Albania

Albania, called Arnawutluk in Ottoman usage, lies on the Adriatic in south-eastern Europe. The entry treats its language, literature, geography and population in turn. ¹

Albanian is an Indo-European language. It has no literary records before 1496, but ancient Illyrian and ancient Epirote, judged from personal and place names, are held to be the prototypes of its northern (Geg) and southern (Tosk) forms. Its native vocabulary is small, and its borrowings are large: the wheel, cart and plough, and the terms of kinship, are not native words; city life, road-building, horticulture, law, religion and family relations come from Latin, much disguised by sound change; Orthodox ritual terms are Greek; names of dishes, garments, parts of the house and Islamic terms came through Turkish. Albanian is spoken by about 1,500,000 people in Albania, 700,000 in Kosovo-Metohija in Yugoslavia and some 40,000 in Epirus. Archaic forms survive on the Greek islands of Hydra and Spetsai and in Sicily and Calabria, where Tosk exiles settled after the Turkish conquests. The Geg dialect, of the north including Kosovo-Metohija and the capital Tirana, differs from Tosk, which has the larger literature, in its use of the subjunctive for the infinitive and in other points. ¹

From the third century the Roman Church kept a bishopric at Scutari in northern Albania, which became the first cultural centre; Bishop John Buzuk's liturgy of 1555 and the seventeenth-century works of Budi and Bogdani belong to it. Literary activity, tolerated by the Turks in the Catholic north, was suppressed in the Muslim centre and the Orthodox south, and took root among the exiled colonies of Sicily and Calabria. Matranga, a descendant of the exiles, began hymn-writing in folk rhythms in 1592, continued by Brancato (1675-1741) and the Calabrian Variboba (born 1725). The movement became secular with the folk songs and rhapsodies of De Rada (1813-1903), an ardent spokesman of Albanian liberation. The Tosk brothers Abdyl, Sami and Naim Frashëri formed a league at Prizren in 1878, and after the San Stefano settlement they sought Albanian autonomy and literary freedom. Forced into exile after years in Istanbul, where they were joined by the lexicographer and Bible translator Kristoforidhi (1827-1895), they formed a literary society at Bucharest and printed Albanian books from 1885. Books printed in exile were smuggled into Albania by caravan. The lack of a literary centre and of a standard alphabet hampered the movement, until a digraphic script replaced Sami's phonetic spelling. After independence in November 1912 the currents combined. In the Catholic north the poets and writers included Shiroka (1847-1917), Xanoni (1863-1915), Mjeda (1866-1937), the satirist Fishta (1871-1940), Prennushi (1885-1946) and Koliqi (born 1903); the Tosk writers included Drenova (born 1872) and Poradeci (born 1899). Konitza (1875-1943) and others moved to Boston, where the Vatra society and its journal Dielli were founded in 1912. ¹

Albania (Shqipni, Shqiperi) lies between about 39 degrees 38 minutes and 40 degrees 41 minutes north, and 20 degrees east of Greenwich on a north-south axis. Its area is 11,097 square miles (28,748 sq km). It is bounded by Yugoslavia, Greece and the Adriatic. Its length is 207 miles; it narrows to 50 miles at Peshkopi and widens to 90 miles at the lake of Little Prespa. The limestone ranges continue the Dinaric Alps, and the land is highest in the east, reaching about 7,000 feet. The largest of the western lowlands, some below sea level, is the fertile Myzeqeja plain. The Drin, the longest river, rises in Lake Ohrid and reaches the Adriatic below Shengjin; the Shkumbi, a winter torrent, divides the country into two roughly equal areas, Gegnija and Toskerija. The highest peak is Tomorr near Berat (2,396 m). Deforestation has left much of the country bare. Durres is the main port; Valona has a fine natural harbour; Saranda is a fishing port and Shengjin ships ore. Tirana, the capital, is given about 100,000 people, Shkoder 35,000, Korce 25,000, Durres 16,000, Vlore 15,000 and Gjirokastra 12,000. A railway of 80 miles links Tirana with Durres, Peqin and Elbasan; most towns are reached by road. The climate ranges from European in the highlands to sub-tropical in the south-west, with Mediterranean vegetation. The densest forests are at Mamuras near Kruja. ¹

