[Illustration: Southeastern Europe, 975 A.D.]
But it is in the southeastern corner of Europe that one finds the worst jumble of nationalities. Six hundred years before Christ, the Greeks and their rougher cousins, the Thracians, Macedonians, and Dacians inhabited this district. When one of the Roman Emperors conquered the Dacians about 100 A.D., he planted a large Roman colony north of the Danube River. Then came the West Goths, who swept into this country, but soon left it for the west of Europe. Next came the Slavic tribes who are the ancestors of the modern Serbs. Following these, came a large tribe which did not belong to the Indo-European family, but was distantly related to the Finns and the Turks. These people were called the Volgars, for they came from the country around the River Volga. Before long, we find them called the Bulgars. (The letters B and V are often interchanged in the languages of south-eastern Europe. The people of western Europe used to call the country of the Serbs Servia, but the Serbs objected, saying that the word _servio_, in Latin, means “to be a slave,” and that as they were not slaves, they wanted their country to be called by its true name, Serbia. The Greeks, on the other hand, pronounce the letter B as though it were V.)
A strange thing happened to the Volgars or Bulgars. They completely gave up their Asiatic language and adopted a new one, which became in time the purest of the Slavic tongues. They intermarried with the Slavs around them and adopted Slavic names. They founded a flourishing nation which lay between the kingdom of Serbia and the Greek Empire of Constantinople.
North of the Bulgars lay the country of the Roumani (ro͞o mä′nï). These people claimed to be descended from the Roman Emperor’s colonists, as was previously told, but the reason their language is so much like the Italian is that a large number of people from the north of Italy moved into the country nearly a thousand years after the first Roman colonists settled there. From 900 to 1300 A.D., south-eastern Europe was inhabited by Serbians, Bulgarians, Roumanians, and Greeks.
[Illustration: A Typical Bulgarian Family]
A fifth people perhaps ought to be counted here, the Albanians. (See map) This tribe is descended from the Illyrians, who inhabited the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea even before the time of the Roman Empire. Their language, like the Greek, is a branch of the Indo-European family which is neither Latin, Celtic, Germanic, nor Slavic. They are distant cousins of the Italians and are also slightly related to the Greeks. They are a wild, fierce, uncivilized people, and have never known the meaning of law and order. Robbery and warfare are common. Each village is always fighting with the people of the neighboring towns. The Albanians, or Skipetars (skïp′ĕtars) as they call themselves, were Christians until they were conquered by the Turks about 1460. Since that time, the great majority of them have been staunch believers in the Mohammedan religion.