Golden Journal No. 39:
Legions of Zog
Story of Albania, Part One
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2021

Nations of earth shall abate,
And yet Albania will live and succeed.
For thee, for thee we fight. 

While Albania is an ancient land ruled by Greeks, Romans and Byzantines, its modern history can be traced to the coming of the Ottoman Turks. Ottoman armies first appeared in Albania in 1385, invited to intervene in one of the endless feuds between the Albanian petty lords. They would remain for another five centuries.

Ottoman penetration of Albania proceeded slowly, but picked up speed in the early 1400’s. Sponsored by Venice, the petty lordlings put aside their differences, more or less, in 1442 to form the Albanian League with Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Naples, as its titular head and Gjergj Skanderbeg, an Albanian-born Ottoman governor who had just deserted the Sultan’s service, as its military chief.

Skanderbeg would lead stout resistance to the Ottomans for the next quarter-century, until he died of malaria. During that span he also placed Albania under the suzerainty of the Kingdom of Naples, and later led an expedition to Naples to help restore King Ferdinand to his throne. Without Skanderbeg, the Albanians were steadily subdued by the Ottomans until the great fortress at Shkodra in northern Albania fell in 1479. Thousands of Albanians fled to southern Italy, where they formed communities that still maintain their cultural and linguistic distinctions; descendants include Italian prime minister and bigamist Francesco Crispi, Communist legend Antonio Gramsci, Pope Clement XI and actress/director Bobbi Starr.

The heroic Skanderbeg, felled by a mosquito.

Over the following centuries, more and more Albanians converted to Islam, though small Orthodox and Catholic communities remained into current times. These converts found great success within the Ottoman system as soldiers and administrators. As the Ottoman Empire de-centralized during the 18th Century, regional governors turned to Albania as a source of recruits, and Albanians were common among the bashi-bazouk irregulars who accompanied most Ottoman armies in wartime and the interchangeable gangs of brigands who plagued the Balkan countryside during times of (relative) peace.

Albanians fought in all of the campaigns waged by the Ottoman Empire during the wars against Russia and Persia, and the Napoleonic Wars. Albanians set themselves up across the Balkans as semi-independent governors, with Muhammed Ali, the son of an Albanian tobacco merchant, seizing power as ruler of Egypt and building the backwater province into a modern state. Ali Pasha, the “Lion of Janina,” began as an Albanian bandit and rose to govern all of modern Albania and Greece plus a slice of neighboring Macedonia; at the height of his power, he could command up to 100,000 troops (though many of these were of dubious loyalty and quality).

Ali Pasha, the Lion of Janina, and his favorite wife, Kira.

With the notable exception of Muhammed Ali, the governors lost their powers in the re-centralization of the Ottoman Empire that began with Sultan Mahmud II’s “Tanzimat” declaration. Albanian lands were divided into two vilayets, or provinces, to be governed by bureaucrats sent out from the capital. Where Ali Pasha had negotiated and allied with foreign powers, giving no thought to the Sultan’s wishes, all foreign affairs now flowed through the Sublime Porte. With their powers reduced, the governors no longer received massive foreign bribes; those also went to the capital.

Soon after Ali Pasha’s death in 1822, an Ottoman army entered Albanian lands to enforce the central government’s will. That force accomplished little, and in 1830 the Ottomans returned. Resid Mahmud Pasha invited local Albanian leaders, known as beys, to a conference where they would be honored for their loyalty to the Sultan. They found Resid’s “New Model” Turkish troops lined up for a ceremonial salute, but rather than discharge them into the air they leveled their muskets and opened fire.

Between the beys and their personal guards, about 1,000 Albanians were killed, and Resid next marched on the most powerful remaining bey, Mustafa Bushati of Shkoder in northern Albania. Mustafa had declared Mahmud II an infidel and refused to attend the conference where his fellow beys died. After a six-month siege Mustafa surrendered, but after Austrian pressure he received a pardon and would actually serve again as a governor in 1846. Meanwhile, a fresh revolt in Bosnia required Resid’s attention and the Ottomans marched away.

That became the pattern for the next two decades: local Albanian leaders, some of them serving Ottoman officials and some tribal leaders, would lead revolts against central authority. An Ottoman army would arrive to suppress them, but could not remain long-term and would eventually leave. And then the cycle would repeat itself.

Albanian provinces (vilayets), 1878.

