The Wars of the Balkan Peninsula: Their Medieval Origins (review)

The title is misleading. The book deals very little with the wars of the Balkan peninsula. It should be entitled The Medieval Origins of the Wars of the Balkan Peninsula, and in fact the book is an updated translation of Originea medieval a focarelor de conflict din Peninsula Balcanic (Bucharest, 2001). That said, this is a useful book. Because “Balkan nationalism has searched and still searches for legitimation in medieval history, real or imaginary,” the purpose of the book is “to examine that medieval history in order to understand why, for instance, Kosovo is a disputed area between Serbs and Albanians, or why Greece does not agree with the official name ‘Macedonia’ for the present state that has its capital at Skopje” (p. 3). Starting from the premise that “the ethnic mosaic is the deepest cause of the endemic state of conflict in the Balkan Peninsula” (p. 6), the author argues that while the medieval history of the Balkans can explain the origins of current ethnic and political conflicts, it provides no compelling arguments for any side in these conflicts.

The first three chapters provide, sequentially, the ethnic, political, and religious background. Chapter 1 deals with the origins and development of the Slavs, Albanians, and Vlachs of the Balkans. Chapter 2, almost one-third of the book (pp. 51–113), is a political history from the seventh through the seventeenth centuries dealing with the rise and fall of the various kingdoms and empires of the area: the Byzantine Empire, the Bulgarian Empire, the small Croatian and Serbian states leading to the great Serbian kingdom of the fourteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 3 focuses on the contest between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in the Balkans and then the spread of Islam. In particular the author argues that the current ethnic and religious situation in Kosovo is mainly the result of war, religious conversion (to Islam), and population movement at the end of the seventeenth century (p. 129).

The author relies almost completely on secondary works; no primary sources are listed in an otherwise impressive and thorough bibliography. Thus, these first three chapters are a synthesis of the work of other archeologists, linguists, and historians. As such, many issues that are still debated but not directly germane to the author’s subject are discussed in a way that might irritate specialists. For more nuanced treatments, one should consult John Fine, Jr.’s The Early Medieval Balkans (1983) and The Late Medieval Balkans (1987), and Florin Curta’s Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1250 (2006).

Chapter 4 discusses the various “Theories of Ethnogenesis with Political Implications” regarding the Greeks, the Albanians, the Bulgarians, the Serbs and Croats, and the Vlachs, and Chapter 5, “The Legitimation of Expansionism by the Abuse of History,” shows how partisans of each ethnic and national group in the arguments over Kosovo and Macedonia have used and frequently misused history. These two chapters are by far the most interesting, and entertaining, part of the book. The author names names and is not afraid to call a scholar a propagandist or a dilettante. While he tries to be a voice of moderation, Madgearu–a concerned Romanian but with no dog in the fight–cannot help but step on a few toes: the Macedonian language was invented in 1944 (p. 180), a Croatian ethnic origin distinct from the Serbs is a twentieth-century creation (p. 156), militant Orthodoxy became the rule in Serbia only with the reign of Stefan Dušan (1331–1355) (pp. 79, 123). He shows a bit more sympathy toward the Albanian and Greek positions: the original homeland of the Albanians is still unknown and may well have included Kosovo (p. 153), and Greek nationalists are right in objecting to the appropriation of the name Macedonia by the Slavs (p. 186). To North American sensibilities, less burdened as they are by ethnic baggage, the author...