Essays on the Latin Orient

1. VALONA

The late Italian occupation of Valona has drawn attention to what has been called one of the two keys of the Adriatic. It may, therefore, be of interest to trace the history of this important strategic position, which has been held by no less than twelve different masters.

The name αὐλών, “a hollow between hills,” was applied to various places in antiquity, and from the accusative of this word comes the Italian form “Valona,” or, as the Venetians often wrote it, “Avalona.” In antiquity there were, however, few allusions to this particular αὐλών, the probable date of its foundation being, therefore, fairly late, although the pitch-mine of Selenitza, three hours to the east, was worked by the Romans in the time of Ovid[801], and Pliny the Elder[802] knew the now famous island of Saseno, to which both Lucan[803] and Silius Italicus[804] allude, as a pirate resort. But there is no mention of Valona till the second half of the second century A.D., when Ptolemy[805] describes it as “a city and harbour.” It subsequently occurs several times in the Antonine, Maritime and Jerusalem Itineraries[806], and in the Synekdemos of Hierokles[807]; whereas Kanina, the little town on the hill above it, which may have been its akropolis, was “built,” according to Leake[808], “upon a Hellenic site,” and identified by Pouqueville[809] with Œneus, the fortress taken by Perseus during the third Macedonian war, and probably destroyed by Æmilius Paullus, which would thus explain its long disappearance from history.

Despite the importance of its position as a port of transit between Rome and Constantinople, Valona is rarely named even by Byzantine historians before the eleventh century. Bishops of Valona, who were at different times suffragans of Durazzo or Ochrida, are mentioned in 458, in 553, and in 519, when the legates sent by Pope Hormisdas to Constantinople were received by the then occupant of the See[810]. It was there that Peter, Justinian’s envoy, met those of Theodatus, the two Roman Senators, Liberius and Opilio, and learnt what had befallen Amalasuntha, the prisoner of Bolsena[811]. Constantine Porphyrogenitus[812] merely enumerates it as one of the cities comprised in the Theme of Dyrrachium. Possibly it was one of the Byzantine harbours between Corfù and the Drin, which escaped temporary absorption in the Bulgarian Empire of Symeon (c. 917). But Kanina was included in that of the other great Bulgarian Tsar Samuel (976-1014), until Basil II, “the Bulgar-slayer,” overthrew that powerful monarch[813], and it is, therefore, probable that Valona too was for a brief space a Bulgarian port. The Sicilian expeditions against Greece in the eleventh and twelfth centuries naturally brought Valona into prominence as a landing-place for troops. Anna Comnena[814] frequently mentions it. Thus, in 1081, Bohemund, son of Robert Guiscard, took and burnt Kanina, Valona, and Jericho, as the ancient harbour of Eurychos (the Porto Raguseo of the Italians) was then called; Robert was nearly shipwrecked in a storm off Cape Glossa, and later on spent two months in the haven of Jericho. When he left Albania in 1082 he bestowed Valona upon Bohemund, and when he made his second and fatal expedition in 1084 it was to Valona that he crossed from Otranto. Trade privileges at Valona (renewed by subsequent Emperors in 1126, 1148 and 1187) formed part of the price which the Emperor Alexios I paid for the assistance of the Venetian fleet in this contest[815]. It was there that the Greek Admiral Kontostephanos watched for Bohemund’s return, and shortly afterwards we find Michael Kekaumenos, Imperial governor of Valona, Jericho and Kanina. In 1149, after the capture of Corfù, Manuel II went to Valona, and encamped there several days before sailing for Sicily to punish King Roger for his attack upon Greece. He landed on the islet of Aeironesion (identified by Pouqueville and Professor Lampros with Saseno); but storms prevented his “punitive expedition,” so he left Valona by land for Pelagonia[816].

The fourth crusade, which led to the dismemberment of the Greek Empire, consequently affected the Adriatic coast. The partition treaty of 1204 assigned to Venice the province of Durazzo, which included Valona, as well as Albania, and in the following year the Venetian podestà at Constantinople formally transferred these possessions to the Republic, which sent Marino Valaresso with the title of “Duke” to govern Durazzo. But meanwhile Michael I Angelos had established in western Greece the independent Hellenic principality known as the Despotat of Epeiros, which included both “Old” and “New” Epeiros (in the latter of which was Valona), extending from Naupaktos to Durazzo, and which he agreed in 1210 to hold as a nominal fief of Venice, from the river Shkumbi, south of Durazzo, to Naupaktos, paying a yearly rent, and promising to grant to the Venetian merchants a special quarter in every town of his dominions, freedom from taxes, and assistance in case of need against the Albanians[817]. Thus Valona for fifty-three years formed an integral part of the Greek Despotat of Epeiros.

The mutual rivalry of the two Greek states which had arisen out of the ruins of the Byzantine Empire—the Empire of Nicæa and the Despotat of Epeiros—suggested to the ill-fated Manfred of Sicily that he might recover the ephemeral conquests of the Sicilian Normans on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. In 1257, while Michael II of Epeiros was at war with the Nicene troops, he occupied Valona, Durazzo, Berat, the Spinarza hills (near the mouth of the Vojussa, or perhaps Svernetsi on the lagoon of Valona), and their appurtenances; and Michael, desirous of securing Manfred as an ally against his Greek rival, made a virtue of necessity by conferring these places together with the hand of his daughter Helen upon the King of Sicily on the occasion of their marriage[818] in 1259. Manfred wisely appointed as governor of his trans-Adriatic possessions a man with experience of the East, Filippo Chinardo, a Cypriote Frank, and his High Admiral. Indeed, when Manfred fell in battle at Benevento, fighting against Charles I of Anjou, in 1266, Chinardo, who married Michael II’s sister-in-law and received Kanina as her dowry, continued to hold his late master’s Epeirote dominions, but later in the same year was assassinated at the instigation of the crafty Despot[819]. The latter had doubtless hoped, now that his son-in-law was no more, to re-occupy the places which had been his daughter’s and his sister-in-law’s dowries. But a new claimant now appeared upon the scene. The fugitive Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, by the treaty of Viterbo in 1267 ceded to Charles I of Anjou “all the land which the Despot Michael gave, handed over and conceded as dowry or by whatsoever title to his daughter Helen, widow of the late Manfred, formerly Prince of Taranto, and which the said Manfred and the late Filippo Chinardo (who acted as Admiral of the said realm) held during their lives[820].” The Sicilian garrisons of Valona, Kanina and Berat held out, however, against both Michael II and Charles I, the latter of whom was for some years too much occupied with Italian affairs to intervene actively beyond the Adriatic. Accordingly, a devoted follower of Chinardo, Giacomo di Balsignano (near Bari), remained independent as castellan of Valona; but in 1269 Charles, having made this man’s brother a prisoner in Italy, declined to release him at the request of Prince William of Achaia, unless Valona were surrendered. Although he actually named one of his own supporters to take Balsignano’s place, that officer held out at Valona for four years more, when he handed over Valona, but was at once re-appointed castellan of both Valona and Kanina by Charles. Thus, in 1273, began the effective rule of the Angevins over Valona. In the following year, the Italian castellan received fiefs in Southern Italy in exchange for Valona and Kanina, and a Frenchman, Henri de Courcelles, was appointed in his stead[821]. Chinardo’s heirs, who had at first been allowed to live on at Valona, were imprisoned at Trani.

The Angevins attached considerable importance to Valona, especially from a military point of view. Frequent mention is made of the castle in the Angevin documents; Greek fire was deposited there, its well is the subject of several inquiries, and it served as a base for Charles I’s designs upon the Greek Empire, which were cut short by the Sicilian Vespers. The chief Angevin officials were a castellan (usually a Frenchman, e.g. Dreux de Vaux), a treasurer, and more rarely a “captain” of the town, who was subordinate to the castellan, who was in his turn under the Captain and Vicar-General of Albania. The garrison sometimes consisted of Saracens from Lucera, and its fidelity could not always be trusted, for a commission was on one occasion sent over to inquire whether it had sold munitions to the Greek enemies of the Angevins. Nor was the harbour, which the Venetians frequented, free from pirates[822]. After the death of the vigorous Despot Michael II, it was not so much from his feeble successor, Nikephoros I of Epeiros, as from the able and energetic Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, that the Angevins had to fear attacks upon Valona, especially after the defeat of their army and the capture of its commander at Berat in 1281. There is no documentary evidence of the presence of any Angevin governor after 1284 at Valona, which, between that date and 1297, when we find a certain “Calemanus” described as “Duke” of the Spinarza district, and, therefore, almost certainly of Valona also, must have been occupied by the Byzantines[823]. Nevertheless, the Angevins continued to regard the Epeirote lands of Manfred and Chinardo as theirs on paper. They are mentioned in the ratification of the treaty of Viterbo by the titular Latin Empress Catherine in 1294, by which they were confirmed to King Charles II, who in the same year transferred them to his son Philip of Taranto[824], then about to marry Thamar, daughter and heiress of the Despot Nikephoros I of Epeiros.

The Byzantines evidently attached considerable importance to Valona and its district, for the successive Byzantine governors were men of family and position: Andronikos Asan Palaiologos, subsequently governor of the Byzantine province in the Morea, who was son of the Bulgarian Tsar, John Asên III, connected with the reigning imperial family, and father-in-law of the future Emperor John Cantacuzene; Constantine Palaiologos, son of Andronikos II; and a Laskaris[825]. Under these exalted personages were minor officials, such as George Ganza, a friend of the Despot Thomas of Epeiros, and his son Nicholas, who successively held the office of Admiral of Valona for over twenty years, while the latter on one occasion grandiloquently styles himself protosevastos et protovestiarius et primus camerlengus of the Emperor; the sevastos Theodore Lykoudas, and Michael Malagaris, prefect of the castle of Kanina[826]. During this second Byzantine period, when Valona was civitas Imperatoris Grecorum (as a document styles it), there was a considerable trade with both Ragusa and Venice, and a colony of resident Venetian merchants there. Occasionally, however, serious quarrels arose between the Ganza family and the Ragusans and Venetians, who demanded satisfaction from the Emperor, and on one occasion Ganza’s son was killed. That there was likewise traffic with the opposite Italian coast is clear from King Robert of Naples’ repeated orders to his subjects to export nothing to a place which belonged to the hostile Byzantine Empire, and to which the Angevins still maintained their claims. For as late as 1328 Philip of Taranto named a certain Raimond de Termes commander of Berat and Valona[827], and death alone prevented him and his brother, John of Gravina, who in 1332 received the kingdom of Albania with the town of Durazzo in exchange for the principality of the Morea, from prosecuting the Angevin claims. The Albanians, however, rose and attacked Berat and Kanina in 1335, but were speedily suppressed by Andronikos III, the first Emperor who had visited Albania since Manuel I[828].

