Kosovo: Albanian Anti-Ottoman revolt (1690)

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[FONT=&quot]The setting is this: the year is 1689, the month of October and we are located in Prizren.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The word is out that General Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who served in the Habsburg army, after burning down Shkup (Skopje) is heading towards Prizren.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Serbian history claims that Piccolomini was welcomed in Prizren by Patriarch Arsenije III Crnojevic and his 20.000 Serbian insurgents who sided with the Austrians in the fight against the Ottomans.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]In 1690 the same sources tell us that this was the year when the Great Migration of Serbs from Kosovo to Hungary happened and it is widely known as ‘Velika Seoba’[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Noel Malcolm in his ‘Rebels, Believers, Survivors. – Studies in the History of the Albanians’ deconstructs the 20.000 Serbian insurgents. I will try to put forward some of the impending evidence that can be found in his book.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]In Camillo Contarini’s (Istoria Della Guerra) words: ‘Near Prizren, as Piccolomini was approaching, the inhabitants came out to meet him with festive shouts: they were 5.000 in number and were led by their Archbishop, holding a banner with an image of the Holy Cross.’[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]We must say that the Archbishop mentioned here is the Catholic Archbishop Pjetër Bogdani and not Arsenije, the Serbian Patriarch.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]There is clear evidence that Arsenije was in Montenegro at this time as he was in contact with Venetian authorities and didn’t return to Kosovo until December 1689.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]But where does the number 20.000 come from? Well, Prizren was considered a large town at that time. Earlier that century, in 1624 Pjetër Mazrreku reported that Prizren had roughly 200 Catholic inhabitants, 600 ‘Serviani’ and 12.000 ‘Turchi, quasi tutti Albanesi.’[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]In 1670, as reported by Pjetër Bogdani in 1681, Prizren had 10.000 households and the number of the population was estimated to be around 50.000. It is easy to conclude that the 20.000 fighting men were mostly from the Prizren area.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]In an intercepted letter written by a secretary of the English Embassy in Istanbul on January 19th, 1690, reports that the ‘Germans’ in Kosovo ‘have made contact with 20.000 Albanians (“Albanois”), who turned their weapons against the Turks.’[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The letter is found among the papers of Ludwig von Baden in Karlsruhe.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]And, as for the Serbian historians who clearly lied about the composition of 20.000, they have the audacity to go on and portray Albanians as traitors who, despite the promise of assistance, left the Austrian army at the last moment before the battle of Kaçanik in early 1690.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Serbs retreated north and Albanians flowed in like a destructive river and thanks to their fantastic powers of reproduction became a dangerous threat to the biological survival of the Serbs in Kosovo.[/FONT]

https://www.reddit.com/r/albania/comments/ksquw2/noel_malcolmrebels_believers_survivors_prizren/

 

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Look at the register of 16th century (1571). Muslims in the rural regions were still rare. This changes however drastically after the Bogdani campaign. But yeah, Vushtrri, Prizren, Peje and Prishtine were the centres that were pred Muslim from the early days. Most of the city dwellers later on also considering themselves to be Turks too.

Sure, this is also the time when animosities rise between Albanians and Serb communities in Kosove - after the Serbian atrocities in South-Eastern Serbia. Prior to that there were conflicts, but mostly local isolated incidents.

True. It seems like many tribes in Northern Albania in 17th century before and during the Austrian-Ottoman wars like Gashi, Krasniqi etc were still Catholic also. Seem to of been widespread attrocities on Catholics.

But from the defter of 1571 to 1690 there seem to of also been quite some conversions according to Mazrreku due to high taxes and impositions on Catholics but even Muslims, many whom were freshly converted, opposed the Ottomans during the Austrian-Ottoman wars.

