The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

the Balkan Peninsula and settled down in nearly all the provinces they now inhabit from the Alps to the shores of the Augean and Black Seas. _ But lacking the higher administrative and military organisation, being by nature and habit peaceful, agricultural communities, they readily acknowledged the suzerainty of the Byzantine Empire and tried to continue in the new Fatherland the life they had led in the old, on the immense plains of the South of Russia. But in the seventh century, a warlike Mongolian tribe, possessing a more effective military organisation, penetrated from the Volga and, having crossed the Danube, conquered and subjugated to its rule the Slav tribes between the Lower Danube, the Balkan mountains, the river Isker and the Black Sea. Being unimportant in numbers, the new-comers soon mingled with and lost themselves in the subjugated Slav population, to which they bequeathed their name of Bulgars and to which they imparted some warlike qualities, forming a Slavo-Mongolian State in which they represented the military caste.

The new Bulgaro-Slav State grew very rapidly, spreading easily to the West, and soon included more and more provinces inhabited by Slavs. To them the Bulgarian State cdme as a reaction to the more alien Byzantine rule, and had the character of an almost national State. There was a time (in the tenth century) when it seemed that the Bulgarian State, which had then

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