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Albania
Albanians under Ottoman Rule
The Ottoman sultan considered himself God's agent on earth, the
leader of a religious--not a national--state whose purpose was
to defend and propagate Islam. Non-Muslims paid extra taxes and
held an inferior status, but they could retain their old religion
and a large measure of local autonomy. By converting to Islam,
individuals among the conquered could elevate themselves to the
privileged stratum of society. In the early years of the empire,
all Ottoman high officials were the sultan's bondsmen the children
of Christian subjects chosen in childhood for their promise, converted
to Islam, and educated to serve. Some were selected from prisoners
of war, others sent as gifts, and still others obtained through
devshirme, the tribute of children levied in the Ottoman Empire's
Balkan lands. Many of the best fighters in the sultan's elite
guard, the janissaries (see Glossary), were conscripted as young
boys from Christian Albanian families, and high-ranking Ottoman
officials often had Albanian bodyguards.
In the early seventeenth century, many Albanian converts to Islam
migrated elsewhere within the Ottoman Empire and found careers
in the Ottoman military and government. Some attained powerful
positions in the Ottoman administration. About thirty Albanians
rose to the position of grand vizier, chief deputy to the sultan
himself. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Albanian
Köprülü family provided four grand viziers, who fought against
corruption, temporarily shored up eroding central government control
over rapacious local beys, and won several military victories.
The Ottoman Turks divided the Albanian-inhabited lands among
a number of districts, or vilayets. The Ottoman authorities did
not initially stress conversion to Islam. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, however, economic pressures and coercion
produced the conversion of about two-thirds of the empire's Albanians.
The Ottoman Turks first focused their conversion campaigns on
the Roman Catholic Albanians of the north and then on the Orthodox
population of the south. For example, the authorities increased
taxes, especially poll taxes, to make conversion economically
attractive. During and after a Christian counteroffensive against
the Ottoman Empire from 1687 to 1690, when Albanian Catholics
revolted against their Muslim overlords, the Ottoman pasha of
Pec, a town in the south of present-day Yugoslavia, retaliated
by forcing entire Albanian villages to accept Islam. Albanian
beys then moved from the northern mountains to the fertile lands
of Kosovo, which had been abandoned by thousands of Orthodox Serbs
fearing reprisals for their collaboration with the Christian forces.
Most of the conversion's to Islam took place in the lowlands
of the Shkumbin River valley, where the Ottoman Turks could easily
apply pressure because of the area's accessibility. Many Albanians,
however, converted in name only and secretly continued to practice
Christianity. Often one branch of a family became Muslim while
another remained Christian, and many times these families celebrated
their respective religious holidays together
As early as the eighteenth century, a mystic Islamic sect, the
Bektashi dervishes, spread into the empire's Albanian-populated
lands. Probably founded in the late thirteenth century in Anatolia,
Bektashism became the janissaries' official faith in the late
sixteenth century. The Bektashi sect contains features of the
Turks' pre-Islamic religion and emphasizes man as an individual.
Women, unveiled, participate in Bektashi ceremonies on an equal
basis, and the celebrants use wine despite the ban on alcohol
in the Quran. The Bektashis became the largest religious group
in southern Albania after the sultan disbanded the janissaries
in 1826. Bektashi leaders played key roles in the Albanian nationalist
movement of the late nineteenth century and were to a great degree
responsible for the Albanians' traditional tolerance of religious
differences.
During the centuries of Ottoman rule, the Albanian lands remained
one of Europe's most backward areas. In the mountains north of
the Shkumbin River, Geg herders maintained their self-governing
society comprised of clans. An association of clans was called
a bajrak, (see Glossary). Taxes on the northern tribes were difficult
if not impossible for the Ottomans to collect because of the rough
terrain and fierceness of the Albanian highlanders. Some mountain
tribes succeeded in defending their independence through the centuries
of Ottoman rule, engaging in intermittent guerrilla warfare with
the Ottoman Turks, who never deemed it worthwhile to subjugate
them. Until recent times, Geg clan chiefs, or bajraktars, exercised
patriarchal powers, arranged marriages, mediated quarrels, and
meted out punishments. The tribesmen of the northern Albanian
mountains recognized no law but the Code of Lek, a collection
of tribal laws transcribed in the fourteenth century by a Roman
Catholic priest. The code regulates a variety of subjects, including
blood vengeance. Even today, many Albanian highlanders regard
the canon as the supreme law of the land.
South of the Shkumbin River, the mostly peasant Tosks lived in
compact villages under elected rulers. Some Tosks living in settlements
high in the mountains maintained their independence and often
escaped payment of taxes. The Tosks of the lowlands, however,
were easy for the Ottoman authorities to control. The Albanian
tribal system disappeared there, and the Ottomans imposed a system
of military fiefs under which the sultan granted soldiers and
cavalrymen temporary landholdings, or timars, in exchange for
military service. By the eighteenth century, many military fiefs
had effectively become the hereditary landholdings of economically
and politically powerful families who squeezed wealth from their
hard-strapped Christian and Muslim tenant farmers. The beys, like
the clan chiefs of the northern mountains, became virtually independent
rulers in their own provinces, had their own military contingents,
and often waged war against each other to increase their landholdings
and power. The Sublime Porte (see Glossary) attempted to press
a divide-and-rule policy to keep the local beys from uniting and
posing a threat to Ottoman rule itself, but with little success.
Data as of April 1992
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