 

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Anyway, after Austrian-Ottoman wars reprisals were heavily on Catholics who had led a pro-Austrian movement. Northern Albania seems to of been largely Catholic before 1690 and supported the Austrians. Also rural areas of Kosove Orthodox and Catholic like you said. Mostly bigger towns had been converted in Kosove. Certainly does not match what some of these ''historians'' claim. It is embarrassing when even amateurs debunk them

Something I found regarding the Berisha tribe:

Throughout Kosovo numerous microtoponyms can be found during the 14th century such as:Berishin Dol,Berishtar,Berishofc,Berishtani,Berishane and Berishiç.^[19] In 1348, Emperor Stefan Dušan mentions "Berisha's Field" as being near Mushtisht in Kosovo.^[20]

 

[broder]

When it comes to the fis name/patronym Berishe and those toponyms I would be more cautious. Reason being is because patronyms like Berivoj, Berislav, Beridrag etc which share the root ‘Beri’ were very common patronyms among Slavs of that era, especially Serbs.

 

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When it comes to the fis name/patronym Berishe and those toponyms I would be more cautious. Reason being is because patronyms like Berivoj, Berislav, Beridrag etc which share the root ‘Beri’ were very common patronyms among Slavs of that era, especially Serbs.

True (Although they don't seem to be the same but I agree, one should look further into it.. As some Albanians can exaggerate IMO just like Slavs exaggerate)

What do you think about the last one ''Berisha's Field'' , apparently it's quoted from a book from Milan Sufflay and some others but it's in French, Latin or whatever

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5626777t/f4.item.texteImage

You need to click the arrows on the lower middle of the screen to scroll to the next page . Apparently it's on page 12.

There was one Albanian guy who said his ancestors are from Berisha tribe and in Kosova they used to be Orthodox.

Berisha is also apprently mentioned in 13th century in Ulqin, Montenegro.

 

[broder]

You are absolutely right.

It's interesting because according to a source from late 1500's quoted by Noel Malcolm, Prizren was an Albanian Catholic town. Then in 1624 it became Muslim.

Even the surrounding region was pred Albanian, not just the city. Look at the register of 1452/53 (Vilajet of Pashtrik), Alb names like Progon, Gjin, Tanush, Gjon, Lesh etc are everywhere. Only Gore stands out, not surprising at all considering it’s the only enclave in that region that still speak a Slavic dialect.

 

[broder]

True (Although they don't seem to be the same but I agree, one should look further into it.. As some Albanians can exaggerate IMO just like Slavs exaggerate)

What do you think about the last one ''Berisha's Field'' , apparently it's quoted from a book from Milan Sufflay and some others but it's in French, Latin or whatever

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5626777t/f4.item.texteImage

You need to click the arrows on the lower middle of the screen to scroll to the next page . Apparently it's on page 12.

There was one Albanian guy who said his ancestors are from Berisha tribe and in Kosova they used to be Orthodox.

Berisha is also apprently mentioned in 13th century in Ulqin, Montenegro.

Not sure honestly hence why I mentioned we should be cautious. I am not a linguist so can’t really dwell much deeper into it. However we shouldn’t overlook the similarities between Berishe and the patronyms I brought up.

Where was he from? Possibilities are that they could have converted to Orothodoxy for a period or were Orthodox locals that adopted the fis.

 

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Not sure honestly hence why I mentioned we should be cautious. I am not a linguist so can’t really dwell much deeper into it. However we shouldn’t overlook the similarities between Berishe and the patronyms I brought up.

Where was he from? Possibilities are that they could have converted to Orothodoxy for a period or were Orthodox locals that adopted the fis.

I don't quite know but he says he is from Berisha e Kuqe and that they used to live there before the Ottoman period and were Orthodox.
But we know there were also significant Albanian Catholics there which is what I think did not lead to assimilation of the Orthodox Albanian population there into the Slav. Some Orthodox Albanians on the Eastern part that predated the Ottoman conquest with mix Albanian-Slav names and some Orthodox Albanians in Western Kosova where there was a significant Catholic population.

 

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Even the surrounding region was pred Albanian, not just the city. Look at the register of 1452/53 (Vilajet of Pashtrik), Alb names like Progon, Gjin, Tanush, Gjon, Lesh etc are everywhere. Only Gore stands out, not surprising at all considering it’s the only enclave in that region that still speak a Slavic dialect.

You know where I can find that ? Anyway it makes a lot of sense since by the year 1557 Kosova had quite a significant Albanian population. And by 1660's Western and parts of Central Kosova seem to of been Albanian. Opoja and Prizren are some of the areas that I know were majority Albanian the earliest.