The census of 1955 counted 1,394,310 people in Albania, against 1,003,097 in 1930. Albanians also lived in Yugoslavia (750,000 by the Yugoslav census of 1948), Greece (an estimated 30,000 to 60,000) and Italy (an estimated 150,000 to 250,000); the estimate for Albanians by birth worldwide was about three million. The 1930 census counted 45,000 Vlachs, 35,000 Slavs, 20,000 Turks and 15,000 Greeks in Albania. The entry divides the Albanians into two groups: the Gegs north of the Shkumbi and the Tosks to the south, which the Turks called Gegalik and Toskalik. The Gegs differ from the Tosks in dialect, outlook and social behaviour, and are thought to have kept national traits more purely. The barren mountains gave too little to support a growing population; when epidemics killed livestock, people emigrated or moved to neighbouring plains, usually as mercenaries, shepherds or farm workers. ¹

From the middle of the fourteenth century Albanians, under Serbian pressure or as mercenaries of feudal lords in Greece, settled in Epirus, Thessaly, the Morea and even the Aegean islands. There most were gradually Hellenised, or later moved to southern Italy under Ottoman pressure. About 1466 Thessaly still had Albanian districts in its towns and 24 Albanian katunes at Livadia (Lebadea) and 34 at Istifa. When Iskender-beg died in 1468, some of his followers withdrew to the mountains or went to the kingdom of Naples; in 1478, 1481 and 1492 more Albanians went to southern Italy and Sicily, where they kept their language and customs to the present day. In the fifteenth century the Ottomans moved some Albanian timar-holders from feudal families, the Mazeraki and Heykal, elsewhere. The only significant Turkish settlements recorded in Albania were a few exiles from Konya, called Konici, and the Yuruks of Kodjadilk on the mountains east of Dibra, stationed to guard the Rumeli-Albania highway. ²

The second significant expansion of Albanians in Rumeli came in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, into the plains of Yakova, Prizren, Ipek (Pec), Kalkandelen (Tetovo) and Kosovo, especially after the mass migration of Serbs from these areas in 1690. This settlement was mostly the result of the muqata'a land system, under which Albanians leased small tracts from large muqata'a holders and settled there as tenants. The Vlachs had lived a pastoral life in the mountains of northern Albania alongside the Albanians since the Slavic invasion of the seventh century, and from the fifteenth century took part in the Albanian expansion. The Ottoman register of 835 AH (1431) records Vlachs and their katunes in southern Albania, especially east of Kanina. ²

The Albanian tribes north of the Drin are called Malj-i-sor, "highlanders". Around 1881 there were nineteen such tribes, with 35,000 Roman Catholics, 15,000 Muslims and 220 Orthodox; the most famous were the Hoti, Klementi, Shkreli, Kastrati, Kocaj and Pulati, in the mountains east of Scutari. During the Ottoman conquest of Albania from 1385 to the end of the fifteenth century the rebellious clans retreated to the most rugged highlands, and their raids on the lowlands coincided with the weakening of Ottoman control in the seventeenth century, when they became the terror of Rumeli. The Ottomans respected the tribal organisation and autonomy of these tribes, because they controlled the mountain passes from Rumeli into Albania. In return for guarding the passes they were exempt from taxation. A register of 1496 says that the Klementi nahiye, of five villages, paid kharadj and ispendje, was exempt from the diwani and other taxes, and was made pass-guardian of Petrishban's territory and the route Medun-Kuca-Plava. In the seventeenth century the Klementi caused trouble through raids in Rumeli and co-operation with the rebel tribes of Montenegro. ²

