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Also for these that want to better understand Kosovo history, North Albanian clans, Orthodox and Catholic Kosovar Albanians, but also later Muslim ones, also events that followed its best for begging to read Noel Malcolm book, British academic and historian: Kosovo, A Short History.
I have retyped important part from his book regarding this discussion:
Early Ottoman Kosovo, 1450s-1580s
By the time of Patriarchate was re-established at Peć, the town of Peć itself may already have gained an absolute majority of Muslims. At the same time, there is an increasing volume of evidence that parts of Western Kosovo had a significant Albanian population, evidence which goes beyond anything that can be demonstrated for the medieval period. Some modern Albanian scholars have put these phenomena together - the growth of Islam and the apparent growth of an Albanian population - to argue that what er are seeing in both cases is the emergence of a previously invisible mass of ethnic Albanians, who had been disguised in the records under Slav Orthodox names. It is claimed that the loss of authority by the Peć Patriarchate in this area between 1455 and 1557 had made t possible for these Albanian to detach themselves from Serbian control; and that white ethnic Serbs would have felt a continuing (and, after 1557, a revived) attachment to their Church which would have prevented the from turning to Islam, the ethnic Albanians would have felt no such scruples about adopting this new religion. Thus, it is suggested, the people who became Muslims were nearly all of them ethnic Albanians, and the creation of a Muslim majority was the same time merely the revelation of an already existing Albanian majority.
Some aspects of this argument are unconvincing on a priori grounds. Ethnic Albanian are unlikely to have felt estranged from the Serbian Church merely because it was not their 'national' Church; this is to project a modern idea of 'national' loyalties a little too far into the past. Orthodox Albanians in southern Albania and Greece, for example, remained loyal to the Greek Church and its liturgy for many generations, even though they may spoken only Albanian in the home. Nor, conversely, were Slavs incapable of converting to Islam: it was happening all the time in the neighboring territories of Macedonia and Novi Pazar, as well as in Bosnia and Hercegovina. (As early as 1580 the 6,000-odd households of the Novi Pazar district were almost entirely Muslim.) Many of Albanian names which crop up in the early Ottoman registers for Kosovo are Catholic Albanian Christian names, such as 'Gjin' (john) and 'Doda' (a diminutive of Dominic); and it is not clear why Albanian who had long been Serbian Orthodox should have regarded the Catholic Church, with its Latin liturgy and Italian-trained priests, as more deserving of 'national' loyalty than a Church based in their own locality.
On all these grounds, one might feel tempted to reject this argument entirely. Those who do so (and this includes almost all Serbian historians) explain the growth of an Albanian population in Kosovo during the early Ottoman period in terms of physical immigration: it is suggested that Albanian from the Malësi were encouraged by the Ottomans to settle in Kosovo, that many of these turned to Islam to gain advantages of superior status, and that those Slavs who became Muslims were not merely Islamicized but, sooner or later, Albanianized as well.
