Ismail Qemali (16 January 1844-26 January 1919) was Head of State of Albania from 1912 to 1914 (preceding Wilhelm, Prince of Albania) and Prime Minister of Albania from 4 December 1912 to 22 January 1914 (preceding Fejzi Alizoti).
Biography[]
Ismail Qemali was born in Vlore, Ottoman Albania in 1844, and he moved to Istanbul in 1860 and entered the Ottoman civil service. He became a liberal reformist and became the governor of several towns in the Balkans, supporting the standardization of the Albanian alphabet and the creation of Albanian cultural organizations. His liberal policy recommendations caused friction with Sultan Abdulhamid II, and he spent 1900-1908 in exile in Western Europe, from which he promoted Albanian nationalism. He supported Italian intervention in the Balkans to check Austria-Hungary's growing power, and he called for reforms, minority rights, revolution, and European intervention in the Ottoman Empire. He returned to Albania after the Young Turk revolution, and he became an Ottoman Liberty Party deputy. However, he supported the Albanian revolts of 1911 and 1912, and he was a principal figure in Albania's declaration of independence, serving as Albania's head of state from 1912 to 1914. After Serbia and Greece occupied Albania during the First Balkan War, Qemali supported the ethnically-Albanian Ottoman officer Ahmed Izzet Pasha becoming ruler of Albania, but he ultimately accepted the Great Powers' choice of Wilhelm, Prince of Wied as Albania's ruler. He went into exile in Paris during World War I, and he died in Perugia, Italy in 1919 while promoting support for the liberal movement in Albania.