Customer Reviews

King Zog of Albania: Europe's Self-Made Muslim Monarch

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Obscure subject, but a wonderful book -- thorough, well-researched, and well-written. If you're a history buff, this is a must-read.

In hindsight, it was probably inevitable that King Zog of Albania would be driven from his throne in 1939. A British diplomat who worked with Zog found him amusing, but believed the King would probably end up assassinated. The conditions in Albania made that a very likely fate. It is a time and place well described in this groundbreaking biography of King Zog written by Jason Tomes.

When Albania broke from the Ottoman Empire in 1913, it was a poor and rural country. The Ottomans had forbidden the teaching of the Albanian language in the schools and many of the people were illiterate. There had been very little done in recent years to develop the country and it was isolated from neighboring Europe by its mountainous terrain and perhaps because it was largely a Muslim country.

The Ottoman system of benign neglect did nothing to discourage the clannishness of the Albanians. Europeans were skeptical that there could even be an independent Albania. Zog saw that it was necessary to make Albanians into citizens, instead of clansmen. This would not be an easy task. The "average Albanian knows nothing about nationality," Zog said. "He has always looked up to the head of his tribe, or his Bey, as the supreme authority."

Ahmet Zog was born in 1895 in Mati environs. He spent some of his adolescence in Istanbul, soaking up the political atmosphere of the Young Turks. He returned when Albania was liberated and later fought alongside the Austrians against the Italians who were occupying part of Albania. The Austrians, who had designs on Albania, considered the young chieftain useful enough to keep in Vienna in case they would need him after the First World War. Later, Zog staged a coup d'état with the help of Yugoslavia and, during his reign, he made Albania into an Italian satellite state.

Zog picked up foreign languages and some sophistication that many of countrymen didn't have, but he also needed to maintain his Albanian roots. Zog was born the son of a Mati Chieftain and his clansmen were his power base. As described in Edith Durham's "High Albania," northern Albania was the land of the blood feud, a place reminiscent of the West Virginia of the Hatfields and the McCoys, where people asked not what their neighbor died of, but who had killed him. His clansmen were both credits and debits to him. It was with their help (and well distributed gold) that Zog was able to overthrow the republican government of Fan Noli. Yet, even when he was trying to introduce laws outlawing blood feuds, he was obligated to participate in them to keep face with his clansmen.

The story of Zog's reign is mostly one of manipulation by the Italians. The Greeks and Serbs were both interested in carving up Albania, but the Italians were the neighbors with the most money. The Italians built roads and sold the Albanians weapons (often hopelessly obsolete) and made Zogist Albania into a puppet state. For his part, Zog got a good deal of loot, including funds for "a white silk tunic with gold frogging, epaulettes...a white fur hat with plume, a black cloak, and white patent leather boots with gold spurs." Besides looking the part of a king, he became rich as one by often getting the better part of a deal, as when he pocketed 300,000 lira selling the Italians inaccessible forestlands in Mati. He always regarded refusing a bribe as looking a gift horse in the mouth, Tomes writes. After Zog was exiled from Albania, he moved from country to country burdened with the many cases of gold that he had acquired during his regime.

Besides being a biography of a scoundrel dominated by an even bigger scoundrel (Mussolini), this book gives some interesting descriptions of Albania in the 1920s and 1930s. Tomes describes the capital of Tirana as city that smelt of mutton and coffee grounds, which was covered in a cloud of dust in the summer and slimy mud in the winter, and where school children were required to recite a catechism that included the lines "where does the mud seem sweeter than honey? In Albania." Despite being more Turkish in manner than the Turks in Atatürk's new republic, Albanians were drawn to European and American culture. Albanians scoffed at Hollywood westerns and war movies as being hopelessly unrealistic while being entranced with the fancy-dress films starring Greta Garbo.

Zog was a hard-working ruler and physically brave, but when the Italians overthrew him, the people hardly noticed. Tomes even writes that the invading Italians made the country more prosperous. When Zog (or "bird" in Albanian) became king and rather hopefully named himself King Zog the first, he was mocked abroad as King Bird I. Yet he couldn't name himself "King Ahmet" because he didn't want to be seen as a Muslim ruler and yet he couldn't disavow Islam. Looking at Zog's reign, it is easier to understand how later Albanian rulers became suspicious of foreign powers and organized religion.

After Zog and the Second World War, the communists came to power under the Stalinist Enver Hoxha. His regime was so repressive that many Albanians today hold King Zog in some esteem, "a sobering thought," Tomes writes.

Perhaps it's never easy to be a king, but Zog had it rougher than most. His country, the poorest and least educated in Europe, was deeply divided not only by clan rivalries but also by religion (Islam,Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism). Independent since only 1913, Albania also had hostile neighbors in Yugoslavia and Greece, both of which coveted large chunks of its territory, and Italy, across the Adriatic, was just as rapacious.

Small wonder that Zog, born Ahmed Bey Zogolli in 1895, saw little gain in the niceties of democracy. Instead, through ruthlessness, guile, charm and, yes, intelligence, he pushed himself to the top of a messy political system, finally declaring himself king in 1928. That he was able to remain both alive and in power until ousted by the Italians in 1939 is no small achievement. And in this engrossing, well-researched biography, Jason Tomes tells how he did it.

Tomes is scrupulously fair, never airbrushing Zog's faults. He was corrupt, duplicitous, a flatterer, a temporizer, a liar. (Could anything he said be believed since he was, in the words of an Englishman who knew him, "a past master in the arts of insincere amiability"?) While Zog could be harsh toward opponents, he was essentially an almost banal family man who spent the bulk of his free time with his six sisters (who lived with him throughout his life, even when he was married) and his mother. His greatest political skill was in playing one side against another, an essential strategy if he and, indeed, Albania were to survive in the tumultuous 1930s.

Much of Zog's life reads like one of those early movie serials in which each chapter ends with a cliff-hanger. Even when his power was secure within the country, he could never relax because of the continuing threats from without. Money was a constant problem, too, and Zog's persistent efforts to secure a reliable source of income were interwoven with the complexities of international realpolitik.

Zog's role on the world stage essentially ended with his flight to Greece after the Italian invasion in April 1939. He lived until 1961, dying in Paris with his beloved queen, Geraldine, and his son, Leka, at his side. The years in exile had been frustrating. He always insisted that if the West just helped him, he could wrest Albania from Communist control and make it a crucial Western beachhead in the cold war. He can be forgiven his optimism -- or delusion, his critics would say -- since he had navigated equally treacherous shoals so well in his earlier life.

So sit back, read Tomes's biography and enjoy the ride.

Ahmet Zogolli (Zogu, King Zog) is one of the great 'characters' of the early twentieth century. Born into a powerful clan in Northern Albania, he was destined to be a leader of men from birth. But Zog wanted to be more than just another petty warlord, he wanted to be a King. Jason Tomes has done a yeomanlike job of turning this 'myth' into a real person, he has shown him (as much as possible) with all his faults and gifts; trying his best to see through the smoke screen that swirls around him.

The man who at 22 was a colonel in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Minister of the Interior at 24, President at 29, King at 34 and ex-King at 45, is not an easy one to pin down. Like Albania during the second half of the twentieth century, little was published or known of the goings on during the early days of the Republic/Kingdom. Even today, few people could tell you much about Albania, much less find it on a map. It was the only country carved out of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1 that did not have a nationalist movement. The country was created more to keep it out of the hands of Greece and Yugoslavia than anything else.

Under the Ottomans, the valleys were divided up into separate administ- rative area that were each ruled by a Bey who then reported to a Pasha who had power over a larger district. Albania was made up of more than six districts one of which was Kosovo. When the Balkans were divvied up at Versailles, Albania ended up over 90% Albanian, but, leaving more Albanians living outside of the country than in. The Greeks wanted the South which was Greek Orthodox, and the Yugoslavs wanted the north which was Roman Catholic (as part of Croatia).

Zog managed to set-up a government in Tirana (which was the middle of nowhere) and stage manage a government by playing off the different Beys against each other. He relied heavily on a gendarmarie that was primarily made up of his historical supporter (from the Mati Valley). While holding off both the Greeks and Serbs (Yugoslavs) he became more and more indebted to the Italians and finally lost his Kingdom to Mussolini in 1939.

As an ex-King he only was acknowledged by Turkey and Egypt, and during his time in England during WW2 he was never given any recognition or money for guerilla warfare from the Allies. The country was handed to the communist insurgents under Enver Hoxha (with a lot of help from Stalin and Tito) at the end of the War. He finally died a recluse in the south of France.

Tomes shows the tragedy of how Albania never was important enough to anyone but the Italians (and then as a colony) for Zog to be able to create a viable government. He talked as if he wanted to create a constitutional monarchy, but first he had to create a country and an educated middle class. He was not altogether altruistic, since he probably stole half the money that came into the country as aid from the Italians, but then he strikes one as a realist and put himself in the forefront whenever he could.

I guess this is as good a non-Albanian depiction as one will get of this self-created little tinpot twit. Zog almost got out of the Middle Ages when you consider that his and other tribes in the north Albanian mountains were still living a paternalistically feudal lifestyle of banditry, shepherding and legal revenge murders, and largely isolated from the outside world. The writer seems to have caught the spirit in which the Brits refused to let Zog continue as a ruler once he fled into exile.