Product Description

"Very well researched, critical yet balanced, this is the best book about Zog to have appeared in any language."
—Bejtullah Destani, Director of the Centre for Albanian Studies

Shortly before 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 1, 1928, Europe gained a new kingdom and its only Muslim king: 32-year-old Zog I of the Albanians. Few foreign journalists were present in the Parliament House in Tirana to hear him swear his oath on the Koran and the Bible, yet the birth of the Kingdom of Albania—a native monarchy, not an alien imposition—did not go unnoticed abroad.

King Zog (1895–1961) was a curiosity, and so he has remained: the most atypical European monarch of the twentieth century, a man entirely without royal connections who created his own kingdom. By contemporaries, he was variously labeled "the last ruler of romance," "an appalling gangster," "the modern Napoleon," "the finest patriot," and "frankly a cad." Even today his reputation is disputed, but Zog is undeniably one of the foremost figures in Albanian history. Though notorious for cut-throat political intrigue, he promised to bring order and progress to a land that had long known little of either. "It was I who made Albania," he claimed.

Zog's reign ended in 1939; Italian Fascists forced him into exile and post-war Stalinists kept him there despite his best efforts to return. In this first full biography, Jason Tomes explores the reality behind the man described in The Times as "the bizarre King Zog" and shows him to have been the product of a unique time and place. Tomes invites readers to set aside their assumptions about modern European monarchy and meet a king who fired back at assassins and paid his bills with gold bullion.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #671064 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-01
• Released on: 2004-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review

"An outstanding biography of the most unusual and controversial king of the 20th century. Highly recommended."

- CHOICE

"Vivid and atmospheric, but based on solid and scrupulous research, this is an outstanding account of one of the most intriguing figures in twentieth-century Balkan history. Non-specialists will read it with pleasure and fascination, and even specialists in Albanian history will find much to learn here from Jason Tomes's marvelously lucid analysis of the politics and diplomacy of the period."

- Noel Malcolm, author of Bosnia: A Short History and Kosovo: A Short History

"Very well researched, critical yet balanced, this is the best book about Zog to have appeared in any language."

- Bejtullah Destani, Director of the Centre for Albanian Studies

About the Author
Jason Tomes has lectured in modern history and politics for the Universities of Oxford, Warsaw, and Boston. He is the author of Balfour and Foreign Policy and over fifty articles for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He lives in England.

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Customer Reviews

King Bird the First
In hindsight, it was probably inevitable that King Zog of Albania would be driven from his throne in 1939. A British diplomat who worked with Zog found him amusing, but believed the King would probably end up assassinated. The conditions in Albania made that a very likely fate. It is a time and place well described in this groundbreaking biography of King Zog written by Jason Tomes.

When Albania broke from the Ottoman Empire in 1913, it was a poor and rural country. The Ottomans had forbidden the teaching of the Albanian language in the schools and many of the people were illiterate. There had been very little done in recent years to develop the country and it was isolated from neighboring Europe by its mountainous terrain and perhaps because it was largely a Muslim country.

The Ottoman system of benign neglect did nothing to discourage the clannishness of the Albanians. Europeans were skeptical that there could even be an independent Albania. Zog saw that it was necessary to make Albanians into citizens, instead of clansmen. This would not be an easy task. The "average Albanian knows nothing about nationality," Zog said. "He has always looked up to the head of his tribe, or his Bey, as the supreme authority."

Ahmet Zog was born in 1895 in Mati environs. He spent some of his adolescence in Istanbul, soaking up the political atmosphere of the Young Turks. He returned when Albania was liberated and later fought alongside the Austrians against the Italians who were occupying part of Albania. The Austrians, who had designs on Albania, considered the young chieftain useful enough to keep in Vienna in case they would need him after the First World War. Later, Zog staged a coup d'état with the help of Yugoslavia and, during his reign, he made Albania into an Italian satellite state.

Zog picked up foreign languages and some sophistication that many of countrymen didn't have, but he also needed to maintain his Albanian roots. Zog was born the son of a Mati Chieftain and his clansmen were his power base. As described in Edith Durham's "High Albania," northern Albania was the land of the blood feud, a place reminiscent of the West Virginia of the Hatfields and the McCoys, where people asked not what their neighbor died of, but who had killed him. His clansmen were both credits and debits to him. It was with their help (and well distributed gold) that Zog was able to overthrow the republican government of Fan Noli. Yet, even when he was trying to introduce laws outlawing blood feuds, he was obligated to participate in them to keep face with his clansmen.

The story of Zog's reign is mostly one of manipulation by the Italians. The Greeks and Serbs were both interested in carving up Albania, but the Italians were the neighbors with the most money. The Italians built roads and sold the Albanians weapons (often hopelessly obsolete) and made Zogist Albania into a puppet state. For his part, Zog got a good deal of loot, including funds for "a white silk tunic with gold frogging, epaulettes...a white fur hat with plume, a black cloak, and white patent leather boots with gold spurs." Besides looking the part of a king, he became rich as one by often getting the better part of a deal, as when he pocketed 300,000 lira selling the Italians inaccessible forestlands in Mati. He always regarded refusing a bribe as looking a gift horse in the mouth, Tomes writes. After Zog was exiled from Albania, he moved from country to country burdened with the many cases of gold that he had acquired during his regime.

Besides being a biography of a scoundrel dominated by an even bigger scoundrel (Mussolini), Tomes gives some interesting descriptions of Albania in the 1920s and 1930s. He describes the capital of Tirana as city that smelt of mutton and coffee grounds, which was covered in a cloud of dust in the summer and slimy mud in the winter, and where school children were required to recite a catechism that included the lines "where does the mud seem sweeter than honey? In Albania." Many Albanians were more Turkish in manner than the Turks in Atatürk's new republic, yet they were still drawn to European and American culture. Tomes writes about moviegoers who boggled at the fancy-dress films of Greta Garbo while scoffing at westerns and war movies as being hopelessly unrealistic.

Zog was a hard-working ruler and physically brave, but when the Italians overthrew him, the people hardly noticed. Tomes even writes that the invading Italians made the country more prosperous. When Zog (or "bird" in Albanian) became king and rather hopefully named himself King Zog the first, he was mocked abroad as King Bird I. Yet he couldn't name himself "King Ahmet" because he didn't want to be seen as a Muslim ruler and yet he couldn't disavow Islam. Looking at Zog's reign, it is easier to understand how later Albanian rulers became suspicious of foreign powers and organized religion.

After Zog and the Second World War, the communists came to power under the Stalinist Enver Hoxha. His regime was so repressive that many Albanians today hold King Zog in some esteem. Tomes calls this a sobering thought.

Fascinating, well-written
Obscure subject, but a wonderful book -- thorough, well-researched, and well-written. If you're a history buff, this is a must-read.

Mezzo mezzo book on a very mezzo guy
I guess this is as good a non-Albanian depiction as one will get of this self-created little tinpot twit. Zog almost got out of the Middle Ages when you consider that his and other tribes in the north Albanian mountains were still living a paternalistically feudal lifestyle of banditry, shepherding and legal revenge murders, and largely isolated from the outside world. The writer seems to have caught the spirit in which the Brits refused to let Zog continue as a ruler once he fled into exile.