DISCOVER. ORIGINS.
The Arvanites
The Origins of the Arvanites
The villagers of Berbati are descendants of Arvanites, populations who originated and migrated from parts of present day Albania to the Peloponnese during the Middle Ages. A succession of migrations continued until the early nineteenth century. The identity of the Arvanites has been linked to their Arvanitic language (Greek: Αρβανίτικα), an “old” Tosk Albanian dialect with Greek influences that has been recently in decline, and their practice of Greek Orthodox Christianity. Arvanites played an important role during the Greek War of Independence as well as in the creation of the new Modern Greek state and are regarded as an integral part of the Greek Nation.
Migration to the Peloponnese
After the Frankish conquest of the peninsula in 1205 that followed the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, the Peloponnese had experienced a process of political and territorial fragmentation. For more than two centuries three political entities coexisted in the Peloponnese: The Frankish Morea, the Venetian ruled territories, and the Byzantine province, which became autonomous from 1348 and governed by a despot residing in Mystras.
Almost constant unrest combined with the Black Death and the frequent Turkish overland raids ravaged the demography and, consequently, the economy of the Peloponnese. This instability and shortage of agricultural labour caused an increasing demographic mobility, as local landlords tried to recruit landless people.
The Arvanites first settled in the Peloponnese in the second half of the 14th century, when the Despot of the Morea, Manuel Kantakouzenos (1326-1380), encouraged Albanian settlers, who practiced a nomadic lifestyle based on pastoralism, to migrate in undeveloped and under-populated areas of the Peloponnese, mainly Arcadia.
The areas governed by the Venetians at first objected but ended up by adopting the same policy, since they were in need of colonists and soldiers in their depopulated areas and hence offered plots of arable land, pastures and tax exemptions to the wandering Albanians in Southern Greece.
A more populous Albanian settlement took place around 1400 during the rule of Kantakouzenos’ successor, Theodore I Palaeologos (1384-1407), when ten thousand Albanians with their families and herds of cattle and horses appeared before the Isthmus and asked Theodore for permission to settle in the Peloponnese. Palaiologos, who appreciated the well-known Albanian military skills seeing a possibility of reinforcing his own position, granted the newcomers passage.