Byron in Love by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page B

‘rugged nurse of savage men’, was part of the Ottoman Empire and within sight of Italy, but as Gibbon had said was ‘as unknown as the interior of America’. Byron, Hobhouse, Fletcher, ‘the reverse of valiant’, and Albanian soldiers armed with sabres and long guns set out with their equipment of four leather trunks, three smaller trunks, a canteen, three beds and bedding, two bed-heads, on horseback, over rugged land, where the beauties of nature and the savageries of man starkly contrasted, domes, minarets, orange and lemon groves, mutilated bodies and roasted heads left hanging as a warning to other offenders.
    Ali Pasha, a ruthless Turkish vizier, governed Albania, Epirus, Macedonia and parts of Greece as far south as the Gulf of Corinth and was said to have more power than the Sultan. For his redoubtable conquests, he had been christened ‘Mahometan Napoleon’ and Napoleon had offered to make him King of Epirus, except that friendship with the English suited his political ambitions better. Hearing that an Englishman of rank, that is to say Byron, was in his dominions, Ali Pasha left orders with his commandant in the city of Jannina that the party be treated with hospitality, he at that very time engaged in une petite guerre with another warlord, Ibrahim Pasha, whom he had driven into a fortress in Berat.
    To Byron the landscape recalled the Highlands of his childhood, the castles like those Sir Walter Scott had depicted, the very mountains seemed Caledonian, the Albanians in kilts, the strut of their cloaks, the shimmer of their daggers, all reminiscent of Highland warriors. Albania was a mixture of races, Albanians in their gold-worked cloaks and crimson jackets, Tartars with high caps, Turks in their vast pelisses and turbans and such were the arcane laws of loyalty or disloyalty that a throat could be slit at the slightest affront. The young women whom Byron thought the most beautiful he had ever seen were ‘beasts of burthen’, ploughing, digging and levelling the highways broken down by torrential rains.
    His letters home were jaunty, asking for news of deaths, defeats, capital crimes and misfortunes of his friends. His mother learnt that if he married it would be with a sultana who had half a score of cities as a dowry.
    In full ‘magnifique’ Albanian uniform, with a silver sabre, he was received at Ali Pasha’s court in Tepelene, a room paved with marble, a fountain playing in the centre, scarlet ottomans all around and a physician to conduct the colloquy in Latin. His Highness the Pasha, aged about sixty, was a short fat man with a long white beard, with a surprising mildness of manner, whose own head would one day be on a stake in Constantinople. He was immediately drawn to the young and beautiful Lord, ‘a pretty stripling’, whose small ears and very white hands bespoke the true rank of nobility. At first he enquired after Byron’s health, then respects were paid to Byron’s mother, then to Byron’s singular beauty, followed by a request that Byron would regard him as ‘Father’ for as long as he remained in the Empire and pay a visit to him at night when he would be at his leisure.
    Byron and Hobhouse were assigned quarters in the palace, their every necessity gratis, and from Ali Pasha twenty times a day Byron was coaxed with gifts of sherbet, almonds and sweetmeats. In their honour each evening a feast was prepared, four fires blazed in the courtyard for kids and sheep to be roasted, black slaves, eunuchs and hundreds of soldiers in attendance, horses caparisoned and ready for action, couriers constantly entering and leaving with dispatches, the kettle drums beaten, boys calling the hour from the minaret of the mosque, whirling dervishes, and the boastful recital of great and barbarous deeds.
    After a one-month stay, it was time for the travellers to take their leave and on a galliot with a crew of forty, provided by Ali