But a more formidable enemy than Angevins or Albanians now threatened Valona. The great Serbian Tsar, Stephen Dushan, was now making Serbia the dominant power of the Balkan peninsula, and the value of the harbour of Valona and the castle of Kanina could scarcely escape the notice of that remarkable man. An entry in a Serbian psalter informs us that the Serbs took Valona and Kanina[829] in the last four months of 1345 or in the early months of 1346, and Serbian they remained till the Turkish conquest. Dushan, like the Byzantines, showed his appreciation of these places by appointing as governor of Valona, Kanina and Berat his brother-in-law, John Comnenos Asên, brother of the Bulgarian Tsar, John Alexander. This Serbian governor, a Bulgar by birth, married Anna Palaiologina, widow of the Despot John II of Epeiros, and mother of the last Despot of Epeiros, Nikephoros II, and became so far Hellenised as to take the name of Comnenos (borne by the Greek Despots of Epeiros, whose successor he pretended to be, and whose title of “Despot” he adopted), and to sign his name in Greek in the two Slav documents which he has bequeathed to us[830]. Although, like his predecessors, he preyed upon Venetian and other shipping at Valona, for which the mighty Serbian Tsar paid compensation, he became a Venetian citizen[831], and was allowed to obtain weapons in Venice for the defence of Cheimarra and its port of Palermo from Sicilian pirates[832]. After the death of Dushan and in the confusion which ensued he embraced the cause of the latter’s half-brother, the Tsar Symeon, who had married his step-daughter, Thomais, against Dushan’s son, and he is last mentioned in 1363, when nearly all the Venetians at Valona died of the plague, and he perhaps with them[833]. Alexander, perhaps his son, followed him as “Lord of Kanina and Valona,” and allied himself with Ragusa[834], of which he became a citizen. The name of Porto Raguseo (Pasha Liman of the Turks), at the mouth of the Dukati valley on the bay of Valona, still preserves the memory of this connection, and was the harbour of the “argosies” of the South Slavonic Republic, whose merchants had their quarters half-way between Valona and Kanina.

In 1371 those places came into the possession of the family of Balsha, of Serbian origin, which a few years earlier had founded a dynasty in what is now Montenegro. Balsha II, who with his two brothers had already taken Antivari and Scutari (“their principal domicile”), killed a certain George, perhaps Alexander’s son—for Alexander is thought to have perished by the side of Vukashin at the battle of the Maritza in 1371—and in a Venetian document of the next year is described as “Lord of Valona.” In consequence of his usurpation the inhabitants of Valona fled for refuge to the islet of Saseno in the bay, and placed themselves under the protection of Venice[835]. Under Balsha II Valona formed part of a considerable principality, for on the death of his last surviving brother, in 1378, the “Lord of Valona and Budua” had become sole ruler of the Zeta—the modern Montenegro—and then, by the capture of Durazzo from Carlo Topia, “Prince of Albania,” assumed the title of “Duke” from that former Venetian duchy. By his marriage with Comita Musachi, he became connected with a powerful Albanian clan[836]; but his ambition caused his death, for Carlo Topia begged the Turks to restore him to Durazzo, while Balsha, like other Christian rulers of his time, instead of concentrating all his forces against the Turkish peril, wasted them in fighting against Tvrtko I, the great King of Bosnia, for the possession of Cattaro. Consequently, when the Turks marched against him, he could raise only a small army to oppose them; he fell in battle on the Vojussa in 1385, and his head was sent as a trophy to the Sultan.

Upon his death his dominions were divided; Valona with Kanina, Saseno, Cheimarra, and “the tower of Pyrgos[837]” alone remained to his widow. Left with only a daughter, Regina, she felt unable to defend all these places from the advancing Turks; so, in 1386, she offered “the castle and town of Valona” to Venice on “certain conditions[838].” The cautious Republic replied that her offer would be accepted, if she would hand over freely “the castle of Kanina with its district and the town of Valona with its district.” This shows that the Venetians, like their recent Italian representatives, realised that Valona required Kanina for its defence, as well as a certain Hinterland. The reply went on to add that, in case she declined to accept this condition, Venice would be content to take over these places, paying her half their rents for her life, while she paid half their expenses. Under those circumstances, she could remain at Valona, or come to Venice, as she chose. But, if she would accept neither proposition, then Venice would be willing to take Kanina and the other places, giving her all the rents for her life, on condition that she paid all the expenses of their maintenance. Nothing came of this negotiation; but in 1389 her envoy agreed to furnish three rowers annually to the captain of the Venetian fleet in recognition of Venetian dominion over the islet of Saseno, which commanded the bay. Thus Venice, like the late Admiral Bettòlo, considered that the occupation of that islet was sufficient. In 1393 Dame Comita Balsha made Venice a second offer of Valona. But, in the meantime, the battle of Kossovo had been fought; the Serbian Empire had fallen, and it was obvious that the Turks had become the most powerful Balkan state. Thus, although Comita was ready to give Venice the men whom she had promised in recognition of Venetian rights over “the towers of Pyrgos and Saseno,” and disposed to cede Valona, her offer was declined with thanks, because “we Venetians prefer our friends to remain in their own dominions and govern them rather than we.” Two years later her envoy, the Bishop of Albania, made a third offer of all the four places which she held: Valona, Kanina, Cheimarra, and the tower of Pyrgos, provision being made for her and her son-in-law that they might go where they liked and live honourably there. This meant in cash 7000 ducats for their lives out of the 9000 which the bishop estimated as the total revenue of the above places. The Venetians ordered their Admiral to inquire into the state of the places and the amount which they produced, before deciding, and ere that Comita died[839].

