Alfred Biliotti
Sir Alfred Biliotti was a Levantine Italian, born on Rhodes, who became a British consular official and amateur archaeologist. Biliotti probably received little formal education, and followed his father, who had carried out consular work for the governments of Britain, Spain and Tuscany, into the British consular service in 1849. He accompanied Charles Newton, an archaeologist then working for the British Foreign Service, on an archaeological tour in 1853, beginning a relationship of patronage by which Newton supported Biliotti in a twofold career, in the consulate and in archaeology.
After periods on Rhodes and at Trebizond, Biliotti was posted to Khania, the capital of Ottoman Crete, in 1885. There, he played a prominent role in the unrest and international interventions that marked the end of Ottoman rule, including the collapse of the Pact of Halepa in 1889 and the Cretan Revolt of 1897–1898. He reported the Lasithi massacres of 1897 and lobbied unsuccessfully for the pursuit and punishment of those responsible, investigated allegations of atrocities against both Christians and Muslims, and negotiated the evacuation of around 3,500 Muslims from a siege at Kandanos, gaining acclaim in the British press.
Biliotti acquired a dominant position in Cretan diplomatic circles, but was reassigned to Salonika in Macedonia in 1899, having gained the distrust of Prince George of Greece and figures in the British establishment, who accused him variously of sympathising with the Ottomans and of plotting against them. In Salonika, he again investigated alleged massacres of the Christian population. He retired on his seventieth birthday, in accordance with consular service regulations, in 1903.
Throughout his consular career, Biliotti carried out archaeological work, largely centred around the acquisition of objects for the British Museum. His excavations included, with Auguste Salzmann, the site of Kameiros on Rhodes, where he excavated over 300 graves of the archaic and classical periods; Ialysos, where he uncovered the first known examples of Mycenaean painted pottery; and the Roman legionary fortress at Satala near Trebizond. He also carried out minor archaeological work in Turkey and on Crete, and had a crocus, C. biliottii, named after him.
Biliotti was regarded as a competent and influential diplomat by contemporaries, and was frequently called upon by Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, who had him knighted in 1896. He was friendly with Eleftherios Venizelos, later prime minister of Greece, and may have helped him flee Crete in 1889. His consular reports have widely been used by scholars of the period, though historians have also argued that Biliotti's negative view of Ottoman Muslims distorted his portrayal of them.
Early life
Alfred Biliotti was born on 14 July 1833 in a Catholic family in Rhodes, capital of the eponymous island, then a loosely-controlled part of the Ottoman Empire. His father, Charles Biliotti, was a native of Livorno, then in the Italian Grand Duchy of Tuscany; his mother, Honorine, was the daughter of George Fleurat, the French vice-consul on Rhodes. Charles had moved to Rhodes at some point before the 1820s, possibly during or in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, and married Honorine in the 1830s. Alfred was the eldest of their seven children; by the time of his birth, Charles was a merchant on Rhodes who had worked for four years as an unpaid translator for the British consular service on the island. Charles stopped his work for the British around the time of Alfred's birth, though continued to perform sporadic consular work for the governments of Spain and Tuscany. Charles's brother Fortunato also served as a British consular agent on the island of Kastellorizo.Charles Biliotti's business included work and property in the town of Makri, in the southwestern part of mainland Turkey. On 7 November 1845, Lawrence Jones, a British baronet, was robbed and murdered by brigands near the town; after both the British consulate and the Ottoman government failed to find those responsible, Charles worked with Ali Pasha, the kaymakam of Makri, to catch them; they were arrested on 23 April 1846. Following Ali Pasha's murder by relatives of the arrested men, Charles was forced to leave Makri and to abandon his business interests in the town; however, the affair reaffirmed the relationship between him and the British state, and he returned under British protection to Makri in March 1848 as Britain's vice-consul.
Alfred Biliotti was a Levantine Italian; a member of the Italian diaspora settled in the eastern Aegean. He may have been educated at a Christian school, possibly in the Ionian town of Ayvalık or in İzmir, but his biographer David Barchard considers it more likely that he never received any formal education, except via a tutor. He appears to have been taught French and a little English, and to have received the equivalent of a secondary school–level education.
