LABERIA
Banned
- Messages
- 1,969
- Reaction score
- 294
- Points
- 83
- Ethnic group
- Albanian
Nicholas Hammond was an philhellene, of course not under the influence of Enver Hoxha.
https://books.google.al/books?id=O9...fsI&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y
Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas
Albanian Ethnogenesis
The Albanian is by habit and instinct a mountaineer, and the heart of Albania has always beaten most strongly in the tangle of very high mountains in the north of the country. That area has been impenetrable to many foreign armies, and its inhabitants have governed themselves and observed their own laws without paying much regard to the rulers of the lowlands; whether Greek, Roman, Turkish or Italian. The laws were traditional, and they were not written down until recently. The Albanians themselves say that their laws were codified, if one may use that word of oral composition, in the fifteenth century by Lek Dukagjini, and that he was an older contemporary and friend of George Skanderbeg (1403-67), the leader of the heroic resistance against the all-conquering Turks. The achievement of Lek Dukagjmi was not to invent laws but to organise the traditional ones of the numerous tribes of the northern part of the country - his own home into a consistent system of law, and to persuade the tribes to adopt it. Since that time the laws have been handed down separately in tribes and in families by oral tradition; and the fact that they still belong recognisably to a codified system is a testimony to the accuracy and strength of an oral transmission, which continued until the mid-twentieth century, when ideological revolutions replaced the code of Lek Dukagjini with that of Enver Hoxha and his colleagues.
In the 1930s the Albanians of the modern state of Albania were only a portion of those who spoke Albanian. Quite apart from the emigrants in Egypt, America and elsewhere, there were large groups of Albanian-speakers in Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia. The most interesting are those who were indigenous to the country but were included in south-western Yugoslavia by the drawing of the frontier in 1912-13.
They have remained completely Albanian in the pre-war sense of the word, retaining their traditional customs and living close to the subsistence level in the hilly country, for instance to the north of Ochrid, where I talked with the peasants of Gorice.
What united this plethora of often warring families and often warring tribes as Albanians was a love of their land, a sense of family unity vis-a-vis Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks and Italians, and a unique language, which belongs, like Greek and Latin, to the Indo-European group of languages but is at a primitive stage of development. This language may be the direct descendant of the Illyrian language, which was spoken by the inhabitants of the north-western part of the Balkans from early in the second millennium B.C. down to the collapse of the Roman Empire If so, it provides an analogy to the survival of Greek today as the direct descendant of Mycenaean Greek. But the purely linguistic evidence is scanty, because the Illyrians were illiterate, and there are not enough toponyms and personal names to convince the specialists in the linguistic field. But on a broader consideration, the inaccessibility of the mountains of northern Albania, the extreme conservatism of Albanian life and customs until recently, and the arrested development of the Albanian language are strongly in favour of the view that the Shqiptars, as they call themselves (7), are the linear descendants of the tribes of the northwest Balkans to which the Greeks and the Romans gave the general name 'Illyrians'.
In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. 'lllyricum', the Roman province of the northwest Balkans which began in the south with Scodra, was a very important part of the Empire, because it provided good soldiers and leading emperors such as Diocletian and Justinian.
For almost half a millennium we know nothing of Epirus Nova except that it suffered from terrible earthquakes and was overrun repeatedly by barbarian invaders who came from north of the Danube. In 1081 even more formidable invaders landed on its coast, the Normans (or the Franks, as the Greeks called them) of the First Crusade, and they conquered and occupied Epirus Nova, while the Byzantine emperor, Alexius, withdrew to concentrate his forces at Ochrid. It was in these circumstances that a region ‘Albania' was first mentioned in literature, namely in the Norman French of the great epic, the Chanson de Roland, composed c. 1082-84. The place-names of Epirus Nova were reproduced in a French form or in a Biblical form: the river Charzanes (modern Arzen) appeared as Cheriant (line 3208) ; the river Mati (the modern name) as Val ('river' in the Chanson) Marchis, Mari or Morois; the ancient Oricus as Jericho; the modern Kanina as Chanmeis and so on. One line of the Chanson, 3255, gives what were probably the limits of Epirus Nova on the coast for the Crusaders as ‘Baile' (Cape Pale north of Dyrrachium) and 'Glos’ (Cape Glossa). Now another manuscript (CV7) gives not these names but 'd'Albanie et de Kent’ in order to convey the same meaning, thus it follows that 'Albanie' was inland of Cape Pale, for 'Kent' (Kanina) was inland of Cape Glossa (9). Again at line 3230 there is mention of Cape Pale, which appears in the best manuscript as 'Baile' and in other manuscripts as Paligea, Baligera, Balie, Balide, Baldise and in V7, as Albeigne. H. Gregoire and R. de Keyser, who were first to recognise that names of places in Epirus Nova were mentioned in the Chanson,(10) regarded all these readings as corruptions of 'Baile’ and in particular they said "V7 a corrompu Baile en Albeigne". Yet 'Albeigne' is so unlike the other versions and so remote from 'Baile' that it is most probably not a corruption at all but, precisely as in line 3255, a variant. If it is a variant of Baile (Cape Pale), ‘Albeigne' like "Albanie' is to be sought inland of Cape Pale.
