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NO MALCOLM
Kosovo, the Albanian-inhabited region of dye sormer Yugoslavia, is potentially the most expiowve of all the danger-zones of Europe. While the Aip.cians who live there refuse to accept the authority of Belgrade, the Serbs claim that Kosovo belongs to Seria by a sacred historic right, derived from the medieval Serbian kingdom and the epic Battle of Kosovo of 1389. Both sides in this bicter dispute make claims sbout history which drift aff into
fantawy and mvth
In this first-ever complete history of Kosowo, Noel Malcolm carefully sifts fet from fiction and lays to rest many of the false claams which have bedevilled all discusnon of the region, A triumph of narrative clarity, his account is based on a profound knowledge of both the original sources and the existing historical literature in
every Balkan language
The story of Kosovo includes the key episodes of two national histortes: the rise of the medieval Serbian state, and the making of modern Albama. This book abo brings to life the fascinating sory of Orroman rule in Earope, It presents not only a crucial part of the background to the modern Yugoslav crisis, but also a vital clement in the
whole pattern of south-east European history
Written with the same clarity and informed by the deep knowledge of the region that distinguished Noel Malcolm’ acclaimed history of Bosmma, Kasove: A Short History * essential to an underntanding of * Europe’
mow complex and dangerous areas
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NOEL MALCOLM
KOSOVO
A Short History
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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS Washington Square, New York
For Melanie Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010
http://www.archive.org/details/kosovoshorthistoOOmalc
15 Occupied Kosovo in the Second World War: 1941-1945 289
16 Kosovo under Tito: 1945-1980 314
17 Kosovo after the death of Tito: 1981-1997 334 Notes 357
Glossary 428
List of manuscripts 431
Bibliography 435
Index 474
Acknowledgements
My first debt of gratitude is to Alistair Home, and to the Warden and Fellows of St Antony's College, Oxford, who elected me to the Alistair Home Fellowship for 1995-6 in order to enable me to complete my work on this book. I am also grateful to Robert Evans and Richard Crampton for letting me try out some of the arguments presented in Chapter 8 at their Central and East European History seminar at Brasenose College.
Anyone who works on Balkan history will know how much time and effort can be spent trying to locate (or acquire) books and articles; there is not a single library, in Western Europe or even in the Balkans, that offers all the relevant materials under one roof. I am grateful to many friends for gifts, loans, copies and other services in this regard: above all, to Bejtullah Destani, whose own knowledge of the sources of Albanian history is extraordinarily encyclopaedic,
and to Ahmed Zilic, a generous and ever-resourceful friend. For similar services I should also like to give special thanks to two other friends, D. S. and J. M, as well as to Norman Cigar, Ger Duijzings, Branko Franolic, Timothy Garton Ash, Fra Ignacije Gavran, Ivo Goldstein, Valeria Heuberger, Christine von Kohl, Branka Magas, Kastriot Myftiu, Luan Malltezi, Zeljko Mandic, Alexander Shi-roka, Aleksandar Stipcevic, Yuri Stoyanov, Marian Wenzel, Tadej Zupan-cic and Isa Zymberi. I am also very grateful to Philip and Anette Goelet for hospitality in Maryland, Berney and Betty Nunan for hospitality in Tirana, and Aleksandra Ivin and Professor M. Rotar for their help at the National Library in Zagreb.
For permission to study and cite manuscript materials in their collections, I am grateful to the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office (representing the Crown) in respect of the Public Record Office,
London, and also to the following: the Archive du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, Paris; the Archivio della Sacra Congregazione della Propaganda Fide, Rome; the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Vatican City; the Archivio di Stato, Venice; the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City; the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice; the Biblioteca Univer-sitaria, Bologna; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna; the Instituto per la Storia della Societa e dello Stato Veneziano, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice; the Kriegsarchiv, Vienna; the National Archives, Washington, DC; the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; and the Somerset Record Office, Taunton. In addition, I am also grateful to the following libraries and institutions: the Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome; the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence; the Biblioteca Nazionale 'Vittorio Emanuele', Rome; the Biblioteke
Kombetare, Tirana; the British Library, London; the Cambridge University Library; the Institut fur osteuropaische Geschichte und Siidostforschung der Universitat Wien, Vienna; the Nacionalna i Sveucilisna Knjiznica, Zagreb; the Oster-reichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; the Osterreichisches Ost- und Siidosteuropa- Institut, Vienna; the library of St Antony's College, Oxford; the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London; the Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek, Hamburg; and the Taylor Institution, Oxford.
