ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the political elbow-room of the regional actors, focusing on Scanderbeg and Stipan Vukčić Kosača. Scanderbeg continued his expansionist strategy in coastal Albania as a Neapolitan vassal, and this contributed eventually to his political isolation in the Adriatic world. Approaching the eastern Adriatic and adjacent parts of the so-called 'Western Balkans' therefore constitutes certainly a mosaic stone that enriches the highly complex picture of late-medieval crusader studies. The western Balkans formed a world of its own mostly in terms of politics: the fifteenth century was the zenith of a long process of political fragmentation in the Balkans, a process which nonetheless had the potential to create a new political landscape, one of regional territorial seigneuries akin to those in Italy or the Holy Roman Empire. The western Balkans had been under constant attack by Ottoman marcher lords since the 1380s, and this sparsely populated and barely urbanized region suffered in some areas an almost complete demographic breakdown.