The correct forms in Greek of the place-names in Epirus Nova were given some decades later by the Byzantine writers and among them by Anna Comnena, the daughter of the Emperor Alexius who had fought against the Crusaders. Thus, corresponding to 'Albanie' and 'Albeigne' was the form 'Arbanon' in Anna Comnena's history, which she completed in 1148. This 'Arbanon' was a mountain, since she wrote of passes and paths through it (13.5), and it lay somewhere between Dyrrachium and 'Deure' (Dibra) in the valley of the Black Drin. The most likely candidate is Mt Dajti, east of Cape Pale (now Rodoni). A plural form in the neuter gender was used by Anna Comnena at 4.8, where "Korniskortes set out from Arbana” (11). As in the case of the Acroceraunia' (sc. 'ore'), a mountainous area was being named ‘Arbana', i.e. Mt Dajti and Mali me Grope most probable.
From 1166 onwards the suffragan bishops of Dyrrachium included ''episcopi Albanenses, Arbanenses, Arbonenses" and even "Arbunenses"(12). As bishops were named not after a race but by a place, these bishops were in charge of a district 'Arbana', or something of the sort. The district was comparatively small, because we hear of suffragan bishops of 'Hunavia' and ‘Tzernikos' (Cermenike), which were situated, like Arbana, on the north side of the Via Egnatia (13). The seat of the diocese may have been a town called something like 'Arbanos’. We have two mentions of such a town: 'Albanopolis' or in a variant reading 'Albanos polis' in Ptolemy 3.12.20, writing in the second century A.D. and 'Albanos' in the company of the towns Achris (Ochrid), Prilapos (Prilep), and Dyrrachium in G. Acropolites 14, writing in the thirteenth century (14). The latter author mentioned also a district 'Albanon' as "a little beyond Dyrrachium," and as containing "difficult terrain" [14] and a fort known as 'Kroai' (49), now Kruje, on the western face of Mt Dajti.
The gap between Ptolemy and Acropolites is bridged by the mention of "Ducagini d'Arbania" in a seventh-century document at Ragusa (Dubrovnik). These Ducagini instigated a revolt against Byzantine rule in Bosnia and in particular at Ragusa, but they had to submit after the second unsuccessful intervention at Ragusa, to which they were said to have come "de terra ferma," i.e overland (15). The name 'Ducagini' is evidently derived from the Latin 'dux' and the common Albanian name 'Ghin'; indeed an Albanian chieftain in 1281 was referred to as "dux Ginius Tanuschus"(16). Moreover, the leading family of northern Albania from the thirteenth century to the Turkish invasion in the fifteenth century was called 'Dukagjin' (Lek Dukagjini the codifier was one of them), and their properties lay between Lesh (Lissus) and the bend of the Drin. It is here then that we should put the ‘Arbania' of the seventh century. The conclusion that 'Albanians' lived there continuously from the second century to the thirteenth century becomes, I think, unavoidable (17).
'Albanoi' as a people appeared first in Ptolemy 3.12.20. In his description of the Roman world, the southernmost part of the province Illyricum included Scodra, Lissus and Mt Scardus (Sar Planina); and, adjoining it the northernmost part of 'Macedonia' included the Taulantii (in the region of Tirana) and the Albani, in whose territory Ptolemy recorded one city only, Albanopolis or Albanos polis. Thus the Albani were a tribe in what we now call Central Albania, and they were an Illyrian-speaking tribe, like the more famous Taulantii, in the second century A.D. Men of this tribe appeared next in 1040, alongside some Epirotes (their neighbours on land) and some Italiotes (their neighbours across the sea), in the army of a rebellious general, George Maniakis. Two chieftains of this tribe, Demetrios and Ghin, pursued an independent policy in the early years of the thirteenth century.
