The wars of the Balkan Peninsula: their medieval origins

Abstract

Past -- The ethnic aspects -- The slavization of the Balkan Peninsula -- The expansion of the Albanians -- The Vlachs (Aromanians) a people without state -- Deportations and colonizations made by the Byzantine and Ottoman empires -- The political aspects -- The downfall and recovery of the Byzantine domination and the rise of Bulgaria -- The small Slavic states from the central and western Balkans -- The Byzantine offensive (ninth-eleventh centuries) -- Pax Byzantina and the centrifugal trends in the eleventh-twelfth centuries -- The inheritors of the Byzantine imperialism -- The rise and the breaking up of great Serbia -- The Ottoman conquest -- Pax Ottomana -- The religious aspects -- The confrontation between Rome and Constantinople in the Balkans -- The spreading of Islam in the Balkans: a new differentiation -- The present. historical propaganda and the Balkan nationalist ideologies -- Theories of ethnogenesis with political implications -- The Greeks -- The Albanians -- The Bulgarians -- The Serbs and the Croats -- The Vlachs (Aromanians) -- The legitimation of expansionism by the abuse of history -- Kosovo- Serbian or Albanian? -- The historical Macedonia - the apple of discord among Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia