Albanians

The Illyrians, who originally lived in central Europe, have migrated southward to the Gulf of Árta in northern Greece by the beginning of the Iron Age.

Corinthians send out agricultural settlers in about 734 BCE to Corfu (Kérkira), a Greek island of two hundred and twenty-nine square miles (five hundred and ninety-three square kilometers) that lies in the Ionian Sea, just off the coast of Epirus in northwest Greece, thereby supplanting a settlement of Eretrians from Euboea, who retire to the Albanian coast.

The island derives its name from the Greek word “coryphai,” meaning "crests" (the fertile island, flat in the south, has mountain ranges in its northern and central regions).

According to legend, the island was Scheria, home of the Phaeacians in Homeric epic.

Octavian has fought three campaigns in Illyria and Dalmatia from 35 BCE to 33 BCE.

The first mention of the province of Illyricum occurs in the context of Augustan settlement of 27 BCE, when it is assigned as a propraetorial province to imperial control.

The Romans divide the lands that make up present-day Albania among the provinces of Macedonia, …

… Dalmatia, and …

…Epirus.

Christianity apparently comes in the late first century CE to the Illyrian-populated lands.

Writings attributed to Paul of Tarsus, the religion's founder, state that he preaches in the Roman province of Illyricum (and legend holds that he visited Durrës. Paul is said to have been born in Tarsus, perhaps around CE 10, and to have died at Rome in about 67, but there are no reliable sources for Paul's life outside the New Testament, in which the primary source is his own letters.)

The Vandals invade Epirus (modern Albania).

Expelled from the Peloponnese (Greece), the Vandals, in retaliation, take five hundred hostages at Zakynthos: they are slaughtered on the way back to Carthage.

The Slavs return to menace Dyrrhachium in 548.

The Bulgarians, who had conquered much of the Balkan Peninsula in about 720, now extend their domain to the lowlands of what is today central Albania.

Many Illyrians flee from coastal areas to the mountains, exchanging a sedentary peasant existence for the itinerant life of the herdsman.

Other Illyrians will intermarry with the conquerors and eventually assimilate.

The invaders in general have destroyed or weakened Roman cultural centers in the lands that are to become Albania.

Leo, failing in his efforts to restore imperial authority in the west, places Illyria, Calabria, and Sicily—all currently controlled by the pope—under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople, thus permitting a unified program of re-Christianization of much of this region. (The Albanian lands for centuries hereafter will become an arena for the ecclesiastical struggle between Rome and Constantinople.

Most Albanians living in the southern and central regions, the majority, will become Orthodox, while …