Inside 17th century Kosovo

[Beast]

Posting sources from mostly 17th century Kosovo, but I will also post some texts from 16th century and will possibly include the area of Skopje/Shkupi (North Macedonia) .

Let's start with the the Turkish traveller Evliya Celebi in his journey through Kosovo in the 1660s, taken some parts of it where he gives insight of some of these areas about the inhabitants:
About the region of Peja in Western Kosovo:

At the base of the fortress flows the ..... river, which originates in the mountains of Peja (4) in Albania, joins the Llap river, and flows down until it joins the Morava. In these regions, this fortress is called Mitrovica of Kosova. There is also a fortress called Mitrovica of Srem, (5) but it is in ruins.

The Llapi river in NE-Kosovo and about the inhabitants of Vushtrri:

Through this part of the plain flows the Llap river, which has its source in Albania, (8) joins the ..... river at the foot of the aforementioned fortress of Mitrovica, and then joins the Morava river, which flows into the Danube.

The inhabitants of Vushtrria are Rumelians. Most of them do not speak Bosnian, but do speak Albanian and Turkish. They wear broadcloth garments and frontier-style red calpacs with low crests of fur and sable. They turn around

From there we journeyed eastwards and arrived at the fortress of ..... i.e., Kaçanik. The origin of this name is that some Albanian brigands once conducted a raid on the town of Skopje and then fled as far as this point where, expecting to find a halting-place, they were massacred instead. So it was called Kaçanlar ("Fugitives"), which became corrupted to Kaçanik.

SOURCE: 1660
Evliya Chelebi:
Seyahatname
- a Journey through Kosova






Military archives from 1689-90 from Italian/German during Austrian-Ottoman wars in Kosovo:

The reputation of this commander grew more and more because of his orderliness such that 5,000 Arnauts [Muslim Albanians] in Pristina [Prishtina] who had risen against the Turks and [the inhabitants of] many of the major towns in the vicinity had given to understand that they would submit to the rule of the Emperor.

Prizren, the capital of Albania:

For his part, he continued his march and arrived on the 6th, as reported earlier, in Prisiran [Prizren], the Capital of Albania, where he was welcomed by the Archbishop (5) [36r] of that country and by the Patriarch of Clementa with their various religious ceremonies.

Outside of Priserin [Prizren] there were at least 6,000 Albanese [Albanian] troops as well as others who had formerly been in the pay of the Turks and who are known as Arnauts.

Some parts where it mentions Albanians and Serbs:

Among the many and varying reports [34v] Piccolomini received was one that informed him that Mamut Bassa [Mahmut Pasha] had withdrawn from Scopia with 8,000 people, of whom 6,000 were soldiers, mostly Rascians and Albanese [Albanians] and was camped in a valley to the right of the town, two hours from our Imperial troops; and they were far enough from Scopia to resist the General and to get away from the disease that had taken over the town.

When German troops marched by, they gave off three volleys of fire as a sign of their pleasure and then swore an oath of allegiance to the Emperor according to their custom. Piccolomini thus had over 20,000 Rascians and Albanese under his orders, all men of martial temperament, who were willing to undertake any endeavour, however great it should be, in accordance with the will of the General.

Thereafter, on the 13th of November, the Arnauts and many Rascian infantrymen, 1,000 men in all, and 100 German cavalrymen under the orders of Herr Sanoski, a captain from Piccolomini’s regiment, were attacked two miles from Prisserin [Prizren] by a force of 1,500 Turks coming in the direction of Skopje who, having been successful in their assault, withdrew and left behind in the field of battle 80 dead on both sides and a similar number of prisoners, of whom only 12 had been taken by our Imperial forces.

There were also various disagreements with the leaders of the Arnauts whom the Duke ordered to give up their weapons and disband their militia and to pay tribute to the Germans, as the peasants did. This was an intolerable insult to this free and martial nation.

His Imperial Majesty discovered that of the 20,000 Arnauts who under Piccolomini’s influence had sworn allegiance to the Emperor, only 300 remained to be relied on, because they had been so badly treated by His Grace and the other officers. Had the Duke not changed his mind when he realised the mistake, he would not have had a single one of them under his command. Even though the remaining men were marching among our Imperial forces, in their hearts they were unwilling.

SOURCE: 1689
Kosovo in the Great Turkish War
of 1683-1699

[Beast]

More from the Austrian-Ottoman wars in 1689-90, which confirms further that the 20,000 people that supported the Austrians in Kosovo against the Ottomans were Albanians:

Among the papers of Ludwig von Baden in Karlsruhe, there is a copy of an intercepted letter, in French, written by a secretary of the English Embassy in Istanbul on 19 January 1690; it reports that the ‘Germans’ in Kosovo ‘have made contact with 20,000 Albanians [“Albanois”], who have turned their weapons against the Turks.*' This may be significant, because the writer’s information presumably came through Ottoman channels, and the Ottoman word for ‘Albanian; ‘arnavud; was not simply a geographical term, but referred to a people with a distinct language

About the town of Prizren in early 17th century and it's inhabitants later during Austrian-Ottoman wars:

Most of this evidence points, then, towards the conclusion that the bulk of the people who rallied to Piccolomini in Prizren—both the 5,000 who came out of the town to greet him, and the others who made up the total of 20,000—were, by our modern criteria, Albanian; but this type of evidence may still be open to some doubt. The doubt can be largely removed by considering the ethnic composition of Prizren. Prizren was a large town, estimated to contain 10,000 households in 1670. In 1681 Bogdani reported that just 30 of these were Catholic. Reports from earlier in the century stated that there were three times as many Orthodox Serb households as Catholic ones: in 1624 Pjetér Mazrreku reported that Prizren had roughly 200 Catholic inhabitants and 600 ‘Serviani. But the great bulk of the population—12,000 people in 1624—were “Muslims, almost all of them Albanians (‘Turchi, quasi tutti Albanesi’). There is no reason to think that this preponderance fell during the century; indeed, the steady Islamization of surrounding areas makes it likely that the proportion of Muslims grew. No doubt the 5,000 who came out to welcome Piccolomini did include many of the local Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox; but they can hardly have accounted for more than a fifth of that crowd. It is surely significant that one of the earliest printed accounts of these events, an anonymous text based on original documents, refers to Piccolomini being greeted at Prizren by ‘5,000 Arnauts, who were partly Christian Albanians and partly Muslim Albanians’ ( 5,000 Arnauten, so zum Theil Christlich- Theils Turkischer Albaneser waren).”

And the anonymous Italian manuscript history, which was also clearly based on dispatches and other documents kept in Vienna, says that “There stood outside Prizren 6,000 and more Albanians, including the same ones who were previously paid wages by the Turks, and who are called “Arnauts”

Rebels, Believers, Survivors Studies In The History Of The Albanians Malcolm Noel ( 2020)

[Beast]

About the Has region in Kosovo, had been Catholic but people converted to Islam:

But the pledged total of 20,000 may well have included other Albanians from areas close to Prizren who were no longer Catholic, having been converted to Islam within the previous two or three generations—for example, the Shulla or Has region, where, as Pjetér Mazrreku reported in 1634, there had previously been 50 Catholic parishes but were now only five.”” Mazrreku also noted that the conversion to Islam was quite superficial; in 1671 another report on this area stated that ‘28 years ago there were very many Christians [sc. Catholics]: now there remain 300 women and very few men, the rest having abjured their faith in order to escape impositions and taxes

Suhareka/Suva Reka in Kosovo, a source from the Albanian Gregor Mazrreku gives us insight that it was Catholic in the 17th century whose inhabitants then converted to Islam:

In 1651 Gregor Mazrreku wrote that all the men in Suhareké (Suva Reka), where there had previously been 160 Catholic households, had gone over to Islam, but that 36 or 37 of their wives remained Catholic

Rebels, Believers, Survivors Studies In The History Of The Albanians Malcolm Noel ( 2020)

[Beast]

The Italian writer Lazaro Soranzo, in the 16th century, gives us an indication about the inhabitants of Prizren:

However, as that last quotation may suggest, there was some flexibility and haziness in the usage of these terms by West Europeans during this period. Some writers used the terms ‘Albaniar’ and ‘Serb’ in a way that seems to have acknowledged linguistic and religious differences (for example, Lazaro Soranzo, in the late sixteenth century, writing of ‘Albanians, who live as Catholics, and observing that Prizren was inhabited ‘more by Albanians than by Serbs’).

Rebels, Believers, Survivors Studies In The History Of The Albanians Malcolm Noel ( 2020)

[Beast]

The towns in Kosovo, mainly Muslim Albanian, lost considerable part of their population due to the wars in the 17th century:

But on the other hand there is evidence of a quite large drop in the population of the towns, most of which did not regain their pre-1690 levels until the nineteenth century; and the towns—of which this part of the Balkans possessed an unusually dense network—were overwhelmingly populated by Muslim Albanians. (Jovan Cvijics claims about the departure of 35-40,000 Serb families from Kosovo were implausible not only on numerical grounds, but also because he described those families as mostly urban.)

Pjeter Bogdanis report in 1681 about the inhabitants of Peja, Muslim Albanians I believe:

When an observer such as Joseph Miiller considered the small size of the Serb Orthodox population of Pejé in the 1830s—just 130 households, compared with more than 2,000 Muslim households—he attributed this sorry state of affairs to the ‘Great Exoduses’ of the past; but if he had been able to consult Bogdani’s detailed report of 1681, he would have found that at that time the Serbs had just 100 households, and the Muslims 1,000.

Rebels, Believers, Survivors Studies In The History Of The Albanians Malcolm Noel ( 2020)

[Beast]

The Archbishop of Bar, Gjergj Bardhi, when he travelled to the area of Gjakova and Prizren in 1638 wrote it was inhabited by Albanians:

In the year 1638, the Archbishop of Bar, Gjergj Bardhi, reported that Gjakova had 320 Muslim homes, 20 Catholic homes and 20 Orthodox homes, and wrote that "the area is inhabited by Albanians and the Albanian language is spoken there".[13]

Gjergj Bardhi, during his visit in Prizren, wrote in 1638 that the area was inhabited by Albanians and that the Albanian language was spoken there.[45

Same thing for the Turkish geographer Hajji Kallfa when he travelled to Prizren in 1630's he wrote it was inhabited by Albanians:

In the 1630's, the Ottoman Turkish traveller Hajji Khalifa wrote that the town of Prizren was inhabited by Albanians.[46][47]

Pjeter Mazreku reported in the early 17th that the town of Shkup/Skopje was inhabited by Muslim Albanians:

In 1623-1624, the Catholic Pjeter Mazreku reported the town was inhabited by 'Turks (Muslims), majority of them being Albanians, the rest are of Asiatic origin', Mazreku further wrote; 'there are also Jews, Serbs and some Greeks in the town'.[111][112]

[Beast]

Some reports about Catholic Albanians and their Islamization in some areas of Kosova in the 17th century and the state of the Serb Orthodox and Catholic relations in Kosova:

While some Catholic culture was kept alive in Kosovo, the general state of the Church was not good. Complaints about the lack of priests continued well into the seventeenth century. (One report of 1630 said that 'thousands' of Catholics in the Prizren area were being lost for this reason.) Some of the clergy were of poor quality: according to the Franciscan who visited Gjakova in 1638, Catholics were converting to Islam not merely because of the absence of priests, but because of the negligence or ignorance of the ones who were there. In 1661 Pjeter Bogdani reported that the parish priest of Prizren, Gregor Mazrreku, 'spends too much time boozing, drinking to the point of complete unconsciousness’. Sixteen years later even Bogdani's uncle, the Archbishop, was criticized as ‘rather negligent' by the secretary of the Propaganda Fide. (He also noted that the bishop of the northern Albanian diocese of Pulat had been imprisoned for many years in Rome, 'for having been unruly, and because of doubts about his faith'

Ndre Bogdani wrote the Orthodox in Kosovo were protected by the Ottomans and described the Orthodox as the Catholics' worst enemies:

The Catholic Church in Kosovo was poor, and was frequently under pressure not only from the Ottoman authorities but also from the Orthodox Church, which tried to force the Catholics to pay it ecclesiastical dues. Within one year of the reinstatement of the Serbian Patriarchate, the new Patriarch Makarije had obtained an imperial firman (decree) that all Christians in his territory must pay their church taxes to him. 50 Such moves by the Orthodox Church, which were always eventually reversed by the diplomatic efforts of the Catholic powers in Istanbul, were a recurrent feature of Orthodox-Catholic relations: a similar firman was granted, for example, in 1661 and only withdrawn in 1665/6, thanks to the efforts of a Scottish general, Walter Leslie, who was acting as an envoy of the Austrian Emperor. A letter survives from Ndre Bogdani in Janjevo in 1664, complaining bitterly about this; he said that the Patriarch, who resided in the nearby monastery of Gracanica, was trying to extract a tribute of 100 scudi (roughly 15,000 akces) from the Catholics, and described the Orthodox - who he said were protected by the Ottomans - as the Catholics' worst enemies.

It is certainly true that the Orthodox Church was looked on with less suspicion by the Ottoman government: the Catholics owed their religious allegiance to a foreign power, the Papacy, whereas the Serbian, Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox Churches all lay within the territory of the Empire

Compared with the Catholic Church, the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo was certainly much larger, richer, more established and more privileged. This helps to explain why a much lower proportion of its members converted to Islam.

- Kosovo: A Short History

[Beast]

Some of the Catholic documents also note cases of Albanians moving into Kosovo from northern Albania. Pjeter Mazrreku reported from Prishtina in 1624: 'not long ago ten Catholic families came from Albania to live in this area’; in Suha Reka in 1637 Gjergj Bardhi found fifteen Catholic families who had fled there from the Dukagjin mountains because of 'assassins'; and Gregor Mazrreku found several Albanians at a nearby village in 1651, who had also ‘fled from the mountains’. Gregor Mazrreku noted that most of these had become Muslims since their arrival. It seems likely that people fled from the Malesi either because of blood-feuds or because they had been punished under the Kanun of Lek Dukagjin (which, it will be recalled, said that people guilty of serious crimes should have their houses burnt down and be expelled). Such people, arriving ina new area, would naturally feel more unattached to the local Catholic community, and would be more easily tempted to make the switch to Islam. Larger groups emigrating together were much more rare; but in these cases there was more religious cohesion. A group of thirty-five Catholic Albanian families from Albania was noted at the mining town of Kratovo, east of Skopje, in 1637; they were already learning the Slav language, and it is likely that they were eventually assimilated by the local Slav-speaking Catholic community. Overall, however, one conclusion is certain: the number of people migrating into the Kosovo area from northern Albania during this period was, relative to the already existing Albanian population of Kosovo, extremely small. The Malesi was almost entirely Catholic; the reports by the Catholic priests in Kosovo are thorough and very detailed; and it is not possible to imagine that many thousands of Catholic immigrants could have escaped their notice - even (or, perhaps, especially) if they did not remain Catholic for long.

- Kosovo: A Short History