The

nations. Two of them, the Greeks and the Illyrians, still keep their own languages, while the third, the old Thracians, speak a Romance language and call themselves Roumans. Slavonic nations hold in the East a place answering to that which is held by the Teutonic nations in the West. . . . But though the Slaves in the East thus answer in many ways to the Teutons in the West, their position with regard to the Eastern Empire was not quite the same as that of the Teutons towards the Western Empire. They learned much from the half Roman, half Greek power with which they had to do; but they did not themselves become either Greek or Roman, in the way in which the Teutonic conquerors in the Western Empire became Roman.

not that of a Turanian people. The history of the Bulgarians therefore shows that it is quite possible, if circumstances are favourable, for a Turanian people to settle among the Aryans of Europe and to be thoroughly assimiliated by the Aryan nation among whom they settled."-E. A. Freeman, Ottoman power in Europe, ch. 2.-See also VLAKHS.

ALSO IN: R. G. Latham, Nationalities of Eu rope.

"After Trajan's death [117] these semiRomanized Thracians could not longer be held in subjection; during his short reign of three years, Maximin, himself a Thracian who had risen from the ranks to the purple, maintained a semblance of order among his kinsfolk, but to the natural restlessness of the people was now added a new cause of disturbance. The Goths had settled on the northern shore of the Euxine [Black Sea], the Vandals had boldly entered the province, and from the great plains further beyond was pouring out a flood of humanity which pressed hard upon both from behind, breaking through in places and emptying itself into the valley of the Danube. Hadrian was forced (270-275) to withdraw his troops to the right bank of that great river and rename the province Ripuarian Dacia. The left shore to the north was thus lost to the empire, but some of the Romans and much of the Romanized population continue to dwell there. These and the traders kept the prevalent low Latin a living tongue. About the year 450 the Huns, and a century later the Avars, permeated the land, until finally there was a mechanical mixture of races, peoples, and tongues in which the old order was utterly disintegrated and the way prepared for the latest inundation, that of the Slavs, whose very name, Slave, indicated the contempt in which they were long held. . . . Slowly the great horde of Goths on the north shore of the Euxine had differentiated itself into two stocks, somewhat different in character and widely different in their historical career; the west, or Visigoths, and the east, or Ostrogoths. The next important migration under Alaric, who actually settled in the central portion of it in 382, in 395 threatened Constantinople and pressed on into Epirus and Hellas. It is to the ruthless occupation of the mainland by barbarians that the islands of Hellas owe to this day their almost homogeneous Greek population, descendants of the Greeks who nearly fourteen centuries ago fled before this Germanic invasion. In time the invaders were more or less Hellenized and established themselves in Epirus as vassals of the emperors at Constantinople. Restless and uncertain as was their temperament, they soon began to fear lest they should be further absorbed into Byzantium, and at last withdrew across the Adriatic to their kindred in Italy. During the period of their settlement in that peninsula they destroyed the art treasures of the country most ruthlessly, and the process which they began was continued by the Huns, who poured their Mongolian flood along the same highway of nations. These in turn were followed by the Ostrogoths under Theodoric, who laid waste the Peloponnesus, and by the Vandals who perpetrated every form of theft and destruction along the Greek coast line; whatever was left after this devastating process substantially disappeared under the rule of the Bulgars, who in 517 ravaged Epirus and Thessaly as far as Thermopylæ. The Byzantine emperor Anastasius sought to protect his capital behind the wall stretching from Propontis to the Euxine, a line of defense so often mentioned in this latest period,

Thus, while in the West everything except a few survivals of earlier nations, is either Roman or Teutonic, in the East, Greeks, Illyrians, Thracians or Roumans, and Slavs, all stood side by side as distinct nations when the next set of invaders came, and they remain as distinct nations still. . . . There came among them, in the form of the Ottoman Turk, a people with whom union was not only hard but impossible, a people who were kept distinct, not by special circumstances, but by the inherent nature of the case. Had the Turk been other than what he really was, he might simply have become a new nation alongside of the South-eastern nations. Being what he was the Turk could not do this. . . . The original Turks did not belong to the Aryan branch of mankind, and their original speech is not an Aryan speech. The Turks and their speech belong to altogether another class of nations and languages. . . . Long before the Turks came into Europe, the Magyars or Hungarians had come; and, before the Magyars came, the Bulgarians had come. Both the Magyars and the Bulgarians were in their origin Turanian nations, nations as foreign to the Aryan people of Europe as the Ottoman Turks themselves. But their history shows that a Turanian nation settling in Europe may either be assimilated with an existing European nation or may sit down as an European nation alongside of others. The Bulgarians have done one of these things; the Magyars have done the other; the Ottoman Turks have done neither. So much has been heard lately of the Bulgarians as being in our times the special victims of the Turk that some people may find it strange to hear who the original Bulgarians were. They were a people more or less nearly akin to the Turks, and they came into Europe as barbarian conquerors who were as much dreaded by the nations of South-eastern Europe as the Turks themselves were afterwards. The old Bulgarians were a Turanian people, who settled in a large part of the South-eastern peninsula, in lands which had been already occupied by Slaves. They came in as barbarian conquerors; but, exactly as happened to so many conquerors in Western Europe, they were presently assimilated by their Slavonic subjects and neighbours. They learned the Slavonic speech; they gradually lost all traces of their foreign origin. Those whom we now call Bulgarians are a Slavonic people speaking a Slavonic tongue, and they have nothing Turanian about them except the name which they borrowed from their Turanian masters. . . . The Bulgarians entered the Empire in the seventh century [see BULGARIA: 7th century], and embraced Christianity in the ninth. They rose to great power in the South-eastern lands, and played a great part in their history. But all their later history, from a comparatively short time after the first Bulgarian conquest, has been that of a Slavonic and