Albanians have long been recognized for their religious tolerance, owing to their centuries of coexistence with those of different faiths, be they Albanians or of other communities. Underneath this tradition of tolerance lies a long history of conversion and subjugation by foreign entities, a history that has culminated into today’s religious status quo.
Religious affiliation has shaped the Albanian ethnic consciousness more than has been recognized by Marxist scholars who have dominated much of the nation’s modern historiography. Understanding the process that formed Albanians' modern religious diversity facilitates a fuller comprehension of the modern ethnic group’s self-conception.
Ancient Roots
To preface, the Albanians, like all European peoples, were adherents of a loosely-organized native religion inherited from their Indo-European ancestors. Prior to Christianization, these “proto-Albanians” believed in various deities, such as the sky god Zojz and Premte, the goddess of love, from which we get the name of Friday in Albanian. Proto-Albanians placed great importance on natural phenomena such as Dielli, the sun, and Hëna, the moon.
Such beliefs have persisted through the centuries, as late as the 20th century in some regions, with many paganic motifs persisting to the present. Most Albanians will recognize symbols of the sun, oath-swearing (besa), funerary lamentation, spring festivals, and a strong affinity for fire during celebrations as important aspects of their culture. All of these motifs, and more, stem from the pagan religion of pre-Christian Albania.
The Emergence of Rome and Christianity
The Roman conquest of territories inhabited by the ancestors of today’s Albanians made way for the eventual introduction of Christianity. According to Christian tradition, it was Paul of Tarsus who preached this new faith to the province of Illyricum, as stated in his Letter to the Romans. The faith, then, has been present in Albanian lands since the 1st century AD.
Over the next few centuries, Christianity would become dominant in the urban centers of the Balkan peninsula. While the more mountainous regions would retain their pagan beliefs, important Roman cities in modern Albania and Kosova became strongholds of the faithful. The region of Dardania, roughly corresponding to modern Kosova, was a particularly important piece of the Christian hegemony over the Eastern Roman Empire, owing most of its influence to Justinian the Great, who was himself of latinized Dardanian stock.
Justinian would invest greatly in his home region, establishing multiple towns and churches. After a series of earthquakes in the area, he would rebuild the episcopal seat of Dardania, known as Ulpiana (today’s Lipjan, Kosova), where he also ordered the construction of a basilica. In 535, Justinian established the Archbishopric of Justiniana Prima, located near today’s Lebane, Serbia, which enjoyed ecclesiastical jurisdiction over provinces in the Diocese of Dacia. These centers of Christianity would later fall victim to pillaging by various tribes between the 4th and 7th centuries, particularly the Slavic newcomers.
Entering the Middle Ages
The conquest of the Diocese by the invading Slavs led to significant gaps in the historical record. Until the establishment of the Archbishopric of Ohrid by the Bulgarians in 1018, it is unclear exactly what occurred in terms of religious conversions and continuity in the region. In 1054 came the Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople, splitting the Church on primarily political but also theological grounds. Albanians and the now-Christianized Slavs would largely fall under the religious jurisdiction of Constantinople as the ecclesiastic seat of Eastern Rome.
In the late 12th century, Kosova would be conquered by Stefan Nemanja, who introduced the Serbian archbishopric to the native Albanian and Vlach populations. Bulgarian and Byzantine domination in the Balkans would soon officially end with the establishment of the Serbian Empire by Tsar Stefan Dušan in 1346, which established control over a significant portion of the Western Balkans. With the formation of Dušan’s empire the fog begins to clear and the religious make-up of Kosova comes into full view.
Dušan, now controlling a vast territory, consolidated several Slavic legal systems into a code known as The Law of the Pious Emperor Stefan, or simply Dušan’s Code. In this manuscript, Dušan mentions the “heretical half-believers,” referring to Latins and Albanians who belonged to the Western Church based in Rome.
Hasan Jashari's Essays on Politics and Society describes how Article 82 of the Code ordered that Albanians must walk alone in Serb villages and that they would be fined if joined by company. An intriguing phenomenon can be seen in the aftermath of the Code in the Field of Dukagjin and, to some extent, throughout Kosova. Enclaves of Albanian Catholicism persisted even where Orthodoxy became the dominant faith. These Arbanaš pockets were mainly located in villages near the White Drin, as per Stefan Dečanski’s mention of them in 1330, along with villages surrounding Prizren and in the region of Drenica – chronicled in Dušan’s 1348 royal decree.
Albanian Catholics are also known to have inhabited areas as far north as Mitrovica, evidenced by the church in Vinarc i Epërm (Upper Vinarc) estimated by locals to be 700 years old. Albanians were also present in mining towns such as Trepça, with the population distribution extending eastwards towards Novobërdë, near modern-day Prishtina, where they coexisted with Ragusan merchants and Saxon miners, all of whom were Catholic.
The historian Oliver Jens Schmitt states in Religion and Culture in Albanian-speaking Southeastern Europe that Novobërdë was a “Catholic stronghold” prior to the Ottoman conquest, also evidenced by the distinctly Albanian Catholic anthroponymy of the clergymen and heads of households.
The stance of the Serbian despots towards “heretics” produced a gradual “Serbianization” effect which saw many Albanian Catholics adopt, whether by force or for simple self-preservation, the Orthodox faith and names used by Serbs, as reflected in the names of individuals recorded living in the Field of Dukagjin. For example, we see a mixed Orthodox-Latin population in the village of Trenova, documented in a tax register, or defter, from 1485 prior to the mass conversion to Islam.
An instinctive reaction might be to think of the men with Orthodox names as Serbs. Yet this would be illogical as the religious connotation of names (e.g. Lazar, Nikolla, Pavli) do not always indicate ethnic origin. Rather, considering the testimonies of Serbian rulers confirming a rural Albanian presence throughout the Field of Dukagjin, alongside the pressure exerted on Albanian Catholics by the Empire, it stands to reason that Dimitri and Nikolla were just as Albanian as Gjoni and Gjini in this instance. The frequency of the name Progoni borne by the individuals with Orthodox names and patronymy is also something worth noting, as this was a well-known Albanian name. Trenova was but one of many villages in the region exhibiting a seemingly mixed Orthodox and Catholic Albanian population.
The pressure exerted on Albanian Catholics by Serbian monarchs would drive many to assimilate or convert. This began to take a toll on the Catholic clergy in Kosova and Northern Albania, as evidenced by the 1332 letter of an anonymous Franciscan friar who details the dynamic between the Slavic Orthodox ruling class and Catholic minority:
“The said Latins and Albanians suffer under the unbearable yoke and extremely dire bondage of their odious Slav leaders whom they detest - the people being tormented, the clergy humiliated and oppressed, the bishops and abbots often kept in chains, the nobles disinherited and held hostage, episcopal and other churches disbanded and deprived of their rights, and the monasteries in decay and ruin.”
This mistreatment under the Serbian Empire would cease when Dušan’s state fell in 1355, enabling Albanian chieftains to take advantage of the power vacuum and create small principalities throughout Albania and Kosova. While the Serbian Branković family kept control of Eastern Kosova, the Albanian Dukagjini family, originally from Lezha, established itself from the Albania coast into the Plain of Dukagjin in Western Kosova, which would be named after them.
The Ottoman Longue Durée
In 1389, the famed Battle of Fushë Kosova would take place between an Ottoman army raised by Sultan Murad I and a coalition of Christian soldiers consisting of Serbs, Hungarians, Croatians and Albanians led by Moravian Serb prince Lazar Hrebreljanović. The Christian coalition would lose this crucial battle to the Ottomans, and Moravian Serbia, which had emerged as the most powerful principality from the downfall of the Serbian Empire, would become vassals of the Sultan. The disorganization of the Serb state would allow for Albanian lords like Gjon Kastrioti to carve a territory for himself from Mat to Prizren.
The Albanian nobility would also soon be turned into vassals by the new Ottoman conquerors. On March 2nd, 1444, however, the League of Lezha would be founded by none other than the son of Gjon Kastrioti, Gjergj. Known to the Albanians as Skenderbej, Gjergj Kastrioti would unite several noble families in an attempt to declare independence from the Ottoman Sultan. While the League succeeded in defeating significantly larger Ottoman armies for around 25 years, it began to gradually fragment.
The Albanians would receive support from Venice, Naples and Hungary despite being in conflict with the powers at various points. Kastrioti had been born into the Orthodox faith and converted to Islam by his Ottoman captors. His turn to Catholicism after declaring his rebellion against the Sultan led the Papacy to name him Defensor Fidei and Athleta Christi (Defender of the Faith and Champion of Christ). Though rewarded with religious titles for his defense of European Christendom against the Ottoman invaders, Kastrioti referred to himself as Dominus Albaniae, or Lord of Albania. In a letter to the prince of Taranto, he emphasized that Albanians were the descendants of Alexander’s army and the Epirotes, evidence that a distinct Albanian identity was present and taking further root in this tumultuous era.
