who have penetrated their haunts,* seem as if directly borrowed from the Odyssey. Water for ablutions before meals is presented to each guest in succession by a female attendant, as at the banquets of Menelaus and Alkinous; meat is cut into small pieces and roasted on spits under the hungry eyes of the expectant wayfarers, precisely after the homely fashion that Homer is never weary of describing; the guest surrenders his weapons to his host in token of confidence, just as Theoklymenus resigned his spear to Telemachus, when the Ithacan prince received him on board his ship,† and as Telemachus in turn delivered his arms to Eumæus on entering the swineherd's cottage; while the flight of the homicide Theoklymenus from Argos is paralleled by the wanderings of many a fugitive Albanian, who has fallen under the terrible ban of family vengeance. Indeed, we can scarcely doubt that the 'Skipetars,' or mountaineers' of modern Albania, are the direct descendants of the Thesprotians, Molossians, and other ancient tribes, whose manners were studied by the poet of the Odyssey on the mainland of Epirus, and who, even at that remote period, were already being thrust into the background of antiquity by the growing glories of the young Hellenic world. Nevertheless, the question Who are the Albanians?' has been very variously answered, and is even yet involved in considerable obscurity. The district anciently known as 'Albania' lay in the angle formed by the Caucasus with the Caspian, and a kind of counter-Argonautic expedition has been invented for the express purpose of connecting Colchis with Colchinium, which, as the dilapidated seaport of Dulcigno, enjoyed last autumn a brief blaze of unexpected celebrity. Efforts directed towards establishing the Pelasgic origin of the race may be described as so many attempts to find the value of one unknown quantity in terms of another; but M. Benloew's conclusion § that the Skipetars of Epirus, as well as the rustic Albanians of Arcadia and Attica, and the islanders of Hydra and Spetzas, are the modern representatives of a population primitively diffused through the whole of the Grecian peninsula, merits attention as the result of much careful etymological enquiry. Leaving the region of speculation, we pass to the less inviting, but more tenable ground of fact. * Albania: a Narrative of Recent Travel, by E. F. Knight, 1880, pp. 223-5. Ibid. xvi. 40. Odyssey, xv. 282. In La Grèce avant les Grecs,' which should be read in conjunction with the strictly etymological treatise quoted at the head of this article. ар The emergence into history of the people known to us as Albanians dates from the year 1079 A.D., when a body of troops of that name figures in the army of Nicephorus Vasilakes, one of the many pretenders to empire who fill a brief space in Byzantine annals. A few years later, Anna Comnena mentions them as Arvanitai, the title by which they are still known to the Greeks, and of which the Turkish Arnaut' is an obvious corruption. That the word represents a tribal pellation of considerable antiquity appears from the circumstance that the Albanoi, with their chief town Albanopolis (the modern Elbassan), find a place in Ptolemy's geography.* It seems probable that the name, at first distinctively applied to a clan dwelling in the mountains behind Dyrrachium, was gradually extended, by one of those caprices of nomenclature apparently designed for the express confusion of etymologists, to all the inhabitants of Epirus and southern Illyria. Indeed, the term Arberia has still, among the Tosks,' or southern division of the Albanian race, a local signification, indicating the Chaonian highlands behind Avlona; while Arbenia, the Gheg' or northern equivalent, signifies the whole land of Albania.† If, as has been plausibly conjectured, the word contains the same root found in Alpine,' 'Albion,' Auvergne,' &c., Albanian' would be simply a Celtic translation of the indigenous national appellative Skipetar' (from skip, a rock). Of a migration of the Skipetars to their present home no tradition has been preserved. They are what the Greeks called autochthonous,' or 'sprung from the soil '-their coming, in other words, belongs to the voiceless ages. Where, two thousand five hundred years ago, Epirot and Illyrian tribes dwelt, the Tosk and Gheg branches of the Skipetar stock now dwell; and we infer continuity of descent partly from the negative evidence of history, partly from the positive evidence of language. There is no record of the arrival in the land of any people who can be identified with the modern Albanians; and the modern Albanians speak a tongue of the same family as, but more primitive in its structure than, either Greek or Latin, and probably of coeval formation with the hoary Sanskrit itself. The highlanders of Albania, like the Basques of the Pyrenees, must then be regarded as a relic of a long-past epoch of migration-a fragment of the primeval * iii. 13, 23. p. 230. † Von Hahn, ‘Albanesische Studien,' p. granite of humanity, overlaid elsewhere by strata of every subsequent age, from Silurian to Pleistocene. The survival of the race is doubtless due in great measure to the rugged nature of its habitat. Wave after wave of invasion has broken round the foot of Scardus and Pindus: but each has in turn retired, leaving the heart of the country unconquered and unsubmerged. In A.D. 493 the Goths came under Ostroilus, who reigned as King of New Epirus (Upper Albania) until swept away by Justinian. In the seventh century began the long struggle for possession between Servians and Byzantines, which ended in the fourteenth only with the disintegration of both empires. An interlude of a century and a half was afforded by the Bulgarian inundation, arrested in 1019 by the exploits of Basil the Slayer. Indeed, the memory of that terrible Ugrian irruption was so recent, and its traces still so evident in 1081, when the Normans under Robert Guiscard began, with the siege of Durazzo (as Dyrrachium was by that time called), their brief, though brilliant career of conquest, that the land lying east of the Adriatic was known to them by no other name than that of Bulgaria. The three succeeding centuries exhibit a confused scene of conflicts between Constantinople and Scutari, the Servian capital, resulting in the alternate destruction and re-establishment (with continually waning dimensions) of the Byzantine Themes' of Dyrrhachium and Nicopolis. With the appearance on the scene, however, of the great Czar of Servia, Stephen Dushan, surnamed Silni' (the Mighty), events assumed a more definite form. He reigned without dispute over Slavs, Greeks, and Albanians, extended his dominions from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth, and, but for his unexpected death, December 26, 1355, a Slav instead of an Ottoman power might even now be seated on the shores of the Bosphorus. His empire, however, thereupon fell to pieces as completely as that of Alexander or Tamerlane. No less than eight petty vassals threw off the yoke imposed upon them by his energetic genius, and the short, troublous story of Albanian independence began to unfold itself. 