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Slav blood than the Bulgars.
(6) There are the Montenegrins, an off-shoot of the Serbs, who in
the fourteenth century, when the Servian Empire fell, took to the hills
and maintained their independence.
Those are the six main racial elements. But there are other scraps
of peoples—the Albanians, for example, and the Macedonians, and
tribes of Moslem Bulgars, and some Asiatic elements brought in by
the Turks.
So far, then, the answer to the question, “Why are the Balkans
so often at war?” is easy of answer. Given the existence on one
peninsula of six different races, four of which have past great
traditions of Empire, and there is certain to be uneasy house-keeping.
But the inquiry has to be pushed further. Why is it that this unhappy
Peninsula should have been made thus a scrap-heap for bits of
nations, a refuge for sore-headed remnants of Imperial peoples? The
answer to that is chiefly geographical.
A study of the map will show that when there was a great
movement from the north of Europe to the south, its easiest line
of march was down the valley of the Danube along the Balkan
Peninsula. In prehistoric times the peoples around the European
shores of the Mediterranean brought to accomplishment a very
advanced type of civilisation. It owed its foundations to Egypt or
to the Semitic peoples, such as the Phoenicians, the Tyrians, and
the Carthaginians, whose race-home was Asia Minor. Whilst this
Mediterranean civilisation was being shaped in the south—in the
north, in the forests or plains along the shores of the Baltic and of
the North Sea, the fecund Teutonic people were swelling to a mighty
host and overflowing their boundaries. A flood of these people in
time came surging south searching for new lands. The natural course
of that flood was by the valley of the Danube to the Balkan Peninsula.
Down that peninsula they cut their path—not without bloodshed
one may guess—and founded the Grecian civilisation. Of this
prehistoric movement there is no written evidence; but it is accepted
by anthropologists as certain. Thus Sir Harry Johnston records, not as
a surmise but as a fact:
The Nordic races, armed with iron or steel swords, spears and arrowheads,
descended on the Alpine, Iberian, Lydian, and Aegean peoples
of Southern Europe with irresistible strength. It was iron against bronze,
copper, and stone; and iron won the day.
Prehistoric invasions of the Balkan Peninsula brought in the fair-
haired, blue-eyed Greeks, the semi-barbarian conquerors of the
Mukenaian and Minôan kingdoms. Tribes nearly allied to the Ancient
Greeks diverged from them in Illyria, invaded the Italian Peninsula, and
became the ancestors of the Sabines, Oscans, Latins, etc.
The parent ancestral speech of the German tribes about four to five
thousand years ago was probably closely approximated in syntax, and
in the form and pronunciation of words, to the other progenitors of
European Aryan languages, especially the Lithuanian, Slav, Greek, and
Italic dialects. Keltic speech was perhaps a little more different owing to
its absorption of non-Aryan elements; but if we can judge of prehistoric
German from what its eastern sister, the Gothic language, was like as late
as the fifth century B.C., we can, without too much straining of facts, say
that the prehistoric Greeks, when they passed across Hungary into the
mountainous regions of the Balkans, and equally the early Italic invaders
of Italy, were simply another branch of the Teutonic peoples later in
separation than the Kelts, with whom, however, both the Italic and the
Hellenic tribes were much interwoven.... Very English or German in
physiognomy were most of the notabilities in the palmy days of Greece,
to judge by their portrait-busts and the types of male and female beauty
most in favour—as far south as Cyprus—in the periods when Greek art
had become realistic and was released from the influence of an Aegean
standard of beauty.
Sistov, on the Danube