South of the Drin lived the Mirdita, numbering 32,000 in 1881, all Roman Catholic. They were divided into five clans called bayraks: Oroshi, Fandi, Spashi, Kushneni and Dibri. The Hoti, for services against the Venetians in 1696, came to head the clans; the entry notes that the bayrak system was itself an Ottoman institution, a banner of authority given to military chiefs. Each clan had a hereditary bayrakdar, or standard-bearer, and its affairs were decided by a council of hereditary elders; the five clans met yearly at Orosh, and a bolukbashi appointed by the Ottoman governor handled business between the administration and the clans. The Mirdita captains claimed descent from Leke Dukagjini, who played an outstanding part in Iskender-beg's struggle and is credited with codifying the customary law, the Kanuni i Leke Dukagjinit. The tribes sent an auxiliary force of one man per household to the Ottoman army, a practice also applied to the Yuruks and Kurds. From the end of the sixteenth century the empire needed more troops in its long wars, and Albanian auxiliaries grew in importance, especially in local wars against the Montenegrins. The Mirdita were regarded as the bravest soldiers in Rumeli, though Heguard (1855) called them the greatest plunderers in the world. When the Tanzimat administration tried in 1855 to disarm them and enrol them in the regular army, they rose and disturbed the Zadrima area, and the government gave up the attempt the next year. Later the Mirdita chief Prenk Bib Doda took a leading part in the independence movement of 1908. A "Republic of Mirdita", proclaimed under Yugoslav auspices in 1921, collapsed the next year. ²

Italian statistics of 1942 gave a population of 1,128,143: 779,417 Muslims, 232,320 Orthodox and 116,259 Catholics. The only significant Catholic group lies in the Shkodra district, while large Orthodox communities live in the districts of Gjirokastra, Korce, Berat and Vlore, and Muslims are spread across the country, mostly in the centre. Albania was attached to the patriarchate of Constantinople in 732 and split between Rome and Constantinople in 1054, the north passing to Rome. The Normans and Angevins strengthened Catholicism; Antivari was the seat of the archbishop of Albania, and Durazzo that of the Latin archbishop; the Orthodox of Albania were directly dependent on the archbishopric of Ohrid. The Ottomans, even before they restored the patriarchate of Constantinople in 1454, favoured Orthodoxy over Catholicism, but for political reasons the Porte tolerated the Catholic church in Albania, and Albanian lords shifted between East and West according to the political conditions. The Orthodox Albanian immigrants to southern Italy kept their own Uniate church recognising the pope. The Ottoman yearbook of 1895 counted, in the province of Yanya (Epirus and Albania south of the Devoll), 223,885 Muslims, 118,033 Greeks, 129,517 Orthodox Albanians, 3,517 Jews and only 93 Roman Catholics. Some of those counted as Greeks were Orthodox Albanians who had been Hellenised through Greek religious and educational institutions from the second half of the eighteenth century. After Albanian independence an autocephalous Orthodox church of Albania was finally recognised by the patriarchate in 1937. ²

The first converts to Islam were the Albanian feudal lords who held timars from the Ottomans. Conversion was not required to keep a timar: allegiance to the Ottoman state was enough, and Christians still received timars through the fifteenth century, though by its end only a few Christian timar-holders were left through voluntary conversion. Elbasan, built by Mehmed II in 870 AH (1466), was a Muslim centre from the outset, as was Yenishehir in Thessaly. Common people converted more slowly: at the start of the sixteenth century the four sanjaks of Elbasan, Ohrid, Avlona and Iskenderiye had only about three thousand Muslim raiya families, and a Catholic source of about 1622 estimated that only one Albanian in thirty was Muslim. In the seventeenth century the Venetians and Austrians tried to stir up insurrection among the Catholic Albanians and the Orthodox Serbs, who resented the rising jizya. In 1614 church dignitaries at Kuci asked for papal aid; about 1622 the first Franciscan missionaries reached Albania and southern Serbia. Albanian Catholics and Serbs co-operated with the Venetians in 1649 and with the Austrians in 1689-1690, and the Porte resolved to retaliate ²

To escape Ottoman pressure, the Christian populations of the plains of Peč, Prizren, Yakova and Kosovo, who were partly Albanian, migrated in mass or adopted Islam; many became crypto-Christians, locally called laramunë, "motley". In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the albanisation and islamisation of these plains went hand in hand. Conversion gained new impetus under the Bushatlis and Ali Pasha of Tepedelen, who, according to contemporary witnesses, forced a number of villages to become Muslim. He is thought to have been a Bektashi himself, and Bektashism made its greatest progress in Albania in his time. Under King Zog its adherents were estimated at about 200,000, with prosperous tekkes at Tirana, Akcahisar (the old Bektashi centre), Berat and on Mount Tomor, and a central organisation in the capital. At the congress of Korce in 1919 the Bektashis sought a separate community apart from the Sunnis, which was achieved only under the communist regime in 1945. Islam played an essential part in the Ottomanisation of the Albanians, and Christian Albanians often called their Muslim compatriots Turks. It also protected the Albanians from assimilation by their Greek and Slav neighbours. Primitive religious beliefs were said to survive under the veneer of both Christianity and Islam, especially in the highlands. ³

The Illyrian origin of the Albanian people is generally accepted, but their relation to the Thracians, Epirots and Pelasgians is still argued. The Illyrian tribes first met Greek culture through the Greek colonies on the Albanian coast in the seventh century BCE; the chief was Epidamnos, near Durazzo (Durres). The Illyrians formed their first independent political organisation in the third century BCE. The Romans conquered them in 167 BCE, and for centuries they were under strong Roman influence. The Via Egnatia, the Roman road to the East, started at Dyrrachium and followed the Shkumbi valley. Ptolemy names for the first time the Albanoi among the Illyrian tribes, with their capital Albanopolis near Croya. In the seventh century the Slav invasion of Albania ended the Romanisation of the Albanians, who withdrew to the mountains of the north and lived a pastoral life there for half a millennium. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Bulgarian empire ruled southern Albania, including Dyrrachion, and at the end of the twelfth century the Serbs under Nemanja occupied the north. The long coexistence with agricultural Slavs left a deep cultural mark on the Albanians. Basil II restored Byzantine rule in the south and took Dyrrachion in 1005. Around the middle of the eleventh century, as Byzantine control weakened in the provinces, the Albanians came down from their mountains; the contemporary sources call them Arbanenses, Albanenses or, in Greek, Albanoi, and in Slav sources Arbanasi. The Ottomans first used the Greek form Arvanid and then its Turkish versions Arnavud and Arnavut. ³

Dyrrachion was taken by the Normans in 1081 and 1185 and by the Venetians in 1204, and passed to the despot of Epirus, Theodore Angelus (1215-1230). In 1272 Charles of Anjou occupied Dyrrachion and the rest of the Albanian coast, calling himself King of Albania, which began a long struggle between Byzantium and the Angevins. Anatolian Turks first came to know Albania in 1337, through their alliance with the Byzantine emperor Andronicus III, who entered Albania with an army that included Turkish troops. Before long Stephen Dushan occupied Albania (Croya in 1343, central Albania in 1343-1346), which seems to have speeded the migration of Albanians into Greece. After Dushan's empire collapsed in 1355, local feudal lords of Slav, Albanian or Byzantine origin appeared everywhere. The Balsha family, in the north, and the Thopia, in the centre, were the most powerful. The Balshas held the coast from Durazzo to Cattaro and tried to control the region as far as Prizren; they came into conflict with the king of Bosnia and with the Serbs. When Carlo Thopia at Durazzo was threatened by Balsha's power, he asked the Ottomans for help in 1385, and Balsha II was defeated and killed by an Ottoman army at Savra, on the Vjose, on 18 September 1385 (12 Shaban 787 AH). The Albanian lords, including Balsha's heirs, recognised the sultan's overlordship; the Dukagjini of Alessio told Ragusa of their peace with the Ottomans in 1387. Alarmed by the Ottoman advance, Venice sent Daniel Cornaro to Murad I to protect Thopia, while also negotiating with Thopia to take the city, and the long Venetian-Ottoman rivalry over Albania began. ³

Kefalia Shahin, a frontier commander, raided Bosnia successfully, but was defeated by the Bosnians near Trebinje on 27 August 1388. After the Ottoman victory on the Kosovo plain in 1389, the Turks settled at Skopje, making it a strong frontier centre, and the Ottomans kept local lords on their side by granting them their lands as timars. Venice took Alessio and Durazzo (1393) and Drivasto (1396), the lords having given them up for an annual pension. Dimitri Yonima, Konstantin Balsha and Gjergj Dukagjin all co-operated with Shahin against Venice. The Ottoman administration, with the lahrir and timar system, began first in the region of Premedi and Korce, where regular Ottoman officials are recorded from the time of Bayezid I. Ottoman expeditions in Albania in 1394 and 1397 preceded this, and Akcahisar (Croya) was granted tax exemption in the same period. Albanian forces under several lords fought at the battle of Ankara in 1402, and after Bayezid's empire collapsed in 1402 many Albanian lords recognised Venetian suzerainty. When Gjergj Stratsimirovic died in 1403, Venice seized part of his inheritance, and his son Balsha struggled against Venice with the support of Stephen Lazarevic and Vuk Brankovic of Serbia. The Ottoman conquest was completed through war against Venice, from northern Epirus to Croya, and formed the province of Arvanid-ili or Arnavud-ili in about 818-820 AH (1415-1417). ³

The Ottoman timar register of 835 AH (1432) shows the conditions the conquest brought: it names the regions and the feudal families who were vassals of the Ottomans around 819 AH (1416), among them the Yuvan-ili, land of the Kastriot family, Balsha-ili east of Kavaje and south of the Shkumbi, Gionomaymo-ili north of Pekin, and Pavlo Kurtik-ili in the Jilema valley. ³

Some Christian feudal families kept part of their lands as timars, and such timars made up 16 per cent of all the timar-holders in Arvanid-ili. Conversion to Islam was not considered necessary for holding a timar. The Turkish population of the province was only military and religious personnel, and the Turkish timar-holders and their men numbered no more than about 800; the whole sanjak was shared out among some 300 timar-holders living in villages or castles. Argyrocastro (Gjirokaster) became the seat of the sanjakbegi, and each county centre had a subashi and a kadi. The Ottoman state treated almost all agricultural land as its own, which the timar system needed, so peasants felt themselves subject to an impersonal central government rather than to close feudal lords. In the north the Ottomans backed first Balsha III and, after his death in 1421, Stephen Lazarevic of Serbia against Venice, which in 1423 had to return Drivasto, Antivari and Budua to Stephen. In the south Carlo Tocco died in 1429, and Murad II, taking advantage of the rivalry among his heirs, took Yanina in October 1430. A new land and population survey of Albania, in spring 1432 (835 AH), marked a tightening of Ottoman control there, and the entry treats it as the real starting point of the long Albanian resistance in the following decades. ⁴

Villages in the mountainous Kurvelesh and Bzorshek areas refused to be registered, and in places they killed their Ottoman timar-holders. Great lords such as Ivan (Yuvan) Kastriot in the north and Arianites Comnenus in the Argyrocastro region had to give up considerable lands for distribution to Ottoman sipahis as timars. Araniti took up arms; Thopia Zenebissi besieged Argyrocastro; Alfonso V of Naples, Venice and Hungary encouraged the rebels, who defeated Ali, son of Evrenos, governor of Albania, at the Bzorshek pass. Christian lords in central and northern Albania joined the revolt. In 837 AH (1434) the forces of Rumeli under Sinan Beg, governor-general of Rumeli, combined to end the rebellion, which had given Hungary hope of a new crusade, but Araniti escaped to the mountains. The later records of the defter of Arvanid-ili show that the revolt did not much affect the Ottoman control of the country: most Ottoman and Christian timar-holders kept their timars, and the highlanders mostly co-operated with the feudal families with whom they had marriage links. ⁴

From 847 AH (1443) Iskender-beg, son-in-law of Araniti, led the rising. His energy and boldness, and the international situation of the time, gave the movement an international character; the entry says that apart from the legend that grew up around him, the origin and motives of his revolt were no different from those of the other Albanian lords. He was appointed subashi of Akcahisar (Croya) about 842 AH (1438) and dismissed in 1440. He wanted to recover Croya and his father's lands in full, to hold them as a feudal lord rather than a timar-holder. He made an alliance with other feudal families, the Thopias, Balshas, Dukagjini, Dushmani, Lecca Zaccaria and Araniti, at the Alessio meeting of 1 March 1444, but the idea of an Albania unified under a national leader was far from reality. He controlled only northern Albania; central and southern Albania remained under Ottoman control, and subashis and sanjakbegs based at Argyrocastro, Ohrid and Belgrade (Berat) tried to suppress him with local forces. The battles described by Marinus Barletius, the entry says, were mostly local clashes, and Iskender-beg's own forces hardly ever exceeded 3,000 men. By a treaty of 26 March 1451 he became a vassal of Alfonso V of Naples and surrendered Croya to the king's men; southern Albania, Vagenetia, Valona and Kanina, followed his example, and Araniti was authorised to take the oaths of the other lords. Each vassal received a yearly pension of 300 to 1400 ducats. The entry notes that the Aragonese system seemed more favourable to the Albanian feudal lords than the Ottoman, though a contemporary Aragonese document says the common people had hardly any complaint against Ottoman administration. Iskender-beg defied Murad II in 1448 and 1450 and Mehmed II in 1466; he was called "Champion of Christ" by the Pope and became the Albanian national hero of the nineteenth century. ⁴