Also large groups of Vlachs were recorded in some tax paying registers in 1480's. Peja seems to of been Muslim by 1557 (But don't quote me on that I could be wrong)

 

[broder]

You know where I can find that ? Anyway it makes a lot of sense since by the year 1557 Kosova had quite a significant Albanian population. And by 1660's Western and parts of Central Kosova seem to of been Albanian. Opoja and Prizren are some of the areas that I know were majority Albanian the earliest.

Also large groups of Vlachs were recorded in some tax paying registers in 1480's. Peja seems to of been Muslim by 1557 (But don't quote me on that I could be wrong)

I have Tatjana Katic’s publication. Can’t remember now where I got it, maybe from poreklo.rs.

 

[broder]

I don't quite know but he says he is from Berisha e Kuqe and that they used to live there before the Ottoman period and were Orthodox.
But we know there were also significant Albanian Catholics there which is what I think did not lead to assimilation of the Orthodox Albanian population there into the Slav. Some Orthodox Albanians on the Eastern part that predated the Ottoman conquest with mix Albanian-Slav names and some Orthodox Albanians in Western Kosova where there was a significant Catholic population.

No family in Kosove can go back that far and remember that they predate Ottomans in a specific settlement, Serb or Albanian. Many Serbs tend to believe that but actually if you just look at the ethnographic literature from the 19th and 20th centuries you will see that they moved constantly. If you go a bit further in time, Ottoman pashas moved their Raja like cattle from settlement to settlement.

 

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I have Tatjana Katic’s publication. Can’t remember now where I got it, maybe from poreklo.rs.

I heard that name before. I think I found something now.

 

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No family in Kosove can go back that far and remember that they predate Ottomans in a specific settlement, Serb or Albanian. Many Serbs tend to believe that but actually if you just look at the ethnographic literature from the 19th and 20th centuries you will see that they moved constantly. If you go a bit further in time, Ottoman pashas moved their Raja like cattle from settlement to settlement.

I can go back only few hundred years maybe.

I know Noel Malcolm mentioned a study on Eastern Kosovo done by a Serb which showed this but there was no study on Western Kosovo (Rrafshi i Dukagjinit)

 

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Anyway some more interesting Albanian history I found that is unknown

Mahmut Bushati, an Albanian lord who held much of Kosovo and parts of Montenego and Albania in the 1700's.

in 1785 he conquered parts of Southern Albania and much of Kosovo too.
Modelling himself (it was said) on Skanderbeg, he set up a 'Confederation of Illyria',
based in Montenegro and called on both Slavs and Albanians

- Kosovo: A Short History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Mahmud_Pasha

 

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Thirdly, the idea that a fixed
but gradually eroded Serb population
was swamped by a tide of Albanian
immigration is misleadingly schematic.
There was flux and emigration, settlement and resettlement,
in all sectors of the population.
Waves of Orthodox people also migrated
into Kosovo: the forced migration of one body of
Vasojevic clansmen has already been mentioned,
and a large group of Orthodox Vlachs, most of
whom would eventually be assimilated into the Serbian
Orthodox population, came in the 1770s.
Just as Catholic Albanian highlanders moved into Kosovo
from the Malesi, so Orthodox Slav ones
from the mountains of Montenegro
moved into Sandzak of Novi Pazar; from there,
many also spread into northern Kosovo.
Members of all the Montenegrin clans took part
in this population drift, though they tended
to be lumped together under the clan-name 'Vasojevic'.


One French taveller in Kosovo
noted in 1911 that some parts of northern Kosovo
which had lost their Serbs in the eighteenth century had
regained a Slav population not long afterwards: villages
near Vucitern which had been entirely 'Albanianized'
up to 100 or eighty years ago, he wrote, had then become
completely repopulated by Slavs.


Orthodox people moved to Kosovo not only from Montenegro
but from all the other surrounding areas too.
In the 1930s a Serb researcher took down details of the
oral family traditions of all the households in
several areas of Eastern Kosovo. He recorded
that only a small proportion of Serb families had been living in the same place for 200 years
or more.

