One Of Tshelebi’S Household Officers, Ibrahim Beg, Had Meanwhile Been Promoted, Through The Friends Of His Patron At Constantinople, To The First Dignities In The Town.

He was made Mutsellim (vice governor), and Mohassel (chief custom house officer), and after the death of Tshelebi, his power devolved upon Ibrahim.

This was in 1786.

Kussa Pasha, a man of probity and talents, was sent at that time as Pasha to Aleppo. Being naturally jealous of Ibrahim Beg’s influence, he endeavoured to get possession of his person, by ordering him to be detained during a visit, made by Ibrahim to compliment the Pasha [p.650] upon his arrival, for a debt which Ibrahim owed to a foreign merchant, who had preferred his complaints to the Pasha’s tribunal. Ibrahim paid the debt, and was no sooner out of the Pasha’s immediate reach, than he engaged Ahmed Aga (one of the present Janissary chiefs), to enter with him into a formal league against Kussa. The Janissaries, together with Ibrahim’s party, attacked the Pasha’s troops; who after several days fighting, were driven out of the town, and Ibrahim was soon afterwards named Pasha of three tails, and for the first time Pasha of Aleppo. From that period (1788-89) may be dated the power of the Janissaries. Ibrahim had been the cause of their rising into consideration, but he soon found that their party was acquiring too much strength; he therefore deemed it necessary to countenance the Sherifs, and being a man of great talents, he governed and plundered the town, by artfully opposing the two parties to each other. In the year 1789, Ibrahim was nominated to the Pashalik of Damascus. Sherif Pasha, a man of ordinary capacity, being sent to Aleppo, the Janissaries soon usurped the powers of government.

At the time of the French invasion of Egypt, the intrigues of Djezzar Pasha of Akka drove Ibrahim from his post at Damascus, and he was obliged to follow the Grand Vizir’s army into Egypt. When after the campaign of Egypt the Grand Vizir with the remains of his army, was approaching Aleppo upon his return to Constantinople, Ibrahim conceived hopes of regaining his lost seat at Aleppo. Through the means of his son Mohammed Beg, then Mobassei, the Janissaries were persuaded that the Vizir had evil intentions against them, forged letters were produced to that effect, and the whole body of Janissaries left the town before the Vizir’s arrival in its neighbourhood. Their flight gave Ibrahim the sought for opportunity to represent the fugitives to the Vizir as rebels afraid to meet their master’s presence; they were shortly afterwards, by a Firmahn from the Porte, formally proscribed as rebels, and the killing of any of them who should enter the territory of Aleppo was declared lawful. They had retired to Damascus, Latikia, Tripoli, and the mountains of the Druses, and they spared no money to get the edict of their exile rescinded. After a tedious bargain for the price of their pardon, they succeeded at last in obtaining it, on condition of paying one hundred thousand piastres into the Sultan’s treasury. Ibrahim Pasha, who had in the meanwhile regained the Pashalik of Aleppo, was to receive that sum from them, and he had so well played his game, that the Janissaries still thought him their secret friend. The principal chiefs, trusting to Ibrahim’s assurances, came to the town for the purpose of paying down the money; they were a few days afterwards arrested, and it was generally believed that Ibrahim would order them the same night to be strangled. In Turkey however, there are always hopes as long as the purse is not exhausted. The prisoners engaged Mohammed, Ibrahim’s beloved son, to intercede in their favour; they paid him for that service one thousand zequins in advance, and promised as much more: and he effectually extorted from his father a promise not to kill any of them. It is said that Ibrahim foretold his son that the time would come when he would repent of his intercession. A short time afterwards Ibrahim was nominated a second time to the Pashalik of Damascus, which [p.651] became vacant by Djezzar’s death, in 1804. His prisoners were obliged to follow him to Damascus; from whence they found means to open a correspondence with the Emir Beshir, the chief of the Druses, and to prevail upon him to use all his interest with Ibrahim to effect their deliverance. Ibrahim stood at that time in need of the Emir’s friendship; he had received orders from the Porte to seize upon Djezzar’s treasures at Akka, and to effect this the co-operation of the Druse chief was absolutely necessary. Upon the Emir’s reiterated applications, the prisoners were at last liberated.

When Ibrahim Pasha removed to Damascus, he procured the Pashalik of Aleppo for his son Mohammed Pasha, a man who possesses in a high degree the qualification so necessary in a delegate of the Porte, of understanding how to plunder his subjects. The chief of a Sherif family, Ibn Hassan Aga Khalas (who has since entered into the corps of the Janissaries, and is now one of their principal men), was the first who resolved to oppose open force to his measures; he engaged at first only seven or eight other families to join him, and it was with this feeble force that the rebellion broke out which put an end to the Pasha’s government. The confederates began by knocking down the Pasha’s men in the streets wherever they met them, Janissaries soon assembled from all quarters to join Hassan’s party; and between two or three hundred Deli Bashi or regular troops of the Pasha were massacred in the night in their own habitations, to which the rebels found access from the neighbouring terraces or flat roofs. Still the Pasha’s troops would have subdued the insurgents had it not been for the desperate bravery of Hassan Aga.

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