rom Constantinople; the Serbs also were not so exposed to the full blast
of the Turkish wrath, and the inaccessibility of much of their country
afforded them some protection. Bulgaria was simply annihilated, and its
population, already far from homogeneous, was still further varied by
numerous Turkish and other Tartar colonies.

For the same reasons already mentioned Bulgaria was the last Balkan state
to emancipate itself; for these reasons also it is the least trammelled by
prejudices and by what are considered national predilections and racial
affinities, while its heterogeneous composition makes it vigorous and
enterprising. The treatment of the Christians by the Turks was by no means
always the same; generally speaking, it grew worse as the power of the
Sultan grew less. During the fifteenth century they were allowed to
practise their religion and all their vocations in comparative liberty and
peace. But from the sixteenth century onwards the control of the Sultan
declined, power became decentralized, the Ottoman Empire grew ever more
anarchic and the rule of the provincial governors more despotic.

But the Mohammedan conquerors were not the only enemies and oppressors of
the Bulgars. The role played by the Greeks in Bulgaria during the Turkish
dominion was almost as important as that of the Turks themselves. The
contempt of the Turks for the Christians, and especially for their
religion, was so great that they prudently left the management of it to
them, knowing that it would keep them occupied in mutual altercation. From
1393 till 1767 the Bulgarians were under the Greco-Bulgarian Patriarchate
of Okhrida, an organization in which all posts, from the highest to the
lowest, had to be bought from the Turkish administration at exorbitant and
ever-rising prices; the Phanariote Greeks (so called because they
originated in the Phanar quarter at Constantinople) were the only ones who
could afford those of the higher posts, with the result that the Church
was controlled from Constantinople. In 1767 the independent patriarchates
were abolished, and from that date the religious control of the Greeks was
as complete as the political control of the Turks. The Greeks did all they
could to obliterate the last traces of Bulgarian nationality which had
survived in the Church, and this explains a fact which must never be
forgotten, which had its origin in the remote past, but grew more
pronounced at this period, that the individual