Chronicle
The Siege of Shkodra
De obsidione Scodrensi
Marin Barleti · 1504
Synopsis
In May 1478, the Ottoman vanguard appears before Shkodra, a Venetian city, and Sultan Mehmed II comes in person to lead the siege. In the citadel, Albanians and Italians, men and women, shut themselves in under the provveditore Antonio da Lezze. The artillery fires on the walls every day, the besiegers launch five assaults on the breaches, then come hunger and waiting. The narrative first goes back to the origins of the Turks, to the history of the city and to the first siege, that of 1474, before following the sultan's campaign against the neighbouring strongholds.
Context
Printed in Venice in 1504 by Bernardino de Vitalibus, the book opens with a letter to the head of the Republic and honours the Senate, which took in the people of Shkodra. It is divided into three books: the background, the shortest; the two sieges, the longest; the capture of the neighbouring strongholds, the sultan's withdrawal and the treaty that cedes the city. The historian Franz Babinger reproaches it for invented harangues; Alex Buda defends a style proper to the classical letters. An earlier manuscript, found in Paris in 2018 by Lucia Nadin, was published in 2022.
Who it is for
A chronicle in humanist Latin, to be read in translation; the speeches are pieces of rhetoric, and the Ottoman numbers are inflated.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first work of history written by a known Albanian author; translated into Italian in 1565, into Polish in 1569, into Albanian in 1962 and into English in 2012.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.