About the Ottoman population registers

Abstract

The present paper deals with the value of the first Ottoman population registers as an important source of information for the medieval history of the Albanian people and of the Albanian language. Through the proper names of the registered family male representatives of the towns and villages, one can easily acknowledge to which ethnos and religion their entire families pertained.
Thus, through the Ottoman registers of the XV-XVII centuries regarding the regions actually inhabited by Albanian-speaking peoples one can be informed about the demographic situation of those regions during the last medieval centuries.
The family representatives of those regions bear mainly Albanian characteristic proper names like Lekë < Alexander, Gjon < Lat. Johannes, Gjin, which has been considered an Albanian typical variant of Gjon, Gjokë < Gjon-kë, Gjikë < Gjin-kë, Gjergj < Lat. Georgius etc.

The two main issues dealt with in this paper are the following:

1. The ethnic composition of those regions at the time of the first Ottoman registers.
2. The ethnic composition of the actually Greek-speaking areas in South Albania.

Concerning the first issue, the linguistic investigation of the proper names represented in the Ottoman registers clearly demonstrates that the population of the actually Albanian speaking regions generally pertained to the Albanian ethnos.
According to such an investigation, one can draw the same conclusion for the villages of the Dropull and Vurgu valleys, as the proper names of those villages are similar to those of the other areas around them.
Of course, one can find in the Dropull and Vurgu villages, as elsewhere in South Albania, Greek influenced proper names like Jani beside Gjon and Gjin, Jorgo beside Gjergj, Aleksander and Aleks beside Lekë etc. But that is due particularly to the great influence of the Greek Orthodox Church. Moreover, among the proper names of those villages one can also encounter proper names with some consonants lacking in New Greek (like b, d, g, c, ç, x, xh).
Thus, the ancient Ottoman registers clearly ´show that the introduction of the Greek idiom in those villages has taken place after the Turkish conquest, particularly at the end of the XVIII century and at the beginning of the XIX century, as some historical facts demonstrate.
Through a similar investigation the author of this paper has come to the conclusion that most of the areas of the southern Epirus, actually within the boundaries of the Greek state, were inhabited by Albanian-speaking peoples at the time of the first Ottoman population registers, but they were gradually hellenized particularly through the influence of the Greek Orthodox Church and of the Greek state after the independence of Greece and later on through the extradition of the Albanian Muslim population.
At the end of the paper the author points out that the town of Arta in the extreme southern Epirus in the Ottoman registers is attested in the form Nartë, which has come out of the Albanian expression Në Artë “in, towards Arta”. For more details about the issues dealt with in this paper, one should consult the Albanian version.