Albanians on Both Sides: A War That Wasn't Ethnic

The national memory of 1821 pictures a war between two peoples: Greeks on one side, Turks on the other, ancient enemies finally meeting in the open. The archival record pictures something far less tidy, and one population above all breaks the symmetry — the Albanian-speakers, who appear in force on both sides of the fighting. Their double presence is not a curiosity to be footnoted. It is a diagnostic fact about what kind of war this actually was, and about what the words “Greek” and “Albanian” did and did not yet mean when it was fought.

The Albanians of the Revolution

That Albanian-speakers were pillars of the Greek cause is not a revisionist claim; it is the settled judgment of the standard academic history. Koliopoulos and Veremis write of the Albanians and Vlachs of the southern Greek lands that

“both had generously contributed in the making of the Greek nation-state in the southern Greek peninsula, the Vlachs in the Greek Enlightenment and the Albanians in helping win the war against the Turks”

— John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis, Modern Greece: A History since 1821, pp. 3–4

The Albanian-speaking communities of Hydra and Spetses supplied the revolutionary fleet; Albanian-speaking villages across the Morea and central Greece supplied its soldiery. These populations, the same historians note, “identified with Greek national aims and future irredentist objectives” after centuries of cohabitation. The heroes and the nation-builders were, to a very substantial degree, drawn from the community the later ethnic narrative would render invisible.

The Albanians of the counterinsurgency

Yet cross the lines and the picture repeats itself. Muslim Albanian irregulars formed a large part of the Ottoman apparatus of suppression — the same warrior population, differently contracted. What is telling is how they served. They were not loyal instruments of a Turkish nation confronting a Greek one; they were semi-feudal military contractors, and they behaved like contractors. Koliopoulos and Veremis record the pattern:

“Although the Albanians appear to have dragged their feet, when called by the Ottoman Government to shore up more energetically the effort to suppress the Greek insurgents”

— John S. Koliopoulos & Thanos M. Veremis, Modern Greece: A History since 1821, pp. 19–20

Foot-dragging is the signature of men fighting for terms, not for a flag. The Muslim Albanian bands calculated, bargained, and withheld service when the price or the prospects were wrong — conduct incomprehensible in a national war and perfectly ordinary in the world of Ottoman military enterprise, where armed force was a trade plied under negotiated obligation.

The kapakia: accommodation without treason

The clearest window onto that older world is an institution the national historiography long preferred to bury: the kapakia, the secret accommodation deals struck between Christian captains and the Ottoman authorities. Mark Mazower, tracing the power of the great captain Odysseas Androutsos in eastern Rumeli, found the practice general:

“the phenomenon of secret agreements between armatoles and the Ottomans – the kapakia as they were termed – was equally pervasive on the other side of the Pindos mountains”

— Mark Mazower, The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe, ch. on Rumeli

And crucially, these were not betrayals as the participants understood them. The Critical Dictionary of the Revolution explains the norm the deals operated under:

“The kapakia, an acceptable arrangement until then, stipulated that under certain conditions negotiations could be opened with an enemy and a truce concluded without blame.”

— eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas, The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary, p. 299

“Without blame” is the load-bearing phrase. A Christian captain could contract a truce with the Ottoman enemy and remain an honorable man among his own, because the war he understood himself to be fighting was a matter of clientage, territory, and survival — a continuation of the armatolik system, not a clash of eternal nations in which any accommodation is treason. Only later, when the war was rewritten as a national resurrection, did the kapakia have to be forgotten or reframed, since national epics have no category for blame-free arrangements with the hereditary foe.

What the words meant

If neither side’s Albanians were fighting an ethnic war, what organized the fighting? The vocabulary of the period answers directly. Peter Mackridge documents that in the Balkans the ethnonyms themselves functioned as occupational labels: Greek-speaking meant commerce, and the profession of arms had its own name. In the Danubian provinces, “Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs who were professional soldiers were known as Arvanitai or Arnaoútides” — as Albanians — whatever language their mothers had spoken (Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, p. 57). “Albanian” named the Balkan warrior’s trade the way “Greek” named the merchant’s. When the Revolution needed fighters, it needed “Albanians” in both senses of the word — the profession and the language community — and that is largely what its klephts, armatoloi, Souliots, and island seamen were.

Assemble the pieces and the conclusion writes itself. Men entered this war along the seams of the old Ottoman order: by trade, because soldiering and seafaring were livelihoods; by faith, because the Orthodox millet, not any nation, was the community that rose; and by contract, because armed service on both sides was a negotiated relationship, honorably suspendable by a kapaki when conditions demanded. Christian Albanian-speakers fought for the Revolution and became founders of Greece; Muslim Albanian-speakers fought for the Porte, reluctantly and on terms. The same population sorted itself by religion and employment — never by an “Albanian” or “Greek” nationality, because in 1821 neither word yet named one.

This is not a diminution of the war’s participants, Greek-speaking or Albanian-speaking, whose endurance and sacrifice the sources amply attest. It is a correction of the frame placed around them afterwards. The ethnic war of the schoolbooks is a retrospective construction, projected onto men who organized their loyalties by older logics. The historical Revolution was won with Albanian oars and Albanian muskets, resisted by Albanian levies who dragged their feet, and threaded throughout with truces concluded “without blame” — a war of faith communities and fighting trades that the nineteenth century, needing ancestors, renamed a war of nations.