Last but certainly not least, I should like to record my gratitude to Tanya Stobbs and Mary Mount for seeing this book so expertly through the press.
A note on names and pronunciations
The following system has been adopted in this book. Its aim is to cater not to the sensitivities of Albanians or Serbs but to the practical needs of English readers. Unfortunately it is not possible to devise any system that will not cause some offence to some or other (or all) of the local inhabitants.
The form 'Kosovo' is used throughout this book (as opposed to the Albanian forms 'Kosove' or 'Kosova'), simply because it is the form currently used in most English-language publications. As explained in Chapter 1, it is used here for the whole territory of the post-1945 ‘Autonomous Province’. The confusing usage which also employs 'Kosovo' to refer to one-half of that territory (and 'Metohija' for the other) is not adopted in this book.
For place-names outside Kosovo, the form used in most cases is the one current in the official or principal language of the modern territory to which that place now belongs: thus 'Skopje' (not 'Skoplje' or 'Shkup'), 'Ulcinj' (not 'Ulqin'
or 'Dulcigno'), and so on. In some cases, however, other forms of the name are mentioned on the first appearance of the place-name, especially if they are common in the historical literature (e.g. 'Durazzo' for Durres).
When giving different forms of place-name (or other technical term), I have used abbreviations to indicate the language in each case: 'Alb.' (Albanian), 'Arb.' (Arabic), ‘Grk.' (Greek), 'Itl.' (Italian), 'Mac' (Macedonian), 'Rom.' (Romanian), 'Srb.' (Serbian) and 'Trk.' (Turkish). The term ‘Serbian' is used throughout this book for the Serbian form of the language which used to be called Serbo-Croat; this language is, by normal linguistic criteria, a single language which exists in several regional forms (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian), but for political and cultural
reasons most people in the former Yugoslavia now prefer to talk about these forms as if they were separate languages. I have occasionally used the term 'Serbo-Croat' (e.g. when referring to the language spoken by the Catholic Slavs of Janjevo).
For place-names inside Kosovo, it might seem logical to use Albanian forms only, given that Albanian is the language spoken by roughly 90 per cent of the population there. However, this book covers periods of history when the proportion of Albanians in the population was very different from what it is now; and some place-names have particular associations with Serbs or the Serbian Church which it would be perverse to ignore (e.g. the Patriarchate of Pec). So a mixture of Albanian and Serbian forms has been used, with a tendency to use Serbian forms for places with special Serbian associations, but also with some element of random distribution as well. Each time a place-name is mentioned for the first time in the text, the form in the other language is given in brackets. However, once a name has been
introduced in this way, it is always thereafter given in the same form, without the bracketed alternative being mentioned again. Thus while the distribution of names between the two languages is partly random, the usage of each individual name is consistent. Readers who wish to find the alternative form of a name can do so using the index. Where no alternative form is given (e.g. with Mitrovica or Prizren) it is because the name is the same in both languages. In many cases, besides, the name is virtually the same, with only slight differences in pronunciation or accentuation (e.g. Alb.: Prishtina; Srb.: Pristina).
Every Albanian place-name can be given in either of two forms: with or without the definite article. This article takes the form of a suffix, which may be either an extra vowel or a modification of an existing vowel at the end of the word. Thus: 'Prizren' (indefinite), 'Prizreni' (definite); 'Tirane' (indefinite), 'Tirana' (definite). Logic should dictate that all names be given in one or other of these forms. However, common usage in English tends to say 'Prizren' and ‘Tirana’. Accordingly, I have followed an increasingly common practice in English-language publications on Albania, which is to use the definite form for feminine names and the indefinite for masculine ones. (But 'the Malesi' uses the indefinite, to avoid a duplication of articles.)
