1820, Ali addressed a circular letter to his
brothers the Christians, announcing that in future he would consider
them as his most faithful subjects, and that henceforth he remitted the
taxes paid to his own family. He wound up by asking for soldiers, but
the Greeks having learnt the instability of his promises, remained
deaf to his invitations. At the same time he sent messengers to the
Montenegrins and the Servians, inciting them to revolt, and organised
insurrections in Wallachia and Moldavia to the very environs of
Constantinople.

Whilst the Ottoman vassals assembled only in small numbers and very
slowly under their respective standards, every day there collected round
the castle of Janina whole companies of Toxidae, of Tapazetae, and of
Chamidae; so that Ali, knowing that Ismail Pacho Bey had boasted that he
could arrive in sight of Janina without firing a gun, said in his turn
that he would not treat with the Porte until he and his troops should be
within eight leagues of Constantinople.

He had fortified and supplied with munitions of war Ochrida, Avlone,
Cannia, Berat, Cleisoura, Premiti, the port of Panormus, Santi-Quaranta,
Buthrotum, Delvino, Argyro-Castron, Tepelen, Parga, Prevesa, Sderli,
Paramythia, Arta, the post of the Five Wells, Janina and its castles.
These places contained four hundred and twenty cannons of all sizes,
for the most part in bronze, mounted on siege-carriages, and seventy
mortars. Besides these, there were in the castle by the lake,
independently of the guns in position, forty field-pieces, sixty
mountain guns, a number of Congreve rockets, formerly given him by
the English, and an enormous quantity of munitions of war. Finally,
he endeavoured to establish a line of semaphores between Janina and
Prevesa, in order to have prompt news of the Turkish fleet, which was
expected to appear on this coast.

Ali, whose strength seemed to increase with age, saw to everything
and appeared everywhere; sometimes in a litter borne by his Albanians,
sometimes in a carriage raised into a kind of platform, but it was more
frequently on horseback that he appeared among his labourers. Often
he sat on the bastions in the midst of the batteries, and conversed
familiarly with those who surrounded him. He narrated the successes
formerly obtained against the sultan by Kara Bazaklia, Vizier of Scodra,
who, like himself, had been attained with the sentence of deprivation
and excommunication; recounting how t