The Indo-European Slavic Croats settled in what is now Croatia and the western half of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late 500's and early 600's A.D. (the eastern half of Bosnia-Herzegovina was settled by the Slavic Serbs at about the same time), and in the process they as well as the Serbs intermarried and gradually Slavicized over several generations the previous inhabitants of these often hilly, mountainous, and forested lands, i.e. the Indo-European Illyrians and Latin-speaking Romans, with the Croats and Serbs incorporating many Illyrian and Latin words into their vocabulary and place names. In 1102 A.D. the Kingdom of Croatia entered into a personal dynastic union with the more populous Kingdom of Hungary, more or less under Hungarian military pressure. The Kingdom of Croatia had been founded in 925 A.D. by King Tomislav Trpimirović. Previously Croatia had been divided into two duchies, one in the south called the Duchy of Dalmatia (late 600's-925 A.D.), and the other one in the north, that was known as the Duchy of Pannonia (late 600's-925 A.D.). King Tomislav had become the Duke of Dalmatia in 910, and the King of a united Croatia in 925, ruling it until his death in 928. After the political union with Hungary in 1102, Bosnia started to gradually disassociate itself from Croatia. The Roman Catholic Christian Croats and Eastern Orthodox Christian Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina saw many of its members convert to the Christian neo-Gnostic or dualist sect known as Bogomilism, that had its origins in Bulgaria, or to the Bosnian Church the latter of which incorporated both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrines and liturgical practices, as well as elements of Bogomilism. From 1451 to 1527, the Sunni Muslim, Ottoman Turks conquered what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina in several stages. As a result of the Turkish conquest, some of the Roman Catholic Bosnian Croats, as well as some of the Eastern Orthodox Bosnian Serbs, converted to Islam, while the Bosnian Bogomils and Bosnian Church adherents saw many of its members become Muslim converts. Some of the Croats and Serbs of Bosnia fled to Croatia from fear of conversion, discrimination, and persecution under Turkish Muslim rule. The Ottoman Turks tried to limit the activity of the Roman Catholic Church in Bosnia-Herzegovina, because this denomination of Christianity was the faith of their enemy, i.e. the Austro-Hungarian and Spanish Empire ruled by the Austrian-German Habsburg or Hapsburg dynasty, that managed to contain and eventually roll back partially the conquests of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkan Peninsula of south-eastern Europe. For this reason the Muslim Turks preferred somewhat the conquered and subjugated Orthodox Church of the Balkans over the Catholics, and this bias resulted in a number of Catholic Croats converting to the Eastern Orthodox denomination of Christianity. See Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In theological doctrines, liturgical practices, monasticism and canon regulars (The Acts of the Apostles 2:44-47), friars (Matthew 10:5-15), the seven sacraments, the biblical canon (the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonicals), religious holidays, the festivals of saints, mariology, iconography and the veneration of sacred, non-pagan images (Exodus 25:18-22, Exodus 26:1 and Exodus 26:31, Exodus Chapter 32, and I Kings 16:29-33), holy relics (Acts 19:11-12 and II Kings 2:20-21), prayers for the souls of the dead (II Maccabees 12:38-46 and The First Epistle of John 5:16-17), The Holy Trinity, salvation by both faith and good works (Romans 2:5-11, Ephesians 2:8-10, Galatians 2:10, and Matthew 25:31-46), genetically and environmentally influenced free will and conditional divine foreknowledge according to the theory of quantum physics (Jeremiah 18:1-10, II Peter 3:8, Matthew 26:41, and Romans 7:18-25), and the administrative hierarchy of the clergy (Titus 1 and Acts 6:1-6), the distance between Catholics and Orthodox is noticeably less than that between the Catholics and the Protestants, the latter of whom are divided into mainline and evangelical Protestant branches. Episcopal Mainline Protestants have somewhat more in common with the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox when compared to the Evangelical Protestants. The Presbyterian Calvinists are regarded as Mainline Protestants, while the Congregationalist Calvinists are often defined as Evangelical Protestants. The Eastern Orthodox churches of Europe differ somewhat from the Oriental Orthodox churches scattered throughout various communities of the mainly Muslim Middle East, North Africa, and Ethiopia or Abyssinia in East Africa, because the Oriental Orthodox have traces of Jewish rites, liturgies, Old Testament Torah or Mosaic Law (The Pentateuch), and Jewish religious holidays retained within their denominations, as well as some Christological doctrines rejected by Catholics, mainstream Orthodox, and mainline Protestants. The earliest converts to Christianity were Jews, as well as Greco-Roman pagans. For references in The New Testament Bible supporting Christian converts from Judaism, see The Gospel of Saint John Chapter 7, Matthew 26:17-19, The Acts of the Apostles 18:21, Acts 20:6, Acts 20:16, Acts 23:6-11, I Corinthians 16:8, Acts 18:18, Acts 21:17-29, Acts 23:6-11, Acts 24:17-18, I Corinthians 9:19-22, Romans 2:13, Matthew 23:1-4, Matthew 5:17-20, and Matthew 7:12. Today there are Jewish Christians called Hebrew Catholics, Messianic Jews, and Jews for Jesus, who believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah but observe Jewish religious holidays. The Apostle Saint Paul is mentioned in passing as observing the Jewish religious holiday of Pentecost or Shavuot according to the New King James Version of the Bible (The Acts of the Apostles 18:21, 20:6, 20:16, I Corinthians 16:8, I Corinthians 9:20-21, I Corinthians 10:32-33), and Jesus Christ at the Last Supper with His 12 Apostles on the night before His crucifixion observed the Jewish religious holiday of the Passover or Pesach (Matthew 26:17-25, Mark 14:12-25, Luke 22:1-23, John 13, and I Corinthians 11:23-34), and is recorded in The Gospel of John, chapter 7, to have observed the Jewish religious festival of the Tabernacles or Sukkot. Some Eastern Orthodox denominations, known as Greek Catholics or Uniates, recognize the administrative and doctrinal authority of the Papacy (Matthew 16:18-19, Matthew 18:18-35, John 20:19-23, Matthew 6:14-15, Luke 18:9-14, Luke 22:31-32, John 21:15-19, Acts 1-2, 10-11, 15, and Galatians 2), as well as the filioque doctrine (John 20:19-23, Acts Chapters 1 and 2, I Corinthians 12:1-3, Romans 10:9, John 5:24, and John 1:1-5). Christianity became the state religion of the hitherto polytheist or pagan Roman Empire in 392 A.D., having gained official toleration in the Roman Empire in 313 A.D. See The Acts of the Apostles 17:16-33 and 19:21-41, I Corinthians 10, and Ephesians 5:5 on references to Greco-Roman paganism in The New Testament Bible. Islam began in the Arabian Peninsula in the 620's A.D. with the Prophet Muhammad (570-632), who was familiar with some of the teachings of the various Jewish and Christian sects and tribes living among the then still largely pagan or polytheist Arab desert and oases tribes of the Middle East, the latter of whom lived as either semi-nomadic pastoralists of goats, camels, horses, donkeys, and mules, as date farmers in towns located near oases, or as long-distance camel caravan merchants. It was only beginning in the 1900's when the petroleum and natural gas reserves of the Muslim Middle East became important for the world economy. Muhammad claimed to have received revelations from the god called Allah in Arabic, whom Muhammad said was also the god of the Jews and Christians known as Yahweh, as relayed to him by the Archangel Gabriel in a series of dreams beginning when he was forty years old, and that the Muslim Bible known as the Quran or Koran was a recording of the literal words of Allah via Gabriel. Muhammad claimed that Islam is the restoration and fulfillment of authentic Judaism and Christianity. According to II Timothy 3:16-17 in the New Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible, all of the Bible, both the Old and New Testament, is inspired by God, as filtered through the imperfections of the human brain. The Jewish religion itself had been heavily influenced by the Zoroastrian religion of the Indo-European speaking ancient Iranians when Palestine was a province of the Persian Empire from 539-332 B.C, with the Zoroastrian god of goodness, light and perfection called Ahura Mazda or Ormazd (The First Epistle of John 1:5) versus the god of pure evil and darkness called Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, the Jewish Christian god called Yahweh versus the fallen archangel and one-time heavenly prosecutor-tester-tempter-accuser called Satan or Lucifer (II Corinthians 11:1-15 and Galatians 1:6-9), the Muslim god called Allah versus the Jinn called Iblis, the Zoroastrian Saoshyant and the Jewish Christian Messiah (The Gospel of John 1:1-5), the Islamic Mahdi and Jesus as the Islamic prophet called the Word of God by Muslims, the Zoroastrian Spenta Mainyu, The Jewish Ruah Ha-kodesh, the Christian Holy Spirit or Paraclete, and the Islamic Ruh al-Qudus, the sacred fire from Heaven's altar associated with the Holy Spirit (Isaiah 6, Luke 3:16-17, The Acts of the Apostles Chapter 2, I Corinthians 3:10-17, Colossians 3:25, I Corinthians 12:1-3), the loyal angels of Yahweh led by the Archangel Michael (Mithras and the yazatas for the Zoroastrians) versus the rebel fallen angels or demons led by the Archangel Satan or Lucifer (Revelation 12, Angra Mainyu and the daevas for the Zoroastrians), and the Antichrist and the Islamic Al-Masih ad-Dajjal or anti-Mahdi. Many of the books of the Old Testament Bible were first written or re-edited when ancient Canaan, Israel, Samaria, Galilee, Judea, and Palestine were provinces of the Persian Empire from 539-332 B.C. See Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity by Hannah M.G. Shapero, 9/6/1997. The Zoroastrian religion was founded by the Persian-Iranian prophet Zarathushtra, known to the ancient Greeks as Zoroaster. Zoroaster lived sometime between 1500 to 1000 B.C. The Zorostrians believe in a Last Day of Judgement and eventual universal salvation for all via the spiritual fires of purgatory in a doctrine known in Greek as Apokatastasis, which was taught by the scholar, early Christian theologian, and Church father Origen Adamantius (184/185-253/254 A.D.). For references in The New Testament Bible that might imply eventual universal salvation for all, see I Peter 3:18-20, I Peter 4:6, John 12:32, I Corinthians 15:28, I Timothy 4:10, Ephesians 1:9-10, Titus 2:11, Luke 3:6, Colossians 3:25, Matthew 13:9-17, I Corinthians 3:10-17, Matthew 5:25-26, Luke 12:58-59, Matthew 18:18-35, Matthew 6:14-15, John 20:19-23, Luke 18:9-14, Luke 12:47-50, Mark 10:25-27, Matthew 27:5-54, The Acts of the Apostles 2:22-41, I Corinthians 15:51-58, Revelation 20:13-15, Revelation 6:9-11, Luke 16:19-31, and I Samuel 28:3-25. Many Christian theologians say that the spiritual fires of God's love associated with the Holy Spirit are psychologically tormenting to those in Hell and/or Hellish Purgatory who have rejected God's love (Hebrews 1:7 and Hebrews 12:29, Revelation 20:9).
