page_title: François Pouqueville
section_title: Increasing conflict with Ali Pasha of Ioannina
hierarchical_section_title: François Pouqueville / Diplomat and archaeologist / Increasing conflict with Ali Pasha of Ioannina
caption_attribution_description: English: watercolor Français&#160;: aquarelle
context_page_description: François Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville was a French diplomat, writer, explorer, physician and historian, member of the Institut de France.
  First as the Turkish Sultan's hostage, then as Napoleon Bonaparte's general consul at the court of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, he travelled extensively throughout Ottoman occupied Greece from 1798 to 1820.
  With his far reaching diplomacy and with his writings, he became a prominent architect of the Philhellenism movement throughout Europe, and contributed eminently to the liberation of the Greeks, and to the rebirth of the Greek Nation.
context_section_description: At first, he was welcomed by the famous pasha whom he accompanied to several of his excursions and who made him discover his native Albania.
  For a time he also took with him the British agent Leake in several travels of archaeological surveys across Greece. Together they reported many forgotten or previously unknown antique sites.
  His diplomatic status also enabled Pouqueville to explore Greece in its entirety as far as Macedonia and Thrace.
  He maintained his journal containing the details of the observations and discoveries he made in the course of a great number of explorations covering all of Greece and the Balkans during his 15 years of diplomatic tenure in Ioannina and in Patras.
  In 1811, joined by his brother Hugues who had also been named consul in Greece, they researched and recorded the remains of no less than sixty five antique cities in Epirus alone.
  In 1813, he discovered in Actium a stone slab with Acarnanian inscriptions which he deciphered. It pertained to the time when the Roman armies appeared in Greece (c. 197 BC) and was a decree of the Senate and of the people of Acarnania proclaiming the brothers Publius and Lucius Acilius as their friends and benefactors.
  In Ioannina, the court of Ali Pasha was increasingly the seat of many political intrigues between the European powers encouraged by the pasha himself, and Pouqueville was for years the target of disparaging and acrimonious critics from some English visitors to Ioannina such as Lord Byron with Hobhouse, and Cockerell, as they allowed themselves to be corrupted by the depraved lifestyle of the Court of Ioannina when Pouqueville instead demonstrated rectitude and firmness against Ali Pasha's criminal abuses of power.
  Moreover, the literary and political notoriety he had acquired with the international success of his first book, dedicated to Emperor Napoléon, and singling him out as the precursor, as early as 1805, of the Greek revival movement emerging in Europe, was evidently a cause for resentment on the part of the English.
  However, after his visit to Ioannina, the distinguished Reverend T.S. Hugues wrote that he (unlike Byron and Hobhouse) "found him very polite, generous and humane, and thought him a scholar and man of the world, nor did that contest in which our respective countries were engaged, in the slightest degree repress his hospitality and attentions – an instance of good manners which would be surprising in the hate-ridden world of today."
  However, after Napoleon's 1807 treaty of Tilsitt which forewarned of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, Ali Pasha renounced his alliance with France and yielded to Britain's complaisance.
  Pouqueville's frequent Philhellene positions and his constant opposition to Ali's devilish rule made Pouqueville's situation progressively more and more dangerous; and, after Pouqueville had ordered French troops to join the Greeks of Parga in their successful defence against Ali's murderous hordes, he often had to remain in his house lest Ali Pasha would have him assassinated too.
  Thereafter, whenever he had an official communication for Ali, his brother Hugues, himself French consul in nearby Arta , had to bring it for him to the pasha whose atrocities he also witnessed throughout Epirus .
  In his memoirs, François Pouqueville concluded: "It was in this manner that the Turks, through their own excesses, prepared and fomented the Greek insurrection."
  Finally, against Britain's continuous attempts to maintain and reinforce the Turks' brutal oppression of the Greeks, the brothers Pouqueville's consistent diplomatic skills succeeded in achieving the desired chasm between the Sultan and Ali Pacha, thus provoking the beginning of the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire that would enable the regeneration of free Greek nationalism.
  Soon, Ali Pacha would be disposed of by the Turkish emissaries from Constantinople and his severed head brought back to the Sultan.
  With remarkable foresight due to his perfect knowledge of the region and its people, François Pouqueville already predicted the recurrent troubles that will henc
caption: Ali Pasha hunting on the lake by Louis Dupré (1825)
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