One other convention should also be explained here. Throughout this
book I have used the names of countries or other territories to refer to their modern (post-1945) geographical areas. This is intended merely as an aid to navigation for the reader. Thus when I describe a seventeenth-century army as crossing northern Bulgaria, I am not implying that there
was any geopolitical entity called Bulgaria actually existing at that time; when during the same period I refer to Bar as a port in Montenegro, I am trying only to help the reader who wishes to find Bar on a modern map. In cases where I am referring to historical entities which differ from the modern geographical ones, I use other phrasings to make this clear (e.g. 'the Serbian kingdom’).
While there is a useful terminological distinction between ‘Serb' and 'Serbian' - the former being a more general ethnic-linguistic-cultural identification, which can be used for Serbs whether or not they live in Serbia - there is no easy equivalent distinction for Albanians. I have therefore used the term 'Albanian' in the general ethnic-linguistic- cultural sense, not in the narrow sense of ‘inhabitant of Albania’. For additional clarity, I also use the terms 'Kosovo Serbs' and 'Kosovo Albanians'; from time to time I also employ the term 'Kosovar', which means 'Kosovo Albanian’.
Finally, technical terms are given in Turkish if they are terms for institutions of Islam or the Ottoman Empire (except that where English forms exist, e.g. spahi instead of Trk. sipahi, I have used them). The term sancak is given in its Turkish form, but 'the Sandzak of Novi Pazar' is given in the Serbian form because it is a current term for part of the territory of Serbia and Montenegro. Technical terms for other things are given in the appropriate language: Albanian for Albanian social institutions (fis, vellazeri), Serbian for medieval Serbian ones (meropah, zupan), and so on. These words are explained on their first appearance, but there is also a brief glossary after the notes.
Personal names are given in the modern spellings of the relevant language. Foreign-language materials are given in translation; for reasons of space, the original is not given in
the notes, except in cases of quotations from manuscripts or other archival sources.
The pronunciation of Albanian is simple and regular: for English-speakers, the following important differences need to be observed:
c is pronounced 'ts'
c 'tch' (as in 'match')
dh 'th' (always voiced, as in 'this')
e 'uh' (like the 'u' in 'radium', or like French ‘deux'; virtually silent if it comes at the end ofa word)
gj 'dj' (as in ‘adjure')
j 'y' (as in 'yellow')
11 like T but a slightly heavier sound
g like 'tch', but a slightly thinner sound
rr like V, but a slightly heavier sound
th 'th' (always unvoiced, as in 'thin', not 'this') x 'dz' (as in 'adze')
xh 'j' (as in ‘jam')
y acute 'u', as in French 'tu' or German '‘iiber'
For the pronunciation of Serbo-Croat:
c 'ts'
c 'tch' (as in 'match')
c like 'tch', but a slightly thinner sound
dj 'dj' (as in ‘adjure', almost like 'j' in 'jam')
j 'y' (as in 'yellow')
r when rolled, can fill in between consonants like a vowel
s 'sh'
z ‘zh' (as in 'Zhivago')
And for the pronunciation of Turkish:
c 'j' (as in 'jam')
c 'tch' (as in 'match')
g is silent, but lengthens the preceding vowel 1 a light ‘uh' (rather like the 'u' in 'radium', or
like French 'deux') 6 long 'uh' (as in French 'peur' or German
'horen') s 'sh' ii acute 'u' (as in French 'tu' or German 'iiber') Maps
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Introduction
‘The Yugoslav crisis began in Kosovo, and it will end in Kosovo.' One can hear this saying repeated almost anywhere in the former Yugoslavia; it is one of the few things on which all parties to the conflicts of the 1990s seem to agree. No one knows how the story will end in Kosovo. Possible final destinations include autonomy,
partition and independence, and the means of arriving at them range from peaceful negotiation or international imposition to civil disobedience, violent intifada and full- scale war. But all parties can agree that the issue of Kosovo is, quite simply, the most intractable of all the political conflicts in the Balkans. It is arguably the area with the worst human rights abuses in the whole of Europe, and certainly the place where, if war does break out, the killing and destruction will be more intense than anything hitherto witnessed in the region.
In the West, the popular view of the recent wars in Croatia and Bosnia was always that these were ‘ethnic conflicts’, created by the bubbling up of obscure but virulent ethnic hatreds among the local populations. This whole approach to the subject was essentially false: it ignored the primary role of politicians (above all, the Serbian nationalist- Communist Slobodan Milosevic) in creating conflict at the political level, and indeed it ignored the fact that the wars themselves were launched not by ordinary civilians but by armed forces directed from above. As a characterization of the history of those regions, talk about ‘ancient ethnic hatreds' was in any case grossly misleading: there had never been ethnic wars in the ‘ancient’ history of Bosnia or Croatia, and the only conflicts with a partly ethnic character to them were modern ones, produced under very special geopolitical conditions (above all, the Second World War). Some elements of prejudice, linked in some cases
to religious issues and in others to memories of the Second World War, did of course exist. But between low-level prejudices on the one hand and military conflict, cor centration camps and mass murder on the other, there lies a very long road: it was the political leaders who propelled the people down that road, and not vice-versa.
Does the same apply to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo? At first sight, this looks much more like a genuine ‘ethnic’ conflict. The basic division is, in the first place, an ethnic one in the full sense: unlike the different types of Bosnian, who are all Slavs and all speak the same language, the Serbs and the Albanians are linguistically quite separate. Together with the differentiation in language goes a range of other cultural differences, many of them linked to religion: the division between Serb and Albanian roughly coincides with the division between Eastern Orthodox and Muslim. (The exceptions are the small minority of Catholic Albanians, and the Muslim Slavs, who more or less identify with the Bosniacs or Bosnian Muslims.) With both language and religion setting people apart, all the conditions seem to be present for a primary conflict of peoples.
And yet, once we begin to examine both the present political situation and the nature of Kosovo's past, the idea of ethnic or religious hatred welling up from the depths of popular psychology starts to seem less convincing. The Albanians of Kosovo today are in many ways a politically mobilized people, but religion has played almost no role at all in that mobilization. There is no Islamic political movement among the Albanians. Some tensions apparently exist (largely hidden from public view) between Albanian Catholics and Albanian Muslims, yet whatever tensions there may be are not strong enough to inhibit either neighbourly good relations or political cooperation. Where religion is a factor in the present political situation is on the Orthodox side, which constantly employs religious rhetoric to justify the defence of 'sacred' Serbian interests; but this is a classic example of religion being mobilized and manipulated for ideological purposes. If we look further back into Kosovo's past, we can find many examples of mixed religious life involving the Orthodox as well as the
Catholics with the Muslims: the syncretistic practices of folk religion, for example, or the tradition of Muslim Albanian ‘guardians' of Orthodox religious sites. There were also, on the other hand, many cases of oppression and discrimination
against both of the Christian Churches by Muslim Albanian lords and their followers. Religious prejudice was part of the pattern here, but the pattern itself was largely a socio- political one, involving the exercise and abuse of local political power for the sake of financial gain.
As for the supposedly long history of ethnic conflict, this too is a Claim that needs to be heavily qualified. There have been many battles and wars in Kosovo over the centuries, but until the last 100 years or so none of them had the character of an ‘ethnic' conflict between Albanians and Serbs. Members of those two populations fought together as allies at the battle of Kosovo in 1389 - indeed, they probably fought as allies on both sides of that battle, some of them under Prince Lazar and others under the Ottoman Sultan. Three hundred years later, when an Austrian army invaded Kosovo, both Serbs and Albanians (including even Muslim ones) rose up in sympathy to throw off Ottoman rule: as we shall see, modern historians have had great difficulty trying to distinguish between Serbs and Albanians when analysing the contemporary reports of these events. A later rebellion in support of another Austrian invasion in 1737 also involved a mixed Albanian-Slav group from the mountain areas of northern Albania and Montenegro: the Slav and Albanian mountain clans there had long traditions of cooperation and intermarriage, and, in some cases, legends of common ancestry. And over many centuries in Kosovo the ethnic divisions between Serbs and Albanians were never entirely clear-cut. There was ethnic-linguistic assimilation in both directions; and enough of a shared way
of life was established for the Serbian colonists who arrived in Kosovo in the 1920s to feel that the long-established local Serbs were almost as foreign to them in some of their practices as the ‘alien' Albanians.
