History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Author: Barbara Jelavich

Edition: reprint, illustrated

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1983

ISBN 0521274583, 9780521274586

400 pages

This narrative concerns the history of the people in five modern Balkan states - Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia - over approximately three centuries. Although the Balkan peninsula has played a major role in history, the area has been subject to less intensive study tha any other European region. To the outside observer the Balkans often appear to be puzzle of confusing complexity. A geographic region inhabited by seven major nationalities, speaking different languages, it has usually impinged on the Western consciousness only when it has become the scene of wars or acts of violence.

Yet this area, because of both its past contributions and its present importance, certainly deserves a larger place in modern historical studies. Part of former ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Habsburg lands, and situated at the convergence of Europe, Africa, and Asia, the peninsula has felt the weight of convergence alternate imperial drives and cultural borderline have intersected - for instance, the boundaries between Eastern (Byzantine) and Western Roman empires, between Islam and Christianity, between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, and between the military blocs of the North Atlantic Treaty and the Warsaw Pact.