Austro-Hungarian Colonial Ventures: The Case of Albania
Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 2 (2022):267-304 DOI 10.38145/2022.2.267
In his unpublished 1955 doctoral dissertation, Johann Wagner persuasively argued that certain members of the leading political, economic, and military circles in Austria-Hungary were very interested in the possibility of global colonization.1 Furthermore, as the data gathered by Evelyn Kolm clearly shows, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, joint Ministers of Foreign Affairs Gusztáv Kálnoky and Agenor Gołuchowski and joint Minister of Finance Benjámin Kállay promoted the idea of creating a competitive military fleet, and they were ready to offer political support for the economic interest groups that insisted on the necessity of colonialism.2 Two out of these three people initiated and played a crucial role in the 1896 Vienna Conference, where they decided to adopt and implement a new Albanian policy.
This Austro-Hungarian Albanian policy was shaped in part by new colonial ambitions and was not merely the result of a one-time decision made in response to singular circumstances. The new Albanian policy harmonized with the general aspirations of the 1890s: Gustav Kálnoky and Agenor Gołuchowski, as heads of Ballhausplatz, made political and institutional attempts to include, in some form or another, the practice of global colonization as part of the foreign policy profile of Austria-Hungary. One of their allies in these efforts was Benjámin Kállay, who, as the governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was well-versed in both the theoretical and the practical issues of colonization.
This study presents the context and consequences of the 1896 conference from a transnational perspective. It also draws attention to two things. First, historical research on the question of colonization should be extended to the Balkan peninsula in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Second, Austria-Hungary’s new Albanian policy was based not only on international models but also on its own experiences in Africa.
Keywords: Albania, Austria-Hungary, colonialism, Balkan Peninsula
Introduction
Historians have paid little attention to the fact that in the 1890s, the ministers of common affairs of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy made a concrete attempt formally to include colonialism in the Austro-Hungarian foreign policy portfolio.
The unusual constitutional structure of Austria-Hungary made this a challenging task. According to the laws on which the Compromise of 1867 rested, Emperor and King Franz Joseph’s realm was divided into two large public entities, the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, each of which had its own government and parliament. The joint ministers of foreign affairs, finance, and war in Vienna were only allowed to deal with common matters as defined in precise terms by the representatives of the two halves of the new empire in 1867. Formally, they did not form a government for the whole empire. The two parliaments could only deal with the joint ministers separately, through delegations of their own envoys. The acceptance of an open portfolio for colonial endeavors was a major political and social challenge for the joint ministers because any kinds of ambitions in this direction could easily have undermined the stability of the dualist system, which had been achieved at no small cost. Colonial policy, after all, raised a number of questions that touched on public law. Who would be responsible for colonization, the empire as a whole or a separate Austria and a separate Hungary? Who would finance the costs of colonial ventures, and who would benefit from these investments? Would colonial issues come to constitute a new, fourth common affair?
Since the study of Austria-Hungary’s colonial past has so far been mainly limited to case studies and the study sites have for the most part been found in eastern and southeastern Europe, as far as I know, no conceptual context has emerged that has marked the place of the Dual Monarchy in Europe’s colonial past in the global context. This study therefore undertakes to examine, in the order and logic of the unpublished archival sources in the National Archive of Vienna, the global strands of history that can be connected to the Albanian policy of the joint ministry of foreign affairs, also known as Ballhausplatz. The study connects a number of issues and facts which have been part of hitherto unrelated, parallel historical narratives (including consuls, cult protectorate, competition with other powers, the Sudan policy of Ballhausplatz, and imperial pressure groups).
In this inquiry, I focus on a joint ministerial conference held in Vienna in 1896 at which the decision was reached to launch a new Austro-Hungarian Albanian policy. I also consider the consequences of this conference. Going beyond the historical publications on the conference, including the views of Teodora Toleva,3 I claim that the new policy had an imperial character but also an equally significant colonial character, since it was a long-term goal of joint ministers Agenor Gołuchowski and Benjámin Kállay to bring the territory and inhabitants of geographical Albania in the Western Balkans under the political, economic, and cultural influence of Austria-Hungary in an asymmetrical relationship. Drawing on unpublished archival sources and the secondary literature on international colonial practices at the time, I seek to determine why the term colonial can be reasonably applied to the new Austro-Hungarian policy towards Albania launched at the end of the century. I begin by offering a brief summary of the attitudes in Austria-Hungary towards colonialism in 1890s. I then provide a broad overview from a transnational perspective of the historical context of the conference where the new Albanian policy was adopted. I analyze the minutes of the conference, examine the personalities and roles of the participants, describe the main features of the new Albanian policy, reveal the hitherto unknown roots (e.g. African aspects) of this policy, and present the imperial interest group that managed to keep the new Albanian policy in operation for two decades, in spite of the fact that the people filling the roles of common ministers were constantly shifting.
Finally, it is worth clarifying the concepts used as a basis for a colonial interpretation of the Austro-Hungarian ventures in Albania. Though Albania was far from the only colony of the Monarchy on the eve of World War I, the colonial expansion pursued by the Ballhausplatz towards the territories inhabited by Albanians was a kind of mixture of “border colonization” and “construction of naval networks” described by Jürgen Osterhammel.4 Albanian politics was at once a border colonialism, as geographical Albania lay in the immediate vicinity of Austria-Hungary. On the other hand, it was also part of the strategies involved in the construction of naval networks, as the target area was surrounded by a wreath of huge mountains towards the Central Balkans, so the region was most easily approached from the sea.
Another source on which I draw in my interpretation of Austro-Hungarian expansionist efforts in Albania as an essentially colonial venture is an article by Trutz von Trotha on colonialism. According to Trotha, the distinctions historians draw among colonies should be based more on the forms of expansion and the goals set by the colonial power with respect to each individual colony than on classifications according to type (colony, protectorate, or mandate). Thus, building on this idea, I suggest that historians would be well to examine imperial expansion in Eastern Europe as a form of colonial expansion.5
The Ballhausplatz’s Colonization Efforts in the 1890s
Based on the monograph of Stephen Gross, Export Empire, we have reasons to suggest that the colonial policy pursued in the 1890s by the two Austro-Hungarian foreign ministers, Gustav von Kálnoky and Agenor Gołuchowski, was originally inspired by the work of the German chancellor Leo von Caprivi.6 Under Caprivi, the state became the most dominant actor in German (informal) colonialism. Caprivi sought to make Germany a much more active participant in the global project of colonialism than it had been in Bismarck’s time, but he did not seek to achieve his aims through a great power policy. He used the organizing power of the state and soft power policies to win the active support of German economic interest groups for his policies. Furthermore, he considered it necessary to win the support of broad sections of German society for the cause of colonialism. In order to do this, he gave active political support to the mass social organizations of the upper and middle classes which promoted colonialism, including, for instance, the Deutsche Kolonialgessellschaft (German Colonial Society).
Kálnoky and Gołuchowski started taking preparatory steps in the 1890s to transform Austria-Hungary into an openly colonial power. In the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry, the questions of colonialism and emigration were entrusted to a separate organizational unit independent within Ballhausplatz. Gołuchowski also provided political support for Austrian civilian organizations which, through their lobbying and publishing activities, urged the participation of the Dual Monarchy in the colonial partition of the world. Finally, Gołuchowski strove to win the support of the political elites of the two empires: the two parliaments and the two delegations debated Gołuchowski’s ideas concerning possible colonial ventures during the annual negotiations concerning the joint budget (1898–1901).
