The concentration of all power in the hands of a Radical Party that equated itself with the people – this is the dominant perception and practice of the so-called golden age of Serbian democracy between 1903 and 1914

At the very start of the nineteen-nineties an institutional reform was carried out in Serbia (as in other so-called transitional countries), under the leadership of Slobodan Milošević. Despite numerous deficiencies, this reform did undeniably create the basic constitutional conditions for establishing a modern democratic order. The principle of division of power was introduced, together with a multi-party system and direct elections; a parliament was founded, and the media were liberalised. For the first time in Serbian history, moreover, a civilian was appointed to head the armed forces. Today, a decade and a half later, we witness a complete debacle of these institutions. Instead of tracing the path to pluralist democracy, market economy and the rule of law, modern political institutions have served as a ruse for covering, or rather legitimising, a wholly archaic and anti-modern political project – one that was also criminal. The issues of state borders and ethnic homogenisation were defined as the primary interests of the Serbian people, before which freedom of the individual, as a value in its own right, either disappears or is at best of secondary importance. A patriarchal, authoritarian and strongly monistic culture emerged into full light, its internal image distinguished by collectivism, egalitarianism and intolerance towards the other or the different, its external image by ethnic nationalism and militarism.

The devaluation of personal freedom, and all the other values of liberal democracy, by Slobodan Milošević’s regime does not mean that it did not enjoy a degree of democratic legitimacy – democratic in a populist (narodnjački) sense, but democratic nonetheless. Serbia embraced Milošević’s policy as though unanimously, giving it near plebiscitary support. In this way the Serbians by their own decision entered not a free and open society but a war, whose legacy was impoverishment, self-isolation and a heavy burden of responsibility for war crimes.

Serbia still lives with this legacy. The Serbian electoral body, indifferent in its majority towards the issue of responsibility for the war and war crimes, continues to vote for the advocates of the war policy, for individuals and parties of an ultra-nationalist and populist nature, seduced by their nationalist rhetoric, sugary archaism and obsession with myths, as well as by their social demagoguery of anti-capitalism and anti-Westernism in general. Their accent shifts between the social dimension and the imperialist programme of uniting all ‘Serb lands’, depending on current political needs. We face daily examples of this organic unity of social populism, authoritarianism and imperialist nationalism.
One of the most impressive was the grandiose concluding rally to promote the Radical Party’s candidates for the post of mayor of Belgrade, held in the autumn of 2004, the rhetoric and scenography of which – combined with a disciplined yet passionate hailing and hymning of the Radicals’ ‘father’, now Hague prisoner Vojislav Šešelj – represented an accomplished reproduction of the National-Socialist model. Its result was catastrophic. The oaths of loyalty to the Hague prisoner, and the public identification of the Radical Party with his deeds, have remained firm. At the same time, the general judgement that the Radicals represent the single most powerful political party in Serbia has conditioned the party-political calculations of the so-called democratic parties, especially in relation to the recent developments associated with the adoption of the new Serbian constitution, thus legitimising the Radical Party more effectively than anything else since 5 October 2000. It needed only a month for these parties to shift from public, forceful and firm demands that the Radical Party be banned, as a party that stimulates national hatred, to the position that its participation – with its decisive influence in elaborating the highest law of the Serbian state for the 21st century – was something quite normal and legitimate. Which of these parties will ever again have the right to question the legitimacy of the Radical Party?

Over the past fifteen years, in other words, Serbia has been voting for the same political option, moving the gravitational centre of its expectations from the nationalist to the social-populist component and back. Here – as indeed everywhere else – 5 October brought about no essential change. On the contrary, by giving victory to the policy of so-called legalism, i.e. the policy of continuity with the regime of Slobodan Milošević, it gave back this option its briefly shaken legitimacy and further strengthened it. This is why surprise at its current power is either hypocritical or politically naive, since it can only involve ignoring the fact that the strongest and perhaps decisive blow against the idea of modern Serbia came precisely after 5 October, when we were faced with the most dramatic testimony in our modern history that the transformation of Serbia into a modern state was not merely a labour of Sisyphus but also a punishable offence. The advocates of a modern Serbia, who had earlier been marked out as renegades and political trouble-makers, now became legitimate targets for assassination. This led to the Serbian ‘murder in the Orient Express’, when almost all the country’s relevant political players – from generals and journalists to poets and clerics – in their different ways stuck their knives into the back of the prime minister Zoran Đinđić, who personified Serbia’s modernisation and re-orientation towards the West. Instead of being named murderers, they were called patriots. The brutality of the attack on the modernisers in Serbia has always been in proportion with their potential. Zoran Đinđić in this respect cannot be compared with any other politician in Serbian twentieth-century history. This is why he elicited no mercy. The aim was realised: the vision of a modern Serbia is daily further from reality and increasingly close to the world of science fiction.

Why is it that Serbia, ever since the fall of Communism, has proved unable to recognise its own vital interest in the values of modern society, continuing instead stubbornly and systematically to oppose them? In other words, what are the roots of the anti-modern political culture which, carried on the wave of ‘democratic transition’ at the end of the 1980s, erupted with mighty force to the surface and remained there, choking all differentiation?

The usual answer, which unhesitatingly points the finger at the Communist legacy and remains at that level, is quite worthless. It does not meet even elementary logic, because it is unable to provide the answer to two commonsense questions:
first, why did Milošević gain support not only from Communists but also from anti-Communists, including the Serbian Orthodox Church?;
secondly, why is the kind of resistance to modernisation displayed in post-Communist Serbia not present in other post-Communist states (such as Hungary, the Czech Republic or Poland) where Communism was far more rigid than in Serbia?
The real problem with this answer is that it is socially damaging, because it blocks critical re-examination of our own history and the self-understanding, responsibility and political maturity that come with that.

Here lies the responsibility of the elite, which, by fostering a distorted and mythological understanding on the part of the citizenry regarding the key processes and actors of Serbia’s modern history, helps in fact to preserve the currently dominant cultural and political model. In short, the answer to the question about the debacle of the democratic transition in Serbia lies in far deeper recesses of history, those that preceded the Communist experience and that, after all, account for that very experience.

‘We are not nationalists, but narodnjaci [men of the people]’, declared the president of the Serbian Radical Party, pointing thereby at the political tradition which gave birth to his party and provided the political articulation for contemporary Radicals. It is the tradition that emerged victorious from one of the crucial and lasting historical conflicts of modern Serbia: the conflict between two different concepts of state and society – between, broadly speaking, collectivism and individualism.

The content of this conflict was precisely defined by the Serbian political elite in the last decades of the 19th century, at the time of the first serious challenges posed by modernity. This was the period of the initial political articulation of broad layers of Serbian society, made possible by the introduction of a representative system and popular participation in politics. The above-mentioned political elite hence derived its legitimacy from the electorate.

What essentially marked this elite was a deep internal division over fundamental, strategic questions concerning the development of the Serbian state and society. It was a matter of projects which, whether in open or in latent conflict, were to become a permanent feature of Serbian history in the 19th and 20th centuries. The basic dividing-line was attitude to the West as a cultural and civilisational model in the broadest sense, which implied differences with regard both to questions of social and economic modernisation and to interpretations of the nature of the state and its goals. At that time, and in response to the modernising project of the ruling liberal elite, the first Serbian Radicals headed by Nikola Pašić articulated the project of the ‘people’s state’, with which they succeeded in organising a mass political movement and the largest political party in Serbian history: the People’s Radical Party. Anti-individualism, the state as a patriarchal community, economic egalitarianism, and national-territorial myths of which the Kosovo myth was the most important, were to be the fundamental orientations of society. The party which mobilised, organised and programmatically shaped this political consciousness was the People’s Radical Party. This political force was the first in Serbian history to transform narodnjački socialism into a mass political programme, thereby ensuring that the primary, decisive – and as history would show also fateful – political articulation of wider layers of Serbian society would be carried out on the basis of this programme.
The liberal reforming elite, weak in regard to its social base but nevertheless dominant in Serbia up to the 1890s, was disunited in both the ideological and the practical political sense. Its representatives can nevertheless be treated as belonging to the same ideological current, especially if one bears in mind the nature of the alternative: the enormous power summoned up by the emerging Radical Party. For the nature of this party, and above all its great social force, showed that political options in Serbia were being defined in accordance with specific criteria, the essence of which was not a choice between conservatism, liberalism and radicalism in the European sense of these concepts, but rather the acceptance or rejection of the European civilizational model in its widest meaning, including the nature of the state.

The programme of the ‘people’s state’ in the original Serbian radical thought rested on a patriarchal, collectivist and egalitarian understanding of freedom and democracy. As such it represented a negation of the modern state in all its aspects. At the end of the 19th century the Radical leaders defined their party clearly and unambiguously as a negation of liberal and an affirmation of radical democratic principles of socialist provenance. In contrast to the liberal parties, for whom the chief role of the state lay in protecting individual rights and political freedoms, the Radical Party – according to one of its ideologues at the time, Pera Todorović – took the position that the main task of the state was social and economic, i.e. securing ‘the people’s welfare’, and that political freedoms were only one instrument for pursuing of this goal. Defining the state as primarily a social and economic category, Pera Todorović explicitly stated that it was necessary to know ‘the difference between the aim and the means’.1 Freedom and democracy, wrote another of the party’s theoreticians Laza Paču, stand in opposition to the very essence of class-divided bourgeois society. In Serbia’s case, according to Paču, its society is more or less homogenous in respect of class, which provides a fortunate situation for the immediate building of socialism by way of ‘associated labour’.2 The method of ‘associated labour’, said Nikola Pašić, constituted the programme of the Radical Party. ‘The Radical Party’ wants to prevent the people from ‘adopting the errors of Western industrial society, where a proletariat is being created as well as immense wealth, and to build industry instead on the basis of association.’ It wants ‘to introduce full self-government … as opposed to a bureaucratic system. Instead of capitalist enterprise … there should be workers’ associations.’ That is how Pašić presented the ideological and programmatic positions of the Radical Party.3 ‘We don’t need wealth. The Serb tribe is not the moneyed tribe of Israel…’4, one of the most influential of the Radical leaders, Archpriest Milan Đurić, was to say after the May 1903 coup, with his open antipathy towards the Jews – often publicly aired. 5 ‘We are all equal … we are not divided into classes as other nations are’,6 so legislative policy should aim at preventing the division of the family zadruga, is how M. Đurić explained the essence of the social philosophy that he advocated in the assembly on behalf of the Radical Party.
Many other Radicals thought of the Serbian state in a similar manner. Arguing in favour of universal [male] suffrage, Aleksa Ratarac stated that

‘Serbia [is] one large zadruga, and we are its representatives. It is better when more people are consulted.’7

Laza Popović explained:

‘There are many of us who are literate. When there were few literate people, Christ walked the earth; but a curse came upon us, since the number of those who are literate has grown. That’s how things are, gentlemen! Our learning does not lead to improvement but to decadence.’8

As late as 1910 the coalition government had to invest great efforts in persuading the assembly to accept a legal proposal on the separation of judicial and police powers! The deputies attacked the proposal on the grounds that Serbia had to remain a ‘peasant state’, and that consequently the number of officials should be reduced, not enlarged. The manner in which the leader of the Old Radicals, Ljuba Jovanović, defended the proposal before his party colleagues in the assembly is highly indicative of the social and political state of mind of the Radical-dominated assembly at the end of 1910. He argued that he himself had once been convinced that Serbia should remain a purely ‘peasant country’, but that he had changed his mind under the influence of the Boer War. For when he saw that the peasant Boer people, which did not wish to follow ‘the path of economic development and industrialisation’, had lost its freedom,

‘he became convinced that if Serbia wished to remain free, [it] had to have, in addition to the peasantry, also other social strata.’9

In Jovanović’s estimate, clearly, the interest of national freedom was for the Serbian assembly the strongest argument in favour of capitalism.

In order to create and sustain such a state, the whole nation had to be organised in a form having simultaneously the character of a movement and the character of a party with a robust organisation, military discipline and a strong internal hierarchy. Consolidation of the internal organisation, centralisation and strict inner-party discipline – combined with the unquestionable authority of the leader – became at the end of the 19th century, and especially after the arrival of the Radicals in power following the adoption of the 1888 constitution, one of the Radical Party’s most important tasks. A widespread network of party branches was established throughout Serbia, and a system of party membership cards introduced.

This emergence – in parallel with the first signs of modernisation – of a mass populist-socialist party, organised in a manner that elsewhere would become known only with the appearance of totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century, is what makes Serbia a unique case in modern European history. The mass character of this party, or more precisely its comprehensive nature, made it a ‘people’s party’, and earned its government an unquestionable as well as exclusive legitimacy that was denied to all other political parties on the grounds that they were not of the people [narodne].
The Radicals called those other parties ‘proprietor’s parties’, implying that ‘proprietors’ were not part of the people and hence their participation in government was illegitimate. The opposition deputy Drag. Joksimović stated:

‘Whenever they are in power, the Radicals say: Don’t touch Mother Serbia, don’t rend its bowels…because for them Mother Serbia is the Radical Party.’10

Insisting that ‘demagoguery’ is ‘fundamentally contrary to democracy’, J. Prodanović argued that in Serbia ‘the peasant cloak and sandals’ were being courted, while ‘the [town] coat and the intelligentsia were being attacked. The people are being seduced by flattery and by denigrating the intelligentsia.’11

Being all-inclusive, the ‘people’s’ party is identified with the nation, and its government with government by the people. In this way the difference between people’s state, people’s party, and the people as forming a single and politically homogenous whole is erased, and the principle established that there is no separation between state and society.

This self-evident truth, according to which the party and the people are one and the same, represents that element of the concept of the national state which the Radical Party was to maintain until the very end of its existence. The distinction in Serbia between people’s or Radical party on the one hand and, on the other, anti-people’s parties would provide the foundations upon which the project of the people’s state, following the arrival of the Radicals in power in the 1903 coup, would be transformed into a party-state overlaid with a parliamentary form.
The concentration of all power in the hands of a Radical Party that equated itself with the people – this is the dominant perception and practice of the so-called golden age of Serbian democracy between 1903 and 1914.

For the Radical masses, as well as for their leader Pašić, parliamentary politics meant seizing governmental power fully and for all time. ‘All power had to go to the Radicals, while non-Radicals could live in the state only as second-rate citizens.’ The only ‘measure of a civil servant’s quality’ was his political position in the previous regime: imprisonment under Milan’s government was of greater value than a university diploma’, is how S. Jovanović described the introduction of the Radical regime under the 1888 Constitution. If municipal governments, which according to the new constitution and electoral law were to have the decisive role in the organisation and conduct of elections, happened to be in the hands of the opposition – which was very rare – they were taken by force, if necessary with the help of the gendarmerie. ‘The whole Radical Party rose with the strength of a great wave to the level of a ruling class’, concluded Jovanović.12 ‘The Radical Party has subjugated in every way the state to its party and, upholding the motto that party is more important than the state, treats Serbia as a milch cow that is the exclusive property of the great Radical people’s party’, one of the Radicals’ most strident critics wrote in 1908 in the journal Nedeljni pregled.13

Inherent in this concept of the people’s state was the idea of the internal enemy. Pašić used to warn:

‘The Radical Party must not allow its enemies to again seize power … its opponents do not sleep, they engage in sabotage day and night, they must be carefully watched … one must be on guard.’14

In accordance with the leader’s message, after the Radical Party won power under the 1888 Constitution its political opponents became targets of a systematic and even physical terror, which apart from revenge had the clear practical political aim of taking over the whole state apparatus, from top to bottom.

In order to justify this treatment of the minority, the Radicals proclaimed all members of the opposing party without exception to be traitors.

‘For the past thirty years the people has been told that those who are not with Pašić are traitors, people who have sold their souls to the devil.’

Mr Pašić is ‘the personification of the Radical Party: those who are against him are traitors’, was Slobodan Jovanović’s bitter comment.15 T. Kaclerović, leader of the Social-Democratic Party, whose representatives were called ‘human degenerates’ and ‘sworn enemies of the Serbs’, told the assembly that Pašić’s Radicals ‘believe that they alone are patriots and speak of their country’.16

This perception of the minority parties as enemy and traitors was accompanied by an understanding of the parliamentary system as inter-party war, demanding constant watchfulness, strong organisation and unconditional obedience. In this way the Radical Party introduced the idea of the internal enemy into Serbian political life. The party state that grew out of the project of ‘the people’s state’, coupled with the idea of the internal enemy, represent the most lasting legacy of the original Serbian radicalism.
It developed deep roots, survived all regimes, and became a component part of the Serbian political culture and mentality.

‘Our idea of democracy is negative, because it is founded on the rejection of Individualism and Culture. It is a specific, intimate collectivism’,

wrote contemporary critics of the Radical Party. The journal Nedeljni pregled was most prominent in regard to its perception of the Radicals’ damaging effect on Serbia’s social and state development.
According to these critics, the Radical Party’s triumphal conquest of power after the murder of the last Obrenović in the coup of May 1903 diverted Serbia from its European path and oriented it towards the East, towards Russia. The introduction of the parliamentary system in Serbia meant the Radicals’ supremacy, which was the same as ‘the supremacy of Russo-philism’, i.e. of those people who [like Pašić] in their youth ‘were physically in Switzerland but spiritually in Russia’. For Serbian Radicalism, ‘Western forms’ were merely ‘blatant imitation’ and when it adopted such forms it became ‘wholly amoral’. Such forms were ‘proclaimed as their aim’ by the very same people who, when it became necessary after the Congress of Berlin to turn Serbia into a ‘modern state’ and take it into ‘the European community’, saw railways as ‘instruments of “Austrian agents” designed to export all Serbia and make its people starve’17 – in short, people who in fact ‘hated’ the West with an ‘intimate and sincere hatred.’18

The programme of the ‘people’s state’ contained a further important element: the missionary idea. Although during its formative period the Radical Party paid great attention to the question of the internal reforms that were supposed to save Serbia from capitalism and bring prosperity to its population, its leaders were clear that Serbia’s foreign-policy programme, which the Radical elite always equated with the project of all-Serb unity, had absolute primacy over issues of internal organisation. The fact that the leaders nevertheless gave priority to the latter during the initial years followed from their belief in the programme of the ‘people’s state’ as a strong factor of mobilisation in the projected war of national unification. Rejecting social division into classes, Father Đurić announced at the same time that the task of Serbian teachers had always been

‘to bring up children to know the Testament idea … so that as future citizens they will do penance for Kosovo and create Great Serbia… We must not remain passive while the old Serb kingdom of Bosnia [sic] and St Sava’s duchy of Herzegovina [resic] are being torn from the bosom of the Serb people.’
‘The mother guards the sheep and reaps the barley and the wheat, but she also sings to her little son and prepares him to avenge Kosovo and create Great Serbia’

that was the message of Archpriest Milan Đurić from the assembly podium.19 Other Radical deputies spoke in the same vein:

‘May God grant that we make our budget as soon as possible in Prizren, that we become the strongest power on the Balkan peninsula, that Serbia becomes the Piedmont of all Serbdom, and that we liberate Serbdom there.’20

Milorad Drašković too believed that Serbia’s main interest was not to win and keep the sympathy of ‘so-called Enlightened Europe’, but ‘to keep and safeguard the gains of war’.21

One of the means for realising this national project was the creation of a people’s army.

‘Every Serb must be a soldier. When our elders built houses they also made gun racks, whereas today…’,

the Radicals complained.22 As the mouthpiece of Pašić’s political ideas and views, Archpriest Milan Đurić explained the need to introduce a people’s army, in accordance with his chief’s basic practical and political view that internal questions had been solved with the introduction of the parliamentary system on 29 May, after which the external political programme had come to the fore: expansion of the Serbian state and unification of the entire Serb people.23 According to Đurić, a people’s army was required so that all together, ‘singing heroic folk songs and animated by that holy idea of ours, … we may do penance for Kosovo and create Great Serbia.’24

Nikola Pašić was even clearer. Serbia’s duty, in his view, was to subject unconditionally all issues of its internal development and political organisation to what he understood to be Serbia’s ‘national task’: to the idea of liberating the Serbs outside Serbia and pan-national unification. Pašić revealed his political credo in 1902:

‘I was always more preoccupied by the life and fate of the Serb people outside the borders of the Kingdom of Serbia than by the need to work for internal popular freedoms. The national freedom of the entire Serb people was for me a greater and stronger ideal than were the civic liberties of the Serbs in the kingdom.’25

Pašić practically repeated these words in the national assembly in 1905, when he said that he had always subordinated

‘all internal questions, including the solution of the constitutional issue’ to ‘the idea of a forthcoming liberation’.

This idea ‘led me also to politics and to Radicalism’, he said in 1905, exclaiming:

‘leave everything else aside and concentrate instead on solving that upon which Serbia’s existence depends. The voice of Serbdom and of the Serb Piedmont summons you.’26

Serbia must decide whether it will be Turkey and Piedmont, or Sweden, Denmark and Norway. If one wishes for Norwegian schools and Danish institutes, then military expenditure must be avoided.

‘But if we want to conduct a national policy, to create Great Serbia, then we must turn this country into a military camp’,

declared Vojislav Marinković in the assembly.27 His, however, was a rare voice from the political minority, which had no influence on the main political current in Serbia in 1903-14.

Finally, there is another very important component of the Radicals’ conception of the ‘people’s state’. This is the practically boundless loyalty and closeness to Russia.

Nikola Pašić decided very early on that the closest possible association with Russia, to be achieved at all costs, was to be one of his party’s most important aims.

‘For five hundred years the Serb people fought against Turkey, [yet] it hates civilised Germans more than the barbarian Turks’,

Pašić wrote in 1884. He believed that the Serb people were ‘the most unhappy in the world’, because King Milan Obrenović – whom he called a ‘traitor’ far worse than Vuk Branković – had separated the country from the Russians and ‘subjected it to the Germans’.28
Unlike the Liberal and Progressive parties, the Radical Party did not wish for Western institutions in Serbia, because the Serb people

‘has so many good and healthy institutions and customs, which need only to be protected and perfected with those wonderful institutions and customs that exist among the Russian and other Slav tribes, while one should take from the West only technical know-how and science, and use them in the Slav-Serb spirit’,

wrote Pašić on the eve of, and in relation to, the forthcoming constitutional reforms which gave birth to the 1888 constitution.
To prevent Serbia’s association with Austria and Germany, i.e. with the West, and to re-orient it towards the Orthodox East, i.e. Russia, was for him an aim to which he was willing to sacrifice even state independence. Serbia had ‘refused to be taken in by the seductive Western culture, with all its injustices’, he continued. Instead it has

‘a magnificent vision of the future, in which the mighty and gigantic Russia gathers around herself her younger sisters wrenched from her by a barbarian hand, orders them and takes them into a gentle motherly embrace…’,
wrote Pašić, expressing the wish that ‘the crown of a united Pan-slav empire should soon adorn the head of the powerful and just Russian Tsar’.29

Pašić’s loyalty to Russia, a loyalty that knew no bounds, became after 1903 not only a given but also an uncontested fact of Serbian political life. This refers as much to the country’s cultural and civilisational as to its foreign-policy orientation.
According to the liberals, Pašić was ‘one of Russian policy’s most obedient ministers and leaders in Serbia’.30 This was the view also of the conservative Nedeljni pregled.

‘The struggle which King Milan waged with the Radicals was in fact not a struggle over internal policy issues … but a struggle between King Milan and Russia, which the Radicals faithfully served.’31

The Social-Democrat Triša Kaclerović – whose party, together with a small number of politicians of diverse party-political orientation, alone occupied the opposite pole regarding Russia – interpreted on several occasions the political moves of Pašić’s Radicals in terms of ‘an order coming from Moscow’32
The Radicals themselves openly displayed their loyalty to Moscow, by among other things addressing the Russian emperor not as the monarch of a foreign state, but as ‘our sovereign’.33
Criticisms of the kind mentioned above consequently did not bother them much, and they did not bother to refute them. On the contrary, responding to one such charge in March 1914, Miloš Trifunović stated:

‘Our leader is the personification’ of the policy ‘of alliance and reliance on the fraternal and mighty Slav country of Russia … throughout the decades following the birth of our party; in that sense the name of Pašić represents a state programme.’34

The Radicals, in fact, did not consider this policy to be that of one individual, but rather a policy which, as Đurić explained, was ‘conducted by Serbia’, i.e. by the whole nation, which was tied to the Russian nation

‘by a common church … and the common Slav home whence we derive…’35

The Russian people is ‘great’, Đurić explained to the small section of the Serbian assembly which did not believe such stuff, because it ‘loves God’; and if it has failed thus far to perform its historical mission, this is because

‘other crafty ones have been cheating the Slav tribe, because this tribe is generous and trusting towards everyone including even its enemy.’36

By claiming to be the party of ‘peasant democracy’, the Radicals succeeded in becoming a distinct political force, and in turning the strong resistance that the process of economic, cultural and state modernisation begun in the second half of the 19th century had created in peasant Serbia into a veritable popular movement. Thanks to its programme, the Radical Party became in the words of its contemporaries a ‘popular credo’, a ‘religious dogma’, a ‘new religion … in which the population fanatically believed’, just as it ‘fanatically believed in its archpriests’.37 The Radicals combined this apolitical, irrational, quasi-religious attitude towards the party with a mass conscription of members and the creation of a disciplined party. The result was that as early as the 1880s the Radical Party organised the Serbian population, transformed the idea of the ‘people’s state’ into a mass political programme, and ensured that the primary and decisive political articulation of broad layers of the population would be realised on the foundations of a populist-socialist and simultaneously also Great-Serb imperialist programme.

________________________________________

1 Todorović, at the main assembly of the Radical Party in 1882, in Latinka Perović, Srpski socijalisti 19. veka, Prilog istoriji socijalističke misli, pp 122-3.

2 Lazar Paču, Građansko društvo i njegove društveno-političke partije, reprinted from Samouprava, Belgrade 1881, pp. 61, 164-6.

3 Latinka Perović and Andrej Šemjakin, Nikola Pašić. Pisma, članci i govori (1872-1891), Belgrade 1995, pp 43-4, 51.

4 Stenografske beleške Narodne skupštine Srbije 1903-1914, 1903/1904, p.79. Henceforth: Sten.bel.

5 Disdain and intolerance towards the Jews, who were regularly called Čivuti [yids], was present in all parties except the Social-Democrats. Thus the independent deputy Gaja Miloradović:

‘We must be on the guard against the Jews. The Jews have stolen everything – one day they will grab everything owned by Serbia.’

Sten.bel., 1909/1910, p. 998. Narodnjak Mih. Škorić described himself as ‘the greatest opponent of the Jews’, ibid., p. 964. The Old Radical Miloš Ćosić, deputy-speaker of the assembly, reproached a deputy for calling one journalist a Jew: ‘you should not insult people, if you wish such writing to stop’, Sten.bel. 1906/1907, p. 3875. The editors of the Progressive Party’s journal Pravda rejected in public the ‘false’ allegations about their Jewish origins with the explanations that their families for generations had nothing to do with ‘Semitism’, Pravda, no.71/1908.

6 Sten.bel., 1910/1911, vol.2, p.12.

7 Sten.bel., 12.5.1910, p.2997.

8 Sten.bel., 25.9.1905, p.767.

9 Sten.bel., 1910/1911. 21.10.1910, p.5.

10 Sten.bel., vol.2., 1.2.1908, pp 618-19.

11 J. Prodanović speaking in 1909, Govori na Konferenciji samostalnih radikala, pp 41-2.

12 Slobodan Jovanović, Vlada Aleksandra Obrenovića, Belgrade 1934, vol.1, pp 226-8.

13 Nedeljni pregled, no.2/1908, p.35.

14 Nikola Pašić’s speech in Smederevo on 9.3.1889; addressing the Radical Party in Niš on 28.5.1889; at the rally in Zaječar on 8.9.1891. In Perović and Šemjakin, op.cit., pp 319-36.

15 Sten.bel., 20.6.1907, p. 4452.

16 Sten.bel., 4.3.1909, p. 1156.

17 Nedeljni pregled here had in mind the strong opposition mounted by the Radicals in parliament against the introduction of railways, which Serbia was bound to carry out under the Berlin agreement. See Latinka Perović, ‘Politička elita i modernizacija u prvoj deceniji nezavisnosti srpske države’, Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima 20. veka, Belgrade 1994, pp 237-242.
After 1903 too, senior Radicals retained the same attitude towards railways that had characterised the official position of the Radical Party in the 1890s.

‘The railway has passed like a snake through our country… the Western snake has caught us and our simple yet glorious customs have started to retreat before those of the Western nations…’.,

Milan Đurić stated in 1906.
See Olga Popović-Obradović, ‘On the ideological profile of the Serbian Radicals after 1903′, Tokovi istorije, 1-2/1994, p. 74.

18. J. Jovanović, ‘Srpske stranke i parlamentarizam’ and ‘A Radical’s reaction’, Nedeljni pregled, 32/1908, pp 519-20, p. 114; D. Nikolajević, ‘Naš democratizam’, Nedeljni pregled 5/1910, pp 65-7; Aristarchos, ‘Rezultati radikalske politike’, Nedeljni pregled, 27/1909, p. 409; Boy, ‘Rđavo ortaštvo’, , Nedeljni pregled, 28-29/1909, p. 425; Lannes, ‘Kriza demokratizma’, Nedeljni pregled, 45-46/1909, p. 685; Marc, ‘Opravdana želja’, Nedeljni pregled, 13-14/1910, p.194. The contributors to Nedeljni pregled often wrote under pseudonyms, some of which we have succeeded in deciphering. Perić’s pseudonym was Garrick, S. Novaković’s Dardanus, M. Novaković’s Fox, M. Čekić’s Brutus and Macready.

19. Sten.bel., 1903-1904, vol.2, p. 2245; 3.10.1903, p.78; 5.2.1905, p. 1446.

20. Sten.bel.,10.12.1905, p.1035.

21. Sten.bel., 31.5.1913, p.654.

22. Sten.bel., 1903/1904, vol.1, p. 74.

23.Pašić’s message to the Radicals of 29.8.1903 contained this message. Vasa Kazimirović, Nikola Pašić i njegovo doba, 1845-1926, vol.2, Belgrade 1990, pp. 15, 21,51-52.

24. Sten.bel., 1903-1904, vol.1, p. 78.

25. Nikola Pašić, Moja politička ispovest, Belgrade 1989, p.129.

26. Sten.bel.,1905-1906, 14.10.1905, p. 153.

27. Sten.bel.,30.3.1911, p. 18.

28. Letter to P.A. Kulakovski in 1884, in Latinka Perović and Andrej Šemjakin, op.cit., pp 157-9.

29. Letter to A.I. Zinoviev, 1887, ibid.

30. Sten.bel., 1912/1913, 18.6.1913, p.694.

31. Jovan B. Jovanović, ‘Stranke i parlamentarizam u Srbiji’, Nedeljni pregled, bno. 32/1908, p. 519.

32. Sten.bel., 1909/1910, p.1902; Sten.bel., 1908/1909, p. 323.

33. This mode of addressing the Russian Tsar was used in the message of support sent by the Serbian assembly in connection with the war in the Far east, 2.2..1904. Sten.bel., 1903/1904,vol.2, pp 1295-1296.

34. Sten.bel., 1913/1914, p. 1263.

35. Sten.bel., 1910/1911, 29.3.1911, p. 21. See also Kosta Stojanović, ASANU, ‘Slom i vaskrs Srbije’, 10133, p. 235. That the Serbian people were deeply loyal to Russia was not disputed even by the strongest critics of the Old Radical policy. ‘The most important thing for Serbia is that the “democratic” East should think well of her. She does not need to be praised by the “reactionary West”’, wrote Nedeljni pregled, no. 2/24.1.1010, p. 20.

36. Sten.bel., 1909/1910, pp 950-951.

37.‘The Serb Radical Party, speech delivered by J.M. Žujović at the meeting of the Independent Radicals, 10 August 1903′, Belgrade 1903, p. 9.

The beginning of the trial of Slobodan Milošević in September 2002 was a historic event: for the first time in Europe a head of state had been indicted by, and brought before, an international court. The second historic moment – the delivery of a verdict – never happened. Milošević died from heart failure just a couple of weeks before the end of the main hearing. This inglorious conclusion does not mean, however, that no opinion is possible on the weight of evidence against the accused and on the credibility of his defence.
Six months after his fall from power, on 5 October 2000, Milošević was charged and arrested in Belgrade for abuse of power and corruption. At the end of June 2001 he was delivered to the International Tribunal for War Crimes in The Hague, which had indicted him already during the war in Kosovo, in the spring of 1999. Contrary to frequent assertions, Milošević’s extradition had an impeccable legal basis. Subsequent investigations carried out by other Serbian courts led to suspicion against him of having prompted others to commit murder in four cases.
Milošević argued before the Tribunal that he did not recognize the court, while at the same time he defended himself in accordance with its rules, at least some of the time and only when it suited him. Srđa Popović, the leading independent Serbian lawyer, commented:

‘According to the rules of the Serbian criminal code regarding court proceedings … a defendant who insults the participants and the dignity of the court – which Milošević does often and in the most boorish manner – can be removed from the court for a limited time or throughout the examination of the evidence (Article 299).’

The trial

The presentation of evidence before the Tribunal started with the case of Kosovo, in February 2002, and ended at the beginning of September 2002, after 90 court days.
The presentation of evidence on the charges concerning the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina began some twenty days later, and ended in February 2004.

The defendant was allowed 150 court days for defence; he began questioning the witnesses in September 2004.
The cases relating to Kosovo on the one hand and to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina on the other were objectively different.
When Milošević appeared before the Tribunal, several trials of people charged with war crimes in the wars of 1991-5 had already begun, and some had even been concluded.

The factual situation had already been sufficiently proven in accordance with the international criminal code: namely, ‘war crimes’ (articles 2 and 3 of the Statute), ‘crimes against humanity’ (article 5) and ‘genocide’ (article 4).

In the verdict passed in April 2001 on Radislav Krstić, chief of staff of the armed forces of RS, for mass murder at Srebrenica (1995), the fact of genocide had been established – for the first time – and confirmed by the Appeal Council in April 2004.

By contrast, the trial dealing with the punishable acts in Kosovo (the deportation and massacre of Kosovo Albanians) represented at the same time the first general acceptance of that fact as proven.

The external difference between the two parts of the trial was evident in that in the first part many witnesses gave their initial testimony in court, while in the second the prosecution was able to use documents, written testimony and already established facts and bases for decision.

The prosecutors Carla del Ponte, Geoffrey Nice, Dermot Groome, Dirk Ryneveld and Hildegard Uerzt-Retzlaff offered evidence confirming beyond doubt Milošević’s direct link with the gravest crimes. Although the accused ‘did not personally meet the victims’, he ordered that these crimes ‘be committed by use of others’.
This is why the main task of the prosecutor was to prove Milošević’s primary responsibility for already established criminal acts. If this did not always succeed fully from the legal point of view, it was nevertheless proved with a degree of probability bordering on certainty that Milošević was the one who pulled the strings behind this criminal enterprise. A clear image thus emerged of Milošević having all power in his hands. The defendant himself contributed to the consolidation of this image — sometimes unintentionally and sometimes because he could not resist displaying his own grandeur.

Slobodan Milošević was president of Serbia from 1989 on: he was twice elected to that post, in 1990 and 1992, in general and direct elections.
In 1997 he was also elected president of the ‘rump Yugoslavia’ (FRY). Borisav Jović, who was a member of the last presidency of the socialist Yugoslavia (1990-1991) and was at that time Milošević’s closest confidant, s tated before the court in November 2003:

‘Milošević had the final say in all important as well as in some less important decisions.’

This means that Milošević alone decided personal promotions and dismissals.

Jović described this practice:
he and Milošević retired the last Yugoslav defence minister, General Veljko Kadijević, in order to facilitate the realization of their concept of a ‘new Yugoslavia’.
(Jović fancied himself able to influence Milošević up to 1992.)
He confirmed that the ‘new Yugoslavia’ assumed the amputation of one third of Croatia (claimed to be ‘Serb land’).
Milošević changed leading officials of the state, the government, his own party (SPS), the army, the secret service and the media at will, and in accordance with his tactical conceptions.
Jović, who similarly lost his post of deputy president of SPS in just twelve minutes at one party meeting, quoted a series of such sudden personnel changes. One can deduce from this that the Serbs active in the wars were Milošević’s men.

The diplomat Charles Kirudja, who met with Milošević on several occasions in Belgrade, confirmed these allegations.
He was particularly struck by the fact that Milošević did not have a team of advisers: he had a position on all issues and if he wished could take decisive measures at any time.
Kirudja described how Milošević summoned the secret police chief Stanišić and sent him to Ratko Mladić in order to end the crisis created by the Bosnian Serbs’ seizure of 284 UN soldiers as hostages.
A large number of other Western diplomats and negotiators testified many times that Milošević had control over all local warlords.

As for Kosovo, it was possible to prove beyond all doubt that, beginning with 1998, he had the apparatus of repression prepared for conducting terror against, and for deportations of, the Kosovo Albanians.
By transferring the highest-ranking individuals in the police and the army, and by linking up these forces with the secret and security services as well as with various special or paramilitary units, he created a highly coordinated formation.
A coordinated and planned pattern of behaviour could be clearly discerned also in the systematic character of the deportations (which the prosecutors confirmed with the relevant maps) and their speed (around 800,000 Albanians were deported in the course of one week, between 24 and 31 March 1999).

Zoran Lilić, who served as president of FRY between 1993 and 1997 with Milošević’s permission, confirmed that Milošević, not he, made all decisions.
Foreign diplomats supported this in their testimony to the court, saying that they never negotiated with Lilić. It has been proved beyond all doubt –on the basis of statements by Milošević’s subordinates, among other things– that during the war he himself ordered the removal of dead bodies from Kosovo.
In May 2001 the Serbian media wrote about the discovery of a mass grave in Batajnica, a place close to Belgrade, containing, it was suspected, the bodies of Albanian victims. Soon afterwards similar mass graves were found in other parts of Serbia. The Batajnica grave held the bodies of those massacred in Suva Reka (near Prizren). The murdered, including two small children and a pregnant woman, had long before been loaded into a refrigerated van (the property of a slaughterhouse in Prizren) and dumped into the Danube. But the van had floated to the surface and been discovered at the beginning of April 1999, after which the police had investigated the case.
The participants testified before the Tribunal. A policeman who had guarded the spot described how 83 bodies and body parts of people up to the age of 70 wearing civilian clothes were loaded onto another van and taken away. The man who undertook the job confirmed that he was acting under orders, while Radomir Marković, who headed the Serbian state security service at the time, referred at one point to an order issued personally by Milošević at a meeting in April 1999, according to which all evidence of crimes in Kosovo had to be destroyed. DNA analyses made by a Spanish laboratory secured indisputable proof of the victims’ genetic similarity with their relatives in Kosovo.

Three months are unacceptable!

The prosecution offered a large quantity of practically unanswerable evidence in relation to concrete criminal acts.
Around 250 of Milošević’s telephonic conversations with his collaborators (the head of the secret service Jovica Stanišić, the director of the customs service Mihalj Kertes, the leaders of various militias and paramilitary formations such as Željko Ražnatović Arkan and Milorad Luković Legija, or the leaders of the Serb rebels in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina), recorded by intelligence services, were accepted as material evidence by the court.
There is, for example, an exchange with Radovan Karadžić in July 1991 when Milošević, evidently in a good mood, informed Karadžić about his recent conversation with the German ambassador:

‘So this ambassador tells me something like he has information that (Croatian Serbs) have weapons; whereupon I tell him

“Serbs always have weapons! We are that kind of people. We always have weapons.”

Milošević laughs cheerfully and continues:

‘He then shits on, what else can he do, after all? So he says he believes that “they even have mortars”. And I tell him “mortars too are weapons”.’ Karadžić, on the other end of the line, begins to laugh, and Milošević adds:

‘What did he expect? – that I would tell him I had sent them there personally?’

These telephonic conversations confirm that Milošević knew full well all the details and was directly involved in all events, large and small.
In September 1991, when the Bosnian police arrested the leader of the Croatian Serbs Milan Martić, Milošević concerned himself with his liberation, and organized a helicopter to ensure the utmost speed.
He repeatedly sent Jovica Stanišić to initiate actions, or when and where necessary to regulate and correct something.
Milošević decided whether the Croatian Serbs should sign any given agreement, and which one of them would do it.
As early as the summer of 1991 Milošević and Karadžić discussed future strategy for Bosnia-Herzegovina, agreeing that the first necessity was to establish control over the ‘Serb areas’.
In the early spring of 1991 Milošević fretted aloud over the three-month-long suspension of the proclamation of Slovenia’s and Croatia’s independence imposed by the EC. It was a far too long wait, couldn’t be allowed; a radical change had to be initiated immediately:

‘… the only question remaining is to ensure the abolition [of the federal state] in line with our conception’.

All under a single command

Regardless of what his initial plans were, Milošević was in a hurry.
As early as the spring of 1990 he ordered Stanišić to proceed, after which the chief of the Serbian intelligence service sent to the Serb ‘fortress’ of Knin in Croatia his right-hand man Frenki Simatović with instructions to prepare a rebellion and train the Serbs militarily.
These actions were confirmed before the court by Aleksandar Vasiljević, head of the Yugoslav counter-intelligence service, who also stressed that the Yugoslav state security service had supplied weapons to the Serb militia and paramilitary units, including those of the Serb Četnik ‘vojvoda’ Vojislav Šešelj, and that in the end they had all come under the command of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA).
Between 1991 and 1992 some 13,000 JNA (later VJ) officers were engaged in the (occupied) areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

A protected witness confirmed that the Chetniks were also transported to the occupied areas in state-owned buses.
According to numerous witnesses, all fighting troops were paid for by Belgrade and most of them were on the payroll of the VJ.
Ratko Mladić’s pension, after all, was paid up to the summer of 2005 by the VJ –albeit, at the end, by way of intermediaries. Seeking to justify himself against the charge of pilfering public money, Milošević himself admitted he had financed the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs.
At the beginning of December 2003 a former JNA officer described how his unit was fired on by another JNA unit from a supposedly Croatian position, in order to be able to ascribe the attack to the Croatian (‘Ustasha’) side and use it as an excuse to march in and drive out the population.

Milošević for his part ignored all this evidence against him, insisting that the JNA had become involved only in order to separate ‘the parties to the civil war’.

Numerous experts provided the prosecution with detailed analyses of the various aspects of the JNA’s conduct of the war.

The Belgian military expert Renaud Theunens analysed the JNA’s confidential documents, and showed precisely how the role of the JNA changed in the course of the war.
The video film he ran on that occasion showed a JNA general praising the participation of Arkan’s units (the ‘Tigers’) in the conquest of Vukovar, with the words:

‘these are not “paramilitaries” but patriots fighting for the Serb people… we surround a village, they march in, kill those who refuse to surrender, and we move on.’

Theunens also produced Milošević’s personal orders to the Serb leaders in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Milošević tried to devalue this evidence, because it involved only an ‘instruction’; but Theunens explained that in the JNA’s terminology ‘instruction’ and ‘order’ had the same meaning.

That Milošević controlled the whole military machine that responded with force to the political changes in Croatia (and Slovenia) –from the top of the JNA via militias and bands of extreme right-wingers to local detachments– was something about which Milan Babić was able to testify at first hand during the hearings.

From the end of 1991 Babić played the role of ‘president’ of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska Krajina, initially with Milošević’s support.
Babić’s testimony appeared credible, his remorse and admission of guilt sincere.
In July 2003 he was sentenced to thirteen years in prison on the grounds of his personal responsibility for deportation of the Croat population and infringements of human rights in 1991 and 1992.

At the beginning of March 2006 Babić committed suicide in his cell in Scheveningen, to which he had been brought from hiding in order to testify against Milan Martić, charged among other things with a missile attack on the Croatian capital of Zagreb (May 1995).
So far as one can tell from outside, Babić, a dentist by profession, was an unstable personality: he deserved better care than that which he got in The Hague.
His testimony was credible because it was consistent and in conformity with other testimonies; he appeared in full control of himself under Milošević’s cross-examination and displayed a sober realism. The presiding judge, Patrick Robinson, asked him:

‘–Do you mean to say that Mr Milošević was the supreme commander of the JNA?’

Babić replied:

‘–Yes! Formally it was the SFRJ presidency, but de facto it was Milošević.’

Credibly established

The fact that the evidence put forward on the war in Croatia turned out to be so credible is linked to the fact that this was the beginning, and an evident framework in which forces evidently under Milošević’s influence functioned.
There was also the high quality of individual proofs:
testimony by witnesses from informed circles and by neutral observers some of whom had from the start been present as eyewitnesses of what happened in Vukovar and other besieged places –like, for example, EC observers.

Milosević’s responsibility and his presence in the Bosnian-Serbian war could not be proved so easily. Apart from many objective differences between the two countries, this was due above all to the fact that the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs –Radovan Karadžić, Momčilo Krajišnik, Biljana Plavšić and others– were politically more prominent than their counterparts in Croatia; as well as to the fact that the Serb forces in Bosnia were stronger, and that a considerable majority of the country’s second-largest national group supported their option. In Croatia, by contrast, the project was supported by only a (mainly rural) part of the Serb population with the Krajina regime, whereas –as the prosecution underlined– a considerable number lived peacefully in the rest of the country.
The Bosnian Serbs, furthermore, functioned more independently than those in Croatia, in their efforts to create an ethnically pure Serb unit by forcibly deporting the non-Serbs. The JNA in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in addition, consolidated itself on the basis of a new structure of command and enjoyed a much higher degree of operational superiority.
The extensive prior preparations for a lightning war against Bosnia-Herzegovina led to a speedy conquest of cities and whole regions, as well as to the siege of Sarajevo. This gave the impression of a relative autonomy of the army, even though, as Jović described, it had all been planned long before.

The leaders of the Bosnian Serbs united around a ‘six-point strategic plan’ to create an exclusively Serb construction, adopted by the Serb assembly in May 1992.
The first aim was ethnic separation. In Karadžić’s words, ‘our enemies, i.e. the Croats and Muslims’ were to be ‘forcefully driven out of their homes, so that we no longer live together with them in the same state’.
This plan included also the elimination of the Bosnian-Serbian border along the Drina, i.e. according to the confession made by Miroslav Deronjić (one of the main actors) the deportation of the Bosnian Muslims who formed the majority of the population there from a fifty-kilometre-wide band of territory west of the Drina.
The minutes of the assembly meeting provide additional essential evidence of substantial material support for the Bosnian Serb entity, which like its Croatian counter-part was unable on its own either to exist or to wage war.
Milošević’s speech before the Bosnian Serb assembly (at the beginning of 1993) confirms this, as does Karadžić’s admission (May 1994) that without Milošević and Serbia ‘we would not have had the means to wage war’.

The UN official David Harland (who had served in Sarajevo from 1993 to1999) gave evidence to the court of Milošević’s connection with the Bosnian Serbs.
During his testimony, the witness tried hard to differentiate clearly and stress the separate interests of Milošević and Karadžić. This notwithstanding, there was no doubt left in the end that Milošević’s influence was overwhelming, and that he was in a position to prevent or stop the Bosnian Serb crimes.

Srebrenica

Units from Serbia fought in Bosnia and participated in many war crimes. Milošević received reports on a daily basis from various sources about military activities in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, including about the bestialities being committed.

One former JNA member gave testimony via video-link about how with his helicopter he had supplied the front-line troops in eastern Bosnia.
These operations were under the command of the head of the special police Frenki Simatović, who directed from Serbia all the units of the JNA and the police deployed there.

The secretary of the notorious paramilitary chief Željko Ražnatović Arkan gave evidence that his ‘Tigers’ never fought in Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina without the knowledge of or instructions from the Serbian security service.

Since many Tribunal sessions were held in camera, it is difficult to say whether the judges were given clearer evidence linking Milošević directly to the massacre at Srebrenica.
His confidant Lilić confirmed that he at least learnt about it very early on; but no investigation was set in train to establish who was involved. This too is a criminal offence.

At all events how the conquest of Srebrenica proceeded, and the plan to exterminate the male inhabitants of the town was implemented, were clearly established in the course of other proceedings before the War Crimes Tribunal. This was done in part with the cooperation of indicted Bosnian Serbs who admitted guilt, such as the above-mentioned Deronjić, who confessed his responsibility for terrible crimes in the east Bosnian town of Bratunac, and two other officers of the Bosnian Serb army, Momir Nikolić and Dragan Obrenović.

We are dealing here with a wide-ranging operation (called Krivaja after the spring of 1995) planned by Ratko Mladić, which means that it is practically impossible that Milošević knew nothing about it. It is more likely that he was kept fully informed. This aside, there is evidence that on 7 July, when the operation was in full swing, Ratko Mladić met with him.
Deronjić himself has stated that on 8 July Karadžić told him in person that all Muslims in Srebrenica would be killed.
It is thus possible to assess the import of Wesley Clarke’s testimony (December 2003). On 13 September 1995 he asked Milošević why, despite his influence with the Bosnian Serbs, he had allowed General Mladić ‘to kill so many people in Srebrenica’. Milošević replied incautiously:

‘Well, General Clarke, I told him not to do it but he would not listen.’

All origins become mysterious if we search far enough into the past. And almost all peoples, when we look at their earliest origins, turn out to have come from somewhere else. Before embarking on these origin quests, it is good to keep a few qualifying principles firmly in mind.

First, it can never be said too often that questions of chronological priority in ancient history – who got there first – are simply irrelevant to deciding the rights and wrongs of any present-day political situation.

Secondly, accounts of the earlier movements of peoples or tribes give a very misleading impression when they treat them as if they were unitary items, with unchanging identities, being transferred from place to place in a game of ethno-historical pass-the-parcel. In many cases (such as the migrations of the Franks in early Western Europe) it is the movement of a people into a new territory or society that gives it an identity it did not previously have. Identities continue to develop over time: ‘Serb’ was a tribal label in the sixth century but not in the sixteenth, so that to treat ‘the Serbs’ as an unchanging category is as foolish as trying to identify Jutes and Angles among the subjects of Queen Elizabeth I.

And thirdly, we should never forget that all individual ancestries are mixed -especially in this part of Europe. When a Serb today reads about the arrival of the early Serbs, he may not be wrong to suppose that he is reading about his ancestors; but he cannot be right to imagine that all his ancestors were in that population. The equivalent is true for the Albanians, and indeed for every other ethnic group in the Balkans.

While most details about the movement of the early Slavs into the Balkans are unclear, the basic facts are known. A large tribal population of Slavs – among whom the Serbs and the Croats were two particular tribes, or tribal groupings – occupied parts of central Europe, north of the Danube, in the fifth and sixth centuries ad. The Serbs had their power-base in the area of the Czech lands and Saxony, and the Croats in Bavaria, Slovakia and southern Poland. This central European location was not the earliest known home of the Serbs; most of the evidence points to an earlier migration from the north and north-eastern side of the Black Sea. At that earlier period the Serbs and Croats seem to have lived together with more warlike Iranian tribes, and their tribal names may derive from Iranian ruling elites: Ptolemy, writing in the second century A.D., located the ‘Serboi’ among the Sarmatians (an Iranian grouping) on the northern side of the Caucasus.
Little is known about the Slavs’ way of life in these earlier periods. The first descriptions we have of them are by Byzantine writers, who portray them as a wild people, more pastoral than agricultural, with many chiefs but no supreme leader. [1]
For a tribal population with a fairly low level of material culture, reaching the line of the Danube and looking south was the equivalent of a hungry man pressing his face against the window of a grocery. The Balkans, fully restored to Byzantine control under the energetic Emperor Justinian (527-65), contained many flourishing towns and cities, supported by productive agriculture and active trading routes.
The Slavs were not the first to cross the Danube in search of better things. Germanic Goths had done so (with Byzantine permission, at first) in the fourth century, and had gone raiding as far as Greece and the Albanian coast thereafter; Huns, under Attila, had attacked in the 440s, and Bulgars (a Turkic tribe) had started raiding at the end of that century. [2] But none of these earlier invaders left any imprint on the Balkans comparable to that of the Slavs. Indeed, by the time that the Turkic-speaking Bulgars came to settle permanently in the Balkans in the seventh century, the Slav element was already so well established there that the conquering Bulgars were eventually to lose their own language and be absorbed by their Slav-speaking subjects. [3]

The first major Slav raids took place in the middle of Justinian’s reign. In 547 and 548 they invaded the territory of modern Kosovo, and then (probably via Macedonia and the Via Egnatia across central Albania) got as far as Durrës on the northern Albanian coast. [4] More substantial invasions took place in the 580s, bringing Slavs deep into Greece. Historians used to think that it was only these later invasions that involved any permanent settlement; but there is evidence of Slav place-names in the Balkans – particularly along the river Morava – by the 550s, which suggests a more continuous process of infiltration. [5]
One factor which may have turned the southward movement of Slavs from a trickle to a flood was the arrival, in the north-western part of the Balkans, of an especially warlike Turkic tribe, the Avars, who subjugated or co-opted some Slavic tribes but drove many others away. By the early seventh century the Avar armies were raiding as far as the walls of Constantinople, and threatening the very existence of the Byzantine Empire.

It was at this point, in the 610s or 620s, that the Emperor of the day (according to a detailed but somewhat confused account by a later Emperor-cum-historian, Constantine Porphyrogenitus) invited the Croats to come down from central Europe and deal with the Avar threat. [6] This they did, bringing with them their neighbours, the Serbs. Both populations then settled in the territories abandoned by the Avars: the Croats in modern Croatia and western Bosnia, and the Serbs in the Rascia area on the north-western side of Kosovo, and in the region of modern Montenegro. In some of these areas they supervened on an already existing Slav population, which, as a result, must gradually have taken on a ‘Croat’ or ‘Serb’ identity. The Serbs did not have anything like a state at this stage, but they developed several small tribal territories, each called a župa and ruled by a tribal chief known as the župan. [7]
By the mid-seventh century, Serbs (or Serb-led Slavs) were penetrating from the coastal lands of Montenegro into northern Albania. Major ports and towns such as Durrës and Shkodra held out against them, but much of the countryside was Slavicized, and some Slav settlers moved up the valleys into the Malësi. By the ninth century, Slav-speaking people were an important element of the population in much of northern Albania, excluding the towns and the higher mountainous areas (especially the mountains in the eastern part of the Malësi, towards Kosovo). [8] Slav-speaking people lived in the lowlands of this area, gradually becoming a major component of the urban population too, until the end of the Middle Ages. [9]

What had happened to the local populations of the western and central Balkans during and after the Slav invasions? Something is known about the urban inhabitants, but much less about the people in the countryside. Despite the apocalyptic tone of early Byzantine writers, who give the impression that all civilization came to an end here in about 600, there is good evidence that the main cities survived (or were revived), just as they had done after earlier sackings. Refugees from central Balkan towns such as Niš and Sofia fled to the safety of Salonica at first, but many must have gone back home later. [10] The main towns on the Dalmatian and northern Albanian coastline, too, retained their Latin-speaking populations and stayed under Byzantine rule. (For naval and commercial reasons, Durrës was the most important Byzantine possession on the entire Adriatic coast of the Balkans.) [11] But outside the major cities there are signs of decline and contraction; typical of the seventh to ninth centuries are the remains of small townships based on hill-forts, such as the one at Koman in the mountains of north-central Albania, where a Christian and probably Romanized (Latin-speaking) population must have led a rather limited existence. [12]
As for the rural population, which was also mainly Latin-speaking in most of the territory of Yugoslavia and north-western Bulgaria, it is assumed that large numbers of people were driven southwards by the Avars, Croats and Serbs. Some evidence from place-names suggests a flow of such refugees down the Dalmatian coast into northern Albania; and a folk tradition set down by a later Byzantine writer referred to a large movement of native people southwards and eastwards away from the area of the Danube and the Sava – that is, from northern Bulgaria, northern Serbia and Croatia. [13] No doubt Latin-speaking peasants and farmers continued to live in many of these areas, especially where they were in contact with a large town or city. But sooner or later the majority of them were Slavicized, and the towns in the interior of the Balkans filled up with Slav-speakers too.

Only the remnants of a Latin-speaking population survived in parts of the central and west-central Balkans; when it re-emerges into the historical record in the tenth and eleventh centuries, we find its members leading a semi-nomadic life as shepherds, horse-breeders and travelling muleteers. These were the Vlachs, who can still be seen tending their flocks in the mountains of northern Greece, Macedonia and Albania today. [14] The name ‘Vlach’ was a word used by the Slavs for those they encountered who spoke a strange, usually Latinate, language; the Vlachs’ own name for themselves is ‘Aromanians’ (Aromani). As this name suggests, the Vlachs are closely linked to the Romanians: their two languages (which, with a little practice, are mutually intelligible) diverged only in the ninth or tenth century. [15] While Romanian historians have tried to argue that the Romanian-speakers have always lived in the territory of Romania (originating, it is claimed, from Romanized Dacian tribes and/or Roman legionaries), there is compelling evidence to show that the Romanian-speakers were originally part of the same population as the Vlachs, whose language and way of life were developed somewhere to the south of the Danube. Only in the twelfth century did the early Romanian-speakers move northwards into Romanian territory. [16]

Finally, before turning to the most mysterious problem of all – the origin of the Albanians – it is worth looking once more at the pattern of settlement in the Kosovo area during the early Slav centuries. Kosovo did not fall within the Serb territory of Rascia, which was further to the north-west: the Serbian expansion into Kosovo began in earnest only in the late twelfth century. About the other early Slav settlers in this part of the Balkans we have much less information. Byzantine sources just referred generally to ‘Sklaviniai’, Slav territories, in the Macedonian region; in the few cases when they made more localized references they often used names derived from rivers, so that it is not clear whether these were the names of Slav tribes or just geographical labels. The ‘Moravoi’ or ‘Moravlians’, for example, who are first mentioned in the ninth century, lived somewhere near the river Morava, but that is all we know about them. Historical map-makers, who do not like leaving too many blank spaces, place these Moravlians over much of south-eastern Serbia from as early as the sixth century, with arrows showing them passing into Kosovo; real evidence for this is lacking. [17]
Obviously some Slavs did spread through all these areas sooner or later.

But there is one intriguing line of argument to suggest that the Slav presence in Kosovo and the southernmost part of the Morava valley may have been quite weak in the first one or two centuries of Slav settlement. If Slavs had been evenly spread across this part of the Balkans, it would be hard to explain why such a clear linguistic division emerged between the Serbo-Croat language and the Bulgarian-Macedonian one. The scholar who first developed this argument also noted that, in the area dividing the early Serbs from the Bulgarians, many Latin place-names survived long enough to be adapted eventually into Slav ones, from Naissus (Niš), down through the Kosovo town of Lypenion (Lipjan) to Scupi (Skopje): this contrasts strongly with most of northern Serbia, Bosnia and the Dalmatian hinterland, where the old town names were completely swept aside. His conclusion was that the Latin-speaking population, far from withering away immediately, may actually have been strengthened here (and in a western strip of modern Bulgaria), its numbers swelled, no doubt, by refugees from further north. These Latin-speakers would have thus formed ‘a wide border-zone between the Bulgarians and the Serbs’. [18]
Kosovo’s protective ring of mountains would have been useful to them; and the Roman mountain-road from Kosovo to the Albanian coast – along which several Latin place-names also survive, such as Puka, from ‘via publica’ – might also have connected them with other parts of the Latin-speaking world. (The hill-top town of Koman, mentioned earlier, is only a few miles from Puka, and may well have had a Latin-speaking population too.) If this argument is correct, we might expect many of the ancestors of the Vlachs to have been present in the Kosovo region and the mountains of western Bulgaria; it may have been in these uplands that they developed their pastoral skills.

Only in the ninth century do we see the expansion of a strong Slav (or quasi-Slav) power into this region. Under a series of ambitious rulers, the Bulgarians – a Slav population which absorbed, linguistically and culturally, its ruling elite of Turkic Bulgars – pushed westwards across modern Macedonia and eastern Serbia, until by the 850s they had taken over Kosovo and were pressing on the borders of Rascia. Soon afterwards they took the western Macedonian town of Ohrid; having recently converted to Christianity, the Bulgar rulers helped to set up a bishopric in Ohrid, which thus became an important centre of Slav culture for the whole region. And at the same time the Bulgarians were pushing on into southern and central Albania, which became thoroughly settled by Bulgarian Slavs during the course of the following century. [19]

Kosovo was to remain under Bulgarian or Macedonian rulers until 1014-18, when the army of the Macedonian-based Tsar Samuel died, his empire broke up, and Byzantine power was fully re-established by a strong and decisive Emperor, Basil ‘the Bulgar-killer’. For nearly two centuries after that, Kosovo would stay under Byzantine rule. [20]
One key element is missing from the picture presented so far. While the origins of the Vlachs are obscure enough, the origins of the Albanians have been the subject of a much more bewildering mass of conflicting claims and theories.
The two main rival theories that have emerged identify the early Albanians as either Illyrians or Thracians: in pre-Roman and Roman times, Illyrians lived in the western half of the Balkans and Thracians in the east. Albanian historians, who like the idea that Albanians have always lived in Albania, prefer the Illyrian theory. Romanian scholars, who have to deal with the awkward fact that there are strong early links between the Albanians and the Vlachs, prefer to put them on the Thracian side of the divide (the ancient Dacians, who lived in Romania, were part of the Thracian group), and in this they are sometimes supported by Bulgarian experts. But there is really no point in going into this labyrinth of historical debate unless one is prepared to discard all national prejudices at the entrance.

The Albanians first emerge in the historical record in 1043, when Albanian troops appear fighting alongside Greeks in the army of a rebel Byzantine general. They are mentioned at Durrës in 1078, and again in 1081, when they joined the Byzantine forces resisting an invasion there by the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard. [21]
(Bizarrely, a garbled list of Albanian place-names, picked up by the Normans on this expedition, was soon afterwards incorporated into the Song of Roland: one manuscript of that poem includes a reference to ‘Albanie’, implying that it was a place or area just north-east of Durrës.) [22]

Over the next two centuries the references to Albanians gradually increase, until by 1281 we have a mention in an Italian document of a ‘duca Ginius Tanuschus Albanensis’, who ruled an area between Durrës and Shkodra: ‘Ginius’ must be the Albanian ‘Gjin’ (John), and this ‘duca Gjin’ is presumed to be the founder of the famous ‘Dukagjin’ family. [23]
By the early fourteenth century there are also signs of a long-established Albanian presence in the mountains of Montenegro, and as far north as the Ragusan hinterland. [24]
The name used in all these references is, allowing for linguistic variations, the same: ‘Albanenses’ or ‘Arbanenses’ in Latin, ‘Albanoi’ or ‘Arbanitai’ in Byzantine Greek. (The last of these, with an internal switching of consonants, gave rise to the Turkish form ‘Arnavud’, from which ‘Arnaut’ was later derived.)
Nor is there any mystery about the origin of this name. In the second century Ptolemy referred to a tribe called the ‘Albanoi’, and located their town, ‘Albanopolis’, somewhere to the east of Durrës. Some such place-name must have survived there, continuously if somewhat hazily, ever since; there was an area called ‘Arbanon’ in north-central Albania in the eleventh century, and in the early twentieth century ‘Arben’ was the local name for a region near Kruja (which lies just north of Tirana). [25] Linguists believe that the ‘Alb-’ element comes from the Indo-European word for a type of mountainous terrain, from which the word ‘Alps’ is also derived. (So too, coincident-ally, is the Gaelic word for Scotland, ‘Albainn’, which classicizing eighteenth-century Scots sometimes turned into ‘Albania’.) [26]

The continuity of this name is a striking fact; but it does not amount to proof that the Albanians have lived continuously in Albania. Place-names can endure while populations literally come and go. In any case, the Albanians do not use this word to describe themselves: in their language, Albania is Shqipëria, an Albanian is a shqiptar, and the language itself is shqip. (The only Albanians to use the ‘Alb-’ root are the ones who emigrated to Italy in the fifteenth century, who call themselves ‘Arbëresh’.) [27] The origins of shqiptar, which first crops up as a personal name in late-fourteenth-century documents, are completely obscure: some think it means ‘he who understands’, from a verb shqipoj, while others connect it with the word for an eagle, shqiponjë, which may have been the totem of an early tribe. [28]
Is there any way to bridge the gap between the ‘Albanoi’ of the second century and the medieval Albanians? The historical record is utterly silent: there is one apparent reference in a medieval document to ‘Duchagini d’Arbania’ warring against a king of Bosnia in the seventh century, but it must be discounted, as the document’s chronology is completely unreliable. [29] For some scholars, the argument from silence carries a certain force of its own; it is suggested that any large-scale migration of the early Albanians into Albania would surely have been remarked on by Byzantine authors. [30] But the truth is that those authors were interested in alien tribes only when their actions impinged, militarily or politically, on the Empire. A small pastoral population, moving away from them into some remote mountain region, might never have attracted their notice.

Some Albanian archeologists have tried hard to show that the Koman hill-town culture of the seventh and eighth centuries is the essential proof of Illyrian-Albanian continuity; but material remains do not tell us what language people spoke (unless they include inscriptions, which these do not), and the main cultural affinities here seem to have been with the Latin-speaking Romano-Byzantine towns of the previous centuries. [31]
And one other line of argument, which tries to find striking similarities between Albanian social practices and what classical authors tell us about the Illyrians, must also be described as inconclusive. Certainly the tribes of the ancient Illyrians, political groupings covering large areas and heavily stratified with a powerful ruling caste, were quite different from the modern Albanian clans. [32]

If there is any chance at all of solving this mystery, it lies in the study of the Albanian language. Historical linguistics is a complex science and not, in some of its activities, a very exact one. But by sifting through the evidence of vocabulary and place-names, and sorting out different layers of borrowings from other languages and cultures, linguists can often construct quite a detailed chronology, just like an archeologist examining different layers of wood-ash and broken pots. They can point out, for example, that the Albanian names for the fauna and flora of the high mountain regions are purely Albanian, while the low-altitude vocabulary borrows heavily from Slav; the words for ploughing are mainly Slav, and so are many words for weaving, masonry and milling. Much of the vocabulary of medieval government and society is also Slav-based. [33] This strongly suggests that the early Albanians led a mainly pastoral life in mountainous regions, before settling in lowland areas after the Slavs had extended their culture and rule. And the evidence of place-names shows that Albanian-Slav contacts in the northern Albanian region must have happened before 900 at the latest: a vowel-shift in the Slav language took place by the end of the ninth century, and some Albanian borrowings from Slav preserve the pre-shift form of the vowel. [34]
We have now got back to the ninth century, but that still leaves seven centuries unaccounted for. The most direct way of bridging the gap with the Roman world would be for the historical linguists to demonstrate a link between Albanian and one of the ‘barbarian’ Balkan languages of the region – either Illyrian or Thracian. It is clear that Albanian is indeed the only surviving representative (apart from Greek) of an ancient Balkan language: it belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, but exists in a sub-section of its own, with no immediate relatives. If either Illyrian or Thracian could be identified as its parent, this would at least set some fairly clear geographical limits to the early home of the Albanians: Illyrians lived in Albania and most of Yugoslavia, Thracians in Bulgaria and part of Macedonia, and the boundary between them ran approximately along the Morava valley and down the eastern side of Kosovo. [35] (Kosovo itself was part of the tribal land of the Dardanians, who almost certainly belonged to the Illyrian grouping.) [36]
bbb
Unfortunately, working out the relation between Albanian and Illyrian or Thracian is like trying to solve an equation with too many unknowns. We do not possess a single text in Illyrian. We have two short texts in what is presumed to be Thracian, but no one knows what they mean. The longer one, consisting of sixty-one Greek letters without any word-divisions, has been subjected to eighteen speculative and somewhat comically divergent translations: one version says

‘I, Rolisteneas, son of Nereneas, eat the sacrificial meal; Tyiezypta, originally from Arazea, attached the golden objects to me’,

while another comes up with

‘O Rolisten, I, Nerenea Tiltea, die peacefully next to you, my quietly deceased one, I who raised the children.’ [37]

The linguists who have offered these translations from the Thracian have at least fared better than the one who interpreted an ‘Illyrian’ inscription as ‘Consecrated to the goddess Oethe’: it was later pointed out that this inscription, if read from bottom to top, produced a perfectly normal Greek phrase, ‘Lord help Anna’. [38]
Apart from inscriptions, there are a few ‘glosses’ (comments explaining the meanings of words) in classical authors: here the evidence is too slight to be conclusive. One Illyrian word, rhinon, glossed as ‘mist’, does resemble an old Albanian word for cloud, ren. A Thracian word for a blackberry, mantia, resembles the Albanian for a mulberry, man, and the Thracian for ‘camomile’ could perhaps be linked to the Albanian for ’sweet-tasting’; but those are the only clear resemblances, and the names of edible plants are in any case famously mobile across linguistic frontiers. [39]

Otherwise, the only evidence available consists of proper names: place-names, personal names and tribal names, preserved in Latin or Greek inscriptions and the works of ancient historians. There are several thousand such names altogether; but the difficulties of interpretation are immense. Trying to extract a language from such evidence is rather like some linguists of the distant future trying to work out the true nature of the English language on the basis of ‘Edinburgh’, ‘Lancaster’, ‘Whitby’, ‘Grosvenor’, ‘Gladstone’, ‘Victoria’ and ‘Disraeli’. Place-names are often the remnants of an earlier language; personal names may reflect cultural influences (it has been observed that if future linguists knew only the names ‘Carlo’ and ‘Lodovico’, they would assume that the Italian language was a type of German); and in any case we have no reason to suppose that the ancient Balkans were any less of a linguistic hotchpotch than they have been for most of the rest of their history. [40]
On balance, there are more examples of plausible links between Illyrian names and Albanian words than there are in the case of Thracian (though there are some of both, and some names were common to the two ancient languages). Most of these relate to place-names in the area of central and northern Albania, such as the river Mat (Alb.: mat, river-bank) or the town of Ulqin or Ulcinium (Alb.: ujk or ulk, wolf), or indeed the early name for the Kosovo area, ‘Dardania’ (Alb.: dardhë, pear). [41]

The strongest evidence, however, comes not from the meaning of the proper names (which is always open to doubt) but from their structure. Most Illyrian names are composed of a single unit; many Thracian ones are made of two units joined together. Several Thracian place-names end in -para, for example, which is thought to mean ‘ford’, or -diza, which is thought to mean ‘fortress’. Thus in the territory of the Bessi, a well-known Thracian tribe, we have the town of Bessapara, ‘ford of the Bessi’. The structure here is the same as in many European languages: thus the ‘town of Peter’ can be called Peterborough, Petrograd, Petersburg, Pierreville, and so on. But the crucial fact is that this structure is impossible in Albanian, which can only say ‘Qytet i Pjetrit’, not ‘Pjeterqytet’. If para were the Albanian for ‘ford’, then the place-name would have to be ‘Para e Besseve’; this might be reduced in time to something like ‘Parabessa’, but it could never become ‘Bessapara’. And what is at stake here is not some superficial feature of the language, which might easily change over time, but a profound structural principle. This is one of the strongest available arguments to show that Albanian cannot have developed out of Thracian. [42]
Other linguistic arguments which have been deployed in this Illyrian versus Thracian debate are more technical. Much ink has been spilt, for example, on the question of whether Illyrian was a satem language or a centum language. This is a traditional classification of all Indo-European languages according to their underlying patterns of consonant development. (The labels are taken from the Old Iranian and Latin for ‘a hundred’.) Albanian is a satem language, and Thracian is thought to have been one too. Most scholars believed that Illyrian was a satem language, until linguists analysed the surviving inscriptions in Venetic, a language of north-eastern Italy which was assumed (on the authority of ancient authors) to be related to Illyrian. This turned out to be definitely centum, and persuaded some experts that the whole Illyrian group must therefore have been centum too – in which case Albanian could not have come from Illyrian. [43] However, more recent research has shown that Venetic had nothing to do with Illyrian. [44] (Similar problems caused by another language thought to be related to Illyrian, the Messapian language of southern Italy, have also been resolved in the same way.) [45] Illyrian was probably satem after all.
And in any case, it is increasingly apparent that the whole satem/centum classification system does not correspond to the fundamental distinguishing features of the Indo-European languages: it may be the linguists’ equivalent of one of those classifications of mammals by eighteenth-century biologists, which modern scientists have had to discard. [46] Another technical (and much more speculative) argument for identifying early Albanian with Thracian was put forward by the Bulgarian linguist Georgiev, who divided Thracian into two languages, one north-western, the other south-eastern, and argued on the basis of consonantal changes that Albanian must have come from the north-western one. But his arguments (at least in relation to the supposed Albanian connection) have been thoroughly dismantled by other scholars. [47]

Other linguistic arguments are more closely linked to geography. The place-names of the northern Albanian region offer a valuable linguistic testing-ground. We know what many of them were called in Roman times; it should therefore be possible to tell whether their modern Albanian form derives from a continuous Albanian tradition going back to contact with the Romans, or whether it is derived from the Slav form of the name. If the latter, then this might suggest that the Albanians entered this area only after the Slav immigration of the seventh century. The fact that Slavs developed their own forms of the urban names directly from the Latin (Skadar from Latin Scodra, for example, where the Albanian form developed as Shkodër/Shkodra) is not in itself significant; their contact in the urban areas would have been mainly with Latin-speakers anyway. But if, on the other hand, the Slav names for rivers or mountains show that they were borrowed from Albanian forms of those names, this would indicate that there were Albanian-speakers in the countryside when the Slavs first arrived.
The evidence is in fact very mixed; some of the Albanian forms (of both urban and rural names) suggest transmission via Slav, but others -including the towns of Shkodra, Drisht, Lezha, Shkup (Skopje) and perhaps Shtip (Štip, south-east of Skopje) – follow the pattern of continuous Albanian development from the Latin. [48]
(One common objection to this argument, claiming that ’sc-’ in Latin should have turned into ‘h-’, not ’shk-’ in Albanian, rests on a chronological error, and can be disregarded.) [49]
There are also some fairly convincing derivations of Slav names for rivers in northern Albania – particularly the Bojana (Alb.: Buna) and the Drim (Alb.: Drin) – which suggest that the Slavs must have acquired their names from the Albanian forms. [50]

Finally, one more common-sensical linguistic and geographical argument should also be mentioned: the claim, by the pioneering German Balkanologist Gustav Weigand, that the early Albanians must have lived a long way to the east of the Adriatic coast, because most of the Albanian words for fish, boats and coastal features are borrowed from other languages. [51] Sterling efforts have been made by Albanian scholars to find authentic Albanian fish-words, but the tally, though not insignificant, is still rather poor. [52] However, Weigand’s argument could not be very powerful even if its basic observation were correct (as it may in fact be). A pastoral population might have lived only 50 miles inland in the Albanian mountains without having any contact with fishing or sailing; it is not necessary to push its location eastwards all the way to Thrace. [53] Of course Illyrians did once live on the coast, and would presumably have had their own maritime vocabulary.
But if Illyrian survived as Albanian, it did so only by means of physical contraction, withdrawal and isolation, which naturally would have taken place in mountain terrain. This is why the purest element of Albanian vocabulary refers to mountains, high-altitude plants and shepherding: the point is not that the proto-Albanians had never lived any other sort of life, but that the only ones who survived as Albanian-speakers did so precisely because that was the sort of isolated and independent life they led, probably for several centuries. The Illyrians who lived on the coastal plains were Romanized, like the ones on the Dalmatian coast and indeed in most areas of Yugoslavia. By the time the Slavs began arriving in the sixth century, there were only scattered pockets of speakers of the old ‘barbarian’ languages left anywhere in the Balkans, and all of them were in mountainous regions. [54]

Of these, the only population considered important enough to be mentioned by name in early written sources was the Thracian tribe of the Bessi, who lived in the western and southern mountains of Bulgaria. We know that their version of the Thracian language was still being spoken in the second half of the sixth century, and we also know that they had been converted to Christianity: the most striking piece of evidence refers to monks speaking ‘Bessan’, as well as Latin and other languages, in a monastery on Mount Sinai in the 560s. [55]
Until very recently, this was treated by most scholars as just an intriguing oddity, a last lingering survival which must have been extinguished before long. However, a dazzling new piece of research and speculative reconstruction by the German scholar Gottfried Schramm has proposed that these Thracian Bessi were none other than the real ancestors of the Albanians.
According to Schramm, the Bessi must have moved out of their western Bulgarian homeland and into the northern Albanian region in the early ninth century, probably to escape the persecution of Christians by the still pagan Bulgar khans. [56] The early conversion of the Bessi to Christianity is indeed, in Schramm’s view, the key to the entire question of how and why Albanian survived as a language. We know that the Bessi were converted by an enterprising bishop, Nicetas, in the late fourth century, and from the writings of a friend of Nicetas who celebrated this event we also know that he learned their language and taught them to practise their Christianity in it – in other words, that Bessan was used as a liturgical language. (The evidence of the Bessan-speaking monks supports this point.) Nicetas, whose own mother-tongue was Latin, may also have translated parts of the Bible; the obvious model – or competition – that he must have had in mind was the work of a heretical bishop, Ulfilas, who was using the Germanic Gothic language for liturgy and Bible-translation among the nearby population of Goths in northern Bulgaria. And, as comparison with other linguistic survivals (such as Armenian or Coptic) shows, nothing helps a language to survive quite so much as its use from a very early stage in a kind of national church. [57]

One thing is quite certain: the Albanians did acquire their Christianity from a Latin-speaking teacher or teachers. The Albanian language contains much Latin-derived vocabulary anyway, having obviously absorbed words from nearby Romans or Romanized barbarians from the second century B. C. onwards; but the Latin element is especially rich in the area of Christian belief and Christian practice. Thus we have meshë (mass), from missa; ipeshk (bishop), from episcopus; ungjill (gospel), from evangelium; mrekull (miracle), from miraculum; and a great number of other words, extending far into the vocabulary of psychology, morality and even the natural world (such as qiell, meaning heaven or sky, from caelum). [58]
Many of the words that would need to be put on such a list, in fact, are not special ecclesiastical terms, for which a non-Christian population would have no equivalent of its own; they are simple words such as ’spirit’, ’sin’, ‘pray’, ‘holy’, and so on, for which most languages, even in pre-Christian times, have their own vocabulary.
When other early evangelizers translated the Bible or the liturgy into Armenian, or Gothic, or Anglo-Saxon, they used local words for these things – that, indeed, is what is implied by the whole idea of translation. Why should Nicetas, translating into proto-Albanian, have simply transferred huge quantities of Latin words? Schramm notes the oddity of this in passing, and suggests unconvincingly that there must have been some special cultural reasons. [59] But the oddity is more overwhelming than he admits. For example, even the word for a flock, as used in Christian discourse, was taken from the Latin (grigje, from grex) – of all the things in the world, the one for which a shepherding population must surely have had its own word already. [60]
The solution to this puzzle is blindingly simple. These elements of Latin vocabulary have undergone exactly the same sorts of sound-changes, compressions and erosions as all the other Latin words which entered the Albanian language over several centuries; and the reason why those words entered the language was that the Albanians were in contact, over a long period, with people who spoke Latin. The existence of large quantities of such Christianity-related Latin vocabulary does not show that someone ‘translated’ Christian discourse into early Albanian. It shows the precise opposite – namely, that Albanians were for a long time exposed to the conduct of their religion not in translation but in the original Latin.
This can even be demonstrated grammatically. The term for ‘Holy Trinity’, Shëndërtat, bears a final ‘t’ and an accent on the last syllable: this shows that it developed from the accusative, sanctam trinitatem, not the nominative, sancta trinitas. That is in fact the normal pattern of development in Romance languages, which gives us, for example, Spanish ciudad from civitatem (not from civitas), or French mont from montem (not from mons). (There are many other Albanian examples too, such as grigje, mentioned above, which is really from gregem, not grex.) What this phenomenon reflects is a pattern of usage in spoken Latin: these words were heard much more often as the objects in sentences than as the subjects. If Nicetas had been coining new Albanian words out of Latin for the purposes of his translation, he would surely have taken them from the nominative form. These words entered Albanian because Albanians heard them, over and over again, in spoken liturgical Latin.
Schramm’s theory fails, therefore; and in so doing it performs a signal service. Thanks to Schramm, the Thracians can now be eliminated from these enquiries. His research into Nicetas’s activities does indeed show that the Bessi received their Christianity, so to speak, in translation; this must force us to conclude that the Albanians, who received theirs in the original Latin, cannot be identified with the Bessi. The language of the Bessi must eventually have perished. Since the Bessi were the only Thracian tribe known to have kept their language as late as the sixth century (and Byzantine sources are naturally more detailed on the Thracian areas, which for them were closer to home, than on the Illyrian ones), it is impossible to find any other Thracian candidates. The origins of the Albanians must be sought, therefore, on the Illyrian side of the divide – particularly in the mountains round Kosovo, in the Malësi, and in the tangle of mountains stretching north from there through Montenegro.

The Latin elements in Albanian help to confirm this location. From the fact that so much general vocabulary was absorbed into Albanian from Latin, and so little from Greek, it is clear that the proto-Albanians lived some way to the north of the Latin-Greek linguistic divide.
This language frontier ran from the Adriatic coast near Lezha across the middle of Albania, then up to the line of the Šar mountains, curving southwards to take in Latin-speaking Skopje, and then running northwards roughly along the Serbian-Bulgarian border. [61] At the same time, the fact that the proto-Albanians never actually lost their language indicates that they were somewhat isolated from the main areas of Roman settlement – which included the lowlands and the major roads.
One influential theory therefore places the early Albanians in the part of northern Albania which (according to archeological evidence and place-names) was the most untouched by Roman influence: the ‘Mat’ district north-east of Tirana and west of Debar. From there, according to this theory, the early Albanians were able to expand to fill the region bounded by the river Shkumbin, the Black Drin, the united Drin and the coast. [62]
What this theory fails to account for, however, is another key aspect of the Albanian language’s connection with Latin: its intimate involvement in the development of the Vlach-Romanian language. Linguists have long been aware that Albanian and Romanian have many features in common, in matters of structure, vocabulary and idiom, and that these must have arisen in two ways. First, the ’substratum’ of Romanian (that is, the language spoken by the proto-Romanians before they switched to Latin) must have been similar to Albanian; and secondly, there must have been close contact between Albanians and early Romanian-speakers over a long period, involving a shared pastoral life. (Some key elements of the pastoral vocabulary in Romanian are borrowed from Albanian.) [63] The substratum elements include both structural matters, such as the positioning of the definite article as a suffix on the end of the noun, and various elements of primitive Balkan pre-Latin vocabulary, such as copil (’child’ in Romanian) or kopil (’bastard child’ in Albanian). [64]
If the links between the two languages were only at substratum level, this might not imply any geographical proximity – it would merely show that proto-Albanian was similar to other varieties of Illyrian spoken elsewhere. But the pastoral connections do indicate that Albanians and early Romanians lived for a long time in the same (or at least overlapping) areas.

This has some geographical implications.
Late Latin developed in two different forms in the Balkans: a coastal variety, which survived as a distinct language (known as Dalmatian) until the end of the nineteenth century, and the form spoken in the interior, which turned into Romanian and Vlach. [65] From place-names it is clear that the coastal form, spoken also in Shkodra and Durrës, penetrated some way into the northern Albanian mountains. [66] There are some traces of this variety of Latin in Albanian, but the Albanian language’s links with the inland variety of Balkan Latin are much stronger. This suggests that the centre of gravity ofAlbanian-Vlach symbiosis lay a little further to the east. [67]
When and how did that symbiosis take place? Presumably the Latin-speaking proto-Romanians came to pastoralism later than the early Albanians. If they had been doing it for as long as the Albanians, and in similar areas, they would – just like the Albanians – have escaped Latinization altogether. Some historians have decided that the proto-Romanians must have been Latin-speaking city-dwellers, who somehow extricated themselves from their towns in the early Slav centuries and became long-distance travellers or shepherds instead; but this seems inherently implausible. [68] (Had they come from the towns, their Latin would surely have been closer to standard Latin in its structure, too.) There is in fact enough Latin agricultural vocabulary in Romanian -words for sowing, ploughing, harrowing, and so on – to show that they were farming in Roman times. [69] The shift towards pastoralism was probably quite gradual. One particular factor that may have helped to promote it was the practice of horse-breeding, which was, or at least became, a Vlach speciality: the medieval records are full of Vlach muleteers and Vlachs leading caravans of pack-horses. [70] Such an occupation requires contact with towns (where the trade is), and may be combined with some farming in the towns’ vicinity; but it also involves a form of stock-breeding, which could have given the early Vlachs an entree into the higher-altitude world of Albanian flocks and herds.

The main area of the Balkan interior where a Latin-speaking population may have continued, in both towns and country, after the Slav invasion, has already been mentioned: it included the upper Morava valley, northern Macedonia, and the whole of Kosovo. It is, therefore, in the uplands of the Kosovo area (particularly, but not only, on the western side, including parts of Montenegro) that this Albanian-Vlach symbiosis probably developed. [71]
All the evidence comes together at this point. What it suggests is that the Kosovo region, together with at least part of northern Albania, was the crucial focus of two distinct but interlinked ethnic histories: the survival of the Albanians, and the emergence of the Romanians and Vlachs.
One large group of Vlachs seems to have broken away and moved southwards by the ninth or tenth century; the proto-Romanians stayed in contact with Albanians significantly longer, before drifting north-eastwards, and crossing the Danube in the twelfth century. [72]

Having reached these conclusions, it may be possible, finally, to draw some further implications from them that point back to a much earlier period of Kosovo’s history. The point is a very simple one. If Albanian-speakers were able to live in this area without losing their language during the period from the sixth century to the twelfth, is there any reason to think that they could not have been there in the previous six centuries or more? The Roman province of Dardania contained some Roman towns and several large estates, but it was far from being utterly and homogeneously Romanized: frequent Roman references to Dardanian bandits and robbers, and the presence of many forts and watch-towers, suggest that it was never completely under control. [73] References to Dardanian cheese, a famous and widely exported product, also testify to a large shepherding population. [74] And if the shepherds in the hills were speaking proto-Albanian, then perhaps that is what the ordinary Dardanians had spoken in the valleys too, before the Romans came. This is more a speculation than a conclusion; and it is not meant to exclude other areas in the Albanian (or Montenegrin) mountains further to the west, given that ‘Dardania’ was, essentially, a tribal division, not a linguistic one. Once again it must be emphasized that such ancient history can have no implications for modern politics. Nevertheless, the idea that the Illyrian Dardanians were ancestors of the Albanians may be of some sentimental interest to Kosovo Albanians today.

________________________________________
Chapter 3. Medieval Kosovo before Prince Lazar: 850s-1380s

The previous chapter brought the political history (if such it may be called) of Kosovo up to the final period of Bulgarian-Macedonian rule, before the territory of Tsar Samuel was reconquered by the Byzantine Emperor Basil the Bulgar-slayer. Medieval Kosovo is often referred to in general terms as ‘the cradle of the Serbs’, as if it had been a Serb heartland from the outset; but the reality was rather different. Just over 800 years separate the arrival of the Serbs in the Balkans in the seventh century from the final Ottoman conquest in the 1450s: out of those eight centuries, Kosovo was Serb-ruled for only the last two-and-a-half – less than one-third of the entire period. Bulgarian khans or tsars held Kosovo from the 850s until the early eleventh century, and Byzantine Emperors until the final decades of the twelfth.

Unfortunately there is very little direct evidence about conditions in Kosovo during those earlier centuries of Bulgarian and Byzantine rule. We can assume that the Slav population that had settled in Kosovo was brought within the cultural realm of the Bulgarian empire, which means that it would have been included in the Bulgarian dioceses of the Orthodox church. Thanks to the work of Saints Cyril and Methodius (and their followers) in the ninth century, the Slavs had a liturgy and other texts in their own language, written in either of two newly invented alphabets: Cyrillic and Glagolitic. The western macedonian town of Ohrid developed strongly as a cultural and religious centre in the ninth and tenth centuries, and by the end of Tsar Samuel’s reign the archbishopric of Ohrid included bishoprics in Skopje, Lipjan (Serb.: Lipljan; a town just south of Pristina) and Prizren. [1] Although the formal division of the Christian Church into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox did not occur until 1054, it would not be anachronistic to describe this Bulgarian Christianity as Eastern in the ninth and tenth centuries; the roots of the conflict between East and West went back a long way. (The Slav liturgy was at first violently rejected by the Roman Church, on the grounds that God spoke only three languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin).

________________________________________
1. Fine, Early Medieval Balkans, pp. 26-7; Obolensky, Byzantine Commonwealth, pp. 85-6; Goldstein, Hrvatski rani srednji vijek, pp. 88-90.

2. Velkov, Cities in Thrace, pp. 31-46, gives a good summary; V. Popović, ‘L’Albanie’, p. 259, discusses the Goth attacks on Albania in 459 and 479.

3. The Bulgar language disappeared by the mid-ninth century: Runciman, Bulgarian Empire, p. 93. From then on, the term ‘Bulgarian’ can be used generally to refer to the political unit which the Bulgars created, to its mainly Slav population, and to their Slav language.

4. Velkov, Cities in Thrace, p. 49; Skok, Dolazak Slovena, p. 105; Hammond, Migrations, p. 66 (suggesting that they entered Macedonia through the Kaçanik pass).

5. Runciman, Bulgarian Empire, pp. 22-4 (traditional view); Fine, Early Medieval Balkans, p. 28 (new evidence).

6. Fine, Early Medieval Balkans, pp. 49-59. Goldstein, Hrvatski rani srednji vijek, pp. 87-92, gives a more hesitant treatment of Constantine’s story, and Whittow, Orthodox Byzantium, p. 263, rejects it.

7. Fine, Early Medieval Balkans, p. 57; on the social organization of the early Serbs see Gimbutas, Slavs, pp. 140-1.

8. Makushev, O Slavianakh, p. 2; Stadtmüller, Forschungen, p. 128.

9. Nopcsa. ‘Beiträge’. p. 238; Ducellier, Façade, pp. 70, 196; Selishchev. Slavianskoe naselenie, pp. 73-85.

10. Lemerle, ed., Les Plus Anciens Recueils, vol. 1, p. 186; Velkov, Cities in Thrace, pp. 52-3; Howard-Johnston, ‘Urban Continuity’; Whittow, Orthodox Byzantium, pp. 267-8.

11. Jireček, ‘Die Romanen’; Šufflay, ‘Städte und Burgen’, p. 36; Stadtmüller, Forschungen, p. 129.

12. Whittow, Orthodox Byzantium, p. 268; V. Popović, ‘Albanie’, pp. 269-72.

13. Nopcsa, ‘Beitrage’, p. 238 (Dalmatians in Albania); Mirdita, ‘Balkanski Vlasi’, pp. 75-6 (citing and analysing the statement by the eleventh-century writer Kekaumenos).

14. For good general studies of the Vlachs, see Wace and Thompson, Nomads;Weigand, Aromunen; and Winnifrith, Vlachs.

15. Weigand, ‘Albanische Einwanderung’, p. 225.

16. For a powerful presentation of the evidence see Schramm, ‘Frühe Schicksale’.

17. E.g. Niederle, Slovanske starožitnosti, vol. 2, map opposite p. 296; Angelov, Obrazuvane, map on p. 155.

18. See van Wijk, ‘Taalkunde gegevens’; quotation from p. 71. The modern dialect of Serbo-Croat which borders Macedonian and Bulgarian territory, the ‘Timok-Prizren’ dialect, does have some transitional features; but research has shown that it picked them up only after the medieval expansion of the Serbian state into Kosovo and the Morava valley, which brought its speakers into closer contact with Bulgarian (ibid., pp. 62, 71).

19. Runciman, Bulgarian Empire, pp. 88-93, 127-38; Selishchev, Slavianskoe naselenie, p. 61; Stadtmüller, Forschungen, pp. 129-32.

20. Whittow, Orthodox Byzantium, pp. 387-8. Hilferding, Geschichte, p. 35 n., notes that after Samuel’s death in 1014, the local Slav tribes in Eastern Kosovo formally submitted to Byzantine rule.

21. Stadtmüller, Forschungen, pp. 162-4.

22. Géegoire and de Keyser, ‘La Chanson’; Grégoire, ‘La Chanson’; Hammond, Migrations, p. 56.

23. Šufflay, ‘Städte und Burgen’, p. 203; duca is the Italian title.

24. Jireček, ‘Albanien’, p. 69; Šufflay, ‘Povijest’, p. 227.

25. For slightly different eleventh-century locations see Stadtmüller, Forschungen, pp. 167-73, and Ducellier, Façade, p. 80; the twentieth-century name was noted by Father Gjecov, and reported in Dema, ‘Shqypnija katolike’, p. 532 n.

26. The same root gave rise to ‘Albion’, an early name for Britain, and another name derived from it, ‘Albany’. There is also a territory known to classical geographers as Albania in the Caucasus; some earlier writers, such as the French diplomat de Pouqueville, supposed that the Balkan Albanians came from there, but there is no connection between the two areas.

27. This probably derives from another version of the place-name, Arbëria, a term for the highlands between Vlora, Gjirokastra and the sea: see Stadtmüler, Forschungen, p. 177.

28. Šufflay, ‘Povijest’, p. 200 (documents); Stadtmüller, Forschungen, p. 70 (eagle). The ‘he who understands’ argument may possibly be the wrong way round; in Hungarian, for example, magyardzni means ‘to explain’, but only because its original meaning was ‘to put into Magyar’, Çabej notes that the presumed derivation of shqipoj from Latin excipere is very doubtful (’Zur Charakteristik’, p. 194). Another derivation of shqip, suggested by Skok, from the place-name Scupi (Skopje; Alb.: Shkup), requires some unusual sound-changes (see Schramm, Eroberer, p. 361).

29. Curiously, it is treated as authentic by Hammond, Migrations, pp. 56-7. But the document, a Ragusan chronicle written probably in the fourteenth century and surviving only in an eighteenth-century copy, evidently described much more recent events: see Makushev, ‘Issledovaniia’, pp. 204, 303-32.

30. E.g. Çabej, ‘Problem of place’, p. 79.

31. Skëndet Anamali has argued the Illyrian-Albanian case in a series of articles: see ‘Problemi i kulturës’ and ‘De la civilisation’. But as Vladimir Popović points out, the finds at Koman and the Kruja necropolis are simitar to those at other semi-isolated Romano-Byzantine towns of this period in Corfu and Dalmatia: ‘L’Albanie’, pp. 269-72.

32. Durham, ‘Antiquity’; for a strong argument against tribal continuity see Kaser, Hirten, Kämpfer, pp. 39-43.

33. Stadtmüller, Forschungen, pp. 138-9, 145-7; Selishchev, Slavianskoe naselenie, pp. 176-81; Jokl, ‘Slaven und Albaner’, pp. 291-7, 315.

34. Schramm, Anfänge, p. 151. The best evidence is from the area of Debar and the Black Drin.

35. Stipčević, Iliri, pp. 27-30; Wilkes, Illyrians, p. 68; Wiesner, Thraker, p. 27.

36. Stipčević, Iliri, p. 30 and n.; Mirdita, Studime dardane, pp. 7-46; Papazoglu, Central Balkan Tribes, pp. 210-69. As Papazoglu notes, most ancient sources classify Dardanians as Illyrians. Her reasons for rejecting this identification in a later essay, ‘Les Royaumes’, are obscure. There were Thracian names in the eastern strip of Dardania, but Illyrian names dominated the rest; Katičić has shown that these belong with two other Illyrian ‘onomastic provinces’ (see his summary in Ancient Languages, pp. 179-81, and the evidence in Papazoglu, ‘Dardanska onomastika’).

37. Decev, Sprachreste, pp. 575, 579 (by Decev and Georgiev respectively).

38. Katičić, Ancient Languages, pp. 169-70.

39. Ibid., p. 171 (cloud); Dečev, Sprachreste, pp. 543, 544 (blackberry), (Çabej notes a Swiss (Rhaetoromance) word for a raspberry, mani, and suggests that the term was originally an Illyrian word, which spread both west into Alpine Latin and east into Thracian (’L'lllyrien’, p. 52). Cimochowski also argues that ‘mantia’ could be Illyrian: ‘Prejardhja’, p. 38. The oft-cited link claimed by Weigand between the Thracian word for ‘thyme’ and the Albanian for ‘peas’ is now rejected: see Weigand, ‘Albanische Einwanderung’, p. 209; Philippide, Originea Rominilor, vol. 1, p. 375; Decev, Sprachreste, p.554.

