Albania's national hero took his famous name from the Ottomans he fought
Gjergj Kastrioti spent twenty years serving the Ottoman sultan, who called him Iskender Bey, Lord Alexander. In 1443 he switched sides, rallied the Albanian lords, and became the most stubborn enemy the Ottoman Empire faced at its peak. He kept the Turkish nickname, and Albania still knows him as Skanderbeg.
Born around 1405 into the Kastrioti, a noble family that barely appears in records before the late fourteenth century, he was sent as a hostage to the Ottoman court. There he graduated from the palace school known as the Enderun and served Sultan Murad II, rising by 1440 to govern the district of Dibra as sanjakbey. The Kastrioti also went by Mazreku, an Albanian word for horse breeder, signalling their tribal ties.
During the Battle of Nish in 1443 he deserted and took control of Kruje and the lands around it. In March 1444, backed by local nobles, he founded the League of Lezhe and united the Albanian principalities. Military historians rank him as the most persistent opponent of Ottoman power in its heyday, and he was never defeated, a record that made him a major obstacle to Ottoman expansion.
Diplomacy mattered as much as fighting. Under the Treaty of Gaeta in 1451 he formally accepted the Kingdom of Naples as sovereign over Albania in exchange for protection, while ruling independently in practice. In 1460 and 1461 he repaid the favour by leading an expedition to Italy for Ferdinand I against John II of Anjou. Pope Pius II picked him in 1463 to command a crusade, but the pope died while troops were still assembling and the campaign never happened. Skanderbeg fought on alongside Venice until he died on 17 January 1468.
His name carries layers. Alexander in Albanian is Skander, and the title Iskender Bey probably likened his generalship to Alexander the Great's. He went on using it after returning to Christianity, and his Italian descendants called themselves Castriota-Scanderbeg. In documents he signed only as Lord of Albania. Western Europeans saw him as a model of Christian resistance, and Albania's nineteenth-century national awakening made him its central hero.
Source: Skanderbeg
