history of Albania

The Illyrians

The origins of the Albanian people are not definitely known, but data drawn from history and from archaeological and anthropological studies have led some researchers to consider the Albanians to be the direct descendants of the ancient Illyrians. The linguistic evidence in that regard is most unclear; the Albanian language is certainly a distinct branch of the Indo-European family, but, largely because of a dearth of information on the language of the ancient Illyrians, it is difficult to convincingly demonstrate a connection between the two languages. (Some scholars, moreover, dispute such theses, arguing that Illyrians were not autochthonous to Albania and that Albanian derives from a dialect of the now-extinct Thracian language, but again the data are sparse and thus the arguments are difficult to judge.)

Illyrian culture is believed to have evolved from the Stone Age and to have manifested itself in the territory of Albania toward the beginning of the Bronze Age, about 2000 bce). The Illyrians were not a uniform body of people but a conglomeration of many tribes that inhabited the western part of the Balkans, from what is now Slovenia in the northwest to central Albania.

Authors of antiquity relate that the Illyrians were a sociable and hospitable people, renowned for their daring and bravery at war. Illyrian women were fairly equal in status to the men, even to the point of becoming heads of tribal federations. In matters of religion, Illyrians were pagans who believed in an afterlife and buried their dead along with arms and various articles intended for personal use.

The land of Illyria was rich in minerals—iron, copper, gold, and silver—and Illyrians became skillful in the mining and processing of metals. They were highly skilled boatbuilders and sailors as well; indeed, their light swift galleys known as liburnae were of such superior design that the Romans incorporated them into their own fleet as a type of warship called the liburnian.

The Greeks

From the 8th to the 6th century bce, the Greeks founded a string of colonies on Illyrian soil, two of the most prominent of which were Epidamnus (modern Durrës) and Apollonia (near modern Vlorë). The presence of Greek colonies on their soil brought the Illyrians into contact with a more advanced civilization, which helped them to develop their own culture while they in turn influenced the economic and political life of the colonies. In the 3rd century bce the colonies began to decline and eventually perished.

Roughly parallel with the rise of Greek colonies, Illyrian tribes began to evolve politically from relatively small and simple entities into larger and more complex ones. At first they formed temporary alliances with one another for defensive or offensive purposes, then federations and, still later, kingdoms. The most important of these kingdoms, which flourished from the 5th to the 2nd century bce, were those of the Enkalayes, the Taulantes, the Epirotes, and the Ardianes.

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After warring for the better part of the 4th century bce against the expansionist Macedonian state of Philip II and Alexander the Great, the Illyrians faced a greater threat from the growing power of the Romans. Seeing Illyrian territory as a bridgehead for conquests east of the Adriatic Sea, Rome in 229 bce attacked and defeated the Illyrians, led by Queen Teuta, and by 168 bce had established effective control over Illyria.

The Roman Empire

The Romans ruled Illyria—which now became the province of Illyricum—for about six centuries. Under Roman rule Illyrian society underwent great change, especially in its outward, material aspect. Art and culture flourished, particularly in Apollonia, whose school of philosophy became celebrated in antiquity. To a great extent, though, the Illyrians resisted assimilation into Roman culture. Illyrian culture survived, along with the Illyrian tongue, though many Latin words entered the language and later became a part of the Albanian language.

Christianity manifested itself in Illyria during Roman rule, about the middle of the 1st century ce. At first the new religion had to compete with Middle Eastern religions—among them that of Mithra, Persian god of light—which had entered the land in the wake of Illyria’s growing interaction with eastern regions of the empire. For a long time it also had to compete with gods worshipped by Illyrian pagans. The steady growth of the Christian community in Dyrrhachium (the Roman name for Epidamnus) led to the creation there of a bishopric in 58 ce. Later, episcopal seats were established in Apollonia, Buthrotum (modern Butrint), and Scodra (modern Shkodër).

By the time the empire began to decline, the Illyrians, profiting from a long tradition of martial habits and skills, had acquired great influence in the Roman military hierarchy. Indeed, several of them went on from there to become emperors. From the mid-3rd to the mid-4th century ce, the reins of the empire were almost continuously in the hands of emperors of Illyrian origin: Gaius Decius, Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian, and Constantine the Great.

From Illyria to Albania

When the Roman Empire divided into East and West in 395, the territories of modern Albania became part of the Byzantine Empire. As in the Roman Empire, some Illyrians rose to positions of eminence in the new empire. Three of the emperors who shaped the early history of Byzantium (reigning from 491 to 565) were of Illyrian origin: Anastasius I, Justin I, and—the most celebrated of Byzantine emperors—Justinian I.

In the first decades under Byzantine rule (until 461), Illyria suffered the devastation of raids by Visigoths, Huns, and Ostrogoths. Not long after these barbarian invaders swept through the Balkans, the Slavs appeared. Between the 6th and 8th centuries they settled in Illyrian territories and proceeded to assimilate Illyrian tribes in much of what is now Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. The tribes of southern Illyria, however—including modern Albania—averted assimilation and preserved their native tongue.

In the course of several centuries, under the impact of Roman, Byzantine, and Slavic cultures, the tribes of southern Illyria underwent a transformation, and a transition occurred from the old Illyrian population to a new Albanian one. As a consequence, from the 8th to the 11th century, the name Illyria gradually gave way to the name, first mentioned in the 2nd century ce by the geographer Ptolemy of Alexandria, of the Albanoi tribe, which inhabited what is now central Albania. From a single tribe the name spread to include the rest of the country as Arbëri and, finally, Albania. The genesis of Albanian nationality apparently occurred at this time as the Albanian people became aware that they shared a common territory, name, language, and cultural heritage. (The Albanians’ own name for their land, Shqipëria, is believed to have supplanted the name Albania during the 16th and 17th centuries. While Shqipëria is popularly believed to be connected to the word for “eagle,” shqipe, it is better taken to be derived from the language name shqip, which itself is most likely related to an adverb meaning “[speaking] clearly,” making shqip “[the] clearly [spoken language].”)

Long before that event, Christianity had become the established religion in Albania, supplanting pagan polytheism and eclipsing for the most part the humanistic world outlook and institutions inherited from the Greek and Roman civilizations. But, though the country was in the fold of Byzantium, Albanian Christians remained under the jurisdiction of the Roman pope until 732. In that year the Iconoclast Byzantine emperor Leo III, angered by Albanian archbishops because they had supported Rome in the Iconoclastic Controversy, detached the Albanian church from the Roman pope and placed it under the patriarch of Constantinople. When the Christian church split in 1054 between the East and Rome, southern Albania retained its tie to Constantinople while northern Albania reverted to the jurisdiction of Rome. This split in the Albanian church marked the first significant religious fragmentation of the country.

Medieval culture

In the latter part of the Middle Ages, Albanian urban society reached a high point of development. Foreign commerce flourished to such an extent that leading Albanian merchants had their own agencies in Venice, Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia), and Thessalonica (now Thessaloníki, Greece). The prosperity of the cities stimulated the development of education and the arts. Albanian, however, was not the language used in schools, churches, and official government transactions. Instead, Greek and Latin, which had the powerful support of the state and the church, were the official languages of culture and literature.

The new administrative system of the themes, or military provinces created by the Byzantine Empire, contributed to the eventual rise of feudalism in Albania, as peasant soldiers who served military lords became serfs on their landed estates. Among the leading families of the Albanian feudal nobility were the Thopias, Balshas, Shpatas, Muzakas, Aranitis, Dukagjins, and Kastriotis. The first three of these rose to become rulers of principalities that were practically independent of Byzantium.

The decline of Byzantium

Beginning in the 9th century, partly because of the weakness of the Byzantine Empire, Albania came under the domination, in whole or in part, of a succession of foreign powers: Bulgarians, Norman Crusaders, the Angevins of southern Italy, Serbs, and Venetians. The final occupation of the country in 1347 by the Serbs, led by Stefan Dušan, caused massive migrations of Albanians abroad, especially to Greece and the Aegean Islands. By the mid-14th century, Byzantine rule had come to an end in Albania, after nearly 1,000 years.

