not be proportionate to the work involved in modernizing Crete. An Ottoman governor-general was effectively the equivalent of a French prefect, but Turkey was—his later apologia noted with some understatement—“only imperfectly developed administratively. ”3

The Albano-Egyptian administration of his father had set up local councils, essentially along Napoleonic lines in the 1830s but there was no provincial or communal budget in Crete (nor indeed as yet a national budget for the Empire: that would not come until 1862) and so the administration of the island operated without a regular income.4 These deficiencies, he believed were the explanation for the backwardness and decay of public monuments. His inspiration was clearly the developments underway in Istanbul in the wake of the Crimean War and the urban reforms of Napoleon III. He tells us 1 British naval intervention on the island in 1841 had helped put down an insurrection against Veli’s father and may have played a part in the Porte’s decision to retain him as governor. 2 FO 195/457 p. 265. Ongley to de Redcliffe. 3 La Vérité p. 18. 4 La Vérité. P. 18.


that “An august personne (i.e. presumably the Empress Eugénie) had told him before leaving Paris, what immense advantages he could bring to the island by giving it routes and voies de communication” and that he had broached his ideas to the Sultan and his ministers before leaving for the island and secured their approval. 1

The new governor began his work swiftly. Less than two months after his arrival, Mr Boone, Ongley’s deputy in Canea, writing on 24 November 1855 in the consul’s temporary absence, reported:

“His Excellency is endeavouring to introduce numerous reforms in the island such as naming the streets in the principal towns and having the houses numbered as in Europe. He proposes to place lights or lamps in a part of this town for which purpose he has ordered them from France, he will also establish a street police similar to that existing in London.”2

Veli’s determination to introduce elements of Western European urban culture, such as street numbers and road sweeping, also took forms which involved direct interference with the way of life of the men of Canea.

Boone went on to report that:

“He has prohibited card playing in the public coffee shops and yesterday issued orders prohibiting the hanging of dirty canvas awnings over the shops in the bazaar, the throwing of dirt or rubbish in the streets or sitting in the streets or public thoroughfares; all those found guilty of trespassing in these particulars are to be either imprisoned for a definite period of time or are to be fined, for the first offence lightly and more severely in proportion for every repetition of the same offence.”

The seeds of future problems were very quick to appear. Veli’s social reforms had immediately triggered the open disapproval of a group of Cretan residents who were entitled to call upon the British consul for protection and who would eventually play the leading part in the governor’s downfall. These were merchants and settlers from the Ionian Islands, at that stage still a British territory. Because of the British protection they enjoyed until the cession of the islands to Greece in 1864, the Ionians were a notoriously troublesome group for British diplomats in the Ottoman Empire, Greeks who were able cock a snoot at the Ottoman authorities.

“Some few Ionians who have coffee shops here and whose principal gain is derived from persons playing at cards in their shops complain bitterly at these Regulations and have shewn some opposition. I have however considered it my duty to assist the Pasha in carrying out the Regulations as related to Ionians,” Boone added.

Another of Veli’s projected improvements, modelled on changes being introduced at the same time in Istanbul, was street lighting for Canea. The 1 La Vérité pp. 21-23 2 FO 195/457 Boone to de Redcliffe, November 24th 1855.

82 D A V I D B A R C H A R D innovation also did not go down well. Christian Cretans objected to it in newspapers published in Syra on the grounds that it might cause people to stumble into holes. Muslims demonstrated violently against it presumably on religious grounds, and a group headed by one Bahri Agha had to be arrested and its leader held for a while in the fortress island of Grabousa.1

Within a month or two on the island, Veli was considering ways to improve the Cretan infrastructure by building a network of roads as the auguste personne in Paris had advised him. He wanted to begin in Rethymo, the third town of the island, and entered into negotiations with its ‘chiefs’—the local notables who mediated between government and the local population—to establish a voluntary arrangement under which the adult male population would work on the construction three days a week. He recruited a British engineer, Edward Woodward, who had worked in the Crimea and built roads in the Ionian Islands, to head the project.

To improve maritime communications, Veli laid down new buoys at the entrance to Canea Harbour in October 1856 and had winch machinery constructed at his own expense to be used for dredging the harbour. However it was never used and lay rusting on the quayside for some years after he had departed.2.

Finance There remained the problem of public finances or the lack of them. Veli

examined alterations to the öþür or ‘tithe’. He proposed that Crete should switch from a system in which the tithes of several villages were auctioned together to one tax farmer, to another in which the tithe was sold separately by the villagers themselves. The tithe was widely regarded by contemporaries as one of the main reasons for the under-population and backwardness of the Ottoman countryside, so the experiment was of considerable potential interest. The public finances of the island did indeed improve. Income from the tithe rose from 3.2 million francs in 1854-55 to 4.49 million francs in 1856-57, the first year of Veli’s governorship.3

1 FO 195/600, Lionel Woodward, Report to Veli Rifaat Pasha, late Governor of Crete on his work on the island July 1856 to July 1858; FO 195/457, Ongley to de Redcliffe, May 8 1857. 2 Guarracino to Sir H. Bulwer, 1 December 1860, FO 195/600/. 3 See George Finlay, The Euthanasia of the Ottoman Empire, Blackwoods, May 1861. Figures for tithe income, taken from Memorandum Relative to the Island of Candia 1866; FO 881/1462 p.18. Tithe reform is described in FO 195/457 Ongley to Stratford January 30 1856. The idea may possibly have come from Veli’s father, Mustafa Naili Pasha, whose career shows him to have been interested in fiscal reform.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 83 Education Both the Tanzimat statesmen and the emergent political forces among

the Ottoman Christians attached importance to the establishment of schools and the expansion of education1. For the Ottomans, educational development involved two further questions. First was it possible to establish an educational system in which Christians and Muslims would attend school together? Second, what could be done to prevent the widening educational gap between Christians and Muslims?

Veli lists the establishment of schools and hospitals among the objects of his governorship, but the latter (partly because of the earthquake in the autumn of 1856) appear to have been his priority. In June 1857 he was given authority:

“to lay out about 900 pounds for the establishing of schools for the Mussulman population. The Government also provides at its expense four teachers, one of whom is for European languages. Books and stationary will also be paid for by the Government.”

Ongley added: “The Pasha has explained his intention of allowing

children of other Creeds to attend these schools.” 2 A striking feature of Veli’s attempted educational reforms was that he

was attempting to carry them out with the cooperation of the Greek clergy and evidently had some success in doing so. When Bayard Taylor visited Candia in 1858, he was shown around the Greek school of the town by the Metropolitan who had, Taylor tells us, established a school

“in which sixteen hundred children of both sexes were receiving

instruction in it. The Metropolitan had run into severe difficulties with the Cretan clergy

and especially the monasteries and was nicknamed by them, the ‘Turko-polite.’ He informed me that Vely Pasha intended establishing a school in the city

in which both Greek and Turkish children were to be taught together, and I was very glad to find that he was himself strongly in favour of the measures. But if this plan ever has any success it will be in spite of the Greek population.”3

1 Much of the expansion took place after 1878. See Stephanos Gontikakis, I Paideia sti kriti 1878-88; Vikelia Demotiki, Iraklion, 1992. 2 FO 195/457 18 June 1858, Ongley to de Redcliffe. 3 Taylor, Travels, 142-147. Taylor attributes the Archbishop’s unpopularity with the local Christians to his Epirote origins.

84 D A V I D B A R C H A R D Culture Veli’s governorship in Crete coincided with the period when the British

government of Lord Aberdeen took advantage of its privileged standing immediately after the Crimean War with the Ottoman government to launch investigations for antiquities and manuscripts. As far as antiquities were concerned, this was a golden age for the collectors of the British Museum. Knowing that anything of value that was discovered would be removed, particularly at this period when the Empire could hardly say no to any request from its British ally, Ottoman officials were usually unenthusiastic when British antiquarians arrived on their turf.

When Charles Newton of the British Museum arrived in Rhodes in 1852, thinly disguised as a vice-consul, he had had to struggle with suspicious and unfriendly local Ottoman administrators. A rather different and more pleasing welcome awaited the Reverend Henry Coxe, a Fellow of Brasenose College Oxford and Deputy Librarian of the Bodleian, who arrived in March 1857 on board the steamer, HMS Gladiator even though his chances of finding much were poor. “I fear he will find little or nothing to discover in this Island,” wrote Ongley.1 So indeed it proved. But not from want of cooperation from the Ottoman authorities in the shape of Veli who gave Coxe’s investigation his full personal support.

“It would be as unjust as it would be ungenerous to pass over as mere

routine civility the attention paid to me by Veli Pasha. Not only did he himself institute inquiries in different parts of the island for my assistance but he most materially facilitated my own progress from place to place by furnishing me with mules, horses, and attendants to accompany me to all parts of the island which I might desire to visit.

“I can only wish that our united efforts had met with greater success.”

Coxe wrote afterwards. 2 The episode exposed the underlying tensions between the Orthodox

Church and its Ottoman rulers. At every monastery visited by Coxe, the abbot and monks were able to produce at best only standard late medieval Greek Orthodox religious texts. This was unsurprising but the clergy used the opportunity to complain stridently that they had once indeed possessed the Classical manuscripts that their English guest was seeking but that the Turks had burnt them all. Veli’s attempts at openness simply gave Christian clerical

1 Report to Her Majesty's Government, on the Greek Manuscripts yet remaining in the Libraries of the Levant. By H. O. Coxe (Parliamentary Paper 1858.); F0 195/457 p. 273 March 16 1857. 2 Coxe, op. cit., pp. 20-23.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 85 opponents of Ottoman rule the chance to denounce it to a visiting Westerner. Under a more repressive governor this might not have happened.

Humanitarian Activities Slavery A recurrent and important issue for Veli, because of its direct

international implications and especial concern to Britain, was the slave trade between the Ottoman Empire and Africa. The ports of Crete were used as overnight stops by merchant vessels travelling from North Africa to Alexandria, Smyrna and Istanbul. Throughout the middle and later 19th century, British consuls in Canea were under instructions to watch for slave vessels and take action when any were identified.

As a result of this pressure, the trade dwindled as the century advanced, but in the late 1850’s slavers from North Africa were still a not uncommon sight, despite an edict by Abdülmecit in 1854 intended to end slavery.

Ten days after Veli’s arrival as governor in Crete, he was confronted with the issue. An Ottoman brig, the “Fesula” arrived in Canea with a cargo of 86 slaves and their two Arab owners. The slaves were suffering from lack of food. Veli arrested the owners, placed them in irons, and ordered the slaves to be taken out of confinement in the Lazaretto and given food. He applied to the Porte for permission to set the slaves and ordered the imprisonment of the owners. On this last point he was opposed by the Muslim members of his own Council until he convinced the Kadi [Muslim judge] that they had been fed on the blood of cattle, at which point resistance to their release subsided.1

On December 20th 1856, another slaver, the “Mashallah” arrived from Tripoli in Libya (Barbary) with 36 passengers of whom 26 were blacks. Times were changing for the slave traders as a result of Ottoman measures to discourage the practice. “I am told that the price of slaves now in Barbary is exceedingly low owing to the difficulty of exporting them and the clearness of Provisions in the Pashalic of Tripoli,” Ongley wrote. 2

Mehmet Darbashi, the Master of the ship, had documents showing that the blacks were free, but Veli Pasha, noting that there were no individual certificates, suspected a trick, and ordered them brought on shore, where they were allowed to communicate with the colony of blacks which now existed in the suburb of Gazi, south of Canea. The “Chiefs of the Free Negroes” explained to the slaves that they were legally free. “The result was that they all decided with evident satisfaction on remaining here.” 1 FO 195/457 Ongley to de Redcliffe, April 24 1856. 2 FO 195/457, p. 243, Ongley to the Earl of Clarendon, December 23 1856.

