Po redaktohet VICKERS (paragraf)

=== Subjection to Ottoman control in Kosovo ===

The years following the Battle of Kosovo were marked by an increase in Ottoman military activity; certain territories were directly annexed and suzerainty was imposed on various hitherto independent princes and tribes. Taking advantage of the increasing internal troubles in Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia, the Ottomans began to extend their conquests deep into the Balkan peninsula. In 1393 the capital of Bulgaria, Turnovo, was captured and a short time later the whole territory of Bulgaria came under Ottoman rule, but it was only in 1455, two years after their capture of Constantinople, that the Ottomans directed a major assault against Serbia, capturing Southern Serbia, the Kosovo region and the richest mine, Novo Brdo, which was estimated at the time of its capture to yield an annual revenue of 120,000 ducats. Among Serbia's losses in 1455 was Pec, seat of the Serbian Patriarch. After the final fall of Serbia to the Ottomans in 1459, all the Serbian eparchies came under the jurisdiction of the Greek Archbishopric of Ohrid. Many ecclesiastical buildings were plundered and some were immediately converted into mosques, among them the church of Our Lady of Ljeviska in Prizren. Many of the great monasteries were looted. Tsar Dusan's magnificent Church of the Holy Archangels was all but razed to the ground, and its rich marble was re-used to build the huge Sinan Pasha mosque in the centre of the town. Today, more than 500 years later, the ruined church's forlorn, grass-covered stones lie scattered along the canyon of the bustling little river Bistrica, providing a playground for Albanian youngsters. The great monasteries of Decani and Gracanica escaped destruction, but their patrimonies were reduced to a handful of surrounding villages.

With the arrival of the Ottomans, Prizren and Pristina became important stages on the revitalised trade route from the Dalmatian coast to Macedonia and Constantinople. The new Ottoman administrative system divided up most of the land according to the Ottoman military fief (or timar) system, which was totally controlled by Ottoman feudal landowners and their officials. In 1432 a land registration was carried out dividing the territory of Albania into 335 timars or fiefs, each usually comprising two or three villages which were then distributed among the leaders of the civil, military or religious administration. Dibra and its surroundings became a separate sandjak (administrative district) while the region now known as Kosovo was included in the sandjak of Skopje. The expansion of the Serbian state southwards had led to a corresponding movement of the Serbian population into present-day Kosovo and Albania, but with the arrival of the Ottomans this process was reversed and migration came to be directed northwards. These events set in motion a series of northward local migrations of Serbs, and by 1481 a large part of the Slav population of Kosovo had migrated to what is now Hungary and Transylvania.

The continued development of mining in Kosovo caused the rapid development of several towns such as Novo Brdo, Janjeva, Trepca and Pristina and a corresponding population shift towards them. Although Ottoman colonists were sent to Kosovo, there were relatively few of them and they settled primarily in and around Prizren. By the first half of the fifteenth century Albanians had begun gradually to move their cattle down from the mountain pastures to the plain of Kosovo where they established small farming settlements. Migrants came mostly from the surrounding mountainous regions to settle in the lowland plains and valleys. As people moved to the towns, others came from the hills and occupied the abandoned villages. No one who has travelled in the formidably inhospitable mountains of present-day northern Albania and western Macedonia can fail to appreciate the chronic lack of suitable land on which to sustain even the smallest population. There are thus two types of new Albanian settlement in Kosovo -- one in pastureland and the other in the towns. With the Treaty of 1489 between Venice and the Porte, recognising Ottoman sovereignty over Albania, almost half the Albanian population emigrated to Italy, and to evade the Ottomans thousands more retreated into inaccessible mountain regions, or migrated to Greece where they settled in Thessaly, Attica and as far south as the Peloponnese.

Albanian historiography asserts that Albanians were the majority in Kosovo even before the Ottoman conquest: `The documents of the period after the Ottoman occupation of Kosovo, in 1455, and especially the land registers, provide many facts that show that these regions were inhabited by the Albanian population, while the Serbs who came as colonists, or as a ruling stratum during the Serbian occupation of these regions, constituted a minority, insignificant numerically but dominant from a political and social standpoint.' In fact, the documents do not show any such thing. The Ottoman defter (register of landed property) of 1455 for the lands of the Serbian Brankovic princes (i.e. most of present-day Kosovo plus small areas of adjoining Sandjak and Serbia proper) record an overwhelming Slavic (Serb) majority.

