Pal Kastrioti

Pal or Gjergj Kastrioti was an Albanian medieval ruler in the latter part of the 14th century in northern Albania. Not much is known about his life. He is mentioned in only two historical sources, which describe his rule as extending over a region between Mat and Dibër. His son was Gjon Kastrioti, and his grandson was Skanderbeg, the Albanian national hero.

In historiography

A figure attested as Kastriot of Kanina in southern Albania who appears in a letter sent on September 2, 1368, by Alexander Komnenos Asen to the Ragusan senate has been hypothesised by several authors, mostly in the early 20th century, as an ancestor of the Kastrioti family. Heinrich Kretschmayr argued that this Kastriot may have been Pal Kastrioti, while John Fine considered it "probable" that this Kastriot was an ancestor of Gjon Kastrioti, and Aleks Buda tried to bridge the geographical discrepancy with this theory, wherein Kastriot of Kanina lived in southern Albania while the Kastrioti were active in north-central Albania, by arguing that after the fall of the Balšić, they returned to their ancestral lands in the Dibër valley. In contemporary historiography, the figure recorded as Kastriot of Kanina in 1368 is considered to be unrelated to the Kastrioti family. Compared to other Albanian noble families, the early Kastrioti remain largely absent from historical and archival records until their initial documented appearance

The historical figure of Konstantin Kastrioti Mazreku is attested in Giovanni Andrea Angelo Flavio Comneno's Genealogia diversarum principum familiarum. Angelo mentions Kastrioti as Constantinus Castriotus, cognomento Meserechus, Aemathiae & Castoriae Princeps (Constantinus Castriotus, surnamed Meserechus, Prince of Aemathia and Castoria). Angelo used the cognomen Meserechus about Skanderbeg, and this link to the same name is produced in other sources and reproduced in later ones like Du Cange's Historia Byzantina (1680).