History of the Balkans
The Eneolithic Varna culture in Bulgaria (4600–4200 BC radiocarbon dating) produced the world's earliest known gold treasure and had sophisticated beliefs about afterlife.
Yamnaya steppe pastoralists apparently migrated into the Balkans about 3000 to 2500 BCE, and they soon admixed with the local populations, which resulted in a tapestry of various ancestry from which speakers of the Albanoid, Hellenic, and other Paleo-Balkan languages emerged.
Parts of the Balkans and more northern areas were ruled by the Achaemenid Persians for some time, including Thrace, Paeonia, Macedon, and most Black Sea coastal regions of Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia.
The name Illyrii was originally used to refer to a people occupying an area centered on Lake Skadar, situated between Albania and Montenegro (Illyrians proper).
Around 513 BC, as part of the military incursions ordered by Darius I, a huge Achaemenid army invaded the Balkans and tried to defeat the Western Scythians roaming to the north of the Danube river.
[12] Several Thracian peoples, and nearly all of the other European regions bordering the Black Sea (including parts of the modern-day Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia), were conquered by the Achaemenid army before it returned to Asia Minor.
For instance, Megabazus' own son, Bubares, married Amyntas' daughter, Gygaea; and that supposedly ensured good relations between the Macedonian and Achaemenid rulers.
But in 358 BC, Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, defeated the Illyrians and assumed control of their territory as far as Lake Ohrid (present-day North Macedonia).
Under Queen Teuta, Illyrians attacked Roman merchant vessels plying the Adriatic Sea and gave Rome an excuse to invade the Balkans.
Also, in 168 BC, by taking advantage of the constant Greek civil wars, the Romans defeated Perseus, the last King of Macedonia and with their allies in southern Greece, they became overlords of the region.
Starting in the 2nd century BC, the rising Roman Republic began annexing the Balkan area, transforming it into one of the Empire's most prosperous and stable regions.
Turning on their hosts after decades of servitude and simmering hostility, Thervingi under Fritigern and later Visigoths under Alaric I eventually conquered and laid waste[citation needed] the entire Balkan region before moving westward to invade Italy itself.
Though normally dated to 1054, when Pope Leo IX and Patriarch of Constantinople Michael I Cerularius excommunicated each other, the East-West Schism was actually the result of an extended period of estrangement between the two Churches.
[23] Throughout its history, Byzantium had fluctuating borders: the Empire often became involved in multi-sided conflicts with not only the Arabs, Persians and Turks of the east, but also with its Christian neighbours- the Bulgarians, Serbs, Normans and the Crusaders, which each at one time or another conquered large amounts of its territory.
The Huns, a confederation of a Turkic-Uralic ruling core that subsequently incorporated various Germanic, Sarmatian and Slavic tribes, moved west into Europe, entering Pannonia in 400–410 AD.
After suffering a defeat at the hands of Bulgars and Slavs, the Byzantine Empire recognised the sovereignty of Asparuh's Khanate in a subsequent treaty signed in 681 AD.
The Uprising of Asen and Peter was a revolt of Bulgarians and Vlachs[31][32] living in Moesia and the Balkan Mountains, then the theme of Paristrion of the Byzantine Empire, caused by a tax increase.
It began on 26 October 1185, the feast day of St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, and ended with the restoration of Bulgaria with the creation of the Second Bulgarian Empire, ruled by the Asen dynasty.
In building its maritime commercial empire, the Republic of Venice dominated the trade in salt,[33] acquired control of most of the islands in the Aegean, including Cyprus and Crete, and became a major "power" in the Near East and in all the Balkans.
Venice seized a number of locations on the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea before 1200, partly for purely commercial reasons, but also because pirates based there were a menace to its trade.
Sultan Selim I (1512–1520) dramatically expanded the Empire's eastern and southern frontiers by defeating Shah Ismail of Safavid Persia, in the Battle of Chaldiran.
Among the Orthodox Christians of the empire (the Rum Millet) a common identity was forged based on a shared sense of time defined by the ecclesiastical calendar, saint's days and feasts.
The Ottoman Empire, called at the time the "sick man of Europe," was humiliated and significantly weakened, rendering it more liable to domestic unrest and more vulnerable to attack.
"[42] World War I was ignited from a spark in the Balkans, when a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand.
In part they feared the power of Serbia and its ability to sow dissent and disruption in the empire's "south-Slav" provinces under the banner of a "greater Slav state".
People across the area suffered serious economic dislocation, and the mass mobilization resulted in severe casualties, particularly in Serbia where over 1.5 million Serbs died, which was approx.
In less-developed areas World War I was felt in different ways: requisitioning of draft animals, for example, caused severe problems in villages that were already suffering from the enlistment of young men, and many recently created trade connections were ruined.
[51] In Croatia and Slovenia, multi-party elections produced nationally inclined leadership that followed in the footsteps of their previous Communist predecessors and oriented itself towards capitalism and secession.
With the exception of its former republics of Slovenia and Macedonia, the settlement and the national composition of population in all parts of Yugoslavia changed drastically, due to war, but also political pressure and threats.
A number of commanders and politicians, notably Serbia's former president Slobodan Milošević, were put on trial by the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for a variety of war crimes—including deportations and genocide that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.
