ch an Empire founded in
the Italian Peninsula was to die its long, uneasy death. The fate of
this Greek Empire had been hardly decided when a new racial element came
on the scene, and over the tottering Empire, already fighting fiercely
with Bulgar and Serb for its small surviving patch of territory, strode
the Turk in the full flush of his youthful strength, giving the last
blow to the rule of the Caesars, and threatening all Christian Europe
with conquest.

Made thus by the Fates the cockpit of the great struggles for
World-Empire, the Balkan Peninsula was doomed to a bloody history: and
the doom has not yet passed away. Perhaps it is some unconscious effect
on the mind of the pity of this that makes the traveller to the Balkans
feel so often a sympathy, almost unreasonable in intensity, for the
Balkan peoples. The Balkan acres which they till are home to them. To
civilisation those acres are the tournament field for the battles of
races and nations.

What is now Bulgaria was in the days of Herodotus inhabited by Thracian
and Illyrian tribes. They were united under the strong hand of Philip
of Macedonia, and Bulgaria counts him the first great figure in her
confused national history, and makes a claim to be the heir of his
Macedonian Empire. The Romans appeared in Bulgaria during the period of
the second war against Carthage. The Roman conquest of the Balkan
country was slow, but shortly before the Christian era the Roman
provinces of Moesia and Thracia comprised most of what is now Bulgaria.

In the days of Constantine, who removed the capital of his Empire to the
Balkan Peninsula, Roman civilisation in what is now Bulgaria was already
being swamped by barbarian invasions. The Goths and the Huns ravaged the
land fiercely without attempting to colonise it. The Slavs were invaders
of another type. They came to stay. It was at the beginning of the third
century that the Slavs made their first appearance, and, crossing the
Danube, began to settle in the great plains between the river and the
Balkan Mountains. Later, they went south-wards and formed colonies among
the Thraco-Illyrians, the Roumanians, and the Greeks. This Slav
occupation went on for several centuries. In the seventh century of the
Christian era a Hunnish tribe reached the banks of the Danube. It is
known that this tribe came from the Volga and, crossing Russia,
proceeded towards ancient Moesia, where it took possession of the whole
north-east territory