Real-life counterpart to the chivalric heroes of romance so important for the West-European canon, the 15th-century warlord Gjergj Kastrioti, known as Skanderbeg (in Albanian, Skënderbeu) became celebrated in countless historical texts, short stories, novels, theatrical, musical works, paintings and monuments.

Born in 1405 into the powerful Kastrioti family, lords of the Dibra region in northeastern Albania, he was raised at the Ottoman court together with his brothers. The given name Iskander resonated with the exploits of Alexander the Great and was combined with the Turkish title bey into the name Skanderbeg by which he became famous. His fame was made on the basis of his defence of the fortress of Kruja, to which he had appointed commander in 1438 by Murat II but which he turned into an anti-Ottoman stronghold until his death in 1468.

Already soon after his death, Skanderbeg’s exploits gave rise to a veritable mythologization in which epic, hagiographic, and even burlesque traits were mingled. The transformation of the historical Skanderbeg into a larger-than-life character occurred at the very moment of his entry into literature, in the Historia de Vita et Gestis Scanderbegi, Epirotarum principis written by the priest Shkodran Marin Barleti in 1510 and published in Rome. This epic poem became the basis of subsequent accounts, historical and fictionalized. It was translated into German, Italian, French, English, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Polish; an Albanian translation appeared only in 1964.

Prodigious events were reported around his birth (a vision his pregnant mother had of his future greatness featured in a woodcut illustrating the 1620 German translation) and death. It was said that the Turks went to pray on his grave as on the tomb of a prophet, and that they carried relics of his bones, wrapped in silk cloths as talismans.

Much of this discourse was first formulated abroad and only in the second instance took hold in Albanian-language writing. Thus, even before European travellers entered the country, Albania entered the European cultural imagination by virtue of the Skanderbeg theme. Travellers in the Northern-Albanian Mirdita region, known for its traditionalism, reported that men wore the black xhurdi (a short sleeveless coat) as a sign of mourning for Skanderbeg.

In the age of Romantic Nationalism, there was a resurgence of Skanderbeg treatments among Albanian scholars living abroad. Folk tales and songs in use among the Italian-based Arbëresh featured him as a marker of identity and pride. In 1898, a “History of Skanderbeg” (Histori e Skënderbeut) by Naim Frashëri was published in Bucharest by an Albanian publisher. Here, the protagonist was stripped of his Christian stature warring against the infidels (as the papally-bestowed epithet of athleta Christi had it), and became a national hero, forerunner and catalyst of the ideal of Albanian independence. Christian elements re-emerged in the first thirty years of the 20th century, when Italian expansionism, culminating in the Fascist era, aimed at assimilating the most famous exponent of the Albanian nation as a soldato di Gesù Cristo.