The village S Demetrio Corone (p. 162) also keeps the name. In short, during all the second half of the fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth, there was a stream of these refugees to the kingdom of Naples. They were kindly received by the Government and were granted considerable tracts of land, to be held by them and their descendants. There was, naturally, much sympathy for the victims of Turkish barbarity; moreover, a great part of Southern Italy and Sicily was then sparsely peopled (as indeed it still is). The king was very willing to grant such tracts of land to people who would cultivate them, and then pay him taxes, the more since the Italians soon found that their new guests were exceedingly industrious, thrifty, and respectable folk. All over the kingdom the new colonists watered the waste places and made wild districts flourish.
The largest Albanian colonies were in the kingdom of Naples and the two Sicilies; but there were others in most parts of Italy, Tuscany, Venice, Rimini, the Papal States, and so on. The descendants of these have long been italianized, and have adopted the Roman rite. In the Papal states there was a great family of Albanian origin — namely, the descendants of Michael de'Lazii. They kept the name Albani. Pope Clement XI (John Francis Albani, 1700-1721) was of this family; so there has been one Pope of Albanian blood.[1]
The Albanians in Italy kept, of course, their own language and customs. They were a foreign colony among the Italians.[2] What is strange is that fragments of these colonies still remain, are still not absorbed into the Italian race. They were allowed a large measure of self-government under their own chiefs, acknowledging the supreme authority of the King of Naples and paying taxes to his Government. They spoke, of course, the Albanian language; but their rites were Byzantine in Greek.
Among these first settlers were some schismatics, some who had adopted the Paulician heresy and even some Moslems.[3] But the greater number, at any rate when they arrived in Italy,
- ↑ For the history of the Lazii-Albani family see Rodotà, iii, 30-34.
- ↑ The Italians were quite conscious of the difference between the Albanians and others who had the same Byzantine rite, whether old Italo-Greeks or new Greek refugees. Thus they called the district of Apulia between Taranto and Lecce, where Albanians settled, Albanía; but the country south of that, where the old Italo-Greeks still kept their rite, was called Grecía. The original Albania, in the Balkans, covers the old province Epirus; hence the Albanians are often called "Epiroti."
- ↑ For these see Rodotà, iii, 57-58.
