VELÐ PASHA AND CONSUL ONGLEY An Anglo-Ottoman Diplomatic Relationship That Got Too Close David BARCHARD The Cretan Crisis of 1858 and the Twilight of Ottoman Rule In the summer of 1858 a revolt on the island of Crete, then an outlying province of the Ottoman Empire, briefly caught the attention of Europe. The headline news was fairly straightforward: a liberal reforming Ottoman governor, Veliuttin Rifat Pasha, usually known simply as ‘Veli Pasha’, left the island ignominiously amid the fierce hostility of the Christian population, the active opposition of most of the foreign consuls, and a dispute with the Ottoman officials who had been sent to replace him. His only significant ally, the British Consul, Henry Ongley, departed equally abruptly. Neither man ever revisited the island, so far as is known, on which both of them had spent much of their lives. Obscure and long-forgotten it may be, but in retrospect the 1858 crisis was a turning point in Crete’s history and points up the general dilemmas faced by the Ottoman Empire as a whole. For the first half of the 19th century, Crete had been an isolated but fairly typical province of the European zone of the Ottoman Empire. After 1858 the gravitational centre of Crete’s social and political life shifted. Newly-emergent Christian Greek commercial families began to dominate the island’s business life. The aspirations of the Christian population rather than the views of Ottoman Vali (governor-general) increasingly defined the viewpoint of foreign consuls on the island. For the next forty years, until the Ottoman withdrawal from the island, the dominant perception of Crete was shaped by philhellenes and Greek nationalists who saw the island as ‘an occupied land’ awaiting eventual liberation. The upheavals in Crete in 1858 also reflected a more general Ottoman failure not confined to that island alone: the defeat in the wake of the Crimean War of the Tanzimat reformers’ dream of creating a socially and economically progressive multicultural order that could appeal to all Ottoman citizens regardless of their religion and culture. Veli Pasha’s government in Crete was par excellence an energetic attempt to turn this idea into reality.