Early Albanian Literature (15th-17th cent.)


The earliest intelligible records of written Albanian date from the second half of the fifteenth century. They consist mostly of words and short phrases discovered in foreign language manuscripts. The first, and perhaps best known of these records, is a baptismal formula dating from 1462 which reads as follows: Unte paghesont premenit Atit et birit et spertit senit (I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost). The author of the formula was Paulus Angelus (ca. 1417-1470), Archbishop of Durrës and a close friend and counsellor of Scanderbeg (1405-1468).

The rise of early Albanian literature is closely linked to the fortunes of the Catholic Church in the southwestern Balkans and to the spread of Italian, specifically Venetian civilization. It was probably Italian and Catholic interests in combatting the spread of Islam in the Balkans that enabled a modest number of religious books to be published in Albanian. The first of these works were Latin and Italian texts translated into an as yet unsophisticated language, but later, more polished ecclesiastical texts were also written in Albanian itself. The authors of the major works of early Albanian literature were all clerics trained in Italy, where
they came into contact with the enlightenment of the late Renaissance and with the ideas and ideals of Italian civilization. Their homeland, by contrast, remained an isolated and primitive backwater. Albania had no large urban centres, no adequate system of education and certainly no publishing facilities, which are the usual prerequisites for the development of written literature. It is thus to Catholic Italy that we must turn our attention for the birth of a new literature. Translations of religious texts into the vernacular had given and were giving rise to many of the national literatures of Europe. In Albania’s case, it was a short-lived, though vibrant phase which ended abruptly with the Ottoman conquest and the rapid decline of Catholicism in the Balkans.

The first book published in Albanian, at least the first one we know of, is considered by many observers to be the most spectacular creation of all the history of Albanian writing. It is a 188-page Albanian translation of the Catholic missal, including many extracts from the Catholic breviary, psalms and litanies. Since the frontispiece and the first sixteen sheets of the only copy of the book we possess are missing, we unfortunately know neither its exact title nor its place of publication. In Albanian it is commonly known as the Meshari (The Missal). What we do know is that it was written in 1555 by one Gjon Buzuku, a northern Albanian Catholic cleric.

The Missal of Gjon (or John) Buzuku originally consisted of 110 sheets of printed text, of which 94 sheets now remain. Since the book contains well-known liturgical texts and excerpts from the Old and New Testaments, it is not too difficult to interpret despite the complex orthography, the archaic language and the numerous printing mistakes and omissions. The 188 pages comprise about 154,000 words with a total vocabulary of ca. 1,500 different words, and are a veritable goldmine for lexicographers and historical linguists. Little is known about the author of this old Albanian missal. The scant information we
do possess about Gjon Buzuku comes from the colophon (postscript) of the missal which Buzuku wrote himself in Albanian, not unaware of the historic dimensions of his undertaking:
“I, Don John, son of Benedict Buzuku, having often considered that our language had in
it nothing intelligible from the Holy Scriptures, wished for the sake of our people to
attempt, as far as I was able, to enlighten the minds of those who understand, so that they
may comprehend how great and powerful and forgiving our Lord is to those who love
him with all their hearts. I beg of you from today on to go to church more often to hear
the word of God. If you do this, may our Lord have mercy upon you. Those who have
suffered up to now shall suffer no longer. May you be the elect of our Lord. He will be
with you at all times if you pursue righteousness and avoid iniquity. By so doing, the
Lord shall give you increase, for your harvest shall last until the vintage and the vintage
shall last until the time of sowing. I, moreover, wish to finish my work if it please God.
I began it in the year 1554 on the 20th day of March and finished it in the year 1555 on
the 5th day of January. If perchance mistakes have been made in any part, I pray and beg
of those who are more learned than I to correct them. For I should not be surprised if I
have made mistakes, this being the very first work, great and difficult to render into our
language. Those who printed it had great difficulty and thus could not fail to make
mistakes, for I was not able to be with them all the time. Running a church, I had to serve
in two places. And now I beg of you all to pray to the Lord on my behalf.”