40. Mladenov, ‘Albanisch’, p. 183 (Carlo, Lodovico).

41. Çabej, ‘Problem of place’; Schramm, Eroberer, p. 293; Huld, Basic Etymologies, pp.48, 121-2.

42. For this important argument see Gjinari, ‘De la continuation’. On Thracian compound names see Georgiev, ‘Thrace et illyrien’, p. 73; Katičić, Ancient Languages, pp. 139-41.

43. The best discussions of this issue are Pisani, ‘Les Origines’; Cimochowski, ‘Prejardhja’, pp. 41-5. See also Mayer, Sprache der Illyrier, vol. 1, p. 12; Katičić, Ancient Languages, pp. 174, 184. One more recent attempt to prove that Illyrian was centum is by Schramm, Anfänge, pp. 26-7. But his argument rests only on one speculative etymology for a river-name, connecting it with an Indo-European root for ‘knee’: this does not match the known derivation from that root in Albanian (see Huld, Basic Etymologies, p. 70).

44. Katičić, Ancient Languages, p. 163; Rosetti, Thrace, daco-mesien’, p. 81.

45. Polome, ‘Position’; Hamp, ‘Position’, p. 111. Based on the assumed Messapian link was another argument, about the accentuation of the first syllable in place-names (Brindisi, for example, preserves the Messapian accent): some Albanian names do this and others do not. Dropping the Messapian-Illyrian connection removes this problem from the agenda.

46. See Huld, Basic Etymologies, pp. 159-61. Huld finds the classification particularly unhelpful for Albanian, which differs in some ways from satem languages without being identifiable as centum.

47. Georgiev. ‘Albanisch, dakisch-mysisch’. See Hamp, ‘Position’; Rosetti, Thrace, daco-mésien’; and, for the fullest demolition, di Giovine, Tracio, dacio ed albanese’.

48. Çabej, ‘Problem of Autochthony’, p. 43; Katičić, Ancient Languages, p. 186; Mihaescu, ‘Les filements’, p. 325.

49. This claim is put forward as a prime argument against the ‘Illyrian’ origins of the Albanians by Schramm: Eroberer, pp. 33-4; Anfänge, p. 23. It had already been answered by Çabej, who pointed out that the shift to ‘h’ belonged to a much earlier (pre-Roman) period of Albanian: ‘Problem of Autochthony’, p. 44. Schramm’s case can be disproved by a series of Albanian borrowings from Latin, such as shkorse (rug) from scortea, shkëndije (spark) from scantilla, shkemb (rock-formation) from scamnum, and shkop (staff) from scopae: see Capidan, ‘Raporturile’. pp. 546-8; Philippide, Originea Rominilor, vol. 2, pp. 653-4; Çabej, ‘Zur Charakteristik’, p. 177; and the entries in Meyer, Etymologisches Worterbuch.

50. Jokl, ‘Slaven und Albaner’, pp. 287. 618, 627.

51. Weigand, ‘Sind die Albaner?’, p. 233.

52. See Çabej, ‘L’lllyrien’, p. 46, and the comments in Hamp, ‘Position’, p. 98.

53. It is sometimes imagined that the shepherds of the northern Albanian mountains must always have grazed their flocks on the coastal plains in the winter, but this is not correct. Many move only from summer pastures in the mountains to winter pastures in nearby valleys: see Kaser, Hirten, Kampfer, pp. 57-67.

54. Skok, Dolazak Slovena, p. 22 (Plovdiv area); Schramm, Frühe Schicksale’, (ii), p. 104 (Ohrid area); Schramm, Eroberer, pp. 115-30 (mountain areas). St Jerome referred to Illyrian-speakers in Dalmatia or Pannonia in the fifth century, but their location is uncertain: Mirdita, ‘Çështja e etnogenezës’, pp.638-9.

55. Schramm, Anfänge, p. 232. In later Byzantine usage, ‘Bessoi’ became a general name for Vlachs (see Cankova-Petkova, ‘La Survivance’). Perhaps because of this, Tomaschek argued (’Die alten Thraker’, (1), p. 77) that these monks were speaking a Balkan Latin, and that bessam was just added in the manuscript as a gloss on latinam; but this is refuted by the evidence of the two earliest MSS (see Milani. ed., Itinerarium, p. 204). There is other evidence, of Christian ‘Bessi’ in Constantinople and Jerusalem:’ Schramm, Anfänge, pp. 112-20. Irfan Shahid’s attempt to identify Bessan here with Arabic is unconvincing (Byzantium and Arabs, Fourth Century, pp. 320-1), but his location of Lakhmids in the region (ibid., pp. 31-60, and Byzantium and Arabs, Sixth Century, p. 979) must overturn a recent claim that the ‘Lachmienses’ at Sinai were Vlachs (Nandris, ‘Jebaliyeh’).

56. Schramm, Anfänge, pp. 149-56.

57. Ibid., pp. 48-77. Even the Goths held out for a long time: a small Gothic-speaking population existed in the Crimea as late as the sixteenth century.

58. For useful listings see Haarmann, Der lateinische Lehnwortschatz, pp. 105-8; Philippide, Originea Romînilor, vol. 1, pp. 665-76.

59. Schramm, Anfänge, pp. 94-5.

60. There are two common Albanian words for flock, kope and tufe.

61. Jireček, ‘Die Romanen’, (i), p. 13; Philippide, Originea Rominilor, vol. 1, pp. 70-2; Papazoglu, ‘Les Royaumes’, pp. 193-5. Albanian does preserve a very small quantity of borrowings from ancient Greek: see Thumb, ‘Altgriechische Elemente’; Jokl, ‘Altmakedonisch’; Çabej, ‘Zur Charakteristik’, p. 182. This low level of borrowing from Greek is a further argument against the identification of Albanians with Bessi, part of whose tribal territory was Hellenized: see Philippide, Originea Romînilor, vol. 1, pp. 11, 283; Velkov, ‘La Thrace’, p. 188.

62. Stadtmüller, Forschungen, pp. 118-22; Zeitler, ‘Das lateinische Erbe’.

63. Schramm gives a valuable survey of the literature and the evidence: ‘Frühe Schicksale’, esp. pp. 112-15. See also Pipa’s comments on the symbiosis in Albanian Literature, pp. 62-75.

64. On substratum vocabulary see Capidan, ‘Raporturile’, pp. 457-83. For an etymology of copil see Reichenkron, ‘Vorromische Elemente’, pp. 242-3. One key word, vatra (hearth), suggests that the original substratum may have been a widespread ‘Albanoid’ group, of which Albanian is the only survivor: Hamp, ‘Distribution’. But below that there may have been a sub-substratum of pre-Indo-European words: for examples (connected with Basque) see Polak, ‘Die Beziehungen’, pp. 213-15.

65. On Dalmatian, which was recorded just in time from its last speaker in the 1890s, see Mihaescu, La Romanité, pp. 91-130.

66. Weigand, ‘Sind die Albaner?’, pp. 231-2.

67. Earlier studies linked Albanian exclusively with Romanian; more recent ones have tried to prise them apart, especially if written by Albanians trying to keep Albanian origins in Albania, or Romanians trying to keep Romanian origins in Romania: see Çabej, ‘Zur Charakteristik’; Mihaescu, ‘Les Eléments’ Mihaescu uses Latin Christian vocabulary in Albanian to emphasize its divergence from Romanian, but this is highly misleading: Romanian has a different vocabulary here simply because Romanians were later brought under the Orthodox Church.

68. Jireček, Geschichte der Bulgaren, pp. 112-13 (admitting some agriculture too); Howard-Johnston, ‘Urban Continuity’, p. 251 (towns only).

69. Capidan, ‘Romanii nomazi’, pp. 205-8.

70. Dinić, ‘Dubrovačka trgovina’.

71. The Montenegrin highlands are rather neglected in most studies of these issues; but they clearly had a well-established Vlach population by the early fourteenth century, when Vlach place-names are recorded there: see Šufflay, Srbi i Arbanaši, p. 75; Radusinović, Stanovništvo, p. 31 (and for Albanian names in Montenegro, see above, n. 24).

72. Capidan, ‘Raporturile’; Schramm, ‘Frühe Schicksale’. Weigand, ‘Albanische Einwanderung’, shows that some Albanians went with the Romanians into Transylvania.

73. Cerskov, Rimljani, p. 54; Mirdita, ‘Rreth problemit’.

74. Cerskov, Rimljani, p. 55.

1. Gelzer, Patriarchat, p. 4; Gjini, Ipeshkivia, pp. 79-80.

You are blinkered by your pro-independence stance formulated by events of the 1990’s. What reason other then Serbia’s military being disproportionate in attempting to quel the CIA and BND (US & German “not so” secret services) trained, armed & inspired terrorists are given to the dismembering of a UN recognised member state?

Yes, atrocities in the Serbian province of Kosovo & Metohija happened and those reponsible should be held account just as in any other crime but that does not provide justification for the dismemberment of the State!

In dismembering a UN recognised state that accepted a resolution (1244 reconfirmed it’s territoial sovereignity) to stop the violence – post conflict (State responsible) but not by the seccesionists – what is the International community doing other then setting a precedent for all other secceionists to be inspired by???

Do we hear of the UN partitioning any other nation which was disproportionate in it’s reactions to an internal matter??? Did the UK hand over Northern Ireland or portions of it???

What of other states and how far back do you go??? Does the US give back whole portions to the Mexicans or how about the indigenous people????

More recently, did Rwanda where a real and horrific genocide was indeed commited get partitioned by the UN ???

What are we to make of Sudan and Darfur – does this mean that Sudan should relinquish immediate control of Darfur and more to the point where are the Germans, US & UK with NATO in bombarding all of Sudan????

What about Iraq – does this mean that the US should in fact force a partition rather then just precipitate one as it seems to be doing???

Lebanon – split it between Christians and Muslims???

Which other nations are ripe for humanitarian partition opps sorry I meant intervention???

More importantly, who & how do you decide right from wrong when there is no black & white but many shades of grey??? For instance what happens in a civil war that is not based on ethnic or religious division???

The US & UK were wrong in there use of force before exhausting all diplomatic avenues in 1999 and the approach because they failed to understand (naive) or purposefully (implicit) created the conditions for a one-sided attack and are now trying their upmost to get the job done before it really comes back to haunt them!!! However, it is in their haste of pushing through a poorly thought through objective that the precedence will actually be what could haunt them and the rest of the Globe.

Fortunetly the UN SC is made of 15 members and not just the 4 (US, UK, France & Belguim) who were blinkered to believe that they were not setting a precedent and realised right form wrong and did not pass this plan offered by Ahtisaari!!!

Win-win is the only way forward – yes Serbia must accept its faults and atone for it’s wrong but that does not mean it’s partition on the contrary reconciliation can only be achieved in the acceptance that all must work together for a better future for all in Serbia no mater what ethnic background !!!

Creating borders and walls will only lead to lose-lose for all those in the region and create even more instability globally. You need to re-evaluate your words!

The same author is the one who stated There was no Albanian state before 1912…!!!!! Alain Ducellier proves your side wrong.

As for Albania itself, the views expressed by Alain Ducellier in Studies of Kosovo are of some relevance:

“In this context, the case of Albania may seem astonishing, since this country was the only national entity to emerge from Byzantium which…. never succeeded in pouring her strong ethnic, linguistic and cultural identity into the mould of a political structure. As is known, this failure persisted well beyond the Middle Ages, since there was no Albanian state before 1912.” (Alain Ducellier in Studies of Kosovo, edited by Arshi Pipa and Sami Rephisti, Easter European Monographs, Boulder, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1984)

Today, the Kosovo Albanians appear divided as to what they want – an independent state, autonomy or union with Albania. But it is put out that their ‘right to self determination’ will be protected for three years in the sense that it will be kept in ‘abeyance’. Meanwhile, the ‘international community’ wants to secure effective ‘independence’ for the Kosovo Albanians within the framework of the Serbian state.

After the recent grave events in Kosova, it is difficult to analyse this problem with all the intellectual seriousness demanded of an historian; furthermore, since, from that time, the press carries articles in support of the “Serbian” thesis, regarded by many as a quite logical one, any voice in opposition to it remains isolated and seems to be inspired by an “Albanophilia” which is a priori considered dubious. Let us make ourselves clear: there is no solid argument today to determine the nationality of this or that region, especially in the Balkans, except for the obvious presence of a national majority. In this sense, Kosova, inhabited by a population two thirds of which is Albanian*, should of course not be treated other than Albanian, and that even without the slightest hint about uniting it with the political entity called “Albania”.
Seeing the persistent use of historical facts to prove that the Serbs, as the oldest inhabitants who were allegedly driven out by Albanians later, have a “right” to Kosova, it would not be irrelevant to demonstrate that in this case, at least, history and the present situation coincide.
In a recent article Michel AUBIN points out that Kosova was the

“economic and political centre of the Serbian mediaeval kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries [1]“,

which is true.
So, it seems that only the Turkish occupation, after driving the Serbs out of the best lands, finally forced them, especially in 1690 and 1738, to emigrate towards southern Hungary and substituted them with Islamicized elements brought over from Northern Albania.

Let us not insist on the fact that the establishment of a centre of political and economic power on a given territory is by no means a proof, particularly in the Middle Ages, of the ethnic predominance of the rulers.
Thus, the small “Serb” despotate of Seres in Northern Greece from 1355 to 1371 managed to rule over a population the overwhelming majority of which was Greek [2]. Nevertheless, let us agree that the Serbs were the majority in Kosova in the 13th century. But then the question arises: who lived in this region before ?

The Slavs are an Indo-European people who came to Europe at a later period, since the frequent waves of their invasions occurred in the 6th and 7th centuries [3]. At that time, many centuries of Romanization had failed to liquidate the old indigenous peoples: the Dacians in Romania, the Thracians in Bulgaria, the Illyrians in Dalmatia, Albania and Macedonia. As for Kosova, it is an undeniable fact that at least from the 18th century B. C. many Illyrian political entities had emerged, and gradually passed from the tribal stage to real small kingdoms like the Dardanians, the Penestes, the Paeonians (to mention only the most important) [4].
All recent studies, both linguistic and archaeological, tend to prove that the Illyrians are most certainly the direct ancestors of the Albanians [5].
As regards archaeology, the study of ceramics and ornaments (rings, earrings, bracelets, and especially fibulae) testifies to an extraordinary continuity in the designs and technology between the ancient Illyrian and the new artifacts discovered in the mediaeval settlements which may be dated to the 6th and 7th centuries A. D. (the Daimaca castle in the vicinity of Puka, and especially Kruja); this is so true that the Yugoslav archaeologist B. COVIĆ has dated the material found in the Daimaca castle from the 6th-7th centuries A. D. [6]. However, we should remember that the excavations in the Daimaca castle started in the last century and that all agreed then that they were a testimony to the “old Slavonic civilization” [7].
Of course, this Illyrian-Albanian continuity is not only proved on the present-day territory of Albania. The findings in the necropolis of Melje near Virpazar (Montenegro) and in two settlements in the Ohri zone in Macedonia have brought to light artifacts belonging to the same civilization [8]. Of course, the intensive activity of Albanian archaeologists since 1945 is the only one to be considered to explain the very rich troves unearthed on their national territory.

Lacking any document which would prove the liquidation or the emigration of the local Illyrian population in the course of Slavic invasions, it is natural to think that during the Late Middle Ages Kosova, like the rest of Albania, had a predominantly Illyrian population, that is, Albanian.
To be sure, a phenomenon of Slavicization is noted and this is best shown by place names, which have little value in determining the ethnic character of a people. The large number of Slavic toponyms found in Albania at present, has never led anyone to believe that the majority of its population was ever [always ?] Slav.
Indeed, such an argument would never serve the advocates of the “Serbian thesis”. The less so since most of the Slavonic toponyms in Kosova and Albania appear to be more Bulgarian than Serbian, which is quite natural because the Bulgarians had occupied the zone since the 9th century, and especially at the end of the 10th century, at the height of the last Bulgarian Empire, with Ohrid as its capital [9].
At that time the Serbs lived away from Kosova; in fact, in the 9th-10th centuries their first compact colonies were Rascia (Raška) in the Ibar valley, west of Morava, and Zeta which corresponds broadly to present-day Montenegro.
It is precisely when prince Stefan NEMANJIĆ became King in 1217 that the Serbian state began to expand and include the zone of Peja (Peć), while the main body of Kosova territories remained outside its borders. It is unnecessary to dwell any longer on this since no “historical” argument can but refute the “Serbian” thesis, as history points out that the Serbs, in regard to Kosova, are very late comers.

Did the Serbian domination wipe out the ancient Illyrian-Albanian population?
In fact, Serbian texts themselves show the opposite: on the occasion when, in 1348, Stefan DUSAN endowed a gift to the monastery of Saint Michael and Gabriel in Prizren, we learn that in the vicinity of that town there were at least 9 villages described as Albanian (Arbanaš) [10].
The famous code proclaimed by the same sovereign one year later shows that in many villages under his rule, besides the Slavonic population, there were Vlach and Albanian elements, which must have been very dynamic since the Emperor was obliged to restrict their settlement on his lands [11]. If the Vlachs and the Albanians come to be called nomads, it is surely not only because they were “shepherds from birth”, but merely because of the economic and political pressure from the ruling people.
This had been happening since 1328 in the regions of Diabolis, Kolonea and Ohrid, where J. KANTAKUZEN mentions an encounter of the Byzantine Emperor ANDRONICUS III with the “nomadic Albanians” of Central Macedonia [12].

To be sure, the Serbian rule was heavy on the Albanian subjects. Allowing for the obvious propaganda aims of the author, there is certainly some truth in what GUILLAUME D’ADAM, a propagandist for the crusade, writes in 1332,

“… these people, both Latin and Albanian, are under the unbearable and very grave yoke of the prince of the Slavs, whom they despise and hate heartily because they are burdened with heavy taxes, their clergymen are treated scornfully, their bishops and priests are often bound in chains, their noblemen expropriated … All of them together and individually, thought that they would sanctify their hands if they stained them with the blood of the above-mentioned Slavs [13].”

We must add that the Byzantine authors are sensitive about the unity of the people from Albania to Macedonia; the historian, Laonikos CHALKOKONDYLIS of the 15th century, after stressing that the Albanians are quite different from the Serbs and the Bosnians [14], says that no other people resembles the Macedonians more than the Albanians [15].
In these conditions the Turkish occupation began in the second half of the 14th century, and it is true that at this juncture the Albanians affirmed themselves again in Kosova, but, of course, not in the way the question is usually presented, as if the Albanians came on the Turkish band-wagon; on the contrary, from the Shkodra Lake up to Kosova they bound together and resisted along with the other Christian peoples.
At the time of the celebrated battle of 1389, the Greek authors mention, apart from the Serbs and the Bulgarians, also, the Albanians of the North, those of Himara, Epirus and the coastal zone [16]. The Turkish chronicler Idrisi BITTISI, mentions the participation of the Albanians of the Shkodra region, whose prince, Gjergj BALSHA, led 5 000 men into the battle [17] ; the same data are provided by the other Ottoman chroniclers, Ali and Hoca SAADEDDIN [18].

The defeat of 1389 totally disorganized the Serbian state and left a free field of action to the most powerful local princes, including the Albanian princes of the North and the Northeast. The most distinguished among them was Gjon KASTRIOTI, SKANDERBEG’s father, who, from an original ruler of the mountainous region of Mat, extended his principality from the mouth of the Ishem River up to Prizren, in the South of Kosova. In 1420 he granted Ragusa a trade privilege from “his coastal lands up to Prizren [19]“.
This new Albanian state brought about the development of a class of merchants from a population which had been discouraged from such pursuit. The archives of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) show that a number of Albanian merchants of Ragusa voluntarily stayed in Kosova. This is proved by a letter which the Republic of Ragusa sent to Marco of TANI in Prishtina [20], in March 1428, after the KASTRIOTIS had submitted to the Turks, and again in 1448 in the same town we find the other Albanian merchant Kimo MATI of Tani [21].

Therefore, there is no reason to think that, at this stage of their conquest, the Ottomans relied particularly on the Albanians to oppose the Slavs.
It is not futile to recall that the Albanians then were no less Christian than the Serbs and no more ready to submit to the Ottomans.
If this is the place to mention the deeds of SKANDERBEG, who carried out some of his battles on the borders of Kosova, we shall state that the Byzantine historian, DUKAS, in the middle of the 15th century, presents as the main reason for the Turkish triumph the reduction in the number of Albanians, from Dalmatia to Thracia [22].
Whereas the Turkish chronicles refer to Albanian uprisings in Kosova, especially those of 1467, when the “rebels” plundered the herds of cattle in the region of Tetova under the leadership of a “traitor” by the name of ISKENDER [23].

Thus, it is clear that a large Albanian population was still living in Kosova even before the Turkish occupation, and it is redundant to explain this fact by supposing an outburst of mass migrations about which historical sources remain silent.
Indeed, the fact that no mention is made of clashes between the Albanians and the Slavs at the time of Tsar DUŠAN, and the more so during the time of the creation of the principality of Kastrioti, proves that the “Albanian state” extended gradually and was welcomed by the local people in general, because there were many Albanian elements among them.

Despite the new information provided by the Ottoman cadastral registers (defterler) recently put at our disposal, it is virtually impossible to determine the relative number of Albanians in relation to that of the Slavs in Kosova in the 15th century. The best example is the publication in 1974, by S. PULAHA, of the Shkodra sandjak defter from 1485, covering the region of Shkodra, Peja, Podgorica and Bihor [24].
First of all, we must stress the extraordinary objectivity with which S. PULAHA treats the rich toponymy and anthroponymy supplied by this source ; together with him, let us repeat that it is quite ordinary for an Albanian to have a Slav name and vice-versa and that a Slav or Albanian toponym does not dictate any concusions about the nature of the population under discussion [25]. However, it is certain that the common use of a double toponym and anthroponym testifies to an ethnic mixture, the component elements of which may be determined according to regions.
In the Shkodra sandjak (which included the entire zone of Peja), S. PULAHA distinguishes three entities in which the Albanian element is represented in various degrees:
the region of Shkodra where the Albanians make up the overwhelming majority,
the region of Piper, Shestan, Altunili, where an equilibrium seems to have been established between the two populations;
the zone of Peja where the Albanians constitute a considerable minority [26] and where a good number of villages have Slavic names but the majority of the population is Albanian [27].

The main conclusion is that such a mixture of the two groups would be quite unimaginable if anyone of them had recently settled in this zone; the Ottoman register of Shkodra shows that the Albanians constitute a very old component of the local population, especially in the region of Peja, and apart from others, since we lack information about any massive migration of Albanians towards Kosova before the 16th century, we are induced to think that a considerable part of the Kosova Albanians had their roots in the ancient Illyrian-Albanian population living there from Antiquity [28].

As for the other half of Kosova, there is still much to be done, but it must be said that a very old cadastral register including also central Kosova (Vilkili) has been preserved. From that register of 1455, the Bosnian historian A. HANŽIĆ, draws precisely the same conclusions : the very particular mixture of the two peoples implies the permanence of the old Albanian substratum [29].

It must be added that this Albanian element was consolidated from the beginning of the 15th century with the “economic” immigration to the mining zone, especially the rich silver mines of Srebrenica and Novo Brdo. These Albanians, nearly all Christians, were masters who emigrated first towards Ragusa from Northern coastal Albania (Tivar, Shkodra), and from the mountainous zone (Mat) [30]. However, these masters had been established in Kosova for many generations, as is the case with Petar GONOVIĆ PRISTENAZ (from Prishtina) [31], Johannes PROGNOVIĆ from Novomonte (Novo Brdo), and, apparently, many others [32]. It is not without interest to point out that this emigration of the Catholic Albanians, attracted by the possibility of working in the mines, continues well into the 17th century and, according to reports by some envoys of the Pope to that region [33] , resulted in their settlement in Novo Brdo, Gjakova, Prishtina and Trepça.

As a conclusion it emerges that in Kosova, it is certainly the Slavs or the Slavonized peoples, the Bulgarians and then the Serbs, who, beginning from the 7th century, occupied a region the population of which was virtually Illyrian-Albanian from antiquity.
With the settlement of Slavs and the Slavicization of part of the local population at the beginning of the 13th century, Kosova became their main major political and economic centre.
As we pointed out, it is impossible to determine how the two elements stood in relation to one another, though they managed to coexist without major problems. The Ottoman occupation, the gradual weakening of Serbia and, at the same time, the internal reaction and the influx of peaceful immigration of Christian Albanians from the north of Albania resulted in the continuous increase of the Albanian element in Kosova.
Many studies are still necessary to confirm this, but there is a possibility that, even before the mass emigrations of 1690 [a myth] and 1738, the Albanians constituted a large minority in Kosova, if not the majority of the population.

It would be a mistake to forget that the Serbs were not the only ones to leave. With the Serbian emigration of 1737-1738 several thousands of Christian Albanians abandoned the mountainous regions of Shkodra to settle around Karlovac, in Croatia, where the Austrian government used them to implement its policy of military colonization; thus these “Klementiner” [Këlmendi], as they are called in the Austrian literature, found themselves in close contact with the Serbs who had emigrated to the Military Frontier and settled in the same manner. They would preserve their traditions and language until 1910, when their Slavicization was complete [34].

The “deslavicization” of Kosova is thus a fictitious problem: it is only the result of a vast convergent movements of population which have always characterized the history of the Balkan peoples. Based on an ancient substratum that remained Albanian, this migration went on without violence throughout the Middle Ages and in the beginning of modern times. Thus, the events of 1690 and 1738 must be considered only as its final act. Of course, this centuries-old movement of population has nothing in common with the ambitious projects of the Yugoslav government which, between the two wars, tried to bring about the division of Albania with fascist Italy and the mass expulsion of Albanians to Turkey [35].

Notes:

* According to Yugoslav sources, in 1989, the Albanians comprised in fact 80 per cent of the population of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosova (ed.).

[1] Michel AUBIN, “Du mythe serbe au nationalisme albanais”, Le Monde, 5-6 Avril 1981, p. 2.

[2] Georges OSTROGORSKIJ, Serska oblast posle Dušanove smrti (The Seres region after the death of Dušan), Belgrade, 1965.

[3] On the Serbs, in particular, H. GREGOIRE, “The Origins and Name of the Croats and the Serbs”, Bizantin, 17, 1945, and S. NOVAKOVIĆ, “Srpske oblasti X.-XI. veka” (Serb territories in the X-XIth centuries), Glasnik Srpskoga društva, 1880, p. 48.

[4] The bibliography on the Illyrians is considerable. Suffice it to mention the archaeological collection Illyria (6 published volumes, Tirana 1971-1976); The Illyrians and the Genesis of the Albanians, Tirana 1971 and The Acts of the Conference of Illyrian Studies, two volumes, Tirana, 1974.

[5] S. ANAMALI and M. KORKUTI, “The Illyrians and the Genesis of the Albanians in the Light of Albanian Archaeological Studies”, in the collection with the same title, pp. 11-39; regarding linguistic data, Eqrem ÇABEJ, “The Illyrians and the Albanians”, in the same volume, pp. 41-52.

[6] B. COVIĆ, Osnovne materialne karakteristike Ilira na njihovom centralnom području, “Sarajevo Symposium”, 1964, p. 101. cf. S. Anamaii and M. Korkuti, The Illyrians and the Genesis of the Albanians, p. 35.

[7] S. ANAMALI, “From The Albanian Civilization of ‘the Early Middle Ages”, Illyrians, pp.184-187.

[8] Ibidem, p. 185, 192.

[9] A.M. SELISEV, Slaviansko naselenie v Albanii, Sofia, 1931, to be taken with some care because of his Greater-Bulgarian prejudices.

[10] S. NOVAKOVIĆ, Zakonski spomenici srpskih država srednjega veka (Legal sources from the Serbian states in the Middle Ages), Belgrade 1912, pp. 628-701.

[11] See, in particular, chapters 77 and 82 of the DUŠAN code (N. RADOJCIĆ, Zakonik Cara Stefana Dušana, Belgrade, 1960, pp. 57-58).

[12] J. CANTACUZÈNE, Histoire, Ed. de Bonn, 1, p. 55, vol.1, p. 279.

[13] BOKARDUS, “Directorium ad passagium faciendum”, Historians of the Crusades, Armenian Historians, 11, pp. 484-485. [14] Laonikos CHALKOKONDYLIS, Histoire, Ed. E. DARKO, Budapest 1922-1926, 1, pp. 277-278.

[15] Ibidem, 11, pp. 277-278.

[16] HIERAX, Chronique sur l’empire des Turcs; SATHAS, Biblioteca graeca, 1, p. 247.

[17] Idrisi BITLISI, Chronique sur l’empire des Turcs, fols. 188-190; in Selami PULAHA, The Albanian-Turkish War of the 15th Century (Ottoman sources), Tirana 1968, pp. 134-138, 142.

[18] S. PULAHA, op. cit., pp. 251-252, 297.

[19] Published by RADONIĆ, Gjuragj Kastriot Skanderbeg i Arbanija u XV. veku, Belgrade 1942, p. 2.

[20] The archives of the state of Dubrovnik, “Litterae et Commissiones Levantis”, X, p. 84 v. (March 17, 1428).

[21] Ibidem, XIV, f. 248 (January 5, 1448).

[22] DUKAS, Istoria Turko-Byzantina, XXIII, 8. Ed. GRECU, Bucharest 1959, p. 179.

[23] KEMALPASAZADE, Chronique, p. 254 in PULAHA, op. cit., p. 191.

[24] S. PULAHA, The Cadastral Register of’the Shkodra Sandjak of 1458, vol. 2, Tirana 1974.

[25] S. PULAHA, op. cit., pp. 31-32.

[26] Ibidem, pp. 33-34.

[27] Ibid., p. 34, counts 15 villages in this case.

[28] S. PULAHA, op. cit., pp. 34-35. It must be noted that this is the conclusion of the great Croat historian, Milan ŠUFFLAY, killed in 1931 by the Serb police (Milan ŠUFFLAY, Povijest sjevernih Arbanaša, reprinted in Prishtina 1968, pp. 61-62).

[29] A. HANŽIĆ, “Nekoliko vijesti o Arbanašima na Kosovu i Metohiji u sredinom XV. vijeka” (Some data on the Albanians of Kosova in the middle of the 15th century), Symposium on Skanderbeg, Prishtina, 1969, pp. 201-209. S. PULAHA, “Albanian Element according to the Onomastics of the Regions of the Shkodra Sandjak in the Years 1485-1582″, Studime historike, 1972, 1, pp. 63 ss.

[30] Consult especially the documents supplied by M. DINIĆ, taken from the state archives of Dubrovnik, and particularly Livre de Comptes by Mihal LUKAREVIĆ (M. DINIĆ, Iz Dubrovskog arhiva 1 ; Belgrade, 1957. Example p. 65 (”Dom Marin de Antivaro”, “Andria Nicholich Arbanexo de Matia”).

[31] M. DINIĆ, op. cit., p. 68.

[32] Ibidem, also the State Archives of Dubrovnik, Pacta Matrimonalia II, f. 103 v. (December 11, 1459).

[33] I. ZAMPUTI, Report on the Situation of Northern and Central Albania in the 17th Century, volume 1 (1610-1634), Tirana 1968, and the report of apostolic visitor, Pjetër MAZRREKU, in 1623-1624.

[34] L. VON THALLOCZY, “Die albanische Diaspora”, Illyrisch-Albanische Forschungen (Vienna 1916), vol. 1, pp. 314 ss. This article is based on, apart from the archives of the Karlovac metropolis, the Archiv des Gemeinsamen Finanzministeriums, Vienna, especially, VI, p. 25, 1739.

[35] This is what we conclude from the Vaso CUBRILOVIĆ memorandum of 1937, Iseljavanje Arnauta ["Expelling the Albanians"], which envisaged a mass transfer of the Kosova people to Turkey. These problems (especially, the 1939 report by Ivo ANDRIĆ, and the scale of Albanian emigration to Turkey between the two wars) are dealt with for instance by M. ROUX, “Language and State Power in Yugoslavia. The Case of the Albanians”, Pluriel 22, Paris, 1980.