Dardania was centered around present-day Kosovo, but also included parts of North Macedonia (northwestern area), Serbia (Novi Pazar) and Albania (Kukës, Tropoja, Has).

[4][5] The first written references to the Dardani are as opponents of Macedon in the fourth century, clashing with Philip II who managed to subdue them and their neighbors in 345.

The first century historian Pompey Trogue reports that these barbarous nations…were of wavering faith and perfidious dispositions and that only Alexander III's smooth succession averted disaster.

[8] They remain absent from our sources until 284 when Lysimachus seized Paeonia, which had revolted earlier in 322, forcing her prince Ariston to flee to Dardania.

[9] It appears that the Dardani escaped the Macedonian yoke entirely during the Wars of the Diadochi as they again began to freely raid Upper Greece under the reign of Lysimachus.

Ptolemy found this offer insulting and rudely refused the embassy by saying that the Macedonians were in a sad condition if, after having subdued the whole east without assistance, they now required aid from the Dardanians to defend their country; and that he had for soldiers the sons of those who had served under Alexander the Great, and had been victorious throughout the world.

[16] At some point in 230-229 in an unknown location in north-west Macedonia, they defeated the Antigonid king Demetrius II who died shortly the next spring.

[18] Groups of Illyrians began to desert the Ardiaen queen Teuta at around the same time and join the Dardani, forcing her to end an expedition into Phoenice.

the Dardanians ... living in the frontiers of the Illyrian and the Thracian worlds retained their individuality and, alone among the peoples of that region, succeeded in maintaining themselves as an ethnic unity even when they were militarily and politically subjected by the Roman arms [...] and when, towards the end of the ancient world, the Balkans were involved in far-reaching ethnic perturbations, the Dardanians, of all the Central Balkan tribes, played the greatest part in the genesis of the new peoples.Whether the Dardanians were an Illyrian or a Thracian people has been much debated and one view suggests that the area was originally populated with Thracians who then exposed to direct contact with Illyrians over a long period.

[..] The meaning of this state of affairs has been variously interpreted, ranging from notions of Thracianization' (in part) of an existing Illyrian population to the precise opposite.