stria, Hungary, Transylvania, and Podolia, and the northern
boundaries of their Empire were fixed by the Carpathians, the
Danube, and the Save. How marked and rapid was the further decline
of the Ottoman Empire may be inferred from the fact that twice in
the eighteenth century Austria and Russia discussed the project of
dividing it between them. But the inevitable disintegration of the
Turkish dominion was not to inure to the glorification of any of the
Great Powers, though Russia certainly contributed to the weakening
of the common enemy. The decline and diminution of the Ottoman
Empire continued throughout the nineteenth century. What happened,
however, was the revolt of subject provinces and the creation out of
the territory of European Turkey of the independent states of
Greece, Servia, Roumania, and Bulgaria. And it was Bulgarians,
Greeks, and Servians, with the active assistance of the Montenegrins
and the benevolent neutrality of the Roumanians, who, in the war of
1912-1913, drove the Turk out of Europe, leaving him nothing but the
city of Constantinople and a territorial fringe bordered by the
Chataldja line of fortifications.

THE EARLIER SLAV EMPIRES

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, Alba