Albania and Kosovo have long, fascinating histories of connection with the wider European world. These essays explore this history from the 15th century to the 20th, through stories of Italian pilgrims, British diplomats, Albanian village girls converting to Islam, Muslims practising secret Christianity, and Ottoman men enslaving fellow citizens.

Thanks to its half-century under Communism, as well as its little-known language, Albania has suffered from neglect and a sense of isolation. Yet, as this study helps to show, the Albanian lands have a long history of interaction with others. They have been a meeting-ground of Christianity and Islam; a channel through which Venice connected with the Ottoman Balkans; a place of interest to the Habsburgs; and a focus for the ambitions of neighbouring powers in the late Ottoman period. Albanians themselves could have many different identities.

The studies in this volume, by one of the world's leading experts on Albanian history, range from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, taking in politics, social history, religion and diplomacy. Each is based on original research; the longest, on Ali Pasha, uses a wealth of manuscript material to tell, for the first time, the full story of the vital role he played in the international politics of the Napoleonic Wars. Other studies bring to life ordinary individuals hitherto unknown to history: women hauled before the Inquisition, for example, or the author of the first Albanian autobiography.

Some of these studies have been printed before (several in hard-to-find publications, and one only in Albanian), but the greater part of this book appears here for the first time. This is not only a landmark publication for readers interested in south-east European history. It also engages with many broader issues, including religious conversion, 'crypto-Christianity' among Muslims, methods of enslavement within the Ottoman Empire, and the nature of modern myth-making about national identity.

This collection of essays is meticulously researched. ...Malcolm unpicks myths that have grown up around the Albanians, their customs and values, their movements and migrations and he introduces us to innovative and important literary and political figures...Noel Malcolm's book is the best resource you can find on these different aspects of early Albanian history and cultural origins. He documents and lays bare the diplomatic background and interweavings in Albania's struggle for survival, and eventual independence in the early 20th century.

Autorentext
Noel Malcolm read History and English Literature at Cambridge University, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Thomas Hobbes. He began his career as a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; he was then political columnist and, subsequently, Foreign Editor of The Spectator, and then chief political columnist of The Daily Telegraph. In 1996 he was a Visiting Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and in 1999 he was a lecturer at Harvard; he gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford in 2001. Since 2002 he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and at Cambridge he is an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Gonville and Caius. He has published books and articles on, among other subjects, early modern philosophy and the history and culture of the Balkans. He was knighted in 2014 for services to scholarship, journalism and European history.

Inhalt

• Preface

• 1: Glimpses of Fifteenth-Century Albania: The Pilgrim Narratives

• 2: The Kelmendi: Notes on the Early History of a Catholic Albanian Clan

• 3: An Unknown Account of Ottoman Albania: Antonio Bruni's Treatise on the beylerbeylik of Rumeli (1596)

• 4: Crypto-Christianity and Religious Amphibianism in the Ottoman Balkans: the Case of Kosovo

• 5: Early Modern Albanians in the Hands of the Inquisition

• 6: Pjetër Bogdani's Cuneus prophetarum (1685): The Work and its Religious Context

• 7: The 'Great Migration' of the Serbs from Kosovo (1690): History, Myth and Ideology

• 8: Ali Pasha and Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars

• 9: British Diplomacy and the League of Prizren, 1878-1880

• 10: The First Albanian Autobiography

• 11: Ernesto Cozzi (1870-1926): A Neglected Figure in Albanian Studies and in the History of Albania

• 12: Myths of Albanian National Identity: Some Key Elements, as Expressed in the Works of Albanian Writers in America in the Early Twentieth Century

• List of Manuscripts