In 1891, at Kálnoky’s instructions, Adalbert Fuchs, who worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was entrusted with the management of overseas and emigration affairs. In 1894, the reorganization of Fuchs’ office was ordered. However, the new organizational system, which was based on new departments or Referatur, was only put in place under Agenor Gołuchowski, who assumed the position of joint Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1895. The new III. Referatur, or third department, headed by Fuchs as section chief (Sektionschef), was entrusted with an array of tasks, including colonial policy and the emigration question (Kolonialpolitik und Auswanderungsfrage).7
This third department was created first and foremost because of economic considerations. The Austrian Empire enjoyed a flourishing period of industrial and commercial development at the turn of the century, and this naturally led to the emergence of new types of lobbying organizations. These organizations included a group of large banking consortia (Bodenkreditanstalt, Wiener Bankverein) and chambers of commerce and industry. Although these lobby groups did not have financial assets or backing that would have made them competitive in the spaces under the control of the great powers, they had enough spare capital to look for investment opportunities in Africa, Latin America, and even the Far East. They soon began to take a growing interest in the question of emigration. Many of their publicists who were engaged in propaganda in support of colonial ventures believed that, as was the case in other European states, the issue of emigration should be linked to the economic interests of Austria-Hungary on the African and Latin American continent. In other words, without active state involvement, the big Austrian banks and the chambers of industry and commerce did not dare take serious independent action. The creation of the third department was thus partly in the interests of the new lobby organizations.8
In 1894, Ernst Franz Weisl founded the Österreichisch-Ungarische Kolonial-Gesellschaft, or Austro-Hungarian Colonial Society, on the model of the German Colonial Society. The Society was established to promote the foreign economic interests of the Dual Monarchy and to win social support for the third department of Ballhausplatz. The society was under the political wing of Gołuchowki, and in the 1890s, it worked together with the Ballhausplatz consular network on several African endeavors (Rio de Oro, Morocco). The joint minister either maintained direct contact with them through the head of the third department or held personal meetings with their leaders. Gołuchowski encouraged his officials and consuls to serve as active figures in the society.9
In the delegation meetings and the parliamentary sessions held in both halves of the empire at the turn of the century, the possibility of Austro-Hungarian participation in global colonialism was raised during debates concerning the development of the navy and the budget of the joint ministries. It also came up in connection with the Spanish-American War and the suppression of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion.10 The majority of the Hungarian MPs consistently voted in favor of covering the expenditures of the navy fleet, despite the debates concerning public law. The minutes from meetings of the House of Representatives reveal that Hungary’s elected representatives opposed the idea of colonial policy in principle but not in practice. After 1867, most Hungarian deputies, both those of the governing coalition and the opposition, did not rule out the possibility that sometime in the distant future, if the conditions were favorable, Austria-Hungary or even Hungary might join the ranks of the powers who were leading the colonial division of the world, whether through force of arms or economic influence. By “favorable conditions,” they meant that Hungarian foreign trade and industry would share in the various opportunities and anticipated benefits in proportion to the so-called quota (the rate at which Hungary and Austria contribute to the costs of common affairs between the two states) or on a parity basis. It is also worth noting that, while supporters of a possible Austrian colonial project would have ventured into Africa, Latin America, or the Far East, the attention of those who were kindling visions of Hungarian imperialism was focused primarily on the Balkans, the peninsula where, according to the consensus of the members of the Budapest House of Representatives, Austria-Hungary already had a colony: Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Drawing on domestic political and public law considerations, the Hungarian prime ministers and the Budapest parliament managed to prevent Ballhausplatz from espousing an open and long-term colonial policy in Africa and the Far East at the turn of the century. Ministers of common civilian affairs drew a number of lessons from this failure. One of these lessons was the need to launch and finance, when the circumstances were auspicious, concrete colonial ventures without, however, calling political attention to their endeavors.
Ballhausplatz’s New Albania Policy
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Albania (understood as a geographical territory) began to play an increasingly important role in Ballhausplatz’s visions for the Balkans, primarily for reasons of foreign trade and foreign policy. The strategic importance of the region grew to such an extent for the empire that, at the turn of the century, the joint Viennese ministries announced a new Albanian policy. This was seen as necessary first and foremost to prevent the emergence of a Russian “iron ring” running alongside Austria-Hungary, from the German-Russian border to the Adriatic. But the new Albanian policy was also intended to help keep Italian and Serbian ambitions for the Eastern Adriatic at bay and to prepare the Dual Monarchy for the eventual collapse of the Ottoman Empire.11
The direct cause of the new Albanian policy on the eve of the turn of the century and a clear sign of the impending collapse of the Ottoman Empire was a memorandum written in early 1896. The memorandum was written by Muslim Albanian nobleman and later grand vizier of the empire, Ferit Bey Vlora of the Great House of Vlora (grand vizier: 1903–1908).12
In the 1890s, Albanian Muslims along the coast of Albania who earlier had been loyal Ottoman subjects were becoming increasingly convinced that the Ottoman Empire would soon disintegrate. Out of concern for the future of the Albanian territories and fearing the ambitions of the neighboring nation states, prominent Albanians who held high civil service or military positions in the capital formed a secret organization. Soon, several similar associations were formed in central and southern Albania. One of the goals of these associations was to cultivate the mother tongue (Albanian) and, through it, the national idea. Members of these circles were increasingly convinced that the Albanian people would never be able to create national and state unity on their own, given their cultural backwardness, their social and ideological fragmentation, the threats posed by neighboring peoples, and the sultan’s repressive policy towards the Albanian national movement. In their assessment, it would only be possible to create national and state unity with the help of a benevolent European great power.
In the early spring of 1896, Ferit Vlora, the leader of the Albanian nationalists in Constantinople, met with Austro-Hungarian ambassador Heinrich Calice to inquire about Ballhausplatz’s plans for Albania and to share his thoughts. He said that, thanks to its policy towards Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary had managed to win the trust of Albanian Muslims. During the visit, Ferit Vlora gave Calice the abovementioned memorandum. It would be hard to overstate the importance of this document. A leading official of the Ottoman Empire was asking Austria-Hungary, a Christian European power, for protection for the Muslim-majority Albanian people.13
Ferit Vlora’s memorandum was essentially a detailed political plan, and it ended up serving as the basis of the program of the Vienna Conference of 1896 (where it was discussed) and the so-called Albanian Action Plans that were a product of the conference. Ferit Vlora asked Ballhausplatz to play a role as protector against the Balkan Slavs and also to launch a consistent policy of intervention against the sultanate in support of Albanian nationhood. This interventionist policy was to have a military side and an economic side. Ferit Vlora proposed that Austrian warships appear in Albanian ports as often as possible and that the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy acquire railway construction and operation concessions on the eastern Adriatic.14 In 1897, in a telegram to Ballhausplatz, Ferit Vlora’s younger brother Syrja Vlora went even further in his proposals: he called for the establishment of an independent Albania as an Austro-Hungarian protectorate.15
Ballhausplatz took the invitation seriously but also with measured caution. The Vlora brothers came from southern Albania, or in other words not from the traditional area of interest for Austria-Hungary. Until 1896, within the framework of the Catholic cult protectorate, only the Catholic Albanians living in the northern regions of geographical Albania belonged to Vienna’s jurisdiction. According to the treaties signed with the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the concordat signed with the papal state in 1855, the duties of the cult protectorate included the protection of the free exercise of religion by local Catholics; the maintenance and operation of churches, schools, and other church buildings; providing training for the Albanian Catholic clergy; preventing taxation of the Church by the state; building new denominational schools and churches; providing financial and humanitarian assistance; and generally providing finances for the operation of the local Catholic Church and providing it with legal protection from the Ottoman authorities. The Vlora brothers were essentially calling for the political and economic extension of this sectarian and humanitarian protectorate power to all Albanians. While it kept this request secret from the outside world and from public opinion in both halves of the empire, Ballhausplatz embarked on a long-term policy of intervention.
Thus, in the name of an influential Muslim group, Ferit and Syrja Vlora, sought the active intervention of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Ottoman internal affairs in the interest of the Albanians against their legitimate ruler, the sultan. When a group of subjects in Africa or Asia sought the active and long-term intervention of a foreign European power in order to assert their interests against their ruler and settle a local, internal political conflict, this is regarded in the secondary literature as the beginning of the establishment of the intervening European state as a colonial power. This type of request, after all, was one of the most important sources of legitimacy for the establishment of colonial rule at the time.16
Regrettably, none of the surviving sources contain information concerning Ferit Vlora’s views on contemporary European colonial issues. However, drawing on contemporary Ottoman sources, Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular suggests that the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was as much an anti-colonial experience for Muslims in the Ottoman Empire as the loss of other lands which belonged to the empire in Asia and Africa. According to Amzi-Erdoğdular, in the eyes of the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, the loss of European territories was qualitatively no different from the colonial annexation of Asian and African provinces.17
It would be worth noting, in connection with the independent political initiative taken by the Vlora brothers that they were not the only people to embark on this kind of undertaking among the Albanian pressure groups. In 1901, Haxhi Zeka Mulla, the political leader of the so-called League of Peja, which was a supra-confessional organization which urged Albanian national development, repeated the request, as did influential Kosovo landowner Jashar Erebara in 1903. Zeka and Erebara represented two Muslim Albanian pressure groups which had considerable influence in rural Albanian areas. Like the Vlora brothers, they believed that the fall of the Ottoman Empire was nigh, and Albanians would only be able to prosper under the protection of a great European power. Given of the tolerant policy shown by the Monarchy towards Muslims in Bosnia, both Zeka and Erebara saw Ballhausplatz as a suitable protectorate. Thus, Austro-Hungarian intervention was sought not only by a group of Constantinople officials and intellectuals with roots in southern Albania, but also by the leaders of political groups with influence in the Albanian vilayet of Kosovo.18
On November 17, December 8, and December 23, a conference was held to discuss the foundations of the new Albanian policy.19 The meetings were attended by the two aforementioned joint ministers, Agenor Gołuchowski and Benjámin Kállay, and several experts were also invited. Head of Department Eduard Horowitz, the leading official in the joint Ministry of Finance, managed affairs concerning Bosnia and Herzegovina and was also involved in Kállay’s activities in connection with the World Expositions. Julius Zwiedinek von Sündenhorst, a former student at the Academy of Oriental Languages in Vienna (which trained consuls, interpreters, and economists), was the leading official at Ballhausplatz. He was recognized not only as an expert on Albanian affairs, but also as an international authority and publicist on the Ottoman Empire, trade in the east, the Levant, and Syria.20
Norbert Schmucker, another former student at the Oriental Academy, had served in various Albanian consulates between 1881 and 1893. He was invited to the conference in part because he had served as Consul General of Austria-Hungary in Bombay from 1893 to 1896, he was familiar with the Indian subcontinent, and he had been a member of the Austro-Hungarian Colonial Society since 1896 and was one of its liaisons to the Foreign Ministry.21
The aforementioned Adalbert Fuchs, head of department for colonial policy, was invited by the common foreign minister. Earlier, Fuchs had been responsible for an array of tasks, including keeping an eye on the territories (mostly in Africa and Asia) to which the Habsburg dynasty or the Common Foreign Office had internationally acknowledged religious, economic, or political claims. He was also responsible for organizing, on request, communication and shipping ties with the regions that had caught the interest of politicians in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy who were eager to pursue colonial ventures.22
Four additional experts were later invited to assist with the implementation of the decisions reached at the conference. Kállay brought in Lajos Thallóczy as an expert on Orientalism, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Albania.23 Consul General in Shkodra (Northern Albania) Theodor Ippen was called on by the Joint Foreign Minister, partly because of his experience as a civilian envoy in the Novi Pazar Sanjak. Although Ballhausplatz did not include Austria-Hungary’s experiences in the sanjaks (which contemporary historian Tamara Scheer has interpreted as informal imperialism)24 among the colonial ventures, the secondary literature on British Punjab (North-West Frontier Province) suggests that it might well be worth regarding them as such.25 The Novi Pazar Sanjak in the Balkans and the Punjab in India served very similar functions. While there were differences in the international legal status of the two territories and in the titles of possession, these were the two regions through which the Dual Monarchy and the British Empire could reach the interior of the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia and pursue their ambitions to conquer and control more territory. The tasks and functions of the military occupation regimes, administration, civilian commissioners, and railway construction plans in the two regions are largely comparable.
