Scanderbegus Latinus
The Image of Skanderbeg in Neo-Latin Literature
Principal investigator
Mag. Dr. Stefan Zathammer
Researcher
Riccardo Stigliano, MA
Partnership
Prof. asoc. Dr. Gentiana Kera (University of Tirana)
Key Data
FWF project number: PAT 7600023
Term: 01.04.2024–31.03.2027
Funding: EUR 373,688
Abstract
George Kastriota (1405-1468), called Skanderbeg, is one of the most important figures of the wars against the Ottomans on the Balkan in the 15th century. Calixtus III (Pope 1455–1458) awarded him the title of athleta Christi, his helmet with its distinctive ornament of goat horns crowns the black double-headed eagle in the coat of arms of the modern Republic of Albania, and the story that Sultan Mehmed II. (1444–1446), on receiving news of the death of the man who had resisted him and his father Sultan Murad II (1421–1444 and 1446–1451) for almost 25 years, is said to have exclaimed “At last Europe and Asia are min! Woe to Christendom! It has lost its sword and its shield,” shows to the importance attributed to Skanderbeg early on.
The humanist Marinus Barletius (ca. 1450 – after 1510), a native of Scutari in northern Albania, Skanderbeg found a masterful biographer early on, who set up a lasting monument to him with a monumental Latin biography. The story of Skanderbeg’s almost novel-like life, in which one can read of victories against an overpowering enemy as well as of misfortune and betrayal, was treated in the early modern period in the different literary genres. For more than 300 years, the prince from the rugged Albanian mountains held a firm place in the ranks of Western heroic figures.
In Albania itself, however, the memory of Skanderbeg had largely faded for a long time after the Ottoman conquest in the 15th and 16th century. Only in the context of the national and independence movement, the so-called rilindja (“rebirth”), in the late 19th century he was ‘rediscovered’. All governments, rulers and regimes that ruled Albania in the 20th century –President (later King) Achmed Zogu, the Italian fascists and German National Socialists, the communists under the dictator Enver Hoxha and the post-communist republic – made him the national hero of Albania and instrumentalized him ideologically as a source of legitimacy for their own cause.
The image of Skanderbeg as a national hero, which has developed in the course of the 20th century through the work of Albanian writers and historians, has little in common with that found in early modern texts. The texts of the early modern period do not show a national hero, but a Christian hero whose struggle was not only about defending his own country, but primarily about defending Christianity and Christian Europe in general. The popularity of Skanderbeg throughout Europe was primarily shaped by neo-Latin literature, which this project aims to examine for the first time.
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