Although Albanian researchers claim with some justification that common Christian names do not necessarily imply Slavs, and a `Todor or a Djuradj, son of Martin' could be either Albanian or Serb, it would be hard to imagine that a `Radihna, son of Dabiziv' or a `Prijezda, son of Relja' had any Albanian ancestry. It is more to the point that wherever Albanians appeared in 1455, they were often though probably not always identified as such. For example, in the village of Siptula, near Pristina, there were a `Petko, Albanian' and a `Mihal, Albanian'. In short, their nationality was not the usual one in the area. The number of Albanian migrations into Kosovo began slowly to increase during the early sixteenth century.

In an effort to cope with the Empire's increasingly diverse ethnic-religious groups, the Ottoman administration devised a socio-cultural communal entity, the millet, based on religious adherence rather than ethnic identity. The first millet -- the Orthodox -- was established in 1454 by Sultan Mehmet II who granted rights and freedoms in perpetuity; these were inherent in the millet and not subject to renewal, abolition or limitation. An Armenian and Jewish millet followed later. Thus non-Muslims were brought into the Muslim organisational system but remained able to retain their own cultural and religious freedoms. The adoption of this system was essentially in response to the hetrogeneous nature of society in the Balkans, and used by Mehmet II to neutralise differences and secure a degree of harmony. The millet and not the church was responsible for maintaining ethnic and linguistic identity. Within the Orthodox millet, the Serbs could preserve their language, religion and ethnic individuality because religion not rationality was the fundamental factor in the Ottoman concept of governance.

During the fifteenth century the great majority of Albanians were still Christians, and Serbs and Albanians lived together in considerable harmony. They venerated the same saints, worshipped in the same churches, and respected a past of shared values. Even today elderly Albanians recall that their fathers would never begin any project on a Tuesday, the day of the Serbian defeat at Kosovo. The Albanians brought with them into Kosovo the maxims of the Kanun of Leke, which for the clans of northern Albania took precedence over all other laws, and for that reason both the church and the state opposed the application of the Kanun. In the areas bordering on Dukagjin, especially in the plains, where the Ottoman government had managed to establish a degree of domination, compromises occurred between the Kanun and the Shariat. Tradition ascribes the Kanun to Leke Dukagjini (1410-81), contemporary and comrade-in-arms of the Albanian national hero Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg. However, Albanian customary law evolved over many centuries, both before and after the lifetime of this particular historical personage. The influence of Illyrian law should not be ignored. As the direct precursors of the Albanians, the Illyrians undoubtedly retained their legal norms despite coming under Roman domination, since it is established that the Roman governor of Illyria permitted the use of local laws when these did not conflict with the principles of Roman law. Even after Diocletian, when the provinces were forced to submit to increased Romanisation, the old laws were retained at least in memory and must have been transmitted orally to succeeding generations.

The turbulent era of struggle against Ottoman expansion, in which Leke Dukagjini participated, also coincided with fundamental changes in the structure of Albanian society, especially the final disappearance of the aristocratic class (Leke belonged to it) and the emergence of a well-defined clan (fis) system. While the Kanun of Skanderbeg was confined to a fairly limited area, that of Leke Dukagjini was observed over a wide area: in the mountains of Lezhe, in Dukagjin, in Shkoder, in Djakovica in Kosovo, and even among the Albanian populations in parts of Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. In certain overwhelmingly Muslim areas such as Krasniq and Lume the Kanun lost some of its power, and Ottoman customs came to replace older traditions. But on the whole the precepts of the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini were respected in all rural areas of the north, including Kosovo. As Syria Pupovci says in his valuable introduction to the 1972 reprint of the Kanun, `In essence, the preservation of customary law was one of the most important elements in helping the Albanian people to maintain, their individuality under Ottoman domination.' For those Serbs who remained in Kosovo the first century of Ottoman rule saw no great social change. In 1557 the patriarchate of Pec was renewed, thanks to Mehmed-Pasha Sokolovic, a Grand Vizier at the Porte of Serbian origin.

(C) 1998 Miranda Vickers All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-231-11382-X