She was succeeded by her son-in-law, “Marchisa” (or Merksha) Jarkovich, “King of Serbia,” a near relative of her own by blood and a cousin of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II. He must, therefore, have been a relative of the latter’s Serbian wife, who was a daughter of Constantine Dragash, Despot of part of Macedonia[840]. He at once, in 1396, offered to cede Valona, Cheimarra, Berat, and the tower of Pyrgos to Venice, but was told that his offer could not be accepted till the Venetians had accurate information about them. He then turned to Ragusa, of which he became an honorary citizen with leave to deposit all his property there for safety. In 1398 he again applied to Venice, because he did not see how he could defend his lands against the Turks. Venice thought it undesirable that they should become Turkish, but decided first to send her Admiral to inquire into their revenues, cost, and condition, expressing a preference for leaving them in their present ruler’s hands. In 1400, as this inquiry had not yet been made, another envoy was sent from Valona to Venice, only to receive the same answer. Upon Merksha’s death, his widow sent yet another envoy to Venice in 1415, with a like result, and was reminded of her late husband’s and her subjects’ debts to the Republic. Then the end came; a document of July 21, 1418, informs us that Valona had fallen into the hands of the Turks[841]. Consequently, lest they should attack the Venetian colony of Corfù or passing Venetian ships, the Venetian bailie, who was about to proceed to Constantinople, was instructed to endeavour to obtain its restitution with that of Kanina and its other appurtenances to Regina Balsha, whose husband had been, like herself, a Venetian citizen. If the Sultan refused, then the bailie was authorised to offer up to 8000 ducats for Regina’s former possessions, and another offer was made in 1424[842]. The Turks, however, retained Valona continuously for 273 years, and, with one brief interval, for 495.

There is little record of its history in the Turkish period. In June, 1436, Cyriacus of Ancona spent two days there, and copied a Greek inscription which he found on a marble base at the Church of Georgios Tropæophoros[843]. In 1466 Venice was alarmed at the repairs executed there by its new masters, which endangered Venetian interests owing to its proximity to the Republic’s colonies in that part of the world—Corfù and its dependencies, in the south, and Durazzo, Alessio, Dulcigno, Antivari, Dagno, Satti, Scutari and Drivasto, in the north—and to the quantity of wood for shipbuilding which it could furnish. Accordingly, the Republic suggested to Skanderbeg to attack it with his own forces, and with Venetian and colonial troops[844]. Nothing came of this suggestion, but in 1472 a Corfiote, John Vlastos, offered to consign Valona and Kanina to Venice on condition of receiving a fixed sum down and an annuity; and the Republic instructed the Governor of Corfù to enter into negotiations with him[845]. This also failed, and Valona, in Turkish hands, became, as had been feared, a base for attack against the Ionian Islands and even Italy. Thence, in 1479, the Turks moved against the remaining possessions of Leonardo III Tocco, Count of Cephalonia; thence, in the following year, they sailed to take Otranto[846]. In 1501, during the Turco-Venetian war, Benedetto Pesaro entered the bay of Valona with a flotilla of light vessels, but a sudden hurricane caused the death by drowning of all his men except those taken prisoners by the Turks[847]. In 1518 the Governor of Valona, a renegade Cheimarriote, succeeded, with the aid of Sinan Pasha, the Turkish Admiral, in compelling Cheimarra to accept Turkish suzerainty by the concession of large privileges. Sinan was so greatly pleased with Valona that he became its governor. In the same year two Turkish subjects attempted from Valona a coup de main upon Corfù, and it was there that the former of the two great Turkish sieges of that island, that of 1537, was decided upon by Suleyman I[848]. In 1570 a further descent was made from Valona, where the Turks had established a cannon-foundry, upon Corfù[849]. In 1638 the attack by the Venetian fleet upon certain Tunisian and Algerian ships off Valona nearly provoked war with Turkey, and led to a temporary prohibition of trade between the inhabitants of that and of other Turkish possessions and Venice[850].

The Turco-Venetian war towards the close of the seventeenth century led at last to the Venetian occupation of Valona, then a place of 150 houses surrounded by a low wall. The motives were the fertility of the district and the desire to expel the Barbary corsairs. Morosini’s successor, Girolamo Cornaro, accompanied by many Greeks, after being delayed two days by a storm off Saseno, landed at Kryoneri, a little to the south of the town, early in September, 1690, where he was joined by 500 Cheimarriotes and Albanians. A Turkish attempt to prevent his landing was repulsed; Kanina, weakly fortified by crumbling walls, was forced to surrender, and its fall had as a natural consequence the capitulation of Valona without a blow. Cornaro, leaving Giovanni Matteo Bembo and Teodoro Cornaro as provveditori of Valona and Kanina, proceeded to attack Durazzo, but was forced by a storm to return to Valona, where, on October 1, he died[851]. Venice intended at first to keep these two acquisitions. Carlo Pisani was ordered to remain at “Uroglia” (Gervolia opposite Corfù) with four galleys for their defence, while the fortifications of Kanina were repaired and cisterns made. But when the Capitan Pasha encamped on the banks of the Vojussa to intimidate the Albanians, many of whom wished to join Venice, the garrisons began to suffer from lack of food and consequent desertions. Thereupon, Domenico Mocenigo, the new Venetian Captain-General, proposed and carried out the demolition of Kanina by mines, and wrote to the home government advocating the destruction of Valona on the ground that its preservation would cripple the campaign in the Morea. A debate upon its fate followed in the Senate. Francesco Foscari urged its retention on account of its geographical position at the mouth of the Adriatic and on a fine bay, well supplied with fresh water from Kryoneri (or “Acqua Fredda”). He alluded to the valuable oak forests in the neighbourhood, whose acorns furnished the substance known by the topical name of valonea to dyers, to the ancient pitch-mines, the salt-pans, and the fisheries. To these material considerations he added the loss of prestige involved in the surrender of a place whose capture had been celebrated with joy by Pope Alexander VIII and announced as an important event to the King of Spain, because it signified the destruction of the corsairs, so long the terror of the Papal and Neapolitan coast of the Adriatic. Besides, “Valona,” he concluded, “opens for us the door into Albania.” To him Michele Foscarini replied, proposing to leave the decision to the naval council, and this proposal was adopted. Mocenigo’s first idea had always been to abandon the place, and his resolve was confirmed by the advance of the Turkish troops under Chalil Pasha; but General Charles Sparre, a Swedish baron, who was sent to execute his orders, found that the rapid approach of the enemy made such an operation too dangerous. The Venetians accordingly burnt the suburb, but prepared to defend the town. But at the outset both Bembo and Sparre were killed by the Turkish artillery fire, and, though the garrison made a successful sortie, the Captain-General repeated his order to blow up Valona. Four cannon and one mortar were left there to deceive the Turks, and on March 13, 1691, after a siege of forty days, they too were removed and Valona evacuated and destroyed. The Turks offered no opposition to the retreating Venetians, and the opinion was freely expressed that the place could have been defended. Thus, after six months, ended the Venetian occupation of Valona[852]. When Pouqueville[853] visited it rather more than a century later, he saw the remains of the two forts blown up by the Venetians, and found that one street with porticoes recalled their former residence. In his time the population was 6000, including a certain number of Jews banished from Ancona by Paul IV. The place was then, as now, very unhealthy in summer, but he foretold a brilliant future for it, if the marshes were once drained.