Although the Albanian historians argument seems unconvincing for general reasons, it nevertheless comes buttressed with some intriguing evidence from the Ottoman registers. The Ottoman officials usually noted which heads of the family were 'new arrivals' in their places of the residence: out of 121 new arrivals in the nahiye of Peć in 1485, the majority had Slav names. In the sancak of Prizren in 1591, only five new arrivals out of forty-one bore Albanian names; and in a group of Kosovo towns in the 1580s and 1590s there were twenty-five new Albanian immigrants and 133 with Slav names - several of them described as coming from Bosnia. This evidence counts strongly against the idea a mass immigration from northern Albania. Other more general arguments against that idea are based of relative population sizes and rates of growth. The population of Kosovo during this period was much bigger than that northern and central Albanian, and its rate of growth was actually lower. This is not what one would expect if a large overflow from the Albanian Malësi were flooding into Kosovo. All arguments which depend on identifying Slav or Albanian names are of course subject to doubts about whether the names really did indicate ethnic-linguistic identity - which is, of course, one of the key points at issue. In a previous discussion of this question it was suggested that although names are not very trustworthy in any particular case, the broad pattern probably does indicate both the nature of the dominant culture and the direction of flow of any tendencies to assimilation.On that basis it is reasonable to say that a Serbian Orthodox culture was overwhelmingly dominant in Eastern Kosovo: the first Ottoman register, of 1455, yields only a small minority of Albanian names, and many of these involve an Albanian-named father and a Slav Orthodox-named son ('Radislav, son of Djon'; Radovan , son of Djin'). 'Arnaud', which suggests that their Albanian identity was a distinguishing feature, setting them apart from the most od the surrounding population. In the 1570s there was a mahalle (quarter) of Janjevo called 'Arbanas'; roughly half of its heads of families had Slav or mixed Slav-Albanian names. According to some Albanian historians, this shows that many apparent Slavs were really Albanian-speaking Albanians. Simpler explanation, surely, would be that the small Albanian minority in Janjevo was gradually being assimilated to the Serbian-speaking majority.
On the other hand, there is clear evidence of Orthodox names appearing in Albanian-language forms - which implies that adherence to the Orthodox Church did not necessarily involve assimilation to a Serbian-language culture. While the majority of the Albanian names in Western Kosovo were Catholic, a significant minority were Orthodox, including several of the fifteen Orthodox families that constituted the entire Orthodox population of Peć in the 1590s. (Also in Western Kosovo in this period were 'Gjon, son of an Orthodox priest', and 'Gjonja, an Orthodox monk'). Again, Albanian historians argue from this that most of the Orthodox population in Kosovo was in fact Albanian; it would surely be simpler to suppose the the majority of the Orthodox (who do have Slav names) were Serbian-speaking and a minority Albanian-speaking, and that the Albanians were not assimilated linguistically because there was also a significant population of Catholic Albanians in Western Kosovo - as the other Albanian names clearly show.
The evidence scrupulously presented by one leading Albanian historian, Selami Pulaha, does not really support the argument which he then tries to build on it. in 1591, for example, in the nahiye of Hoça (north of Prizren), there were 883 heads of family with Slav or other orthodox names, 196 with mixed Albanian-Slav names and 248 with purely Albanian names; Pulaha's conclusion is that the area was 'completely Albanian'. A group of Kosovo towns in the same period yields 330 purely Slav Orthodox names and 217 mixed Albanian-Slav or purely Albanian; Pulaha deduces that the urban population was 'almost completely Albanian'. Similarly, the claim that only Albanians became Muslims can be argued only on the basis of the prior assumption that all people with Slav names were really Albanians. Of the Muslims of Hoça in 1591, fifty-four had Albanian names and nineteen Slav names; of those in the Has district (near Gjakova) in 1571, 166 had Albanian names and 37 Slav names. What this suggests is not that Slavs never became Muslims, but that a higher proportion of Albanians did so; and the reason for that catholic Albanians were even less well supplied with priests in the early Ottoman period than they had been under Serbian rule. What a straightforward reading of this evidence would suggest is that there were significant reservoirs of a mainly Catholic Albanian-speaking population in parts of Western Kosovo; and evidence from the following century suggests that many of these eventually became Muslims. Whether Albanian-speakers were a majority in Western Kosovo at this time seems very doubtful, and it is clear that they were only a small minority in the east. On the other hand, it is also clear that the Albanian minority in Eastern Kosovo predated the Ottoman conquest.
Finally, one other social process was taking place in this period which is also relevant to arguments about the migration of Albanians into Kosovo: the formation of the northern Albanian clans. As was mentioned in the first chapter, these clans appear to have been formed out of groups of pastoral families in the Malësi from the late Middle Ages onward: the main stimulus must have been the requirement of self-protection after the old system of powerful land-owning families (Balshas, Dukagjins, and so on) had been broken up by the Ottoman invasions and the disruptions of the fifteenth-century revolts. Dome of the oldest clans preserve detailed family trees in their oral tradition, going back to founder-ancestors in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries; other were formed from sub-branches of these older clans.
