Bernardino Vitali was an Albanian printer and publisher, active in Venice from 1494 to 1539. His printing workshop published more than 200 works of Venetian humanists in the first half of the 16th century. [1]
Bernardino Vitali was an Albanian printer and publisher, active in Venice from 1494 to 1539. His printing workshop published more than 200 works of Venetian humanists in the first half of the 16th century. [1]
Vitali was one of the albanesoti, Albanians who had settled in Venice mostly as refugees after the fall of Shkodra (northern Albania) to the Ottomans. [2] The refugees had acquired Venetian citizenship and were integrated in the economic and social life of the republic. A close relative of Bernardino Vitali, Giovanni - possibly his grandson - was a priest and calligrapher from Brescia. He lived in Vitali's house in San Zulian and produced a luxury copy of the code of regulation of the Scuola degli Albanesi in 1552. [3]
Vitali opened his printing workshop in 1494 in Venice with his brother Matteo. The workshop operated until 1539. It was first located in the quarter of Santa Maria Formosa and later in San Zulian. In his career, Vitali published over 200 works in wide ranging subjects. [3] He operated two other printing workshops in Rome and Rimini. His printing signature were the stylized Latin forms of his name: Bernardinus de Vitalibus or Bernardinus Venetus de Vitalibus. One of the first publications of the Vitali brothers was Enneades, an early attempt at writing universal history by Sabellicus. [2] Vitali published many of the works of Albanian humanists who had settled in Italy after the Ottoman conquest of the country. He was the publisher of Marin Beçikemi and Marin Barleti, the first Albanian historian. Vitali was also Barleti's editor. One of the last publications in Vitali's career was Tabulae Anatomicae by Andries van Wesel with illustrations by Jan van Calcar. [4]
Marin Barleti was a historian, humanist and Catholic priest from Shkodër. He is considered the first Albanian historian because of his 1504 eyewitness account of the 1478 siege of Shkodra. Barleti is better known for his second work, a biography on Skanderbeg, translated into many languages in the 16th to the 20th centuries.
Gjon Buzuku was an Albanian Catholic priest who wrote the first known printed book in Albanian. Commonly referred to as the Missal, this book is considered an important monument of Albanian studies, being the oldest source for studying the Albanian language.
The Arbëreshë, also known as Albanians of Italy or Italo-Albanians, are an Albanian ethnolinguistic group in Southern Italy, mostly concentrated in scattered villages in the region of Calabria and, to a lesser extent, in the regions of Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania, Molise and Sicily. They are the descendants of Albanian refugees who fled Albania, and later some from Morea between the 14th and the 18th centuries following the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.
The League of Lezhë, also commonly referred to as the Albanian League, was a military and diplomatic alliance of the Albanian aristocracy, created in the city of Lezhë on March 2, 1444. The League of Lezhë is considered the first unified independent Albanian country in the Medieval age, with Skanderbeg as leader of the regional Albanian chieftains and nobles united against the Ottoman Empire. Skanderbeg was proclaimed "Chief of the League of the Albanian People," while Skanderbeg always signed himself as "DominusAlbaniae".
The second siege of Krujë took place from 1466 to 1467. Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire led an army into Albania to defeat Skanderbeg, the leader of the League of Lezhë, which was created in 1444 after he began his war against the Ottomans. During the almost year-long siege, Skanderbeg's main fortress, Krujë, withstood the siege while Skanderbeg roamed Albania to gather forces and facilitate the flight of refugees from the civilian areas that were attacked by the Ottomans. Krujë managed to withstand the siege put on it by Ballaban Badera, sanjakbey of the Sanjak of Ohrid, an Albanian brought up in the Ottoman army through the devşirme. By 23 April 1467, the Ottoman army had been defeated and Skanderbeg entered Krujë.
The Stratioti or Stradioti were mercenary units from the Balkans recruited mainly by states of southern and central Europe from the 15th century until the middle of the 18th century. They pioneered light cavalry tactics in European armies in the early modern era.
The Albanian–Venetian War of 1447–48 was waged between Venetian and Ottoman forces against the Albanians under George Kastrioti Skanderbeg. The war was the result of a dispute between the Republic and the Dukagjini family over the possession of the Dagnum fortress. Skanderbeg, then ally of the Dukagjini family, moved against several Venetian held towns along the Albanian coastline, in order to pressure the Venetians into restoring Dagnum. In response, the Republic sent a local force to relieve the besieged fortress of Dagnum, and urged the Ottoman Empire to send an expeditionary force into Albania. At that time the Ottomans were already besieging the fortress of Svetigrad, stretching Skanderbeg's efforts thin.
The Scuola dei Greci was the confraternity of the Greek community in Venice. Its members were primarily Greeks, but also included Serbs.
The siege of Shkodra took place from May 1478 to April 1479 as a confrontation between the Ottoman Empire and the Venetians together with the League of Lezhe and other Albanians at Shkodra and its Rozafa Castle during the First Ottoman-Venetian War (1463–1479). Ottoman historian Franz Babinger called the siege "one of the most remarkable episodes in the struggle between the West and the Crescent". A small force of approximately 1,600 Albanian and Italian men and a much smaller number of women faced a massive Ottoman force containing artillery cast on site and an army reported to have been as many as 350,000 in number. The campaign was so important to Mehmed the Conqueror that he came personally to ensure triumph. After nineteen days of bombarding the castle walls, the Ottomans launched five successive general attacks which all ended in victory for the besieged. With dwindling resources, Mehmed attacked and defeated the smaller surrounding fortresses of Žabljak Crnojevića, Drisht, and Lezha, left a siege force to starve Shkodra into surrender, and returned to Constantinople. On January 25, 1479, Venice and Constantinople signed a peace agreement that ceded Shkodra to the Ottoman Empire. The defenders of the citadel emigrated to Venice, whereas many Albanians from the region retreated into the mountains. Shkodra then became a seat of the newly established Ottoman sanjak, the Sanjak of Scutari. The Ottomans held the city until Montenegro captured it in April 1913, after a six-month siege.
The siege of Shkodër may refer to:
Zeta was one of the South Slavic medieval polities that existed between 1356 and 1496, whose territory encompassed parts of present-day Montenegro and northern Albania. The Crnojević noble family ruled the Zeta from 1451 until 1496. The state included parts of modern Montenegro and parts of modern Albania.
The Humoj or Omoj was an Albanian noble family that served as pronoiars of the Republic of Venice in the region of Balec and Drisht in the 15th century.
Marin Beçikemi was an Albanian scholar and orator who was a prominent humanist in the cities of Brescia and later Padua in the Republic of Venice in the early 16th century. He maintained a humanist school and was a professor in the University of Padua. He mostly wrote commentaries about classical Latin literature and was well known for his orations in the region of Venice.
The Siege of Shkodra is a book written by a Shkodran priest, Marin Barleti, about the Ottoman siege of Shkodra in 1478, led personally by Mehmed II, and about the joint resistance of the Albanians and the Venetians. The book also discusses the Ottoman siege of Shkodra in 1474. The book was originally published in 1504, in Latin, as De obsidione Scodrensi. Barleti was an eyewitness of the events.
The Moneta family was a 15th-century noble family of Zeta, Serbian Despotate and Venetian Republic in the region of Scutari. They first served Zeta's Lord Balša III and Serbian despot Stefan Lazarević before they became pronoiars of the Venetian Republic in 1423. Their religion was Eastern Orthodox and they ruled the land between rivers Bojana and Drin. The most notable members of the Moneta family include Rajko Moneta, his wife Jelena and their three sons. First Rajko and then his sons participated in numerous military conflicts including the Second Scutari War, the Albanian–Venetian War (1447–1448) and the Ottoman sieges of Scutari, first in 1474 and then 1478/1479. After Scutari was captured by the Ottomans in 1479 Nicholas, one of the sons who became voivode of Scutari, went to Venice to join his wife and their five children who took refuge in Venice in 1478 before the last Ottoman siege of Scutari started.
Antonio Loredan was a member of the Venetian noble family of Loredan, captain of Venetian-held Scutari and governor in Split, Albania Veneta, and the Morea.
Paganino Paganini, was an Italian printer and publisher from the Republic of Venice during the Renaissance. He was the original publisher of Luca Pacioli's mathematical works, Summa de arithmetica and De divina proportione, and of what is thought to be the first printed version of the Quran in Arabic.
This is an alphabetical index of people, places, things, and concepts related to or originating from the Republic of Venice. Feel free to add more, and create missing pages.
