Gesuiti e Santa Sede in Albania fra mediazione culturale, missione e islamizzazione

This article offers a cultural and linguistic reflection on the process of Islamization in the Albanian area between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on the role of Catholic missions and the strategies of the Holy See in the Balkan context. Rather than reconstructing Islamization in institutional or quantitative terms, the study investigates the ways in which this process was mediated, represented, and articulated at the linguistic and textual level. The first part provides a general historical and linguistic framework, with particular attention to the circulation of religious texts, the differentiated use of languages of culture, and the late emergence of an Islamic written tradition in the Albanian language. The second part examines the perspective of the Holy See and the activity of the Jesuits in the late sixteenth century, focusing on missionary practices and the production of religious texts in the vernacular, understood as instruments of cultural as well as pastoral mediation. The combined analysis of these two levels makes it possible to observe how different religious policies, linked to external centers of power, operated within the same cultural space without producing an immediate linguistic or cultural assimilation. This dynamic becomes fully visible only retrospectively, through the examination of sources, texts, and practices of mediation, and calls for a cautious and contextualized reading of religious developments in early modern Albania.