86 D A V I D B A R C H A R D Leprosy Veli Pasha may have had practical rather than idealistic motives for

many of his reforms, but his relief measures for the numerous lepers of 19th Crete can only have been prompted by idealistic motives. Leprosy and the relatively large number of lepers was a serious chronic problem for Crete throughout the century. Veli’s initiative was apparently only noted by Captain Spratt who wrote that Veli ordered half an okke of bread to be given to every leper daily.

“This tardy charity is to them a great boon and relieves the local

government of this island from a great blot.”1 The next major attempt to deal with the problem of leprosy would

come around 1900 when Prince George of Greece was the first High Commissioner of an autonomous Crete, But the Prince’s solution, less humane than Veli’s, was simply to turn the island of Spinalonga into a leper colony and confine the leper population there.

Earthquake relief On October 14th 1856, a major earthquake struck eastern Crete,

causing severe damage across the island. Around Candia alone, 700 deaths were reported. “The population is living in tents and a few huts built up in haste,” reported Ongley. “Many of the villages have been totally destroyed.” Veli did not belong to the widespread category of Ottoman governors who responded slowly to a disaster. He opened his father’s mansion at Perivolia as a hospital and relief centre for the wounded. It was almost the only habitable building left. Lionel Woodward was directed to help in the construction of huts and the clearing of badly damaged houses and the rebuilding of the city. “Veli Pasha is doing everything that a humane and energetical man can be expected to do under such circumstances,” wrote Ongley.2

The evidence seems unassailable that Veli’s reform projects for Crete were well-intentioned and essentially sensible. In more fortunate times he might have gone down in history as an outstandingly successful and enlightened administrator. Yet less than three years after he had arrived, he was forced off the island. 1 T.B. Spratt, Travels and Researches in the Levant, London 1865, p. 41. 2 FO 195/457 Ongley to de Redcliffe, 27 October 1856.


“Annoyed by Mahomedans and Christians” — Veli Pasha and the Reception of the Hattð Hümayun in Crete

Few Ottoman administrators might have seemed less likely to be felled

by religio-political conflict than Veli. He had grown up on an island where the difference between Muslims and Christians often meant relatively little and Albanian Muslim husbands privately told their Christian Greek wives that there was little real distinction between the two religions.1

In Bosnia as governor and again in Paris as Ottoman ambassador, Veli had encouraged the building of churches for Ottoman Christians. He was after all the grandson of a priest himself. In Crete he therefore embarked on a church-building programme too, but it would not pay him any dividends in popular support.

Veli used his own funds (his family still owned extensive property in Crete) to engage in a programme of church-building.2 And he pressed the Ottoman Government to authorise large projects. On 17th June 1857, Veli announced to the Greeks of Canea that he had obtained permission from the Sultan for the construction of a new church together with the grant of 100,000 piastres towards its cost. “What Christian government ever helped to build a mosque? What Catholic country ever gave funds to a Protestant church,” asked Bayard Taylor.3

This largesse was of course balanced by assistance to Crete’s Muslims and Veli also encouraged mosque-building, though the Veli Pasha mosque in Rethymo is named after an 18th century predecessor.

Nevertheless the programme ran up against opposition including that of the French consul.

Chatry de la Fosse, according to Longworth, “found fault even with his [Veli’s] liberality in providing the Christians of Canea with ground to build a church on, and he took the part of the fanatic Turks who were opposed to the concession.”4

According to Veli’s anonymous defence of his record in Crete, he also enabled 210 Christian pilgrims to use an Ottoman naval vessel to travel to the shrine of the Virgin on Tinos. “No other Turkish pasha that I have heard of, has shown so much indulgence and liberality of Christians” wrote Longworth afterwards. His conclusion was that Veli had overdone things. “The Pasha behaved with extraordinary liberality towards the Orthodox Greeks…. The

1 Richard Madden, Travels in Turkey, Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine, London 1833, pp. 147-8. 2 This activity, though not the debacle of her ancestor’s Cretan career, was still recalled by Veli’s great-granddaughter, Mrs Ðffet Sunalp, around 2000. 3 B. Taylor, Travels, p. 121. 4 FO 881/1550 Longworth, in Report on Condition of the Island 1858-1862, 13.

88 D A V I D B A R C H A R D truth was that he began by humouring them too much, and this made them unreasonable.” 1

The Rescript of February 1856 Veli’s governorship and his church-building programme coincided with

a drastic change in the Ottoman legal and political environment. In the fourth month of Veli’s stay on the island, the Hattð Hümayun or ‘Imperial Rescript’ was proclaimed in Istanbul on 18th February 1856. Details of it reached Crete in early March.2 The decree, which conferred full legal equality on all Ottoman citizens regardless of their religion, was a radical departure from all previous Islamic state practice. Till now the ruling Islamic caste of an Islamic state had enjoyed substantial legal and social privileges and the economic benefits that flowed from them.

Despite the changes in Crete in the first half of the 19th century, many restrictions were still in force on the island and were the subject of bitter complaints. These were monitored by the consuls of the Western powers, a practice which would grow more intensive and more politically important as the century advanced. Ottoman Christians were not allowed to inherit property from relatives who happened to be Muslim and their inheritance was handled by mosque officials. The testimony of non-Muslims could generally not be used against Muslims in open court, although this law was supposed to have changed already. In addition there were strong sanctions on conversion from Islam to Christianity, and the building of new churches or restoration of old ones was virtually impossible, though, as Veli’s earlier encouragement of church-building shows, this prohibition was already breaking down before 1856.

For Ottoman reforming administrators, the Rescript was a natural extension of the reconstruction which had begun under Mahmut II. The Hattð Hümayun was in line with the general policies of the Tanzimat reformers. Mahmut II (1808-1839) had anticipated its provisions in a famous remark (if indeed he actually said it) that “henceforth he intended to recognize Muslims only in the mosque, Christians only in the church, and Jews only in the synagogue.”3 Even before the decree, the Ottoman government had begun to appoint Christian subjects to senior positions previously reserved only for

1 La Vérité, p. 71; Report of Mr Longworth, 11 and 12. 2 Manoulis Peponakis, Exislamismoi kai Epanekchristianismoi stin Kriti (1645-1899), Rethymno, 1997, pp. 104-5. 3 Eduard Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, ou, histoire des réformes dans l’Empire Ottoman depuis 1826 jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, 1884, Vol. 1, p. 5.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 89 Muslims. In 1840 an Istanbul Christian Greek of Cretan descent, Kostaki Musurus, had been appointed Turkey’s first envoy to Greece.

From the perspective of the Turkish Tanzimat reformers like Veli, the Hattð Hümayun was not just about religious toleration and equality. More importantly, it was also a blueprint for national regeneration. The spring of 1856 which saw the proclamation of the Hattð Hümayun, also saw the Ottoman Empire embarking with relative optimism on administrative, economic, urban development, and educational reforms aimed at turning it into a modern state. The Rescript’s text reflects this spirit, including proposals for the reform and regeneration of Ottoman society and the encouragement of economic progress. The non-Muslims were intended to share in this work. The patriarchates of the main millets or religious communities were expected to reform themselves and their communities: an outcome which by and large did not happen.1

That was not however how the Hattð Hümayun was perceived in Europe. It was known to have been hammered out in tough negotiations between A’ali Pasha, the Grand Vizier, and the British and French Ambassadors in Constantinople in the weeks between the ending of the Crimean War and the Peace Conference in Paris. It was part of a bargain which Britain and France extracted from the Ottomans in return for defending them in the Crimean War. European public opinion would never accept an Ottoman state whose Christian subjects did not exist on equal terms with the rest of the population. In British eyes the emancipation of Ottoman Christians perhaps resembled the United Kingdom’s emancipation of Catholics over a quarter of a century earlier.

But Catholic emancipation was child’s play compared with the challenge that faced the Tanzimat statesmen. They faced potential opposition from both Muslims and Christians.

For the Muslim lower classes, equality with Christians conflicted with some deep taboos, of which the strongest was acceptance of the right to change religion or apostatize from Islam and it meant the loss of entrenched social and legal privileges.

For Christians, outside the elite who were taken into Ottoman public service, the Hattð Hümayun was not seen as a route to a new common Ottoman citizenship but rather as a package of immediate benefits which also

1 The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Tanzimat Reforms: The National Regulations of 1860 Dr. Maria Tsikaloudaki, paper given in March 2003 at a seminar on "The Greek Orthodox Church in the Modern Era" at the University of Haifa: http:/hcc.haifa.ac.il/Departments/history-school/conferences/greek-orthodox_church/pdf/Tsikaloudaki_CongrGreekChurch.pdf

90 D A V I D B A R C H A R D offered a political lever against Ottoman administrators in local disputes through the consuls of the Western European powers.

The Hattð Hümayun in Crete In the spring of 1856 Veli, as he later reported, seriously

underestimated the problems that enforcement of equality would create. In his anonymous defence, he tells us that “The Hattð Hümayun was not really a change in Crete.” There was already, he noted, an element of power-sharing on the island, evidently dating back to the 1830s and the reforms introduced by the Egyptians. Bishops already sat alongside mullahs and kadis in council. Equality, he thought, was not really the problem. 1

In fact the issue proved the most fatally controversial of Veli’s governorship.

The central issue was conversion. Conversion from Christianity to Islam in Crete was a relatively recent phenomenon, less than two hundred years old, which must have been reasonably well-remembered in many families. Furthermore Christians and Muslims were separated by a shifting and uncertain boundary. Until the middle of the 19th century, intermarriage, such as that in Veli’s own family, between Christian girls and Muslim men was fairly common. The frontier between Christian and Muslim ran inside family life, and the rewards for males who conformed outwardly to Islam were created a temptation to dissemble. There seem to have always been some Crypto-Christians among the Cretan Muslim population. The Greek War of Independence of the 1820’s saw some Crypto-Christians renouncing Islam, though at a high risk.

Those risks had now been removed and within a few months of the Hattð Humayün, a trickle of applications began by Cretan Muslims who wanted to register as Christians. The first applicants were in Rethymo and they sounded out not the Ottoman authorities, but the French consular agent there, to see if it was safe to do so. The French consul, de la Fosse, informed the governor, who asked for a delay of a few days while he checked with his masters in Istanbul. Veli’s fears were of a flood of conversions and intercommunal violence. Ongley described his reactions:

“Veli Pasha told me he had done this because the number of those in

Crete who are likely to profess openly Christianity is so great that he fears the Mahomedans of the lower class might be guilty of some excesses towards them, and therefore he is desirous to have the Porte’s opinion on the matter.”

1 La Vérité, p. 14. For the impact as seen by Cretan Christians, see Peponakis, Exislamoi.


He also pointed out that the Hattð Hümayun stated that no one could be forced to change their religion, but it did not explicitly state that Muslims could become Christians.1

Veli’s anxieties were heightened by the presence in Candia of one of the most famous figures in 19th Century Ottoman Kurdish history, Bedirhan Bey, who had been exiled to the island with his family and foreigners at the insistence of the European powers late in 1847 for attacking and killing Nestorian Christians.2 During his early years on Crete, Bedirhan Bey played the role of an uncompromising defender of traditional Sunni Islamic values. “The Kurdish exiles there [Candia] are the heads of the fanatical party,” wrote Ongley and it was they who seemed most likely to create objections to the application of the edict of toleration.3

The accepted view was that some thousands of Cretan Muslims were likely to become Christians. In fact, the figure turned out to be much lower, around 500. Most of these conversions passed off with relatively little incident, despite initial troubles. But in 1857 and 1858 a handful of cases became causes célèbres, with far-reaching consequences for Veli.

