Privileged Albanians in Venice

Continuation of "Skanderbeg as the young Alexander"

After Skanderbeg's death in January 1468, Venice hoped that Paul the Angel would stabilize the political situation in Albania. But the archbishop died a year later, crushed by the disaster in his homeland, which was deserted by the Ottomans. Its extraordinary importance for the Albanian history of the XNUMXth century cannot be doubted.

However, with the death of the archbishop, the importance of the Angel family does not end, on the contrary: his brother, Pjetër Angelus (Peter Angelus), after many vicissitudes managed to save himself in the Serenissima and there to play a leading role in the Albanian community. This community, along with the Engjëlli family, represents the second foundation stone for the Albanian encounter with antiquity. In Venice, the Albanians, as the most privileged group of subjects in the Stato da mar (Maritime Republic), owned since 1442 and had their social center in the school of S. Maria and S. Gallo. So, not only did the citizens of the cities of Venetian Albania, exiled by the Ottoman occupation, establish this diaspora community, but moreover they took advantage of this to quickly integrate into the society of the city of Saint Mark. The Ottoman occupation of Drishti and, after a long siege, the surrender of Shkodra to the Sultan with the peace of 1479, again led a large number of northern Albanians to Venice. Their fate is best known after the Senate set up a special committee of members for issues related to the citizens of Shkodra.

Among the refugees were also many priests, who received new benefits. Most of them were closely related to the Angel family and to the memory of the archbishop who died ten years ago, such as Demetrio Franco who is supposed to have been the administrator of Skanderbeg's finances and the author of a biography about him, but also Marin Barleti from Shkodra, whose book on Skanderbeg's biography was published in Rome in 1508 and which would actually protect the figure of Gjergj Kastriot for hundreds of years. Both of these authors, but especially Barleti, raised in their works the role of the door of the Angels in Skanderbeg's war against the Ottomans and did so in such a way that it is meant more as a tribute to the door of the Angels than a historical description. Indeed, the door of the Angels was the epicenter of the small intellectual elite in Venice. Two of the most important biographical works on Skanderbeg were written under their direct influence. But the Angels were also related to the Muzakas in the Kingdom of Naples. Because it should not be forgotten that most of the Albanian nobles, especially the Skanderbeg family, went not to Venice, but to South Italy, where the Kastriots had received land holdings from King Ferrante in 1467, among them Mount S. Michele and S. Giovianni Rottono.

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The noble door of the Muzakai in Southern Italy

Even the noble door of the Muzakas from Central Albania had managed to create a new existence in Southern Italy. From its ranks comes the only noble chronicler of Arberia, Gjon Muzaka (Giovianni Musachi), who at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, around the same time as Skenderbeu's biographers, Barleti and Franco, compiled a family chronicle, which offered a completely different perspective of the events, presenting Skenderbeu as a homo novus, who had completely abolished and expropriated the old Albanian nobility. Muzaka was in contact with the Venetian Angels and wrote under their instigation.

However, the Angels influenced not only these three important historians, but they also exercised a prominent activity for the cultivation of tradition. Most of the relevant texts are summarized in the codex "Codex Ashburnham" 1167 of the Laurenziana Library, a codex that has been well-known until today mainly for the fact that it contains the first linguistic evidence of written Albanian, a baptismal formula in the vernacular, which by the order of archbishop Paul Angel, it would have to be used for urgent baptisms in times of war. The codex appears very heterogeneous in terms of content and begins with the acts of a reformist synod of the church of Central Albania, held in November 1462 under the presidency of the archbishop; this synod was intended to reform the disordered church administration due to constant Ottoman attacks.

Attached to this basic text on Albanian ecclesiastical history is a register of the provinces of the regio illyrica of late antiquity, which is supposed to have been taken from the "Golden Book of the Archives of the City of Durrës." It continues with Pope Pius II's call for a crusade against Mehmed II in November 1463. The codex is closed by a series of copies of documents that are classified into two groups:

1) The agreement that Venice made for the taking over of the cities of Durrës (1392) and Drisht (1442) - that is, the two places where the archbishop had acted; AND

2) Documents according to which the noble origin, namely Byzantine-imperial, of the Angel family, as well as its land holdings, are proven; these are supplemented by documents compiled by Venetian officials, which testify to the faithful attitude of the archbishop towards Venice. Some of these documents, first of all a so-called privilege of a Byzantine emperor, Michael - are clearly forgeries. This does not surprise you at all, because the Angels had made a name for themselves as great forgers and manipulators of genealogies in Italy in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries. The purpose of the one who drew up the codex in the XNUMXth century was more than clear: it had to ensure the exiled Angels in Italy a place in the elite of the Apennine Peninsula. However, not all the texts in question are forged: in the library of the Museo Correr, the originals of some important documents were recently found, which match their copies. The trend of codex content will be discussed in more detail below. Here, in conclusion, we should also mention another unknown figure until recently, more precisely Marin Dulcich from Shkodra, who copied the statutes of the city of Shkodra at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, placing at the top of them a unique privileged document of Alexander the Great. Great. The conclusions of this paragraph are to be highlighted: the economically weak civic communities did not form the basis of the secular educated classes.

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To be continued in the next issue of the Culture Supplement

This study was published in F. Fuchs (Hrsg.): "Osmanische Expansion und europäischer Humanismus" (Pirckheimer Jahrbuch Bd. 20). Wiesbaden, 2005, p. 123-144. Footnotes have been removed by the editors and crosswords have been added. Translated from German: Sylë Ukshini