After his death in 1468, the League would fall into complete disarray. Lekë Dukagjini, second-in-command to Skënderbej, would continue the fight against the Ottomans until 1479. It is here, with the fall of the Albanian noble families, that the foundations of the modern-day religious distribution amongst Albanians were established.
The chaos of the Ottoman takeover would leave Albania without a native ruling class and no real state structure to speak of, with the lands reverting to a pre-feudal tribal structure. Many Albanian noblemen fled the country to Italy, initially bringing with them the Byzantine Rite of Christianity and establishing the Arbëreshë community.
Being separated from other Catholic states, the churches in Kosova and Albania would suffer financially. Many clergymen, including the important Bishop of Lezha, abandoned their cities and moved to the mountains. Prizren would remain without a bishop for decades, despite complaints to external Catholic authorities. In The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith, Sir Thomas Walker Arnold explains that the Diocese of Pult possessed a ratio of merely two priests for around six thousand Catholics. This clerical shortage would prove devastating to the community and only continue due to the largely anti-Catholic attitude of the Ottomans, who viewed the Vatican as the focal point of resistance against the Empire and a source of inspiration for Albanian Catholics.
The Ottomans would conquer Novobërdë in 1455, thus eliminating one of the last strongholds of Catholicism in Kosova. Though Islam has been present in Kosova since at least 1289, when the Syrian Al-Aga family established a mosque in the region of Dragash, the religion would not take root in earnest amongst the native population for another four centuries.
The Ottomans brought with them an Islam that might be far less recognizable to modern-day Muslims. This is because the early Ottoman Sultans, such as Osman and Murad I, were well-accustomed to incorporating heterodox components of Islam, commonly known as Sufism, into the social structure of the Empire.
The Empire’s Sufis would greatly strengthen the presence of Islam in the Balkans, especially in Albania and Kosova. The Sufi orders or tariqas, such as the Qadiriyya, Malamatiyya, and the Khalwatiyya, would build religious lodges called tekkes in major cities of the region like Prizren and Gjakova. It is possible that the lack of clergy within Kosova caused Albanian Catholics to look towards new figures of religious authority, finding them in dervishes and sheikhs, which only furthered the conversion of Albanians to Islam. As the scholar Dritan Egro states, “these orders were often more accessible and welcoming than formal Islamic institutions and their leaders provided a form of spiritual leadership that resonated with local Albanian communities.”
Being the religion of the victors, conversion to Islam brought vast material benefits. Remnants of the Albanian land-owning aristocracy in Kosova’s major towns became occupants of timars, or Ottoman land grants. It is through this system that the first major Albanian conversions to Islam occurred. As non-Muslims in the Empire, they were subject to a special tax known as the jizya. Ottoman documents bear witness that because the jizya was paid in cash, it was the most diffıcult payment to meet. Scholars like Egro emphasize that the conversion of Albanians to Islam should not be viewed as a primarily spiritual decision but rather as a pragmatic one that allowed Albanians to climb the Ottoman bureaucratic system's ranks and avoid the financial disadvantages that came with being a non-Muslim subject.
The jizya was designed to create a de-facto second class in Ottoman society. It symbolized subordination to the Islamic rulers and acted as a reminder that those who paid it were protected but unequal. By imposing this financial obligation, the Ottomans effectively reinforced feelings of exclusion and inferiority in their non-Muslim subjects whilst fostering a sense of privilege among Muslims. According to Ottoman records, the jizya was collected in greatest volume in today's Kosova and North Macedonia, which, alongside these territories being less forbiddingly mountainous than Northern Albania, could explain why their populations were subject to higher rates of conversion than the Catholics of Northern Albania.
The jizya was not the only disadvantage experienced by non-Muslims. As Ergo explains:
“[they were not] allowed to wear uniforms or carry arms or to take out their banners during their feasts, except during holidays. The dhimmi was not permitted to marry a Muslim woman or to enter in sexual connection with her. They were required to wear distinctive clothing from those of Muslims. The dhimmis were not permitted to ride on horseback or to carry weapons, but to ride only on donkeys and mules. The houses of non-Muslims should not be higher than the houses of Muslims. They should not ring the church bells loudly nor should they raise their voices loudly in prayer. Their dead must be buried in places away from Muslim quarters.”
The Albanian land-owning elite, then, was motivated to avoid these second-class subject limitations and aspired to achieve a level of power similar to that enjoyed in the pre-Ottoman days.
A prominent part of the story was shaped by the Devşirme system, in which young Christian boys were taken from the Balkans as hostages, forcibly converted to Islam and transformed into soldiers of the Janissary corps. Halil Inalcik's Islam in the Ottoman Empire notes the Ottoman historian Saddedin Efendi's estimate that in 200 years, the Devşirme system converted 200,000 Christian boys to Islam.
These slave-soldiers would return to their homelands after retirement, where they would be granted land ownership as a reward for their service. By then investing in Ottoman architectural projects such as mosques and the surrounding külliye, as was required for wealthy individuals, the retired soldiers spread Islam in the Balkans with high effectiveness. Notable among these projects is the Sinan Pasha mosque in Prizren, built by the eponymic pasha in 1615.
It is also worth noting that the Janissary corps long enjoyed strong ties with the Bektashi order, which had less stringent requirements than mainstream Sunni Islam. This was a particularly appealing feature to soldiers recently converted from Christianity and helped established the Bektashis' influential presence in the Balkans.
The question of why the Serbs did not convert en masse to Islam like Albanians has long been prevalent. While a considerable number of Serbs did become proselytes of the Islamic faith, they indeed did not convert at anywhere near the same rate as Albanians. This is largely because the Serbian Orthodox Church, more specifically the Patriarchate of Peć, stood as an institution that allowed for a high degree of local influence in the Orthodox Serb community within Kosova and Serbia. The structure of the church allowed Serbs to preserve their identity as directly connected to their faith, thereby resisting conversion to Islam. While Serbian rulers were often vassals and allies of the Ottomans and their Church was subject to taxation, the Orthodox clergy provided a center of spiritual and political resistance for ethnic Serbs against Ottoman hegemony.
In stark contrast, Catholic Albanians did not benefit from such a structured column of support. A lack of native clergy significantly hampered Albanians from preserving their doctrine, not to mention that most clergymen at this point were foreign, illiterate and did not speak Albanian.
This phenomenon also occurred amongst other vulnerable groups in the Balkans, such as the Slavic Bogomils who had survived persecution in the Sharr Mountains of Kosova and members of the Bosnian Church. Considered heretical by Rome and Constantinople, the two movements were left powerless and thus susceptible to high rates of conversion, not unlike Albanians.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Albanians in Kosova would begin to move from rural areas to urban centers in search of economic opportunity, attracted by the status enjoyed by city inhabitants. In order to preserve their crafts and financial stability, many of these formerly rural Albanians converted to Islam. Those who retained their Catholic faith were displaced and forced out of the trades, left with no choice but to pick up labor in the agricultural sector.
This mass conversion to Islam, induced by financial and social incentives, alarmed many Catholic leaders, Albanians included. In 1555, Gjon Buzuku published the Meshari. This translation of the Roman Catholic liturgy would be the first Albanian-language publication in history. Nearly a century later Gjergj Bardhi, the Archbishop of Tivar, detailed that Andrea Bogdani, the Archbishop of Shkupi, had been preparing two children to become priests.
These efforts to preserve a Catholic identity amongst Albanians would culminate in 1689, in the midst of the Austrian-Ottoman War. The nephew of Andrea, Archbishop Pjetër Bogdani, would foster resistance against the Ottomans and inspire a combined Muslim-Catholic Albanian force of six thousand to arrive in Prishtina in an attempt to take the city of Prizren with Austrian aid. Together with his vicar, Toma Raspasani, Bogdani would successfully form an army but pass away due to the plague on December 6th, 1689. His body would be exhumed by the Ottomans and according to tradition his bones were fed to dogs in the central square of Prishtina.
At this point in Albanian history came the development of the laraman, or “crypto-Catholic” community in Kosova. This population was the result of lukewarm and apathetic conversions to Islam in order to avoid the payment of taxes such as the jizya, discrimination and obtain positions in the Ottoman government. These crypto-Catholics would be one of many examples of religious amphibianism in the Balkans, with many Albanian tribes including both Muslim and crypto-Catholic members.
