A variety of offenses against women served as an igniting spark for blood feuds. Many girls were engaged to marry in their infancy by their parents. If later the girl did not wish to marry the man whom the parents had chosen for her and married another, in all likelihood a blood feud would ensue. Among the Tosks, religious beliefs and customs, rather than clan and tribal traditions, were more important in regulating marriages.

The family had for centuries presented the basic, most important unit in the social structure of the country. One aspect of this was the deep devotion of a person to his parents and family. This feeling took a striking form because the family was a social unit occupying to a great extent the place of the state. Children were brought up to respect their elders and, above all, their father, whose word was law in the confines of his family.

Upon the death of the father the authority of the family devolved upon the oldest male of the family. The females of the household, with the exception of the mother, occupied an inferior position. The unwritten law of family life was based on the assumption that a daughter was part of the family until she married. When the time came for sons to set up their own households, all parental property was equally divided among them; the females did not share in this division.

Geographical conditions affected Tosk social organization. The region's accessibility led to its coming much more firmly under Turkish rule. This rule in turn resulted in the breakup of the large, independent family-type units and their replacement by large estates owned by powerful Muslim landowners, each with his own retinues, fortresses, and large numbers of tenant peasants to work the lands. Their allegiance to the sultans in the period before 1912 was secured by the granting of administrative positions either at home or elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire.

The large estates were usually confined to the plains, but the process of their consolidation was a continuing one. Landowning beys would get peasants into their debt and thus establish themselves as semifeudal patrons of formerly independent villagers. In this way a large Muslim aristocracy developed in the south, whose life style was in marked contrast both to that of the chieftains of the highlands in the north and to that of the peasantry, the majority of whom assumed the characteristics of an oppressed social class. As late as the 1930s two-thirds of the rich land in central and southern parts of the country belonged to the large landowners.

There was a sharp contrast between the tribal society of the Geg highlanders and the passive, oppressed Tosk peasantry, living mostly on the large estates of the beys and often represented in the political field by the beys themselves. This semifeudal society in the south survived well into the twentieth century because of the lack of a strong middle class. After independence in 1912, however, a small Tosk middle class began to develop, which in the 1920-24 period, having common interests with the more enlightened beys, played a major role in attempts to create a modern society. But the advent of Zogu in 1925 as a strong ruler put an end to Tosk influence and, from that time until the Italian invasion in 1939, Zog cemented his power in the tribal north by governing through a number of strong tribal and clan chiefs. To secure the loyalty of these chiefs, he placed them on the government payroll and sent several of them back to their tribes with the military rank of colonel.

In the 1939-44 period general anarchy prevailed throughout the country, and in the north the tribal chieftains assumed their old independent positions. The three major resistance movements that developed during World War II represented the principal social classes then in existence in the country. The Communist-dominated National Liberation Movement was composed chiefly of low-level Tosk intellectuals and bureaucrats, some labor leaders, and a few chieftains from the Geg areas, such as Haxhi Leshi, who was head of state in 1970. The movement derived its main support from the small working class and the poor peasants.

The nationalist Balli Kombetar (National Front) was composed of nationalist beys and Orthodox intellectuals and derived its support from well-to-do peasants, merchants, and businessmen. The Legality Movement, a pro-Zog organization, was headed by a chieftain from Mat, and its supporters were confined to that region. Farther north the resistance groups were led by the local chieftains, such as Muharem Bajraktari and Gani bey Kryeziu. The collaborators with the Italian authorities were composed of reactionary beys, Geg chieftains (both Muslim and Catholic), and a small group of intellectuals that had embraced the fascist ideology. This group had little or no popular support.

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION UNDER COMMUNIST RULE

The general class structure of the country at the advent of the Communist regime in 1944 consisted of the peasants and workers making up the lower class and a small upper class. The peasants represented over 80 percent of the total population, most of whom lived at or below subsistence level. Chiefly because of the old grievances against the landowning beys and the promises made by the National Liberation Movement (which presented itself as a purely patriotic, democratic movement for agrarian reforms), a large number of peasants, especially the tenant and landless ones, sided with the movement ([see ch. 1], General Character of the Society).