The Turks neglected Valona, as they neglected all their Albanian possessions. Sinan Pasha had been so good and popular a governor that, although a native of Konieh, he was nicknamed “the Arnaut,” and his descendants long held the appointment as almost a family fief; indeed, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, the natives of Valona besieged and cut to pieces a certain Ismail Pasha, who had endeavoured to wrest the governorship of the town from one of Sinan’s descendants[854]. A generation later, however, a sanguinary feud, which broke out between the members of this governing family, led the other notables of Valona to invoke the intervention of the famous Ali Pasha of Joannina, who had already cast covetous eyes on the place, then ruled by Ibrahim Pasha. But the treacherous “Lion of Joannina” carried off not only Ibrahim but also the notables of Valona to the dungeons of his lake-fortress, where they were subsequently put to death. Ibrahim, however, lingered on, and was forced to address a petition to the Turkish government begging it, in consideration of his age and infirmities, to bestow the governorship of Valona and Berat upon his gaoler’s eldest son, Mouchtar Pasha, who appointed a Naxiote Christian, Damirales, as his representative in the former town. In 1820 the Turkish authorities, resolved to crush the too-powerful satrap of Joannina, easily induced the people of Valona to drive out Mouchtar’s partisans. But the population repeatedly gave the Turks cause for alarm, and in 1828 Rechid Pasha treacherously executed a powerful Bey of Valona, who had come to pay his respects to him at Joannina. Nevertheless the local people continued to resist any obnoxious Turkish authority[855].

During the first Balkan war, on November 28, 1912, Albanian independence was proclaimed at Valona, and an Albanian government formed, of which Ismail Kemal Bey was President[856]. But when an Albanian principality was created in the following year, and Prince William of Wied was chosen as its ruler, Valona recognised Durazzo as the capital. Meanwhile, Italy had intimated that she could not consent to the inclusion of Valona, to which she attached special importance, within the new Greek frontier; and insisted on the islet of Saseno, which had formed part of the Hellenic kingdom since 1864, being ceded to the Albanian principality. Greece complied with this demand, and on July 15, 1914, the Greek garrison abandoned Saseno at the order of the Venizelos Cabinet. When the European war broke out, Italy took the opportunity, on October 30, to occupy Saseno by troops under the command of Admiral Patris, who found it inhabited by twenty-one persons, and re-christened the highest point “Monte Bandiera” from the Italian flag which was hoisted there[857]. She had sent a sanitary mission to Valona itself and, on December 25, occupied that town. Then, as in 1690 and as in the days of Manfred and his successors, Kanina was likewise in Italian hands, while for the first time in its long history Valona has been connected with Great Britain, for the new jetty there was the work of the British Adriatic Mission, sent to rescue the retreating Serbian army. But, by the Tirana agreement of August 3, 1920, Italy renounced Valona (assigned to her by the treaty of London in 1915), and now holds Saseno alone.

RULERS OF VALONA

2. THE MEDIÆVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE

The late Professor Freeman once remarked during a great crisis in the Balkans, that it was the business of a Minister of Foreign Affairs “to know something of the history of foreign countries.” The demand, however unreasonable it may seem, derives special importance from the fact, that recent events have signally justified the forecasts of the eminent historian and signally falsified those of the Minister whom he was criticising. For in the Balkans, and especially in Greece and Serbia, history is not, as it is apt to be in some western countries, primarily a subject for examinations, but is, thanks to the popular ballads, an integral part of the national life and a powerful factor in contemporary politics. The glories of the Byzantine Empire exercise a continual fascination upon the Greeks; the conquests of the Tsar Stephen Dushan in Macedonia have been invoked as one of the Serbian claims to that disputed land; whereas no Englishman of to-day has been known to demand a large part of France on the ground that it belonged to the English Crown in the reign of Dushan’s contemporary, Edward III.

But there is a further reason for the study of Balkan history by practical men. Our judgments of the Balkan peoples are often harsh and unjust, because we do not realise the historic fact that they stepped straight out of the fifteenth century into the nineteenth (and in some cases into the twentieth), like Plato’s cave-dwellers who emerged suddenly from darkness into the full light of day. For the centuries of Turkish rule, interrupted in the case of Northern Serbia by the twenty-one years of Austrian rule between the treaties of Passarovitz and Belgrade in the eighteenth century, left them much as it found them—with their material resources undeveloped, their roads reduced to mule-tracks, their harbours undredged, their education neglected. Consequently, it was manifestly unfair to expect those who were practically contemporaries of our Wars of the Roses to enter the nineteenth century with the same ideas and the same culture as the gradually evolved states of Western Europe. The wonder rather is that so much progress has been accomplished in so short a time, especially when we remember that the eminent personages who direct the affairs of this world are apt to regard the Balkan peoples, with their deeply-rooted historical traditions and aspirations, and their extraordinarily keen sense of nationality, immensely stimulated by the victories of 1912-13, as pawns in a game, to be moved about the board as its exigencies demand. Let us Western Europeans, then, who have had no personal experience of Turkish rule, be less censorious of those who have lived under it for nearly four centuries at Semendria and for five at Skopje.

