TURKS AND ALBANIANS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPEOTATOR.1 SIR,—It may prove of interest at the present time to recall the previous occasions on which the Albanians have taken up arms against their Turkish masters. On at least four occasions in modern times the trouble has been general, and not merely confined to the petty squabbling and skirmishing between the clans and the Turkish Pashas which may be said to be the chronic condition of the country. The first of these occasions was when the Empress Catherine sent a Russian fleet into the Mediterranean, and excited the Greeks of the Morea to rise against their Turkish rulers. The Sultan, having full occupa- tion for his armies on the Danube, called on the Albanian clans to suppress the rising, and some twenty thousand of them entered the Morea, put down the revolt, and took possession of the country, on which they lived at free quarters, refusing to quit it when summoned to do so by the Sultan. After the Russian War an army was despatched under the famous Ghazi Hasan to expel them, and Turks and Greeks united to root them out of the land. In the struggle that followed the Albanians were almost exterminated. And it is in these troubled times that Lord Byron has laid the scene of his poem "The Giaour." He describes Black Rasan's scimitar as- " Stained with the best of Arnant blood, When in the pass the rebels stood, And few returned to tell the tale Of what befel in Parnes' vale."
In the early years of the nineteenth century All Pasha of Janina, himself an Albanian, made himself virtually indepen- dent, and made war and peace with the European Powers on his own account. When a Turkish army was despatched against him in 1820, he tried to create a diversion by raising the Greeks against their masters ; but in doing so he alienated the sympathies of the Albanian Mussulmans, who deserted his cause, and he was taken and killed by Khurshid Pasha. In 1827 the Albanian Mustafa Pasha, hereditary Pasha of Scutari (Iskudara), who was called by the European writers of the day Scodra Pasha, raised a revolt against the Sultan to avenge the destruction of the corps of Janissaries, of which he himself was a member. He led an army into
Macedonia, where he was met and defeated by the Russians, who were then in possession of Adrianople. After peace had been made with them, the Sultan sent Reshid Pasha with a Turkish army of regular troops to quell the revolt. Scodra Pasha's troops were defeated in a pitched battle, and Scutari was captured. He surrendered to the Turks, and was exiled to Cyprus, while all who had followed his standard were mercilessly massacred. In 1847 the Bus of Albania and Bosnia rose in arms to resist the reforms known as " Tanzimat " (regulations) and the in- troduction of the conscription into their districts. Omar Pasha, the Croat renegade and ex-Austrian sub-office; who afterwards became famous in the Crimean War, led a Nizam army through Albania and Bosnia, suppressing the rising by a judicious mixture of force and diplomacy. The Beys yielded for the time; but, after all, things went on very much as before, the Arnauts substituting passive for active resistance to the reforms. The name of " the seven Sings,"
by which the Albanians designate the Great Powers of Europe, is an old one among the Turks, whose annalists speak of the Christian States of Europe as " the seven infidel Kings of Feringistan." Some have supposed this epithet to refer to the seven Electors of Germany, but it is more probable that it is need in a general way without any precise numerical significance, like " the seven climates," " the seven seas," &c.—
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