https://books.google.al/books?id=O9...fsI&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y
Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas
Albanian Ethnogenesis
The Albanian is by habit and instinct a mountaineer, and the heart of Albania has always beaten most strongly in the tangle of very high mountains in the north of the country. That area has been impenetrable to many foreign armies, and its inhabitants have governed themselves and observed their own laws without paying much regard to the rulers of the lowlands; whether Greek, Roman, Turkish or Italian. The laws were traditional, and they were not written down until recently. The Albanians themselves say that their laws were codified, if one may use that word of oral composition, in the fifteenth century by Lek Dukagjini, and that he was an older contemporary and friend of George Skanderbeg (1403-67), the leader of the heroic resistance against the all-conquering Turks. The achievement of Lek Dukagjmi was not to invent laws but to organise the traditional ones of the numerous tribes of the northern part of the country - his own home into a consistent system of law, and to persuade the tribes to adopt it. Since that time the laws have been handed down separately in tribes and in families by oral tradition; and the fact that they still belong recognisably to a codified system is a testimony to the accuracy and strength of an oral transmission, which continued until the mid-twentieth century, when ideological revolutions replaced the code of Lek Dukagjini with that of Enver Hoxha and his colleagues.
In the 1930s the Albanians of the modern state of Albania were only a portion of those who spoke Albanian. Quite apart from the emigrants in Egypt, America and elsewhere, there were large groups of Albanian-speakers in Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia. The most interesting are those who were indigenous to the country but were included in south-western Yugoslavia by the drawing of the frontier in 1912-13.
They have remained completely Albanian in the pre-war sense of the word, retaining their traditional customs and living close to the subsistence level in the hilly country, for instance to the north of Ochrid, where I talked with the peasants of Gorice.
What united this plethora of often warring families and often warring tribes as Albanians was a love of their land, a sense of family unity vis-a-vis Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks and Italians, and a unique language, which belongs, like Greek and Latin, to the Indo-European group of languages but is at a primitive stage of development. This language may be the direct descendant of the Illyrian language, which was spoken by the inhabitants of the north-western part of the Balkans from early in the second millennium B.C. down to the collapse of the Roman Empire If so, it provides an analogy to the survival of Greek today as the direct descendant of Mycenaean Greek. But the purely linguistic evidence is scanty, because the Illyrians were illiterate, and there are not enough toponyms and personal names to convince the specialists in the linguistic field. But on a broader consideration, the inaccessibility of the mountains of northern Albania, the extreme conservatism of Albanian life and customs until recently, and the arrested development of the Albanian language are strongly in favour of the view that the Shqiptars, as they call themselves (7), are the linear descendants of the tribes of the northwest Balkans to which the Greeks and the Romans gave the general name 'Illyrians'.
In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. 'lllyricum', the Roman province of the northwest Balkans which began in the south with Scodra, was a very important part of the Empire, because it provided good soldiers and leading emperors such as Diocletian and Justinian.
For almost half a millennium we know nothing of Epirus Nova except that it suffered from terrible earthquakes and was overrun repeatedly by barbarian invaders who came from north of the Danube. In 1081 even more formidable invaders landed on its coast, the Normans (or the Franks, as the Greeks called them) of the First Crusade, and they conquered and occupied Epirus Nova, while the Byzantine emperor, Alexius, withdrew to concentrate his forces at Ochrid. It was in these circumstances that a region ‘Albania' was first mentioned in literature, namely in the Norman French of the great epic, the Chanson de Roland, composed c. 1082-84. The place-names of Epirus Nova were reproduced in a French form or in a Biblical form: the river Charzanes (modern Arzen) appeared as Cheriant (line 3208) ; the river Mati (the modern name) as Val ('river' in the Chanson) Marchis, Mari or Morois; the ancient Oricus as Jericho; the modern Kanina as Chanmeis and so on. One line of the Chanson, 3255, gives what were probably the limits of Epirus Nova on the coast for the Crusaders as ‘Baile' (Cape Pale north of Dyrrachium) and 'Glos’ (Cape Glossa). Now another manuscript (CV7) gives not these names but 'd'Albanie et de Kent’ in order to convey the same meaning, thus it follows that 'Albanie' was inland of Cape Pale, for 'Kent' (Kanina) was inland of Cape Glossa (9). Again at line 3230 there is mention of Cape Pale, which appears in the best manuscript as 'Baile' and in other manuscripts as Paligea, Baligera, Balie, Balide, Baldise and in V7, as Albeigne. H. Gregoire and R. de Keyser, who were first to recognise that names of places in Epirus Nova were mentioned in the Chanson,(10) regarded all these readings as corruptions of 'Baile’ and in particular they said "V7 a corrompu Baile en Albeigne". Yet 'Albeigne' is so unlike the other versions and so remote from 'Baile' that it is most probably not a corruption at all but, precisely as in line 3255, a variant. If it is a variant of Baile (Cape Pale), ‘Albeigne' like "Albanie' is to be sought inland of Cape Pale.
