Of all the Balkan peoples the Bulgarians were the most completely crushed
and effaced. The Greeks by their ubiquity, their brains, and their money
were soon able to make the Turkish storm drive their own windmill; the
Rumanians were somewhat sheltered by the Danube and also by their distance
from Constantinople; the Serbs also were not so exposed to the full blast
of the Turkish wrath, and the inaccessibility of much of their country
afforded them some protection. Bulgaria was simply annihilated, and its
population, already far from homogeneous, was still further varied by
numerous Turkish and other Tartar colonies.

For the same reasons already mentioned Bulgaria was the last Balkan state
to emancipate itself; for these reasons also it is the least trammelled by
prejudices and by what are considered national predilections and racial
affinities, while its heterogeneous composition makes it vigorous and
enterprising. The treatment of the Christians by the Turks was by no means
always the same; generally speaking, it grew worse as the power of the
Sultan grew less. During the fifteenth century they were allowed to
practise their religion and all their vocations in comparative liberty and
peace. But from the sixteenth century onwards the control of the Sultan
declined, power became decentralized, the Ottoman Empire grew ever more
anarchic and the rule of the provincial governors more despotic.

But the Mohammedan conquerors were not the only enemies and oppressors of
the Bulgars. The rôle played by the Greeks in Bulgaria during the Turkish
dominion was almost as important as that of the Turks themselves. The
contempt of the Turks for the Christians, and especially for their
religion, was so great that they prudently left the management of it to
them, knowing that it would keep them occupied in mutual altercation. From
1393 till 1767 the Bulgarians were under the Greco-Bulgarian Patriarchate
of Okhrida, an organization in which all posts, from the highest to the