In 1928, the Croatian scholar Mirko Breyer published a book about a family from Budva. It carried the subtitle “the novel of the life of a Paštrovič-Budva family.” Breyer chose the word “novel” deliberately. The story of the Zanovic family reads like fiction, and in some places it almost certainly is. The problem is figuring out which places.
The father, Antun Zanovic, was a merchant and shoemaker. He lived in Budva, a small walled town on the Adriatic coast, ruled by Venice since 1420. Inside those walls, people spoke Venetian dialect. Outside, in the hills, they spoke Serbian. The Ottoman border sat twenty kilometers inland. It was the kind of place where identities were layered and negotiable, where a man could be Venetian by law, Slavic by blood, and something else entirely by ambition.
Antun had eight children. Several of his sons would become some of the most accomplished fraudsters in European history. One of them would correspond with Voltaire. One would swindle the Dutch Republic. One would counterfeit Russian banknotes. And one, the youngest, would grow up to become a respectable politician.
The fourth child was Stefano. He was born on February 18, 1751. He would be dead at thirty-five.
The Education of an Impostor
Antun sent Stefano to study in Venice and Padua. This was not unusual for a prosperous Budva merchant’s son. Venice was the natural destination. The Republic of St. Mark governed Budva, and the Venetian educational system absorbed bright boys from across its territories. Padua’s university was one of Europe’s oldest.
What Stefano learned there, beyond the formal curriculum, was how aristocrats behaved. How they spoke. How they held themselves. How they expected the world to treat them. He was a polyglot from childhood, growing up between Venetian Italian and Serbian. In Padua he added French, Latin, and polished German. He was charming, well-read, and carried himself with a confidence that made his origins invisible.
By his late teens he had settled in Florence, where his brother Primislav had joined the Accademia degli Apatisti. He began calling himself Count Zanovic. The shoemaker’s son was gone.
Florence: The Card Game
In December 1771, Zannowich and his brother Primislav pulled their first major scheme. The target was Henry Fiennes Pelham Clinton, the young Earl of Lincoln, nineteen years old and traveling through Italy on his Grand Tour. The brothers befriended him, drew him into a card game, and took him for 12,000 pounds sterling. Lincoln paid a quarter on the spot and signed bills of exchange for the rest. Primislav traveled to London and cashed them.
Giacomo Casanova was in Florence during this period. He watched the Zannowich brothers operate and recognized something familiar. Years later, he wrote about Primislav: “It seemed to me to see in him my portrait when I was fifteen years younger.” Casanova, who had run his own share of frauds, who had escaped from the Leads prison in Venice, who had charmed half the courts of Europe, looked at these boys from Budva and saw younger versions of himself.
The difference, Casanova noted, was that he pitied them. They lacked what he called “facilities.” Not talent. Not nerve. Something else. Perhaps judgment about when to stop.
The Invention of Prince Castriotto
After Florence, Zannowich made the move that would define his career. He stopped being a count and became a prince.
His chosen identity was Prince Castriotto of Albania, the eleventh descendant of George Kastrioti Skanderbeg. This was not a random choice. Skanderbeg (1405-1468) was the Albanian national hero, the man who had held off the Ottoman Empire for twenty-five years. His family had been real European nobility. After Skanderbeg’s death, the Kastrioti moved to the Kingdom of Naples and received the Duchy of San Pietro in Galatina. Actual Kastrioti descendants still lived in southern Italy in Zannowich’s time.
Zannowich had no connection to them whatsoever. He was a shoemaker’s son from Budva. But the beauty of the claim was that few people in Berlin, Paris, or Amsterdam could verify it. Albania was remote. The Kastrioti line was obscure enough to be plausible but prestigious enough to open doors. And Zannowich sold it completely. He had portraits made under his assumed identity. One, engraved by Joseph Friedrich Rein, shows him in profile with laurels and an eagle. Another, by an unknown artist, bears the inscription “Le Prince Castriotto d’Albanie, XI petit fils dv Grand Scanderberg.” Both survive in the British Royal Collection.
He also wrote a book about his supposed ancestor. Le grand Castriotto d’Albanie (1779) ran to 131 pages and included what Zannowich presented as Skanderbeg’s last speech. It was literature in the service of fraud, or fraud in the service of literature. With Zannowich, the line was always blurry.
