In the book “Seoba u sporovima” from 1991, citing sources like “Antiquities XII, 193”, a 17th century publication and the “Propaganda Fide” from 1635 we can read:
“Lingua Epirotica sive Albanica”.
This means “The Epirotic or Albanian language.”
In the same publication we can read the definition “Epirus sive Albania” which translates to “Epirus, that is to say, Albania” or “Epirus, or Albania.”
The expression Epirus sive Albania encapsulates a forgotten continuity between antiquity and the early modern world. To seventeenth-century Europeans, there was no contradiction in calling the same land by two names. The Albanians of the mountains and coasts were, in their eyes, the modern heirs of Pyrrhus’s Epirus, the guardians of an ancient spirit of independence, speaking a language that Rome itself labeled Epirotic. What classical geography had known as Epirus, the early modern world recognized as Albania.
Notes
- Dictionarium Latino-Epiroticum sive Albanicum, Rome: Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, 1635.
- Pjetër Bogdani, Cuneus Prophetarum de Christo Salvatore Mundi et eius Evangelica Veritate (Padua: 1685), preface and dedication.
- Johannes Janssonius, Epirus hodie vulgo Albania, Amsterdam, c. 1650. Copy in the David Rumsey Map Collection.
- Report of the Propaganda Fide missionaries in Dalmatia and Albania, cited in Antiquitates Italicae XII (Rome, 1683), 193.
