Marin Barleti

Marin Barleti was a historian and Catholic priest from Shkodra. He is considered the first Albanian historian because of his 1504 eyewitness account of the 1478 siege of Shkodra. Barleti is better known for his second work, a biography on Skanderbeg, translated into many languages in the 16th to the 20th centuries. Some scholars assert he was an ethnic Italian, while most Albanian scholars believe he was Albanian.

Barleti was born and raised in Scutari , then part of the Republic of Venice. Many western scholars believe that Barleti was an Italian settler from Italy, while most Albanian scholars today claim he was an ethnic Albanian. In 1474, the Ottoman Empire besieged Shkodra and Barleti participated in the successful defense of the town, both in the first siege in 1474 and the second in 1478. Both Barletis parents were killed in the sieges. When Venice ceded Shkodra to the Ottomans in 1479, Barleti escaped to Italy where he would become a scholar of history, classical literature and the Latin language.

Source: Wikipedia