The Indo-European speakers, including the ancestral Iranians or Indo-Aryans, originally lived as semi-nomadic, horse riding archers, lancers, and swordsmen, and as tribal herders or pastoralists of cattle, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, and mules, on the steppes and prairies of what is now southern Russia and eastern Ukraine located north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and from 4000 to 1000 B.C. the ancestral Indo-Europeans spread out from their homeland in several waves and stages into the rest of Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia, in the process intermarrying and influencing and being influenced by the previous inhabitants of these lands, the latter of whom belonged to various races, phenotypes, and language groups. The conquests of the Indo-Europeans might also have been assisted by the spread of a disease epidemic to which they were immune to, but which their subjugated peoples were not, with the epidemic taking a toll on a large minority of the conquered peoples, according to some archaeo-geneticists. See (a). Kurgan Hypothesis, (b). Genetic History of Europe, (c). Indo-European Languages, (d). Paleo-Balkan Languages, (e). Prehistory of Southeastern Europe, and (f). Myths of British Ancestry. The Indo-European language branches include the Indo-Aryan or Indo-Iranian, Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian, and Old Prussian), Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Latin and Italiot, Greek, Armenian, Illyrian-Thracian or Thraco-Illyrian, Phrygian or Thraco-Phrygian, Tocharian, Hittite and Mitannian languages, and some of these languages have ceased to be spoken and/or written in the modern world. The Basque language spoken in parts of the Pyrenees mountain ranges of northern Spain and adjacent southwestern France by the Basque ethnic group, is a surviving remnant of the Caucasian but pre-Indo-European languages once spoken throughout Europe before the arrival of Indo-European speaking settlers, migrants, and invaders resulted in the conquest and linguistic assimilation of the rest of the Caucasian pre-Indo-Europeans. Some linguists believe that the pre-Indo-European, Ice Age, Caucasian languages of Europe was as diverse as that spoken by the American Indians in both North and South America, before their discovery FOR Europe by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage of exploration carried out from 1492-1493. The American Indians themselves, according to genetic research, were descended from the Siberian Asiatic tribes that had migrated along the relatively ice free and narrow coastal plains of the land corridor known as Beringia during the last Ice Age, which used to connect Russian Siberia with what today is the American state of Alaska, now separated by the narrow Bering Stait. When the Ice Age began to melt away, world sea levels began to rise. When the Ice Age was at its most intense degree, world sea levels were about 130 meters lower than present levels.
The split between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy began when the multi-ethnic but largely Caucasian Roman Empire and Roman military split into the Latin-speaking West Roman Empire and Greek-speaking East Roman or Byzantine Empire in 395 A.D., with the West Roman Empire officially ending in 476 A.D., and the Caesaro-papist Byzantine Empire officially ending in 1453 A.D. The Byzantine Emperors tightly controlled the Patriarch of Constantinople, as did also the Eastern Orthodox Russian Czars over the Metropolitan Archbishops of Moscow, Kiev, Novgorod, and Saint Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, while the usually Germanic Holy Roman Emperors often struggled to control the usually Italian Popes and vice versa. The Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed sooner then the more and longer united, as well as more wealthy Eastern half, because it was subjected to frequent civil wars and barbarian invasions at one and the same time from 383-388, 392-394, 397-398, 407-411, 413, 421, 423-425, 427, and 432 A.D, and in times of civil war the level of training, drill, discipline, and loyalty went out of the window for the personnel of the Roman military (1). The Protestant Reformation is often regarded by historians as beginning in 1517 with the former German Catholic Pauline and Augustinian friar called Martin Luther (1483-1546), a movement which soon split into many competing denominations, classified as either belonging to mainline or evangelical Protestantism. Protestantism was a Christian movement that broke away from Catholicism , with the partial exception of the Jansenists, Gallicans, and Old Catholics, and the Counter Reformation was the reformist reaction of Catholicism towards Protestantism. Today eastern and northern Germany is mainly Lutheran Protestant, while southern and western Germany is Catholic, as is also German-speaking Austria. The original goal of the Protestants was to return to what they believed to be the literal and fundamental teachings of the Bible, much as Islamism and Islamo-fascism today is trying to return to the literal and fundamental teachings of the Quran (the Muslim Bible), Sunna or Hadith (the recorded deeds and words of the Prophet Muhammad), and Sira (the official biography of Muhammad). In the modern world, Biblical scholars of the Judeo-Christian Bible have called into question the historical accuracy of large parts of both the Old and New Testament, because the books of the Bible were written decades, and sometimes centuries, after the events they purport to record, and in addition the contents of the Judeo-Christian Bible have often been disproved by archaeology, archaeogenetics, paleography, and the sciences of geology, evolution, and physics. Muslim fundamentalists have issued death threats towards scholars who have questioned the historical accuracy of the Quran, Sunna or Hadith, and Sira. Whereas the Judeo-Christian Bible goes from the violent, warlike, and intolerant Old Testament to the relatively peaceful and tolerant New Testament, the Muslim Bible known as the Quran goes in the opposite direction, with the early peaceful and tolerant chapters of the Quran being overruled or abrogated by the violent, warlike, and intolerant latter chapters of the Quran. The Bosnian Muslims, along with the Albanian Muslims of Kosovo and Albania, partly because of their former European pagan and Christian background, are less fundamentalist, fanatical, terroristic, and jihadist on average then the Arabic, Berber, Iranian, Afghani, Pakistani, Turkish, and Central Asian Turkic Muslims.
Bogomilism was a Christian neo-Gnostic or dualist sect that began in Bulgaria during the 900's A.D. Bogomilism traced its origins to the Manichaean religion that began in the 200's A.D. as a heretical splinter group of Iranian or Persian Zoroastrianism, and the Greek Byzantine or East Roman Empire shared a large border with the Persian Empire ruled by the Sassanid dynasty, before Iran was conquered by the Muslim Arabs in several military campaigns of conquest carried out between 633 and 654 A.D. Bogomilism managed to gain many converts in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina from the 1100's to 1400's. After the completion of the Sunni Muslim, Ottoman Turkish conquest of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1463, the Bogomils, as a result of both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox persecution, were more likely to convert to Islam as they were not friends of either the Catholic Croats or Orthodox Serbs, and because Bogomilism in its beliefs had some things in common with the Islamic faith, because both religions began in the Middle East. The Bogomils in southern France and northern Italy during the Middle Ages were known as the Cathars, Albigensians, and Patarenes. The Bosnian Church was a Christian church in medieval Bosnia which was independent of and considered heretical by both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox hierarchies. Roman Catholicism during the Middle Ages was the Christian denomination of Croatia and most of Dalmatia, while in Serbia the dominant Christian denomination at the time was Eastern Orthodoxy. In between Croatia and Serbia during the Middle Ages was the largely mountainous and forested land of Bosnia-Herzegovina, nominally Catholic, but with a Catholicism never firmly established due to a weak church organization and poor and hard means of communication and travel. Bosnia was a no-man's land between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The Bosnian Church began to become powerful in Bosnia from around 1250 onwards. Previously Roman Catholicism was predominant in the west, north, and center of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while Eastern Orthodoxy was predominant in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, although the western part of Herzegovina today is largely Catholic Croat. See Herzegovina. The medieval Kingdom of Croatia (925-1102 A.D.) included what is now the western and central three-fifths or 60% of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Croats arrived in what is now Croatia and parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina in th late 500's and early 600's A.D. from what is now part of south-eastern Poland, Slovakia, and the western Carpathian Ukraine known by the name of Ruthenia. They were a Slavic tribe ruled by the Iranian-speaking Alans, Sarmatians, and Scythians. When the Croats arrived in their Balkan homeland, they began to intermarry with and assimilate the previous inhabitants who belonged to the Illyrian branch of the Indo-European language family, some of whom had been Romanized during the era of Roman rule in the Balkans, especially those among them who lived in the towns and cities of Dalmatia along the coasts of the Adriatic Sea. The Slavic Croat language has borrowed many words and place names from the pre-Indo-European, Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, and Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age, Caucasian hunter-gatherers, from the Neolithic or New Stone Age Anatolian/Middle Eastern farmers, and from the originally pastoralist Indo-European Illyrian or Thraco (Thracian)-Illyrians, Celts, Ancient Greeks, and Roman Italiot Latins of the Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages, as well as from the medieval and early modern Byzantine Greeks, Venetian Italians, Finno-Ugric Hungarians, Ural-Altaic Turks, and the Austrian-Germans, all of whose speakers have invaded the Balkan Peninsula before, during, or after the political independence of Croatia during the Middle Ages. The Albanian language is the only surviving dialect of Thraco-Illyrian spoken and written to this day. During the reign of King Tomislav Trpimirović, from 910-925-928, the western, northern, and central part of Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of Croatia, while the eastern and southern part belonged to Serbia. King Tomislav ruled in all over from between 60 to 66% of what is now part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the