A few decades later the country was confronted with a new threat, that of the Turks, who at this juncture were expanding their power in the Balkans. The Ottoman Turks invaded Albania in 1388 and completed the occupation of the country about four decades later (1430). But after 1443 an Albanian of military genius—Gjergj Kastrioti (1405–68), known as Skanderbeg—rallied the Albanian princes and succeeded in driving the occupiers out. For the next 25 years, operating out of his stronghold in the mountain town of Krujë, Skanderbeg frustrated every attempt by the Turks to regain Albania, which they envisioned as a springboard for the invasion of Italy and western Europe. His unequal fight against the mightiest power of the time won the esteem of Europe as well as some support in the form of money and military aid from Naples, the papacy, Venice, and Ragusa. After he died, Albanian resistance gradually collapsed, enabling the Turks to reoccupy the country by 1506.

Skanderbeg’s long struggle to keep Albania free became highly significant to the Albanian people, as it strengthened their solidarity, made them more conscious of their national identity, and served later as a great source of inspiration in their struggle for national unity, freedom, and independence.

The nature of Turkish rule

The Turks established their dominion over Albania just as the Renaissance began to unfold in Europe. Cut off from contact and exchanges with western Europe, Albania had no chance to participate in or benefit from the humanistic achievements of that era. Conquest also caused great suffering and vast destruction of the country’s economy, commerce, art, and culture. Moreover, to escape persecution by their conquerors, about one-fourth of the country’s population fled abroad to southern Italy, Sicily, and the Dalmatian coast.

Although the Turks ruled Albania for more than four centuries, they were unable to extend their authority throughout the country. In the highland regions, Turkish authorities exercised only a formal sovereignty, as the highlanders refused to pay taxes, serve in the army, or surrender their arms—although they did pay an annual tribute to Constantinople.

Time and again Albanians rose in rebellion against Ottoman occupation. In order to check the ravages of Albanian resistance—which was partly motivated by religious feelings, namely defense of the Christian faith—as well as to bring Albania spiritually closer to the empire, the Ottomans initiated a systematic drive toward the end of the 16th century to Islamize the population. That drive continued through the following century, by the end of which two-thirds of the people had converted to Islam. A major reason Albanians became Muslims was to escape Turkish violence and exploitation, an instance of which was a crushing tax that Christians would have to pay if they refused to convert.

Islamization aggravated the religious fragmentation of Albanian society, which had first appeared in the Middle Ages and which was later used by Constantinople and Albania’s neighbours in attempts to divide and denationalize the Albanian people. Hence, leaders of the Albanian national movement in the 19th century used the rallying cry “The religion of Albanians is Albanianism” in order to overcome religious divisions and foster national unity.

The basis of Ottoman rule in Albania was a feudal military system of landed estates, called timars, which were awarded to military lords for loyalty and service to the empire. As Ottoman power began to decline in the 18th century, the central authority of the empire in Albania gave way to the local authority of autonomy-minded lords. The most successful of those lords were three generations of pashas of the Bushati family, who dominated most of northern Albania from 1757 to 1831, and Ali Paşa Tepelenë of Janina (now Ioánnina, Greece), a brigand-turned-despot who ruled over southern Albania and northern Greece from 1788 to 1822. Those pashas created separate states within the Ottoman state until they were overthrown by the sultan.

After the fall of the pashas, in 1831 Turkey officially abolished the timar system. In the wake of its collapse, economic and social power passed from the feudal lords to private landowning beys and, in the northern highlands, to tribal chieftains called bajraktars, who presided over given territories with rigid patriarchal societies that were often torn by blood feuds. Peasants who were formerly serfs now worked on the estates of the beys as tenant farmers.