The Writer
This is where Zannowich resists the easy category of “con man.”
He was genuinely literate. In 1773, he published Opere diverse, a collection that included philosophical essays, a poem called L’Anima (The Soul), and a translation of Rousseau’s Pygmalion. He dedicated the volume to his father, Antun of the Paštrovič maritime clan. That dedication is telling. Even in his published work, he was constructing an identity, foregrounding the clan name rather than the shoemaker’s workshop.
The book’s portrait was engraved by Augustin de Saint-Aubin, who also engraved portraits of Rousseau. Zannowich tried to use this connection. He attempted twice to visit Rousseau at his home on the Rue Plâtrière in Paris. Both times Rousseau refused to see him. Zannowich then did something reckless. He published a letter announcing his own religious conversion and urging Rousseau to convert too. Worse, he mentioned that D’Alembert had praised his Pygmalion translation. This was a fatal mistake. Rousseau was paranoid about D’Alembert, whom he believed to be part of a conspiracy against him. Instead of gaining Rousseau’s friendship, Zannowich ended up referenced in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, grouped with D’Alembert as a suspected conspirator.
He had better luck with Voltaire, who actually replied to his letters. He corresponded with the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, the poet Pietro Metastasio, and Frederick William II of Prussia, to whom he dedicated a book of French verses called L’Alcoran des Princes Destinés au Trône.
His most ambitious literary work was Lettere turche (Turkish Letters), published in Dresden in 1776 under the name Stiepan Pastor-Vecchio. It was an epistolary novel modeled on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, containing anecdotes about “the lightness of men, the inconstancy of women, slander, comedy, theater, and play,” interspersed with oriental tales. In one letter, he called himself “the Voltaire of Dalmatia.” Only a handful of copies survive. No library in France or the United States holds one.
The Dutch Catastrophe
In 1772, the Zannowich brothers orchestrated their most consequential fraud.
Using forged letters of recommendation from merchants in Lyon and a Venetian intermediary, they approached the Dutch firm Chomel en Jordan. They invented fictitious trading companies, promised shiploads of wine and olive oil aboard vessels that did not exist, and secured diamonds and a large sum of money through forged bills of exchange.
The ships never arrived. The companies were phantoms.
By the time the Dutch merchants realized what had happened, the losses were enormous. Chomel and Jordan appealed to the Dutch government. The Dutch government demanded restitution from Venice, since the fraud had been facilitated through Venetian intermediaries. Venice refused. The Dutch threatened to seize Venetian merchant ships in their ports.
What had started as a confidence trick by two brothers from Budva escalated into an international crisis. French and Austrian diplomats intervened. For a brief period in the late 1770s, the possibility of armed confrontation between the Venetian Republic and the Dutch Republic was real, all because of forged documents and fictional cargo ships.
Casanova, then working for the Venetian Ambassador Foscarini, had access to the diplomatic files. In 1784, he published Lettre historico-critique sur un fait connu, dépendant d’une cause peu connue (Historical-critical letter about a known fact depending on a little-known cause). It was a detailed account of the affair, published under a Hamburg imprint. Even Casanova, no stranger to fraud himself, was impressed by the scale of what the Zannowich brothers had accomplished.
Montenegro: Becoming Stephen the Little
The most audacious chapter of Zannowich’s life was also his briefest.
In 1773, Montenegro lost its ruler. This ruler was himself an impostor. Šćepan Mali, “Stephen the Little,” had arrived in Montenegro in 1766, allowed people to believe he was Tsar Peter III of Russia (Catherine the Great’s murdered husband), and through that useful ambiguity had unified the warring Montenegrin tribes, conducted a census, built roads, and established a police force. He ruled for seven years. On September 22, 1773, his Greek servant, bribed by the Ottomans, cut his throat at the Donji Brčeli Monastery.
Zannowich arrived in Montenegro on May 5, 1774, less than eight months later. He claimed to have been one of Stephen’s generals. Some accounts say he tried to assume Stephen’s identity entirely, presenting himself as the man who had ruled Montenegro.
The Montenegrins had already lived through one impostor. They knew the script. Within months, they advised Zannowich to leave. He did. But the episode gave him material. In 1784, he published the first account of Šćepan Mali ever written, a book that carefully distinguished between himself and Stephen while simultaneously trading on the association. He was always working multiple angles.
The Duchess and the Empress
In Rome, around 1778, Zannowich met Elizabeth Chudleigh, the Duchess of Kingston. She was fifty-seven. He was twenty-seven. She had been convicted of bigamy by the House of Lords. He was pretending to be an Albanian prince. They were, in a sense, perfect for each other.
Elizabeth Chudleigh was one of the great adventuresses of the 18th century, wealthy, politically connected, and utterly uncontrollable. She and Zannowich became lovers. In 1777, they had a boat built and sailed into Kronstadt, the port of Saint Petersburg, in a spectacle designed to announce their arrival. They were received at Catherine the Great’s court.
The details of their time in Russia are fragmentary. What we know is that Zannowich moved on. He always moved on. Elizabeth, according to one contemporary, loved him “with folly and deep tenderness.” Later, when the money ran out, he would forge a promissory note in her name to swindle 5,764 guilders from a Frankfurt bank.
The Brothers
Stefano was not the only Zanovic brother working the courts of Europe.
Primislav, the third-born, was his chief partner. He was the one who cashed the Earl of Lincoln’s bills in London. He helped orchestrate the Chomel & Jordan diamond fraud. The brothers routinely exchanged names and identities, appearing to be in two places at once and making it nearly impossible for authorities to track them.
Marko, the eldest, went to Russia in 1781. He secured the patronage of Semyon Zorich, a Serbian-born general who had been one of Catherine the Great’s lovers. Zorich had an estate at Shklov (in modern Belarus). Marko settled there and was given the title of count. In 1783, he and another brother were arrested for counterfeiting Russian banknotes. They were sent to Siberia. Catherine pardoned them in 1788, reportedly because Stefano, in his published works, had been flattering to the Empress.
The youngest brother, Miroslav, born in 1761, chose a different path. He became a Freemason. He published a book of thoughts and sonnets. He opposed Venetian territorial claims over Dalmatia. In 1813, he served as Budva’s delegate at the assembly that unified Montenegro and Boka. He died in 1834 at the age of seventy-three, a respectable citizen.
The same household produced con men and statesmen. Same parents. Same walled town. Same view of the Adriatic.
The Courts of Europe
Zannowich’s map of movement reads like a fever dream of 18th-century geography.
In Berlin (1776), he tried to gain the confidence of Frederick the Great. Frederick, according to one account, “immediately saw right through him.” But Zannowich grew close to Frederick’s heir, Frederick William II, and dedicated poetry to him.
In Dresden, he published the Turkish Letters. In Zweibrücken, he was received well until rumors from Berlin caught up. In Alsace and Lorraine, he reinvented himself again. In Vienna (1784), he arrived as Prince Castriotto and tried to enlist Orthodox clergy in a scheme to seize power in Montenegro. The Habsburg authorities pushed him out by the end of July.
He moved through Munich, Regensburg, and Augsburg, persuading merchants to invest in Dutch market deals. He tried to sell ten thousand Montenegrin mercenaries to anyone who would pay. He entered a Bavarian monastery, claiming to be an exiled prince seeking sanctuary.
All of this ran on paper. Forged letters. Borrowed names. Bills of exchange drawn on people who did not exist. In an age before photographs, before telegraph, before standardized passports, a well-spoken man with the right clothes and the right references could be anyone. Casanova knew this. Cagliostro knew this. The Count of Saint-Germain knew this. Zannowich knew this better than most.
Amsterdam, April 4, 1786
They caught him in Amsterdam.
When the police interrogated him, Zannowich made contradictory statements. He declared himself to be, simultaneously: Prince of Albania. Skanderbeg. An Orthodox Patriarch. General-Captain of Montenegro. Count Zanovic-Crnojević. And Stephen the Little.
Six identities at once. It reads like either a breakdown or a performance. Maybe both.
The charges were debt and fraud. He had been drawing on fabricated credit, forging promissory notes, and living on money that belonged to other people. The Amsterdam authorities had finally assembled enough evidence.
Seven weeks later, on May 25, 1786, Stefano Zannowich died in his cell. He was thirty-five years old.
Every source confirms the cause: suicide. The specific circumstances remain undocumented. Helmut Watzlawick, the Swiss scholar who published the definitive bio-bibliography of Zannowich in 1999, notes only that he “se suicida dans sa prison.”
The World That Made Him Possible
Zannowich was not an anomaly. He was a product.
The 18th century was the golden age of the European impostor. Passports were single sheets of paper with no photograph, no date of birth, and sometimes no physical description at all. Identity verification across borders was effectively impossible. A man who spoke four languages, dressed well, and carried convincing letters of introduction could claim any title he wanted. The burden of proof fell on the accuser, not the claimant, because accusing a genuine prince of being a fraud was a serious social error.
Budva gave Zannowich everything he needed to exploit this system. It was Venetian territory, which gave him fluency in Italian and access to Venetian networks. It was on the edge of the Ottoman world, which gave him the exotic association of “Albania” and “Montenegro,” places that most Europeans could not find on a map. It was culturally layered in a way that made identity itself a performance. A man from Budva could be Venetian, Serbian, Albanian, Dalmatian, or Montenegrin depending on who was asking.
Zannowich was not the first to exploit this fluidity. Šćepan Mali had done it before him in Montenegro, turning an unnamed wanderer into a tsar. The Freemasons and their lodge networks provided another kind of portable identity. Cagliostro used Egyptian mysticism. Saint-Germain used the claim of immortality. Zannowich used Albanian royalty. Different masks. Same stage.
The Two Readings
The first reading is simple. Zannowich was a gifted con man, a pathological liar with a talent for languages and a complete absence of conscience. He stole from merchants, defrauded banks, exploited a naive English earl, and forged documents. He died as con men often die: alone, in a cell, having run out of people to deceive.
The second reading is harder.
He corresponded with Voltaire, and Voltaire answered. He wrote an epistolary novel that scholars now treat as a genuine literary work. He published philosophical essays, political prophecy, and what remains the first account of Šćepan Mali’s rule. He moved through the highest intellectual circles of the Enlightenment and was not, by all accounts, out of his depth.
Casanova saw something of himself in Zannowich. This is worth pausing on. Casanova is remembered as a writer and a wit, a man of culture. The memoirs he left behind are considered a masterpiece of 18th-century literature. Zannowich left behind Lettere turche, a book that almost nobody has read because almost nobody can find a copy. Had circumstances been different, had Zannowich been born in Venice instead of Budva, had the Zanovic family been patrician instead of Paštrovič, the same intelligence and the same literary gifts might have produced something remembered differently.
Or maybe not. Maybe the fraud and the literature were inseparable. Maybe Zannowich could only write because he lived the way he did, in constant motion, constantly reinventing, always one step ahead of discovery. Maybe the Turkish Letters are good precisely because their author knew what it meant to see the world through borrowed eyes.
Alfred Döblin thought so. In Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Döblin has a character tell the story of “Stefan Zannovich, an Albanian peddler’s son” as a parable. Another character insists on telling the ending: that Zannovich overreached, was discovered, and killed himself. The parable is about the limits of self-invention. You can become anyone. But you cannot become anyone forever.
What Remains
Budva still exists. The Venetian walls still stand. Tourist brochures mention Zannowich occasionally, usually as “the Casanova from Budva.”
His portrait hangs in the British Royal Collection, cataloged as “Castriotto d’Albanie.” His books survive in a handful of European libraries. The Lettere turche was listed on AbeBooks for $2,232. Watzlawick’s 1999 bio-bibliography, published in Geneva, runs to 153 pages. Breyer’s 1928 family chronicle, published by the Croatian cultural institution Matica Hrvatska, is available on the Internet Archive.
The man who wrote those books, who charmed those courts, who nearly started a war between two republics, died at thirty-five in a cell in Amsterdam. Before his arrest, he had written something that reads like both an epitaph and a challenge: “May my career end even though I am 25 years old, I will have no regrets, provided that the centuries to come speak with admiration of my ambition and my Turkish Letters.”
He was off on the age. He was right about the centuries.