Within a few weeks of 19th February 1856, a trickle of defections from Islam to Christianity was getting under way in Crete. There were reports that a Greek priest was instigating covert Muslims to register as Christians. The initial danger was that these conversions, by offending the deepest traditions of the Muslim lower classes, would provoke a fierce reaction from them. Veli told Ongley that he feared “that the conversions might cause some hostile movement on the part of the fanatical Turks in which, in the end, the Turks would be worsted, as the Christian element is superior in strength and numbers in every part of the island except the three cities.”4

Just under three months after the Rescript was promulgated, Ongley wrote to his ambassador on 12 May 1856:

“In consequence of the publication of the new Hattð Sherif of the Sultan

relating to Privileges and Reforms in Turkey, some of those individuals who are openly Mussulmans and in secret Christians have now openly professed the latter faith. About fifteen of them were brought before the Council of the City of Candia a few days ago, and a large crowd of fanatical Turks followed them. One of the police threatened them with decapitation

1 FO 195/457 Ongley to de Redcliffe, 8 April 1856, p.176. 2 For an overview of Bedirhan’s life, see Hasan Gökçe "Bedir Khan Bey, der Emir of Cezire – Einer der letzent autonomem Kurden-Fürsten des 19. Jahrhunderts". in Hans-Lukas Kieser (ed.) Kurdistan und Europe Einblicke in die Kurdische Geschichte des 10. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Chonos Zurich 1997. esp. pp.104-5. (I am grateful to Dr Johan Strauss for this reference.) Contemporary details of the military defeat of Bedirhan which preceded his exile are given in The Times for Times Thursday 5 August 1847. 3 FO 195/457, June 20, 1856, Ongley to de Redcliffe. 4 FO 195/457, Ongley to de Redcliffe, May 12, 1856.


but this man has been put under arrest in consequence of the representations of Mr. Vice-Consul Ittar.”1 At the centre of this storm were seven converts to Christianity in

Candia. Veli ordered them to be held in protective custody in prison while he waited for instructions from Istanbul but after two weeks none had arrived so on the 28th May, Ongley reported that they had been set free and accompanied by guards to protect them until they left the town.

“I feel certain Veli Pasha will not allow any religious persecution here, so far as it is possible to prevent it,” Ongley wrote, in his characteristic fashion which unconsciously created suspicions in the very act of trying to avert them.2 Nonetheless the situation was entirely novel. Ongley added that his French colleague, de La Fosse was already predicting that the Ottoman authorities might respond by asking Veli to require the converts to leave the island. But in fact there was no such request.

At the end of June 1856, there came another and more embarrassing case of family conversion, directly affecting members of the Ottoman administration in the island. The wife, daughter, and son-in-law of Derviþ Efendi, the Treasurer at Candia, switched to Christianity and then immediately sought the protection of a Maltese merchant, Mr Ittar, who was vice-consul there for Britain, France, and Austria. Veli Pasha asked Ongley to instruct Ittar to hand over the three, promising that they would be protected. Ongley had no hesitation in complying. He pointed out to his French colleague that the episode raised the question of whether the Ottoman government was carrying the Hattð Hümayun out of its own accord or only because of foreign pressures. Ongley was eager that it should be the former.

Matters would have been easier if the Ottoman government had taken a strong line, but as Ongley reported “the authorities at Constantinople have given Veli Pasha carte blanche in this affair and enjoin him to do all he can to keep things quiet.” Eventually the three were reunited on grudging terms, with Derviþ Efendi threatening to do nothing worse to his daughter than disinherit her. But the Treasurer warned Veli that in the village of Episkopi, mass conversions to Christianity appeared to be under way, claiming that only four out of eighty “Turkish”, i.e. Muslim, families remained.3

A fortnight later, Veli paid a visit to Candia “to calm down the irritation said to exist there between the Christians and the Turks.” Vice-Consul Ittar was reporting rumours of insulting and beatings of the apostates, particularly in the Sitia district and said that in Candia itself, fear of Muslim

1 F0 195/457, Ongley to de Redcliffe, May 12 1856. 2 ibid, 28 May 1856. 3 ibid June 27 1856.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 93 reprisals was growing. Veli ordered that any Muslims beating Christians should be arrested and sent to Candia. As a precaution he had written to Istanbul asking for two battalions of soldiers to be sent to the island to help him maintain order.

The risk, as he with great candour explained to Ongley, was that, with the rural Muslims being a vulnerable minority, “a few hot-headed fanatical Turks might bring about a state of things which the greater part of their countrymen would wish to avoid.”1

The lack of proactive policy-making and clear guidelines from the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople left Veli in an unenviable situation. By the end of the summer, the converts were growing steadily bolder, and to Muslim eyes, more impudent. On September 29 Ongley reported that “the Christians do not always act with prudence.” When the apostates returned to their villages, the Christians received them with “public manifestations of joy” which “led to some little disturbances.”2

Furthermore the conversions were followed by property disputes. When only part of a family converted to Christianity, those who remained Muslim sued to seize their property from them, as the converts had inherited from Muslims and under Islamic law, Christians could not be the heirs of Muslims. As Ongley pointed out, this retrospective forfeiture was legal and practical nonsense but at this date the Christian converts could still be seen by ordinary Muslims as defectors from a ruling caste who lost their privileges when they abandoned it.3

In trying to make the edict of toleration a reality, Veli seems to have gone further and faster than many other Ottoman administrators. This, combined with his interest in attracting an international audience in Europe and America, gained him for a while the compliments of diplomats. A year later, in the spring of 1857, he was in correspondence with Carroll Spence, the American Minister in Istanbul. He had been put in touch with Spence by a Cretan Greek lady, Elizabeth Contaxachi, who was one of the governor’s few ardent supporters. On May 26th 1857 Spence wrote to Veli warning that “this charter of civil and religious equality will be nugatory, unless the Ottoman functionaries, to whom the execution of its decrees are entrusted, exert themselves zealously to carry into effect its liberal enactments.

“To those who have done so, the acknowledgements of all liberal

governments are due, and I am pleased to express to you my conviction, that no governor general in Turkey is better entitled to them than your Excellency…Permit me therefore…to testify my sincere admiration for your character, as a philanthropist and a statesman.”

1 FO 195/457, p. 211, Ongley to de Redcliffe, July 11 1856. 2 FO 195/457, p. 226, Ongley to de Redcliffe, September 29 1856. 3 ibid.


Spence urged Veli to continue “on the path of reform” even though he might “be annoyed by Mahomedans and Christians” and promised that “your Excellency will nevertheless eventually reap the greatest reward a statesman can attain, the respect of all good and sensible men.”1 This forecast proved badly mistaken.

The particularly thorny complication of the conversion issue was that it cut across distinctions of sex and class. Advocates of toleration and religious freedom in the Ottoman Empire had conceived of religious identification in terms of choices made by adults and essentially by adult males, in other words by heads of households and families. Yet the early cases that occurred in practice reveal the role played by women. These may reflect a difference between the public world of Ottoman Cretan men and the private world of their womenfolk. In the latter Christianity and crypto-Christianity perhaps lingered.

The issue of female conversion was not new or confined to Crete: it was already an intrinsic problem both for the new order emerging in the Ottoman Empire and also in the interplay between the Empire and for the diplomats of the Christian Western powers that had now penetrated so deeply into its internal life. On several occasions in the 1840’s, more than a decade before the Hattð Hümayun, conversion disputes had already been one of the most awkward issues in the dealings of foreign ambassadors (who were invoked by converts as protectors) and the Ottoman government. The hardest cases involved teenage girls, whose ability to decide their religion was open to question and whose adherence to a particular religion might fluctuate with the progress or collapse of a romance. 2

On Crete the danger that romance and religion would become intertwined was clearly seen by the governor, though he saw it as being sometimes a problem of the deliberate seducing of Muslims away from their faith, a view which was later endorsed by Longworth.

“Young Turks see the Greek girls fall in love with them and change their

religion to marry them, while the young Greeks do not see the young Turkish girls and therefore are not induced to act in the same manner,”

1 Carroll Spence to Veli Pasha, 26 May 1857, Spence Collection Georgetown University. Veli and Spence were also in contact over a proposal by Veli to donate Cretan marble for the Washington Monument. See: also Spence Collection, Box: 1 Fold: 23 Correspondence: Elizabeth B. Kontaxaki to Carroll Spence; 7/28/1857 & 10/2/1857. 2 See for example the case described in the Times of 18 August 1847 in which the young A’ali Efendi deals with a case of conversion to, and subsequent apostasy from, Islam by a young girl in Damascus. For cases in Crete, see Peponakis, Exislamoi, pp. 98-103.


Veli told Ongley. The consul himself noted “When young girls or married women, whether Greeks or Turks abandon their religion for the sake of their lovers, the Turkish population cannot view such a matter with satisfaction, nor do the Greeks in general like it.” 1

The Breakdown with the Consuls As a result of these pressures, Veli Pasha’s administration began to run

into serious difficulties. By 1857 they were sufficiently great to call his position on the island into question. The trouble came initially, as we have seen, not from the local population but from the consuls of France, Austria, and Greece and the first manifestations of it appeared not on the island, but in the international press at the other end of Europe.

Reporting on his investigation in Crete immediately after Veli’s departure, Longworth described how

…an alliance sprung up and offensive measures soon resulted from it.

Libels against Veli Pasha soon began to appear in foreign newspapers, in those of Athens, Trieste, and Belgium. Nobody could for a moment doubt from what sources these slanders emanated or avoid associating them with the known sentiments of the three Consulates….the abuse became as it proceeded more and more virulent, the charges more and more reckless.2 On January 30th 1857, Ongley reported

“I have also to complain of the behaviour of the French Consul towards myself on several occasions, but particularly within the last two months, as regards a vile and infamous libel against the Governor, myself, and several respectable ladies and gentlemen here, written there is every reason to believe by a M. Joseph Caporal, a Frenchman and published through the medium of his nephew, Adolphus Caporal, the former favourably known to the French government and an intimate friend of the Consul, the latter a man of very indifferent character.”3 These charges eventually culminated in accusations of murder: Veli

was accused by Le Nord, a Belgian newspaper, of poisoning the French woman governess teaching his children and later of killing the Archbishop of Candia. The governor sued successfully in the Belgian courts for libel, winning

1 FO 195/457 Ongley to de Redcliffe 17 January 1857. and 1st April 1857. FO 881/1550 28 August 1858, Report by Consul Longworth on the Primary Causes, p.12. 2 FO 881/1550 Reports. Condition of the Island 1858-1862, 13. 3 FO 195/457 Ongley to de Redcliffe, p. 248-50. January, 30 1857.

96 D A V I D B A R C H A R D substantial damages of 150 livres. The newspaper withheld the name of the writer of the article.1

Seen from a 21st century perspective, the most surprising feature of the contest between Veli Pasha and the consuls is the impunity with which fairly junior French and Austrian officials could proceed against an Ottoman official whom they did not like. Veli was by no means the first Ottoman governor to experience this. In January 1853, one of the greatest figures among the Tanzimat reformers, A’ali Pasha, had been sacked as governor of Ðzmir at the insistence of an unfriendly Austrian consul.

By the spring of 1857, Cretan opinion was divided over the success of Veli Pasha’s policies. The Governor was beginning to face a formidable range of enemies. These naturally included nationalist Greeks, who wanted the reform process to fail and traditionalist Muslims, but his main opponents in the early stages appear to have been simply Chatry de la Fosse and Stiglitz, the consuls of France and Austria, together with Joseph Caporal and his family, which was connected by marriage with the Austrian consul. Stiglitz’s hostility to Veli appears to have been motivated entirely by private family concerns revolving around the slight to Joseph Caporal, his relative-by-marriage.