After graduating from the Academy of Oriental Languages, Julius Pisko served as a consul in Belgrade, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and (geographical) Albania.26 He trained himself to be an expert in colonial affairs precisely under the influence of his experiences in Albania. In 1902–1903, he took part in the SMS Zenta mission to Africa and Latin America, which had three objectives: to demonstrate Austria-Hungary’s great power status, to demonstrate the Monarchy’s military capabilities on the ocean, and to make trade policy surveys and gather statistics. As a participant in the military mission, Pisko visited the British, French, German, Portuguese, and Belgian colonies in Africa and studied them as a trade correspondent for the common foreign office. He also assessed possibilities for Austro-Hungarian economic colonization on the African continent. He regularly sent reports both to the joint ministries and to the Austrian and Hungarian governments. On the basis of his work as a publicist, Pisko seems to have identified, in the course of his travels, with the supremacist, racist views which undergirded the British and French colonial projects. Like all the Austro-Hungarian consuls who later took part in the ventures in Albania, he became a member of the Flottenverein (in 1906). The Flottenverein was a mass Austrian social organization which, on behalf of its several thousand members, demanded of the joint ministries and the governments of the two halves of the empire that the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy play an active role in the colonial partition of the world.27
Heinrich Calice recommended to the conference organizers that they also invite Albanian monk Prenk Doçi. Doçi had taken part in the League of Prizren’s uprising against the Ottoman Empire (1878–1881). He escaped execution by fleeing to Rome with the help of the Austro-Hungarian consular service, which turned to Propaganda Fide to help Doçi escape. In Rome, Doçi became secretary to Cardinal Antonio Agliardi, a papal diplomat, who took him first to Canada and then to India as apostolic delegate between 1884 and 1889. During his two major trips to India, Agliardi was entrusted with the task of reorganizing the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the complex political, administrative, ethnic, and sectarian context of the subcontinent and preparing a concordat on the local modus vivendi with Portugal. He developed a close working relationship with Doçi, one of the consequences of which was that, during the Balkan wars, as nuncio in Vienna, he often presented himself as one of the papacy’s experts on Albania.28 It is perhaps worth noting that, in August 1913, the cardinal, who had visited India, referred to the Austro-Hungarian protectorate in Albania as the jewel in Franz Joseph’s crown.29
As part of the Albanian initiatives, Doçi wrote a memorandum for the common foreign ministry in 1897 in which made concrete suggestions concerning the potential organization of Albania as a state. If one examines his proposals, which included a Catholic Principality in northern Albania as an autonomous administrative unit which would be formally dependent on the sultan but practically dependent on Austria-Hungary, it seems quite possible that Doçi drew on Indian examples when drafting his memorandum.30
The Role of Benjámin Kállay in Launching Operations in Albania
The minutes of the conference reveal that the Joint Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Joint Ministry of Finance played different strategic roles in shaping the new Albanian policy. Foreign Minister Agenor Gołuchowski was looking primarily for answers to logistical and political questions, for instance where and with whom the so-called “Albanian actions” should be carried out and how the Albanian consulates should be reorganized. In contrast, Benjamin Kállay, the Joint Minister of Finance, wanted to implement the new policy within the framework of a complex great power operation. Kállay determined first and foremost the means which would be used to influence the Albanians and the practical tasks which would need to be carried out in support of Albanian nation building. His main proposal was for Vienna to draft an organizational charter for a future Albanian principality which would lay the foundations for a state which would be formally independent but would practically function as an Austro-Hungarian protectorate.31
The strategy adopted by Kállay in 1896 was based largely on his experiences as governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina and his knowledge of British colonial practices. In order to assert the interests of the Monarchy as a great power, Kállay proposed that the plan of action should include the distribution of arms and ammunition to the Albanians and that Ballhausplatz should openly take the side of the former in the recurring Albanian-Montenegrin border disputes. In his assessment, these two steps would offer an immediate sign of the strength of the protections being offered by Austria-Hungary and would win allies for Vienna. Kállay also suggested that some influential Albanian political and military leaders should be provided with financial subsides from time to time through the consulates.32
According to Kállay, an active economic policy was indispensable for the Albanian actions to succeed. In his view, the Austro-Hungarian press should pursue active propaganda to increase trade with the Albanian territories. Albanian merchants, he felt, should be able to bring their goods to Vienna, as this would help win their support. Furthermore, he felt that a trading house should be established to carry out the essential functions of mediation in order to nurture trade between the Dual Monarchy and Albania. Kállay also considered it important that, instead of relying on smaller shipping companies, Ballhausplatz get the Trieste-based Austrian Lloyd, the largest Austrian shipping company, for “special and regular service to Albania.” Head of the colonial department Adalbert Fuchs, who organized shipping connections with Albanian ports, was entrusted with this task. Within a few years, the transport link between Austria-Hungary and Albania was established. The aforementioned Austrian Lloyd and Ungaro-Croata, the largest Hungarian steamship company (Fiume), operated the ship services.33
Although historians have only rarely made the economic expansion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its trade relations with the eastern Adriatic between 1896 and 1914 the focus of their studies, unpublished archival sources reveal that an Austrian businessman and banker named Paul Siebertz established a department store and printing press in the southern Albanian port town of Vlora in the early years of the twentieth century and even bought a hotel at some point. The infrastructure created by Siebertz furthered the interests of Austro-Hungarian imperial expansion because it physically linked the center to the periphery at a historic moment when not only Ballhausplatz but also the Austrian Industrialists’ Association was aiming to acquire Vlora, together with Thessaloniki. Siebertz’s endeavors also helped consolidate pre-capitalist conditions in the region.34
We also know that Zef Curani, an Albanian from the city of Shkodra in northern Albania who had studied at the Vienna Commercial Academy, was one of the Albanian merchants who came into contact with Ballhausplatz as a consequence of the new policy. Curani’s principal tasks in the implementation of operations in Albania included information gathering, propaganda, arms smuggling, nation building, and the creation of a single Albanian alphabet. Ballhausplatz rewarded Curani for his services with regular subsidies. The joint foreign ministry also gave him a financial incentive in the development of Austro-Hungarian-Albanian trade relations: in the summer of 1913, for example, he handled all the shipments of goods between Oboti and Shkodra (northern Albania) on the Buna River to and from the Monarchy (he enjoyed a monopoly), and he received a share of the profits from these shipments. The relationship between Ballhausplatz and Curani offers a clear example of the kind of soft power imperialism described by Stephen Gross in his aforementioned monograph Export Empire.
In connection with the idea of supporting Albanian nation building, Kállay had two fundamental questions in mind. First, he sought to strengthen the social groups and organizations that were capable of shouldering the burden of modern nation building and on which Austria-Hungary could rely. Second, he wanted to nurture national sentiment among Albanians who belonged to social strata which had hitherto been indifferent to the national idea. Kállay wanted to use the new subsidy policy to exert an influence on three social groups: members of the Albanian Catholic Church, Muslim beys from impoverished but respectable families of noble birth, and members of the Albanian diasporas abroad.35
Kállay wanted to transform the Catholic Church into a national church. While it was true that the episcopacy in Albania was indeed comprised of Albanians, most of the lower clergy and monastic orders consisted of Italians or pro-Italian priests who were involved in political propaganda in the interests of Italy. Kállay therefore proposed that, in cooperation with the Vatican and the Jesuit order, the noviciates who were being sent to the Albanian territories would in the future be chosen from among young people of Albanian nationality who were studying theology in the seminaries in Austria-Hungary. With this proposal, Kállay sought, in essence, to reconcile the interests of the Catholic Church with Austria-Hungary’s foreign policy interests so that the latter would dominate. Kállay made two demands that he expected to be met in exchange for more financial support through the institution of the protectorate: the clergy should actively spread pro-Albanian national propaganda and, politically, it should be loyal to Ballhausplatz’s visions. Otherwise, the subsidies would drop or be cut off, or Vienna could even find a way to compel a given monastic order to leave the region.36
Kállay agreed with Ferit Vlora’s memorandum, and he felt it was important to make the Albanians understand that Austria-Hungary was not supporting a denomination, but rather hoped to further the creation of an independent Albania where Catholics and Muslims would strive together to achieve national goals. He urged the participants in the conference to harness the ambitions of influential beys to reach these goals. The quantities and frequency of the subsidies given to individuals, he felt, should depend on the extent to which the beneficiaries took clear political stances.37
The method suggested by Kállay (and later adopted) of selecting the beys is reminiscent of the ways in which the British Empire in West Africa drew distinctions between “good” and “bad” Muslims. Formally, Ballhausplatz strove to maintain a neutral attitude towards the various Muslim groups in Albania, but it supported and strengthened the power, economic sway, and influence of the social stratum of beys who cooperated with it. The Austro-Hungarian consular network, furthermore, was increasingly willing to engage in conflicts with the group of officials running the Ottoman administration when their endeavors threatened the sustainability of the social order. The disruption of the social status quo would have had repercussions which would have been felt on the international stage.38
Kállay also suggested that the planned operations should be extended beyond the Albanian territories and that subsidies should be provided to influence the cultural organizations of the Albanian diasporas in Bucharest and Sofia. The print materials published by these cultural organizations in Albanian and then smuggled into the territory of the Ottoman Empire could be used to propagate a national Albanian idea that was also pro-Austrian. The conference adopted and implemented Kállay’s proposals.
