Kelmendi (tribe)

The Ottomans tried several times to expel them completely from their home territory and forcefully settle them elsewhere, but the community returned to its ancestral lands again and again.

The historical origin of the toponym is traced to the Roman fort of Clementiana which Procopius of Caesarea mentions in the mid 6th century in the road that connected Scodra and Petrizên.

[1] The Kelmendi region is located in the District of Malësi e Madhe in northern Albania, situated in the northernmost and most isolated part of the country.

[3] French consul Hyacinte Hecquard (1814–1866), noted that all of the Kelmendi (Clementi) except the families called Onos believe that they descend from one ancestor, Clemens or Clement (Kelment or Kelmend[4] in Albanian).

Another story, which Jovićević had heard in Selce, was that the founder was from Piperi, a poor man that had worked as a servant for a wealthy Kuči, there he sinned with a girl from a noble family, and left via the Cem.

The defter of households and property was initially carried out in 1485, but Kelmendi doesn't appear in the registry as they resisted the entry of the Ottoman soldiers in their lands.

Of the five katuns of Kelmendi, in four the name Kelmend appears as a patronym (Liçeni, Gjonoviq, Leshoviq, Muriq), an indication of kinship ties between them.

[13] The self-governing rights of northern Albanian tribes like Kelmendi and Hoti increased when their status changed from florici to derbendci, which required mountain communities to maintain and protect land routes, throughout the countryside, which connected regional urban centres.

The Kelmendi were to guarantee safe passage to passengers in the route from Shkodra to western Kosovo (Altun-ili) and that which passed through Medun and reached Plav.

This caused the name of Kelmendi to be used as a synonym for all Albanian and Montenegrin tribes of the Ottoman borderlands as they were the best known community of that region to outsiders.

However, as Arslan Pasha waited for the payment of the tribute, the Kelmendi ambushed part of his troops and killed about thirty cavalrymen.

[23] Mariano Bolizza recorded the "Climenti" in his 1614 report as being a Roman rite village, describing them as "an untiring, valorous and extremely rapacious people", with 178 houses, and 650 men in arms commanded by Smail Prentashev and Peda Suka.

[24] In 1614, they, along with the tribes of Kuči, Piperi and Bjelopavlići, sent a letter to the kings of Spain and France claiming they were independent from Ottoman rule and did not pay tribute to the empire.

[25][26] Clashes with the Ottomans continued through the 1630 and culminate in 1637-38 where the tribe would repel an army of 12,000 (according to some sources 30,000) commanded by Vutsi Pasha of the Bosnia Eyalet.

According to Albanian bishop Frang Bardhi writing in 1638, the Kelmendi tribe grew very rich by attacking and stealing merchandise from Christian merchants in Albania, Bosnia and Serbia, killing those who resisted them.

[31][failed verification] According to French historian Ernest Lavisse and to François Lenormant, in 1638 Sultan Mourad IV asked Doudjé-Pasha, the governor of Bosnia, to lead a punitive expedition, in the heart of winter, against the Kelmendi.

The tribe weakened by famine and lacking ammunition, put up a desperate defense, rolling huge blocks of rock from the tops of the mountains onto the Turkish army.

The death of their knèze Vokodoud, killed in a fight, and a few days after that of the Voivode Hotasch, whom the Pasha himself surprised by climbing an inaccessible peak with crampons, deprived the Clementi of their best chiefs and determined their submission,[32] the other Kelmendi leaders were decapitated by the Ottomans and their heads sent to the Sultan.

[34] In 1664, Evliya Çelebi mentioned Kelmendi Albanians among the "infidel warriors" he saw manning Venetian ships in the harbour of Split.

[36] In 1658, the seven tribes of Kuči, Vasojevići, Bratonožići, Piperi, Kelmendi, Hoti and Gruda allied themselves with the Republic of Venice, establishing the so-called "Seven-fold barjak" or "alaj-barjak", against the Ottomans.

According to the report, the Kelmendi had constructed a church dedicated to Saint Clement in the settlement of Speia di Clementi (Ishpaja) 20 years earlier in 1651, that was used by the entire tribal community to attend mass and receive the holy sacrament.

However, it is also reported that the Kelmendi had come to occupy and absorb the plateau of Nixi (Nikç) and Roiochi, which collectively had 112 households and 660 inhabitants, following a series of incursions and attacks on the local population.

Yet Noel Malcolm debates it further and comes to the conclusion that the Albanians in kosovo were kosovars, however the Kelmendi did fight at Bijelo Polje when the Austrian troops were going back north and joined their troops to Habsburgs, to raide the ottomans at their weakest the [43] [44] In 1700, the pasha of Pejë, Hudaverdi Mahmut Begolli, resolved to take action against the continuing Kelmendi depredations in western Kosovo.

With the help of other mountain tribes, he managed to block the Kelmendi in their homelands, the gorge of the upper Cem river, from three sides and advanced on them with his own army from Gusinje, In 1702, having worn them down by starvation, he forced the majority of them to move to the Peshter plateau.

[45] After the defeat in 1737, under Archbishop Arsenije IV Jovanović Šakabenta, a significant number of Serbs and Kelmendis retreated into the north, Habsburg territory.

[49] In later negotiations with the Ottomans, an amnesty was granted to the tribesmen with promises by the government to build one to two primary schools in the nahiye of Kelmendi and pay the wages of teachers allocated to them.

[49] On May 26, 1913, 130 leaders of Gruda, Hoti, Kelmendi, Kastrati and Shkreli sent a petition to Cecil Burney in Shkodër against the incorporation of their territories into Montenegro.

[51] By the end of the Second World War, the Albanian Communists sent its army to northern Albania to destroy their rivals, the nationalist forces.

The region consists of six primary villages: Boga, Nikç, Selcë, Tamarë, Vermosh and Vukël, all part of the Kelmend municipality.

[56] Other families hailing from Kelmend include the Mujzići in Ćirjan, Džaferovići in Besa, and the Velovići, Odžići and Selmanovići in Donji Murići.