The Turco-Venetian war towards the close of the seventeenth century led at last to the Venetian occupation of Valona, then a place of 150 houses surrounded by a low wall. The motives were the fertility of the district and the desire to expel the Barbary corsairs. Morosini’s successor, Girolamo Cornaro, accompanied by many Greeks, after being delayed two days by a storm off Saseno, landed at Kryoneri, a little to the south of the town, early in September, 1690, where he was joined by 500 Cheimarriotes and Albanians. A Turkish attempt to prevent his landing was repulsed; Kanina, weakly fortified by crumbling walls, was forced to surrender, and its fall had as a natural consequence the capitulation of Valona without a blow. Cornaro, leaving Giovanni Matteo Bembo and Teodoro Cornaro as provveditori of Valona and Kanina, proceeded to attack Durazzo, but was forced by a storm to return to Valona, where, on October 1, he died[851]. Venice intended at first to keep these two acquisitions. Carlo Pisani was ordered to remain at “Uroglia” (Gervolia opposite Corfù) with four galleys for their defence, while the fortifications of Kanina were repaired and cisterns made. But when the Capitan Pasha encamped on the banks of the Vojussa to intimidate the Albanians, many of whom wished to join Venice, the garrisons began to suffer from lack of food and consequent desertions. Thereupon, Domenico Mocenigo, the new Venetian Captain-General, proposed and carried out the demolition of Kanina by mines, and wrote to the home government advocating the destruction of Valona on the ground that its preservation would cripple the campaign in the Morea. A debate upon its fate followed in the Senate. Francesco Foscari urged its retention on account of its geographical position at the mouth of the Adriatic and on a fine bay, well supplied with fresh water from Kryoneri (or “Acqua Fredda”). He alluded to the valuable oak forests in the neighbourhood, whose acorns furnished the substance known by the topical name of valonea to dyers, to the ancient pitch-mines, the salt-pans, and the fisheries. To these material considerations he added the loss of prestige involved in the surrender of a place whose capture had been celebrated with joy by Pope Alexander VIII and announced as an important event to the King of Spain, because it signified the destruction of the corsairs, so long the terror of the Papal and Neapolitan coast of the Adriatic. Besides, “Valona,” he concluded, “opens for us the door into Albania.” To him Michele Foscarini replied, proposing to leave the decision to the naval council, and this proposal was adopted. Mocenigo’s first idea had always been to abandon the place, and his resolve was confirmed by the advance of the Turkish troops under Chalil Pasha; but General Charles Sparre, a Swedish baron, who was sent to execute his orders, found that the rapid approach of the enemy made such an operation too dangerous. The Venetians accordingly burnt the suburb, but prepared to defend the town. But at the outset both Bembo and Sparre were killed by the Turkish artillery fire, and, though the garrison made a successful sortie, the Captain-General repeated his order to blow up Valona. Four cannon and one mortar were left there to deceive the Turks, and on March 13, 1691, after a siege of forty days, they too were removed and Valona evacuated and destroyed. The Turks offered no opposition to the retreating Venetians, and the opinion was freely expressed that the place could have been defended. Thus, after six months, ended the Venetian occupation of Valona[852]. When Pouqueville[853] visited it rather more than a century later, he saw the remains of the two forts blown up by the Venetians, and found that one street with porticoes recalled their former residence. In his time the population was 6000, including a certain number of Jews banished from Ancona by Paul IV. The place was then, as now, very unhealthy in summer, but he foretold a brilliant future for it, if the marshes were once drained.
The Turks neglected Valona, as they neglected all their Albanian possessions. Sinan Pasha had been so good and popular a governor that, although a native of Konieh, he was nicknamed “the Arnaut,” and his descendants long held the appointment as almost a family fief; indeed, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, the natives of Valona besieged and cut to pieces a certain Ismail Pasha, who had endeavoured to wrest the governorship of the town from one of Sinan’s descendants[854]. A generation later, however, a sanguinary feud, which broke out between the members of this governing family, led the other notables of Valona to invoke the intervention of the famous Ali Pasha of Joannina, who had already cast covetous eyes on the place, then ruled by Ibrahim Pasha. But the treacherous “Lion of Joannina” carried off not only Ibrahim but also the notables of Valona to the dungeons of his lake-fortress, where they were subsequently put to death. Ibrahim, however, lingered on, and was forced to address a petition to the Turkish government begging it, in consideration of his age and infirmities, to bestow the governorship of Valona and Berat upon his gaoler’s eldest son, Mouchtar Pasha, who appointed a Naxiote Christian, Damirales, as his representative in the former town. In 1820 the Turkish authorities, resolved to crush the too-powerful satrap of Joannina, easily induced the people of Valona to drive out Mouchtar’s partisans. But the population repeatedly gave the Turks cause for alarm, and in 1828 Rechid Pasha treacherously executed a powerful Bey of Valona, who had come to pay his respects to him at Joannina. Nevertheless the local people continued to resist any obnoxious Turkish authority[855].
During the first Balkan war, on November 28, 1912, Albanian independence was proclaimed at Valona, and an Albanian government formed, of which Ismail Kemal Bey was President[856]. But when an Albanian principality was created in the following year, and Prince William of Wied was chosen as its ruler, Valona recognised Durazzo as the capital. Meanwhile, Italy had intimated that she could not consent to the inclusion of Valona, to which she attached special importance, within the new Greek frontier; and insisted on the islet of Saseno, which had formed part of the Hellenic kingdom since 1864, being ceded to the Albanian principality. Greece complied with this demand, and on July 15, 1914, the Greek garrison abandoned Saseno at the order of the Venizelos Cabinet. When the European war broke out, Italy took the opportunity, on October 30, to occupy Saseno by troops under the command of Admiral Patris, who found it inhabited by twenty-one persons, and re-christened the highest point “Monte Bandiera” from the Italian flag which was hoisted there[857]. She had sent a sanitary mission to Valona itself and, on December 25, occupied that town. Then, as in 1690 and as in the days of Manfred and his successors, Kanina was likewise in Italian hands, while for the first time in its long history Valona has been connected with Great Britain, for the new jetty there was the work of the British Adriatic Mission, sent to rescue the retreating Serbian army. But, by the Tirana agreement of August 3, 1920, Italy renounced Valona (assigned to her by the treaty of London in 1915), and now holds Saseno alone.
RULERS OF VALONA
| Byzantine Empire | -1081 | |
| Normans of Sicily | 1081-4 | |
| Byzantine Empire | 1084-1204 | |
| Despotat of Epeiros | 1204-57 | |
| Manfred | 1257-66 | |
| Chinardo | 1266 | |
| Giacomo di Balsignano | 1266-73 | |
| Angevins of Naples | 1273-(?)97 | |
| Byzantine Empire | (?) | 1297-1345/6 |
| Serbs | 1345/6-1417 | |
| Turks | 1417-1690 | |
| Venetians | 1690-1 | |
| Turks | 1691-1912 | |
| Albanians | 1912-14 | |
| Italians | Dec. 25, 1914-Aug. 3, 1920 | |
| Albanians | 1920- | |
2. THE MEDIÆVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE
The late Professor Freeman once remarked during a great crisis in the Balkans, that it was the business of a Minister of Foreign Affairs “to know something of the history of foreign countries.” The demand, however unreasonable it may seem, derives special importance from the fact, that recent events have signally justified the forecasts of the eminent historian and signally falsified those of the Minister whom he was criticising. For in the Balkans, and especially in Greece and Serbia, history is not, as it is apt to be in some western countries, primarily a subject for examinations, but is, thanks to the popular ballads, an integral part of the national life and a powerful factor in contemporary politics. The glories of the Byzantine Empire exercise a continual fascination upon the Greeks; the conquests of the Tsar Stephen Dushan in Macedonia have been invoked as one of the Serbian claims to that disputed land; whereas no Englishman of to-day has been known to demand a large part of France on the ground that it belonged to the English Crown in the reign of Dushan’s contemporary, Edward III.
But there is a further reason for the study of Balkan history by practical men. Our judgments of the Balkan peoples are often harsh and unjust, because we do not realise the historic fact that they stepped straight out of the fifteenth century into the nineteenth (and in some cases into the twentieth), like Plato’s cave-dwellers who emerged suddenly from darkness into the full light of day. For the centuries of Turkish rule, interrupted in the case of Northern Serbia by the twenty-one years of Austrian rule between the treaties of Passarovitz and Belgrade in the eighteenth century, left them much as it found them—with their material resources undeveloped, their roads reduced to mule-tracks, their harbours undredged, their education neglected. Consequently, it was manifestly unfair to expect those who were practically contemporaries of our Wars of the Roses to enter the nineteenth century with the same ideas and the same culture as the gradually evolved states of Western Europe. The wonder rather is that so much progress has been accomplished in so short a time, especially when we remember that the eminent personages who direct the affairs of this world are apt to regard the Balkan peoples, with their deeply-rooted historical traditions and aspirations, and their extraordinarily keen sense of nationality, immensely stimulated by the victories of 1912-13, as pawns in a game, to be moved about the board as its exigencies demand. Let us Western Europeans, then, who have had no personal experience of Turkish rule, be less censorious of those who have lived under it for nearly four centuries at Semendria and for five at Skopje.
In the following pages I propose to give a general sketch of mediæval Serbian history, emphasising those points which may help us to understand the events of the last few years, and referring those who desire further details to the great (if unpolished and unfinished) work of the late Constantin Jireček, who for the first time has placed the history of the Serbs in the Middle Ages upon the impregnable rock of contemporary documentary evidence.