Ali Pacha

Ali Pacha is one of the pieces in Celebrated Crimes by the French writer Alexandre Dumas, and when issued as a standalone volume it is often bound with The Marquise de Saint-Géran and Murat. Set in the Balkans in the early nineteenth century, it tells the life of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, the Albanian ruler who rose through the cracks of Ottoman power, expanded his domain through cunning, daring, and ruthlessness, and governed a territory whose population rivaled that of Sweden and Norway combined; his seizure of Parga did not satisfy his ambition, and the flight of its inhabitants abroad, escaping his persecution, stands as a footnote to the shadow of his power. Dumas handles historical sources with a novelist's hand, weaving battles, court intrigue, private grudges, and betrayal into a portrait of a complex figure who is both a shrewd ruler and a brutal tyrant, and uses his dramatic downfall to discuss unbounded ambition and the corruption of power. The book belongs to Dumas's non-fiction narratives, combining the information of a history book with the readability of a popular novel.