Skanderbeg

Gjergj Kastrioti, known as Skanderbeg, was an Albanian lord who served the Ottoman sultans for some twenty years and then turned against them, leading Albanian resistance from 1443 until his death in 1468. Fighting mostly in the mountains of what is now northern Albania, he defeated a long series of Ottoman armies and twice saw off sieges of his fortress of Krujë led by the sultans themselves. He is the national hero of Albania.

Skanderbeg was born around 1405, probably in the village of Sinë; historians now broadly accept the year, though no birth record survives. His father, Gjon Kastrioti, held lands in north-central Albania and, like many Balkan lords, became a vassal of the Ottoman sultan, paying tribute and supplying troops. As was customary, he sent sons to the sultan's court as hostages. Skanderbeg went to Edirne as a young man, converted to Islam, trained in the palace school and rose in the service of Murad II. The Ottomans named him Iskender Bey, "Lord Alexander", a name that stuck. By 1440 he governed the district of Dibra.

In November 1443, during the Battle of Niš against the crusading army of John Hunyadi, Skanderbeg abandoned the Ottomans with some 300 Albanians. He rode to Krujë and, using a forged order from the sultan, took control of the town. He returned to Christianity and raised a red banner bearing a black double-headed eagle, a design echoed in Albania's flag today. On 2 March 1444, in the Venetian town of Lezhë, he brought the leading Albanian noble families together in a military alliance known as the League of Lezhë, the first time much of Albania had been united under one leader.

Skanderbeg's forces, usually 10,000 to 15,000 men, relied on mobility, ambush and the mountain terrain to defeat much larger armies, beginning at Torvioll in 1444. Relations with the Republic of Venice, which feared his growing power on its coast, broke down into open war in 1447 and 1448 before a peace treaty. In 1450 Murad II besieged Krujë with an army perhaps 100,000 strong, but the garrison held out, and the sultan withdrew in October. Short of money, in 1451 he signed the Treaty of Gaeta with Alfonso V of Aragon and Naples, accepting nominal Neapolitan overlordship in return for military aid.

The new sultan, Mehmed II, sent repeated expeditions into Albania. Skanderbeg suffered a costly defeat at Berat in the mid-1450s, and some of his own allies, including his nephew Hamza, went over to the Ottomans. But in September 1457 he surprised and routed a large invading army at Albulena, and Pope Calixtus III named him a captain-general of the Holy See. In 1461 he crossed to Italy with a small force to help Alfonso's son Ferdinand I against his rivals. Pope Pius II planned to make him a leading commander of a new crusade, but the pope's death in August 1464 ended the project.

In 1466 Mehmed himself besieged Krujë a second time. When he failed, he built the fortress of Elbasan nearby and left an army to keep up the pressure. In April 1467 Skanderbeg and his ally Lekë Dukagjini broke the siege, killing the Ottoman commander. In January 1468, while meeting the remaining Albanian nobles at Lezhë, Skanderbeg fell ill, most likely with malaria, and died on 17 January.

Without him, resistance faltered. Krujë fell in 1478 and Shkodër in 1479, and many Albanians fled to the Kingdom of Naples, where their descendants form the Arbëreshë communities of southern Italy. Skanderbeg's fame in western Europe as a defender of Christendom was immediate and lasting. In the nineteenth century he became the central symbol of the Albanian national movement.

Our 1400 map shows the Balkans as Ottoman power spread across them in his childhood, and the 1492 map shows Albania absorbed into the Ottoman Empire after his death.