The history of Albania

Albania occupies the mountainous south-western corner of the Balkans, facing Italy across the Adriatic and Ionian seas. In antiquity its land was home to Illyrian tribes and Greek colonies before it became part of the Roman Empire and then Byzantium. Medieval Albanian principalities rose in the gaps between Byzantine, Serbian, Angevin and Venetian power, and under Skanderbeg resisted the Ottomans for a quarter of a century before nearly five hundred years of Ottoman rule, during which most Albanians became Muslim. Independent since 1912, the country passed through a monarchy, Italian occupation and one of the most isolated communist dictatorships in the world before turning to democracy in the early 1990s and towards NATO and the European Union.

Stone tools from caves near Sarandë and on Mount Dajti, above Tirana, show that people lived in the area during the Palaeolithic. Farming villages appeared from about 6000 BCE, at sites such as Maliq near Korçë and around Butrint. In the Bronze Age, from the third millennium BCE, newcomers from the north built burial mounds for clan leaders, and over the following centuries these communities developed into the peoples the Greeks called Illyrians, while the south was home to tribes of Epirus.

The Illyrians were not a single nation but many tribes, among them the Taulantii near the coast, the Ardiaei in the north and the Dardani further inland. They built hill forts, worked iron and traded with the Greek world. Greek colonists founded Epidamnos, later called Dyrrachium and now Durrës, in 627 BCE, and Apollonia, near modern Fier, around 600 BCE. In the south Butrint grew into a Greek town of Epirus. Illyrian kings competed with Philip II of Macedon, whose kingdom became the Macedonian Empire, and with the kings of Epirus. Whether modern Albanians descend from the Illyrians, from another ancient Balkan people such as the Thracians or Dardanians, or from a mixture, is still debated by historians and linguists.

Illyrian piracy on the Adriatic, and the expansion of the Ardiaean kingdom under Queen Teuta, drew Rome across the sea in 229 BCE. After a series of wars, Rome defeated the last Illyrian king, Genthius, at Shkodër in 168 BCE and absorbed the region. Under the Roman Empire the coast and interior became part of the provinces of Illyricum, Macedonia and Epirus. The Via Egnatia, the great road to Byzantium, started at Dyrrachium and Apollonia, and in 48 BCE Julius Caesar and Pompey fought outside Dyrrachium during the Roman civil war. Christianity reached the coast early, and several emperors of the late empire came from the Illyrian provinces.

After the division of the empire the region belonged to the Byzantine Empire. Goths and Huns raided it in the fourth and fifth centuries, and from the sixth and seventh centuries Slavs settled widely in the Balkans, though the coastal towns stayed Byzantine. The First Bulgarian Empire held much of the interior in the ninth and tenth centuries. The name Albanoi, for a people living around Krujë, appears in Byzantine writing in the eleventh century, and from then the Albanians are clearly attested.

In the late eleventh century Normans from southern Italy attacked Dyrrachium, and over the next two centuries the region was fought over by Byzantium, the Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Despotate of Epirus, the Angevin rulers of Naples and the Republic of Venice. Around 1190 local lords founded the Principality of Arbër, centred on Krujë, generally seen as the first Albanian state. In 1272 Charles of Anjou proclaimed a Kingdom of Albania along the coast. In the mid-fourteenth century the Serbian ruler Stefan Dušan conquered most of the land, but after his death in 1355 Albanian noble families such as the Thopia, Balsha, Dukagjini, Kastrioti and Muzaka carved out their own principalities. Venice took control of Durrës, Shkodër and other ports to protect its Adriatic trade.

The Ottoman Empire entered the region in the 1380s, defeating the Balsha at Savra in 1385, and by the 1430s most Albanian lords were Ottoman vassals. Gjergj Kastrioti, a noble's son taken as a hostage and trained at the Ottoman court, where he was given the name Skanderbeg, deserted in 1443 and seized Krujë. In 1444 he united the Albanian nobles in the League of Lezhë. For twenty-five years he defeated Ottoman armies, held Krujë against three sieges, including one led by Sultan Mehmed II, and won support from Venice, Naples and the papacy. After his death in 1468 resistance faded. Krujë fell in 1478 and Venetian-held Shkodër in 1479, and Durrës followed in 1501. Many Albanians fled to southern Italy, where their descendants, the Arbëreshë, still live.

Albanian lands were divided into Ottoman provinces. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries most Albanians converted to Islam, drawn by tax advantages and opportunities in state service, while Catholics remained in the north and Orthodox Christians in the south. The Bektashi Sufi order became strong in the south. Albanians rose high in the empire as soldiers and administrators, and the Köprülü family of grand viziers in the seventeenth century was of Albanian origin. The mountain clans of the north kept a large degree of self-rule under customary law, the Kanun.

As central authority weakened in the eighteenth century, powerful local rulers emerged: the Bushati family in Shkodër and Ali Pasha of Tepelena, who ruled much of southern Albania and northern Greece from Ioannina until the Ottomans killed him in 1822. Ottoman reforms in the nineteenth century, which brought conscription and new taxes, provoked repeated revolts.

