Rebels, Believers, Survivors: Studies in the History of the Albanians

505 Pages·2020·3.438 MB·English

by  Noel Malcolm

Rebels, Believers, Survivors
Rebels, Believers,
Survivors
Studies in the History of the Albanians
NOEL MALCOLM
1
1
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933229
ISBN 978–0–19–885729–7
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198857297.001.0001
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This book is dedicated to the memory of Robert Elsie
Preface
That the history of the Albanian lands is poorly known and little studied, outside
those territories themselves, is a disappointing fact but not a very surprising one.
For half a century, Albania itself was under a Communist regime of an unusually
inward-looking and autarkic kind; there was very little cultural contact between it
and the outside world. Kosovo fared somewhat better in Titoist Yugoslavia, but
the academic establishment in that country was much more interested in the his-
torical development of the South Slavs than in the history and culture of what it
regarded as a very backwaterish province.
Previously, for roughly half a millennium, the Albanian lands—a phrase used
here simply as a historical term, to mean the territories of present-day Albania
and Kosovo, plus some other nearby areas that have had significant Albanian-
speaking populations—had formed part of the Ottoman Empire. Despite the ini-
tial resistance of the Albanians under Skanderbeg, and various subsequent
rebellions, the Ottoman sultans tended to take their Albanian subjects for granted.
This was partly because the Albanians supplied so many soldiers and administra-
tors to defend and run the Ottoman state, and partly because the conversion of a
majority of the Albanian population to Islam meant that the sultans saw these
subjects as belonging to a different category from the other peoples of the Balkans,
whose ‘national’ rights were gradually recognized. As a consequence, even in the
late Ottoman period there was no general provision for Albanian-language edu-
cation within the Albanian lands. Belgrade had an institution of higher educa-
tion—which later became the University of Belgrade—from 1808; Athens had a
university from 1837. In both Serbia and Greece, therefore, major works of history
were being written and printed at a time when few Albanians were even being
taught to write in their own language. In the field of Balkan studies, the relatively
greater influence of those other schools of national historiography has continued
to this day.1
‘National’ historiography can be, of course, problematic in itself. For all the
former subject peoples in the Balkans, the task of establishing a positive narrative
of nationhood was felt to be a high priority; everything was to be fitted, if at all
possible, into a simplistic long-term story of national resistance and national lib-
eration. When Albanian writers began producing serious works of history, from
the mid-twentieth century onwards, they were certainly not immune to this ten-
dency. Indeed, the crude nature of Communist ideology in Albania, with—after
the break with the Soviet Union in 1961—its incorporation of a peculiarly strident
nationalism, made the products of Albanian historians doubly suspect in the eyes
x Preface
of Western readers, even when those writings did include the fruits of genuine
historical research. And such readers were, in any case, very few indeed, not only
because these publications were poorly distributed, but also because so few
Westerners had any knowledge of the Albanian language. Even in the post-
Communist period, when valuable work has been published by historians in
Albania and Kosovo, that last problem remains a major one.
For all these contingent reasons, the history of the Albanians may seem, to the
casual observer, a rather self-enclosed and inward-looking affair. But the truth is
the opposite: this is a history that radiates outwards in all kinds of directions. The
Albanian lands have long been a meeting-ground of religions, and Catholicism,
Orthodoxy and Islam all connected Albanians with larger currents of culture and
thought outside their own region. For much of their history, the Albanian lands
were a crossroads of cultures and interests—a channel through which Venetian
and other Italian powers interacted with the Ottoman Balkans from an early stage,
a place of interest to the Habsburgs over several centuries as they tried to extend
their own Balkan influence, and a focus for Greek and Slav ambitions both during
the later period of Ottoman rule and, crucially, at the time of that empire’s disinte-
gration. In addition, the Albanians have been a very active and mobile people;
there were large-scale, long-term settlements of Albanian populations in Greece
and southern Italy, and—as I have illustrated in a previous book, Agents of
Empire—many individuals pursued careers, as soldiers, merchants, administrators
and intellectuals, much further afield in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
A single volume of essays cannot possibly do justice to the full extent of these
contacts and connections. While this book covers quite a broad range of subject-
matters, and extends chronologically from the fifteenth century to the twentieth,
it makes no attempt to be systematic; this is a collection of writings on a variety
of topics that have caught my interest, for a variety of reasons, over the years. But
since each essay is based on the study of primary sources, manuscript as well as
printed, a glance at the list of archives in different countries provided in the ‘List
of Manuscripts’ will give at least some sense of the wide range of European
resources on which students of Albanian history can draw. (I should state at the
outset that I have not studied Ottoman manuscript materials; but readers should
not imagine that I have thereby missed the Ottoman equivalent of the sort of
qualitatively rich documentation that is available in Vienna, Venice, Rome or the
Vatican. Up until the nineteenth century, the relevant Ottoman archival materials
consist primarily of tax registers and records of executive decrees; more personal
and discursive documentation is not preserved in the Ottoman state archives to
anything like the extent that it is in their West European counterparts. Much
important work has in any case been done on those Ottoman documents that
relate to the Albanian lands, by scholars such as Selami Pulaha, Skënder Rizaj,
Petrika Thëngjilli and Ferit Duka, and I have benefited greatly from their
researches.)
Preface xi
While the topics discussed in this book connect in many ways with specific
developments and interests outside the Albanian lands, the essays also try to shed
some light on larger thematic issues, the significance of which goes far beyond
their immediate Albanian context. These include religious conversion, the phe-
nomenon of ‘crypto-Christianity’ among Muslims, methods of enslavement in
the Ottoman Empire, the development of nationalist historiography, and the
nature of modern myth-making about national identity. Even for readers who
have no specialist concern with the history of the Albanians, therefore, my hope
is that this book will contain many things of interest.
One essay, on Ali Pasha and his relations with Great Britain during the
Napoleonic Wars, is so much longer than the others that it deserves some com-
ment here. After Skanderbeg, Ali Pasha of Tepelenë (or of Ioannina) is the best-
known of all the figures in pre-twentieth-century Albanian history. Lord Byron’s
visit to Tepelenë as his guest in 1809 was commemorated in Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage; the novelist Alexandre Dumas published a biography of Ali Pasha; the
composer Albert Lortzing even wrote an operetta about him. There have been
many literary works featuring Ali, and several bellelettristic biographies; yet
serious academic study of his life and actions has been surprisingly rare. Only one
monograph has been written about him in English within the last eighty years,
and its central arguments are, as I explain in my essay, quite unconvincing. Yet Ali
remains a very significant figure, not because of his romantic allure, but because
he played a crucial role in the geopolitics of south-eastern Europe throughout the
period of the Napoleonic Wars. The territories he controlled were of huge poten-
tial importance where any plans for a French invasion of the Ottoman Empire
were concerned. Napoleon knew that, and so too did the British, who maintained
diplomatic agents at Ali’s court over many years. My essay here uses, for the first
time, all of the extensive materials in British archives that were generated by that
relationship; it supplies much new information, thereby helping, I hope, to fill a
gap in the political, diplomatic and military history of the Napoleonic period.
I believe that the intrinsic interest of this material, and of the whole story that
I tell here, justifies the length of the essay. At the same time, I must emphasize that
it does not claim to offer a general biography of Ali, even for the years it covers;
and to attempt to biographize him fully would of course be out of the question
here, as that would be a much larger task, involving the use of many other bodies
of evidence.
While the essays in this volume vary greatly in size, I hope I can truthfully say
that each has the length appropriate to its subject-matter. They are arranged here
in a general chronological sequence. Since each was written quite separately, how-
ever, there is no reason why readers should feel obliged to read the book sequen-
tially. (One individual, Pjetër Bogdani, who is the primary subject of chapter 6,
also features more briefly in two other chapters, nos. 2 and 7; the degree of over-
lap is very slight, and those chapters do not need to be read in any particular
xii Preface
order.) In a few cases cross-references have been given. Also in a few cases, I have
added either an introductory note, to offer a little background information to the
non-specialist reader, or an additional note, to supply some further details.
Four of the essays appear here for the first time: chapters 1, 5, 8 and 10. Since
these include by far the longest two items in the volume (as well as the fourth-
longest), they represent roughly 60 per cent of the total. In addition: when chap-
ter 3 was previously published, the main text it presents was given only in the
original Italian; it appears here in English for the first time. And the same is true
of the entire text of chapter 9, which was previously published only in Albanian.
Two other items, chapters 6 and 11, were published by the Kosovan Academy of
Sciences and Arts and by the Albanian Institute in Zurich, respectively; both are
hard-to-find publications, absent from most research libraries in the UK, Western
Europe and North America. And so far as I know, only one item, chapter 2, has
hitherto been available online in academic libraries. So, although eight out of the
twelve essays have been published before, I am encouraged to think that bringing
them together in this volume may perform a useful service.
In each essay, all quotations from foreign-language sources are given in English
(my own translation, unless otherwise stated) in the text, with the original given
in the notes. In a few cases, where the previous printing lacked the original word-
ings, they have been supplied here. Ottoman terms are given in their modern
Turkish forms, unless there is a standard English version (e.g. ‘pasha’, ‘Janissary’).
Similarly, where a particular form of a place-name has become standard usage in
English, that form is used: I therefore have ‘Tirana’ and ‘Prishtina’, but other
Albanian place-names are given in their indefinite form in Albanian. Generally, I
use the place-names that belong to the official or primary language of the country
where the place is now situated.
For permission to reprint the previously published items, I am very grateful to
the following publishers and institutions. (I list the items by chapter-number
here; full details of the original publications can be found in the Bibliography.) 2:
Südost-Forschungen (De Gruyter, Berlin); 3: Revue des études sud-est européennes
(the Institute of South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy,
Bucharest; with special thanks also to Professor Andrei Pippidi); 4: the School of
Slavonic and East European Studies, London; 6: Studime (the Academy of
Sciences and Arts of Kosovo); 7: De Gruyter, Berlin; 9: the Institute of History,
Prishtina (publishers of the Albanian translation); 11: the Albanian Institute,
Zurich (with special thanks to Dr Albert Ramaj); 12: C. Hurst & Co.
During my many years of study of Albanian history, I have accumulated very
many debts of gratitude. Some individuals are thanked in particular essays; here
I would like to add the names of Oliver Schmitt, who invited me to the conference
at which the first version of chapter 7 was given as a paper, and Peter Bartl, the
doyen of historians of Albania in Western Europe, in whose honour that confer-
ence was held. I am also deeply grateful to the staff of all the libraries and archives
Preface xiii
where I have carried out these researches. Thirty-eight are mentioned in the List
of Manuscripts, and to those I would add the following libraries: All Souls
College, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library,
Cambridge; the Österreichische Staatsbibliothek, Vienna; the School of Oriental
and African Studies, London; the School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
London; the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Cambridge; the Taylor
Institution, Oxford; the Warburg Institute, London; the Widener Library,
Harvard. I particularly wish to thank my editor at the Oxford University Press,
Luciana O’Flaherty, for her encouragement and support. And, as always, I am
extremely grateful to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, for
enabling me to carry out much of this research, and for providing such an ideal
scholarly environment in which to work.
But my greatest and most long-standing debts in this case are to two individuals.
Robert Elsie, to whose memory this book is dedicated, was not only an excep-
tionally gifted and extraordinarily productive—and generous—scholar, but also a
much-valued friend; his loss is deeply felt by all who knew him, and by everyone
in the field of Albanian studies. Bejtullah Destani has also been a generous friend,
and an encouraging one: the idea of collecting these essays came from him first
of all. Over many years, his energy and expertise in seeking out the records of
Albanian history have been matched only by his persistence and resourcefulness
as an editor and a publisher. Between them, these two individuals have done more
during the last three decades than any others I can think of in the world, both to
extend our knowledge of the culture and history of the Albanian lands and to
propagate it to a wider readership.
Finally, for non-Albanian speakers, some approximate guidance on the pro-
nunciation of words and names:
c ‘ts’
ç ‘tch’ (as in ‘match’)
dh ‘th’ (always voiced, as in ‘this’; Albanian writes ‘th’ for the unvoiced ‘th’, as
in ‘thin’)
ë a light ‘uh’ (like the ‘u’ in ‘radium’; virtually silent at the end of a word)
gj ‘dj’ (as in ‘adjure’)
j ‘y’ (as in ‘you’)
ll like ‘l’, but a slightly heavier, longer sound
q like ‘tch’, but a slightly thinner sound
rr like ‘r’, but a slightly heavier, more rolled sound
x ‘dz’ (as in ‘adze’)
xh ‘j’ (as in ‘jam’)
y acute ‘u’ (as in French ‘tu’ or German ‘über’)
zh ‘zh’ (as in ‘Zhivago’)
Osijek
Pakrac
Belgrade
BOSNIA AND
HERCEGOVINA
Smederevo
SERBIA
Sarajevo
h e rc
e
Niš
g
o
v
i
n
MONTENEGRO
a
Pejë Prishtina Sof
Dubrovnik
Podgorica
Kotor malëmsia dehe PKriOzrSeOnVO
Bar Shkodër Skopje Kiustendil
Ulcinj
Lezhë
NORTH
MACEDONIA
Tirana
Durrës
Elbasan Ohrid
ALBANIA
Berat Salonica
Vlorë
t h e s
Ioannina sa
Corfu Trikala l
y
GREECE
Lamia
I: The Albanian lands and the Balkans (with modern borders)