Milan Šufflay was a prominent Croatian historian, politician, and a pioneering founder of Albanology who famously championed the theory that modern Albanians are the direct descendants of the ancient Illyrians. He dedicated much of his academic life to documenting this heritage, publishing foundational works like the Codex Albanicus and Serbs and Albanians: Their Symbiosis in the Middle Ages. Because of his fierce Croatian nationalism and intellectual resistance to the royalist Serb narrative, Šufflay was heavily persecuted by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. During this turbulent period in the 1920s, he became a close political ally of Ante Pavelić—the lawyer and Croatian Party of Rights leader who served as Šufflay's defense attorney during his 1921 high treason trial, long before Pavelić founded the fascist Ustaše movement. Ultimately, Šufflay's anti-Yugoslav stance proved fatal; on 19 February 1931, he was brutally assassinated outside his Zagreb home by agents linked to the royal Yugoslav secret police. Following the murder, the authorities broke into his apartment and stole his invaluable, unpublished manuscripts—including the third volume of the Codex Albanicus—in an attempt to silence both his political voice and his historical research.
