Area Handbook for Albania. Stephen Peters

      This appeal to the past was also accentuated in 1968 in connection with the 500th anniversary of the death of the country's national hero, Skanderbeg. The regime sent a number of scholars and historians to search for historical documents in Vienna and Rome in preparation for the celebration.

      With the exception of these efforts to resurrect the past after a hiatus of fifteen years, the primary function of the country's historians, all under the control of the Party, is to glorify the country's achievements in the period under communism. The Party is given credit for all that has been done in the economic development of the country, in improvements in the people's health, and in expansion of educational and cultural facilities, all of which have been considerable. In 1970 Enver Hoxha, first secretary of the Party, like Stalin in his day and Mao Tse-tung in 1970, was daily quoted and glorified.

      ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES

      The modern Albanians call their country Shqiperia and themselves Shqipetare. In antiquity the Albanians were known as Illyrians, and in the Middle Ages they came to be called Arbereshe or Arbeneshe, and their country Arberia or Arbenia. The present European forms, Albania and Albanians, are derived from the names Arbanoi and Albanoi or Arbaniti, which appeared in the eleventh century.

      In antiquity the Albanians formed part of the Thraco-Illyrian and Epirot tribes that inhabited the whole of the peninsula between the Danube River and the Aegean Sea. Until 168 B.C. the northern and central part of present-day Albania comprised parts of the Kingdom of Illyria, whose capital was Shkoder. The Illyrian Kingdom was conquered by the Romans in 168-167 B.C., and thereafter it was a Roman colony until A.D. 395, when the Roman Empire was split into East and West, Albania becoming part of the Byzantine Empire.

      Under the Roman Empire, Albania served as a key recruiting area for the Roman legions and a main outlet to the East. The present port of Durres (the ancient Durrachium) became the western terminum of Via Egnatia, an actual extension of Via Appia, by which the Roman legions marched to the East. It was during the Roman rule that Christianity was introduced into Albania.

      From the fifth century to the advent of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans in the fourteenth century, invasions from the north and east, especially by the Huns, the Bulgarians, and the Slavs, thinned the indigenous Illyrian population and drove it along the mountainous Adriatic coastal regions. During the crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Albania became a thoroughfare for the crusading armies, which used the port of Durres as a bridgehead. By this time the Venetian Republic had obtained commercial privileges in Albanian towns and, after the Fourth Crusade (1204), it received nominal control over Albania and Epirus and took actual possession of Durres and the surrounding areas. In the middle of the thirteenth century Albania fell under the domination of the kings of Naples, and in 1272 armies of Charles I of Anjou crossed the Adriatic and occupied Durres. Thereupon, Charles I issued a decree calling himself Rex Albaniae and creating Regnum Albaniae (the Kingdom of Albania), which lasted for nearly a century.

      OTTOMAN TURK RULE

      In the period after the defeat of the Serbs by the Ottoman Turks in 1389 in the battle of Kosovo, most of Albania was divided into a number of principalities under the control of native tribal chieftains, most of whom were subsequently forced into submission by the invading Turks. Some of these chieftains, however, were allowed their independence under Turkish suzerainty. One of the most noted of these was John Kastrioti of Kruje, a region northeast of Tirana, whose four sons were taken hostage by the sultan to be trained in the Ottoman service. The youngest of these, Gjergj, was destined to win fame throughout Europe and to be immortalized as the national hero of his country. Gjergj (b. 1403) soon won the sultan's favor, distinguished himself in the Turkish army, converted to Islam, and was bestowed the title of Skander Bey (Lord Alexander), which, in Albanian, became Skanderbeg or Skenderbey.