Ottoman rule in Albania remained backward and oppressive to the end. In those circumstances, many Albanians went abroad in search of careers and advancement within the empire, and an unusually large number of them (in proportion to Albania’s population) rose to positions of prominence as government and military leaders. More than two dozen grand viziers (similar to prime ministers) of Turkey were of Albanian origin.

Albanian nationalism

By the mid-19th century Turkey was in the throes of the “Eastern Question,” as the peoples of the Balkans, including Albanians, sought to realize their national aspirations. To defend and promote their national interests, Albanians met in Prizren, a town in Kosovo, in 1878 and founded the Albanian League. The league had two main goals, one political and the other cultural. First, it strove (unsuccessfully) to unify all Albanian territories—at the time divided among the four vilayets, or provinces, of Kosovo, Shkodër, Monastir, and Janina—into one autonomous state within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. Second, it spearheaded a movement to develop Albanian language, literature, education, and culture. In 1908, in line with the second program, Albanian leaders met in the town of Monastir (now Bitola, North Macedonia) and adopted a national alphabet. Based mostly on the Latin script, this supplanted several other alphabets, including Arabic and Greek, that were in use until then.

The Albanian League was suppressed by the Turks in 1881, in part because they were alarmed by its strong nationalistic orientation. By then, however, the league had become a powerful symbol of Albania’s national awakening, and its ideas and objectives fueled the drive that culminated later in national independence.

When the Young Turks, who seized power in Constantinople in 1908, ignored their commitments to Albanians to institute democratic reforms and to grant autonomy, Albanians embarked on an armed struggle, which at the end of three years (1910–12) forced the Turks to agree, in effect, to grant their demands. Alarmed at the prospect of Albanian autonomy, Albania’s Balkan neighbours, who had already made plans to partition the region, declared war on Turkey in October 1912, and Greek, Serbian, and Montenegrin armies advanced into Albanian territories. To prevent the annihilation of the country, Albanian national delegates met at a congress in Vlorë. They were led by Ismail Qemal, an Albanian who had held several high positions in the Ottoman government. On November 28, 1912, the congress issued the Vlorë proclamation, which declared Albania’s independence.

Creating the new state

Shortly after the defeat of Turkey by the Balkan allies, a conference of ambassadors of the great powers (Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, and Italy) convened in London in December 1912 to settle the outstanding issues raised by the conflict. With support given to the Albanians by Austria-Hungary and Italy, the conference agreed to create an independent state of Albania. But, in drawing the borders of the new state, under strong pressure from Albania’s neighbours, the great powers largely ignored demographic realities and ceded the vast region of Kosovo to Serbia, while in the south Greece was given the greater part of Çamëria, a part of the old region of Epirus centred on the Thíamis River. Many observers doubted whether the new state would be viable with about one-half of Albanian lands and population left outside its borders, especially since those lands were the most productive in food grains and livestock. On the other hand, a small community of about 35,000 ethnic Greeks was included within Albania’s borders. (However, Greece, which counted all Albanians of the Orthodox faith—20 percent of the population—as Greeks, claimed that the number of ethnic Greeks was considerably larger.) Thereafter, Kosovo and the Greek minority remained troublesome issues in Albanian-Greek and Albanian-Yugoslav relations.

The great powers also appointed a German prince, Wilhelm zu Wied, as ruler of Albania. Wilhelm arrived in Albania in March 1914, but his unfamiliarity with Albania and its problems, compounded by complications arising from the outbreak of World War I, led him to depart from Albania six months later. The war plunged the country into a new crisis, as the armies of Austria-Hungary, France, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia invaded and occupied it. Left without any political leadership or authority, the country was in chaos, and its very fate hung in the balance. At the Paris Peace Conference after the war, the extinction of Albania was averted largely through the efforts of U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson, who vetoed a plan by Britain, France, and Italy to partition Albania among its neighbours.

A national congress, held in Lushnje in January 1920, laid the foundations of a new government. In December of that year Albania, this time with the help of Britain, gained admission to the League of Nations, thereby winning for the first time international recognition as a sovereign nation and state.

