Manastir Vilayet

The central authorities redivide the Albanian lands among the vilayets of Shkoder, Janina, Bitola, and Kosovo after 1865.

The reforms anger the highland Albanian chieftains, who find their privileges reduced with no apparent compensation, and the authorities eventually abandon efforts to control the chieftains.

Ottoman troops crush local rebellions in the lowlands, however, and conditions there remain bleak.

Large numbers of Tosks emigrate to join sizable Albanian émigré communities in Romania, Egypt, Bulgaria, Constantinople, southern Italy, and later the United States.

As a result of contacts maintained between the Tosks and their relatives living or returning from abroad, foreign ideas begin to seep into Albania.

The 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War deals a decisive blow to Ottoman power in the Balkan Peninsula, leaving the empire with only a precarious hold on Macedonia and the Albanian-populated lands.

The Albanians' fear that the lands they inhabit will be partitioned among Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece fuels the rise of Albanian nationalism.

The first postwar treaty, the abortive Treaty of San Stefano signed on March 3, 1878, assigns Albanian-populated lands to Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria.

Austria- Hungary and Britain block the arrangement because it awards Russia a predominant position in the Balkans and thereby upsets the European balance of power.

A peace conference to settle the dispute is held later in the year in Berlin.

The Treaty of San Stefano triggers profound anxiety among the Albanians meanwhile, and it spurs their leaders to organize a defense of the lands they inhabit.

In the spring of 1878, influential Albanians in Constantinople—including Abdyl Frasheri, the Albanian national movement's leading figure during its early years—organize a secret committee to direct the Albanians' resistance.

In May the group calls for a general meeting of representatives from all the Albanian-populated lands.

On June 10, 1878, about eighty delegates, mostly Muslim religious leaders, clan chiefs, and other influential people from the four Albanian-populated Ottoman vilayets, meet in the Kosovo town of Prizren.

The delegates set up a standing organization, the Prizren League, under the direction of a central committee that has the power to impose taxes and raise an army.

The Prizren League works to gain autonomy for the Albanians and to thwart implementation of the Treaty of San Stefano, but not to create an independent Albania.

The Ottoman authorities support the Prizren League at first, but the Sublime Porte presses the delegates to declare themselves to be first and foremost Ottomans rather than Albanians

Some delegates support this position and advocate emphasizing Muslim solidarity and the defense of Muslim lands, including present-day Bosnia and Hercegovina.

Other representatives, under Frasheri's leadership, focus on working toward Albanian autonomy and creating a sense of Albanian identity that will cut across religious and tribal lines.

Because conservative Muslims constitute  a majority of the representatives, the Prizren League supports maintenance of Ottoman suzerainty.

The Prizren League sends a memorandum to the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin, which had been called in July 1878 to settle the unresolved problems of the Russo-Turkish War.

The memorandum demanded that all Albanians be united in a single Ottoman province that would be governed from Bitola by a Turkish governor, who would be advised by an Albanian committee elected by universal suffrage.

The Congress of Berlin ignores the league's memorandum, and Germany's Otto von Bismarck even proclaims that an Albanian nation does not exist.

The congress cedes to Montenegro the cities of Bar and Podgorica and areas around the mountain villages of Gusinje and Plav, which Albanian leaders consider Albanian territory.

Serbia also wins Albanian-inhabited lands.

The Albanians, the vast majority loyal to the empire, vehemently oppose the territorial losses.

Albanians also fear the possible loss of Epirus to Greece.

The Prizren League organizes armed resistance efforts in Gusinje, Plav, Shkoder, Prizren, Prevesa, and Janina.

A border tribesman at the time describes the frontier as "floating on blood."

The Congress of Berlin orders a commission to trace a border between the Ottoman Empire and Montenegro in August 1878.

The congress also directs Greece and the Ottoman Empire to negotiate a solution to their border dispute.

The Great Powers expect the Ottomans to ensure that the Albanians will respect the new borders; they ignore the fact that the sultan's military forces are too weak to enforce any settlement and that the Ottomans can only benefit by the Albanians' resistance.

The Sublime Porte, in fact, arms the Albanians and allows them to levy taxes, and when the Ottoman army withdraws from areas awarded to Montenegro under the Treaty of Berlin, Roman Catholic Albanian tribesmen simply take control.

The Albanians' successful resistance to the treaty forces the Great Powers to alter the border, returning Gusinje and Plav to the Ottoman Empire and granting Montenegro the mostly Muslim Albanian-populated coastal town of Ulcinj, but the Albanians there refuse to surrender as well.

Finally, the Great Powers blockade Ulcinj by sea and pressures the Ottoman authorities to bring the Albanians under control.

The Great Powers decide in 1881 to cede Greece only Thessaly and the small Albanian-populated district of Arta.

The Ottoman sultan, faced with growing international pressure to "pacify" the refractory Albanians, dispatch a large army under Dervish Turgut Pasha to suppress the Prizren League and deliver Ulcinj to Montenegro.

Albanians loyal to the empire support the Sublime Porte's military intervention.

In April 1881, Dervish Pasha's ten thousand men capture Prizren and later crush the resistance at Ulcinj.

The Prizren League's leaders and their families are arrested and deported.

Frasheri, who originally receives a death sentence, is imprisoned until 1885 and exiled until his death seven years later.

In the three years it survives, the Prizren League effectively makes the Great Powers aware of the Albanian people and their national interests.

Montenegro and Greece receive much less Albanian-populated territory than they would have won without the league's resistance.

Formidable barriers frustrate Albanian leaders' efforts to instill in their people an Albanian rather than an Ottoman identity.

Divided into four vilayets, Albanians have no common geographical or political nerve center.

The Albanians' religious differences force nationalist leaders to give the national movement a purely secular character that alienates religious leaders.

The most significant factor uniting the Albanians, their spoken language, lacks a standard literary form and even a standard alphabet.

Each of the three available choices, the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts, imply different political and religious orientations opposed by one or another element of the population.

In 1878 there are no Albanian-language schools in the most developed of the Albanian- inhabited areas—Gjirokaster, Berat, and Vlore—where schools conduct classes either in Turkish or in Greek.

Albanian intellectuals begin devising a single, standard Albanian literary language in the late nineteenth century and making demands that it be used in schools.

In Constantinople in 1879, Sami Frasheri founds a cultural and educational organization, the Society for the Printing of Albanian Writings, whose membership comprises Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox Albanians.

Nairn Frasheri, the most-renowned Albanian poet, joins the society and writes and edits textbooks.

Albanian emigres in Bulgaria, Egypt, Italy, Romania, and the United States support the society's work.

Others oppose it.

The Greeks, who dominate the education of Orthodox Albanians, join the Turks in suppressing the Albanians' culture, especially Albanian-language education

In 1886 the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople threatens to excommunicate anyone found reading or writing Albanian, and priests teach that God will not understand prayers uttered in Albanian.