The national hero of Albania has the improbable (to our eyes) name of Skanderbeg. He was born George Kastriotis to a family that owned/ruled somewhere between 3 and 20 villages with a castle (“Kastrioti” implies “owner of a kastro, Greek for castle”). When he was 18, he was sent as a hostage to the Ottoman court, to ensure that his father would not rebel. He was put into the Palace School with the upper-level devşirme kids; one of his brothers may also have been taken in the devşirme levy. In service to the Ottomans, George was known as Alexander, which is Iskander in Turkish. The Turkish title for any kind of leader or ruler is Beg, but the “g” is pronounced as a y. We often spell it “Bey,” but sometimes in old documents it’s still Beg. So as George rose in the Ottoman ruling bureaucracy, he became Iskander Beg, which became Skander-beg even in his time (when he signed his name in Cyrillic characters, he wrote it that way).
Skanderbeg served the Turks for 20 years, sitting out several rebellions and often governing parts of Albania; then suddenly he defected to the Christian side. His family had remained devoutly Orthodox, although hostage Skanderbeg was expected to follow Muslim daily religious customs. His father and several of his brothers had died by then, and he had adopted his nephew Hamza. In 1443, forces led by the King of Poland (and his regional ruler, John Hunyadi, about whom more later) made the Ottomans retreat, which left the Kastrioti lands free. Skanderbeg left the Turks and went home, taking Hamza and 300 Albanians with him.
From that point on, he led a chronic rebellion against the Turks in his part of Albania. His insider status made him particularly dangerous. Early on, before he was known to have deserted the Turks, he showed Ottoman officials forged documents in the central Albanian town of Krujë. The documents appointed him Bey of Krujë, and once he had taken this role, it was hard to dislodge him. He knew Turkish and Arabic; he knew many of the officials and the structure of the hierarchy; he knew the weak points of the Ottoman army.
Skanderbeg declared to other Albanian and Serbian nobles that he was the successor to their previous Prince, Stefan Lazarević, one of the founding knights of the Order of the Dragon. He set up a standard with a black double-headed eagle, on which today’s Albanian flag is based. He successfully captured a series of castles that became the core of his nascent kingdom. His “court” was multi-ethnic, with Serbs, Albanians, Greeks and Italians who had been displaced in the Ottoman wars. They wrote documents in three scripts: Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic.
As his power grew, other Albanian nobles joined his cause. Multiple noblemen always lead to bickering and divided loyalty, but under Ottoman pressure, they became more loyal to Skanderbeg, who was the only effective resistance in sight. His forces grew to 10,000 and upward. It was hard for the Ottomans to keep track of his men, since like all guerrilla forces, they could melt away into the countryside and look like simple farmers, or hide in mountain forests. The Albanians won a few pitched battles against the Ottoman army in 1444-6.
The other power in the region was Venice, which first supported the Albanians but then turned on them, choosing to eliminate the smaller threat before making some kind of peace treaty with the larger. Skanderbeg’s forces were beset on two fronts. They won a blistering battle against Venice that led Venice to sue for peace. Albanians joined Serbs and Poles at the Ottoman front; they had already lost a major fortress and soon they were fighting to keep Skanderbeg’s capital, Krujë.
The struggle to defend Krujë from the Ottoman siege took all the resources Albania could muster, and in the aftermath of saving his city, Skanderbeg’s fortunes ran low. Other nobles chose to work with the Ottomans, while he held out. His rescue came when the King of Aragon offered to make him a vassal of Aragon and its ally against Venice, Naples. Aragon had formal overlordship in Albania, in exchange for sending material support for Skanderbeg’s fight. A hundred Spanish soldiers were stationed at Krujë, sort of like American advisers in the Vietnam or Syrian wars. King Alfonso V was probably considering launching a new crusade from Albania; he signed treaties with other Albanian noblemen, too. Skanderbeg married the daughter of one of the other Albanian feudal lords, and he was back in business.
In the years before Constantinople fell, while Mehmet II was preparing his army and guns, the Albanians saw significant victories against Ottoman forces. When Europe reacted in shock to the fall of Constantinople, the King of Aragon increased his support to Albania. He sent a Spanish Viceroy to rule Albania, Greece and Serbia in his name, and with the Viceroy came a new crusade flag. Spanish and Neapolitian troops joined Skanderbeg. Together, they turned to take back the Albanian fortress of Berat, which the Ottomans had occupied. After a long siege, the Ottoman commander promised to surrender, but Skanderbeg carelessly took the promise for the deed. He left, with half the army. The Ottomans rallied and slaughtered the rest of the Albanians and Neapolitans.
By this time, Skanderbeg’s young wife had given birth to a son. All this time, his brother’s son, Hamza, had followed him like a son. Apparently he had viewed himself as a prince in waiting; when a new heir was born, Hamza gave up hope. He actually defected back to the Ottomans and helped lead an army of 70,000 into Albania to put an end to his uncle’s rebellion. Amazingly, the Albanians came out of nowhere and soundly beat the Ottoman army at the Battle of Ujëbardha, Hamza was not killed, but he was captured and put in some kind of prison at Naples.
The Ottomans intensified their efforts to end the Albanian rebellion once for all. Three successive armies advanced to Albania and were defeated, in 1461. Mehmet II finally signed a ten-year truce with Skanderbeg. By this time, Skanderbeg had been in high-level talks with two Popes who both kept wondering about starting up a new crusade and asking him to lead it. In 1463, only two years into the truce, Pope Pius II preached crusade, and Albania joined. Once again, Skanderbeg was at war with the Ottoman Empire.
The Pope died before he could get his promised forces actually into the field, but the truce had already been broken. The new Pope had no commitment to the effort that his predecessor had set in motion, and the Kingdom of Naples could not spare much. Skanderbeg was an old man by this time, in a body that had experienced much wear and tear. He still managed to destroy a major Ottoman army sent against him, again lifting a siege against his hometown of Krujë. By this time, he had been fighting the Turks for about 30 years and several generations of fighting-age men had grown up revering him. They flocked to join him, and they kept winning miraculous victories.
Skanderbeg could not live forever, though. It’s clear that his personal strategic genius had been behind most of Albania’s striking success. He had kept the nobles as united as possible, formed international alliances to keep their effort afloat, even successfully intervened to help the King of Naples. He had lifted three sieges of Krujë and beaten Ottoman armies much larger than his many times. But finally, he died of malaria. A nephew (not Hamza) stepped in to take his place, and Venice was still at war with the Ottomans and tried to maintain cooperation. But it wasn’t the same. When Mehmet II circled back again, the fourth siege of Krujë succeeded, and the nephew’s alliance with Venice soon fell apart. Albania became Ottoman territory, with pockets of resistance.
Albanian lords who had followed Skanderbeg fled to Naples, settling around Apulia and Calabria. King Ferdinand had a castle and estate set aside for Skanderbeg’s widow and son, in Galatina right at the Italian boot’s farthest heel. The descendants of these Albanians are still a distinct ethnic group in Italy, known as the Arbëreshë. Their Albanian language still preserves the oldest forms, when the majority of Albanian speakers in the homeland took on several centuries’ worth of Turkish borrowings.