When Albania declared its independence in 1912, of the four large groups of the founding fathers (members of the so-called great houses, refugees, beys, and intellectuals who belonged to the diasporas), the latter two became influential political factors in Albanian society, both because of the unusual political circumstances and to no small extent thanks to the support they were given by Austria-Hungary.39
If one considers Kállay’s proposals from the perspective of the prevailing colonial practices at the time, the new subsidy policy seems to have functioned in part as a tool with which to maintain the diversity of Albanian society by creating a new hierarchy between and within groups which was then controlled and overseen through subsidies. The creation of a national Catholic Church meant that, within the new hierarchy, some orders (Jesuits) enjoyed conspicuously more support, while others (Franciscans) had to make do with less. The deal offered to the Catholic Church in 1896 meant unequal conditions and political subordination for Propaganda Fides on Albanian territory, since the amounts of the subsidies received through the Austro-Hungarian protectorate were also determined by the political reliability shown to Ballhausplatz.
The same logic was applied in secular society to the funding provided for the selected Muslim beys. The Austro-Hungarian consular network identified bey families which, fundamentally because of their economic circumstances, had drifted into the camp of internal opposition to the Ottoman Empire. Their opposition had become an important means of expressing their commitment to the Albanian language and the Albanian national movement (one could mention, for example, the Toptani family in central Albania). As a reward for their political loyalty to Austria, Ballhausplatz began to strengthen the economic position of this social group and its place in Albanian society. Austria-Hungary’s ability to use the beys as tools to achieve its ends was limited, however, by the fact that Italy, in pursuit of its own imperialist interests, also began to finance this social group, as well as the members of the lower priesthood, who were partly Italian.40
All in all, the implementation of the new Albanian policy was successful and remained secret partly because it was possible to avoid calling any attention to the measures among political circles by bypassing the two parliaments on the issue of funding. There was always enough money for the Albanian policy without it appearing anywhere as a separate budget item. Through the item of “Catholic churches in Levant,” Ballhausplatz could use monies provided for the common ministries to pursue its aims in Albania. In addition, since 1864, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been handling the so-called “united Oriental funds,” which were pooled from the assets of two civil foundations (the Sklavenredemptionsfond and the Orientalische Missionsfond). The pooled funds were basically used to run Catholic schools and missions in the Ottoman Empire. If additional funds were needed for the new Albanian policy, these budgets could be increased without attracting notice.41 (For a thorough account of the concrete details and statistics concerning the use of these funds, see the monographs by Schanderl, Schwanda, Toleva, Deusch, and Gostentschnigg.)
The monarch also regularly used monies from the private funds of the Habsburg family to support the Catholic archdioceses in Albania. The sources contain no concrete indication of the Emperor and King having used these funds to finance political enterprises in Albania, but it is worth noting that as early as 1858, Franz Joseph had given permission to finance specific colonial projects, such as Wilhelm Tegetthoff’s expedition to the Red Sea, by secretly using state funds through the private funds of his brother Archduke Maximilian.42
Pax Austro-Hungarica
The participants in the Vienna Conference of 1896 thus adopted a policy of subsidies intended to ensure that, in time, the eastern Adriatic would come under the sway of a prince who would rule under an Austro-Hungarian protectorate. Since the minutes of the conference do not reveal what pattern the protectorate would follow, it is worth keeping in mind that two great powers, Russia and Great Britain, had already used this form of rule not far from the Albanian territories. In the eastern Balkans, Russia had held the Romanian principalities (1830s) and Bulgaria (1878–1885) under its power as a protectorate. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, the so-called Septinsular Republic (1797–1812) in the Ionian Islands near the Albanian coast enjoyed protections as a British protectorate, as did Malta (1800–1813) and Cyprus (1878–1914) in the Mediterranean. In each of these territories, the role of the British Empire as protector was a sort of next step to colonization: United States of the Ionian Islands (former Septinsular Republic) was under British colonial rule from 1815 to 1864, and Malta became a Crown colony in 1813, followed by Cyprus a century later, in 1922.43
For Ballhausplatz, of the two protectorate models, the Russian was preferable, as the Ballhausplatz officials envisioned a prince and principality in Albania after the possible collapse of the Ottoman Empire rather than an administration led by a governor or administrator.
Kállay proposed that an organizational statute be drafted for the future Albanian principality, a suggestion which indicates that he may have been drawing not only on the models of Wallachia and Moldavia, but also the smaller Ottoman units with administrative autonomy and mixed Muslim-Christian populations. These units—Samos (1834), Lebanon (1860–1864), Crete (1868, 1898), and Eastern Rumelia (1878)—had been given an organizational statute (reglement/statut organique) in the nineteenth century with international assistance. As the Austro-Hungarian delegate, Kállay had participated in the drafting of the latter’s organizational statute.
In the formulation of concrete action programs, or in other words, the operations that it was hoped would lead to the creation of a protectorate, the participants in the 1896 conference drew heavily on the example of Syria. The activities of the French consuls in Syria after 1861 and the new methods they had developed to exert an influence on the local population were incorporated into the practices of Austro-Hungarian consuls. But alongside the international models, Ballhausplatz drew at least as much on its own imperial experiences and practices. Ballhausplatz adopted practices which had been used in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Novi Pazar Sanjak, and it took into consideration and learned from the experiences of the Austro-Hungarian consulate in Khartoum in Sudan (see below).44
After the conference, the various tasks were divided up among the joint ministries. Under the influence of the theoretical and practical guidance of Lajos Thallóczy, the focus of Kállay’s line was primarily on nation-building tasks. They decided to publish a textbook in Albanian on Albanian national history for Albanian ethnic schools. To further the creation of a uniform Latin alphabet, literature programs were launched in Vienna, Borgo Erizzo (or Arbanasi in Croatian and Arbneshi in Albanian, where the population was Albanian-speaking) in Dalmatia, Brussels (where the French-language journal Albanie was published), Bucharest, and Sofia. Several Albanian-language publications were published as part of the program. The joint Ministry of Finance also strove to put forward economic and trade action plans.
The Gołuchowski line undertook political tasks: preparing the Albanian elite and intellectuals for the state-building project; logistical and financial support for the Albanian national movement; and the development of a consular network able to carry out the new tasks.
Although the idea arose of creating a separate department within the joint foreign ministry for the oversight and organization of the new Albanian policy, ultimately, the operations were carried out by the Albanian experts at Ballhausplatz, who worked within the existing organizational structure.45 (Unfortunately, the sources reveal little concerning what the actual responsibilities of this Albanian department would have been.) Lajos Thallóczy selected the consul candidates for the program from among the students at the Academy of Oriental Languages in Vienna, where Thallóczy himself was also an instructor. After having completed their studies at the academy, the candidates attended a six to twelve month continued training course on site, i.e., at the Albanian consulates, where they learned Albanian and acquired knowledge of the circumstances on the ground. Training courses were also organized for these emerging Albania experts in Borgo Erizzo. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs worked together with the Dalmatian governorate to organize Albanian language courses in the local schools in part for Austrian and Hungarian citizens who voluntarily sought, either as civilians or as soldiers, to participate in the implementation of the new Albanian policy. Those who received training in these schools included Heinrich Clanner von Engelshofen, for instance, who was a confidante of Joint Chief of Staff Conrad and the most important intelligence officer for Joint Staff and Ballhausplatz in Albania.46
The allotment to the consuls of the tasks involved in the Albanian operations was the result of a concerted effort by the two joint ministries. The preservation of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire was still a primary interest for Austria-Hungary, and the preparations underway for the creation of an Albanian state were merely a cautionary step in anticipation of the imminent collapse of the empire, so the consuls had to operate in secret.
Thus, the consuls could not do anything to alter the organizational system of the Ottoman state administration, and they had to build their policies on local structures. Ballhausplatz gave them a free hand in this and did not exercise close supervision over them. Nonetheless, even if the Albanian policies were broken down to the level of the sanjak, they were to be implemented in a coordinated manner. The consuls had to be fluent in Albanian and familiar with local customs and conditions, and they had to build up their own networks of contacts by traveling regularly within the territories of their offices. The consul was expected to build a network of contacts to ensure that, through him, Austria-Hungary would gain prestige as a protector power and would be able to propagate its vision of the values of civilization. The consuls had to prevail on the Albanian beys to turn to them with their complaints and to seek them out as representatives of their interests and sources of advice, and not the state administration or state officials. The Austro-Hungarian consuls took this pattern from the practice of the French consuls in Syria. The primary means used to build a network of contacts were the distribution of gifts and distinctions of various kinds, regular or temporary subsidies, personal visits (e.g. extended stays with the bey families), measures taken against the state authorities, support for education in Albanian, and cultural and financial support for the Albanian national movement. Ballhausplatz also provided logistical support for the leaders of the national movement: they could bypass the controlled communication channels of the Ottoman Empire by using the local branches of the Austrian Post and Austrian Lloyd, which meant that the secrets contained in their letters were safe.47
All in all, the responsibilities and tasks of the consuls described above, the push for the transformation of the Albanian social hierarchy, and the efforts to promote economic expansion were little more than a west Balkan, Austro-Hungarian adaptation of the everyday practices used by the so-called indirect rule protectorates, which were based essentially on the British models in Africa and Asia. The fact that the Joint Chiefs of Staff allowed the military fleet to make regular demonstrations of force in Albanian ports in Ottoman territorial waters buttresses this claim. Indeed, an annual show of military force was one of the features of the British indirect rule in West Africa.48
For as should be noted, Ballhausplatz’s new Albanian policy also enjoyed the support of the joint staff. In a memorandum of April 2, 1897, Chief of the General Staff Friedrich Beck pushed for the creation of an independent, pro-Vienna Albania, which he supported with reference to allegedly “vital” reasons.49 He considered it important to have a strong presence on the eastern Adriatic coast for two reasons from a military point of view. First, control of the area would ensure free passage for Austria-Hungary’s military and merchant fleets to the Mediterranean through the Otranto Strait. Second, it would give the Monarchy a strategic position just to the south of Serbia and Montenegro.50 In effect, Beck’s plan would have meant the creation of a cordon sanitaire in Albania that would have protected the sea route, the free use of which was essential if Austria-Hungary sought to maintain its status as a great power. The chief of the General Staff (and Ballhausplatz) was merely adopting a common practice of colonial great powers: the British Empire, for example, surrounded its sea routes to India with a network of British protectorates in order to ensure that these routes remained safe for its ships.51
Beck adopted a committed imperialist policy: he asked the Austro-Hungarian consuls in Albania to gather geographical, cartographic, and infrastructural data. He was prepared, furthermore, to carry out independent military operations in Albanian territory, and he accepted the proposal which had been made by Ferit Vlora and allowed units of the joint navy to make regular demonstrations of force. One of the primary tasks of the units of the fleet that were deployed was to give Albanians a tangible demonstration of Austria-Hungary’s military capabilities and the protections they enjoyed as a kind of protectorate. The first such demonstration was held in 1902, when the SMS Monarch (1895), SMS Wien (1895), and SMS Budapest (1896), three vessels which belonged to a relatively new class of battleship, docked in Durrës, a coastal city with the largest port in Albania.52
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Austria-Hungary’s new Albanian policy led to serious great power rivalry between the Monarchy and Italy over the assertion of influence in Albania. To this day, the secondary literature on the subject has reduced this great power rivalry, which unfolded in the ecclesiastical, economic, and cultural spheres, to the phenomenon of informal imperialism.53 Yet the interests of the two great powers collided in another fringe territory of the Ottoman Empire, namely the Sudan. North Africa was an important cornerstone not only of Austria-Hungary’s Balkan policy but also of Italy’s.
Ballhausplatz’s Experiences in the Sudan
Historians who have done research on the Austro-Hungarian empire’s policy in the Balkans have paid little attention to the fact that Ballhausplatz’s ambitions in southeastern Europe went hand in hand with its presence in North Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. As early as the British occupation of Egypt and the 1882 Constantinople Conference to address the resulting Egyptian uprising, it had been perfectly clear to joint Foreign Minister Gustav von Kálnoky that any shift of power in Egypt would automatically give rise to international tensions in the Balkans, thus making it difficult to stabilize the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and hampering Austria-Hungary’s efforts to position itself in southeastern Europe. Furthermore, the conflict in Egypt threatened Austria-Hungary’s economic markets in the Levant. This was primarily why Ballhausplatz took an active political stance in North Africa during these two decades. In the great power rivalry, Ballhausplatz took part in diplomatic negotiations in support of British foreign policy interests.54
But how did Ballhausplatz end up getting involved in affairs in the Sudan? From the outset, in the 1840s, the Catholic missionaries from the Habsburg Empire, while spreading the faith and fighting the slave trade, very consciously sought to acquire economic markets for the empire in the region. In 1850, the Khartoum consulate was established to provide political protection for the missions. The Habsburg Consulate and the Catholic missions (Apostolic Vicariate of Central Africa, 1846) immediately developed a symbiotic relationship with each other, and under their oversight, religious and ecclesiastical affairs became completely intertwined (“indivisibiliter ac inseparabiliter”) with commercial and political affairs. That was in part a consequence of the support shown by the Franz Joseph for the Catholic missions founded by the subjects of the Habsburg Empire in 1851. A letter written in 1850 by the Slovenian Father Ignacij Knoblehar, who headed the missionaries, suggests that the monks involved in the mission were aware that, with their work, they could help further the process of colonization.55
The symbiosis between the missions in the Sudan and the Habsburg Consulate in Khartoum was so strong and their commercial ambitions so encouraging that Charles Augustus Murray, the British consul General in Alexandria (and also a man who acquired a reputation as an author of fiction), initiated the establishment of a British consulate in Khartoum. At Murray’s suggestion, in 1850, John Petherick was appointed consul. Petherick was a merchant and mining expert with a strong knowledge of Arabic and the local conditions. In his reports to the Foreign Office in the 1860s, Petherick repeatedly accused Austria of using its local representatives to organize a colony at the confluence of the White and Blue Niles. Even if Ballhausplatz had entertained this idea, in the 1890s, political colonization had long since ceased to be one of the Dual Monarchy’s aims in the Sudan.56
When developing the new Albanian policy, which of its experiences in the Sudan did Ballhausplatz learn draw on? The consulates in Khartoum and Albania were able to work closely with the denominational structure of the protectorate under the same conditions because they were all formally subject to the same international agreements. The Ottoman sultans had consented to the establishment of Habsburg Catholic missions and consulates in the Sudan and in the Albanian territories in the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718 and the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739.57
The Austro-Hungarian consulates in the Sudan and Albania had one important thing in common: the consults sent by Ballhausplatz to both areas were well-qualified, multilingual, and had studied at the Academy of Oriental Languages in Vienna. This stood in sharp contrast to the practices of other great powers, which appointed people from very mixed backgrounds to similar posts.58
Although state interests and the interests of the Catholic Church were traditionally intertwined in the practices of the Austro-Hungarian foreign policy missions in the Ottoman Empire (the ambassador and consuls in Constantinople were also officials of the cult protectorate), the situations of the consulates in Khartoum and Albania differed from the situations of the other consulates. The Common Foreign Office coordinated its policies in the Balkans and North Africa in the last two decades of the nineteenth century: in order to appear as a successful great power in the former, it abandoned its previously acquired positions in the latter and supported the British Foreign Office. Albania and the Sudan, however, were on the periphery of the Ottoman Empire, where the various great powers had conflicting interests. In the Sudan, the British, French, Italian, and Egyptians competed to assert their interests. In Albania, Ottoman, Italian, Austro-Hungarian, and French ambitions collided.
The experiences in the Sudan were also useful in the development of the new Albanian policy because the work of the consulate in Khartoum was intertwined not only with the management of the protectorate but also with the efforts to handle the political tensions that had developed with Italy over the operation of the protectorate. These tensions stemmed essentially from the two problems discussed below, each of which also affected the work of Propaganda Fide.
Although 90 percent of the missions were financed by the Monarchy or the recently unified Germany, the institutions where the next generation of missionaries was trained were still in Italy (which also had unified in the meantime), in territories which had belonged to the Habsburgs. With the birth of the modern Italian state, Italian missionaries became increasingly committed to serving their government’s aspirations for power. While the Ballhausplatz consuls and the personal commitment of Franz Joseph provided political protections for the missions in the Sudan and the missions were financed almost entirely by the German-speaking regions of Europe, many Italian missionaries were increasingly supportive of Italy’s great power aspirations. They were encouraged in their work by the ambitions of the Italian state in neighboring Ethiopia and Somalia. According to Walter Sauer, the missionary order in the Sudan, which was created by Daniele Comboni, pursued a similar nationalist church policy.59
The other conflict of a legal nature related to the cult protectorate concerned the exercise of consular functions. In international relations, it has long been accepted that each state has formalized the right to protect its citizens in foreign affairs affecting its citizens. For many missionaries, the creation of a unified Italy means a change of nationality (or more precisely, citizenship). One could think of the aforementioned Daniele Comboni (1831–1881), for instance, who was one of the most prominent leaders of the Vicariate of Central Africa and who, from one moment to the next, went from being a Habsburg subject to being a subject of the House of Savoy. For decades, the Austro-Hungarian and Italian consuls struggled in their day-to-day workings with the legal complexities of this change of citizenship. Some Italian consuls were also sometimes eager to intervene in the affairs of Catholic clergy who, although Italian nationals, were Austrian citizens.60
The activities of missionaries of Italian nationality and Italy’s great power ambitions in North Africa created lasting friction between Ballhausplatz, the Consulta (the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and Propaganda Fide (1866–1890). These frictions may have played a role in the decision of the papacy to work together with Austria-Hungary in its ecclesiastical policy in the Albanian territories at the turn of the century. The events which had taken place in the Sudan were repeated: this was why, in part, Balhausplatz sought to replace members of the lower clergy and the orders in Albania who were of Italian nationality with Albanian priests educated in Austria.