During the Ottoman-Venetian war of 1463-1479 Albania became one of the main theatres of operations. The Ottomans took Croya, Drivasto, Alessio and Jabljak in 1478, Scutari in 1479 and Durazzo in 1501; Alessio, which they had lost in the war of 1499-1503, was retaken in 1503. After failing at Antivari and Dulcigno, they took both in 1571, completing the conquest of Albania. Until about 870 AH (1466) Ottoman Albania was a sanjak called Arvanid (or Arnavud)-ili. When Mehmed II erected Elbasan into a new sanjak in 1466, the region was reorganised, and Avlona in the south and Ohrid in the east were made sanjaks, while Iskenderiye (Scutari) was formed in the north in 1479. The entry says that up to the end of the sixteenth century Ottoman rule created a peaceful and prosperous period, when most old feudal families adjusted to the Ottoman regime; one of the Araniti, Ali Beg, held a large timar around Kanina, Argyrocastro and Belgrade. ⁴

The Albanian towns, nineteen in the four Albanian sanjaks, were small market towns of 1,000 to 4,000 people. Only Avlona became a commercial centre of some importance, with 4,000 to 5,000 people. To encourage commerce, the government settled there a sizeable Jewish colony of refugees from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. The Kanun-name of Avlona shows that imported European velvets, brocades, mohairs, cotton goods, carpets, spices and leather came from Bursa and Istanbul; some citizens of Avlona had business partners in Europe; and tar and salt, produced near the city, were bought by state agencies at fixed prices. The tax income from Avlona for the sultan's treasury alone was about 32,000 gold ducats a year, and a garrison and a small fleet were stationed there permanently. ⁴

The Ottomans did not radically change the taxes that Albania had paid under the Byzantines and Serbs. Ispendje, probably a Serbian tax, was paid by every adult Christian male at 25 akca, and the basic Ottoman taxes were the fusht, in fact one eighth of agricultural produce, and the jizya. Some Byzantine dues survived, and the Albanian custom called adet paid for other things. All these taxes except the jizya, which went to the sultan's treasury, were assigned to timar-holders. The rate of taxation was not lighter than before, but the Ottomans abolished forced labour and fixed in advance the taxes due from each peasant; the Kanun-name of 1583 forbade abuses such as forced labour, taking land without lawful reason, and demanding cash for the ushr, which was to be paid in goods. The Albanians held an outstanding place in the ruling class of the empire: at least thirty grand viziers are identifiable as Albanian, including Gedik Ahmed, Kodja Davud, Dukagjinzade Ahmed and Kodja Sinan Pasha. Albanians were always present in large numbers in the Kapikulu army, which the devshirme system, practised in Albania as in Bosnia, supplied. Two changes weakened the empire at the end of the sixteenth century: the timar system broke down, letting large estates form in the provinces, and the fiscal system deteriorated, so that new taxes were needed and the jizya was raised. This fell heavily on the Christians, and the Catholic highlanders rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and co-operated with hostile powers. The Klementi, whose tax of 1,000 akca had become trivial as the akca lost value, had to pay a jizya of 1,000 gold coins, and their revolt spread to the tribes of northern Albania, who raided the plains of Rumeli as far as Filibe; the Porte's armies, and a new castle near Gusinje, were needed, and Duce Mehmed Pasha crushed their revolt of 1638. ⁵