Many crypto-Catholics publicly celebrated Islamic holidays and took Islamic names but kept practicing Christian traditions in the secrecy of their homes. This would create a notable syncretism between Albanians of different faiths, a great example of which being the pilgrimage of Catholic and Sufi Albanians to celebrate their respective holidays on Mount Pashtrik on the boundary between Albania and Kosova.
Bogdani’s famed resistance would not be the last attempt at an opposition to the Ottoman system. In 1703, Pope Clement XI convened a synod in the Albanian region of Mirdita, known as Kuvend i Arbërit. Himself of Italo-Albanian origin, Clement XI would finance missions into the Ottoman lands in order to counteract conversion to Islam and crypto-Catholicism. At the synod, he laid out a plan to reinvigorate Catholic practice amongst Albanians and standardize the faith in a hostile environment. One of his goals was to encourage crypto-Catholics to publicly declare their faith. This was a tall order, however, as public conversions carried great risk.
In 1744, Pope Benedict XIV would reinforce a previous encyclical stating that crypto-Catholics in the region must declare their Catholic faith or cease to receive the sacraments, one of the cornerstones of Catholic belief. This would heavily backfire, however, causing many crypto-Catholics to fully turn to Islam while others continued to hide their faith. The scholar Noel Malcom highlights this phenomenon in his influential book Rebels, Believers, Survivors: Studies in the History of the Albanians. He describes the Archbishop of Shkupi, Matija Mazreku’s refusal to baptize an eighteen year-old crypto-Catholic in Peja after his refusal to publicly declare his faith. Mazreku, however, was deeply affected by his decision to deny the baptism, stating that:
“Because they [Albanian Catholics] have been abandoned by us missionaries, they completely embrace Islam, and these people bear an incredible hatred, aversion and contempt towards us, and we suffer worse persecution from them than from the true and original Muslims.”
Beginning in the mid-19th century, Ottoman reforms beginning with the Hatt-i Şerif of Gülhane were instated to ensure equal rights for all subjects regardless of religion, among other fundamental changes. This would lead enduring crypto-Catholics to declare themselves as followers of Christianity, most prominently in the regions of Rugova, Karadak and Dushkaja. Such public declarations, however, were often met with severe opposition. Malcolm even describes the execution of laramans by local pashas in Rugova in 1817, mere decades prior to the Tanzimat reforms. By this point, the majority of Albanians in Kosova were Muslims.
Influence on Modern Ideologies
The late 19th and early 20th centuries represent a period of unmatched importance in the history of Albanian thought. The dawning nation’s leading intellectuals sought to distance it from the Ottoman millet system’s conflation of all Muslims with the Turkish identity. Perceiving a need for inter-religious unification, they placed primary importance on Albanians’ common language and ancestry. This was eloquently argued by Naim Frashëri, a writer hailing from the Bektashi order, whose note of unity established him as the Albanians’ national poet. Decades later, the Fransciscan Father Gjergj Fishta placed a crowning wreath on this sentiment by stating: “Indeed we have Easter and Eid, but Albania belongs to us all.”
Today, Kosova’s religious landscape is essentially homogeneous, as roughly 91% of the population considering themselves followers of Islam, with the overwhelming majority belonging to the Sunni Hanafi school. However, Ottoman-era remnants of Sufism can still be witnessed, especially in cities such as Gjakova, Prizren, and Rahovec, as is the case elsewhere in the region, including Southern Albania. Catholics in turn constitute approximately 2.2% of Kosova’s population and are limited mainly to the villages of the region of Dushkaja, Klinë, Karadak, Has and a large concentration in the capital city of Prishtina. Crypto-Catholic communities still exist in these regions and in recent years many public conversions to the faith have taken place by both Muslim and crypto-Catholic families.
Though the history of Islam’s presence in Albanian lands engenders much controversy, there is no doubt that the religion has left a vast imprint. Indeed, many of the community's most notable figures have been followers of the faith. Despite disagreements inherent to an often complex history, it remains clear that the Albanian people have consistently sought peaceful solutions to the differences that faith brings about, often maintaining a notably pragmatic view.
It is necessary for scholars to break through the myths that shroud this history to provide a fuller understanding of the Albanians’ material conditions and self-conception, both past and present.
Valton Vuçitërna is a first-year student studying Finance at Michigan State University's Eli Broad College of Business. Valton was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan to parents from Kosova and is the founder of The Anadrini Project, a database designed to record the histories and genetics of families in the region of Anadrini. He is interested in European history and the cultural heritage of the Albanian people.
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