The key development, it seems, was the adaptation of the social structures of pastoral life to the purposes of territorial self-defenses, with several of the clans of the northern Malësi, the process by which vëllazëris (brotherhoods) came together to form clans can be traced through Venetian and Ottoman documents, to the period between 1455 and 1485: what happens in these cases was that the members of the dominant brotherhood would impose their name on the whole clan, and on the territory which the clan defended. And at some time in the sixteenth century the Ottoman authorities gave up even trying to impose their normal administrative or feudal system in those areas, letting the clans run their own affairs in virtual 'zones of self-government' instead. Curiously, the development of the clan system in Scotland was taking breakdown central power and feudal structures in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Scottish clans also developed the idea of common ancestry: 'at first this relationship might clearly be seen as fictitious or honorary, but in time the metaphor of kinship tended to be converted into belief that real blood kinship existed.
Thus, increasingly, Albanian from the Malësi would bear the name of their clan as a kind of surname: Berisha, Këlmendi, Shala and so on.There are many people with these names in modern Kosovo, and it is clear that, from the early seventeenth century onward at least some of their ancestors must have come into Kosovo as immigrants from the Malësi. ('At least some' is a necessary qualifications, because we cannot assume that the process of agglomeration - of people joining a clan and taking its name - never took place on Kosovo soil.) However, there are also many Kosovo Albanian who do not bear clan names. Serbian writers sometimes argue that all these Albanian must therefore be Albanianized Serbs, as if all genuine Albanians would originally have belong to clans. but since we know that there were non-clan Albanian in Kosovo as early as the fifteenth century, that clans were only formed in areas which (unlike Kosovo) lacked governmental security, and indeed that many of the clans in the Malësi were still only in the process of formation at that time, this particular version of the argument about 'Albanianized Serbs' can simply be dismissed.
pages 111 - 115, Kosovo, a short history. N. Malcolm.
I have retyped important part from his book regarding this discussion:
Early Ottoman Kosovo, 1450s-1580s
By the time of Patriarchate was re-established at Peć, the town of Peć itself may already have gained an absolute majority of Muslims. At the same time, there is an increasing volume of evidence that parts of Western Kosovo had a significant Albanian population, evidence which goes beyond anything that can be demonstrated for the medieval period. Some modern Albanian scholars have put these phenomena together - the growth of Islam and the apparent growth of an Albanian population - to argue that what er are seeing in both cases is the emergence of a previously invisible mass of ethnic Albanians, who had been disguised in the records under Slav Orthodox names. It is claimed that the loss of authority by the Peć Patriarchate in this area between 1455 and 1557 had made t possible for these Albanian to detach themselves from Serbian control; and that white ethnic Serbs would have felt a continuing (and, after 1557, a revived) attachment to their Church which would have prevented the from turning to Islam, the ethnic Albanians would have felt no such scruples about adopting this new religion. Thus, it is suggested, the people who became Muslims were nearly all of them ethnic Albanians, and the creation of a Muslim majority was the same time merely the revelation of an already existing Albanian majority.
Some aspects of this argument are unconvincing on a priori grounds. Ethnic Albanian are unlikely to have felt estranged from the Serbian Church merely because it was not their 'national' Church; this is to project a modern idea of 'national' loyalties a little too far into the past. Orthodox Albanians in southern Albania and Greece, for example, remained loyal to the Greek Church and its liturgy for many generations, even though they may spoken only Albanian in the home. Nor, conversely, were Slavs incapable of converting to Islam: it was happening all the time in the neighboring territories of Macedonia and Novi Pazar, as well as in Bosnia and Hercegovina. (As early as 1580 the 6,000-odd households of the Novi Pazar district were almost entirely Muslim.) Many of Albanian names which crop up in the early Ottoman registers for Kosovo are Catholic Albanian Christian names, such as 'Gjin' (john) and 'Doda' (a diminutive of Dominic); and it is not clear why Albanian who had long been Serbian Orthodox should have regarded the Catholic Church, with its Latin liturgy and Italian-trained priests, as more deserving of 'national' loyalty than a Church based in their own locality.