reign of the Serbian Prince Časlav Klonimirovič from around 927 to 960, some of the Croat controlled lands of Bosnia-Herzegovina were conquered by the Serbs. The lands controlled by the Croats and Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina often fluctuated during the time when The Kingdom of Croatia existed from its foundation in 925 until its dynastic personal union with the then Catholic Kingdom of Hungary in 1102, a union that lasted until 1527 when both Croatia and Hungary became part of the joint Austrian-Spanish Habsburg Empire in an attempt to gain military protection from the advancing Turks. Under the dynastic personal union with Hungary, Croatia had its own oligarchically elected parliament (Sabor) and usually ethnic Croat viceroy (Ban). Serbia in the Middle Ages had several independent and semi-autonomus political states before its final conquest by the Muslim Turks in 1537, and they were known as The Kingdom of Serbia (1217-1346), The Empire of Serbia (1346 to 1371), Prince Lazar's Serbia (1371-1402), and The Despotate of Serbia (1402-1537). See also Medieval Croatia. The Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks speak the Slavic Serbo-Croatian language, as do also the Eastern Orthodox Montenegrins, and the Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Montenegrins understand each other as much as the Germanic, Norse or Nordic Scandinavian Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians do. Whereas the Scandinavians are mainly Lutheran Christians, the Serbo-Croats are either Catholic or Orthodox Christians, or Sunni Muslims. Islam has many beliefs in common with Judaism and Christianity, but with its own unique interpretation of these Abrahamic faiths. The federation of Yugoslavia existed from 1918-1941, and from 1945-1991, firstly as a Serbian royal dictatorship, and secondly as a Serbian dominated Communist dictatorship, much as the Russians dominated the Absolutist Monarchical Empire of Czarist Russia from 1547 to 1917, and then the federation of the Communist dictatorship known as the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. Before Yugoslavia came into existence in 1918, and for a second time in 1945, its ethnic groups had been ruled as nation-states by independent kingdoms that sooner or later fell to a succession of foreign rulers, ruled by them with degrees of autonomy that varied over time. From 1941-1945, Yugoslavia was partitioned into protectorates, occupied zones, spheres of influence, and puppet states ruled by the then Fascist or National Socialist/Nazi nations of Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The Scandinavian Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians were united in a federation from 1397 to 1523 A.D. known as the Union of Kalmar, under the rule of the Danish monarchy, having previously been separate kingdoms at one time or another. The communist federation of Yugoslavia was part of the Non-Aligned Movement of neutral nations during the Cold War years of 1945-1991, neither allied officially to The United States of America (U.S.A.) or The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), or at least during the reign of President and Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito from 1945 until his death in 1980. Tito's father was a Croat, while his mother was a Slovene. Yugoslavia under Tito accepted economic and military aid from both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. During the Cold War Yugoslavia formed a cheap bulwark for The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), preventing the Soviet dominated Warsaw Pact nations from gaining acccess to the Adriatic Sea, while at the same time Greece and Turkey blocked a land access to the Aegean Sea. Tito split from the Warsaw Pact of once Communist Eastern Europe in 1948, at that time controlled by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who was born to ethnically Georgian parents. Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union in 1929, and ruled over it until his death in 1953. See Tito-Stalin Split. American relations with Tito's Yugoslavia cooled for a while after Tito gave diplomatic and military support to the Soviet Union when it sided with Syria and Egypt in their war with Israel during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Eastern Orthodox, Slavic Serbian royal monarchy of the Karađorđević dynasty, in opposition to the Serbian royal Obrenović dynasty, had formed a military alliance with the Eastern Orthodox, Slavic Russian imperial Romanov dynasty during the late 1800's and early 1900's at a time when the Sunni Muslim, Ottoman Turkish Empire was losing control over its Balkan provinces to both the Russian Empire and the largely Roman Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire. Czarist Russia and Imperial Austria-Hungary increasingly came into conflict over who would control the Balkan nations as satellites within their respective spheres of influence. Czarist Russia entered into World War One on the side of Serbia in 1914, but exited the war when the Communists seized power in Russia in November 1917 as a result of Russia's disastrous conflict with the Kaiser's Germany, the Kaiser's Austria-Hungary, and the Sultan's Turkey. Russia in World War One had a shortage of everything but manpower. From September to November 1944, the Soviet Red Army liberated Serbia from Nazi Germany and their anti-Communist, Serbian royalist collaborators known as the Chetniks, in a military campaign known as the Belgrade Offensive, before the Soviet Red Army left Yugoslavia and entered Hungary to battle the Nazis and their anti-communist Hungarian collaborators known as the Arrow Cross from March 1945 onwards. For a list of prominent World War Two Serbian Chetniks, see (a). Milan Nedić, (b). Dimitrije Ljotić, (c). Kosta Pećanac, (d). Kosta Mušicki, and (e). Draža Mihailović. The Soviets established in power the Yugoslav Partisans, a Communist-led, multi-ethnic resistance movement led by Tito that fought the Fascist occupation forces of Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, and Germany. During World War Two, several Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian anti-communists loyal either to the memory of the Czarist Russian Empire or desiring independence for Ukraine and Belarus, collaborated with the Germans against the Soviet Communists, in particular those Russians led by Andrey Vlasov. Some of the members of the multi-ethnic Yugoslav Partisans were conscripted against their will and press ganged into joining, as were some of the members of the various Axis collaborationist factions belonging to different Yugoslav ethnic groups, and who found Communism, Italian Fascism, Hungarian Fascism, Bulgarian Fascism, and the German Fascism known as National Socialism/Nazism to be all repulsive and exploitative. Many non-communist resistance groups during World War Two when contemplating the respective merits and demerits of the totalitarian ideologies of Communism and Fascism had the sentiment of "neither shit nor diarrhea." A Fascist economy was a free enterprise economy heavily regulated by a dictatorial, militaristic, imperialist, ultra-nationalist, and racist government, and during times of total war before the era of nuclear deterrence beginning in 1945, Fascism evolved into a mixed economy with both socialist and capitalist features. The Yugoslav Wars of Independence began in June 1991, and the nuclear armed Communist federation of the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. At the time there was a fear that the Yugoslav Wars of Independence would engulf the nations bordering Yugoslavia, as had happened in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the Serbian-Bulgarian War of 1885, the First Balkan War of 1912, The Second Balkan War of 1913, The First World War of 1914-1918, and The Second World War of 1939-1945, and this fear led the United Nations to place an arms embargo on the former Serbian dominated Yugoslavia during the Yugoslav Wars of Independence fought from 1991-1995. The Serbian Fascist Chetniks made a comeback, particularly under the leadership of Vojislav Šešelj, during the Yugoslav Wars of Independence, and the Serbian-Kosovo War of 1999. The Serbian Chetniks have also sent paramilitary forces to fight alongside Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Ukrainian counties of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014. The Russian fascists have made a comeback under the leadership of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Aleksandr Dugin, both of whom are supported by President Vladimir Putin, and sometimes openly at that. The ethnically Serbian Slobodan Milošević, who ruled Serbia and Yugoslavia from 1986-2000, and who died in 2006 in jail in The Netherlands for war crimes ordered and permitted by him during the Yugoslav Wars of Independence fought in the 1990's, revived the Greater Serbia project initially espoused by the Chetniks. During the Yugoslav Wars of Independence, Russia supplied the Serbs with weapons, ammunition, and military volunteers.
In the 1991 Yugoslav Census, it was found that 43.47% of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared themselves to be Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks, 31.21% Orthodox Serbs, 17.38% Catholic Croats, 5.54% Yugoslavs, and 2.40% Others, with Others being either Orthodox Montenegrins or Muslim Albanians. In the 2013 Census held in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 50.11% called themselves Bosniaks, 30.78% Serbs, 15.43% Croats, 2.73% Others, 0.71% did not declare themselves, and 0.18% did not answer. See Demographic History of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Today, the nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided into two distinct political entities since the end of The Bosnian War of 1992-1995, with one called the Republic of Serbia, and the other called The Federation of Bosniaks and Croats. The Bosniaks and Croats fought a war with each other from 1992-1994, and both of them also fought the Serbs, before joining forces to fight the greater threat posed by the Serbs. Today, the Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina wish to have their own autonomous region within Bosnia-Herzegovina separate from the Bosniaks such as the Serbs have had since 1992. This is a sensible and fair idea, because Bosnia-Herzegovina has no real overwhelming religious and ethnic majority. It is more or less impossible to partition the Croat and Serb areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina between the nation-states of Croatia and Serbia because Bosnia-Herzegovina is a patchwork of often non-contiguous ethnic and religious enclaves. The exclaves of Uzbekistan in Kyrgyzstan (Kirghizistan), and the exclaves of Tajikistan in Kyrgyzstan provide examples that might be applied towards the future internal political boundaries of Bosnia-Herzegovina, along with the examples of the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan (Nakhichevan) in Armenia, and the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan.
