Nobody’s Kingdom: A History of Northern Albania
Note; this review was originally published on my 5 April 2023, on my Substack newsletter, The Traveller’s Literary Supplicant.
Reviewed by Christopher Deliso
Tom Winnifrith, Nobody’s Kingdom: A History of Northern Albania (Signal Books, 2020)
The first survey of its kind, Winnifrith’s work presents the north of Albania as if it was its own country, complementing his earlier work on the country’s south and (even earlier) specialization in the Vlach minority of Greece.
While not himself a solider, Winnifrith Hibbert in that he too was keen to rough it in hard-to-access locales and appreciate local realities and local insights.
After initial travels in Greece, “his research interests expanded to include the Vlachs, a nomadic Balkan race who spoke a Latinate language,” daughter Tabitha Gilchrist wrote in an obituary in The Guardian. “On trips to remote villages, he befriended them, learned about their history and language and helped give them a national identity.”
While a professor at Warwick University, Winnifrith “became the driving force behind the development of a new department of classics which opened in 1976, and which thrives today.”
As with Somewhere Near to History, the Foreword to Nobody’s Kingdom is written by James Pettifer. He traces Winnifrith’s interest in the Vlachs ultimately to his Oxford student days, when he was captivated by “Christ Church classics tutor and University Lecturer in Ancient History, Eric Gray. Gray was a Philhellene who spoke good modern Greek.” During WWII, Gray had been inserted in the Greek leftist ELAS guerrilla group fighting in the Arcadia region, and his tales of war led the young Winnifrith to visit and learn about the place and its peoples.
Pettifer adds that Winnifrith taught Classics and English in the 1960s, enjoying regular holidays in Greece (except for during the military dictatorship from 1967-1974). He got a PhD on the Bronte sisters as novelists, and later went on to teach at Warwick, until retirement in 1998.
Pettifer concludes that the book depicts “Northern Albania seen through the eyes of a scholar very learned in the medieval and Byzantine worlds as well as the ancient classics.” And he reiterates that Winnifrith was “a resourceful and active traveller into old age, willing to rough it in order to speak to the people on the ground in often remote localities.” This description could be applied almost exactly to the research method of Prof. Pettifer himself as I have seen it over the past 15 years or so here in the region.
Book Structure and Composition
Nobody’s Kingdom is divided into nine chapters. After the first (which explores the differences between the south and north of the country) and the second (which focuses on geography), the rest of the chapters follow a chronological order.
Thus we learn of the relative influences that different civilizations, invaders and occupier had over time, ranging from the Illyrians (from 1200-230 BC), Romans (230BC-235 AD), Goths, Slavs and Byzantines (to 1018), to the five-centuries of so-called ‘anarchic’ Albanian presence, before the Ottomans (1501-1912), and various modern Albanian states after the creation of the Albanian state in 1912.
Some Interesting Points from Nobody’s Kingdom
Although the book is far too long to discuss in detail in this space, a few examples will suffice to show Winnifrith’s exacting brand of old-school scholarship, rooted in a Classical education and 20th-century worldview combined with regular fieldwork until relatively recently.
Winnifrith begins by recounting a now-closed former tourist agency that sold overpriced tours to Albania, which highlighted the combination of tourist sites and an exotic, unknown country. While even back then there were some large hotels in the main towns of the south, Winnifrith states that tourist accommodation, while fewer and further between, existed in northern towns like Shkodër, Kukës, Peshkopi and Bajram Curri. And, despite the historic (and still-noted) more wild nature of the north, Winnifred notes that the past two decades have led to “a large western military presence in the neighbourhood and a fund of goodwill to western travelers” among the locals.
Beyond simply the linguistic and social differences of the northern Ghegs and southern Tosks, the author traces the modern-day divisions in Albania to the ascendancy (and later, heavy-handedness) of Enver Hoxha’s communist government. “The wartime division does reflect a fundamental difference between the North and the South which I have followed in dividing my work on Albania into two volumes,” he explains.
Winnifrith further notes that the isolated north was historically less associated with Greek culture and rule (whether ancient, Byzantine or modern), and more open to influences from Italy, the Catholic Church and (later) Austria.
Well before the ancient Illyrian civilization that spanned the Adriatic coast to Croatia (as I discuss in my own 2020 textbook, The History of Croatia and Slovenia), northern Albania hosted Neolithic populations of hunters, farmers and fishermen, “notably Blaz in the Mat valley.” In the Bronze Age (1900-1200 BC), remnants of civilization and war have been discovered- most, in the more fertile south, but also in a northern cave at Nezir, in Mat, the author adds. Similar remains have been found from the Iron Age, as numerous tumuli containing weapons in north-central Albania attest. But Winnifrith dismisses as “rather crude” certain Albanian historians’ theories of a proto-Illyrian civilization covering the Western Balkans.
Winnifrith’s tendency is to discuss the history of today’s northern Albania within the contours of the major civilizations of the time leads to frequent statements of sparse or missing archeological or literary evidence. For example, he writes of Roman times that “apart from Scodra and Lissus there are few Roman cities in the North, the fortresses of Gajtan and Sarcia belonging principally to late antiquity.”
The author also discusses the artifacts of Komani-Kruja, cited as proof by Albanian historians of a missing medieval link between the ancient Illyrians and post-1500 Albanians, while noting that some Western historians are skeptical.
Further Insights and Methodology
It is clear that the author is a stickler for the facts in a way that is sadly not always upheld by historians today. Even tangential episode are not exempt from this treatment. While Winnifrith says modern research has cast doubt over the long-related ‘Dorian invasion’ of Greece, “in Albania without any literary evidence we cannot be sure of any kind of invasion, or know how the Bronze Age Illyrians related to their Iron Age successors or how both groups can be linked to the parallel groups further south.”
Discussing the larger sweep of Albanian history, and eminent medieval clans like the Dukagjin and of course national hero Scanderbeg, Winnifrith points out several problematic areas or, at least, points out that some claims need further clarification. In doing so he makes an interesting point about how modern outcomes have affected historiographical trends:
“Albanian historians tend to ignore these cracks in the facade of Albanian unity, achieved for the first and almost last time in the fifteenth century,” he writes, “since the period after Albanian independence in 1912 has been marked by a series of internal division.”
This sort of insight distinguishes the book as objective and a work crafted by a scholar capable of approaching the subject from many informed angles.
Due to all the inconsistencies and lack of historical data, Winnifrith admits that it might seem “almost impossible to write” the bulk of the book: “primary sources are infrequent and unreliable, secondary sources partial in more senses than one.” This is all true, though certainly not his fault. One criticism might be the author’s decision to do without footnotes in the interest of ‘accessibility’ (I always prefer footnotes, whenever possible, to find exact sourcing and further reading). But Winnifrith does make a very interesting point here in defense of his decision, which illustrates the very interesting way in which his mind worked. He laments the unreliability of oft-repeated sources in general in his micro-polemic against footnotes:
“Writers repeat statements from other writers, sometimes quoting those other writers as a source in their footnotes. But we then discover that these other writers have no authority for their original statement. Thus it is not true that St Paul visited Durrës. He only tells us that he got as far as Illyricum (Romans 15:19) and this could just mean the frontier. It is not true that Gibbon said that Albania was more remote and unknown than the centre of America. There is no trace of this remark in any of his recorded writings.”
However, despite the lack of footnotes, the author does include appendices, maps and bibliographical notes.
Conclusion: A Very Worthwhile Book for the Serious Student or Traveler
Nevertheless, as this is a book that sets out to tell the history of a sub-region as if it were a country over thousands of years (though that country did not exist until 1912), the willing suspension of disbelief is somewhat required. Yet this does not mean that Nobody’s Kingdom can be ignored, for it is really the only book of its kind in English to devote such detail, and from such a scholarly mind, to this particularly gnomic and mysterious part of Albania.