Diplomatic career
Early career
In 1849, at the age of sixteen, Biliotti took a post as a clerk to his father, the British vice-consul based at Makri. In 1850, he was made a dragoman at the British consulate on Rhodes; he is recorded from 1853 as making certified translations for the consulate from Greek into English.Biliotti first met Charles Newton, an archaeologist then working for the Foreign Service, during the latter's posting to the eastern Aegean. In the spring of 1852, Newton was posted as a vice-consul to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, though the consulate at Rhodes was instructed to facilitate Newton's archaeological work as a greater priority than any diplomatic duties of his role. Newton's main task was to find archaeological finds and acquire them for British museum collections, and to identify local agents to supervise exploratory excavations. In 1853, he was promoted to the role of consul on Rhodes. In June of the same year, he travelled to the island of Chios with the historian George Finlay and Biliotti, then aged nineteen. Barchard credits Newton's patronage of Biliotti with allowing the latter to advance to prominence in the consular service, despite his lack of educational qualifications.
On 24 January 1856, Biliotti became vice-consul on Rhodes. The position was unpaid, as were most other British consular posts: they were generally assumed to be part-time positions whose holders would support themselves by other commercial activities. From 15 February until 12 April 1860, and again from 15 February to 12 April 1861, he held the position of acting consul. He was taken on as a paid vice-consul on 26 August 1863, and became a naturalised British citizen on 23 October 1871.
In 1873 or 1874, Biliotti was made vice-consul at Trebizond: the historian Lucia Patrizio Gunning has written that this move was intended to facilitate [|his archaeological work] at the nearby site of Satala. Though his predecessor, Gifford Palgrave, had held the post of consul, Biliotti was kept at the lower rank of vice-consul and paid £200 per year less in annual salary. In November 1878, following an intimation from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, that he was considering transferring Biliotti to Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey, Biliotti wrote in protest to Austen Henry Layard, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and successfully did away with the proposal.
Biliotti was promoted to consul in 1879; his father died at the end of May in the same year, and Biliotti wrote repeatedly to Salisbury to request a transfer to Crete. This request was not yet granted, though Biliotti was given additional responsibility for the consulate at Sivas in 1882. He was, however, paid less than other British consular officials and the representatives of other powers in Trebizond: in 1881, Biliotti received £400 per year and £160 in expenses, while his predecessor had been paid £600 per year and £200 in expenses in 1871 and his French counterpart was paid £1,250 per year. From Trebizond, he sent crocus specimens to the botanist George Maw, who named one species, C. biliottii, after him in 1886.
Crete
In 1885, Biliotti succeeded Thomas Backhouse Sandwith as consul on Crete, based at Khania. He was made consul-general on the island in 1897. In 1900, the French diplomat and philhellene Victor Bérard alleged that Biliotti's appointment to the post in Khania had been a reward for his "obscure but useful" services in acquiring antiquities for the British Museum. According to Esmé Howard, who served as consul-general there in the early twentieth century, Biliotti ended a problem of frivolous lawsuits raised by the island's Maltese community by requiring parties to a case to place money in deposit before it could be heard.The Cretan consulate was, in common with the consular delegations of most other Great Powers, marked by infighting and ineffective co-operation. The consuls of other nations accused Biliotti of supporting anti-Ottoman rebellion and fomenting his own secret plots; he in turn accused them of working against him. Bérard wrote in 1898 that what he called the "Biliotti Question" was the main problem confronting Crete.
Collapse of the Pact of Halepa, 1889
Since 1878, Crete had been administered according to the Pact of Halepa, which had been negotiated by the Ottoman Empire with Greek rebels on the island. Under the Pact, Crete was treated as a semi-autonomous province, and Christians were given a privileged position: they had preferential treatment in applying for official posts, a guaranteed majority in the island's governing assembly, and the right to found newspapers and intellectual societies. Greek was also made an official language of the island.Following the legislative elections of April 1889, which were won by the reformist, liberal party, the defeated conservative faction held demonstrations calling for union with Greece. In response, the Ottoman government imposed martial law. In December, the Ottoman government abrogated the terms of the Pact of Halepa and reimposed direct rule, under the governor Shakir Pasha. The Cretan politician Eleftherios Venizelos, later prime minister of Greece, was a friend of Biliotti's and has sometimes been described as his protégé. Venizelos fled Crete for mainland Greece around the end of September, fearing Ottoman reprisals; Biliotti may have lent him the rowing-boat he used in his escape. In July 1889, the Ottomans stationed around 20,000 soldiers on the island. Cretan Christians protested, and accused the soldiers of various crimes and abuses of power. Biliotti established an enquiry to verify accusations of massacres made in Greek newspapers, and found that, while the stories were generally false or vastly exaggerated, 50 Christians and 42 Muslims had been killed, 115 Christian schools, 57 mosques, 37 Muslim schools and 14 churches had been destroyed, and 6,640 other Muslim-owned buildings and 2,456 Christian-owned ones had been vandalised. In the years that followed, the Christian population largely refused to co-operate with the Ottoman government, effectively making the island ungovernable.