As previously mentioned in this web site the Croats arrived in what is now Croatia and parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late 500's and early 600's A.D. from what is now part of south-eastern Poland, Slovakia, and the western Carpathian Ukraine known by the name of Ruthenia. They were a Slavic tribe ruled by the Iranian-speaking Alans, Sarmatians, and Scythians. When the Croats arrived in their Balkan homeland, they began to intermarry with and assimilate the previous inhabitants who belonged to the Illyrian branch of the Indo-European language family, some of whom had been Romanized during the era of Roman rule in the Balkans, especially those among them who lived in the towns and cities of Dalmatia, which has a large coastline along the Adriatic Sea. See Kingdom of Croatia (925-1102 A.D.). The original homeland of the Croats was known as White Croatia, centered around the modern day city of Kraków in what is now the south-eastern part of Poland. See White_Croatia. American immigration documents dating from the early 1900's show that Polish immigrants to The United States of America who were born in and around the city of Kraków called themselves Bielochrovats or White Croats. See White Croats. The Slavic Croats of Croatia are descended from the non-Indo-European but Caucasian Ice Age peoples who lived at the time as hunter-gatherers, as well as Neolithic or New Stone Age farmers from Anatolia and the Middle East in general, and from such Indo-European speaking peoples who invaded and settled in the Balkan Peninsula before the Croats known as the Illyrians and Thracians or Thraco-Illyrians, Greeks, Celts, Romans, Iranians, Germanic Goths, and the non-Indo-European, Ural-Altaic Huns and Avars. See Origin Hypotheses of the Croats. Genetic studies conducted on the Croats have shown them to have substantial Caucasian but non-Indo-European origins dating from the last Ice Age, more so in the maternal line as compared to the paternal line, as well as more in the collateral side branches (i.e. mother's paternal line and father's maternal line) See Genetic Studies on Croats. During the last Ice Age, the northern third of the Adriatic Sea was dry land and a plain linking what is now Slovenia and Croatia with northern Italy, and dry land also linked what is now the Asian part of Turkey with its European part, because so much of the world's water was locked up in ice caps and glaciers. The Slavic Serbs arrived in what is now Serbia, Montenegro, and the eastern and southern part of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late 500's and early 600's A.D. from their original homeland of White Serbia, located in what is now the southern part of the former East Germany and south-western Poland. In their original homeland they were known as the Sorbs, a tribal subgroup of the Slavic Wends. See White Serbia. White Serbia shared a border with White Croatia, that was located in what is now south-eastern Poland, Slovakia, and Ruthenia or the Carpathian Mountains of Western Ukraine. For a time, like the White Croats, the White Serbs were also ruled by the Iranian speaking Alans, Scythians, and Sarmatians. The Sorbs, also known as the Srbi or Serbs, are a West Slavic ethnic minority group living in Lusatia, that today lies in the German states or provinces of Upper Saxony and Brandenburg-Prussia, and the Polish provinces of Lower Silesia and Lubusz. They speak the Sorbian language, which is also known as Wendish or Lusatian. The majority of them are Roman Catholics, although a minority of them are Lutherans. The Polish Bielochrovats or White Croats are Roman Catholics. The Serbs of the Balkans or former Yugoslavia, like the Croats of the Balkans, share the same set of ancestral groups and genetic lineages, much as the Germanic Norse or Nordic Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians of Scandinavia also do. See Origin Hypotheses of the Serbs and Genetic Studies on Serbs. Montenegro was a part of Serbia during the Middle Ages, and the Eastern Orthodox Montenegrins are ethnically akin to the Eastern Orthodox Serbs. Montenegro broke away from The Kingdom of Serbia in 1451, largely because of the conquests achieved by the Sunni Muslim, Ottoman Turkish Empire. The Serbian Slavs migrated into what is now Montenegro after around 550 A.D., and over the course of several generations assimilated the previous inhabitants known as the Illyrians, of whom the Albanians are the modern day descendants of. Albania and Montenegro share a border, and there are Albanian ethnic minority groups living in some Montenegrin counties bordering Albania. Whether they have been there continuosly since ancient times, migrated there later during the Middle Ages from Albania, or a bit of both scenarios, needs further independent historical investigation before a decision can be made on whether it is fair and just to reunite the Montenegrin Albanians with Albania. See History of Montenegro. There are minor differences in dialect between the Montenegrin and Serbian languages, as there are also between Croatian and Serbian, and between Croatian and Montenegrin. The Hungarian or Magyar conquest of the Carpathian and Danubian Basin from 894-1000 A.D. disconnected the Serbs and Croats of what is now parts of Germany, Poland, and The Ukraine, as well as Slovakia, from the Serbs and Croats of what used to be Yugoslavia, i.e. disconnected the West Slavs from the South Slavs of The Balkans. Before the Hungarian or Magyar conquest and gradual assimilation and intermarriage with the previous inhabitants of what is now Hungary, the area was inhabited by the Thraco-Illyrian Pannonians, the Celts, the Romans, the Romanized-Latinized Pannonians and Celts known as the Vlachs and Aromanians, and by the Slavic Croats and Serbs. Some 20% of the Hungarian vocabulary today is of Slavic origin. The original Hungarian or Magyar invaders fought on horseback as archers armed with the composite recurved bow, as lancers, and as swordsmen armed with slightly curved sabres. See Hungarian Conquest of the Carpathian Basin. They invaded Europe from the Eurasian steppes and prairies where they had lived as semi-nomadic and tribal herders and pastoralists. Hungarian is a non-Indo-European language belonging to the related Ural-Altaic and Finno-Ugric language families, that also includes Turkish, Mongolian, Manchurian, Finnish, and Estonian. The original homeland of the Magyars was somewhere between the Ob and Yenisei River in Siberian Russia or near the Sayan mountains in The Russian Siberian-Mongolian border region. They were a small warrior-elite minority which ruled over a largely Caucasian population after their conquest of what is now modern day Hungary. See Hungarians. The Slavic Slovenian language is most closely related to the Czech language, while the Slavic Bulgarian language shares many similarities with Ukrainian, the latter of which belongs to the East Slavic language group that also includes Russian and Belarusian/Byelorussian//White Russian. The Slavic language of North Macedonia is closely related to Bulgarian with a degree of overlap with Serbian. Like the Croats and Serbs, the Slovenes and Bulgarians arrived in the Balkans from around 550 to 650 A.D. The Bulgarian language, although Slavic, is named after the Turkic-Mongolic Bulgars, originally Eurasian steppe semi-nomads and pastoralists who conquered the Bulgarian Slavs in the 680's A.D., before the Turkic-Mongolic Bulgars became eventually assimilated linguistically by the Bulgarian Slavs.
The Croatian Military Frontier (Krajina) was formed in the 1500's A.D. by the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty, who at the time were rulers of The Holy Roman Empire along with its Spanish branch. The Krajina district of Croatia, which bordered what is today the nations of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, was transferred in 1627 to the imperial rule of the Habsburgs. The Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors promised free land and freedom of religion to people who came to the area in return for their participation in military defense from the Ottoman Turks. Many of those who settled in the Krajina Military Frontier district were Eastern Orthodox Serbs, as well as Catholic Croats, who wished to escape from the Islamic rule of the Turks in Turkish occupied Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Austrian controlled Habsburg Kingdom of Croatia, that existed from 1527-1868, before it was partitioned between Austria and Hungary from 1868-1918, traces its origins to the Turkish defeat of The Kingdom of Hungary in 1526 fought at The Battle of Mohács on Hungarian soil. As a result of this victory, the Croatian and Hungarian nobles chose the Austrian King Ferdinand I von Habsburg in 1527 as their ruler in an attempt to gain the military protection of The Holy Roman Empire from the advancing armies of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. The Ottoman Turks twice besieged unsuccessfully the Austrian capital of Vienna, once in 1529, and again for a second time in 1683. During the 1500's the Ottoman Empire expanded in stages to include most of the Croatian provinces and counties of Slavonia, western Bosnia and Lika. By 1552 the territory of Croatia under Habsburg rule as a result of the Turkish conquests had been reduced to 20,000 square kilometers, compared to the approximately 59,000 square kilometers that today make up the modern nation of Croatia. By orders of the Habsburg king in 1553 and 1578, large areas of Croatia adjacent to the Ottoman Empire were carved out into the Military Frontier District known as The Krajina which was ruled directly from the Austrian Habsburg military headquarters located in the city of Vienna. Because of the dangerous proximity of Krajina to the Ottoman armies, the largely ethnically Catholic Croats saw a large decline in their civilian population living in the region of Krajina. To remedy this problem, the Austrian Habsburgs encouraged the settlement of Krajina by Orthodox Serbs, Catholic German-speaking Austrians, Catholic and Lutheran Germans, Catholic and Calvinist Hungarians or Magyars, Catholic Slovaks, Catholic and Protestant Hussite Czechs, Greek Catholic or Uniate Ruthenians (Carpathian Western Ukrainians), and Orthodox Ukrainians, thereby creating a volatile and unstable ethnic patchwork in the Krajina district of Croatia. During the Croatian War of Independence fought from 1991-1995, the Krajina Serbs, with the backing of the Serbian dominated military and government of Yugoslavia, tried to forcibly annex Krajina into a Greater Serbia project, which also included some 70% of Bosnia-Herzegovina that the Serbs had managed to conquer during the Bosnian War of Independence fought from 1992-1995. In the 1981 Yugoslav Census, the Serbs formed 12% of the population of Croatia and 32% of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the height of their conquests during The Croatian War of Independence, the Serbs controlled 33% of the territory of Croatia. In the 1981 Yugoslav Census, the Catholic and Calvinist Magyars or Hungarians formed 19% of the population of the northern Serbian region of Vojvodina. The Hungarians had conquered this region of Serbia from the Orthodox Serbs in the 900's A.D., that had been settled by the Serbs during the 600's A.D. From 1941-1944, during The Second World War, the Hungarians with the approval of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy annexed a part of the Serbian region of Vojvodina. The Catholic Croats known as the Bunjevci, who originally lived in what is western Herzegovina, migrated into the Croatian regions of Dalmatia and Lika, and from there they later migrated to the region of Serbia known as Bačka from the 1200's-1600's. The Šokci were Catholic Croats who migrated from northern Bosnia into the region of Serbia known as Syrmia in the 1700's, that lies between the Danube and Sava Rivers. In the 2011 Serbian Census, the Catholic Croats made up some 0.8% of the population of Serbia. See Croats of Serbia. Based on who arrived before who in history, the Serbs of Croatia should accept living under Croatian rule, as should also the Croats and Hungarians of Serbia accept living under Serbian rule.