In the following pages I propose to give a general sketch of mediæval Serbian history, emphasising those points which may help us to understand the events of the last few years, and referring those who desire further details to the great (if unpolished and unfinished) work of the late Constantin Jireček, who for the first time has placed the history of the Serbs in the Middle Ages upon the impregnable rock of contemporary documentary evidence.

The Serbs, like the Bulgars, are not original inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, where, at the dawn of history, we find three principal races—the Greeks, the Illyrians (who are perhaps the ancestors of the Albanians), and the Thracians. But a continuous residence of thirteen centuries qualifies the Serbs to be considered a Balkan people. The usually received account of their entry into the peninsula is that given by the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in his treatise “De Administrando Imperio,” written some three centuries later. He tells us that the Emperor Herakleios (610-41) gave them the territory which was later called “Serblia”—a country bounded in the time of Porphyrogenitus by Croatia on the north, Bulgaria on the south, the river Rashka near Novibazar on the east, and the present Herzegovina on the west. But a chain of historical facts proves that Herakleios merely gave to the Serbs what they had already taken. About a century before his time the Slavs, whose oldest home was in Poland, had begun to cross the Danube, and about 578 had actually appeared before Salonika. Herakleios, occupied with the war against the Persians in the East, could not defend the Western Balkans. So he made a virtue of necessity, just as, in our own day, governments have granted autonomy to lost provinces which they could no longer protect. The Danubian principalities, Bulgaria, Eastern Roumelia, Crete, and the Lebanon are examples.

This arrangement suited both parties. The Byzantine Court could keep up a formal suzerainty, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus could point in proof of it to the quite unscientific etymology of the word “Serboi” from the Latin servi, because they had become the “slaves” of the Byzantine Emperor. This national name, which first occurs in the ninth century, when we find Eginhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, describing in 822 the “Sorabi” as “said to occupy a large part of Dalmatia,” is still applied not only to the Balkan Serbs but to those of Saxony, whose language, however, is so different that a Serb of Bautzen cannot understand a Serb of Belgrade. The later Byzantine historians, full of classical lore, sometimes call the Serbs Τριβαλλοί after the Thracian tribe, which occupied in antiquity part of modern Serbia, and the king of which is brought on the stage and made to talk broken Greek in the Birds of Aristophanes. Yet, despite this false etymology of their name, Constantine Porphyrogenitus himself admits what was doubtless the fact, that the Croats and Serbs were “subject to none.” “Thus,” in the words of Finlay[858], “the modern history of the eastern shores of the Adriatic commences with the establishment of the Sclavonian colonies in Dalmatia.” Of the two pre-existing elements in the population, the Romans, as Constantine Porphyrogenitus says, retired into the coast-towns, while the Illyrian aborigines were pushed southward into the country which since the eleventh century has borne the name of Albania from the district of Albanon near Kroja. Under the name of Ἀρβανῖται the Albanians are first mentioned in 1079.

The history of mediæval Serbia falls naturally into three sections: (1) from the entry of the Serbs into the Balkan peninsula to the close of the twelfth century—a period during which the Byzantine Empire, after finally crushing the Bulgarians, dominated the Near East, and the Serbs, divided into two separate states, played a subordinate but restive part; (2) from the rise of the Nemanja dynasty towards the close of the twelfth century to the battle of Kossovo in 1389—a period which saw Serbia rise to be for a brief space by far the greatest state in the peninsula; (3) the decline, when Danubian Serbia existed at the pleasure of the Turks, till in 1459 she received her death-blow.

During the first of these periods the only serious resistance to the Byzantine hegemony of the Balkan peninsula was offered by the Bulgarians—a Finnish, or, according to others, Tartar tribe, which entered it in 679, and became gradually absorbed in the Slavonic population, which it had conquered. The vanquished imposed their language upon the victors, but the victors, like the Angles in England, imposed their name upon the vanquished. Two powerful Bulgarian monarchs, Krum and the Tsar Symeon, in 813 and 913 threatened the very existence of Constantinople, as did the Tsar Ferdinand in 1913; and Krum was wont to pledge his nobles out of the silver-set skull of the Greek Emperor Nikephoros I, whom he had slain in battle. The Serbs, however, maintained friendly relations with these powerful neighbours till about the middle of the ninth century, when history registers the first of the long series of Serbo-Bulgarian wars, of which we have seen three in our own time. When the Serbs were united, they were able to defeat the Bulgars. But the rivalry of the hereditary princes, whom we find ruling over them at this period, led to the formation of pro-Bulgar and pro-Byzantine parties, so that the native ruler tended to become a Bulgarian or Byzantine nominee, while there was a pretender in exile at Prêslav or Constantinople only awaiting the opportunity to be restored by foreign aid. About 924, however, the Bulgarian Tsar Symeon, instead of placing a puppet of his own on the throne, carried away almost the whole Serbian people captive into Bulgaria. Serbia thus remained barren; and when, after Symeon’s death, the Serbian prince, Tchaslav, escaped from the Bulgarian court to Serbia, he found there only fifty men, and neither women nor children. By submitting to the Byzantine Emperor and with the latter’s help, he restored the scattered Serbs to their own country.

For the rest of the tenth century Serbian history is a blank, save for the survival of the leaden seal with a Greek inscription belonging to a Prince of Diokleia, the country called after the town of Doclea, whose ruins still stand near Podgoritza. This was the time of the great Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, under whom Bulgaria stretched to the Adriatic; and Durazzo, the key of the Western Balkans, as Byzantine statesmen considered it, became a Bulgarian port. In his days there lived on the lake of Scutari a saintly Serbian prince, John Vladimir. Samuel carried off this holy man to his own capital on the lake of Prespa. But the Tsar’s daughter, according to the story, was so greatly moved by his pious speeches and his beauty while engaged in washing his feet, that she begged her father to release him. The saint escaped prison but not matrimony; he married the love-sick Bulgarian princess; but not long after was murdered as he was leaving church by an usurper of the Bulgarian throne. His remains repose in the monastery of St John near Elbassan; his cross is still preserved in Montenegro and carried every Whitsunday in procession at dawn.

The complete destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, “the Bulgar-slayer,” in 1018, removed the danger of a Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans, and made the Danube again the frontier of the Byzantine dominions, which surrounded on three sides the Serbian lands. Manuel I added Σερβικός to the Imperial style; Serbian pretenders were kept ready at Constantinople or Durazzo, in case the Serbian rulers showed signs of independence, while high-sounding court titles rewarded their servility. The internal condition of the Serbian people favoured Byzantine policy. For them, as in our own day, there were two Serb states, and two national dynasties, one ruling over the South Dalmatian coast, the present Herzegovina, and Dioklitia, modern Montenegro, with Scutari and Cattaro for its capitals; the other governing the more inland districts from a central point in the valley of the Rashka (near Novibazar), whence Serbia obtained the name of “Rassia,” by which she was largely described in the West of Europe during the Middle Ages. Of these two dynasties the former assumed the royal title—Hildebrand addressed a letter to “Michael, King of the Slavs”—but the latter became the more important, although its head contented himself with the more modest designation of “Great jupan,” that is, the first among the jupani, or Counts (Serbian jupa = county).

Whenever opportunity offered, however, the Serbs endeavoured to emancipate themselves from Byzantium. Kedrenos informs us that “after the death of the Emperor Romanos III (in 1034) Serbia threw off the yoke of the Greeks”; Stephen Vojislav, ruler of Dioklitia, not only seized a cargo of gold, which was thrown up on the Illyrian coast, but saw a Byzantine army perish in the difficult passes of his country. A second Imperial invasion, which started from Durazzo, met with the same fate as that which befell the Austrian “punitive expedition” in December 1914. The Serbs allowed the invaders to penetrate into the Zeta valley, occupied the heights and utterly routed them as they returned, laden with booty, through a narrow gorge. Michael, Vojislav’s son, made peace with the Emperor, and received the title of protospathários, or “sword-bearer,” at the Byzantine court, while he assumed at home the title of king. But, after the crushing defeat of the Byzantines by the Seljuks in Asia at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, the temptation to rise was too strong for the Balkan Slavs to resist. Accordingly, at the invitation of the Bulgarians, Michael sent them a leader in the person of his son, Constantine Bodin, who was proclaimed at Prizren “Peter, Emperor of the Bulgarians.” Bodin was, however, captured by the Byzantines, but escaped and married the daughter of a citizen of Bari—the first example but not the last of a Serbo-Italian union. At his request Pope Clement III confirmed the rights of the Archbishopric of Antivari, the ancient See, which is mentioned as an Archbishopric so early as 1067, and on the holder of which Leo XIII in 1902 conferred the title of “Primate of Serbia.” But Bodin, bellicose and crafty as Anna Comnena describes him, fell again into the power of the Byzantines. Our countryman, Ordericus Vitalis, describes him as “treating in a friendly fashion” the Crusaders who passed through his territory. Usually, however, the Crusaders had difficulty with the Serbs; and William of Tyre tells how at Nish, then a “fortified town, filled with a valiant and numerous population,” certain “Germans, sons of Belial,” set fire to the mills, thus provoking the retaliation of the natives.

The excellent Archbishop, who was sent in 1168 on an embassy to Monastir, remarks that Serbia was a country “of difficult access”; and that the Serbs, whose name he also derives from their supposedly original state of servitude, were “an uncultured and undisciplined people, inhabiting the mountains and forests, and not practising agriculture, but possessed of much cattle great and small.... Sometimes their jupani obey the Emperor: at other times all the inhabitants quit their mountains and forests ... to ravage the surrounding countries.” Yet the oldest piece of Serbian literature—a book of the Gospels in Cyrillic letters[859]—dates from this very period; and a priest of Antivari composed in Latin a history of the rulers of Diokleia, who were gradually ousted by the “Great jupani” of Rascia, who in their turn were forced to submit to the chivalrous Byzantine Emperor, Manuel I. A court poet of the period, Theodore Prodromos, represents the Serbian rivers Save and Tara, red with blood and laden with corpses, addressing the conqueror, and the Serbian jupani trembling at the roar of the lion from the Bosporus.

The death of Manuel I, in 1180, freed the Southern Slavs from Byzantine rule; and the following decade saw the foundation of the great Serbian state, which reached its zenith in the middle of the fourteenth century, and then fell before the all-conquering Turk. As has usually happened in Balkan history, this national triumph was the work of one man—Stephen Nemanja, the first great name in Serbian history.

The founder of the Serbian monarchy was a native of what is now Podgoritza, whence he built up a compact Serbian state, comprising the Zeta (modern Montenegro), and the Land of Hum (the “Hill” country, now the Herzegovina), Northern Albania and the modern kingdom of Serbia, with a sea-frontage on the Bocche di Cattaro, whose municipality in 1186 passed a resolution describing him as “Our Lord Nemanja, Great jupan of Rascia.” Of the Serbian lands Bosnia alone evaded his sway, forming a separate state, which, first under bans, and then under kings, survived the Serbian monarchy till it, too, fell before the Turks; while in the land of Hum he set up his brother, Miroslav, as prince. Thus, he substituted for the aristocratic Serbian federation a single state, embraced the Orthodox faith, which was that of the majority of his people, and strove to secure its religious as well as ecclesiastical union by extirpating the heresy of the Bogomiles, or Babuni (whence the name of the Babuna pass near Monastir, so famous in the fighting of 1915), then rife in the Balkans. At the same time he sent presents to St Peter’s in Rome and St Nicholas’ at Bari.