None of this is meant to imply that Kosovo was always a wonderland of mutual tolerance. Conditions for much of its history were far from Utopian. Much blame must lie with the rapacious local Albanian lords of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to whom the property of Christian peasants represented particularly easy pickings. But this sort of exploitation, as already suggested, was not driven primarily by motives derived from religion or ethnicity. Muslim Albanian peasants also suffered grievously. What really turned the division between Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Albanians into a more general and systematic conflict was the polit xization of the issue in the nineteenth century, which arose
during the growth and expansion of the Slav Christian states in the Balkans.
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 played 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.
From the Albanian point of view, the experience of that imposition of Serbian-Montenegrin rule (and its reimposition as Yugoslav rule in 1918) was similar to that of many other peoples conquered and colonized by European Christian powers - the Algerians under the French, for example, or the Central Asians (or Chechens) under the Russians. Many aspects of this period of Kosovo's history match just such a 'colonialist' model. There was even, for example, an explicit programme of introducing Serb ‘colonists' to Kosovo throughout the inter-war period.
From the Serbian point of view, however, what happened in 1912 was to be understood according to a very different pattern of ideas: it was the ultimate example of a war of liberation to release a captive population (the Serbs of Kosovo) from an alien imperial power (the Turks). And of course there was a real difference between the case of Kosovo and the case of a territory such as Algeria: in the latter example, there was no continuous history of a French population in Algeria going all the way back to a medieval French kingdom there. The trouble with Kosovo, however, was that both of these conflicting conceptual models - the colonialist one, which made sense to the Albanians, and the
liberationist one, which made sense to the Serbs - were simultaneously true. The truth as experienced by the Albanians could be described as the more important of the two truths, on the simple grounds that Albanians made up
the absolute majority of the population of Kosovo at the time of its conquest. But to reduce the Serb version to a secondary status could not be the same as denying it altogether.
At the time, the Serbian government made great efforts to bolster its case and turn it into the dominant interpretation. A memorandum sent to the Great Powers by Belgrade in early 1913 set out three justifications for Serbian rule in Kosovo: the 'moral right of a more civilized people’; the historic right to an area which contained the Patriarchate buildings of the Serbian Orthodox Church and had once been part of the medieval Serbian empire; and a kind of ethnographic right based on the fact that at some time in the past Kosovo had had a majority Serb population - a right which, according to the memorandum, was unaffected by the 'recent invasion' of Albanians. 1
Of these three lines of argument, the first was rapidly devalued by the actual behaviour of the Serbian (and, subsequently, Yugoslav) regime in Kosovo. The second was in two parts, one relating to the Serbian Orthodox Church, the other more generally to the medieval empire. Claims are still made today that Kosovo is the 'Jerusalem' of the Serbs; but this has always been something of an exaggeration. In no form of Christianity, including Eastern Orthodoxy, does a ‘holy place' play any sort of theological role equivalent to the role of Jerusalem in the theology of Judaism. The seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church was not founded in Kosovo; it merely moved there after its original foundation (in central Serbia) was burnt down. Nor does the Patriarchate have any continuous history as an institution: it was re-created by the modern Yugoslav state in 1920 (having been defunct for 154 years), and since that date the Patriarch has tended to reside mainly in Belgrade. As for the Serbian empire, this was a medieval state which
had its origins not in Kosovo but in Rascia, an area beyond Kosovo's north-western border, and most of the important early medieval Serbian monasteries and churches were built outside Kosovo itself. But in any case, the main objection here must be that it makes no sense to base claims of modern political ownership on the geography of long-gone kingdoms or empires. This objection is a simple point, but one which people in the Balkans sometimes find it
convenient to ignore. Edith Durham, who knew the region well and witnessed the effects of the Serb-Montenegrin conquest of Kosovo in 1912, later recalled a characteristic exchange: 'I once pointed out to a Serb schoolmaster that we had held Calais at the same time but that did not give us the right to it. He replied: "Why not? You have a fleet.'" 2