The correct forms in Greek of the place-names in Epirus Nova were given some decades later by the Byzantine writers and among them by Anna Comnena, the daughter of the Emperor Alexius who had fought against the Crusaders. Thus, corresponding to 'Albanie' and 'Albeigne' was the form 'Arbanon' in Anna Comnena's history, which she completed in 1148. This 'Arbanon' was a mountain, since she wrote of passes and paths through it (13.5), and it lay somewhere between Dyrrachium and 'Deure' (Dibra) in the valley of the Black Drin. The most likely candidate is Mt Dajti, east of Cape Pale (now Rodoni). A plural form in the neuter gender was used by Anna Comnena at 4.8, where "Korniskortes set out from Arbana” (11). As in the case of the Acroceraunia' (sc. 'ore'), a mountainous area was being named ‘Arbana', i.e. Mt Dajti and Mali me Grope most probable.
From 1166 onwards the suffragan bishops of Dyrrachium included ''episcopi Albanenses, Arbanenses, Arbonenses" and even "Arbunenses"(12). As bishops were named not after a race but by a place, these bishops were in charge of a district 'Arbana', or something of the sort. The district was comparatively small, because we hear of suffragan bishops of 'Hunavia' and ‘Tzernikos' (Cermenike), which were situated, like Arbana, on the north side of the Via Egnatia (13). The seat of the diocese may have been a town called something like 'Arbanos’. We have two mentions of such a town: 'Albanopolis' or in a variant reading 'Albanos polis' in Ptolemy 3.12.20, writing in the second century A.D. and 'Albanos' in the company of the towns Achris (Ochrid), Prilapos (Prilep), and Dyrrachium in G. Acropolites 14, writing in the thirteenth century (14). The latter author mentioned also a district 'Albanon' as "a little beyond Dyrrachium," and as containing "difficult terrain" [14] and a fort known as 'Kroai' (49), now Kruje, on the western face of Mt Dajti.
The gap between Ptolemy and Acropolites is bridged by the mention of "Ducagini d'Arbania" in a seventh-century document at Ragusa (Dubrovnik). These Ducagini instigated a revolt against Byzantine rule in Bosnia and in particular at Ragusa, but they had to submit after the second unsuccessful intervention at Ragusa, to which they were said to have come "de terra ferma," i.e overland (15). The name 'Ducagini' is evidently derived from the Latin 'dux' and the common Albanian name 'Ghin'; indeed an Albanian chieftain in 1281 was referred to as "dux Ginius Tanuschus"(16). Moreover, the leading family of northern Albania from the thirteenth century to the Turkish invasion in the fifteenth century was called 'Dukagjin' (Lek Dukagjini the codifier was one of them), and their properties lay between Lesh (Lissus) and the bend of the Drin. It is here then that we should put the ‘Arbania' of the seventh century. The conclusion that 'Albanians' lived there continuously from the second century to the thirteenth century becomes, I think, unavoidable (17).
'Albanoi' as a people appeared first in Ptolemy 3.12.20. In his description of the Roman world, the southernmost part of the province Illyricum included Scodra, Lissus and Mt Scardus (Sar Planina); and, adjoining it the northernmost part of 'Macedonia' included the Taulantii (in the region of Tirana) and the Albani, in whose territory Ptolemy recorded one city only, Albanopolis or Albanos polis. Thus the Albani were a tribe in what we now call Central Albania, and they were an Illyrian-speaking tribe, like the more famous Taulantii, in the second century A.D. Men of this tribe appeared next in 1040, alongside some Epirotes (their neighbours on land) and some Italiotes (their neighbours across the sea), in the army of a rebellious general, George Maniakis. Two chieftains of this tribe, Demetrios and Ghin, pursued an independent policy in the early years of the thirteenth century.