As central control weakened, highlanders began to penetrate Rumeli and even Anatolia from the early seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century the pashas, beys and ayans everywhere hired these highlanders, reckoned the best mercenaries, organised in bolukhs of about 100 men under a bolukbashi, a condottiere who arranged everything for his men with the employer; the example of Mehmed Ali in Egypt shows the role of such bolukhs. Many Albanians also joined the mountain bands of Rumeli, called Dagli eskiyasi or Kircaali. In the same period the lease of state lands in the lowlands gave rise to a class of absentee landlords, who sought ever more mukataa. Among them the Bushatli family in the north, in the land of the Gegs, and Tepedelenli Ali Pasha (1744-1822) in the south, among the Tosks, became semi-independent despots. Mehmed Pasha Bushatli built his power on large mukataas and an alliance with the highlanders, and was made governor of Scutari in 1779. After his death in 1796, the Porte's attempt to recover these mukataas led his son Kara Mahmud Pasha to rebel. Ali Pasha, too, held about 200 estates, and the Porte did not challenge the Bushatlis and Ali Pasha, since they checked the domination of the local ayans and balanced each other. Through his sons, whom he had made governors of Thessaly, the Morea and Karli-ili, Ali Pasha formed a semi-independent state in Albania and Greece; in 1820, when the central government moved against him, he rebelled and incited the Greeks to revolt. The last Bushatli, Mustafa Pasha, was destroyed only in 1832 by the reformed army of Mahmud II. The centralising policy of the Tanzimat caused trouble with the autonomous tribes of northern Albania. ⁵

The Albanian League for the Defence of the Rights of the Albanian Nation was founded at Prizren on 13 June 1878, to influence the Congress of Berlin, and it proved important for the later birth of an Albanian state. Encouraged by the Ottoman government, the League resisted the Montenegrins and Greeks to keep the four Ottoman wilayets of Yanya, Iskodra, Manastir and Kosova. When it moved towards an autonomous Albania, the Porte sent an army and dispersed the League in 1881. Austria-Hungary and Italy encouraged the Albanian movement to extend their influence, while Russia supported Montenegro's claims over Albania. Abdulhamid II sought Albanian support by enlisting Albanians in his bodyguard and granting them favours, but Albanian intellectuals, with the Young Turks in Paris and elsewhere, looked to an autonomous Albania. The Albanian stand against Abdulhamid at the Frizovik meeting of 1908 helped the Revolution to succeed. In the Ottoman parliament the Albanian deputies Ismail Kemal, Esad Toptani and Hasan Prishtina joined the Fürriyet ve İtilaf party, which sought decentralisation against the centralist Ottomanisation policy of the Ittihad ve Terakki party. After the Congress of Manastir (November 1908) an uprising broke out among the highlanders, who resisted the government's attempt to collect their arms. On 4 September 1912 the new Ottoman government accepted the Albanian demand for autonomous administration, but the Balkan War changed everything; in November 1912 Ismail Kemal declared the independence of Albania at Avlona (Vlore). The London conference proclaimed Albania an autonomous principality under the guarantee of the six powers on 29 July, which the entry prints as 1923 (not verified against the page image). The newly elected prince, Wilhelm von Wied, had to leave the country on 3 September 1914. ⁵

In the First World War Serbia claimed Scutari and Durazzo. With their country threatened with dismemberment, Albanian leaders convened a congress at Lushnje on 31 January 1920 and demanded independence; a national government was formed in Tirana, and an Albanian partisan army drove the Italians out of Vlore. Italy recognised Albanian independence by the treaty of Tirana on 3 August 1920. In its first years of independence (1921-1924) the small state had a turbulent parliamentary life: the Muslim landowning beys of the western and central plains clashed with the Popular Party of Fan S. Noli. A revolution forced the prime minister, Ahmed Zog, to flee to Yugoslavia, but with Yugoslav support he returned to power on 24 December 1924. A constituent assembly proclaimed a republic and named Zog president. He then signed a series of treaties with Italy (12 May 1925, 27 November 1926, 22 November 1927 and March 1936) which put the country virtually under Italian protection, and in September 1928 Zog was proclaimed King of the Albanians. He fled the country one day before the Italian invasion of 6 April 1939. The entry closes with its bibliography, signed by Halil Inalcik. ⁵