It has been put forth convincingly that Gjon Buzuku did not live in Albania itself but rather somewhere on the northern Adriatic in the Republic of San Marco, perhaps in the Venetian region itself, where families of Albanian refugees had settled after the Turkish conquest of Shkodra in 1479. In Venice, Buzuku would have had greater access to the requisite literary education and to training as a priest than in Albania itself. Judging from the traits of the northwestern Gheg dialect used in the text, Gjon Buzuku’s family must have stemmed from one of the villages on the western bank of Lake Shkodra, possibly around Shestan, which is now in Montenegro. Elements of other dialects also occur, which would seem to confirm the assumption that Buzuku was born and raised outside of Albania, unless of course he was consciously endeavouring to employ a language more widely
intelligible than his native dialect. Not only is Buzuku’s language completely devoid of the strong Turkish influence in later Albanian, it also contains many surprisingly archaic features not otherwise recorded in the language. Due to the complexity of the writing system he practised, these features have as yet only been investigated in part. The mystery of Buzuku’s missal is compounded by the fact that only one copy of the book has survived the centuries. It was discovered by chance in 1740 in the library of the College of the Propaganda Fide by the Jesuit cleric Johannes Nicolevich Casasi (1702-1752) of Gjakova/Djakovica, known in Albanian as Gjon Nikollë Kazazi, when he was visiting Rome in his capacity as Archbishop of Skopje. He described his discovery as “an old Albanian missal totally frayed with age.” Casasi made a copy of fragments of the text, which he transmitted to Giorgio Guzzetta (1682-1756), founder of the Albanian seminary in Palermo. At the end of the
eighteenth century, the book is known to have been part of the impressive collection of Cardinal Stephan Borgia, which later ended up in the Vatican Library. Many observers have been puzzled by the rarity of Buzuku’s Albanian missal and by the lack of Albanian books in the sixteenth century in general. The reason is to be found in Church history. The policies of the Catholic Church with regard to publications, in particular publications in the vernacular, vacillated substantially during the years of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and thereafter. In the spirit of a much-needed Reformation, the Church initially authorized some translations of ecclesiastical texts into the vernacular, but soon changed its course. In a reaffirmation of the traditional Catholic teachings of the Counter-Reformation, which put an end to the Renaissance in Italy, and in the general atmosphere of intimidation
which reigned during the Inquisition, it soon put the very same books onto the Index and suppressed them. Particularly rigorous were the Index of 1554-1555, i.e. the very year Buzuku finished his missal, and the Index of 1559 under Pope Paul IV (r. 1555-1559). Not only was Buzuku’s missal, which was printed in a language no one in high Church circles could have understood, probably regarded as a heretical threat, it also soon became outdated. In 1563, one of the concluding decrees of the Council of Trent called for a revision of the two most important liturgical manuals used by the Church: the breviary and the missal. The reformed versions of these manuals appeared in 1566, together with a new catechism. Thus, even in the unlikely event that Buzuku’s missal had escaped the attention of the Inquisition, it would soon have been out of date and unfit for use. Many liturgical and religious works are also known to have been suppressed or withdrawn from circulation in the subsequent thirty year period between 1568 and 1598. Seen in the light of the influence of the Council of Trent and the Inquisition, which was at its height at the time of writing, it is quite miraculous that even one copy of the Albanian missal survived.

Gjon Buzuku was not a creator of literature per se. His missal, with the exception of the colophon, is simply a conglomeration of translations of Latin religious texts. But as author of the first Albanian book, it was he who can be said to have given birth to literary Albanian. Because the missal and any other religious texts in Albanian which may have existed in the mid-sixteenth
century were suppressed by the Inquisition, an Albanian literary tradition which might have arisen here, based on the astounding achievement of Gjon Buzuku, was nipped in the bud and suppressed.

The second major work of early Albanian literature is entitled E mbsuame e krështerë, Rome 1592 (Christian Doctrine), a twenty-eight page catechism translated from the Latin catechism of the Spanish Jesuit priest Jacob Ledesma. It was written by Lekë Matrënga (1567- 1619), known in Italian as Luca Matranga, an Orthodox cleric of the Italo-Albanian community of Sicily. Matrënga’s work contains an introduction in Italian, an eight-line poem which constitutes the earliest specimen of written verse in Albanian, and the catechism itself, being religious instruction on church doctrines in the form of questions and answers. His Christian Doctrine is of historical and literary significance not only as the second oldest publication of Albanian literature, but also as the first work by an Italo-Albanian and the first one written in the southern Tosk dialect. All other early Albanian authors, Gjon Buzuku, Pjetër Budi, Frang Bardhi and Pjetër Bogdani, wrote in their native northern Gheg dialects.

Two generations after Gjon Buzuku follows the second major figure of early northern Albanian literature. Pjetër Budi (1566-1622), known in Italian as Pietro Budi, was the author of four religious works in Albanian. He was born in the village of Gur i Bardhë in the Mati region of the north-central Albanian mountains. He trained for the priesthood at the so-called Illyrian
College of Loretto (Collegium Illyricum of Our Lady of Luria), south of Ancona in Italy, where many Albanians and Dalmatians of renown were to study. At the age of twenty-one he was ordained as a Catholic priest and sent immediately to Macedonia and Kosova, then part of the ecclesiastical province of Serbia under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Antivari (Bar), where he served in various parishes for an initial twelve years. In 1610 he is referred to as‘chaplain of Christianity in Skopje.’ In 1616, Pjetër Budi travelled to Rome where he resided until 1618 to oversee the publication of his manuscripts, four works in Albanian comprising a total of one thousand pages, printed within the space of five years? Budi’s most important work is the Dottrina Christiana or Doktrina e Kërshtenë (Christian Doctrine), a translation of the catechism of Saint Robert Bellarmine. It was published in Rome in 1618 and is preserved in only one original copy. Of more literary interest than the catechism itself are Budi’s fifty-three pages of religious poetry in Albanian, some 3,000 lines, appended to the Christian Doctrine. It constitutes the earliest poetry in Gheg dialect. Much of it was translated from Latin or Italian, though some is original.

Frang Bardhi (1606-1643), known in Latin as Franciscus Blancus or Blanchus, is the fourth in the sequence of early Albanian writers of note. He is author of the first Albanian dictionary, published in Rome on 30 May 1635, which at the same time constitutes the first work in Albanian not of direct religious content. It was during his last year at the College of the Propaganda Fide when he was twenty-nine years old that Bardhi published the 238-page Latin- Albanian dictionary. The work, bearing the title Dictionarium latino-epiroticum, una cum nonnullis usitatioribus loquendi formulis, Rome 1635 (Latin-Epirotic dictionary with several common expressions), comprises 5,640 Latin entries translated into Albanian, and is supplemented by an appendix of parts of speech, proverbs and dialogues. The two stated objectives of the dictionary were to save the Albanian language from ‘bastardization’ and to help the Albanian clergy to learn Latin. The first of these goals may be seen within the context of the
strong Turkish influence the Albanian language was undergoing in the seventeenth century.

Pjetër Bogdani (ca. 1630-1689), known in Italian as Pietro Bogdano, is the last and by far the most original writer of early literature in Albania. He is the author of the Cuneus prophetarum (The band of the prophets), the first prose work of substance written originally in Albanian (i.e. not a translation). Born in Gur i Hasit near Prizren about 1630, Bogdani was educated in the traditions of the Catholic church to which he devoted all his energy.

His uncle Andrea Bogdani (ca. 1600-1683) was Archbishop of Skopje and author of a Latin-Albanian grammar, now lost. Bogdani is said to have received his initial schooling from the Franciscans at „iprovac in northwestern Bulgaria and then studied at the Illyrian College of Loretto, as had his predecessors Pjetër Budi and Frang Bardhi. In 1656, he was named Bishop of Shkodër, a post he held for twenty-one years, and was also appointed Administrator of the Archdiocese of Antivari (Bar) until 1671. In 1677, he succeeded his uncle as Archbishop of Skopje and Administrator of the Kingdom of Serbia.
It was in Padua in 1685 that the Cuneus prophetarum, his vast treatise on theology, was published in Albanian and Italian with the assistance of Cardinal Barbarigo. Bogdani had finished the Albanian version ten years earlier but was refused permission to publish it by the Propaganda Fide which ordered that the manuscript be translated first, no doubt to facilitate the work of the censor. The Cuneus prophetarum is considered to be the masterpiece of early Albanian literature and is the first work in Albanian of full artistic and literary quality. In scope, it covers philosophy, theology and science (with digressions on geography, astronomy, physics and history). With its poetry and literary prose, it touches on questions of aesthetic and literary theory. It is a humanist work of the Baroque Age steeped in the philosophical traditions of Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Bogdani’s fundamental philosophical aim is a knowledge of God, an unravelling of the problem of existence, for which he strives with reason and intellect. Though Bogdani’s talents are certainly most evident in his prose, his unaffected religious
poetry is not devoid of a modest elegance. The basic corpus of his verse are the poems of the ten Sibyls, which are imbued with the Baroque penchant for religious themes and classical allusions. It is Bogdani’s use of the Albanian language which sets him apart from all other early Albanian writers. He has a conscious interest in old and forgotten words and a much richer vocabulary which he skilfully employs to form new abstract concepts. Bogdani philosophizes on scholasticism and theology with confidence and elegance whereas his predecessor, Frang Bardhi, fifty years before him, had experienced obvious difficulties in expressing abstractions of any kind. In Bogdani’s work we encounter for the first time what may be considered a literary language. As such, he may justly bear the title of father of Albanian prose.

Other works of Albanian letters in the seventeenth century are few and far between, like the occasional palm tree on the horizon of a literary desert. None of these works is of particular literary value, though great cultural, linguistic and historical significance must be attached to anything written in Albanian in this period. At any rate, the five Albanian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Gjon Buzuku, Lekë Matrënga, Pjetër Budi, Frang Bardhi and Pjetër Bogdani, form the core of early
Albanian literature. They bestowed upon it an initial breath of creative genius and a modicum of refinement and sophistication. Together with a small number of minor authors and no doubt others who have been lost to the annals of literary history, they gave birth to a rapidly evolving literature which was to be nipped in the bud, so to speak, by the tempestuous course of Albanian
history. What might have been the solid roots of a dynamic national literature such as those which grew in the more fortunate regions of Europe in the seventeenth century were severed by the Turkish conquest and consequently by the decline and fall of Albania’s somewhat ambivalent patron, the Catholic Church.

With the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, early Albanian literature suddenly withers and the first notable chapter of Albanian literary history comes to a rapid and definitive close. Not until the so-called Rilindja movement of national rebirth in the second half of the nineteenth century was literature in Albania to regain the vitality it experienced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The national literature had once again to start afresh.

Courtesy of Albanologist Dr.Robert Elsie from his Article
Albanian literature: an overview of its history and development.
in: Österreichische Osthefte, Vienna, 45, 1-2 (2003), p. 243-276.
Source: http://www.elsie.de/pdf/articles/A2003AlbLitOsthefte.pdf