Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

The external policy of Byzantium during the reigns of the Andronicoi 

Page 11

Advance of the Albanians to the south. In the first half of the fourteenth century, the Albanians for the first time began to play a considerable part in the history of the Balkan peninsula. Both Andronicus III and Stephen Dushan fought with them.

Albania had never, from the time of classical antiquity, been able to form a single unified nation, and the history of the Albanians had always been a part of the history of some foreign people. Internally they were divided into small principalities and autonomous mountain tribes, and their interests were exclusively local. Albania abounds in ancient remains which as yet have been unexplored. The history of Albania cannot, therefore, be written in its proper and final form without reference to the precious relics the Albanian soil has jealously guarded for centuries. It is only when these archeological treasures come to light that a really scientific history of Albania can be written.

The ancestors of the Albanians were the ancient Illyrians, who dwelled along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, from Epirus as far north as Pannonia. The Greek geographer of the second century A.D., Ptolemy, mentioned an Albanian tribe with a city of Albanopolis. The name of these Albanians was in the eleventh century extended to the rest of the ancient Illyrians. This people was called in Greek, Albanoi, Arbanoi, or Albanitai, Arbanitai; in Latin, Arbanenses or Albanenses; from the Latin or Roman form comes the Slavonic Arbanasi, in modern Greek Arvanitis, in Turkish Arnaut. The Albanians also call themselves Arber or Arben. Later on there appeared a new name for the Albanians, Shkipetars, the etymological origin of which has not been definitely fixed. The Albanian language is now full of Roman elements, beginning with the ancient Latin language and ending with the Venetian dialect, so that some specialists call the Albanian tongue a half-Romance mixed-language (halbromanishe Mischsprache). Of old the Albanians were a Christian people. In the earlier Byzantine time, Emperor Anastasius I, who came from the chief IIlyrian coast city of Dyrrachium (Durazzo), may have been Albanian. An Albanian origin for the family of Justinian the Great is also possible.

Great ethnographic changes occurred in the Albanian population in the epoch of the so-called barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries, and of the gradual occupation of the peninsula by the Slavs. Later, the Albanians (not yet called in the sources by this name) were subject first to Byzantium, then to the Great Bulgaria of Simeon. For the first time, Albanian, as a general name for the whole people, appeared in the Byzantine sources of the eleventh century, after the Normano-Byzantine conflicts in the Balkan peninsula. In the epoch of the Latin Empire and of the first Palaeologi the Albanians were successively controlled by the Despotat of Epirus, the second Bulgarian Empire, the Emperor of Nicaea John Ducas Vatatzes, and finally, by Charles of Anjou, who styled himself by the grace of God the King of Sicily and Albania. In the fourth decade of the fourteenth century, not long before Andronicus' death, the Serbian king Stephen Dushan conquered the major part of Albania. ... 

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