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.

Alfred was the eldest of their seven children; by the time of his birth, Charles Biliotti was a merchant on Rhodes who had worked for four years as an unpaid translator for the British consular service on the island.

[18] 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.

[26] 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.

[27][c] 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.

[32] Under the Pact, Crete was treated as a semi-autonomous province,[33] 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.

[34] Following the legislative elections of April 1889, which were won by the reformist, liberal xypolitoi ('barefoot') party, the defeated conservative faction held demonstrations calling for union with Greece (enosis).

By that evening, Christians and Muslims had erected barricades in the streets and began shooting at each other:[44] Biliotti requested that a warship of the Royal Navy be sent immediately to restore order.

[43] Biliotti visited the worst-affected areas of Khania, in the company of Orthodox priests, to attempt to calm the situation, and arranged for displaced Muslim families to be billeted in houses left behind by Christian refugees,[45] thousands of whom had fled to mainland Greece or other Cretan towns.

[47] Violence intensified in Khania's Christian neighbourhoods from 19 January;[48] on 3 February, the Ottoman governor, George Berovich Pasha, asked the consuls for assistance in calming the situation.

[48] Meanwhile, in the eastern part of the island around Lasithi,[51] in the French zone of occupation,[52] around 1,000 people were killed by Greek rioters; the British Vice-Consul in Candia, Lysimachos Kalokairinos, tried to cover up the murders, though Biliotti established that they had indeed happened.

[54] Early in March 1897, an Anglo-French military expedition was sent by sea from Khania to relieve the siege of Kandanos in south-western Crete, where around 3,000 Muslim civilians and several hundred Ottoman soldiers were facing imminent massacre by Christian insurrectionists.

Biliotti was the only one of the foreign consuls, who were invited to accompany the expedition at two hours' notice, to go: he negotiated the safe passage of the Muslims inside Kandanos with their Christian opponents, promising the latter that Crete was to be given self-government and that the European powers would see to the end of effective Ottoman rule.

[58] In the midst of the strife And war to the knife O'er a question fierce and knotty Let us sing to the praise 'Mid the death-strewn maze Of Sir Alfred Biliotti No craven was he Who could put to sea Saving thousands by pluck and daring Let King George have his say But we'll cheer the way Of our consul's overbearing!

[53] In December 1897,[53] a joint British, French, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Italian force occupied Crete; the following year, they appointed Prince George of Greece as High Commissioner of the newly-established, largely autonomous Cretan State, effectively ending Ottoman control of the island.

[61] In April 1898, Austria-Hungary and Germany withdrew their troops; the governance of Crete was subsequently reorganised, with the admirals of the four remaining powers' naval contingents forming a council, and each nation administering a sector of the island.

[67] In December 1898, Biliotti was tasked by Herbert Chermside, the commandant of the British sector of occupation, to persuade those Muslims who had left their homes in eastern Crete to return.

[74] In March 1899, the Foreign Office transferred Biliotti to Salonika in Macedonia, then an Ottoman possession, as Consul-General: a more prestigious post, albeit one that came with a salary £200 (equivalent to £28,437 in 2023) lower than he had received at Khania.

On his return around the end of April, Biliotti investigated the reports and found them to be exaggerated; he established that around 50 people had died, and accused Dillon of fabricating Turkish atrocities to distract attention from the Macedonian rebels.

He received a monthly pension of £40 (equivalent to £5,425 in 2023) and spent most of his retirement in Rhodes, though he retained his house in Khania and regularly visited İzmir, a centre for Catholics in the region.

[84] In 1856, Biliotti conducted an impromptu excavation to rescue survivors from the Church of St John of the Collachium on Rhodes, which was destroyed on 6 November in an explosion after lightning struck gunpowder that had been stored in its cellars.

[87] In 1869, Biliotti visited Crete for the first recorded time, as a representative of the British Museum, which sent him to Ierapetra on the island's south coast to acquire two Roman statues, one of which is now known as the Hieraptyna Hadrian.

[g] Biliotti attempted to secure for Myres a firman (permit) to excavate at the site of Knossos, but his request was denied by Mahmoud Pasha, the island's Ottoman governor, in December of that year.

Newton subsequently sent him to Saddak to ascertain whether any additional fragments of the statue or other works were to be found there,[116] and persuaded the Foreign Office to grant Biliotti the necessary time off from his duties and money to cover his expenses during the expedition.

[114] Biliotti's explorations at Saddak were hampered by poor weather, but he reported that local peasants had found fragments of other bronze statues in the area, and correctly asserted that it was the site of the ancient town of Satala,[117] the fortress of the Roman Legio XV Apollinaris.

[112] Funded by £10 (equivalent to £1,173 in 2023) of Newton's own money, Biliotti made small-scale excavations with a team of 36 workers in the fields where the Aphrodite statue was reported to have been found, which turned up no further sculptural remains.

[121] In that year, the archeologist Terence Mitford wrote that it "remains by far the best description of the legionary fortress" at Satala, partly because the site had deteriorated considerably in the century since Biliotti's visit.

[19] In 1883, Biliotti discovered the hilltop sanctuary of Çirişli Tepe, approximately 50 kilometres (31 miles) south of the ancient Greek city of Amisos on the Turkish coast of the Black Sea.

[138] Reflecting on the Cretan crisis of 1897, Harris, who had commanded the British naval forces in the theatre, called Biliotti "in every way the right man in the right place" for his knowledge of Mediterranean languages and customs.

The historians Robert Holland and Diana Markides have argued that neither charge was correct, and that Biliotti considered all of Crete's peoples both peace-loving, credulous and vulnerable to manipulation.