The Croatian language has three dialects known as Chakavian, Kajkavian, and Shtokavian. The Dalmatian language is a now extinct Romance or Latinate language once spoken in the Croatian region of Dalmatia that has a large indented coastline with numerous island chains alongside or in the Adriatic Sea. The Dalmatian language could once be heard as far south as The Bay of Kotor in modern day Montenegro. The Dalmatian language evolved from the vulgar Latin spoken by the Illyro-Romans, and it went extinct by the late 1800's. Some of the Dalmatian words were borrowed by the Croatian Slavic dialects of Chakavian and the Dubrovnik dialect of Shtokavian. The Illyro-Romans were the Romanized or Latinized Illyrian tribes who lived in the ancient Roman Balkan provinces of Illyricum, Moesia, Pannonia and Dardania. The Illyro-Romans who lived in the Balkan highlands lived as stock-breeders and were referred to as the Vlachs. They were eventually absorbed and assimilated by the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Albanians, and Greeks. The Morlachs were a Vlach pastoralist community who lived in the mountains of Croatia from 1350-1530, and probably even earlier than that. They were the descendants of the Romanized Illyrians and the pre-Slavic Romance or Latinate speaking people. They included both Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. Dalmatia is one of the four historical regions of Croatia, along with Croatia proper, Slavonia, and Istria. Dalmatia extends from the Adriatic Croatian island of Rab in the north to the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro to the south. Dalmatia was named for the Illyrian tribe of the Dalmatae, who lived in the area before being conquered by the Roman Empire. The Slavic Croats arrived in the area during the late 500's and early 600's A.D., and they incorporated many words from the Vulgar or vernacular Latin known as Dalmatian, and again for a second time when Dalmatia was ruled by the Italian Republic of Venice from 1420-1797, with the Venetian Republic being a mercantile, aristocratic oligarchy. The Venetian Italian spoken in Dalmatia was known as Dalmatico. The independent Croatian Republic and mercantile oligrachy of Ragusa, with its capital in the southern Dalmatian city of Dubrovnik, existed from 1358-1808, having previously been under Venetian suzerainty from 1205-1358. The Croats living in the northern plains of Croatia, known as Slavonia, speak a dialect of Croatian that has many Hungarian-Magyar and Austrian-German words, a legacy of the long rule of Croatia by the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, and the Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina have some Turkish words in their Croatian dialect, which is a legacy of the time of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Excavated archaeological material dating from the Roman period shows that the coastal and inland urban centers of Dalmatia were almost completely Romanized by the 300's A.D., while its rural and largely mountainous and forested countryside remained largely Illyrian in language, culture, and in its pagan or polytheist religion, including Greco-Roman paganism. The Roman conquest of the tribes of Illyria, which included what was the lands of the former Yugoslavia as well as Albania, happened in stages between 229-168 B.C., with the Roman province of Illyricum being delineated in its political boundaries betwen 32-27 B.C. The Illyrian tribes rose up against the Roman Empire in The Great Illyrian Revolt of 6-9 A.D., but this revolt, like so many others in the the various provinces of the Roman Empire, was crushed by the Romans.
Istria is the largest peninsula that juts out into the Adriatic Sea, which itself is an arm of the Mediterranean Sea. Istria is located at the northern head of the Adriatic between the Gulf of Trieste and the Kvarner Gulf, and is shared by the nations of Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy. In ancient times it was inhabited by the Veneti tribe, who were a mixed population of Italiot and Illyrian peoples. Istria was finally conquered by the Romans in 177 B.C. after a long campaign. On the western coastal plains of Istria there was a large Italian minority before 1945, and who saw the majority of its people either forcibly expelled or massacred by the Slovene and Croat members of the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance movement in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, largely in revenge for the war crimes committed by the military forces of Fascist Italy in their zone of occupation in Yugoslavia, a case of repaying a war crime with a war crime, or in other words repaying evil with evil. See the following Old and New Testament prohibitions in the Bible on repaying evil with evil: Romans 12:17-21, Proverbs 25:21-22, I Thessalonians 5:15, I Peter 3:8-9, Matthew 5:38-48, Leviticus 19:18, Deuteronomy 32:35, Hebrews 10:30, Colossians 3:25, and Matthew 13:18-23. It is now too late to redress the crime done to the Istrian Italian minority in 1945 with changes in political borders. One of the results of 1945 is that Slovenia today has access to the Adriatic Sea along the northern coastal plains of Istria. Croatia itself as a result of imperial rule by the Hungarians, Austrians, and Turks, has lost a lot of territory in what is now part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Histri were an ancient Venetic tribe who had some ties with the Illyrians and Thracians. The Adriatic Veneti of ancient times, who lived in the north-eastern Italian region of Veneto, where the city of Venice is located, spoke the Venetic Language, that was related to Latin and the other Italic languages/dialects, with many words borrowed from the Celtic, Germanic, and Illyrian languages, often as a result of trade and intermarriage. The Liburnian language belonged to the Venetic group, similar to that spoken by the Histri, with many words borrowed from the Caucasian but Pre-Indo-European languages, as well as from the Indo-European Illyrians. Liburnia was an ancient tribal region in the coastal lands of the north-eastern Adriatic Sea prior to the Roman conquest of the Balkans, located in what is now the modern day nation of Croatia, in the Croat regions of northern Dalmatia, the lands around the Gulf of Kvarner, the plains around the Croatian Adriatic port city of Zadar, and the eastern coastal plains of the peninsula of Istria. The Italiot tribe of the Latin-speaking Romans slowly conquered and unified in stages the other Indo-European Italiot, Celtic, Greek, and Illyrian tribes, as well as the Caucasian but pre-Indo-European Rhaetian, Etruscan, Camuni, and Ligurian tribes of ancient Italy during the time when Rome was ruled as an oligarchical Republic from 539-30 B.C. Today the majority of Croats are Catholics, as are also the Italians.
The Slovenes arrived in what is now Slovenia during the late 500's and early 600's A.D., and judging from their Slavic language that shares some similarities with the Czech language, their orginal homeland was probably located in what today is The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia. See History of Slovenia. The Frankish merchant Samo united several Slavic tribes in an effort to gain military protection for them from the raids of robbery and violence at the hands of the Avars, an Ural-Altaic or Mongolic-Turkic people who came from the Eurasian steppes and prairies. Because of the bravery and command skills of Samo, he was elected the King of the Slovenes in 623 A.D., and remained so until his death in 658. After Samo's death, the Slovenes again fell under the rule of the Avars for a time. The majority of Slovenes today are Roman Catholics.
The Serbs arrived in what is now Serbia, Montenegro, and parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late 500's and early 600's A.D. In the northern region of Serbia known as the Vojvodina, Illyrian tribes used to live there before being conquered by the Roman Empire in the last century B.C. (i.e. 100-1 B.C.), and these somewhat Romanized Illyrians later on were conquered by the Serbs, who gradually Slavicized the Illyrians over the course of several generations. The Hungarians, also known as the Magyars, arrived in the Pannonian Plain during the 890's A.D., and then went on to conquer a part of the Serbian region of Vojvodina during the early 900's A.D. Some of the Serbs living in Vojvodina became Magyarized when they adopted Hungarian as their second language for various reasons, as did also some of the Croats living in the northern Croatian region of Slavonia. See Magyarization. An increasing number of Serbs settled in Vojvodina from the 1300's onwards. Because the Serbs arrived in Vojvodina several centuries before the Hungarians, the Hungarian ethnic minority living in Serbian Vojvodina should accept living under Serbian rule, as should also the Hungarian ethnic minority living in Croatia accept living under Croatian rule, because the Croats arrived in what is now Croatia during the late 500's and early 600's A.D. Parts of Croatia and Serbia were annexed by Fascist Hungary with the approval of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy from 1941-1944. The majority of Serbs today are Eastern Orthodox, whereas the majority of Croats are Roman Catholics. Although the majority of Hungarians are Roman Catholics, a sizeable minority of Hungarians are Calvinists. Croatian and Serbian are Indo-European Slavic dialects, while Hungarian is largely a non-Indo-European, Finno-Ugric language.
Montenegro was a part of Serbia during the Middle Ages, and the Eastern Orthodox Montenegrins are ethnically akin to the Eastern Orthodox Serbs. Montenegro broke away from The Kingdom of Serbia in 1451 A.D., largely because of the conquests achieved by the Sunni Muslim, Ottoman Turkish Empire. The Serbian Slavs migrated into what is now Montenegro after around 550 A.D., and over the course of several generations assimilated the previous inhabitants known as the Illyrians, of whom the Albanians are the modern day descendants of. Albania and Montenegro share a border, and there are Albanian ethnic minority groups living in some Montenegrin counties bordering Albania. Whether they have been there continuosly since ancient times, migrated there later during the Middle Ages from Albania, or a bit of both scenarios, needs further independent historical investigation, before a decision can be made whether it is fair and just to reunite the Montenegrin Albanians with Albania. See History of Montenegro. There are minor differences in dialect between the Montenegrin and Serbian languages, as there are also between Croatian and Serbian, and between Croatian and Montenegrin. Unlike the Eastern Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins, the Croats are Roman Catholics.
In ancient times, what is now North Macedonia was inhabited by the Paeonians, who were a Thracian tribe, and also by the Dardanians, an Illyrian people, and by the ancient Greek southern Macedonians in the southern frontier lands of what is now North Macedonia. In ancient times, what is now the Greek province of Macedonia or South Macedonia was inhabited by speakers of Greek dialects, as it still is, and of whom Alexander the Great was a member of. The ancient languages of the local Thraco-Illyrian people living in what is now North Macedonia might have become largely extinct before the arrival of the Bulgarian Slavs in the 500's A.D., due to Hellenization under the Greek Southern Macedonians, and later on due to Latinization under the Romans. Eastern Macedonia is today within the political boundaries of the nation of Bulgaria, and was inhabited in ancient times by Thracian tribes. Around 680 A.D., the Bulgars, a Mongol-Turkic people who originated from the steppes of Central Asia, arrived in what is now Bulgaria and North Macedonia, before subsequently becoming Slavicized in language and culture over the passage of several generations. Albania and North Macedonia share a border, and there are Albanian ethnic minority groups living in some North Macedonian counties bordering Albania. Whether they have been continuosly there since ancient times, migrated there later during the Middle Ages from Albania, or a bit of both scenarios, needs further independent historical investigation before a decision can be made on whether it is fair and just to reunite the North Macedonian Albanians with Albania. The Roman Catholic missionary Mother Teresa was born in North Macedonia to ethnically Albanian parents, because a minority of Albanians are Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, while the large majority of Albanians are Sunni Muslims, having converted to Islam when the Ottoman Turkish Empire ruled the Balkans. The Albanian language evolved from ancient Illyrian. The Slavic language spoken in North Macedonia is related to the Bulgarian language, albeit with substantial influence from the Serbian Slavic language, and for several long periods of time during the Middle Ages North Macedonia was a part of Bulgaria. The Slavic language spoken in Bulgaria is most closely related to Ukrainian. See History of North Macedonia.
The Ancient Macedonians spoke a language closely related to the North West or Doric Greek dialect, as was also the Greek dialect spoken by the Ancient Spartans, the latter of whom were also known as the Laconians. The Greek dialect of prestige spoken by the ancient Macedonian aristocracy was the Attic Greek dialect spoken by the ancient Athenians and their imperial subjects. Attic Greek belonged to the Ionian group of Greek dialects, and Attic Greek later became the Koine Greek or common Greek spoken in the Biblical New Testament times, that is the primary influence on modern Greek. Essentially an ancient Greek people, the southern Macedonians during the 300's B.C. onwards gradually expanded from their homeland along the Haliacmon River Valley located on the northern frontier lands of ancient Greece, and in the process they subjugated and absorbed the neighbouring non-Greek tribes of Thracians and Illyrians, who were two distinct but closely related peoples. The Ancient Macedonian Language was a variety of spoken and written North Western Greek that gradually fell out of use from the 300's B.C. onwards, when it became marginalized by the Macedonian aristocracy after they adopted the prestigious Attic or Athenian Greek dialect. The Ancient Greek dialects belonged to the Attic/Ionic, Arcadocypriot or Mycenaean-Achaian-Achaean, Aeolic, and North West/Doric groups. The North Macedonian Slavs living in Greek South Macedonia should accept living under Greek rule as should also the Greeks living in North Macedonia accept living under North Macedonian rule. The Greeks, North Macedonians, and Bulgarians are Eastern Orthodox in their faith, while most of the Albanians of North Macedonia are Sunni Muslims, with some of them adhering to the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian denominations. In both the First World War (1914-1918) and The Second World War (1939-1945), Greek Southern Macedonia was annexed by Bulgaria with the support of at first the Kaiser's Germany and later on by Nazi Germany in an attempt to gain access to the Aegean Sea, which is an arm of the Mediterranean Sea, with the rest of Greece being partitioned by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Fascist Bulgaria during The Second World War. There is a province in south-western Bulgaria known as Macedonia, inhabited in ancient times by the Thracians, and today largely inhabited by Slavic speakers.
The ancestors of the Indo-European speaking Greeks arrived in what is now Greece from around 2000 B.C. onwards. The Greek language split from the Indo-European Armenian language around 5000 B.C., and emerged as a separate linguistic lineage around 4000 B.C. The ancestors of both the Greeks and the Armenians originated from the pastoralist, semi-nomadic tribes living on the prairies and steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas in what is now part of southern Russia and the eastern Ukraine. See The Greeks. The Greeks intermarried with and assimilated the previous Caucasian but non-Indo-European peoples of what is now Greece who were known as the Pelasgoi and Eteo-Cretans. The Pelasgoi and Eteo-Cretans came from what is now Turkey during the Ice Age when dry land bridges connected what is now Europe with the Asian peninsula of Anatolia or Asia Minor, which is now a part of the nation of Turkey. Sea levels were much lower during the Ice Age because so much of the world's water was frozen in ice caps and glaciers. See Pelasgians and Eteocretan Language. The Turks themselves did not arrive into what is now Turkey until the 1000's A.D., at a time when the Byzantine Empire was embroiled in civil wars, and the original homeland of the Turks was located in what is now called the nation of Turkmenistan, formerly a republic of the Soviet Union in Central Asia. The Turks of Central Asia began to convert to Sunni Islam after being conquered by the Arab Muslims during the late 600's and early 700's A.D., and when the Turks arrived in what is now Turkey via Iran during the 1000's A.D., they began to intermarry with and convert the previous Greek-speaking, Byzantine Eastern Orthodox Christian inhabitants of Turkey to Islam, the latter of whom over the course of several generations learnt the Turkish language in a process known as Turkification. The Armenians arrived in what is now Armenia around 2000 B.C., and their language is most closely related to the Greek dialect spoken by the ancient southern Macedonians. The region of Epirus in north-western Greece was settled by Greek tribes from around 2000 B.C. onwards, and during ancient times was a frontier area contested with the Indo-European Illyrian peoples to the north. From around 1348 A.D. onwards Albanian clans, who were descended from the Illyrians, began to migrate into Epirus from Albania to the north. The Cham Albanians of Epirus did not migrate in significant numbers into Epirus until after 1337 A.D., with major migrations occurring during the 1340's and 1350's A.D. Northern Epirus was settled by Greek tribes from around 2000 B.C. onwards, but today forms part of the nation of Albania. The mostly Muslim Albanian ethnic minority living in the Greek region of Southern Epirus should accept living under Greek rule because the Greeks arrived in the region a long time before they did. Likewise the Greeks living in Northern Epirus should accept living under Albanian rule. See Greeks in Albania. During The Second World War, the area of Southern Epirus inhabited by the Cham Albanians was annexed by Fascist Italy into their Albanian protectorate.
Western Thrace or West Thrace is a geographic and historical region of Greece between the Nestos and Evros Rivers, located in the north-eastern part of Greece. Eastern Thrace is the part of Turkey that lies within the continent of Europe, while Northern Thrace is today a part of south-eastern Bulgaria. The Roman province of Thrace was founded in 46 A.D. The Bulgarian Slavs arrived in what is now the nation of Bulgaria during the late 500's and early 600's A.D., while the Turks conquered the region of Eastern Thrace from the Greek Byzantine Empire during the 1300's and 1400's A.D. The Greek Byzantine Empire existed from 330/395-1453 A.D. In both The First and Second World Wars, Bulgaria forcibly occupied the Greek region of West Thrace in an effort to gain access to the Aegean Sea. Bulgaria has a large coastline along the Black Sea, which is connected to the Aegean Sea by the Bosporus Strait or Strait of Constantinople, the Sea of Marmara, and the Hellespont Strait or Dardanelles Strait. Thrace during ancient times was inhabited by the Thracian Indo-Europeans, who were most closely related to the Illyrian Indo-Europeans. The Thracians in ancient times were divided into numerous tribal groups. Before the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 B.C., that was fought between the Greek empires led by the city-states of Sparta and Athens, the southern coastal plains of Thrace was settled by colonists drawn from the the Greek city-states that spoke the Athenian and Ionian dialects. From 168 B.C. to 46 A.D. Thrace was a client kingdom of the Roman Empire, before becoming a Roman province. Thrace was a part of the East Roman but Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire after the Roman Empire split into a western and eastern half after 395 A.D. The Byzantine Empire belonged to the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity. Thrace was conquered by the Sunni Muslim, Ottoman Turkish Empire in several military campaigns carried out from 1352 to 1372, no doubt assisted by the four major civil wars fought within the Byzantine Empire during the 1300's. The Thracians, an Indo-European people, entered the Balkans from the steppes north of the Black Sea from around 1500 B.C. onwards, and in the process they intermarried and assimilated the Caucasian but non-Indo-European peoples. About 1000 B.C. the Thracians and the linguistically related Dacians began developing from the proto-Thracians. The Dacians were the ancestors of the Romanians, and a sizeable part of their land of Dacia, rich in gold and silver mines, and a land that in ancient times had many defendable forested mountains and plateaus, formed part of the wealthy and highly Latinized Roman province of Dacia from 106-275 A.D. The Thracian language, closely related to the Illyrian language, that are sometimes grouped together into the language group known as Thraco-Illyrian and Thraco-Dacian, was spoken in what is now Bulgaria when the Slavs arrived in the 600's A.D. The Thracians were very superficially Latinized and Hellenized in language and culture by the Roman soldiers, officials, and merchants who spoke Latin and/or Greek, with much of the Thracian peasantry continuing to speak Thracian tribal dialects. The Thracian language over time melded with the Indo-European Slavic dialects spoken by the then Bulgarian newcomers. The era of ancient Greek Colonisation was the organised colonial expansion by the Archaic Greeks throughout the coastal lands of the Mediterranean and Black Seas from 750 to 550 B.C. During the 600's B.C. Greek colonies were established along the coastal lands of Thrace, the Propontis or Sea of Marmara, and the Black Sea or Pontos Euxinos. The Greek city-state of Megara founded the colony of Byzantium (Byzantion), located in Eastern Thrace, in either 667 or 657 B.C., and the colony remained primarily Greek-speaking until its conquest by the Muslim Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1453 A.D. In 330 A.D. the Roman Emperor Constantine I, who was the first Roman Emperor to grant Christians toleration in the hitherto pagan or polytheist Roman Empire, renamed Byzantium Constantinople, i.e. "Constantine's City." On 29 May 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, who renamed it Istanbul, although it was not until 1930 that the name became official. Istanbul comes from the Greek phrase "eis-ten-polin" which means "to-the-city." On the opposite Anatolian eastern side of the Bosporus Strait from Byzantium had been founded the city of Chalcedon in 685 B.C. by Greeks from the city-state of Megara in the region of Attica, renamed by the Turks Kadiköy after they captured the city from the Byzantine Greeks in 1353. The Bulgarian Slavs living in the Greek province of West Thrace should accept living under Greek rule as should the Greeks living in the Bulgarian province of North Thrace accept living under Bulgarian Slavic rule. Today East Thrace in the European part of Turkey is mostly inhabited by Muslim Turks (i.e. Islamicized and Turkified ex-Greek descendants), and it is too late to return East Thrace to Greece as it once belonged to before 1453. The island nation of Cyprus was settled by the Mycenaean Greeks in two waves between 2000-1000 B.C. The Ottoman Muslim Turks conquered Cyprus in 1571 A.D., and ruled it until the British conquered Cyprus in 1878, although Turkey did not recognize British rule in Cyprus until the start of World War One in 1914. Cyprus became an independent nation in 1960, although the British kept two large military bases in Cyprus. In 1974 Turkey launched a military invasion of Cyprus, in the process seizing and forcibly annexing the northern third of Cyprus, where most of the Muslim Cypriot Turks lived. A large Greek Eastern Orthodox population also lived in the annexed area of Cyprus, and many of them were killed or forcibly expelled from that area of Cyprus by the Turks. The only thing that really deterred the Turks from seizing the remaining southern two thirds of Cyprus was the presence of British military bases. In 1983, the Cypriot Turks of the annexed northern third of Cyprus declared an independent republic with the military protection of Turkey, a declaration that is recognized as being legal only by Turkey and no other nation in the world. The United States has two military air bases in Turkey, and a naval base on the Turkish Aegean Coast. The United States also has military bases in Greece. The United States of America, The United Kingdom, Greece, and Turkey are all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO. During the Cold War of 1945-1991, Turkey as a NATO member helped to monitor the movements of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet based in the