KRUJË, ALBANIA—Everyone in this country of sea and mountains, Christianity and Islam, tradition and tolerance, and vibes that bridge Greek and Italian, has told me about Skanderbeg, the national hero.
I knew nothing about this 15th-century mountain chieftain. I came to Albania firstly because it is outside the Schengen zone, because it is friendly to Ukraine and thin on Russians, and because after four years of war I needed somewhere to rest and recharge for whatever fresh hells are coming.
After just a few days in the capital, Tirana, I was not only seeing Skanderbeg’s name on signs and squares but hearing it everywhere. A woman who works with Western think-tanks told me to read about him. So did several bartenders, and a taxi driver, and the man who sold me water. *Read about Skanderbeg, everyone said. *So I did: Harry Hodgkinson’s Skanderbeg.
Today Skanderbeg is chiefly known to Albanians. In the 1400s he was in demand across Europe—Pope Calixtus III called him Athleta Christi, the Athlete of Christ. And in the chambers of Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan, he was both feared and respected. He became, indeed, the wall preventing Turkish conquest of Christendom.
I spent days reading about Skanderbeg from the ruins of the castle at Krujë where he was born—and which he later would fortify as a point defending all of Europe from Turkish invasions. He repeatedly requested European troops for reinforcement. Only after his death, unprotected by their Albanian chieftain ally, did the Venetians at last send troops to his stronghold.
Through the windows of my inn in the castle of his birth, I could see the plains and the coastal towns where early renaissance history played out: the Venetian seaports, the passes through which the Ottomans invaded, and the wild mountains in which Christendom was defended.
George Kastrioti was reportedly—though there is dispute about this—taken from his Christian Albanian family as a boy and sent to the Ottoman court, where he was converted to Islam, trained as a soldier (the Christian soldiers forcibly converted to Islam, known as Janissaries), and given the name Iskander—Alexander—with the rank of bey: Lord Alexander, that is, Skanderbeg.
In 1443 he rode away from an Ottoman army in the field, went home to the mountains north of what is now the Albanian capital, Tirana, and raised his father’s flag over the castle on the rocky outpost at Krujë. He began the resistance to the Turks.
For the next twenty-five years he kept the largest military power on earth out of Albania, and by extension out of Italy, Austria, and the rest of Europe. Sultan Murad II came in person and failed. Mehmed II, who had taken Constantinople, came and failed. The Ottomans besieged Krujë four times and never took it while Skanderbeg lived.
He had a country of perhaps half a million people. He fought with the terrain, struck supply lines, refused the battles he could not win, and changed his methods faster than a massive empire could change its own.
While he held, the Ottoman advance into Europe stopped at the Adriatic.
He died of a fever, possibly malaria, at Lezhë on 17 January 1468, aged sixty-four or so. With 12 years after the shield was buried, the invaders Skanderbeg had been holding back were in Italy.
Krujë fell ten years later. The northern Albanian lakeside city of Shkodër fell the year after that. In the summer of 1480 an Ottoman fleet crossed the Adriatic and landed at Otranto, on the heel of Italy. The city was taken, the archbishop was killed in his own cathedral, and 813 men were beheaded on a hill outside the walls for refusing to convert. The Church canonized them in 2013 as the Martyrs of Otranto.
In Rome, with the Turkish threat growing, Pope Sixtus IV considered fleeing to Avignon.
What stopped the advance on Naples and Rome was not an army. Mehmed II died in May 1481, his sons fell to fighting each other over the throne, and the garrison at Otranto was left to its own devices. The Italians retook the city that September.
“I CAN TELL HE IS BALANCED FROM SENTENCE ONE”
Skanderbeg had been so vital to the defense of Europe, and so feared by those who sought to break Europe, that throughout the centuries tributes with varying degrees of myths have been written—most notably by Marin Barleti, a priest from Shkodër, whose Latin life of him appeared in Rome around 1508 and was translated across Europe.
The book I was carrying is Harry Hodgkinson’s Scanderbeg: From Ottoman Captive to Albanian Hero, published in 1999.
I showed it to the keeper of an antique shop and Albanian history expert here in the stone mountainside city of Gjirokaster, up a lane off the bazaar. He opened it, read for about fifteen seconds, and handed it back.
“I can tell he is balanced from sentence one.”
Why?
“Because he starts off describing Albania, rather than by overly praising Skanderbeg.”
Hodgkinson, who oversaw Albania and Yugoslavia for British naval intelligence under Ian Fleming during the Second World War, and who as a young man walked from Charing Cross to Jerusalem, opens the life of a national hero with a description of limestone.
I read most of the book in Krujë, in an inn built into the castle ruins, looking down at the plain those armies crossed and past it to the Adriatic and the old Venetian ports. You can see the whole argument from up there.
THE ATHLETE OF CHRIST
Popes and princes across Italy knew Albania under Skanderbeg was the shield of Christendom, the wall behind which the rest of Europe tried to go about its business.
They meant it, and they paid for it—subsidies from Rome and Naples, grain and supplies from the Republic of Venice, a formal alliance with Alfonso of Aragon, King of Naples, sealed at Gaeta in 1451. This was not charity. Everyone understood that the route to Rome, Buda, and Vienna ran through Albania, and they were buying a buffer.
What they would not do was send an army.
The crusades meant to relieve him were announced, funded, postponed, abandoned. At Mantua in 1459, Pius II summoned the princes of Christendom to a crusade. Few came, and fewer committed.
Pius II died at Ancona in 1464 waiting for a fleet that never assembled.
He warned them. He wrote, sent envoys, and wrote again. A man in his position fights two wars, and the second one is fought with paper.
EUROPE'S SHIELD, AGAIN
I have spent four years reporting from a country described, in almost exactly the same words, as Europe’s shield.
Ukraine is a country on the edge, holding the line for Europe and the free world against barbaric invaders (at least the Ottomans had a civilization). Ukraine receives weapons yes but the West as in the days of Skanderbeg is happier to send thoughts and prayers. Aid arrives late and smaller than promised, subject to the domestic politics of countries that are not being bombed yet. Some Western partners still have commercial interests on the enemy’s side. Strongly-worded warnings sent and filed.
And underneath all of it, never quite said aloud, the assumption that the shield will hold because it has held so far.
Here is what Skanderbeg understood and the courts of Italy did not.
**A shield is not a feature of the landscape. It is a man, or a nation of people, doing something extremely difficult at enormous cost. **
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*JP Lindsley, an American journalist based in Ukraine, is co-founder and editor-in-chief of UnderFire.News. *
What else we’re watching today:
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Voting was also conducted in occupied Ukrainian territories that Moscow claims to have annexed. The remaining parliamentary parties offer different brands of nationalism, communism, or managed criticism, but none presents a credible challenge to the war or Putin’s rule.
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Raybird is a compact fixed-wing UAV built for persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. The current platform offers up to 24 hours of endurance, a 2,500-kilometer maximum flight range, a ceiling of 5,500 meters, and capacity for electro-optical, radar, and radio-frequency payloads. Skyeton claims the system has accumulated more than 350,000 combat hours in Ukraine, giving the Arm…