When Frederick Barbarossa stopped at Nish on the third Crusade in 1189, Nemanja met him with handsome gifts; but we may doubt the statement of a German chronicler that he did homage for his lands to the Teutonic ruler. No German Emperor ever set foot in Nish again till the recent visit of the Kaiser to King Ferdinand, when a modern chronicle, the Wolffbureau, revived the memory of Barbarossa’s presence there. In 1195 Nemanja retired from the world, at the instigation of his youngest son, who is known in Serbian history as St Sava; and he died in 1200 as the monk Symeon in the monastery of Chilandar on Mount Athos. He, too, received the honours of a saint; his tomb is still revered in the monastery of Studenitza, which he founded; and his life was written by his eldest son and successor Stephen, and by Stephen’s brother St Sava—the beginning of Serbian historical biography.

Nemanja had never assumed the title of king, continuing to style himself as “Great jupan”; but Stephen won for himself the title of “the first-crowned king,” by obtaining, in 1217, a royal crown from Pope Honorius III. There were diplomatic reasons for the assumption of this title. The Byzantine Empire had now fallen before the Latin Crusaders; Frankish principalities had arisen all over the Near East; and the Latin ruler of Salonika had assumed the royal style. Bulgaria had arisen again, and her sovereigns had revived the ancient title of Tsar; and the King of Hungary had presumed to call himself king of “Rascia” also. To show his connection with the former kings of Diokleia, Stephen added that country to his style; to complete the independence of his kingdom, he obtained through his saintly and diplomatic brother from the Œcumenical Patriarch at Nice the recognition of a separate Serbian Church under Sava himself as “Archbishop of all the Serbian lands.” Sava was buried in the monastery of Mileshevo in the old sandjak of Novibazar, whence his remains were removed and burned by the Turks near Belgrade in 1595. Many a pious legend has grown up around the name of the founder of the national Church; but, through the haze of romance and beneath the halo of the saint, we can descry the figure of the great ecclesiastical statesman, whose constant aim it was to benefit his country and the dynasty to which he himself belonged, and to identify the latter with the national religion.

While Stephen’s successor was a feeble character, the second Bulgarian Empire reached its zenith under the great Tsar John Asên II, who boasted in a still extant inscription in his capital of Trnovo, then the centre of Balkan politics, that he had “conquered all the lands from Adrianople to Durazzo.” The next Serbian King Vladislav was his son-in-law; St Sava died as his guest. But the hegemony of Bulgaria disappeared at his death in 1241; there, too, the national resurrection had been the work of one man. The Greeks regained their influence in Macedonia, and in 1261 recaptured Constantinople from the Latins.

We have an interesting description of life at the Serbian court in the time of the next King, Stephen Urosh I[860] (c. 1268), from the Byzantine historian Pachymeres. There was a project for a marriage between a daughter of the Greek Emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, and a son of Stephen Urosh. First, however, two envoys were sent to report, and the Empress specially charged one of them to let her know what sort of a family it was into which her daughter was about to marry. The pompous Byzantines were horrified to find “the great King,” as he was called, living the simple life in a way which would have disgraced a modest official of Constantinople, his Hungarian daughter-in-law working at her spindle in an inexpensive gown, and his household eating like a pack of hunters or sheep-stealers. The lack of security for travellers deepened the unfavourable impression of the envoys, and the marriage was broken off. Stephen Urosh II (1281-1321), surnamed Milutin (“the child of grace”), greatly increased the importance of Serbia. We have different pictures of this monarch from his Serbian and his Greek contemporaries. One of the former extols his qualities as a ruler, one of the latter portrays him as anything but an exemplary husband. But these characters are not incompatible, as we know from the case of Henry VIII, whom Stephen Urosh II resembled not only in the number of his wives, but in his opportunist policy. His chief object was to enlarge his dominions at the expense of Byzantium; he occupied Skopje, and established his capital there—the Serbian residence had hitherto fluctuated between Novibazar, Prishtina and Prizren—and so greatly impressed the Emperor Andronikos II with his advance towards Salonika that the latter sacrificed his only daughter, Simonis, to the already thrice-divorced monarch, giving as her dowry the territories which his son-in-law had already taken from him. Simonis, however, when she grew up—she was only a child at the time of her engagement—preferred Constantinople to the society of her husband; and nothing but his threat to come and take her by force induced her to return.

Behind this marriage of convenience there lay the project of uniting the Greek and Serbian dominions under a Serbian sceptre—a project to which the national party was resolutely opposed. At the same time, he not only had—what all Serbian rulers have coveted—an outlet on the sea, but actually occupied for a few years the port of Durazzo, that much-debated spot, which during the Middle Ages was alternatively Angevin, Serbian, Albanian and Venetian, till in 1501 it became Turkish. Nor was this astute ruler only a diplomatist and a politician; he offered the Venetians to keep open and guard the great trade route which traversed his kingdom, and led across Bulgaria to the Black Sea. A munificent founder of churches, his generosity is evidenced in Italy by the silver altar, bearing the date 1319, which he gave to St Nicholas’ at Bari, and on which he described himself as ruling from the Adriatic to the Danube; but his name is better known by the verses of Dante, who has given him a place in the Paradiso among the evil kings for his issue of counterfeit Venetian coin[861]—a common offence in the Levant during the Middle Ages: