It is not beside the point! The mediavel territory of (modern) Albania was also populated by Slavs and Greeks. The Albanians didn`t chose to resist as much as they could, by accepting islam in great numbers - similar as Christians both Serbs and Croat in mediavel Bosnia, creating what we know today as Bosniak muslims. One of the main reason that both territory of Albania (not state but territory with very mixed population of natives, Slavs and Greeks with those who came during turkish ocupation of Balkans) and Bosnia (kingdom) didn`t have as developed religion in form, structure and presence in every level of society that could form strong traditional, national and cultural identity of their people, that later could provide constant resistence under the great pressure of foreign aggression - Turks. In Bosnia there was what some historians today describe as heretic churche - for that statement I do not have enough proof, but it was certainly unique church under the influence both from Byzant and Rome on substratum of old slavic customs and beliefs. The Orthodox church (in mediavel times also state ideology) in Greece and Serbia was base for preserving cultural and national consciousness of their people and giving hope for later renovation of state. Serbian church was of greatest support for people during turkish ocupation, what Turks were aware of and there for happened brutal atempt to stop future resistance - in 1594. turkish Sinan-pasha (Albanian) burned holy relies of Saint Sava (first archbishop of serbian orthodox church and later person of greatest influence in serbian cultural tradition) in Belgrade.
“...
The region of Kosovo and Metohija has been settled since the early Middle Ages by a homogeneous Serb population. The first Serbian states of the 10th and 11th centuries leaned toward Kosovo. Under Byzantine rule, right up to its final incorporation into the Serbian Nemanjic state in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, Kosovo was, ethnically speaking, a Serbian land when political integration began. This is borne out by historical documents (the charters of Serbian rulers), particularly by a study of the anthronyms (first names) they contain, and the original toponyms (place names) - for in Kosovo and Metohija these are all mainly of Slav origin. Nomadic groups of Albanian shepherds, mostly of the Roman Catholic faith, made up a negligible 2 percent of the overall population and were concentrated in the mountainous west, around what is today the Yugoslav-Albanian border. There were also a few Albanian craftsmen, miners, and merchants in the towns.
It was the ethnic homogeneity of this densely populated medieval territory that led to its rapidly becoming the state, political, economic, and cultural center of the Serbian nation. The Serbian Orthodox Church, the national religious organization since the birth of the state in 1219, played its part in maintaining Kosovo as a Serbian territory. The leading monasteries founded by the Nemanjic dynasty (Gracanica, The Virgin of Ljeviska, Banjska, Decani, and The Archangels) with their icon paintings showing the sovereignty of the state and continuity of Serbian rule, relics of canonized rulers, and its Great Church (the Pec Patriarchate) - whose relics of canonized leaders of the national Church, together with many other monasteries and a dense network of small parish churches all over Kosovo and neighboring regions, represent the basis on which the Serbs formed and consolidated their national consciousness and built up a national and cultural identity. These monuments, then, concentrated and deployed over one territory, are national boundary-stones. The only intact survivors of the Turkish-Albanian Muslim devastation of these parts, they are still active centers of Serbian spiritual and national consciousness. Serbia’s architectural and art monuments in Kosovo rank among the finest achievements of medieval Europe, while the literary creations from this region represent the very foundations of the Serbian written word, which helped form a national consciousness during this period. It was rightly said (in the Serbian Memorandum to the ambassadors of the European Powers in London in 1913) that this territory is a kind of “Holy Land” for the Serbian people’for it was here in the Middle Ages that they attained a high degree of civilization and it is on the achievements of this period that their European identity rests.