It is worth keeping in mind, in the interests of understanding the broader context, that, in connection with the cult protectorate, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Austria-Hungary was confronted in North Africa and Albania not only by Italy but also by France. The French state had an older protectorate over Catholics in the Ottoman Empire dating back to the sixteenth century. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century, the French cult protectorate also went beyond its denominational borders and became an instrument with which France could pursue political aims. Between 1878 and 1903, the governments in Paris attempted to take the position of the Austro-Hungarian cult protectorate in the Albanian territories from the papacy.61
At the same time, as the French colonial ventures got closer and closer to the Austrian mission houses in the Sudan, the French Catholic Church wanted to annex the Vicariate of Central Africa too. It made its first attempt to do in the 1860s, when Franz Binder from Transylvania was serving as consul in Khartoum. The second attempt came during the Mahdi uprising, when Europeans were forced to flee the Sudan. Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie, cardinal of Carthage and Algiers and Primate of Africa, was laboring ambitiously to Christianize the continent. With the help of Propaganda Fide, Lavigerie was able to get his hands on the two most important Austrian mission houses, Gondokoro and Heiligenkreuz. After the British put down the Mahdi uprising, the two mission houses were returned to the Vicariate of Central Africa. They were returned not only because the British sought to push the French out of the region. The events were also shaped by the fact that British General Charles Gordon, who was leading the efforts to consolidate the Sudan politically, was working alongside Rudolf Carl von Slatin, an Austrian colonial figure who had entered British service (and who had been raised to the rank of Pasha by the Ottomans).62
Finally, it is worth considering why it was possible for the Monarchy to benefit directly in Albania from its experiences in the Sudan. This was due primarily to the simple fact that, since the early 1880s, however Ballhausplatz’s internal organization (the grouping of cases and referrals) shifted, the European, Asian, and African territories of the Ottoman Empire and its vassal states in Europe and Africa were always in the hands of the same referent. In 1896, this was Julius Zwiedinek, who was entrusted in part with developing concrete plans for the Albanian operations (the other person in charge of the Albanian action plans was the aforementioned Norbert Schmucker, who at the time was the Austro-Hungarian consul general in Bombay).63
Another clear indication of the ways in which the cult protectorate policies in the Sudan and Albania had an impact on each other after 1896 is the fact that, in accordance with Ballhausplatz’s system for managing documents, the consulate in Khartoum received extracts or copies of some of the statistics concerning payments related to operations in Albania. Accordingly, duplicates of certain cult protectorate documents relating to Albania (understood as a geographical region) were also filed under the heading “Africa” in the Austrian State Archives.64
Later evidence that Ballhausplatz’s Balkan and Albanian policy was not completely divorced from its approach to North Africa is found in the person of Aristoteles Petrović. Petrović left his post as consul general in Alexandria to become the Austro-Hungarian delegate to the International Control Commission for Albania, which was formed in 1913. Petrović was also one of the experts in charge of colonial affairs for and a confidant of Leopold Berchtold, the joint foreign minister.65
The Albanian Lobby
In time, the people responsible for the implementation of the decisions reached at the 1896 conference and the participants in the operations in Albania formed a lobby which, by the year of annexation, had grown into an imperial interest group. Kurt Gostentschnigg devoted an entire monograph of several hundred pages to a detailed presentation of the activities of this lobby, including the ways in which it influenced Ballhausplatz’s Albania policy, so in the discussion below I limit myself to the most important features of this interest group.66
The Albania lobby never formally organized into an association. It was very heterogeneous, as it was made up of loosely connected subgroups. Members were recruited from different social strata and ethnicities, and they joined the lobby for varying reasons and with varying aims. However, the interest group did have a strong Catholic, aristocratic character. The subgroups consisted of diplomatic officials, military officers, aristocrats, scientists, scholars, journalists, and one official-historian. For the most part, they were indifferent to Albania. In their eyes, the Albanian cause was little more than a means of demonstrating the strength and unity of Austria-Hungary as an empire, both to the outside world and domestically. In the last decade and a half of the Dual Monarchy, they came together to form a supranational lobby which, step by step, brought Ballhausplatz’s Albania policy under its influence.
The lobby was both the driving force behind Austro-Hungarian policy towards Albania and the source of expertise on the culture and region. The interest group functioned within the sphere of the joint Foreign Ministry. Some of its members were also ministry officials or consuls. In time, they emerged as experts on the Albanian question in the eyes of the relevant policymakers. Step by step, they instrumentalized the foreign ministry and, through it, the consular network. They participated in Albanian nation-building and state-building as external ethnic entrepreneurs.67 This was possible because the changes in personnel at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not drastically hamper the work of the lobby and its pursuit of the original program. The Albanian beys and the diaspora communities involved in Vienna’s project and the various political and cultural operations undertaken in the service of this project were able to count on continuous subsidies from Vienna over the span of some two decades. In the first decade of the new century, some members of the lobby were also continuously recruiting new members who were committed to the imperialist Austro-Hungarian Albanian policy: experts in the Foreign Ministry who had been in charge of Albanian affairs since 1896 were joined at Ballhausplatz for the most part by new young people selected and appointed for this purpose from among the students at the Oriental Academy by Lajos Thallóczy (including, for instance, Carl Buchberger and Konstantin Bilinski Jr.).
In addition to the work of the lobby, another important part of the background of Vienna’s aspirations and operations in Albania was the birth of Albanian studies as a modern, scientific discipline in Austria-Hungary. In the 1850s, Habsburg consuls serving in Albanian territories began, purely out of their own interests, to pursue scholarly research in which they examined questions concerning the linguistic, ethnographic, and historical aspects of the almost unknown Albanian people.68 In time, their research was published in book form. As the great powers began to take an increasing interest in Albania, some of the most eminent Balkan historians of the time also started studying Albanian history, including for instance the Czech historian Konstantin Jireček, the Croatian Milan Šufflay, and the aforementioned Thallóczy.69 By the turn of the century, modern Albanian studies had claimed its place as one of the philological sciences. By supporting this new discipline, Ballhausplatz gained another opportunity to increase the support it enjoyed among the activists of the Albanian national movement, much as it also gained new opportunities to arrive at clearer assessments of the economic potential of the Albanian territories and to arrive at a more precise scholarly and statistical understanding of Albania.
Though the new discipline of Albanian studies was not the product of great power politics, it nonetheless was in a closely symbiotic relationship with the politics of Ballhausplatz after 1896 and with members of the Albanian lobby. Officials in the common foreign ministry regarded Albanian studies as an imperial discipline. In 1911, Head of Department Karl Macchio noted in a summary for internal use that the study of Albanian culture and history played the same role for Austria-Hungary as Egyptology did for France and Mesopotamian studies for Britain. All three disciplines were important because of the interests and aims of the great powers in the east, and the financial support that was provided was an indispensable part of great power politics. It is worth noting, however that unlike Egyptology and Mesopotamian studies, Albanian studies not only gained an institutionalized form in Austria-Hungary.70
Conclusion and Epilogue
Though the archival sources that I have drawn on in the course of this inquiry avoided the use of the contemporary colonial terminology, in my view, one can confidently regard the new Austro-Hungarian Albanian policy of 1896 as a fundamentally colonial policy. On the one hand, the Austro-Hungarian ventures in Albania fit Osterhammel’s concepts of “border colonization” and “construction of naval networks” and Trotha’s interpretational perspective on colonialism. Coastal Albania before World War I was a perfect example of an ideal potential colony according to the turn-of-the-century definition. It was relatively close to the Dual Monarchy, which meant that formally, the new Albanian policy formally fell into the category of so-called border colonization.71 Albania was separated from the interior by high mountains and was therefore most easily accessible by sea, which means that from a certain perspective it could have been considered an overseas territory. Almost all of Albania’s coastline was splotched with swamps that were breeding grounds for malaria. This strip of land which belonged to the Muslim East was practically unknown in Europe. There was a considerable cultural difference and distance between the potential colonizer and the colonized. In 1896, the Dual Monarchy began diligently acquiring scientific knowledge of the region and its culture, a project that enjoyed the support of the joint ministries, the scientific institutions in both halve of the empire, and the joint Austro-Hungarian General Staff.72
On the other hand, the unpublished sources cited in this study (the memoranda written by the Vlora brothers, joint Chiefs of Staff Friedrich Beck, and Head of Department Karl Macchio and the minutes of the 1896 conference) very clearly reveal that Ballhausplatz’s operations in Albania were aimed at establishing an unequal, asymmetrical relationship with the Albanian territories: geographical Albania was to be made dependent on Austria-Hungary politically, economically, and culturally. Through a policy of subsidies and an indirect form of rule adapted to the circumstances in the western Balkans (based in part on military and economic influence), Ballhausplatz sought to transform and control the hierarchy of Albanian society and the Catholic Church; and through the Albanian nation-building project, Ballhausplatz wanted gradually to transform and replace the local cultural mindset, which essentially had been under the influence of the Muslim, oriental Ottoman Empire, with the Central European, Christian values of the “civilized” empire of Austria-Hungary.