6 It opened prosperously with a victory and a youthful hero. Nicephorus II. took advantage of the general confusion to reassert the Byzantine claims upon Epirus, but was defeated and slain in 1358 by the Albanians under Charles Thopia, in a battle fought at Achelous, a village near the Gulf of Arta The victory, indeed, was gained over a foe of the time past, while the far more terrible foe of the time to come had yet to be dealt with, and the victor proved to be made of that in different stuff out of which good fortune moulds a sham hero, and adversity a too genuine traitor. Charles Thopia, with a younger brother George, was the offspring of a romantic and unfortunate marriage. His father, Andrew Thopia, a member of a powerful Albanian clan, had carried off from Durazzo a daughter of King Robert of Naples, in defiance of her previous engagement to a rival suitor. The offence was aggravated by the feudal dependence of the Thopias upon the House of Anjou, who had succeeded in establishing certain ill-defined and worse-founded claims to the possession of some portions of Albania and the adjacent islands. A tragical penalty was exacted. King Robert enticed the two culprits with fair words to Naples, and there the brief romance of their wedded life ended on the scaffold. Their infant children were, however, rescued and brought up in the mountain-fortress of Croya, whence the elder emerged to win the laurels of the field of Achelous. He now proclaimed himself King of Albania,' and added, in token of his royal descent, the lily of France to the crowned lion of his ancestral shield. His dominions, indeed, were not extensive. In the north, a Slav chieftain, named Balsha, had established an independent principality, enlarged by his three sons until it included Montenegro and the larger part of Upper Albania. In the south, a Servian despot reigned at Joannina, whose power was continually threatened, and his sway curtailed, by the hostility of the surrounding native rulers. Thus there was left to the King of Albania' little more than the rugged district of Mat, isolated in the heart of the land-a county rather than a kingdom. He succeeded, however, in bringing his small domain into better harmony with his large title, and at the same time gratifying the vengeance he had vowed against his maternal relatives, by the capture of Durazzo, the last Adriatic stronghold of the House of Anjou. But this illusory triumph was only a prelude to the disaster, and the worse disgrace, amidst which his life closed. Brought into conflict with his powerful brother-in-law, Balsha II., he imitated the examples of Julian and Narses, by inviting the presence of his country's worst enemies. At his word, 40,000 Turks under the Grand Vizier, Chaireddin, swarmed over the passes of Pindus, defeated and slew Balsha in the salt-covered plain of Saura, and then, by a just retribution, turned their arms against their miserable ally. Their purpose was, however, for the moment, not conquest, but plunder; and a heritage, wasted indeed and insecure, but entire, descended to his son in 1388, and on his death, four years later, was quietly occupied by the Venetians. The subtle and self-seeking policy of the Republic of the Lagoons happened at that period to coincide in the main with the general interests of Christendom. Restricted on the Italian side by the well-compacted strength of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, her statesmen sought indemnification in the gradual extension of her territory along the Dalmatian and Albanian shore. Patient, wary, sagacious, they missed no chance of aggrandisement which the intestine discord and external weakness of their neighbours offered to them. Step by step they secured their footing on the Adriatic, gaining ground now by the foreclosing of a mortgage, now by the falling in of an inheritance-acquiring a town here as the fruit of a brief and bloodless campaign, there again as the equivalent of so many silver ducats doled out yearly to some imprudent and impecunious princelet. Whoever lost, Venice, on the whole, gained; whoever receded, Venice, on the whole, advanced. She alone, of the Christian powers menaced by the deadly peril of Ottoman attack, knew how to turn to account the breathing space afforded by the overthrow of Bajazet on the plain of Angora. and understood how to consolidate her position before the customary expedient of fratricide should have restored to the nascent empire internal unity and aggressive efficiency. Thus, when Amurath II. began, in 1421, his long and eventful reign, the banner of St. Mark floated over Durazzo, Alessio (the ancient Lissus), Scutari, Dulcigno, and Antivari; the entire seaboard from the roads of Durazzo to the mouth of the Tagliamento was-except where Ragusa and a few other independent cities broke the line-Venetian; the possession and fortification of Corfu barred the entrance to the Adriatic, making it practically a Venetian lake; and a large part of Albania sought the protection, or acknowledged the supremacy, of the great Republic. That protection was sorely needed. There seemed no longer any hope of presenting a united front to the common enemy. With the death of Balsha III. in 1421, vanished the last relic of a predominant dynasty, and the native system of government by clans once more exerted without restraint its disinte grating action. In the southern division of the country the Skipetar race had just experienced a crushing reverse. Not only in Epirus, but in Etolia and Acarnania, the Albanian element of the population had attained considerable importance, and its chiefs much turbulent power, when Charles Tocco, 'Count Palatine' of Cephallenia, sprung from a Neapolitan |