GOTTFRIED SCHRAMM: A NEW APPROACH TO ALBANIAN HISTORY

Robert Elsie

1994

German scholar Gottfried Schramm (b. 1929) studied in Göttingen, Erlangen

and Tübingen, and finished his doctorate in 1953. He taught modern and eastern
European history at the University of Freiburg (Breisgau) from 1965 until his
retirement. Schramm’s German-language book “Anfänge des albanischen
Christentums: die frühe Bekehrung der Bessen und ihre langen Folgen” [The Origins
of Albanian Christianity: the Early Conversion of the Bessians and its Long-term
Consequences], Freiburg im Breisgau 1994, caused furor when it was published
because it contradicted the prevailing theory of the Illyrian origin of the Albanian
people. Schramm derived the Albanians from the Christian Bessi, or Bessians, an
early Thracian people who were pushed westwards into Albania from their original
mountain homeland in the present Bulgarian-Serbian-Macedonian border region in
the ninth century. Schramm’s theory is still largely rejected, but the prospect of early
Albanian (i.e. Bessian) being used as a liturgical language in a monastery on the
Sinai Peninsula in the sixth century makes interesting food for thought. Here is a
short extract from his introduction.

Gottfried Schramm

In 1040 AD, troops provided by the Albanians revolted against a Byzantine

military commander in southern Italy and joined an insurgent who planned to
overthrow the Emperor in Constantinople in 1043. With this information recorded in
the 1080s by Byzantine historian Michael Attaliates, who noted down all the events of
his lifetime that seemed of importance to him, a nation entered the annals of recorded
history, a people who – according to traditional thinking – had lived for centuries
somewhere in the dark, beyond the grasp of historical records. These Albanians, it
was thought, were now replacing the ancient Illyrians on Albanian soil who had
disappeared from the stage at the end of their subjection to Rome in 168 BC. There
was no doubt about it – they had survived about 800 years of Roman rule and then the
great Slavic invasions of the seventh century AD, without losing any of their
autonomy as a people with a language of their own, at a time when all the other
barbarian peoples of antiquity had vanished from the map of Europe. How could it be
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that this people in Albania could be so doggedly persistent and survive where others
did not? Languages survive change best when they are spoken in remote regions that
are difficult to reach. But was Albania, that is open to the Adriatic on its coastal plain
and was crossed by a major route of transportation, the Via Egnatia, really that
isolated?

Albanian postage stamp

of Nicetas of Remesiana

It is hard to understand the reasons why the Albanians would be such an

exceptional case, as described above. However, we need not bother trying to find a
convincing interpretation because, if my thesis is right, the course of events generally
accepted never took place. The Albanians are not the descendents of the ancient
Illyrians who lived on Albanian soil before them, but rather of immigrants from the
interior of the Balkan Peninsula. Their real ancestors were the Bessians, an ethnic
group that disappeared before the first information about the Albanians was recorded.
We only need to attach the Bessian thread, which carried on in the central part of
southeastern Europe up to the fall of the Roman Empire, with the Albanian thread that
suddenly emerges out of the dark in the eleventh century and can thus put together a
story that enables us to understand why the latter people had a completely different
fate from all the other barbarians of southeastern Europe.

This is, of course, easier to claim than to prove. In order for the reader to be
able to judge for himself as to whether it is worth his time to pursue the initially
complex arguments of this thesis, allow me to first introduce the basics of this new
history, disencumbered here by arguments and proof. What I offer here should be read
as if the protagonists where themselves speaking, after swearing an oath as to the
veracity of their words.

Our story begins where the mountains of southeastern Europe form their
highest peaks. This region is now divided by a border separating Serbs and
Macedonians on its western side from Bulgarians on the eastern side. This region was,
in ancient times, the home of the Bessians. That the Bessians had a different fate from
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many of the other barbarian peoples of southeastern Europe derives from the curious
fact that they – and they alone among the ancient peoples of this mountainous region
– converted to Christianity at an early stage, in the second half of the fourth century.
This new religion was introduced to the Bessians at a time when it had already taken
root in the cities in the Roman Empire and was beginning to spread into the
countryside. Elsewhere, the conversion of a savage mountain people would not have
been regarded as possible or necessary.

A number of circumstances had to come together for the Bessians to change

customs. In the town of Remesiana on the northwestern side of the Bessian
mountains, there was an important bishop called Nicetas who lived there in the second
half of the fourth century. He had made a name for himself in the Latin Church as a
theologian and exemplary preacher. Widely known was a series of sermons he held
making information on the faith available to adults who wished to be baptized. One
realizes in them how determined Nicetas was that the message of the Church be
understood and appreciated as much as possible by those wishing to join it. It was the
Gothic bishop Ulfilas who gave him an opportunity to spread this message beyond the
mountains where he lived. Ulfilas had fled with his congregation from the region
north of the Danube River to the Christian southern side in order to avoid religious
persecution. These refugees were resettled on the northern slopes of the Balkan
Mountain range, above the fertile valleys, a mere 250-270 kilometres from
Remesiana. This immigrant group proved to Nicetas that a Christian mountain people
could lead a peaceful existence in the tenets of their faith and serve as pass guards for
one of the roads leading over the mountains. The Bishop of Remesiana was also
impressed by the missionary zeal of Ulfilas’ congregation to convert the surrounding
Germanic and other barbarian tribes. This was dangerous because Ulfilas was a
homoousian, i.e. a moderate Arian, whereas Nicetas was a determined supporter of
Athanasian Christianity. If he did not convert the Bessians, there was a good chance
that Ulfilas or his followers would, and would do so in such a way that Nicetas
regarded as blasphemous.

Ulfilas’ surprising charisma was based in good part on the fact that he made
Gothic an ecclesiastical language by translating the Bible, or a good part of it, and the
liturgy, into that language. This resulted in the rapid success of his mission. The hearts
and the minds of the Ostrogothic barbarians who could now attend mass in their
language and read the Bible in Gothic, were suddenly more receptive to the new faith
than they had been with mass in Latin or Greek. Nicetas had no difficulty following
this example because he and most of the people of Remesiana were familiar with
Bessian and Latin. Among the texts that he wrote or translated into a language that
had never been written down were songs and, most likely, liturgical and biblical texts.

Of course, Nicetas had one disadvantage over Ulfilas, whose followers had
already been converted when they emigrated to their new homeland on the lower
slopes of the Balkan Mountain range. Nicetas’ Bessian heathens housed in isolated
settlements high up among the rugged mountain peaks. As bishop, he would not have
been able to spend much time in missionary activities up in the mountains without
neglecting his work in Remesiana. However, this disadvantage was compensated for
when he conferred to monks and nuns – probably for the first time in the history of
Christianity – the task of converting a people systematically to the new faith. These
pious men and women abandoned their customs as hermits far from human
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settlements. Their traditional lifestyle, that arose in the contemplative world of eastern
Christianity and was originally focussed on meditation and incessant prayer, received
a second calling in new missionary activity. By the end of the fourth century, Bessian
monks and nuns from the old-established local population that had just been
converted to Christianity were recruited for the new mission. Proof of the swift rise of
monastic life and the strength and breadth of its effectiveness is the fact that by the
sixth century there were colonies of Bessian monks in Constantinople and – as
autonomous monastic communities or subgroups of ethnically mixed monasteries, in
the Holy Land. They conducted their monastic activities using their own language for
the liturgy.

As such, this people, who were long seen as wild and savage robbers in the
remote reaches of the mountains and who terrified the inhabitants of the lower slopes
and plains, rose to join the small and illustrious circle of monastic nations who, with a
liturgical language of their own, not only pursued an active monastic lifestyle at home
but also engaged in pilgrimages. Among other such nations as the Copts, Syrians,
Armenians and Georgians, the Bessians were, before the emergence of the Christian
Irish in the fifth century, the only Christian group to look westward to Rome.

In the sixth century, however, the Slavs invaded the Balkan Peninsula and by
the middle of the seventh century they had swept Byzantine rule out of most of
southeastern Europe. This caused Christianity in the Balkan Peninsula to wither away
and, in many areas it would seem, to die out, although it had been firmly rooted there
for centuries. Urban settlements were abandoned or were reduced to a shadow of their
former selves. The collapse caused many dioceses to waste away or fall apart entirely.
The Church thus lost the basis of its support. The rural and mountain population,
increasingly on its own, had been far too superficially converted to preserve its
Christian beliefs in the long run in the face of such adversity. With the Bessians,
however, things were different because their monasteries and hermitages - pillars of
Christianity – as well as their most precious asset, a liturgical language of their own,
made this people more resistant to abandoning the faith to which they had converted
in the fourth century. The same phenomenon was true for Christians in other parts of
the empire who were invaded by heathens or Muslims.

Another factor strengthened the position of the Christian Bessians. Many

converted Romans from the plains south of the Drava and Lower Danube Rivers were
pushed southwards and only a few of them found refuge in the towns of the
Macedonian belt. Many of them had no choice but to flee up into the mountains.
There are two reasons why refugees might have been attracted to living close to the
Bessians. Firstly, the Bessians inhabited the highest and thus best protected reaches of
the peninsula. Secondly, the native Bessian population provided the refugees, their
long-time Christian brethren, with support that they would probably not have
encountered elsewhere. The ancestors of the Romanians learned the profession of
shepherding from the Bessians, and seem to have adopted it more thoroughly than the
latter. The Bessians were more involved in farming. The fact that Romanian shepherds
grazed their herds in the winter on land they had leased from the Bessians and that, in
many cases, they attended the same churches, brought it about that the two peoples
and their languages influenced one another and grew together. However, as both had
their own liturgical languages – Bessian and Latin – one language did not suppress the
other.
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Together with a liturgical language of their own and a symbiosis with another
Christian people, the Bessians had a third pillar of support for their religious survival,
being that they were not cut off from the Byzantine Empire and Church by heathen
conquest. Even up to the early ninth century, the Byzantine Empire was present in
many parts of the Bessian mountains, even in its eastern and western reaches,
although its presence may have been weak. The Empire willingly accepted young
Bessians, in particular for military service. The Bessians could also ordain their
priests here, and the stream of monks on pilgrimages to the East probably did not
subside all at once.

By the sixth and seventh centuries, the fertile plains of southeastern Europe
had been settled by Slavic invaders. With time, the invaders also advanced into the
higher regions, and the Bessians were unable to resist the pressure that the spread of
the Slavs caused to the older native population. Some of them were gradually
slavicised and shared the fate of the rest of the native barbarian population of the
Balkan Peninsula. Others, however, were forced westwards by the persecution of
Christians instigated in the Bulgarian Empire in the first half of the ninth century. The
most probable time period for their retreat and movement westwards is 816-817 when
a long-term peace agreement was concluded between the Byzantines and the resolute
and impatiently heathen, Khan Omurtag.

The emigrant Bessians were given a mountainous region called Arbanon that
stretched southwards to the Shkumbin River and northwards at least to the Mat River.
Here they were to protect the coastal fortress of Dyrrachion [Durrës], the key to
Byzantine power on the Adriatic, from any Bulgarian attack from the east. They also
pledged to provide the Empire with troops for other theatres of war, if necessary. In
exchange, the Arbanites, as the new immigrants were now known, were given
extensive autonomy throughout Arbanon and were promised ecclesiastic support with
a bishop, whose took up his see at the mountain fortress of Kruja. As this bishop, and
the archbishop of Dyrrachion, were representatives of the Greek-oriented Byzantine
Church, the original Bessian form of their Christian religion was soon diluted under
Greek influence and their autonomy gradually waned. Arbanites who served as
officials in the Byzantine Empire only reinforced this trend. It is still an open question
as to when Bessian as a liturgical language and the alphabet in which it was written
died out. It cannot, however, be excluded that the church services that the Albanian
emigrants of Calabria attended around the year 1600, often in their own language and
apparently in a special national form of Orthodox liturgy, were the continuation of an
unbroken historical tradition founded by Bishop Nicetas of Remesiana in the fourth
century.

[Excerpt from: Gottfried Schramm, Anfänge des albanischen Christentums:

die frühe Bekehrung der Bessen und ihre langen Folgen (Freiburg im Breisgau:
Rombach, 1994), p. 9-14. Translated from the German by Robert Elsie.]