The situation in Kosovo did not essentially change even in the course of the Turkish invasions in the last 2 decades of the 14th century - that is to say, ethnic relations were unaltered and the region retained its Serbian character. Unlike Albania, where Djordje Kastriot Skanderbeg, relying on the Albanian people, tried to unite the Albanian feudal landowners to resist the Turks in the mid-15th century, Kosovo remained Serbian, sharing the political fate of the other Serbian regions in the despotic domains of the Lazarevic and Brankovic families. The areas in which there existed a Serbo-Albanian ethnic symbiosis at that time lay far to the west of Kosovo, in lower Zeta, the Skadar Plain, and the northern Albanian mountains. Anthroponymic study of original Turkish defteri (censuses) in the 15th century shows that the line of the present-day state border between Yugoslavia and Albania, in its northern sector, chiefly coincides with today’s ethnic boundary between the Serbs and Albanians.
...
The Turkish invasions set in motion great ethnic masses in the Balkans and caused upheavals with lasting, frequently tragic results. Yet, where Kosovo is involved, the first Serbian migrations in the 15th century did not affect this region to any great degree, nor did they bring the Albanian shepherds down from the Prokletije Mountains. In the 16th century official Turkish records put Christians in a continuing absolute majority over Muslims (Turks and converted Albanians). Together with the other Christian peoples, who still survived as small groups of town-dwellers and shepherds (Orthodox Greeks and Vlachs and Roman Catholic Arbanasi/Albanians), the Serbs made up 97 percent of the total population.
Consequently, the territory of Old Serbia (the historical name for the region of Kosovo, Metohija, and neighboring areas) existed as a Serbian land in the 15th and 16th centuries. The restored Pec Patriarchate (1557) not only played an enormous part in linking up the Serbs scattered over the Balkans and even the Pannonian Plain, it was also instrumental in organizing Serbian resistance and the struggle against the Turks, especially in Kosovo. By the end of the 17th century this region had reopened its former religious centers, and Serbian power to resist grew apace. The Serbs were in a desperate position under the Turks. The effect of Turkish government and forced conversions to Islam, as Ivo Andric wrote in his doctoral thesis, was “absolutely negative.” All historical sources support him. Ottoman rule reposed on the law of discrimination and the absolute authority of Islam, with legal permission to commit acts of individual or mass violence up to total annihilation of people or whole areas.
...”
The Kosovo Question -
Past and Present
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/bookstore/kosovo/kosovo12.htm
“...
The fall of Serbian countries under the Turkish captivity brought to the Serbian people and their church the hardest days in the history. The conqueror wanted to destroy, with the hard blow, the national consciousness of their own strength and to present himself as the limitless master over the nonMuslim subjects (the subjugated people). The time of great plunder, the leading away of many slaves, the destruction of the churches and monasteries, arose. Such state provoked constant motion of the population, the migrations. And just on account of being acquainted with that and of knowing of the hard living of the Serbian people under the Turks, fearing for their own state and people, Hungarian kings and Austrian tsars were luring Serbs to go to their state and to, towards the Turkish border, form the military border as the alive wall towards the Turks. The settled Serbs were there the first protective zone of the Western Christian world from the Turks and Islam. When it is spoken of the bulwark of the Western Christianity (*antemurale christianitatis), then by that honorable name this suffering people should be meant in the first place, who used to leave their fire-sides in Serbia and Bosnia to avoid the evil of the Turks and they fought against them from the Christian region. The Church followed her children with maternal care and guarded them in the new settlements in the same way as at the old fire-sides which they had to leave to avoid the Turkish oppression and to be able to fight against it.
...”
A short History of Serbian Orthodox Church
http://www.svetisavaflemington.org/english.htm
Er, you made an argument in your earlier posts that the predominance of Albanians in Kosovo is recent and illegitimate.
You further stated that they became dominant (through ethnic cleansing) 400 years ago.
We may have a difference of opinion on what can be defined as “recent”; 400 years seems to be more than enough time to confer legitimacy in any reasonable sense. If you open up that can of worms, then you also permit all sorts of other historical grievances, such as for instance Muslim/Moroccan claims to parts of Spain, Chinese claims to Korea, Korean claims to parts of China, etc. ad infinitum. There has to be a statute of limitations on this sort of thing.
Historical scholarship is useful and interesting, but it is misused if it is just a way of creating a sort of legal brief.