In the early stages the opposition was not in principle philhellene. Chatry de la Fosse and his Chancelier and successor Derché seized any means they could to undermine Veli. This sometimes meant they criticized him not from a Christian standpoint but from a hard-line Muslim one.

In February 1857, for example, Ongley reported that the French consul had been advising the Muslim opponents of street lighting in Canea how they should organise a petition against the governor and also that the consul was handing out money to the poor Muslims “apparently for the purposes of currying favour with them, for else why not have it distributed to both Turks and Greeks?”2 Their criticisms over church-building have been noted above.

Their campaign against Veli in the European press having failed to dislodge him, the consuls decided to strike nearer home. They sent Joseph Caporal to the Ottoman capital to see “what could be done with the Embassies and the Porte to seek his removal.”3 But at this stage Veli was far from being a wholly isolated figure on Crete. Indeed in the spring of 1857, there was something of a groundswell of support for him, led by Elizabeth Kondaxachi, the governor’s most enthusiastic ally. Kontaxachi’s ardent friendship with 1 FO 881/1550 Turkey: Reports. Condition of Crete: Longworth to Sir H. Bulwer, 28 September, 1858. 2 FO 197/457 Ongley to de Redcliffe, p. 263, February 21 1857. 3 ibid, p. 14.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 97 Veli may have been part of the character-assassination campaign by the Consuls.

Be that as it may, Kondaxachi was an intelligent woman and an effective supporter. Early in 1857 she organised a petition to the Porte thanking the Sultan for granting the Hattð Hümayun and expressing satisfaction in the way in which Veli Pasha was implementing it. A total of 2,500 signatures (roughly equivalent to one percent of the total population of the island) was collected.

Kontaxachi then sailed to Istanbul1, accompanied by representatives from Candia and Canea, to present the petition to the Porte and to lobby foreign embassies on behalf of Veli Pasha. She had considerable success with the British and Americans, though less with the French ambassador, Edouard Thouvenel. Nonetheless her aim of securing Veli Pasha’s position was achieved and the threat, real or imagined, of his withdrawal receded. Veli “received a Firman publicly acknowledging his services, and was rewarded with a decoration of the first class of Order of Merit from the Sultan.” 2

Around the same time however, Chatry de la Fosse and Stiglitz received reinforcements with the arrival of a new Greek consul, Nicholas Canaris, on the island. The son of a Greek minister, Canaris landed in Canea on a Greek military gunboat on 29th May 1857, ignoring both the conventional 21-gun salute to the fortress and the quarantine regulations of which he had been forewarned. He also brushed aside Veli’s polite attempts to find a solution for his problems. The Sanitary Department, over whom the governor had no authority, then held him for the full 21 days. Once in the saddle, Canaris quickly aligned himself with the Austrian and French consuls and his influence seems to have made their opposition to the governor more definitely philhellenic in tone.3

The Opened Mail Packages During the spring of 1857, Veli Pasha also became drawn into a

separate dispute between Ongley and Stiglitz. One of Veli’s aims had been to open a new Austrian Lloyds steamship link between Crete and Syra. In May 1857 this came into operation. When the boat arrived, Ongley went on board (he and Stiglitz were both shipping agents) and found it was bearing mail 1 M. Caporal, evidently bent on a rival mission, was on the same boat. 2 FO 195/457 p. 275, April 1st 1857 Ongley to de Redcliffe; FO 195/600, Longworth to Sir H. Bulwer, 28 September, 1858. 3 FO 195/457, Ongley to de Redcliffe, p.245, January 7 1857 (marked ‘not sent home’ in Constantinople) and 31 May 1857.

98 D A V I D B A R C H A R D packages with ‘red pencil’ letters intended for Canea and addressed to Stiglitz. Ongley, according to his own account intervened, thinking they had gone astray. He opened some of the packets and forwarded them to their destinations.

A furious and protracted altercation then followed between the two consuls, with each accusing the other of improper behaviour to the governor and demanding the other be sacked. A few weeks later, Ongley was able to claim that he had caught Stiglitz tampering with mail and that a letter to the governor from his father in Istanbul had been diverted and opened.

It is difficult to know what was really at stake. Was Ongley tampering with the mail of his rivals? His attempts to exculpate himself as usual only make the reader suspect him of evasion or worse—but it is curious that one of those whose letters was interfered with was a ‘Signor Bolanaki”, presumably a relative of Veli Pasha through his Cretan Greek mother.1

The conversion scandals of 1857 While the consuls of England and Austria bickered, the religious

disputes of the island continued. The governor faced a series of awkward decisions throughout 1856 and 1857, each of which was likely to offend one of the communities. The flow of converts after the Hattð Hümayun had taken an unexpected turn and was now happening in both directions. While some Cretans wanted to become Christians, others wished to convert to Islam.

At the end of 1856 Veli received applications from four Candia Greeks wanting to become Muslims. Three of the four were girls, but the other applicant was a priest. Veli withheld permission for the girls to convert and gave the priest sixty days to consider his choice, intending to make him “feel the odiousness and ridiculousness of his conduct.” Later he did exactly the same to three Muslim minors who want to become Greeks to get away from the surveillance of their families.2

Love and elopements continued to be the main motive in many conversions. On January 17th 1857, Ongley reported to Stratford that a 25-year old girl had taken refuge in his house, saying she wanted to become a Christian.

“It turned out that the reason for this was not conscientious feelings but a

love affair with a Christian servant of her father and she was afraid of her father’s anger….Her father says he will rather kill her than see her become a Christian.”

1 FO 195/457 May 1857, Ongley to de Radcliff. 2 La Vérité, p. 74.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 99 Ongley passed the young woman to the home of Veli’s secretary,

saying that “it was probable that, she would be allowed to marry the man she chose.” 1

Then came two controversial applications by girl converts in opposite directions. In April 1857, the governor received an application from the daughter of a Cretan Christian, Pervolaraki Andoni, to become Muslim in order to marry someone called Ramazan whom her father opposed. Taking the view that she was too young to decide for herself, Veli refused permission. He tells us that the Greeks “highly approved” his decision2.

Only a few days later however, Veli received an application from a young Muslim girl, apparently still in her teens, called Safiye who wanted to become a Christian3. Again it was in order to marry a servant, this time a person called Cocoli. Veli treated her in exactly the same way as he had done the Christian girl and refused permission, but quickly found himself confronted by an uproar.

On 19th May 1857 news of the Pasha’s refusal to allow the conversion was published in the Parisian press, a development which must have been mortifyingly embarrassing to the former ambassador and perhaps contributed to his growing isolation.4

The girl had been baptized by the “Monk Parthenius” 5, an Ionian priest, (thus someone under British protection at that date) while members of her family claimed she had stolen money. In order to get her away from them, Veli took her into the women’s quarters of his own household or ‘harem.’ Interviewed by the Cretan Judicial Council, the girl insisted that she wished to become a Christian and the Ionian priest backed her up, citing the Hattð Hümayun. Cretan Christian opinion now came out against the decision. In its eyes, the former ‘Safiye’ was now Marigo. 6

Veli declared his intention to keep the girl in his household along with his daughter Ðffet and his other children until she turned 21. Inside his house, Safiye/Marigo was considered as a Christian as of course was Veli’s mother.

1 FO 195/1857, p. 254 Ongley to de Redcliffe, January 17 1857. 2 La Vérité, p. 74. Veli adds that the girl later became Catholic and then tried to return to Islam. 3 La Vérité, p.74; FO 195/1857, April 1. and 30 June. Ongley gives the name of the girl as ‘Chakir’=Þakir—also the name of a wealthy Mussulman merchant punished by exile in the Mournies incident of 1833. Veli’s conduct is easier to understand if the girl was a member of a leading Cretan family. 4 La Vérité, p. 74. 5 FO 195/1857 p. 336 contains a signature giving the priest’s full name as Parthenius Pannaiotti Mavromatti, but here and in FO 195 600, Ongley to Lord Clarendon, 6 January 1858, Ongley calls him Parthenius Baggi. Another Ionian Father Parthenius Kelaides, would be the driving force in Crete for union with Greece over the next three decades 6 La Vérité, p. 74; FO 195/457 14 April, p. 277, Ongley to de Redcliffe, and p. 322, 30 June 1857.

100 D A V I D B A R C H A R D She was periodically visited by Lucy Ongley to see that all was well. The girl was “treated by Veli Pasha’s mother as quite a companion,” Mrs Ongley reported. Nevertheless the governor was conscious of the possibilities that she would claim ill-treatment and be taken into hiding, while he would incur further bad publicity in Crete and abroad.

His fears were born out by events. In late June Safiye/Marigo vanished, evidently smuggled out of the governor’s house by her new co-religionists. “They take away the girl as if I had ill-treated her or was going to do so,” Veli told Ongley indignantly, adding “If I do not find her, the Turks will say that I connived at her escape and am encouraging Turkish girls to become Christians.” Ongley’s reaction was that “the Monk Parthenius who has caused all the trouble should be sent out of the island.” 1

In mid-July the girl was found. She had apparently been hiding in the monk’s house. She now refused to have anything to do with her family but was taken by carriage to the Governor’s house. Lengthy interrogations of the girl, Parthenius, and other witnesses, followed, were carried out in the presence of Veli’s loyal friend and supporter, Elizabeth Kontaxachi. The girl refused to return to her family and said that she had lived at the houses of priests for months—a claim Parthenius stoutly denied in a statement which Ongley described as “a tissue of lies.”)

On the 18th July, Ongley decided to place Parthenius under arrest at the house of Bishop Kallistos of Canea. But before this could be done, the monk got wind of the decision and fled to the house of the French consul, declaring that he would not leave the building because of Ongley’s plans to send him to Constantinople and he feared for his life. Later Ongley persuaded him to come to a meeting at which the monk apologized to the British consul and begged forgiveness.2. Safiye/Marigo meanwhile was handed over to her family and was supposed to have been taken by steamer to Constantinople. In fact, as Ongley reported a month later, she turned up in Syra, from where she was taken to Athens3. She thus became, as far as Christian propaganda was concerned, a living testimony to Veli Pasha’s intolerance. Veli himself was now even more strongly convinced of the need to prevent young Christian men from seducing Muslim girls from their families and began to wonder if a law could not be passed to allow Muslim girls to marry Christian men, thus making the conversion issue irrelevant.

1 FO 195/457, p. 320 Ongley to de Redcliffe, June 30 1857. 2 FO 195/457, pp. 331-6, July 18 1857, Ongley to de Redcliffe. 3 FO 195/457 p. 361, August 22 1857, Ongley to de Redcliffe. La Vérité, p.74.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 101 At this point, the affair of the opened packages and the uncontrollable

fury it generated between Ongley and the other consuls re-erupted. Ongley’s reporting during the second half of 1857 focuses at excruciating length on his disputes with his Austrian and French colleagues and the demands of each side that the other be sacked. No doubt he felt to some extent that his professional life was at stake. But as a result the conversion scandals, and the effects they were having on Veli’s standing in the island, are eclipsed in Ongley’s reports.

As Veli’s disillusionment with the Cretan community deepened, his control over events slipped away. Apart from the complicated row with Stiglitz over the packages, the French consul, de la Fosse, was now, Ongley reported, saying openly that either he or Veli Pasha must leave the island while the chancelier of the Consulate, Derché, had defied protocol by letting the governor know that he was offended because he had not been to see him.1

As already noted,2 the weakness of the Ottoman Empire meant that consuls sometimes effectively enjoyed more power than a provincial governor. Caught between the consuls of Austria and France, and the two communities in Crete, Veli Pasha’s only friends seem to have been Elizabeth Kontaxachi and Henry Ongley—the latter to judge both from his own account and the subsequent turn of events being now Veli’s main source of advice.

The Final Act: January to July 1858 At the beginning of 1858, new Ottoman government regulations on

conscription arrived in Crete.3 Christians as well as Muslims were henceforth liable to military service. The requirement was logical. If the Ottoman Empire was ever to become a unified modern state, it would have to be able to call on all its citizens to defend it. But conscription was deeply unpopular in Ottoman rural society, and Christians regarded non-liability for military service as their one major advantage over their Muslim fellow-countrymen. The prospect of

1 Ongley notes that Derché was known by his own government to be a “difficult character” and caused problems with other British officials. Nine years later, Derché was also strongly disliked by the philhellene American consul, William Stillman. A year later Derché’s successor shocked Charles Mismer, French secretary of the Grand Vizier A’ali Pasha , in Canea 1867 by flouting diplomatic convention by turning up late for an appointment with the head of the Ottoman government, “dressed like a colonel of the future [Paris] Commune”, see Mismer Souvenirs du Monde Musulman, Hachette, Paris, 1892, p. 40. However consular misbehaviour involving foreign sovereigns could lead to retribution: Chatry de la Fosse seems to have left the island in the autumn of 1857 because of the excessive protests he made at not being invited to a dinner party to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday that spring. 2 See above p. 44. . 3 The account of these months is based on Report by Consul Longworth on the Primary Causes of the Insurrection in Crete,

102 D A V I D B A R C H A R D serving in the Ottoman armies was an unwelcome twist to the freedoms conferred by the Hattð Hümayun.

Faced with strong opposition, the Ottoman government made a compromise. It introduced a bedel or commutation charge of 5,000 piastres for Christians. “Few Muslim communities would decline to purchase immunity from military service on these terms,” James Longworth commented.1

Payment was to be made by local communities, rather than individuals. Furthermore as the new system had in theory been introduced two years earlier at the time of the Hattð Hümayun, there was a backlog of payments to be collected. Given the fragility of his position, Veli Pasha, would have been well advised to stand aside, but his instincts were more those of an administrator than a politician, and he tried to direct the assessment process personally. “He … drew great odium on himself thereby,” wrote Longworth afterwards.2

The Christians in the countryside were in a self-confident mood during the first few months of 1858. The olive harvest ended in January. It was a bumper season and the farmers felt able to take a tough line, not least perhaps because they had more money in their pockets than usual and feared that the authorities were trying to take it away. Discontent was fanned in following weeks by rumours of more taxes, a tax on sheep and goat, which seems to have been wholly imaginary. The over-excitement and hysteria which was a recurrent feature of Cretan life though the 19th century had erupted and would grow stronger as the months passed.

As signs of civil disobedience became more numerous, the government had increasingly to use force. In Selinos, on the south of the islands, five Seliniots took to the mountains refusing to pay recruitment tax. They were arrested and brought before the council and sent in March 1858 to Constantinople. Instead of strengthening his authority, this action made Veli appear harsh and injudicious. Then the population of Amaria and Agia Vassili on the south coast told their müdürs [local officers) that they would not pay the military tax.

Veli decided to go to the district himself and meet the dissidents at Akoumia. Accompanied only by his French secretary, two Turkish text-writers, and a small group of zaptiyes, [Ottoman constables], he sat in the porch of the church with the Orthodox priests and ‘captains’ of Akoumia.

1 FO 881/1550, Longworth, Report, 25 August 1858, reprinted in Public Print, February 20 1867 Crete p.10. 2 FO 881/1550, Longworth, Report, p.10.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 103 Eventually he convinced the villagers to pay up and obtained the money a few days later.

Even in these remote places there were signs of a hidden hand working against him. At the monastery of Asomatos, the abbot informed him that the Christians were ‘being pushed by foreign emissaries.’ The same story was told him in other villages.1

The Insurrection Begins In the spring of 1858, violence against the government finally erupted.

As always in 19th century Cretan revolts, the leader was a Christian chief working in Ottoman service who switched his loyalties. In the village of Lakos (today Lakki) 20km south of Canea, Mavroyeni, a zaptiye in Canea, declared a revolt, aided by three companions from Alikianou, Stellino Giorgaki, Hadji Kiriakio, and Carzoupi Bakrovardono. Despite Crete’s history of insurrections, Longworth tells us in his report that contemporary newspapers took it as established fact that these events had been orchestrated by Derché and Stiglitz.

A certain amount of concerted activity was publicly discernible. A few days after the insurrection had begun, the French consul sent for a French warship, the “Solon” and the chiefs were invited on board, though the French officers may not have understood the implications of parading the guests. The insurgents seem to have hoped for arms and ammunition, but received neither. Nonetheless the revolt started to gather force.

Even so, in Longworth’s view, writing soon after the event, it was Veli’s misjudgements rather than the strength of the opposition which caused it to succeed in its aim of evicting him.

“It is after all, probable that a movement thus hastily contrived for the

purpose of getting rid of the Pasha would have proved no very serious affair or have failed even in its object, had not the pasha himself been deficient in resolution and presence of mind,”

Longworth wrote2. On 16th May, the second day of the Muslim Þeker Bayramð, the

holiday at the end of Ramazan, the insurgents struck directly against the government for the first time, murdering two Albanian soldiers at Melbesin

1 La Vérité, P.52-3. For a negative view, Longworth Report. 2 FO 881/1550, Longworth, Report p.10.

104 D A V I D B A R C H A R D Amari Kastelli. This was the signal for panic among Muslims in western areas of the coast. 1

Tensions between Cretan Christians and Muslims in rural communities were now very great. Hearing news of the murders, rural Cretan Muslims reacted as they always did at such times by fleeing for safety to Canea and the other fortified cities along the northern coast.

A fresh Muslim flight to the towns would mean that the Ottoman government lost control of the countryside. Veli personally remembered the events of 1841 and other uprisings and no doubt knew that his predecessor, Mehmet Emin Pasha, had scotched an insurrection in 1854 by keeping the gates of the towns closed and refusing to allow an exodus of Muslims from the countryside. There was therefore a strong case for remaining firm.

But the governor lost his nerve. Always mindful of the weakness of the Ottoman Muslim presence on the island and the fact that it could not be sustained without military support from outside, Veli responded by handing 500 guns to Muslims in Rethymno and allowed the flight into the towns to continue. He was now being accused of atrocities, apparently without any foundation, by the press in Athens.

Spratt, possibly on the basis of what Veli or his associates told him, believed that this was done out of humanitarian motives to prevent bloodshed, but Longworth took the view that it had been a fatal mistake, permitting the insurrection to become general and causing the Ottoman government temporarily to lose control over most of the hinterland. Veli himself wrote proudly afterwards that “In all this insurrection there was not one Turkish shot fired against the Greeks or one Greek shot fired against the Turks.”2

The decision led inexorably to a disaster for the Cretan Muslims themselves, just as earlier and later flights of this kind also did. Once inside the walls, the defenders faced siege conditions and shortages of water and food. They also lost the summer crops they grew for food after the olive harvest was over. Though the troubles of 1858 were relatively brief by the standards of 19th century Cretan insurrections and lasted a mere three months, Spratt, one of the few 19th century Western observers at any date who paid attention to the sufferings the sieges inflicted on the Cretan Muslims, wrote:

1 The timing of the attack is not mentioned by Ongley or other contemporaries. Many 19th century Cretan insurrections and inter-communal clashes coincide with Christian or Muslim religious holidays, especially in the spring. Veli reports being handicapped by the absence of some of his officials on holiday. The negotiations seven days later may also have been linked to the Pentecost festival on 23 May. In the next insurrection of 1866, the murder of Albanian soldiers also triggered a flight. 2 La Vérité, p. 54. See also p.13. Explaining the geography of the island, Veli writes of “propriétaires et les cultivateurs musulmans disséminés sans défense sur d’immenses étendues où il leur est impossible de s’improviser des centres de résistance.”


“Thus crowded within the fortresses and fortified towns at the hottest season, and many of the Turks being without sufficient food and resources for their families, sickness and want spread amongst them; and, becoming more and more irritated day by day under the growing misery of their starving wives and children, whilst their crops were spoiling through no fault of their own, it was with difficulty that open violence was prevented and order maintained in Candia—alarms or panics frequently occurring.”1 In 1858 the insurrectionists do not seem to have had any hopes of

immediate union with Greece. Instead they forwarded their demands through Stiglitz and Derché whom they met on the 20th May on Mount Eleousa. “I firmly believe that the whole affair is an intrigue of the French, Greek, and Austrian consulates,” Ongley wrote, reporting the insurgents’ meeting of 21st May.2

On May 24th, Veli wrote to the insurgents, saying that he had treated them as a father rather than a governor, and pointing to the new religious freedom on the island and denying most of the new taxes. He told them to disperse and go to their homes and not to forward complaints to him through foreign consuls. “The consuls are here for no other purpose but that of looking after the interests of their own subjects, and not to interfere in the affairs of Ottoman subjects.”3

However the disorders were being followed by the Ottoman government in Istanbul, where Caporal was by now living and the sands were running out for Veli’s governorship. In late May the Ottoman government despatched three Imperial Commissioners to restore order. Two were Muslims, Admiral Ahmet Pasha and Remzi Efendi. The third, Adossides Efendi, was an Ottoman Greek, one of the new generation of Christian officials who would play a frontline role in Crete and elsewhere in the Empire over the next half century. “I have named these persons according to their rank,” Longworth wrote afterwards, “But if precedence were allowed to actual influence and capacity, the order would have to be exactly inverted.”4

The commissioners were not the harbingers of an Ottoman military invasion of the island. Instead they entered into talks with both Christians and Muslims. On 25th May, they and Veli signed a deal with the insurgents granting an amnesty and agreed to ask the Ottoman government to ease the proposed tax on straw. They also asked the Ottoman government to consider

1 T.B. Spratt Travels, pp. 52-3. 2 FO 195/.600 May 21 1858. 3 The full text of his letter to the Cretans of May 21 1858 is reprinted in the Confidential Paper of February 20 1867. 4 FO 881/1550, Longworth, Report, p.16.

106 D A V I D B A R C H A R D whether or not to end the involvement of the Muslim clergy in assessing Christian inheritances. The Cretan district councils would be elected annually.

Nonetheless these agreements did not stick, at least initially. Ongley, travelling around the countryside, found the population in a state of high excitement with the peasants obsessively fearful of new taxes. He thought that the consuls and French priests were responsible for fomenting the crisis. The violence caused by it was growing worse. Two more Albanian soldiers were murdered by Cretan Christians near Rethymno and on Saturday 29th May, there was fighting in Candia when Christians stabbed a Muslim in a pothouse brawl. A general attack by the town’s Muslims on its Christians was averted with difficulty, partly thanks to the efforts of the exiled Kurdish chieftain from Jizre, Bedirhan Bey. Since a visit to Constantinople the previous year, Bedirhan had been living in hopes of release from the island and no longer sided with the hard-line Muslims. He sheltered Cretan Christians in his house and the danger of violence passed.1

Tensions between Veli and the Imperial Commissioners Relations between the commissioners and the government had quickly

broken down after their arrival. Despite their willingness to strike a deal with the Christians, Ahmet Pasha and Remzi Efendi were officials of a more conservative disposition than Veli and were soon on bad terms with him, partly because of his determination to cling on to the government of the island.

By the second week of June, the commissioners had convinced themselves that they could inform the capital that they had restored peace. But the Muslim population still refused to leave the safety of the towns despite the conditions they had to endure inside the walls. Outside the towns, there were skirmishes between the two communities as Muslim groups forayed out to get water and food for their animals. 2

The Governor remained on his estate at Perivolia outside Canea. He was still in close contact with Henry Ongley, now his sole adviser and friend. According to Ongley, Veli believed that he had sufficient support among Cretan Muslims to undercut the commissioners and see him through the dispute.

On the 7th June, the opponents of Veli and Ongley made their next move, one with fatal consequences for the British consul’s career in Crete.

1 FO 195/600, Ongley to Constantinople, May 28, 20, 24, and 31 1858. 2 Ongley to Alison, 9 June 1858, reprinted in Confidential Paper of 20 February 1867, p.5.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 107 The insurgents and their supporters addressed a petition to the British Embassy in Constantinople. The signatories emphasized that they had not sent it through the British Consulate in Canea because of the partiality and improper actions of the consul. The document was afterwards described by Longworth during his investigations as “the calumnies of a few disreputable Ionians at Canea”.1

Names such as Calechorino and Cassimati, the signatures of Ionian merchant families fairly recently established on the island, are indeed conspicuous in the petition. The Ionians, who had been among the first to complain of Veli’s reforms in November 1856, represented the future of Crete. Families in the protests against Veli were destined to dominate both commercial and British consular life for the remainder of the century, linking the latter closely with Greek nationalism.

The petition offered several apparently damning reasons why its signatories had not sent it via Ongley.

“1. Because the representative of the Great Power of Britain in this place has

commercial interests on account of which he has sacrificed not only the interests of such foreigners as apply for his assistance, but even those of this own subjects.

“2. Because he is on terms of the greatest intimacy with the present governor of Crete, Veli Pasha, against whom we are petitioning, and with whom he cooperates for our misfortune.

“3. Because he does not enjoy the least favour on the part of the inhabitants of Crete, of whatever nationality they may be.

“4. Because whenever the least disturbance is heard of on our part, he advises the Governor, Veli Pasha, to apprehend 50 or 60 of us and to torment them, whilst on the contrary we expect that on each occasion he would recommend him to act better and more wisely.”2

It was probably no accident that the allegation about Ongley’s

personal business interests taking precedence over his duties as a consul was placed top of the list. The charge was a shrewd blow against the consul. The mid-Victorian Foreign Office was intensely uneasy about relying on merchants to act as its consuls and would end the practice in the next quarter century. An investigation into Ongley’s affairs was now inevitable.3

Under different circumstances, and without such aspersions by the local British-protected community, the consul might have been entitled to the strong backing of his superiors. That in turn would have assisted Veli. But the 1 Longworth, Report,. P.17 2 FO 195/600, p. 91, 7 June 1858. Humble Petition of the Christian Inhabitants of all Crete to Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy. 3 For a 19th century discussion of the problems of the British consular service, see J.C. M’Coan, Consular Jurisdiction in Turkey and Egypt, William Ridgway, London 1878, esp. p.15. M’Coan’s anxieties centre precisely on the sort of consular representation that the British had in Crete after 1860.

108 D A V I D B A R C H A R D reputation of both men had been too deeply undermined during the previous two years.

In any case, the petition’s arrival in Constantinople coincided with the ambassadorial interregnum between Viscount de Redcliffe’s final departure from the city, after his resignation in support of Palmerston, and the arrival of his successor, Sir Henry Bulwer at the beginning of July.

To judge from the absence of references to it in his final despatches from Crete, Ongley was completely unaware of the petition in the final weeks during June, a sign perhaps of how isolated he and the governor now were from events in the Austrian-French-Insurgent camp.

After a short absence from Canea, Admiral Ahmet Pasha returned to the Cretan capital on June 17th. On 21st June, the first orders arrived indicating that Veli would definitely be recalled to Constantinople. His successor was to be Sami Pasha, the man who had also replaced him in Bosnia. The security situation remained urgent with clashes between the insurgents and local Muslims still taking place around the walls of the large cities and the Muslims, according to Longworth, burning the olive trees of their Greek neighbours1.

Instead of accepting that his time in Crete was over, Veli Pasha continued to linger in his residence, conduct which attracted attention as far away as London. Crete was of course his homeland. Perhaps like other 19th century governors of Crete, Christian and Muslim, he harboured inside him a dream of becoming ‘Prince of Crete’. He may well have realised that once he left, he would probably never see the island again. And he may have been fearful of the reception that would await him in Istanbul if he returned to the capital in disgrace and have retained some hopes of being able to use his personal influence on the island to retrieve the situation.

So for two weeks after his recall, Veli did nothing but continue to argue that he was under no obligation to step down until his successor arrived.2 However the insurrection continued and the tension got worse.

On Saturday, 3rd of July, violence broke out in the centre of Canea itself after a young Christian robbed and murdered a Muslim shopkeeper. He was swiftly caught and detained by Ahmet Pasha. Excitement among the Cretan Muslims was now at fever pitch. Angry crowds demanding revenge for the killing began to carry the corpse around, eventually arriving at the building where Ahmet Pasha was and firing shots to demand the immediate execution of the killer. It was the worst outbreak seen in the town for more than a decade.

1 Longworth, Report on the Primary Causes, p.16. Longworth here emphasizes the good conduct of Greek farmers who he says were not in a rebellious mood. Burning of olive trees, by both Christians and Muslims, was a standard feature of Cretan insurrections, with the degree of damage inflicted deliberately varying according to the seriousness of the dispute. 2 FO 195/600 Ongley to Constantinople, June 7, 17, and July 7 1858.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 109 Ahmet Pasha was not the chief civil authority in Canea and had no

specific authority to carry out an execution without the approval of the governor and the council—this would normally have required confirmation from Constantinople. Veli Pasha quickly heard of the incident and, after discussing the matter with Ongley, sent word that he would not endorse the execution and it could not take place without government approval. Told of this, Ahmet Pasha responded that he would take full responsibility and countermanded Veli Pasha’s orders, saying that Veli was no longer governor.

Then the admiral resolved the immediate issue of how to deal with the prisoner very simply: he handed him over to the crowd who promptly strangled him and dragged his body through the streets on a rope. Eventually the corpse was obtained by one of Veli Pasha’s men who took it to the hospital which the governor had set up in the town. From there it was quietly handed over to the Orthodox clergy for burial.1

After Veli received news of all this, he held another crisis meeting with Ongley and, as Ongley naively reported to his superiors, asked him what he should do and whether he still had the powers of a governor. It was absolutely startling conduct for an Ottoman official but perhaps Veli did not realise that Ongley could not distinguish between a deeply private exchange between two officials who had become personal friends and allies, and a formal enquiry.

Ongley responded that in his view Veli was indeed still governor and then reported both the question, and the advice he had given in response to it, back to his masters in Constantinople in a fashion which suggests he was completely blind to its implications. Ongley was uncomfortably close to bestowing office on an Ottoman official. But he seems merely to have thought that he was strengthening Veli’s position.

By way of explanation he added in his despatch “The Turks have openly opposed the recall of Veli Pasha and have let the Porte know it, they think that they have just as much right to have a voice in the matter as the Greeks and cry out ‘We want Veli Pasha.’”

The newly arrived British ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Henry Bulwer, read this account a few days later and was evidently aghast. At the bottom of the despatch Sir Henry wrote in his own hand: “The Porte ought to remove Vely Pasha at once from Candia; and indeed, it would be a bad thing to give Mr Ongley another consulate.”2

London responded by sending in the navy. Three days later a British vessel, the “Desperate”, a steam corvette, was anchored outside Canea. Its 1 This execution—if it can be considered an execution—was the last to take place in Crete until the governorship of Mahmut Celalettin Pasha in January 1894. 2 FO 195/600 Note by Bulwer dated 10 July 1858 at the foot of Ongley’s despatch of 5 July.

110 D A V I D B A R C H A R D presence asserted the primacy of Britain over the other powers. As soon as the “Desperate” arrived on Monday 12th July, the British and Ionian community in Canea prepared a despatch, this time handed directly to Ongley, requesting that its Captain anchor directly off the town to assure their protection. By Tuesday morning the British ship lay opposite the town.

The influence of Derché and Stiglitz was now waning. But the end had also come for Ongley and Veli’s careers in Crete.

Veli’s time had run out at the same time as the “Desperate” arrived. Things had started well enough for him on Monday the 12th. Instructions came by post that morning from the Ottoman government. They still urged its three leading officials in Crete to act in concert and so implicitly recognized Veli’s continuing authority.

In the evening however, fresh instructions arrived. These told Veli to leave the island at once. Ongley thought this abrupt change most unreasonable. He wrote to Constantinople:

“It is very strange that [despite the morning’s instructions] at sunset [they]

say that Veli Pasha must leave immediately and that he was a revolutionnaire and that the consuls and insurgents demanded that he should go.”1 Hearing these instructions, Veli Pasha asked for time to consider them

and rode straight to Ongley’s house a mile outside the town. This time, on Ongley’s account, he did not ask for advice but for asylum on board the “Desperate.”

This was another most extraordinary request: perhaps Veli momentarily supposed himself to be in urgent danger of arrest or worse. Ongley however received it without objection and went out to the ship to pass the message on to its captain, Commander Craigie, who replied he had no objection.

But when Ongley returned, Veli Pasha had gone back into Canea for another confrontation with the commissioners. He would go at once, he said, if they would give him written confirmation that the insurgents and consuls had demanded his removal. The commissioners would not do so, and they were reluctant to give him any instructions in writing. They seem however to have been in close contact with Derché and Stiglitz, for Veli Pasha told Ongley at their next meeting that he had learned that the consuls had asked the admiral if he could not seize the Pasha and send him on board by force. Fearing that Ahmet Pasha was inclining to this idea and was about to send soldiers to detain him, Veli took refuge in Ongley’s house the following day and remained there for the rest of his time in Crete. 1 FO 195/600, Ongley to Bulwer, 13 July 1858.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 111 By now Veli’s family, including the nine-year-old Ðffet and his other

children, had been on board the Ottoman steamer, “Feyzi Bahri”, for six days. Veli had given instructions to the steamer to leave for Constantinople, but they had been countermanded by Ahmet Pasha who was unwilling to see the vessel go without Veli Pasha on board.

Matters were in any case now more or less over. On the 13th July Veli’s officially-designated successor Sami Pasha arrived on the “Purshut”, a Turkish steamship. There were no longer any possible grounds for Veli to remain. He and his family sailed for Constantinople the same day.

As always, Ongley managed to strike an irrelevant note in his political reporting, at least as far as conventional diplomacy was concerned. “The people who most regret the departure of Veli Pasha are the Blacks who certainly lose a great protector in him,” he wrote1.

Consul Longworth’s Mission Four days later in Constantinople, at the British Embassy’s summer

building in Therapia [modern Tarabya], James Longworth, a veteran member of the consular service and one who possessed no commercial ties, was told to take over as consul in Crete. Longworth was a fluent Turkish speaker, the author of a book on the Muslim Circassians and their conquest by Russia, a close friend and former Bosporus housemate of Henry Layard. He thus represented, as Ongley did, a pro-Ottoman strain in British diplomacy. This was perhaps exceedingly fortunate for Ongley’s career prospects.

Unusually, Longworth had to sign a deposition showing that he understood the instructions for his mission in Crete. He was to act “according to the letter and spirit of his instructions and produce a general report of the state of the island.” He was to collect facts and communicate them confidentially, his central task being to explain what had gone wrong on the island and in particular whether or not, Henry Ongley was guilty of the very serious charges levelled against him.2

Longworth arrived on the “Sheikh-i Saadi”, a Turkish steamer, on the 23rd. Ongley departed on it the same day. By then he must have been aware that his future as an official was hanging in the balance.