Of the three arguments in the Serbian memorandum cited above, the third, about ethnography, is the one that has most bedevilled all historical writing about Kosovo. Looking at some historical works from the region itself, one might almost think that ethnic demography was the only real subject-matter of Kosovo's history. (The present book, it is hoped, will give a different impression.) Some modern Albanian writers argue, quite implausibly, that there was always an Albanian majority in Kosovo, even in the medieval Serbian kingdom; many Serbs believe, equally falsely, that there were no Albanians at all in Kosovo before the end of the seventeenth century. One historical-demographic myth which enjoyed great power in the late nineteenth century was the idea that most of the Albanians in Kosovo were ‘really’ Slavs; while it is true that ethnic identities have always been fluid to some extent, this claim is simply not justified by the historical evidence. Another myth has grown up around the 'Great Migration' of the Serbs in 1690 which, it is alleged, created a demographic vacuum, subsequently filled by a flood of alien Albanians from outside Kosovo. A
closer study of the evidence, presented in this book, will suggest that although there were heavy war losses in 1690, affecting all categories of population, most aspects of the ‘Great Migration' story are fanciful. And the evidence also suggests that, while there was a steady flow of Albanians from northern Albania into Kosovo, a major component of the Albanians' demographic growth there was the expansion of an indigenous Albanian population within Kosovo itself.
It is not the purpose of this book to present a case for or against any particular solution to the Kosovo crisis. Some form of self-government for the Albanians there seems, to almost all outside observers, both necessary and right; but there are various different forms that might be attempted. It may be useful, however, merely to point out that the acceptance or rejection of possible solutions for Kosovo will involve different considerations from the ones which have applied to the Bosnian case. Bosnia was a historic unity, a geopolitical entity which had enjoyed an almost continuous history as such (as a unit within Ottoman, Austro-
Hungarian and Yugoslav states) since the Middle Ages. Kosovo is not such a historic unity: there was a vilayet of Prizren from 1868 and a vilayet of Kosovo from 1877 onwards, but those vilayets had a very different shape on the map from modern Kosovo, and before that period Kosovo was divided among several Ottoman administrative units. (These facts have sometimes been grossly misrepresented by Albanian spokesmen: in the memorandum submitted by the Kosovar delegation to the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia in September 1992, for example, it was stated that Kosovo ‘has been an autonomous entity since ancient times'’.)
On the other hand, Serbia does not have a continuous history either. For several hundred years, Kosovo was not part of Serbia, because there was no Serbia to be part of: during most of the long Ottoman period, Serbia did not exist as an entity at all. Kosovo was annexed de facto by Serbia within living memory, in 1912; de jure, as is explained in this book, it was not annexed by the Serbian kingdom at all. In modern historical terms, the relation between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia is less close or organic than the relation between any part of Bosnia and the rest of Bosnia. Objections on grounds of historical identity to the partitioning of Bosnia, in other words, need not entail any equivalent objections to the dividing of Kosovo from Serbia.
In terms of ethnic geography, again, the case of Bosnia is very different from that of Kosovo. The three constituent peoples of Bosnia lived mixed together, creating a jumbled ethnic-religious patchwork; in many areas there was no absolute majority group at all. The argument against any division of Bosnia was therefore both practical and moral - practical because there were no clear lines for it on the map, and moral because the only way of creating such lines was to engage in ‘ethnic cleansing’ and other human rights abuses on a massive scale. Kosovo, on the other hand, offers what by any Balkan standards can be described as a compact mass of ethnically homogeneous people. Of course ethnic homogeneity in itself is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for statehood; but it has in fact been treated as at least a natural starting-point for the creation of many modern states, both large and small. Those Serbian politicians who have defended the right of Bosnian or Croatian Serbs to carve out new, artificially homogenized ethnic areas for themselves are especially ill-placed to argue against the claims of the
Albanians, who already constitute roughly 90 per cent of Kosovo's population.
In this Introduction I have concentrated on the present-day Kosovo crisis, and on the historical and pseudo-historical arguments that surround it. I recognize that most readers who already take some interest in Kosovo will have that political crisis constantly in mind when they study Kosovo's history today. And in one sense, of course, a history of Kosovo has to be defined by questions projected back into the past from the political conditions of the late twentieth century, for the simple reason that the precise politico- geographical borders of Kosovo - which form the basic territorial unit of discussion throughout this book - were created for the first time in 1945.
There is indeed something rather artificial about writing the history of a unit of territory, as a unit, when its defining borders have been a political reality only for the last few decades of that history. But the enterprise is not as perverse as it may sound: there are histories of eighteenth- century Italy, although there was no country called Italy at that time; there are histories of Bulgaria which go back many centuries; and there are histories of Greece down the ages, even though the modern borders of Greece were finalized only in 1947. Kosovo does in fact have quite a strong geographical identity, as I have tried to describe in the first chapter of this book. But in any case I have not stuck rigidly to the present-day borders while exploring my more general field of interest in this book; it is not possible to talk about the history of Kosovo without discussing also the Sandzak of Novi Pazar, the upper Morava valley, the Skopje and Debar regions of Macedonia and, above all, the mountains of northern Albania. These areas too are briefly described in the opening chapter; readers unfamiliar with the geography are urged to spend a few moments locating
these surrounding places on the map, as such knowledge will provide a useful aid to navigation in what follows.
Even if there were no crisis in present-day Kosovo, however, I still believe that the history of the area would deserve to be written for a whole host of reasons. It is one of the cultural crossing-places of Europe; it was probably central both to the survival of the Albanian language and to the development of the Romanian one; it became the geographical
heart of an important medieval kingdom; it was one of the most characteristic parts of the Ottoman Empire in Europe; and it was the area in which the modern Albanian national movement was born, and had its greatest successes and failures.
Many of these aspects of Kosovo's history have also been widely misrepresented, thanks to the national or ideological preconceptions of modern historians. Arguments about the ‘ethnogenesis' of the Albanians or the Romanians are notoriously subject to such distortions. The portrayal of the Albanian national movement of the late nineteenth century has also been skewed by modern ideological concerns. And for generations the historians of almost every Balkan country have been basing their accounts of the Ottoman period on some very dubious assumptions, drawn originally from the nationalist historiography of the nineteenth century and adapted to the requirements of Marxist theory -assumptions about the automatically tyrannical nature of Ottoman 'feudal' rule and the equally automatic striving of all subject peoples for ‘national liberation'. On the other hand, even historians who have kept broadly within these patterns of thought have been able to do valuable new research on many aspects of Ottoman life: even Communist Albania, with all its restrictions on intellectual life, produced
important works of scholarship, such as Zija Shkodra's
account of the Ottoman guild system or Petrika Thengjilli's study of Ottoman taxation, which I have made use of in this book, and which certainly deserve much wider recognition.
At the same time, however, a new wave of important studies relating to the Ottoman Balkans, mainly by Turkish or non- Balkan historians (such as Fikret Adanir and Machiel Kiel), have been completely revising many of the commonest assumptions about how the Ottoman system functioned. I hope that the use I have made of these works will add some further interest to this book; I believe that nowhere in the study of European history are more important or more rapid advances in knowledge being made today than in the study of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Kosovo is, in many ways, an Ottoman territory par excellence; the city of Prizren, where until recently all the street-names were given in Turkish as well as Albanian and Serbian, has always seemed to me one of the most fascinatingly Ottoman places left in the world. It is particularly sad that the rediscovery and re-evaluation of much Ottoman reality by historians should be taking place at the same time as an
increasingly virulent rejection and caricaturing of the Ottoman past by the spokesmen of Serbian nationalism, who have encouraged the wholesale destruction of Ottoman monuments in Bosnia. The Ottoman heritage, including the heritage of Islam, is something that belongs to the culture of all the people of the Balkans; to reject it as ‘alien', after sO many centuries, is as historically absurd as it would be for Irish writers to reject the English language as alien, or South American peasants to reject Catholic Christianity. The same Serbian nationalists who revile the Ottoman heritage have also tried to portray the Albanians of Kosovo as ‘aliens'. Kosovo's Muslim Albanian population does indeed bear the imprint of its long centuries of Ottoman
acculturation; it merely emphasizes the point I am making to observe that the Albanians are, at the same time, one of the oldest-established populations in Europe. No people could be less ‘alien' to the history of the Balkans. And no understanding of Balkan history can be complete without a knowledge of the history of the Albanians, as well as the Serbs, of Kosovo.
