Prizren League Resistance

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 had 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 (an abortive treaty between Russian and the Ottoman Empire, signed on March 3, 1878, which had assigned Albanian-populated lands to Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria), but not to create an independent Albania.At fir, the Ottoman authorities support the Prizren League, but the Sublime Porte presses the delegates to declare themselves to be first and foremost Ottoman subjects rather than Albanians.

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

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 the maintenance of Ottoman suzerainty.In July 1878, the league sends a memorandum to the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin, which has been called to settle the unresolved problems of Turkish War, demanding 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, Shkodër, Prizren, Prevesa, and Janina.

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

"In August 1878, the Congress of Berlin orders a commission to trace a border between the Ottoman Empire and Montenegro.

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, ignoring 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 pressure 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.Faced with growing international pressure "to pacify" the refractory Albanians, the sultan dispatches 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 10,000 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.

No related events match the current filters.