1 FO 195/600, Ongley to Bulwer, 13 July 1858. 2 FO 195/600, July 17 1858, with a signed undertaking written in Longworth’s own hand.

112 D A V I D B A R C H A R D Longworth in Canea Once in Canea, Longworth was immediately plunged into the hysteria

of 19th century Crete at times of crisis. Canea Christians complained to him about Ongley and the “intimacy” which had existed between him and Veli Pasha. Within a day of his arrival, Longworth was reporting his exasperation at the feverish tone of Cretan affairs. He quickly experienced, as many others before and after did, the hostility of M. Derché.

With the state of excitement which prevails, a disinterested and

dispassionate person finds it impossible to act impartially, [or] see things independently without giving offence to some party or other. My French colleague appears to suspect me of partisanship because I have hired some rooms belonging to a former dependent of Vely Pasha’s. In fact I cannot engage a servant or have half an hour’s talk with any individual without exposing myself to misconstruction,

he told Bulwer.1 The only agreed common point seemed to be a general indignation

against the departed governor. After an interview with Admiral Ahmet Pasha on the day of his arrival, Longworth wrote again saying that the admiral, evidently still in high dudgeon, had made accusations against Veli Pasha of defying instructions by staying on the island. As yet, Longworth was inclined to side with the prosecution case.

I will presently abstain from offering any remark with respect to them [the

admiral’s accusations] further than the expression of my belief that Vely Pasha will find it difficult to exculpate himself as to recent transactions, more particularly as regards his refusal to return to Constantinople after being deposed.2 This prediction would prove completely wrong. The Admiral revealed that he was also forwarding a letter written to the

Imperial Commission on the 7th July to the Ottoman government with a view to having a formal complaint made against Ongley.

Where Ongley was concerned however, Longworth was from the outset inclined to be sympathetic, writing “I would only venture to express my belief on a prima facie view of the circumstances connected with the late unfortunate transactions in this Island that Mr Ongley has throughout, as far as he was conscious of it, been influenced by a sense of duty and a serious desire of upholding British interests and carrying out the true object of 1 FO 195/600, 23 July 1858, Longworth to Bulwer. 2 FO 195/600 23 July, 1858.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 113 British policy as conveyed to him in instructions from the government.”1

During the next few weeks, Sami Pasha and the commissioners gradually restored some sort of calm by striking a series of bargains with the insurrection leaders, most of which centred on getting assurances from Constantinople that the island’s inhabitants would not face new taxes. Skirmishing continued around the edges of the towns. Longworth was inclined to blame the Muslims and see the Christians as the moderates as far as the fighting went, though he added that, “Their demands have been preposterous enough.”

Veli’s development projects were immediately axed once he had gone. His English engineer, Lionel Woodward, was dismissed within a week or two of his departure. Woodward had made progress in constructing the road from Canea to Rethymno but the network of highways which Veli had planned would never be built while Crete was under Ottoman rule. Stung by the failure of his projects, Woodward wrote a formal valedictory despatch in August: “Report to Veli Rifaat Pasha, late Governor of Crete on his work on the island July 1856 to July 1858.”

Like Bayard Taylor and Veli, Woodward was inclined to place blame for the failure of the public works programme squarely on Christian Cretan opposition to them.

“The truth is that there are certain persons in Crete as well as in other parts

of the World who are determined not to be satisfied. Had the road been begun in a superficial way, the very same persons who now cry out that it is too substantially done would have been the first to draw up a petition complaining of the unstable nature of the work. The same spirit pervaded the attacks made on all your Excellency’s projects for improvement. I remember at the time when the lamps were first introduced into the streets of Canea, reading an article in the Syra newspapers dated from Canea in which the writer inveighed loudly against the folly of lighting the streets when the pavement was so bad.”2

Soon the only memorial of Veli’s improvements was the rusting winch and dredging machinery in Canea harbour which he had bought with his own money, but which had never been used. Longworth at least was appreciative of the road building work which Woodward had carried out in the teeth of Christian unwillingness to construct them. He observed:

“How Mr Woodward, unassisted by skilled subordinates, and unfurnished with the commonest implements, has so far succeeded is a wonder 1 FO 195/600, p.145, 23 July 1858. 2 FO 195/600 pp. 167-75, Lionel Woodward Report to Veli Rifaat Pasha, late Governor of Crete on his work on the island July 1856 to July 1858.

114 D A V I D B A R C H A R D to be explained only by inferences the most creditable to his good management and perseverance.”1

Longworth’s Report By the end of August, Longworth had concluded his investigation into

the Cretan debacle. He had conducted a series of interviews at the consulate with the relevant parties, “the principal merchants, the Ottoman authorities, then the French, Austrian, and American authorities.” Finally he had looked at Mr Ongley’s accounts. He was now ready to report on the question of Ongley’s guilt or innocence of the offences of which he had been accused.2

His first finding was that Ongley’s enemies turned out to be less numerous than they had seemed during the insurrection. “The depositions of merchants were favourable to Mr Ongley without exception. It was most gratifying to observe the unanimity with which all spoke of his high standing and integrity.”

The reports that Ongley was purchasing tithes and tax farming rights turned out to have no evidence to support them.

The French and the Austrians had, Longworth recorded, “nothing favourable or unfavourable” to contribute to the inquiry. The serious insults, calumnies, and accusations which the two sides had hurled at each other during the past three years evidently fell outside the remit of Longworth’s investigations. Perhaps a bargain had been struck or, more likely, there was a stand-off. Neither Derché nor Stiglitz would have been very eager for the Foreign Office to probe their shadier tactics or their links with the insurrection—which, to judge by some contemporary newspaper reports were widely known and could be taken as proved. In any case, Stiglitz had been motivated by an entirely private family grievance, the breach between Veli and Joseph Caporal.3

The only voice now strongly raised against Ongley came from the Ionian community. Andreas Calechorino, father of the future British Vice-Consul in Candia, complained against Ongley not as a merchant but because of alleged consular lapses. He claimed that Ongley had failed to press various claims of Calechorino’s with the authorities because of his political partiality.

1 F0 881/1550 Longworth, Report, p.11. 2 This account is taken from FO 195/600, Longworth to Bulwer, August 28 1858, which contains material not printed in the 1867 version. 3 See for instance The Times editorial of 25 September 1858, printed below in Appendix A where the accusations against the consuls go far beyond anything in Ongley’s despatches.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 115 Longworth made short work of this. “If the complainant had reason to

be dissatisfied with Mr Ongley’s proceedings in his case, there was nothing to prevent his referring it to Constantinople, and he may appeal if he pleases even at present. With respect to the imputation he casts on Mr Ongley’s motives, I do not think that, unaccompanied as it is with an iota of proof, it carries much weight with it.”1

As far as Veli Pasha’s commercial transactions with Mr Ongley went, he had had a private account of 508,586 piastres over the previous two and a half years, but “On the whole these commercial transactions appear to have been as advantageous to the Government and the Pasha as to Mr Ongley.”2

So, whatever reservations the Foreign Office and the Constantinople Embassy had about Henry Ongley, and his entitlement to a further posting, were dispelled.

The Later Lives of Ongley and Veli Ongley did not serve again in the Ottoman Empire perhaps because of

the complaint that Ahmet Pasha had made about his letter of July 7th. On September 5th, just a week after Longworth’s report, he was posted to Jassy [now Iaþi] in the emerging principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, soon to be known as Romania, and held that office till December 6th the same year. But he never had to travel north. Three weeks later, 28th September 1858, he was appointed Consul for Morea (the Peloponnese) resident in Patras. It was, Ongley must have reflected, about as close to Crete as one could get. He remained at Patras until his retirement in 1874, occasionally offering advice on Cretan matters in his despatches. He had till then remained apparently unscathed by further misfortunes but in 1875 his finances collapsed when he was forced to commute his pension for a lump sum to pay off the debts of his eldest son, also a consular official. His final years were spent in Limassol, presumably in relative poverty, where he died in 1892.3

Veli Pasha survived his Cretan disgrace without the problems which Longworth had forecast. While we do not know the reception which Veli received either from the Ottoman government or from his father when he landed at the Golden Horn, not long after his arrival, he was appointed to the Tanzimat Council, the central body planning the reform programme, and the

1 FO 195/600, Longworth to Bulwer, August 27, 1858. By the time of the Confidential Paper, Andreas’s son Lysimachus Calechorino was British Vice-Consul in Candia. 2 Ibid. 3 This biographical information comes from Lucy and Henry Sarell Ongley, an unpublished article by Charles Sarell.

116 D A V I D B A R C H A R D appointment seems to have been backdated by several weeks to June, before his departure from Crete.

He was however sufficiently worried about possible damage to his reputation in France that he swiftly commissioned an anonymous defence---“La Vérité sur les Événements de Candie”—from E. Dentu, a French publisher which specialised in polemics and apologias. The book appeared in Paris before the end of the year.

After two years on the Tanzimat Committee, Veli was re-appointed governor of Edirne in August 1860. Less than six months later however, he went back to Paris as ambassador, where he lasted sixteen months before being ousted for a second time in this post in May 1862 by Mehmet Cemil Pasha, the son of his father’s hated rival, Mustafa Reþit Pasha. Thereafter his career seems to have remained on a plateau. Still he was a fairly senior figure in the Ottoman administration, serving as the governor of three large Anatolian provinces. In the memoirs of his cousin, Ðsmail Kemal Bey, we get a glimpse of Veli in his final posting as governor of Hüdavendigar (Bursa) in 18771. Ðsmail Kemal records how in 1877, when being sent into exile in Kütahya by Abdülhamit for his associations with the liberal politics of Midhat Pasha, he and his fellow prisoners were received “very kindly” by Veli who lent them money to cover their expenses, though only after carefully taking signed securities from them2. Veli’s last years were passed under the anti-British and anti-constitutional despotism of Abdülhamit II, presumably an uncongenial period for him. At his death in 1891, around the age of 70, the Pasha was buried in an elaborate marble sarcophagus beside that of his father in a graveyard for high officials at the Fatih Camii in Istanbul.

Something of an Anglophile disposition seems to have lingered in the family. His sister in law, Mrs Hilmy Pasha, was a good friend of Sir Henry and Lady Layard during their embassy in Constantinople in the late 1870s, 3 while one of his grandsons would be a member of the pro-British Ðngiliz Muhipler Cemiyeti immediately after World War One, though another would be at the side of Atatürk when he landed at Samsun.

1 See Sinan Kuneralp, Son Dönem Osmanlð Erkân ve Ricali (1839-1922), Isis, Istanbul, 1999, p.125. 2 Ismail Kemal Bey, Memoirs, edited by Somerville Story, Constable, London 1922, pp. 159-60. 3 See the diaries of Lady Layard.


Crete after Veli Pasha Conditions in Crete remained tense during the summer of 1858 and for

long afterwards. After Sami Pasha achieved an understanding with the insurrectionists, the revolt fizzled out. As conditions became safer the Muslims started to leave the safety of the fortified coastal towns. Longworth’s initial impression had been that the Muslims were guilty of more aggression than the Christians, but in a long valedictory report written at the end of September, he painted a very bleak picture. The Governor was on the edge of resignation, because his task seemed hopeless, the Mussulmans were victims of daily murders, assassinations, burglaries and abduction. The districts of the interior were in a frightful state of anarchy and the Christians were forming secret associations all over the island, while there were continuing signs that the Ionian merchants were smuggling weapons and ammunition into the island.

