CHAPTER VI


THE BALKAN STATES

THE BALKANS.--As we have learned in Chapter I, the Balkan states are,
with the exception of Montenegro, the result of a series of revolutions
which took place during the last hundred years. These revolutions were
the result of two causes. First there was a growing restlessness of the
different groups of people in the Balkan peninsula. This was due not
only to centuries of Turkish misrule, but also to the influence of the
republican movement which developed in northern and western Europe as a
result of the French Revolution. The second cause of the Balkan
revolutions was the gradual growth among the oppressed races of the
feeling that they would better their condition by throwing off the
despotic Turkish rule and by organizing each separate race into a
separate nation. Thus it was that the revolutions brought into existence
a group of small states, each populated chiefly by one of the races
inhabiting the Balkans.

[Illustration: THE BALKAN STATES 1913]

RACES IN THE BALKANS.--There are more races represented in the Balkans
than in any similar sized territory in Europe. Most of the Balkan states
lie along what was the northeastern fringe of the Roman Empire. So we
find inhabiting them not only ancient races like the Greeks and
Albanians, but also descendants of Roman colonists like the
Roumanians, and other racial groups like the Serbs and Bulgars, which
represent the survivals of the barbarian invasions of the Middle Ages.
While the larger groups of invaders passed on to the west, these dropped