By the late 1840’s, the motives for these revolts began to change. Early on, these featured resistance to taxes, conscription, and the imposition of religious orthodoxy decided in Constantinople rather than allowing local imams to go their own (often heretical) way. But the 1847 uprising called on Albanians to rise for their nation as well as these reasons.

The so-called “Albanian Awakening” celebrated by later Albanian patriots was severely limited in scope – very few Albanians were literate, and fewer still had developed any sort of national consciousness. A standardized Albanian alphabet did not appear until 1844, and was mostly used by exiled writers and activists for the next several decades. These intellectuals, inspired by the French Revolution, Greek Revolt and Italian Risorgimento, hoped to ignite the same national passions in their countrymen. But their numbers remained negligible, with even less influence in Albania.

Russian victory in 1878 over the Ottoman Empire put the future of the entire Balkan Peninsula up for grabs. The Russian attempt to remake the region to their liking was blocked by Britain and Austria-Hungary, but Albanian beys were horrified that the Sultan’s government had agreed to hand majority-Albanian areas to Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria. Forty-seven leading Albanian beys gathered at Prizren in Kosova to declare their loyalty to the Sultan and their wish that all of the Empire’s Albanian lands be gathered together in a single province, or vilayet. They did not, at least initially, make any mention of autonomy, much less independence, but simply called for unification under the Sultan and expressed their willingness to fight for the Ottomans against the hated Bulgarians and Serbs.

This League of Prizren angered the Ottoman authorities by refusing to suppress their Albanian identity, and vowing to fight for the regions signed away in peace negotiations. Ottoman troops enforced the cessions of Albanian territory to Serbia and Montenegro at gunpoint, resulting in armed clashes and even full-scale battles between the Sultan’s troops and his own supporters. The fighting ended in the suppression of the League while Montenegro and Serbia took the promised territories. Presaging the events of a century later, the Serbs proceeded to ethnically cleanse their new lands, ejecting the Albanian inhabitants and massacring those who refused to leave.

Most of the refugees were settled in Kosova, strengthening its Albanian proportion and imbuing the Kosovar Albanians with a bitter anti-Serb attitude that would remain for generations. Albanian guerillas filtered over the border for years afterwards to raid the Serb villages that sprouted on their former lands. While Ottoman garrisons sometimes assisted and even armed these raiders, for the most part the authorities were now firmly against the Albanians.

A generation later, Albanian leaders tried again, forming the League of Peja in 1899 under the leadership of Haxki Zeka, a veteran of the League of Prizren. While some beys were involved, the delegates included school teachers, large landowners, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic clergy and a handful of intellectuals. Once again, they pledged their loyalty to the Sultan and their determination to defend Albanians from their predatory neighbors. This time the league took concrete actions, mustering an army of 15,000 volunteers and founding Albanian-language schools. Members pledged to eradicate blood feuds, swearing that any who pursued a vendetta against another Albanian did so against all Albanians.

Perhaps inevitably, the Ottoman government and Albanian nationalism could not co-exist, and Ottoman forces moved to suppress the league and its army. At least 40,000 Ottoman troops moved into Kosova, the center of league operations, and by 1900 had crushed the movement’s outward activities. Zeka reached out to Austria-Hungary (which bordered Albanian lands through the occupation of Novi-Pazar) offering to place Albania under Habsburg rule; the Austrians demurred but the Serbs took note and a Serbian agent assassinated Zeka in 1902.

Albanians battle the Turks, 1910.

Albanians rose again a decade later, in response to new Ottoman taxes and a renewed centralization drive. The Albanians raised thousands of insurgents and battled the Turks openly for control of towns and key railway passes. The new Young Turk government in Constantinople reacted with savage repression, eventually deploying up to 50,000 troops in Albanian areas including Kurdish Hamidiye irregular cavalry. The Hamidiye had been created during the 1894-96 Armenian massacres and specialized in terrorizing non-Islamic communities. And so they did in Albania as well, targeting Serbs – who had not participated in the uprising – for massacres, arson and expulsion.

Albanian culture was to be eradicated. Albanian schools were destroyed and books in the Albanian language – whatever the topic – burned. Use of the Albanian alphabet became a capital crime, and journalists and teachers faced summary execution. Use of the Latin alphabet (including importation of books using it) was merely a felony.

Those harsh measures temporarily brought armed resistance to a close, but merely prepared the way for a new insurgency.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his dog Leopold, who is a good dog.

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