When the Congress of Berlin in 1878 proposed giving Albanian-inhabited lands to Montenegro and Serbia, Albanian leaders formed the League of Prizren, in Kosovo, to resist. The league was suppressed in 1881, but it marked the start of a national movement, the Rilindja, which promoted schooling in Albanian. In 1908 a congress in Monastir adopted the Latin alphabet for the language.

The Balkan Wars of 1912 brought Serbian, Montenegrin and Greek armies into Albanian lands. On 28 November 1912, at Vlorë, Ismail Qemali proclaimed independence. In 1913 the great powers recognised an Albanian state but left Kosovo and other areas with large Albanian populations to Serbia, Montenegro and Greece, so that roughly half of all Albanians lived outside the new country. A German prince, Wilhelm of Wied, was installed as ruler in 1914 but left after six months. During the First World War Albania was occupied by the armies of several states on both sides, and the 1920 Congress of Lushnjë restored a national government, with Tirana as the new capital.

Politics in the 1920s was a struggle between reformers led by Bishop Fan Noli, who briefly took power in the June Revolution of 1924, and the northern chieftain Ahmet Zogu, who returned with Yugoslav help at the end of that year. Zogu became president in 1925 and in 1928 proclaimed himself King Zog I. He brought order and some modernisation but grew dependent on loans from Italy, which gained a strong hold over the economy and the army.

On 7 April 1939 Benito Mussolini's Italy invaded. Zog fled, and Albania was joined to the Italian crown. In 1940 Italy used it as a base to attack Greece, a campaign that went badly. After the Axis conquest of Yugoslavia in 1941, Italy attached Kosovo and western Macedonia to its Albanian protectorate. When Italy surrendered in 1943, Germany occupied the country. During the Second World War a nationalist resistance, the Balli Kombëtar, and a communist-led National Liberation Movement fought the occupiers and each other. Albania was also notable for sheltering Jews: its Jewish population, swollen by refugees from elsewhere in Europe, survived the war almost entirely, protected by Albanians of all faiths acting on the code of hospitality called besa.

The communist partisans, supported by Yugoslav communists and Allied supplies, took Tirana in November 1944, and their leader Enver Hoxha ruled until his death in 1985. The new regime executed or imprisoned opponents, seized land and businesses and created a pervasive secret police, the Sigurimi. Thousands were executed and tens of thousands passed through prisons and labour camps, and whole families of suspected enemies were sent into internal exile.

Hoxha's foreign alignments shifted repeatedly in the Cold War. At first Albania was virtually a satellite of Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, but when Tito broke with Joseph Stalin in 1948 Hoxha sided with Moscow and purged pro-Yugoslav leaders. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Hoxha refused to follow, and in 1961 broke with the Soviet Union, turning to China under Mao Zedong for aid. That alliance ended in 1978, after which Albania pursued near-total self-reliance. In 1967 the regime closed every mosque and church and declared Albania an atheist state, and the 1976 constitution enshrined it. Hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers were built against invasions that never came. Literacy, electrification and health care improved, but by the 1980s Albania was the poorest country in Europe.

Hoxha's successor, Ramiz Alia, made cautious changes as communism collapsed across eastern Europe in the revolutions of 1989. Student protests in December 1990 forced him to allow opposition parties, and thousands of Albanians fled by sea to Italy. The communists, renamed the Socialist Party, won the first multi-party elections in 1991, but the Democratic Party under Sali Berisha won in 1992. Rapid privatisation and emigration transformed the economy, but in 1996 and 1997 the collapse of fraudulent pyramid schemes, in which a large share of the population had invested their savings, triggered an uprising. Army depots were looted, about 2,000 people were killed, and an Italian-led multinational force, Operation Alba, was deployed to restore order. The Socialists won elections later in 1997, and a new constitution was approved in 1998.

In 1999, during the war in Kosovo, Albania took in about half a million refugees from the neighbouring province. Politics remained a bitter contest between the Socialists and the Democrats, with Berisha returning as prime minister from 2005 to 2013. Albania joined NATO in 2009 and became a candidate for European Union membership in 2014.

The Socialist leader Edi Rama, a former mayor of Tirana, became prime minister in 2013 and won further elections in 2017 and 2021. His governments pursued judicial reform aimed at corruption and organised crime, and tourism grew strongly. An earthquake near Durrës in November 2019 killed 51 people. Accession negotiations with the European Union formally opened in July 2022, and in the parliamentary election of 11 May 2025 the Socialists won a fourth consecutive term, with Rama promising EU membership by 2030. International observers described that vote as competitive but marred by misuse of state resources, and the opposition alleged fraud.

In 2026 plans for luxury resorts on protected coastline, including a project at Zvërnec near Vlorë backed by a company linked to Jared Kushner, set off weeks of protests in Tirana, known as the "flamingo revolution", with demonstrators demanding Rama's resignation. Members of the European Parliament warned that the plans could put Albania's accession talks at risk. The 2023 census counted about 2.4 million people, down from 2.8 million in 2011, reflecting decades of emigration, and large Albanian communities live in Kosovo, North Macedonia, Italy and Greece.