On all these grounds, one might feel tempted to reject this argument entirely. Those who do so (and this includes almost all Serbian historians) explain the growth of an Albanian population in Kosovo during the early Ottoman period in terms of physical immigration: it is suggested that Albanian from the Malësi were encouraged by the Ottomans to settle in Kosovo, that many of these turned to Islam to gain advantages of superior status, and that those Slavs who became Muslims were not merely Islamicized but, sooner or later, Albanianized as well.
Although the Albanian historians argument seems unconvincing for general reasons, it nevertheless comes buttressed with some intriguing evidence from the Ottoman registers. The Ottoman officials usually noted which heads of the family were 'new arrivals' in their places of the residence: out of 121 new arrivals in the nahiye of Peć in 1485, the majority had Slav names. In the sancak of Prizren in 1591, only five new arrivals out of forty-one bore Albanian names; and in a group of Kosovo towns in the 1580s and 1590s there were twenty-five new Albanian immigrants and 133 with Slav names - several of them described as coming from Bosnia. This evidence counts strongly against the idea a mass immigration from northern Albania. Other more general arguments against that idea are based of relative population sizes and rates of growth. The population of Kosovo during this period was much bigger than that northern and central Albanian, and its rate of growth was actually lower. This is not what one would expect if a large overflow from the Albanian Malësi were flooding into Kosovo. All arguments which depend on identifying Slav or Albanian names are of course subject to doubts about whether the names really did indicate ethnic-linguistic identity - which is, of course, one of the key points at issue. In a previous discussion of this question it was suggested that although names are not very trustworthy in any particular case, the broad pattern probably does indicate both the nature of the dominant culture and the direction of flow of any tendencies to assimilation.On that basis it is reasonable to say that a Serbian Orthodox culture was overwhelmingly dominant in Eastern Kosovo: the first Ottoman register, of 1455, yields only a small minority of Albanian names, and many of these involve an Albanian-named father and a Slav Orthodox-named son ('Radislav, son of Djon'; Radovan , son of Djin'). 'Arnaud', which suggests that their Albanian identity was a distinguishing feature, setting them apart from the most od the surrounding population. In the 1570s there was a mahalle (quarter) of Janjevo called 'Arbanas'; roughly half of its heads of families had Slav or mixed Slav-Albanian names. According to some Albanian historians, this shows that many apparent Slavs were really Albanian-speaking Albanians. Simpler explanation, surely, would be that the small Albanian minority in Janjevo was gradually being assimilated to the Serbian-speaking majority.
On the other hand, there is clear evidence of Orthodox names appearing in Albanian-language forms - which implies that adherence to the Orthodox Church did not necessarily involve assimilation to a Serbian-language culture. While the majority of the Albanian names in Western Kosovo were Catholic, a significant minority were Orthodox, including several of the fifteen Orthodox families that constituted the entire Orthodox population of Peć in the 1590s. (Also in Western Kosovo in this period were 'Gjon, son of an Orthodox priest', and 'Gjonja, an Orthodox monk'). Again, Albanian historians argue from this that most of the Orthodox population in Kosovo was in fact Albanian; it would surely be simpler to suppose the the majority of the Orthodox (who do have Slav names) were Serbian-speaking and a minority Albanian-speaking, and that the Albanians were not assimilated linguistically because there was also a significant population of Catholic Albanians in Western Kosovo - as the other Albanian names clearly show.
