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 In the spring of 1878, influential Albanians in
Constantinople--including Abdyl Frasheri, the Albanian national movement's
leading figure during its early years--organized a secret committee to direct
the Albanians' resistance. In May the group called for a general meeting of
representatives from all the Albanian-populated lands. On June 10, 1878, about
eighty delegates, mostly Muslim religious leaders, clan chiefs, and other
influential people from the four Albanian-populated Ottoman vilayets, met in the
Kosovo town of Prizren. The delegates set up a standing organization, the
Prizren League, under the direction of a central committee that had the power to
impose taxes and raise an army. The Prizren League worked to gain autonomy for
the Albanians and to thwart implementation of the Treaty of San Stefano (an abortive
treaty between Russian and the Ottoman Empire, signed on March 3, 1878, which assigned Albanian-populated lands to Serbia, Montenegro, and
Bulgaria), but not
to create an independent Albania.
At first the Ottoman authorities supported the Prizren League, but the
Sublime Porte pressed the delegates to declare themselves to be first and
foremost Ottomans rather than Albanians. Some delegates supported this position
and advocated emphasizing Muslim solidarity and the defense of Muslim lands,
including present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina. Other representatives, under
Frasheri's leadership, focused on working toward Albanian autonomy and creating
a sense of Albanian identity that would cut across religious and tribal lines.
Because conservative Muslims constituted a majority of the representatives, the
Prizren League supported maintenance of Ottoman suzerainty.
In July 1878, the league sent a memorandum to the Great Powers at the
Congress of Berlin, which was called to settle the unresolved problems of
Turkish War, demanding that all Albanians be united in a single Ottoman province
that would be governed from Bitola by a Turkish governor who would be advised by
an Albanian committee elected by universal suffrage.
The Congress of Berlin ignored the league's memorandum, and Germany's Otto
von Bismarck even proclaimed that an Albanian nation did not exist. The congress
ceded to Montenegro the cities of Bar and Podgorica and areas around the
mountain villages of Gusinje and Plav, which Albanian leaders considered
Albanian territory. Serbia also won Albanian-inhabited lands. The Albanians, the
vast majority loyal to the empire, vehemently opposed the territorial losses.
Albanians also feared the possible loss of Epirus to Greece. The Prizren League
organized armed resistance efforts in Gusinje, Plav, Shkodėr, Prizren, Prevesa,
and Janina. A border tribesman at the time described the frontier as
"floating on blood."
In August 1878, the Congress of Berlin ordered a commission to trace a border
between the Ottoman Empire and Montenegro. The congress also directed Greece and
the Ottoman Empire to negotiate a solution to their border dispute. The Great
Powers expected the Ottomans to ensure that the Albanians would respect the new
borders, ignoring that the sultan's military forces were too weak to enforce any
settlement and that the Ottomans could only benefit by the Albanians'
resistance. The Sublime Porte, in fact, armed the Albanians and allowed them to
levy taxes, and when the Ottoman army withdrew from areas awarded to Montenegro
under the Treaty of Berlin, Roman Catholic Albanian tribesmen simply took
control. The Albanians' successful resistance to the treaty forced the Great
Powers to alter the border, returning Gusinje and Plav to the Ottoman Empire and
granting Montenegro the mostly Muslim Albanian-populated coastal town of Ulcinj.
But the Albanians there refused to surrender as well. Finally, the Great Powers
blockaded Ulcinj by sea and pressured the Ottoman authorities to bring the
Albanians under control. The Great Powers decided in 1881 to cede Greece only
Thessaly and the small Albanian-populated district of Arta.
Faced with growing international pressure "to pacify" the
refractory Albanians, the sultan dispatched a large army under Dervish Turgut
Pasha to suppress the Prizren League and deliver Ulcinj to Montenegro. Albanians
loyal to the empire supported the Sublime Porte's military intervention. In
April 1881, Dervish Pasha's 10,000 men captured Prizren and later crushed the
resistance at Ulcinj. The Prizren League's leaders and their families were
arrested and deported. Frasheri, who originally received a death sentence, was
imprisoned until 1885 and exiled until his death seven years later. In the three
years it survived, the Prizren League effectively made the Great Powers aware of
the Albanian people and their national interests. Montenegro and Greece received
much less Albanian-populated territory than they would have won without the
league's resistance.
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