- Kosovo: A Short History

 

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It was nineteenth-century Serbian ideology that created a cult of the medieval battle of Kosovo as some sort of nationally-defining historical and spiritual event. It was the political role plaved by protector-powers such as Russia, with their consuls in Prishtina or Mitrovica, that helped to create a new atmosphere of suspicion and hostility on the part of the local Albanians; Ottoman policy in the Crimean War, and the later transplanting of fiercely anti-Russian (and generally anti-Orthodox) Circassians into Kosovo also played an important part in souring Albanian-Serb relations. It was the mass-expulsion of Albanians and other Muslims from the areas conquered by Serbia and Montenegro in 1877-8 that persuaded the Albanians in Kosovo that Serbia — and the Serbs of Kosovo who were claimed as an ‘unredeemed’ part of the Serbian population — represented a threat to their existence. And, above all, it was the policies imposed from above by the Serbian and Montenegrin governments from the first moment of their conquest of Kosovo in 1912 that created systematic hostility and hatred on a scale that the region had never seen before.

- Kosovo: A Short History

 

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This period also saw a deterioration in relations between the Muslims and Christians of Kosovo. The prime cause of this was the mass expulsion of Muslims from the lands taken over by Serbia, Bulgaria and Monte- negro in 1877-8. Almost all the Muslims (except, as we have seen, some Gypsies) were expelled from the Morava valley region: there had been hundreds of Albanian villages there, and significant Albanian populations in towns such as Prokuplje, Leskovac and Vranje. A Serbian schoolmaster in Leskovac later recalled that the Muslims had been driven out in December 1877 at a time of intense cold: “By the roadside, in the Gudelica gorge and as far as Vranje and Kumanovo, you could see the abandoned corpses of children, and old men frozen to death.’ Precise figures are lacking, but one modern study concludes that the whole region contained more than 110,000 Albanians. By the end of 1878 Western officials were reporting that there were 60,000 families of Muslim refugees in Macedonia, ‘in a state of extreme destitution’, and 60—70,000 Albanian refugees from Serbia ‘scattered’ over the vilayet of Kosovo. Albanian merchants who tried to stay on in Nis were subjected to a campaign of murders, and the property of those who left was sold off at one per cent of its value. In a petition of 1879 a group of Albanian refugees from the Leskovac area complained that their houses, mills, mosques and tekkes had all been demolished, and that ‘The material arising from these demolitions, such as masonry and wood, has been sold, so that if we go back to our hearths we shall find no shelter.

- Kosovo: A Short History . page 228

 

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I have Tatjana Katic’s publication. Can’t remember now where I got it, maybe from poreklo.rs.

Is it possible to PM it to me ? Just wanna study it. Can't understand Serbo-Croat-Chetnik language.

 

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Actually I found it now

 

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[FONT=&quot]It's very difficult to explain it briefly because there is a long history behind it, and a lot of myths and historical falsification. [/FONT]

20th century thinking of the Serbs is what matters. It is influenced not only by the 14th century events, but by many other events, too. In the last two centuries, Serbs became a pet nation of some Western intellectuals and nations. Romanticist linguists from Central Europe propagated the idea that whoever speaks Serb-Croatian is a Serb. In the twentieth century, some powers wanted to create a Greater Serbia. Russia did it not out of Orthodox solidarity but out of the desire to have access to Mediterranean ports, while France and Britain saw in a Greater Serbia a bulwark against Austrian and German influence. The three prevailed in giving Kosovo to Serbia in 1913. If it had been made a part of Albania, as Austria and Italy insisted, we would have no Kosovo problem today.

[FONT=&quot]The Turks' atrocities were no worse than atrocities of other nations at the time. In fact, according to a Serb Janissary, who wrote a book very popular in the 16th and 17th century, 'Memoirs of Janissary,' written for the Polish king, there was more justice under the Turks at his time than in Serbia preceding the Turkish conquest. Ottoman Turks, like the Habsburgs, were good empire builders, and knew that prolonged rule cannot be achieved through terror. It was only in the last centuries of the Ottoman Empire, when economy deteriorated and with it the Turks' ability to maintain order, that Turkish rule became oppressive.[/FONT]

http://edition.cnn.com/chat/transcripts/branimir_chat.html