The evidence scrupulously presented by one leading Albanian historian, Selami Pulaha, does not really support the argument which he then tries to build on it. in 1591, for example, in the nahiye of Hoça (north of Prizren), there were 883 heads of family with Slav or other orthodox names, 196 with mixed Albanian-Slav names and 248 with purely Albanian names; Pulaha's conclusion is that the area was 'completely Albanian'. A group of Kosovo towns in the same period yields 330 purely Slav Orthodox names and 217 mixed Albanian-Slav or purely Albanian; Pulaha deduces that the urban population was 'almost completely Albanian'. Similarly, the claim that only Albanians became Muslims can be argued only on the basis of the prior assumption that all people with Slav names were really Albanians. Of the Muslims of Hoça in 1591, fifty-four had Albanian names and nineteen Slav names; of those in the Has district (near Gjakova) in 1571, 166 had Albanian names and 37 Slav names. What this suggests is not that Slavs never became Muslims, but that a higher proportion of Albanians did so; and the reason for that catholic Albanians were even less well supplied with priests in the early Ottoman period than they had been under Serbian rule. What a straightforward reading of this evidence would suggest is that there were significant reservoirs of a mainly Catholic Albanian-speaking population in parts of Western Kosovo; and evidence from the following century suggests that many of these eventually became Muslims. Whether Albanian-speakers were a majority in Western Kosovo at this time seems very doubtful, and it is clear that they were only a small minority in the east. On the other hand, it is also clear that the Albanian minority in Eastern Kosovo predated the Ottoman conquest.
Finally, one other social process was taking place in this period which is also relevant to arguments about the migration of Albanians into Kosovo: the formation of the northern Albanian clans. As was mentioned in the first chapter, these clans appear to have been formed out of groups of pastoral families in the Malësi from the late Middle Ages onward: the main stimulus must have been the requirement of self-protection after the old system of powerful land-owning families (Balshas, Dukagjins, and so on) had been broken up by the Ottoman invasions and the disruptions of the fifteenth-century revolts. Dome of the oldest clans preserve detailed family trees in their oral tradition, going back to founder-ancestors in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries; other were formed from sub-branches of these older clans.
The key development, it seems, was the adaptation of the social structures of pastoral life to the purposes of territorial self-defenses, with several of the clans of the northern Malësi, the process by which vëllazëris (brotherhoods) came together to form clans can be traced through Venetian and Ottoman documents, to the period between 1455 and 1485: what happens in these cases was that the members of the dominant brotherhood would impose their name on the whole clan, and on the territory which the clan defended. And at some time in the sixteenth century the Ottoman authorities gave up even trying to impose their normal administrative or feudal system in those areas, letting the clans run their own affairs in virtual 'zones of self-government' instead. Curiously, the development of the clan system in Scotland was taking breakdown central power and feudal structures in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Scottish clans also developed the idea of common ancestry: 'at first this relationship might clearly be seen as fictitious or honorary, but in time the metaphor of kinship tended to be converted into belief that real blood kinship existed.
Thus, increasingly, Albanian from the Malësi would bear the name of their clan as a kind of surname: Berisha, Këlmendi, Shala and so on.There are many people with these names in modern Kosovo, and it is clear that, from the early seventeenth century onward at least some of their ancestors must have come into Kosovo as immigrants from the Malësi. ('At least some' is a necessary qualifications, because we cannot assume that the process of agglomeration - of people joining a clan and taking its name - never took place on Kosovo soil.) However, there are also many Kosovo Albanian who do not bear clan names. Serbian writers sometimes argue that all these Albanian must therefore be Albanianized Serbs, as if all genuine Albanians would originally have belong to clans. but since we know that there were non-clan Albanian in Kosovo as early as the fifteenth century, that clans were only formed in areas which (unlike Kosovo) lacked governmental security, and indeed that many of the clans in the Malësi were still only in the process of formation at that time, this particular version of the argument about 'Albanianized Serbs' can simply be dismissed.
pages 111 - 115, Kosovo, a short history. N. Malcolm.