The fact that Adalbert Fuchs, who was the head of Ballhausplatz’s colonial affairs department, took part in the launch of the operations in Albania further confirms that the empire’s Albania policy was indeed a fundamentally a colonial undertaking, as does the fact that the Austro-Hungarian consuls involved in the day-to-day shaping of Albanian policy (as did many of the members of the Albanian lobby, including Friedrich Beck, Ferenc Nopcsa, and Leopold Chlumetzky) were all members of the Austrian Flottenverein. The contemporary British and French analogies in Syria, West Africa, and India also lay bare the colonial character of Albanian politics.
The final stop, as it were, of the Austro-Hungarian policy towards Albania in 1912–1914 was the complete economic exploitation of the emerging independent state of Albania. The propaganda efforts of the Albanian lobby between 1896 and 1912 had successfully mobilized society in the two halves of the empire. In Austria, in 1913, inspired by the formation of the British Albanian Committee, an Albanian Committee was formed consisting of aristocrats and leading figures from large industrial and financial interest groups. The primary objective of this committee was to bring the financial affairs of the new Balkan country under its control through the organization of the Albanian National Bank. In an interesting episode in the evolution of colonial thinking in Austrian public opinion, when a revolt broke out in Albania against the princely power in June 1914, civil activists began to recruit a so-called Albanian Legion in Vienna in defense of public order and the interests of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The goal of the recruiting office was to organize independent fighting units consisting of volunteers who would travel to Albania at their own expense and fight against the rebels in central Albania with their own weapons. According to unpublished archival sources, within 24 hours, 2,000 people had signed up, and according to the Vienna police, nearly 10,000 more were expected to arrive the following day. In the end, this office, with which the Austrian Albania Committee was in direct contact, was closed by the Vienna police at the request of joint Foreign Minister Berchtold. Despite the Foreign Ministry’s prohibition, however, several dozen volunteers still traveled to Albania to take part in the fighting.73
As for Hungary, the establishment of Albania went hand in hand with the birth of independent Albanian studies in Hungary, which served Hungary’s imperial aspirations of Hungary at the national level.74 More important was the fact that an Austro-Hungarian-Italian negotiating committee agreed to divide Albania economically into three spheres of interest in November 1913 (50 percent for Italy, 25 percent for Austria, and 25 percent for Hungary). Key to the Hungarian success was, first, that the members of the Asiatic Society of Hungary (the Turanian Society), as Hungarian state-officials, play a significant role in the imperial and colonial actions of Ballhausplatz in Albania and Anatolia between 1912 and 1914. Second, the Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza pressured Leopold Berchtold to win acceptance for the Budapest government’s national aspirations.75
Ultimately, the way in which Albania was economically partitioned reveals that colonialism did not become a fourth common cause within the Habsburg Empire. Austria and Hungary acted as separate colonizing parties. In talks with the Italian representatives, a joint team of economists of Austrian and Hungarian nationality took part in the negotiations. In other words, the international negotiations were conducted at the level of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The signing and of the agreements and their parliamentary approval, however, were the responsibilities of the respective Austrian and Hungarian authorities. Formally, this never actually took place, as the January 1914 coup d’état led by the Young Turks took events in Albania in an entirely new direction.
Archival Sources
Österreichisches Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (ÖStA HHStA)
Administrative Registratur (AR)
F4: Kt. 99, 450, 456,
F 27: Kt. 8, 28-30,
(I.) Allgemeines
(2. Geheime Akten) Kt. 473,
(7. Delegationsakten) Kt. 573,
(8. Generalia) Kt. 685, 710,
(19.) Nachlässe
Nachlass Kral, Kt. 1,
Nachlass Kwiatkowsky, Kt. 1-2,
Nachlass Mérey, Kt. 15,
Politisches Archiv
XII. Türkei, Kt. 419,
XIV. Albanien, Kt. 21, 64,
Kriegsarchiv in Vienna (KA)
AOK-Evidenzbureau
Kt. 3498,
Militärkanzlei Franz Ferdinand (MKFF)
Kt. 203,
Operationsbüro, Fasz. 46,
Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Magyar Országos Levéltára [Hungarian State Archive] (MNL OL)
K 255 Pénzügyminisztérium, elnöki iratok
Z 41 Pesti Magyar Kereskedelmi Bank Rt., Okmánytár (PMKB)
Országos Széchényi Könyvtár [National Széchényi Library] (OSZK)
Kézirattár, Fol. Hung. 1677
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1 Wagner, “Österreichisch–ungarische Kolonialversuche.”
2 Kolm, Die Ambitionen, 17–21.
3 Toleva, Der Einfluss Österreich-Ungarns.
4 Osterhammel, Colonialism, 4–10.
5 Trotha, “Colonialism,” 433.
6 Gross, Export Empire, 35.
7 ÖStA HHStA, AR, F4/450, no. 69–70, “Kanzleiverordnungen.”
8 Loidl, “Kolonialpropaganda,” 38–43.
9 Jahresbericht der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Colonial-Gesellschaft 1896; “Kolonialpolitik,” 18–19.
10 Kolm, Die Ambitionen, 24–25.
11 ÖStA HHStA, Nachlass Kwiatkowsky, Kt. 2, 1: Albanien in der Politik der Großmächte.
12 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, Ferit bey’s memorandum; ÖStA HHStA, Nachlass Kwiatkowsky, Kt. 1, Manuscript, 179–181; ibid., Kt. 2, Orange-Pallium, 180.
13 ÖStA HHStA, Nachlass Kwiatkowsky, Kt. 1, Manuscript, 179f.
14 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, Ferit bey’s memorandum.
15 Clayer, Në fillimet e nacionalizmit shqiptar, 526–27.
16 Hofmeister, Die Bürde des Weissen Zaren, 33.
17 Amzi-Erdoğdular, Afterlife of Empire, 50–51.
18 ÖStA HHStA, I/8, Kt. 685, Akten 1895–1904, Varia 1901, report of Führer, August 27, 1901, 1–3; Verosta, Die völkerrechtliche Praxis der Donaumonarchie, 112–13.
19 Schwanda, Das Protektorat Österreich–Ungarns, 31; Toleva, Der Einfluss Österreich–Ungarns, 51–93.
20 Zwiedinek, Syrien und seine Bedeutung; Hof- und Staats-Handbuch, 88, 117, 1005.
21 Jahresbericht der Österreichisch–Ungarischen Colonial-Gesellschaft 1896, 4, 38.
22 Wagner, “Österreichisch–ungarische Kolonialversuche,” 203; ÖStA HHStA, AR, F4/99, Adalbert Fuchs; ÖStA HHStA, Nachlass Mérey, Kt. 15/273, A private letter written by Pasetti to Mérey, Ischl, August 26, 1895. Callaway, “The Battle over Information,” 278–87.
23 Csaplár-Degovics, “Ludwig von Thallóczy,” 141–64.
24 Scheer, “Minimale Kosten, absolut kein Blut,” 241.
25 McCrone Douie, The Panjab, 188–200, 212–19.
26 Jahrbuch des K. und K. Auswärtigen Dienstes 1903, 265.
27 Die Flagge 2, no. 2 (1906): 12; Pisko, Berichte der commerciellen Fachberichterstatters; Pisko, Die Südhalbkugel im Weltverkehr.
28 ÖStA HHStA, Nachlass Kwiatkowsky, Kt. 2, Kwiatkowski: Lebenslauf, 64; ÖStA HHStA PA, XII/419/e/Prinz Achmed Fuad, Pálffy’s report to Berchtold, no. 26 A-B, Rome, August 14, 1913, 1–11; Kőszeghy, “A Balkán-protektorátusról,” 178–81.
29 ÖStA HHStA PA, XII/419/e/Prinz Achmed Fuad, Pálffy’s report to Berchtold, no. 26 A-B, Rome, August 14, 1913, 3.
30 ÖStA HHStA, Nachlass Kral, Kt. 1, Promemoria – Monsignore Primo Dochi’s über Albanien, Vienna, March 14, 1897, 1–15.
31 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, minutes of the conference on on November 17, 1896, 6; Behnen, Rüstung–Bündnis–Sicherheit, 361.
32 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, minutes of the conference on November 17, 1896, 8, 10–12.
33 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, minutes of the conference on December 8, 1896, 22–25; ibid. minutes of the conference on December 23, 1896, 7; Der Österreichische Lloyd und sein Verkehrsgebiet.
34 ÖStA HHStA, I/7, Kt. 573, letter from the Alliance of Austrian Industrialists to Gołuchowski, no. 1634, Vienna, May 10, 1898, 4; Kolm, Die Ambitionen, 18; Gostentschnigg, Wissenschaft im Spannungsfeld, 309–16, 480.