Bishop Noli and King Zog

At the start of the 1920s, Albanian society was divided by two apparently irreconcilable forces. One, made up mainly of deeply conservative landowning beys and tribal bajraktars who were tied to the Ottoman and feudal past, was led by Ahmed Bey Zogu, a chieftain from the Mat region of north-central Albania. The other, made up of liberal intellectuals, democratic politicians, and progressive merchants who looked to the West and wanted to modernize and Westernize Albania, was led by Fan S. Noli, an American-educated bishop of the Orthodox church. In the event, the East-West polarization of Albanian society was of such magnitude and complexity that neither leader could master and overcome it.

In the unusually open and free political, social, and cultural climate that prevailed in Albania between 1920 and 1924, the liberal forces gathered strength, and by mid-1924 a popular revolt forced Zogu to flee to Yugoslavia. Installed as prime minister of the new government in June 1924, Noli set out to build a Western-style democracy in Albania, and, toward that end, he announced a radical program of land reform and modernization. But his vacillation in carrying out the program, coupled with a depleted state treasury and a failure to obtain international recognition for his revolutionary, left-of-centre government, quickly alienated most of Noli’s supporters, and six months later he was overthrown by an armed assault led by Zogu and aided by Yugoslavia.

Zogu began his 14-year reign in Albania—first as president (1925–28), then as King Zog I (1928–39)—in a country rife with political and social instability. Greatly in need of foreign aid and credit in order to stabilize the country, Zog signed a number of accords with Italy. These provided transitory financial relief to Albania, but they effected no basic change in its economy, especially under the conditions of the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s.

The social base of Zog’s power was a coalition of southern beys and northern bajraktars. With the support of this coalition—plus a vast Ottoman-style bureaucracy, an efficient police force, and Italian money—King Zog brought a large measure of stability to Albania. He extended the authority of the government to the highlands, reduced the brigandage that had formerly plagued the country, laid the foundations of a modern educational system, and took a few steps to Westernize Albanian social life.

On balance, however, his achievements were outweighed by his failures. Although formally a constitutional monarch, in reality Zog was a dictator, and Albania under him experienced the fragile stability of a dictatorship. Zog failed to resolve Albania’s fundamental problem, that of land reform, leaving the peasantry as impoverished as before. In order to stave off famine, the government had to import food grains annually, but, even so, thousands of people migrated abroad in search of a better life. Moreover, Zog denied democratic freedoms to Albanians and created conditions that spawned periodic revolts against his regime, alienated most of the educated class, fomented labour unrest, and led to the formation of the first communist groups in the country. Italy, on the other hand, viewed Albania primarily as a bridgehead for military expansion into the Balkans. On April 7, 1939, Italy invaded and shortly after occupied the country. King Zog fled to Greece.

World War II

In October 1940 Italian forces used Albania as a military base to invade Greece, but they were quickly thrown back into Albania. After Nazi Germany defeated Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941, the regions of Kosovo and Çamëria were joined to Albania, thus creating an ethnically united Albanian state. The new state lasted until November 1944, when the Germans—who had replaced the Italian occupation forces following Italy’s surrender in 1943—withdrew from Albania. Kosovo was then reincorporated into the Serbian portion of Yugoslavia, and Çamëria into Greece.

Meanwhile, the various communist groups that had germinated in Zog’s Albania merged in November 1941 to form the Albanian Communist Party and began to fight the occupiers as a unified resistance force. After a successful struggle against the fascists and two other resistance groups that contended with them for power—the National Front (Balli Kombëtar) and the pro-Zog Legality Party (Legaliteti)—the communists seized control of the country on November 29, 1944. Enver Hoxha, a college instructor who had led the resistance struggle of communist forces, became the leader of Albania by virtue of his post as secretary-general of the party. Albania, which before the war had been under the personal dictatorship of King Zog, now fell under the collective dictatorship of the Albanian Communist Party. In 1946 the country officially became the People’s Republic of Albania and in 1976 the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania.