Falsification of Kosovo's history and propaganda

Since my other thread got derailed by these trolls. In this thread we will be debunking Serbian claims and their falsification of Kosova's history.

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The setting is this: the year is 1689, the month of October and we are located in Prizren.
The word is out that General Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who served in the Habsburg army, after burning down Shkup (Skopje) is heading towards Prizren. Serbian history claims that Piccolomini was welcomed in Prizren by Patriarch Arsenije III Crnojevic and his 20.000 Serbian insurgents who sided with the Austrians in the fight against the Ottomans. In 1690 the same sources tell us that this was the year when the Great Migration of Serbs from Kosovo to Hungary happened and it is widely known as ‘Velika Seoba’ Noel Malcolm in his ‘Rebels, Believers, Survivors. – Studies in the History of the Albanians’ deconstructs the 20.000 Serbian insurgents. I will try to put forward some of the impending evidence that can be found in his book.
In Camillo Contarini’s (Istoria Della Guerra) words: ‘Near Prizren, as Piccolomini was approaching, the inhabitants came out to meet him with festive shouts: they were 5.000 in number and were led by their Archbishop, holding a banner with an image of the Holy Cross.’
We must say that the Archbishop mentioned here is the Catholic Archbishop Pjetër Bogdani and not Arsenije, the Serbian Patriarch.
There is clear evidence that Arsenije was in Montenegro at this time as he was in contact with Venetian authorities and didn’t return to Kosovo until December 1689. But where does the number 20.000 come from? Well, Prizren was considered a large town at that time. Earlier that century, in 1624 Pjetër Mazrreku reported that Prizren had roughly 200 Catholic inhabitants, 600 ‘Serviani’ and 12.000 ‘Turchi, quasi tutti Albanesi.’
In 1670, as reported by Pjetër Bogdani in 1681, Prizren had 10.000 households and the number of the population was estimated to be around 50.000. It is easy to conclude that the 20.000 fighting men were mostly from the Prizren area.
In an intercepted letter written by a secretary of the English Embassy in Istanbul on January 19th, 1690, reports that the ‘Germans’ in Kosovo ‘have made contact with 20.000 Albanians (“Albanois”), who turned their weapons against the Turks.’ The letter is found among the papers of Ludwig von Baden in Karlsruhe. And, as for the Serbian historians who clearly lied about the composition of 20.000, they have the audacity to go on and portray Albanians as traitors who, despite the promise of assistance, left the Austrian army at the last moment before the battle of Kaçanik in early 1690.
Serbs retreated north and Albanians flowed in like a destructive river and thanks to their fantastic powers of reproduction became a dangerous threat to the biological survival of the Serbs in Kosovo.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/albania/com...ivors_prizren/



This German text from Kosovo in 'The Great Turkish War 1689' also refers to 'Archbishop of Albania' and 'Patriarch of Clementa' clearly referring to the Albanian Archbishop Pjeter Bogdani and not the Serbian Arsenije Crnojevic and it refers to Prizren in Kosovo as the capital of Albania which had a majority Albanian population.

The Austrians were greeted by Albanians:

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For his part, he continued his march and arrived on the 6th, as reported earlier, in Prisiran [Prizren], the Capital of Albania, where he was welcomed by the Archbishop (5) [36r] of that country and by the Patriarch of Clementa with their various religious ceremonies.

Outside of Priserin [Prizren] there were at least 6,000 Albanese [Albanian] troops as well as others who had formerly been in the pay of the Turks and who are known as Arnauts.

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In the Serbian version they changed it entirely into 6,000 Serbs and 20,000 Serbs and Prizren as a Serbian town.


The Serbian Arsenije Crnojevic never led any kind of resistance against the Ottomans in Kosovo, unlike what is claimed in Serbian history, it was the Albanians Pjeter Bogdani and Toma Raspasani:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pjetër_Bogdani
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toma_Raspasani
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Turkish_War



Nor did Arsenije lead 30k-40k Serb refugees from Kosovo to Hungary. He ran like a chicken to Belgrade where he spent most of his summer, according to, at least, a leading expert on Kosovo's history; British Historian Noel Malcolm, who argues most of the 30k-40k refugees that settled Hungary did not come from Kosovo.



Great-Migration-of-the-Serbs-from-Kosovo-(1690)

Another aggressive Serbo-Chetnik propaganda debunked

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Serbian historians explain the growth of an Albanian population in Kosovo during the early Ottoman period in terms of physical immigration: it is suggested that Albanians from the Malesi were encouraged by the Ottomans to settle in Kosovo, that many of these turned to Islam to gain the advantages of superior status, and that those Slavs who became Muslims were not merely Islamicized but, sooner or later, Albanianized as well.

The Ottoman officials usually noted which heads of family were new arrivals in their places of residence; out of 121 new arrivals in the nahiye of Pec in 1485, the majority had Slav names. In the sancak of Prizren in 1591, only five new arrivals out of forty-one bore Albanian names; and in a group of Kosovo towns in the 1580's and 1590's there were twenty five new Albanian immigrants and 133 with Slav names - several of them described as coming from Bosnia. This evidence counts strongly against the idea of mass immigration from northern Albania. Other more general arguments against that idea are based on relative population sizes and rates of growth. The population of Kosovo during this period was much bigger than that of northern and central Albania, and its rate of growth was actually lower. This is not what one would expect if a large overflow from the Albanian Malesi were flooding into Kosovo.

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- Kosovo: A Short History - Noel Malcolm

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Lazaro Soranzo, in the late sixteenth century, writing of 'Albanians, who live as Catholics, and observing that Prizren was inhabited ' more by Albanians than by Serbs')

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Let's debunk some more aggressive Serbo-Chetnik propaganda.