      In 1443 Hungarian King Hunyadi routed at Nish the sultan's armies, in which Skanderbeg held command; Skanderbeg fled to his native land and seized from the Turks his father's fortress at Kruje. His defection and reconversion to Christianity and the creation in 1444 of the League of Albanian Princes, with himself as its head, enraged the Ottomans, who began a series of intense campaigns that lasted until Skanderbeg's natural death in 1468. In his wars against the Turks, Skanderbeg was aided by the kings of Naples and the popes, one of whom, Pope Nicholas V, named him Champion of Christendom.

      Skanderbeg's death did not end Albania's resistance to the Turks; however, they gradually extended their conquests in Albania and in time defeated both the local chieftains and the Venetians, who controlled some of the coastal towns. The Turkish occupation of the country resulted in a great exodus of Albanians to southern Italy and Sicily, where they preserved their language, customs, and Eastern Orthodox religion.

      One of the most significant consequences of Ottoman rule of Albania was the conversion to Islam of over two-thirds of the population. As the political and economic basis of the Ottoman Empire was not nationality but religion, this conversion created a new group of Muslim Albanian bureaucrats, who not only ruled Albanian provinces for the sultans but also served in important posts as pashas (governors) in many parts of the empire. A number of them became viziers (prime ministers), and one, Mehmet Ali Pasha, at the beginning of the nineteenth century founded an Egyptian dynasty that lasted until the 1950s.

      Some of the Albanian beys and pashas, especially in the lowlands, became almost independent rulers of their principalities. One of these, Ali Pasha Tepelena, known in history as the Lion of Yannina, whose principality at the beginning of the nineteenth century consisted of the whole area from the Gulf of Arta to Montenegro. By 1803 he had assumed absolute power and negotiated directly with Napoleon and the rulers of Great Britain and Russia. The sultan, however, becoming alarmed at the damage Ali Pasha was doing to the unity of the empire, sent his armies to surround him in Yannina, where he was captured and decapitated in 1822.

      Under the Turks, Albania remained in complete stagnation and, when the Turks were expelled from the Balkans in 1912, they left it in about the same condition as they had found it. The Albanian highlanders, especially in the north, were never fully subjected, and their tribal organizations were left intact. Turkish suzerainty affected them only to the extent that it isolated them from the world. Thus, they preserved their medieval laws, traditions, and customs. As a result, Western civilization and development did not begin to penetrate Albania in any meaningful way until it became independent in 1912.

      NATIONAL AWAKENING AND INDEPENDENCE

      The Albanian national awakening made rapid strides after the Treaty of San Stefano in 1877, imposed on Turkey by the Russians, gave the Balkan Slavic nations large parts of Albania. The Western powers, refusing to accept Russia's diktat on Turkey, met in Berlin the following year to consider revision of the Treaty of San Stefano. Albanian leaders in the meantime convened at Prizren and founded the League for the Defense of the Rights of the Albanian Nation. Although the league was unable to bring sufficient pressure on the Congress of Berlin to save Albania from serious dismemberment, it set in motion a political movement that had tremendous influence on Albanian nationalist activity for decades to come.

      Most of the league leaders held high positions in, or were influential members of, the ruling Turkish elite and were fully aware of the shaky position of the Ottoman Empire; they therefore demanded from the Turks administrative and cultural autonomy for all Albanian lands united in a principality. The Turkish government refused and in 1881 forced the dissolution of the league. Meanwhile, Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary began to take an active interest in Albania. Russia aimed at blocking expansion of Austrian influence in the Balkans and supported the territorial demands of Serbia and Montenegro. Italy and Austria-Hungary, on the other hand, concerned over Russia's influence extending to the Adriatic, attempted to influence developments in Albania.

      The advent of the Young Turks regime (1908), in whose establishment Albanian officials in the service of the empire played a major role, encouraged the Albanians to found cultural and political clubs for the propagation of Albanian culture and the defense of Albanian rights. In 1908 a congress of intellectuals from all parts of Albania and the Albanian colonies abroad, especially the Italo-Albanian colonies in Italy, convened in Monastir (Bitolj) to decide on an Albanian alphabet; it adopted the Latin one as most suitable