There is historic justice in the circumstance that the Turkish Empire
in Europe met its doom at the hands of the Balkan nations themselves.
For these nationalities had been completely submerged and even their
national consciousness annihilated under centuries of Moslem
intolerance, misgovernment, oppression, and cruelty.
None suffered worse than Bulgaria, which lay nearest to the capital of
the Mohammedan conqueror. Yet Bulgaria had had a glorious, if
checkered, history long before there existed {9} any Ottoman Empire
either in Europe or in Asia. From the day their sovereign Boris
accepted Christianity in 864 the Bulgarians had made rapid and
conspicuous progress in their ceaseless conflicts with the Byzantine
Empire. The Bulgarian church was recognized as independent by the
Greek patriarch at Constantinople; its primates subsequently received
the title of patriarch, and their see was established at Preslav, and
then successively westward at Sofia, Vodena, Presba, and finally
Ochrida, which looks out on the mountains of Albania. Under Czar
Simeon, the son of Boris, "Bulgaria," says Gibbon, "assumed a rank
among the civilized powers of the earth." His dominions extended from
the Black Sea to the Adriatic and comprised the greater part of
Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Servia, and Dalmatia; leaving only to the
Byzantine Empire--whose civilization he introduced and sedulously
promoted among the Bulgarians--the cities of Constantinople, Saloniki,
and Adrianople with {10} the territory immediately surrounding them.
But this first Bulgarian Empire was short-lived, though the western
part remained independent under Samuel, who reigned, with Ochrida as
his capital, from 976 to 1014. Four years later the Byzantine Emperor,
Basil II, annihilated the power of Samuel, and for a hundred and fifty
years the Bulgarian people remained subject to the rule of
Constantinople. In 1186 under the leadership of the brothers Asen they
regained their independence. And the reign of Czar Asen II (1218-1240)
was the most prosperous period of all Bulgarian history. He restored
the Empire of Simeon, his boast being that he had left to the
Byzantines nothing but Constantinople and the cities round it, and he
encouraged commerce, cultivated arts and letters, founded and endowed
churches and monasteries, and embellished his capital, Trnovo, with
beautiful and magnificent buildings. After Asen came a period of
decline culminating in a humiliating defeat by the Servians {11} in
1330. The quarrels of the Christian races of the Balkans facilitated
the advance of the Moslem invader, who overwhelmed the Serbs and their
allies on the memorable field of Kossovo in 1389, and four years later
captured and burned the Bulgarian capital, Trnovo, Czar Shishman
himself perishing obscurely in the common destruction. For five
centuries Bulgaria remained under Moslem despotism, we ourselves being
the witnesses of her emancipation in the last thirty-five years.
The fate of the Serbs differed only in degree from that of the
Bulgarians. Converted to Christianity in the middle of the ninth
century, the major portion of the race remained till the twelfth
century under either Bulgarian or Byzantine sovereignty. But Stephen
Nemanyo brought under his rule Herzegovina, Montenegro, and part of
modern Servia and old Servia, and on his abdication in 1195 in favor of
his son launched a royal dynasty which reigned over the Serb people for
two centuries. Of {12} that line the most distinguished member was
Stephen Dushan, who reigned from 1331 to 1355. He wrested the whole of
the Balkan Peninsula from the Byzantine Emperor, and took Belgrade,
Bosnia, and Herzegovina from the King of Hungary. He encouraged
literature, gave to his country a highly advanced code of laws, and
protected the church whose head--the Archbishop of Ipek--he raised to
the dignity of patriarch. On Easter Day 1346 he had himself crowned at
Uskub as "Emperor of the Greeks and Serbs." A few years later he
embarked on an enterprise by which, had he been successful, he might
have changed the course of European history. It was nothing less than
the capture of Constantinople and the union of Serbs, Bulgarians, and
Greeks into an empire which might defend Christendom against the rising
power of Islam. Dushan was within forty miles of his goal with an army
of 80,000 men when he died suddenly in camp on the 20th of December,
1355. Thirty-four years {13} later Dushan's countrymen were
annihilated by the Turks at Kossovo! All the Slavonic peoples of the
Balkan Peninsula save the brave mountaineers of Montenegro came under
Moslem subjection. And under Moslem subjection they remained till the
nineteenth century.