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 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 the
territory immediately surrounding them. But this first Bulgarian
Empire was shortlived, 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 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 bought 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 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
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.