Orientation: places, names and peoples
A journalistic cliche of the nineteenth century described the Kosovo region as the lost heart of the Balkans. Like many cliches, this one was both slightly foolish and, at the same time, suggestive of a significant truth. Although Kosovo has played a central role in Balkan history, it has remained, during much of that history, mysterious and little known to outsiders. Western knowledge of the whole central Balkan area was confined to the major through-routes until surprisingly recently: European maps of this area contained gross inaccuracies well into the late nineteenth century. 1 Yet it was not only Westerners who knew little of this area. According to a Bulgarian geographer who visited Kosovo during the First World War, parts of the Kosovo region had been, until just a few years previously, ‘almost as unknown and inaccessible as a stretch of land in Central Africa’. 2 Political factors are the main reason for the inaccessibility of Kosovo during the last period of Ottoman rule, which was marked by chronic disorder, violent rebellion and even more violent repression. But simple physical geography also matters, helping as it does to explain both the seclusion of the area and, at the same time, its near-central importance.
The present borders of Kosovo - that is, of the 'Autonomous Province' of the post-1945 Yugoslav constitutions - are of course the products of political history. At the same time, they correspond more or less to a physical fact. Kosovo
forms a geographical unit because it is ringed by ranges of mountains and hills. The most dramatic of these is the range of the Sar mountains (Alb.: Sharr) which runs eastwards out of the mountain complex of northern Albania and forms much of Kosovo's southern border. Its highest peaks are over 2,500 metres (nearly 8,000 feet), some of them crowned with permanent snow; the high pastures,
green and Alpine, are places of breathtaking beauty, grazed in the summer by herds of semi-wild horses, which veer off from the approaching traveller like flocks of starlings on the wing. On the western side of Kosovo, running northwards from the Albanian massif into Montenegro, is another range, the 'Accursed Mountains' (Srb.: Prokletije; Alb.: Bjeshket e Nemura), so called because of their fierce impenetrability: rivers have sliced through their dry limestone like wires through cheese, creating a network of vertiginous gorges. The borders of Kosovo continue (still moving clockwise) along another mountain range until, at their northernmost extension, they cross a different massif: the Kopaonik range, which pushes down into Kosovo from the highlands of central Serbia. On the eastern side of Kosovo the circuit of mountains softens, with a string of summits less than half the height of those of the south and west, until we come back, in the south-eastern corner of Kosovo, to the easternmost extension of the Sar mountains - a range of hills known as the Skopska Crna Gora (Alb.: Karadak, from the Turkish for 'Black Mountain'; this is also the meaning of Srb. 'Crna Gora’). 3
Within this ring of peaks and hills, the interior of Kosovo is raised up, its plains qualifying as plateaux, 1,200 feet or more above sea level. Some idea of the elevation, and the near-central position of Kosovo in this Balkan region, can be gained from the curious fact that rivers run out of Kosovo into each of the three coastlines of the Balkans: the Aegean,
the Black Sea and the Adriatic. 4 One, the Lepenac, runs south through the Kacanik (Srb.: Kacanik) gorge into Macedonia, where it joins the broad river Vardar on its slow journey to the Greek coast near Salonica. Another, the Ibar, flows northwards out of the eastern half of Kosovo and passes through central Serbia into the river Morava, which joins the Danube near Belgrade. The valley of the Morava is the main south-north axis of Serbia, and its most important head-waters, near the Serbian-Macedonian border, are streams which flow out of the southeastern corner of Kosovo. Finally, on Kosovo's western