Mehmed Ali Pasha (marshal)

Image by/from Abdullah frères

Mehmed Ali Pasha (November 18, 1827 – September 7, 1878) would be a German-born Ottoman career officer and marshal. He was the grandfather from the Turkish statesman Ali Fuat Cebesoy, and also the great-grandfather of famous poets Nazim Hikmet and Oktay Rifat Horozcu and also the socialist activist, lawyer, and athlete Mehmet Ali Aybar.

Mehmed Ali was created as Ludwig Karl Friedrich Detroit (also referred to as Carl Detroy) in Magdeburg, Prussia. His parents were Carl Friedrich Detroit and Henriette Jeanette Severin. In France They family name suggests Huguenot ancestry, like a descendant of Protestant refugees from France within the 16th or 17th century. Throughout his teenage life in 1843 he ran off to ocean, and traveled towards the Ottoman Empire, where he accepted Islam and it was circumcised. There, in 1846, Ali Pasha, later Grand Vizier, sent him to some military school. He received a commission within the Ottoman Army in 1853 and fought against against Russia within the Crimean War. He is made a brigadier general and Pasha in 1865.

Within the 1877-1878 war against Russia, Mehmed Ali brought the Turkish army in Bulgaria. He was effective in the operations around the Lom river (August-September 1877), but was afterward forced back by his opponents. He unsuccessful to effect a junction with Suleiman Pasha, and it was replaced through the latter. Later in 1878 he would be a participant in the Congress of Berlin.

In August 1878, the Ottoman government selected him to overview the entire process of the cession from the Plav-Gucia region to Montenegro in compliance towards the decisions from the Congress of Berlin. Mehmed Ali Pasha’s first task was the pacification from the Albanian League of Prizren, which opposed the border change included in the areas (Plav-Gucia) were Albanian-lived on. He showed up in Kosovo at the end of August, working to make local Albanians adhere to the Berlin Agreement but was blocked from the further movement for the Ottoman-Montenegrin border through the local committees from the Albanian League. Stationed in Abdullah Pasha Dreni’s estate in Gjakova with several Ottoman battalions he was wiped out on September 6 following a seven-day fight with several 1000 Albanians opposing cessation of Albanian lived on lands to European forces.