By 1385, Ottoman forces had reached the Ionian coast, and by 1415 they had garrisons across southern Albania. In 1431, most of the land was occupied, and thousands fled to Calabria, Naples, Ragusa, and Sicily, while others retreated into the mountains. Heavy taxes, forced levies, and the devshirme system sharpened resentment. The conquest brought mosques, but also fear, flight, and a new social order.

Skanderbeg’s campaign began after the League of Lezhë formed, and it lasted until the fall of Shkodër. He repeatedly defeated Ottoman armies led by Murad the Second and Mehmed the Second, and he drew together the Arianitis, Dukagjinis, Zaharias, and Thopias under a central authority. For a time he was Lord of Albania, and the Ottoman advance into western Europe slowed as Italian princes gained breathing space.

Yet the wider Christian world did not rally as Skanderbeg had hoped. Naples offered support, but many European powers did not, and Pope Pius the Second’s promised crusade never materialised. That failure mattered. Skanderbeg’s victories were real, but they were temporary, because his forces lacked the manpower and resources for a war of endless defence. The Ottomans could be delayed, not removed.

The cost of that struggle was severe. Repeated invasions devastated the countryside, reduced the population, and ruined flocks and crops. Even where Skanderbeg won the field, the land behind him suffered. By the time his resistance weakened, the Ottomans had learned patience as well as force. The mountains had held them for a generation, but the war could not be sustained forever.

When the Ottomans secured a firm foothold, Albanian towns were organised into four sanjaks, and trade was encouraged through the settlement of Jewish refugees from Spain. Vlorë became a port of imports and connections, handling velvets, cotton goods, mohairs, carpets, spices, and leather from Bursa and Constantinople. Some merchants there worked with partners across Europe, and commerce softened conquest without erasing it.

Islamisation widened from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth, as Catholic suppression pushed many communities towards conversion and Orthodox families followed later. The motives varied, but the direction was clear enough. Islam offered new opportunities within the empire, and some families embraced it for advancement as much as belief. Religion, in this period, became not only a matter of faith but of survival and rank.

Albanians also rose within the Ottoman state itself. Because their lands were strategically important, many served in the military and bureaucracy, and more than two dozen became grand viziers. Among the most notable were Zagan Pasha, the Köprülü family, Muhammad Ali of Egypt, and Ali Pasha of Tepelena. Even Bayezid the Second and Mehmed the Third were born to mothers of Albanian background, showing how far the connection reached.

By the late eighteenth century, the Albanian Renaissance was stirring, and in the nineteenth century it gathered strength in literature, arts, and political thought. Ottoman authorities still tried to suppress any sense of national unity, yet the language and culture endured. Writers and activists began to imagine a future beyond imperial rule. Romantic and Enlightenment ideas gave that longing a sharper voice, and identity became a public cause.

The Russian victories in the Russo-Ottoman wars led to the Treaty of San Stefano, which threatened to hand Albanian-populated lands to Slavic and Greek neighbours. Britain and Austria-Hungary blocked that settlement through the Treaty of Berlin, and the response was the League of Prizren. It began with Ottoman backing, because some officials favoured Muslim solidarity, but it quickly became a vehicle for protecting Albanian lands.

About three hundred Muslims attended the assembly, including delegates from Bosnia and the administrator of the Sanjak of Prizren, though there were no delegates from the Vilayet of Scutari. Only forty-seven Muslim deputies signed the Kararname, which declared a readiness to defend Ottoman territorial integrity against Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro. The language was still imperial, but the political habit of organising together had clearly begun.

Under Abdyl Frashëri, the League shifted from loyalty to autonomy. It demanded that Kosovo, Shkodër, Monastir, and Ioannina be merged into a single Albanian Vilayet, and it used force to stop Montenegro taking Plav and Gusinje. After early successes, including the Battle of Novšiće, the League was forced back, and Ottoman troops later defeated it outright. The movement had shown what coordination could do.

The nineteenth-century awakening was not only political. Albanian literature and the arts flourished, and the idea of Shqipëri gradually replaced older names such as Arbëria among many speakers. Those words, often translated as Children of the Eagles and Land of the Eagles, carried a new self-image. They did not yet create a state, but they gave the nation a name to carry into the next struggle.

On 28 November 1912, Albania declared independence from the Ottoman Empire, and on 4 December the Assembly of Vlorë set up a Senate and Government. The Conference of London recognised sovereignty, but the Treaty of London in July 1913 fixed borders that left many Albanians outside the new state, divided mainly among Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece. Independence had arrived, yet partition arrived with it.

To manage the new country, the International Commission of Control was established in Vlorë on 15 October 1913, while the International Gendarmerie became the first law enforcement force. In November, the first gendarmes arrived. Wilhelm of Wied, the Prince of Albania, came to Durrës on 7 March and began forming a government, appointing Turhan Pasha Përmeti to lead the first cabinet. It was a fragile start to sovereignty.

The new order immediately faced resistance. In November 1913, pro-Ottoman forces offered the throne to Ahmed Izzet Pasha, an Ottoman war minister of Albanian origin, because many peasants saw the principality as the tool of the Great Powers and local landowners. That distrust ran deep, especially where land was concentrated in few hands. A state could be proclaimed in a hall, but it still had to be accepted in the fields.

In February 1914, the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus was proclaimed in Gjirokastër by local Greeks who opposed incorporation into Albania. The episode was short-lived, but it showed how disputed the south remained. By 1921, the southern provinces were brought into the principality. In the meantime, the regime at the centre was already under siege from its own peasants, clerics, and rival armed groups.

Essad Pasha Toptani, leading a coalition of Muslim clerics, proclaimed himself the saviour of Albania and Islam and rose against Prince Wied. To balance him, Wied appointed Prênk Bibë Doda, the Mirdita Catholic leader, as foreign minister. Then Isa Boletini and his men, mostly from Kosovo, joined the International Gendarmerie in May and June 1914. By late August, rebels held most of central Albania.

Prince Wied’s rule could not survive that storm. The rebels defeated the northern Mirdita Catholics, the capital lost control, and by 3 September 1914 he left the country. His departure ended the principality’s first attempt at stable government. What remained was a land pulled apart by war, foreign interests, and rival claims, with statehood still more promise than fact.

After the First World War, the country had no stable government and no settled borders, which left it exposed to Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia. The Congress of Durrës in 1918 asked for protection at the Paris Peace Conference and was refused. In 1919, Serbian attacks on Albanians in places such as Gusinje and Plav caused massacres and displacement. The post-war settlement offered little peace, only more pressure.

Fan Noli became prime minister in 1924 with a programme of constitutional government, land reform, and reduced Italian influence. He wanted better roads, schools, and hospitals, but he lacked foreign aid and faced hostility from former allies. When he opened diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, Belgrade accused him of bolshevism. That charge, combined with Italian pressure, helped bring Zog back to power.

In 1928, Zog transformed the republic into a monarchy and took the title King Zog the First, backed by Fascist Italy. The Senate disappeared and a unicameral National Assembly took its place, though the king kept wide powers. It was a constitutional change on paper and a personal rule in practice. The state now had a crown, but it still depended on outside support and internal obedience.

In 1939, Benito Mussolini’s Italy invaded, forcing Zog into exile and turning the country into an Italian protectorate. During the wider war, Italy pressed claims on Chameria, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo, feeding the idea of Greater Albania. Then, in 1943, Nazi Germany replaced Italy and imposed labour, exploitation, and repression. By 1944, partisans under Enver Hoxha and other communist leaders had liberated the land.

The communist takeover opened a new era under Enver Hoxha, whose People’s Republic embraced Marxist-Leninist rule. Religion was banned, travel was restricted, and private property was abolished. Opponents faced imprisonment, exile, or execution. The regime also promised modernisation, and it pursued industry, railways, schools, healthcare, and literacy drives. The country was being remade by decree, for good or ill.

Hoxha’s foreign policy moved through alliances and ruptures. Albania first aligned with Yugoslavia, then turned to the Soviet Union, then broke with Moscow in 1961, and later sided with China during the Sino-Soviet split. It withdrew from the Warsaw Pact after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and relations with China cooled by 1970. Each break left the state more isolated, but also more determined to stand alone.

Religious life was crushed with particular force. In 1946, church and mosque estates were nationalised, and places of worship were closed or repurposed. Clergy of Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions were persecuted, and public faith became dangerous. Then, in 1976, Albania declared itself the world’s first constitutionally atheist state. Citizens were expected to renounce religion and embrace socialist life instead.

The social programme under Hoxha was severe but ambitious. The regime attacked poverty, illiteracy, poor health, and gender inequality through industrialisation, infrastructure, and education. A railway system linked more places than before, adult illiteracy was driven down, and women gained more public rights. Yet progress came under a hard political ceiling. The same state that built schools also built prisons, and dissent remained unforgiven.

After four decades of communism and the revolutions of 1989, students and activists pushed the system towards change. The first multi-party elections came in 1991, and the communists still held on until their defeat in 1992 by the Democratic Party. The shift was real but uneasy, because the economy had been too long under central planning. Democracy arrived into a country still learning how to breathe freely.

In the years that followed, pyramid schemes spread with official backing and drew in perhaps a sixth to a third of the population. Sali Berisha defended them as investment firms, and many people sold homes, cattle, and remittances to buy in. When the schemes collapsed in late 1996, protests broke out, first peacefully, then violently in February 1997. The state began to lose control of the streets.

By March 1997, the Police and Republican Guard had deserted, leaving armories open to militias and criminal gangs. Albania slid into civil war, and foreigners and refugees fled. Aleksandër Meksi and Sali Berisha resigned after the general election. Then, in April, Operation Alba, a United Nations force led by Italy, entered to help evacuations and restore order. It was a rescue as much as an intervention.

The recovery that followed was gradual. The Western European Union’s Albanian Police element worked with the government to rebuild the judiciary and the police. After the collapse of central planning, the economy moved towards an open market, and the service sector became dominant, with manufacturing and tourism also important. The country remained developing, but it was no longer sealed off from the wider world.

In 2009, Albania joined NATO and formally applied for European Union membership on 28 April of that year. That same outward turn shaped the next decade, and on 24 June 2014 it received official candidate status. The state was no longer defined by isolation or occupation, but by negotiation and alignment. The old question had become not whether it could survive, but where it wished to belong.

Edi Rama of the Socialist Party won the elections of 2013 and 2017 and then led a programme of institutional reform. He pushed modernisation in the economy, the judiciary, and law enforcement, while unemployment fell and women came to hold almost half the ministerial posts from 2017. In 2021, his party won a third straight victory. The government had become steadier than the nation once dared hope.

On 26 November 2019, a magnitude six point four earthquake struck near Mamurras, shaking Durrës, Kodër-Thumanë, Tirana, and even places farther away. Albanian diaspora communities and foreign governments sent humanitarian aid. Then COVID-19 was confirmed on 9 March 2020, and a state of emergency lasted from March to June. The country answered one disaster and then another, with institutions now tested by crisis rather than collapse.

Vaccination began on 11 January 2021, and by 11 August that year more than one million doses had been given. Tourism also surged, with over eleven million visitors in 2024, showing how open the country had become. Albania remains an official EU candidate, negotiating accession since 2022. The final scene is not a battlefield or a throne room, but a working republic counting doses and guests alike.