35 MNL OL, PMKB, Z 41, 458/3230, Letter written by Handels- und Transport-AG to Weiss, 3230/-1, Vienna, August 1, 1913, 6; Csaplár-Degovics, “A dalmáciai Borgo Erizzo,” 6–7; Csaplár-Degovics, “Österreichisch–ungarische Interessendurchsetzung,” 181; Gostentschnigg, Wissenschaft im Spannungsfeld, 472, 583–84, 609, 650, 658–60, 677–78; Gross, Export Empire, 12.
36 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, minutes of the conference on November 17, 1896, 17–18; ibid. Minutes of the conference on December 8, 1896, 15, 17, 19–20; ibid. Minutes of the conference on December 23, 1896, 2–4.
37 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, minutes of the conference on December 8, 1896, 4–6.
38 Reynolds, “Good and Bad Muslims.” To the distinction of “good” and “bad” Muslims in contemporary Austria, see Gingrich, “Frontier Myths of Orientalism,” 106–11.
39 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, minutes of the conference on November 17, 1896, 19–20; ibid., Minutes of the conference on December 8, 1896, 16, 18; ibid., Minutes of the conference on December 23, 1896, 4–5; Csaplár-Degovics, “Der erste Balkankrieg und die Albaner.”
40 Csaplár-Degovics, “Österreichisch-ungarische Interessendurchsetzung.”
41 Deusch, Das k.(u.)k. Kultusprotektorat, 623–27.
42 Wagner, “Österreichisch–ungarische Kolonialversuche,” 58–59.
43 Egner, Protektion und Souveränität, 59–79, 62–63, 312–19.
44 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, Fol. 517–736, Pisko, Elaborat über die Consularämter, Beilag: 9, Üsküb, January 25, 1897; Toleva, Der Einfluss Österreich-Ungarns, 102–29, 427–31.
45 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, Fol. 517–736; Pisko, Elaborat über die Consularämter, Üsküb, January 25, 1897, 5.
46 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, Fol. 517–736, Pisko, Elaborat über die Consularämter, Üsküb, January 25, 1897. 3–4; Csaplár-Degovics, “A dalmáciai Borgo Erizzo.”
47 ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, Fol. 192–516, Calice’s report to Gołuchowski, no. 658, Constantinople, February 18, 1897, 1–10; ibid., Private letter written by Calice to Zwiedinek, Constantinople, March 3, 1898; ibid., Reverta’s report to Gołuchowsky, no. 8 D–K, Rome, March 20, 1897; ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, Fol. 517–736; Pisko, Elaborat über die Consularämter, Üsküb, January 25, 1897. 1–6, and Beilag, 1–45; ibid., The Information Bureau’s report on Doçi’s memorandum, Vienna, March 29, 1897, 1–13; ÖStA HHStA, I/2, Kt. 473, Fol. 517–736, Die albanesische Action im Jahre 1897; ibid., Der Stand der nationalen Bewegung in Albanien (1901); ibid., Memoire über Albanien; ÖStA HHStA, Nachlass Kwiatkowsky, Kt. 1, Manuscript, 178–191; ÖStA HHStA, Nachlass Kwiatkowsky, Kt. 2; Kwiatkowski: Lebenslauf, 30–79; Toleva, Der Einfluss Österreich-Ungarns, 427–31.
48 Crowder, “Indirect Rule: French and British Style”; Green, “Indirect Rule and Colonial Intervention”; Power, “‘Individualism is the Antithesis of Indirect Rule’: Cooperative Development”; Grishow, “Rural ‘Community,’ Chiefs and Social Capital,” 70; Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism,” 4; Nwabughuogu, “The Role of Propaganda”; Fisher, “Indirect Rule in the British Empire”; Reynolds, “Good and Bad Muslims”; Ruthner and Scheer, Bosnien-Herzegowina, 36–42, 228.
49 KA Operationsbüro, Fasz. 46, no. 29, Beiträge zur Klarstellung der bei einer etwaigen Änderung des status quo auf der Balkanhalbinsel in Betracht zu ziehenden Verhältnisse.
50 Schanderl, Die Albanienpolitik Österreich-Ungarns, 64.
51 Krause, Das Problem der albanischen Unabhängigkeit, 26–27; Hecht, “Graf Goluchowski als Außenminister,” 125–27, 140; Onley, “The Raj Reconsidered,” 44–62.
52 ÖStA HHStA, Nachlass Kwiatkowsky, Kt. 2, Kwiatkowski: Lebenslauf, 44–45.
53 Behnen, Rüstung–Bündnis–Sicherheit; Gostentschnigg, “Albanerkonvikt und Albanienkomitee,” 313–37; Komár, Az Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia, 26, 29, 194; Schanderl, Die Albanienpolitik Österreich-Ungarns, 22–23, 71, 117–27.
54 Komár, Az Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia, 26, 29, 194.
55 ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/8, a letter written by Knoblecher to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, December 6, 1850. Sauer, “Ein Jesuitenstaat,” 23; Agstner, Das k. k. (k. u. k.) Konsulat für Central-Afrika, 10, 13; McEwan, A Catholic Sudan Dream, 43–44; Hill, Egypt in the Sudan, 98.
56 ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/29/1/IIc, Die österreichische Mission von Central-Afrika 1894, 8–9; Santi and Hill, The Europeans in the Sudan, 174–75; McEwan, A Catholic Sudan Dream, 42.
57 ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/30, Huber’s report to the Ministry of Trade, no. 528, Alexandria, August 6, 1850; ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/8, Übersetzung eines Fermans für den Generalvikar von Centralafrika, Constantinople, early April, 1851; Agstner, Das k. k. (k. u. k.) Konsulat für Central–Afrika, 6–17.
58 McEwan, A Catholic Sudan Dream, 35–36, 85.
59 ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/28/2/I; ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/29/1/II: 1871–1911/d–j; McEwan, A Catholic Sudan Dream, 85, 93, 120, 126, 133, 137; Sauer, “Ein Jesuitenstaat in Afrika?” 61.
60 Benna, “Studien zum Kultusprotektorat,” 33–35; Gstrein, Unter Menschenhändlern im Sudan, 25.
61 ÖStA HHStA, I/8, Kt. 710, Umfang und Art der Ausübung des französischen Kultusprotektorates, 1–175; Ippen, “Das religiöse Protektorat,” 296, 299–300; Deusch, Das k.(u.)k. Kultusprotektorat, 635–36.
62 ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/28/2/I, Africa 2a, a letter written by Reverta to Kálnoky, no. 46, Rome, December 31, 1889, 5.
ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/28/2/I, Africa 2b, Centralafrikanische Mission and Abgrenzung des Sudan Vicariats; ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/29/1/IIc, Die österreichische Mission von Central-Afrika 1894, 26; Hill, Slatin Pasha; McEwan, A Catholic Sudan Dream, I, 74–76, 116–17, 120.
63 ÖStA HHStA, AR, F4/450, no. 69–70, “Kanzleiverordnungen”; ÖStA HHStA, AR, F4/456, Referats- und Geschäfteinteilungen.
64 ÖStA HHStA, AR, F27/28/2/I, Africa 2b, Abgrenzung des Sudan Vicariats, Subventionen III–VI.
65 Jahrbuch des K. und K. Auswärtigen Dienstes 1914, 378–79; Bridge, “Tarde Venientibus Ossa,” 319–30.
66 Gostentschnigg, Wissenschaft im Spannungsfeld.
67 Gostentschnigg, “Die albanischen Parteigänger Österreich–Ungarns,” 119–70; Csaplár-Degovics, “Österreichisch-ungarische Interessendurchsetzung,” 180.
68 Hahn, Albanesische Studien.
69 Thallóczy, Illyrisch-albanische Forschungen; Thallóczy et al., Acta et diplomata res Albaniae.
70 ÖStA HHStA PA, XIV/21, Äußerung betreffs der materielle Unterstützung des […] Werkes “Acta et diplomata res Albaniae med. Illustrantiam,” Vienna, October 25, 1911.
71 Trotha, “Colonialism,” 433; Wendt, Vom Kolonialismus zur Globalisierung, 234; Osterhammel and Jansen, Kolonialismus, 1–8; Osterhammel, Colonialism, 4–10.
72 Ruthner, Habsburgs “Dark Continent,” 45–48.
73 ÖStA HHStA, XIV/64/26, Löwenthal’s report to Berchtold, No. 51A-B/P, Durazzo, July 11, 1914. KA MKFF, Kt. 203, Haberl’s report, no number, Vienna, June 27, 1914. KA AOK-Evidenzbureau, Kt. 3498, Hranilovic: Albanien 1914, Anwerbung von Freiwilligen für Albanien; OSZK, Kézirattár, Fol. Hung. 1677, Bosniaca IX/6, a letter written by Berchtold to Tisza, Vienna, June 27, 1914. Freundlich, Die albanische Korrespondenz, XXXVII, 499–500.
74 Csaplár-Degovics and Jusufi, Das ungarisch-albanische Wörterbuch, 73–98.
75 MNL OL, K 255, 672/6 (1913), no. 4926/P.M./1913, “II. rész; Elnökség,” [Part II. Presidency], Budapest, December 19, 1913, 1–5.