A society, composed chiefly of young men educated at Athens, have been

collecting signatures in the four provinces of Rethymno to a memorial in which it is proposed to proclaim General Calergis Prince of Crete. Longworth’s recommendation was that a body of troops should be sent

to the island for the judicious employment of “military repression.”1 But in fact Ottoman rule in Crete was currently too weak for any such

possibility to be conceivable. The Empire’s problems in the Balkans prevented the Porte from stationing a large force on the island. Sami Pasha and his successor, Hekim Ðsmail Pasha, retained control of Crete by striking deals with the ‘chiefs and capitanoi’ rather than using those forces they did have. Looking back on the aftermath to Veli Pasha’s downfall, another Foreign Office specialist, Thomas Green, wrote in 1867:

“The Governor-General was instructed by his Government to adopt all

means to conciliate the Capitani ... instead of applying the force which he had at his disposal, [he] appealed to the Capitani, and he consequently soon became subservient to their interests. The result of this policy was that the Capitani became the masters of the situation, and the oppressors of the labouring and greater portion of the population. The greater number of these Capitani had been Chiefs in the late insurrection, but the Porte, thinking to maintain tranquillity through their instrumentality, took them into its service as Capitani, or Police Chiefs, Zaptiehs, and farmers of tithes.”2

1 FO 881/1462 p. 25, Consul Longworth to Sir H. Bulwer, September 28 1858. 2 FO 881/1462, Green, Memorandum Relative to the Island of Candia, 1867 p. 22.


Even in the autumn of 1858, the Cretan Christians were now disillusioned with European governments, Longworth wrote,

“with the exception of that of England .... The Chiefs or Capitani speak

bitterly of the bad faith and inconsistency they have experienced at the hands of the Consular Body. They were induced by them to petition for the removal of Vely Pasha, against whom, they say they had no real ground of complaint. On the contrary, they now declare he was the best governor they ever had.”1

This was a vindication of a sort for Veli. However it was clear that the

French and the Austrians strongly endorsed Greece’s claim to Crete and the Cretan Christians could sense that the island was beginning to slip away from Ottoman control. Longworth remarked that he was being sounded out by the Chiefs about whether Britain would interfere if and when Greece attempted to assist a further uprising on the island. Ottoman power on the island would henceforth be drastically weaker than it had been at the start of 1858.

The implications were spelt out two years later by the next consul at Canea, Frederick Guarracino:

The prestige of the Sultan’s government appears to be entirely lost in this

island, whenever a Greek, of whatever class, he may be, can find an opportunity of expressing his thoughts, he invariably says “Why should we be governed by the Turkish any longer?” adding that this cannot and must not last. … The general sentiment no doubt is in the desire of annexation to Greece.2

Along with Ottoman power, the Cretan Muslims now seemed to be

clearly in retreat. There is, Guarracino wrote,

Total neglect on the part of the Turks of all that concerns them personally. Even their private or landed property is neglected and there are few Turks who are not willing to dispose of this when any purchaser offers. Within the last two years a large quantity of landed property has passed from Turkish into Greek hands and it is only the scarcity of money in the place now that prevents a much further similar exchange.3 Among the largest purchasers of Muslim land in the years were some

of the Ionians who had opposed Veli, particularly the Calechorino family.

1 FO 881/1462 Longworth to Bulwer, September 28, 1858, pp. 25-6. 2 FO 195/600 Guarracino to Bulwer, p. 571 December 1 1860. 3 FO 195/600, p. 571, Guarracino to Bulwer, December 1 1860.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 119 The scene was being set for the next, and far bloodier, Cretan

insurrection of April 1866 and the three years of brutal struggle which would follow it.

Subsequent Accounts of Veli Pasha’s Governorship After he left the island, Cretan Christian memories of Veli became

another part of the folklore of the struggle for union with Greece. Accounts of his governorship were predictable black and white tales of Ottoman oppression and the Christian Greek struggle against it.

The story grew worse as time passed. Twenty years after Veli’s departure, when the events were fairly recent, Edmond Desmazes for example wrote in 1878 of Veli Pasha on the basis of what he had heard as a Philhellene volunteer during the three years war in Crete between 1866 and 1869:

« Par ses manières de gentilhomme osmanlis épris de réformes

européennes, ce personnage des plus médiocres, avait su se faire à bon marche, sur le bord de la Seine, une réputation de haute capacité—grâce à cette presse boulevardier qui paye en réclames sans dignité ni conscience. »1 As time passed the picture was simplified. In 1897, for example, the

London Greek Committee, one of the main Hellenic lobby groups in the British capital, recalled:

“Uncurbed and undaunted, the Cretans rose again in May, 1858, the

vexatious administration of Veli Pacha, who had succeeded his father, Mustafa, proving intolerable.” Veli was thus simply:

“one of those neo-Turks whom a short residence in the west had endowed with a measure of charlatanism without touching their innate barbarity ... On the other hand, the demands of the [Christian] Cretans were of so sober and practical a character, and their attitude so correct and faultless, that the Turkish Government saw the expediency of at least a semblance of conciliation.”2

1 Edmond Desmaze, Etudes & Souvenirs Hélleniques, Paris 1878, p, 272-5. Desmaze was a communard and his views probably partly reflect the view he took of Veli’s cordial dealings with the French Imperial family. 2 Anonymous, Crete and Greece - The London Greek Committee, London, 1897, p. 34.

120 D A V I D B A R C H A R D Henri Couturier, another philhellene, writing in 1898 describes how the

Porte and Veli Pasha as its representative were alarmed by the number of conversions to Christianity after the proclamation of the Hattð Hümayun and used violence to repress them. Veli Pasha was assisted in this by the English consul, Mr Ongley, and the two men were driven off the island by the uprising which followed. A similar line is taken, perhaps not surprisingly, by some Cretan historians today.

No historian of the late Ottoman Empire seems to have written about the events of 1856-1858 in Crete. None has considered the light they cast on the aims of the Hattð Hümayun, the ways in which these were frustrated, or on the recurrent suggestions by European historians that the Rescript was simply a cynical and insincere exercise in placating the European powers.1 The failure of Veli Pasha’s Cretan governorship casts light on why the Ottoman Empire did not evolve, as the Tanzimat statesmen hoped, into a fully internationally-accepted Western state along liberal lines. Among the causes of the debacle of the Tanzimat process and the course taken by the Ottoman Empire after 1871 was the scepticism and hostility of the continental European powers about the possibility of making a Muslim Empire into a European state and their support for its Christian adversaries. Veli Pasha’s experiences in Crete shows how Austrian and French opportunism played out in one province.

Britain’s role in late Ottoman history is an ambiguous and shifting one. Diplomacy is never altruistic. Nonetheless if Britain had played an effective part in sustaining the Ottoman liberalism of the Tanzimat, the Ottoman lands as a whole might have experienced a ‘softer landing.’.

But the story of Henry Ongley and Veli Pasha in Crete shows that the endorsement of British officials is by no means necessarily a blessing.

APPENDIX Veli Pasha’s downfall in Crete as satirically described in a Times leader.

The following extract from an editorial in The Times of September 25

1858 gives a picture of Veli Pasha’s downfall, as seen from London in the form of a melodrama. (An initial section, set on Mount Ida, is omitted here.)

1 e.g, A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, Oxford, 1971.p 83-5. “The Turks gave a voluntary promise to reform…[which] counted for nothing; the Turks never put their promises into execution.” Taylor here follows 19th and early 20th century English and French liberal historians who believed that the Hattð Hümayun was simply a dishonest gesture.

V E L Ð P A S H A A N D C O N S U L O N G L E Y 121 The scene changes to Canea. Everything is in movement: the Pasha arrives. He

is a gallant young gentleman, fresh from Paris, where he had immense success, drew copiously on his father, and peopled Père La Chaise with broken hearts. The Cretans are astonished but prefer mutton to weak tea. The Pasha is ably assisted in his duty as master of the house by his factotum, formerly surgeon barber to his father, now his pillar, tutor, and general major domo, who had been to Paris with him, seen him decorated with the croix, considers himself as a guarantee for the French tendencies of the Pasha, and expects to do much for French interests in Candia which are represented by from 15 to 20 subjects. At the tea kettle presides his wife.

The next scene shows the Pasha in his studio, a well-sized room backing over the sea, with a comfortable divan in the way of furniture. The Pasha, seated in a corner, smokes, looks at his handsome figure, and begins to think he is big enough not to be any longer in need of a dry nurse, and that change is agreeable,

In another house may be seen a medical gentleman pacing about the room, and holding one of his energetic monologues, which is interrupted by the entrance of the Greek Consul, who tries to condole but only increases the fury. The French Vice-Consul and the Austrian Consul follow with equally peaceful intentions and equally bad results. All agree that the Pasha is a monster and a traitor who has gone over to the English instead of following the wise counsels of the four gentlemen who are all more or less connected by relationship of friendship and who have therefore the right to rule Candia.

The next scene is at Constantinople where the outraged medical man exposes all the villainies of Vely Pasha and succeeds at last in losing the pension which Vely Pasha's father had till then given to his convicted physician.

We are again in the Sphakiot Mountains eating mutton. The confidential man of the Greek consul arrives; another sheep killed and the news asked for. The confidential man is silent and his tears roll down the mutton. General consternation and he begins. "You sons of Greeks, you are here joyfully singing and feasting while the barbarous Turk treads on your neck and a tyrannical pasha tramples your most sacred rights under his foot." General astonishment. He continues "Has he not given you nine days labour to make a road for your own use between the most important points of the island? Has he not upset your most cherished institutions with his new-fangled ideas, got out a dredging machine at his own expense to clear out the harbour of Canea to facilitate the exportation of your produce? Has he not ruined the most prosperous trade of paper lantern manufacturers by lighting the capital? Has he not erected a hospital for the Turks as well as the Orthodox, and thus forced these last to breathe the air infected by the Turks. Now to crown it all he is going to ask you for the arrears of the conscription tax which have not yet been paid up. It is indeed paid all over the empire and some of the districts have been fools enough to pay it here too, but remember that you are Greeks who never pay if they can help it. You have nothing to fear of the Consuls who, with the exception of England, have recognized your rights and drawn up a petition for you which has been signed by the people of Canea. Now if

122 D A V I D B A R C H A R D ever is the time for you to rise.” Thus he speaks and his sweet tongue carries conviction into the minds of his audience; they begin to see that the island is ruined unless Vely pasha is recalled.

Such is the true story of the outbreak. Impartial investigations on the spot have shown that the people at Retimo, Candia, Episcopi, and in the interior knew nothing at all about the petition until it arrived from Canea, where the Consuls reside, and the people in this district where likewise the first in arms. The others arose only when the Mahomedans thinking themselves in danger, assembled in the towns to resist the aggression. Vely Pasha's enemies accusing him of having ordered such a measure, which if true, was no doubt a false step, as it ought the two elements into open conflict; but it probably required no such order, for the Turks would scarcely deceive themselves about what awaited them if the rising was successful.

Thus you see the people of Candia were the puppets, of which the Consuls held the strings, and they made them jump and kick until they had got rid of Vely Pasha, against whom the whole was directed. How completely the game succeeded is shown by the complaints which the people now utter of having been deserted by the Consuls since Vely Pasha has been removed.

The deluded Cretans may have opened their eyes since and seen that they were the cat’s-paw for consular rivalries but their eyes it seems, have likewise been opened to another fact which is more important than the removal of a pasha, and it is that people have only to rise to get what they want, and having succeeded once, there is danger they should try it next time on their own account.

Veli Pasha and Consul Ongley: A Diplomatic Relationship That Got Too Close

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