The Balkan Peninsula

THE Fates were unkind to the Balkan Peninsula. Because of its position, it
was forced to stand in the path of the greatest racial movements of the
world, and was thus the scene of savage racial struggles, and the
depositary of residual shreds of nations surviving from great defeats or
Pyrrhic victories and cherishing irreconcilable mutual hatreds. As if that
were not enough of ill fortune imposed by geographical position, the great
Roman Empire elected to come from its seat in the Italian Peninsula to die
in the Balkan Peninsula, a long drawn-out death of many agonies, of many
bloody disasters and desperate retrievals. For all the centuries of which
history knows a blood-mist has hung over the Balkans; and for the
centuries before the dawn of written history one may surmise that there
was the same constant struggle of warring races.