Crimean Peninsula through the Straits of Constantinople, the Aegean Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, especially after the Soviets established a naval base at the Syrian Mediterranean port of Tartus in 1971. Since 2015, in response to the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011, the Russians under the rule of President Vladimir Putin have increased their military presence in Syria in support of Syrian President and dictator Bashar al-Assad at Khmeimim air base, located a short distance south-east of the Syrian Mediterranean city and sea port of Latakia, and in 2014 the Russians forcibly annexed the Crimean Peninsula and the counties of Donetsk and Luhansk in the nation of Ukraine. Although the hearts of the Americans and British are with the Eastern Orthodox Christian and Indo-European Greeks, their heads are with the Sunni Muslim and Ural-Altaic Turks. In the post-Cold War era, the Turks have often proven to be unreliable allies in the NATO alliance, when they refused to allow the Americans to use their soil to launch an invasion of Kurdish inhabited northern Iraq in 2003, in their support for the often Islamist, terrorist, and Jihadist Syrian rebel factions, in the rise of Islamism and ultra-nationalism within Turkey itself, in their purchase of Russian surface to air missiles, and their use of blackmail against the European Union in their threat to allow the Syrian war refugees in Turkey, along with the economic migrants from Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia in Turkey, permission to invade the wealthier nations of Europe by means of uncontrolled migration via the Balkans, as had occurred in 2015. History has a tendency to often repeat itself, or as the American author Mark Twain once said, "history does not repeat, but it does rhyme." The Apostle Saint Paul, according to The Acts of the Apostles 17:26, taught that although all the ethnic groups, tribes, and nations of men were made by God from a common ancestor, it is God who has determined their national boundaries and times of existence. The fascistic one-party state of the Republic of Turkey (1923-1945) for most of World War Two (1939-1945) had a friendly so-called "neutrality" towards Nazi Germany, much as Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, and proto-Juan Perón's Argentina had, because Turkey was no friend of the Russian dominated Communist Soviet Union, nor that of the Czarist Russian Empire that had preceded it. The Ottoman Turkish Empire had been allied with the Kaiser's Germany, the Kaiser's Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser extent with the German-derived Bulgarian monarchy during World War One (1914-1918). See History of the Republic of Turkey and Military History of the Republic of Turkey. Ancient pagan Greece was the birthplace of European civilization, and the word civilization traces back to Latin word roots meaning city-based or urban-based cultures. Greece was the European nation most geographically closest to the ancient civilizations of the once pagan Middle East. Ancient pagan Greece was the birthplace of democracy, although in the city-state of Ancient Athens only adult male citizens over the age of 18 years could vote, provided they had both parents who were also born citizens after 451 A.D. In the ancient Athenian democracy that existed from 508-322 B.C., slaves, metics or resident foreigners, be they both non-Athenian Greeks or non-Greeks, women, and children could not vote. In addition, the poorest Athenian adult male citizens who belonged to the landless laboring class of citizens who owned no slaves, and who were known as the thetes, were often too busy struggling to earn a living and therefore could not find the time to participate in the Athenian democracy during times of normalcy. Without the leisure time given to those Athenian citizens who could afford slaves in varying numbers, and without the tribute collected from the subjugated Greek city-states by naval patrols of the Athenian Empire, the ancient Athenian democracy would not have been possible. See The Thetes in Ancient Athens.
During the Cold War of 1945-1991, the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union supported the relatively secular but dictatorial, socialist one-party states of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Southern Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, and Algeria in the Muslim and/or Arab world at one time or another, while The United States of America supported once secular Ural-Altaic Turkey, the Shah's semi-absolutist but secular Indo-European Iran, Hebrew Israel, and the petroleum and natural gas rich, theocratic, absolutist, Arabic, Sunni Muslim, Saudi Arabian monarchy. Saudi Arabia was once upon a time scared by the pro-Soviet nations of Iraq and Southern Yemen, nations that have a long border with Saudi Arabia. After the Iranian Islamist Revolution of 1979 brought to power an authoritarian, theocratic, Shiite Muslim, Persian Indo-European regime in Iran, the Saudi royal family came to fear Iran, as did also the other Sunni Arab monarchies and aristocracies of the Persian Gulf nations, especially after the Shiite Arabs of Iraq came to power in Iraq in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that began because President George Bush junior refused to believe the Central Intelligence Agency when they expressed grave doubts that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction. The reason why Saddam Hussein refused to allow United Nations weapons inspectors into Iraq in 2002 and 2003 was because he was worried that Iran would view Iraq to be militarily weak if the U.N. inspectors found that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq and Iran had fought a war with each other from 1980-1988, a war begun by Iraq. Iraq had dismantled its weapons of mass destruction in the years between the first American-Iraqi War of 1991, fought over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and the second American-Iraqi War of 2003, fought over non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Kuwait had been a part of Iraq since the time of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, before being conquered by the British in 1899. Kuwait gained independence from Great Britain in 1961. Under the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni Arab Muslim minority was in power, while the Shiite Arab Muslim Iraqis, along with the Sunni Muslim, Iranian-speaking Kurds of Iraq, were disenfranchised. The Sunni ISIS and AL-Qaeda Islamists have found much support from the Sunni Arab Iraqis, as well as from the rural and urban poor of Sunni Muslim, Arabic-speaking Syrians, who are disenfranchised by the minority Alawite Shiite Muslim, secular Syrian Arabic regime of Bashar al-Assad, who has received substantial military support from Vladimir Putin's Russia since 2015. The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has also received support from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who are the Waffen-SS of the authoritarian Iranian theocracy, as well as from the the Lebanese Shiite Arab Muslims belonging to the fundamentalist Hezbollah political party. During the Iraqi Civil War of 2014-2017, the Shiite Persian Iranians backed Shiite Arab Iraqi militias against Iraqi ISIS fighters, a case of Muslim fundamentalists fighting Muslim fundamentalists, or in other words Islamo-fascists versus Islamo-fascists. The Sunni and Shiite Muslim schism dates back to The Battle of Karbala fought on 10 October, 680 A.D. in what is now Iraq, some 48 years after the death of The Prophet Muhammad in 632 A.D. In October 1973, during the Yom Kippur War between the American-backed, nuclear armed Israel and the Soviet-backed Syrians and Egyptians (Operation Nickel Grass), and the largely anti-American Arab oil embargo of October 1973 to March 1974, some 12% of the petroleum consumed in The United States came from the Middle East, and about 10% in 2008. President Richard Nixon even contemplated sending in American troops to seize the oil and gas fields of the Middle East during the Arab oil embargo. In 1941 and 1942, during World War Two, the then allied British, Communist Soviets, and Americans seized the oil fields of Iraq and Iran in order to prevent their capture by the military forces of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. There was another oil supply shock as a result of the February 1979 Iranian Revolution (1979 Oil Crisis), soon followed by the Iranian seizure of the American embassy in the Iranian capital of Tehran in November 1979, and then followed by the Iranian inspired, Arab Shiite Muslim uprising in Saudi Arabia's oil rich Eastern provinces in November to December 1979, that occurred at the same time as the seizure of the Grand Mosque in the Saudi capital of Mecca by Saudi Sunni Muslim fundamentalists who sought to to overthrow the pro-American Saudi monarchy and replace it with a global Muslim Caliphate. The Sunni Saudi, Islamo-fascist rebels of 1979 were inspired by the Shiite Muslim fundamentalists who had overthrown the secular, pro-American, and pro-Israeli Iranian monarchy earlier in 1979. Saudi Islamists accuse the members of the Saudi monarchy and aristocracy of practicing un-Islamic libertinism behind closed doors, an often true accusation, although according to the Muslim Bible known as the Quran, the Islamic heaven is an orgy of free sex, wine, food, and perhaps even of hashish, the latter of which is a drug like the alcohol of wine is also. I found out about the nature of Islamic heaven in a website article called Islamic Heaven: Allah's Whore House - The Naked Truth, posted on May 13, 2015 by a disillusioned former Muslim called Syed Kamran Mirza who quoted many chapters and verses of the Quran, as well as the Sunna, to back up his accusations. Today, in Israel, The United States has six war reserve stock depots to be used in an emergency by American military personnel stationed at military bases located in Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and The United Arab Emirates. See Israel-United States Relations. The British established a Jewish Homeland in Palestine in 1917 during The First World War for a number of reasons. The first reason was in order to protect the nearby Suez Canal located in the then British protectorate of Egypt, opened in 1869, and which shortened considerably the sea voyage between The United Kingdom and the British colonies and dominions located in South Asia, South East Asia, East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Ocean. The second reason was to form a land bridge between Egypt and the oil-rich British Persian Gulf Protectorates of Kuwait, southern Iran, Bahrain, Qatar, The United Arab Emirates, and Oman after the British conquered the Turkish occupied Arab imperial provinces of Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq during World War One. British troops stationed along the Mediterranean Sea shores of Egypt and Cyprus could travel to the Persian Gulf ports via the Middle Eastern land bridge, and from the Persian Gulf they could travel by naval troop transports to then British-ruled India. See Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 by Ken Stein, 2007, CIE (Center for Israel Education). The third reason was the use of the Kirkuk (Iraq) to Haifa (Palestine) oil pipeline via Jordan from 1935-1948, and this pipeline supplied petroleum to Allied forces fighting during World War Two in the Mediterranean theaters of North Africa, Lebanon and Syria, Greece, Italy, and southern France. From 1968-1979 the Trans-Israel oil pipeline that connected the Israeli Mediterranean Sea ports of Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Haifa with the Israeli port of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba, an inlet of the Red Sea, supplied Europe with Iranian oil during the time of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (reign 1941 to 1979), before the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power. In 2003, the Trans-Israel oil pipeline began to transport Russian petroleum shipped from the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk destined for customers in East Asia. See Why Does the United States Support Israel?
Palestine or Canaan in the ancient world lay on an important intersection of trade or caravan routes of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, linking the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Kush with Phoenicia, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumeria, and Persia (Ezekiel 5:5, Ezekiel 38:12, and Daniel 11:34). The Fertile Crescent of the Middle East comprised the valleys of the Nile, Jordan, Litani, Orontes, Euphrates, and Tigris rivers, as well as the originally forested mountains, hills, and coastal plains of the Levant. The Levant today consists of the modern nations of Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and the parts of these nations that face the Mediterranean Sea have subtropical dry climates with mild, rainy winters and hot, dry summers, and are covered with such trees as Cedars of Lebanon and Cypresses on the uncleared parts of hills and mountains. See Via Maris (The Way of the Sea), The Ancient King's Highway, and The Fertile Crescent. Israel and/or Palestine since ancient times has been located where the continents of Eurasia and Africa meet, separated by water since the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. From 66-136 A.D. the monotheist Jews (with angels) of Roman Palestine fought three failed wars of independence against their polytheist Roman masters, and at the end of each war a large part of the Palestinian Jewish population was killed in combat or in massacres, died of starvation and disease, or were sold into slavery, both in Israel and in the other provinces of the Roman Empire. The Jews who survived in Palestine came to form a minority in their own country, outnumbered by the Samaritans, whom the Jews regarded as half-caste Jewish heretics (Assyrian Captivity or Exile; Babylonian Captivity or Exile), Greco-Roman pagans or the descendants of Jews who had converted to Greco-Roman paganism, and by Christians, many of whom were converts from Judaism or Greco-Roman paganism. See Jewish-Roman Wars. The Jewish minority in Palestine came to be largely concentrated in the Galilee region, where they continued to live until the re-establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. See Continuous Jewish Presence in the Holy Land (with Maps).
After Christianity was declared the official state religion of the Roman Empire in 392 A.D., Greco-Roman paganism entered into a rapid terminal decline towards extinction, especially in the East Roman or Byzantine provinces, and after the Arab Muslim conquest of Palestine in the 630's A.D., many of the Palestinian Jews, Samaritans, and Christians began to convert to Islam in increasing numbers.The reason why the Jews formed such a disproportionate minority of Russian Communists or Bolsheviks was because they had been persecuted by the Eastern Orthodox Russian Emperors or Czars of the Romanov Dynasty (1613-1917), and occasionally massacred under their rule in campaigns known as pogroms. The New Testament Bible has many passages condemning the Jews for refusing to convert to Christiamity, as does also the Muslim Quran and Sunna often condemn the Jews and Christians for failing to convert to Islam, which teaches that whoever does not become a Muslim will inevitably go to hell. See Antisemitism in Christianity; Antisemitism and The New Testament; and Antisemitism in Islam. According to the following Hadith (saying of The Prophet Muhammad) as found in the Sunna:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (the Boxthorn tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews. (related by al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim) - Sahih Muslim, 41:6985, and 41:6981-6984; Sahih al-Bukhari 4:56:791 and 4:52:177.Communism, at least officially, preached ethnic tolerance and the international solidarity of all workers, even if it did not always follow this in practice. See Jewish Bolshevism. During the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920, the non-Communist White faction often carried out massacres against the Russian Jews, and as a result they drove many of the Jews into the arms of the Russian Red, Bolshevik, or Communist faction. See Why Did Russian Jews Support the Bolshevik Revolution? by Michael Stanislawski, Nathan J. Miller Profesor of Jewish History at Columbia University, posted on October 24, 2017, 9.30 P.M. The atheistic and anti-capitalist Soviet and Russian Communists however disliked religious and capitalistic Jews. The atheist Karl Marx himself strongly wrote against capitalistic Jews. Karl Marx's father Herschel or Heinrich Marx was a German Jew who converted to the Prussian State Evangelical Lutheran Church, although Heinrich was largely a non-religious man of the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment, who was interested in the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire, while Marx himself was interested in the philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. See Economic Antisemitism and Karl Marx. While the European Communists aimed at the cultural, religious, and economic genocide of the Jews, the Nazis aimed at their genetic genocide. While an atheistic Communist would metaphorically stab a religious man in the front, a warped excuse for a self-deluded Christian that is often a Fascist, especially of the National Socialist/Nazi brand, would stab a Christian metaphorically from behind. Either way, death would be the result. The German Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a notorious anti-Semite/anti-Jew and an anti-democrat, as graphically illustrated in his two 1543 publications called On the Jews and Their Lies (The First Epistle of Saint John Chapter 2, verses 22 to 23, Romans 9:6-7, and The Acts of the Apostles 13:45-52) and On the Holy Name and the Lineage of Christ, Against the Thieving and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (1525 A.D; The Epistle of the Apostle Saint Paul to the Romans 13:1-7, I Peter 2:13-20, I Corinthians 6:1-8, The Gospel of Saint John 19:10-11, Matthew 5:38-41, Luke 20:19-26, Luke 3:12-14, Ephesians 6:5-9, Hebrews 13:17, I Corinthians 7:2024, Genesis 9:18-29, Genesis Chapter 10, Galatians Chapter 4, and The Acts of the Apostles 17:26), and On the Bondage of the Will (1525 A.D; Ephesians 2:8-10, The Acts of the Apostles 15:18, and II Timothy 3:16-17). Martin Luther published in 1523 a book called That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew in the hope that the Jews of Germany would convert to the Lutheran denomination of Christianity en masse, but he lived long enough to see that hope bitterly dashed as he grew older. Martin Luther, who died in 1546, believed that the Second Coming of Christ as the Parousia and the Son of Man would happen sometime before 1600 A.D., and that the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648), that he unleashed upon Europe, was a sign that the Apocalypse was nigh. See (a). List of Dates Predicted for Apocalyptic Events; (b). Martin Luther and Antisemitism; Martin Luther: Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor, by Peter F. Wiener; (c). Luther, Exposing the Myth: Luther-As He Was: Luther Speaks for Himself by Raymond Taouk; (d). Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis by Jörg L. Spenkuch and Philipp Tillman; (e). Who voted for the Nazis? (electoral history of the National Socialist German Workers Party) by Dick (Richard) Geary, edited by John D. Clare; (f). Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany by Christopher J. Probst; (g). Religion in Nazi Germany; (h). 5 March 1933 German Federal Election; (i). Adolf Stoecker; (j). Religious Views of Adolf Hitler; and (k). John Calvin (1509-1564). When Martin Luther was asked whether it would be justifiable to box the ears of a Jew, he said "Certainly. I for one would smack him on the jaw. Were I able, I would knock him down and stab him in my anger. It is lawful, according to both the human and the divine law, to kill a robber; then it is even more permissible to slay a blasphemer." See Peter F. Wiener, Martin Luther: Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor, Part 3: Luther's Political Doctrines - Luther and the Jews. These following Bible passages however imply that democracy and freedom is Christian: John 15:12-15, Matthew 20:25-28, Mark 10:42-45, Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31, Matthew 22:34-40, Mark 12:28-34, Luke 10:25-28, Galatians 5:14, Romans 13:8-10, Deuteronomy 6:4, and Leviticus 19:18. Usury was the sin of a Jew lending money on interest to a fellow Jew who lived in poverty, as written in The Old Testament passages Exodus 22:25 and Leviticus 25:35-37, although a Jew was allowed to lend money on interest to a non-Jew or Gentile according to Deuteronomy 23:20-21. According to Mark 10:26-27, Matthew 19:25-26, and Luke 18:26-27, Jesus said to His disciples that what is impossible with man is not so with God, for nothing is impossible with God. God's grace can save a rich person who follows the Ten Commandments, even though on his or her own without God's grace it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich person to enter heaven, as Jesus is recorded as saying in Mark 10:23-25, Matthew 19:23-24, and Luke 18:24-25. God's grace can save a rich person who earns their money legally, invests their money legally, does not evade their taxes, and who gives generously to charitable causes (Galatians 2:10), because from God's freely given gift of grace which all are free to choose or reject (II Corinthians 5:15, Jeremiah 18:1-10 and Romans 9-11), good works or good deeds flow (Ephesians 2:8-10, Romans 2:5-11, Galatians 2:10, Matthew 25:31-46). The Eye of the Needle was an ancient Jewish aphorism. A Midrash (Hebrew Bible commentary) on the Song of Songs uses the phrase to speak of God's willingness and ability beyond comparison, to accomplish the salvation of a sinner:
The Holy One said, open for me a door as big as a needle's eye and I will open for you a door through which may enter tents and [camels?].See Eye of a Needle in Wikipedia. See also Christian Communism and Christian Socialism.
The Evangelical branch of the Protestants in the United States, who in 2015 made up about 25% of the American population, support the doctrine of Christian Zionism, which states that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ as the Parousia cannot happen until the Jews are restored to the land of Israel in Palestine from their exile in the Diaspora, and when they convert to Christianity en masse, in order to fulfill Biblical prophecy (Matthew 23:37-39, Luke 13:34-35, Matthew 21:42-46, Luke 21:1-6, Luke 23:27-31, Luke 19:41-44, Matthew 5:38-41, I Thessalonians 2:14-16, Luke 20:19-26, Matthew 3:7-10, Romans 9-11, Zechariah 12:10, John 19:37, Revelation 1:7, Zechariah 12-14, Ezekiel 38-39, Ezekiel 47-48, Revelation 22, Revelation 4:6, and The Acts of the Apostles 1:6-8). However, Mark 16:15-16 implies that those generations of Jews who died before the Second Coming of Christ without having converted to Christianity will go to hell, as is also implied by The First Epistle of Saint John 2:22-23. The current position of the Roman Catholic Church is not to actively try to seek the conversion of Israel to Christianity, believing that it will happen in the last days leading up to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ as the Parousia, althought the Baptists believe in missionary campaigns of conversion to the Jews, basing their standpoint on Christ's commission to the apostles to preach and baptize in His name to all the peoples of the Earth (Matthew 28:18-20, Mark 16:15-20, Luke 24:46-49, The Acts of the Apostles 1:6-8, and Romans 10:6-17). The American Evangelicals tend to vote more for the Republican Party, and less so for the Democrats. They tend to be concentrated in the Bible Belt of the South Eastern United States. John 19:1-16 says that Pontius Pilate agreed to Christ's crucifixion after the Jewish mob who did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, whose coming had been prophesied in The Old Testament several times, went on to accuse Pilate of committing treason towards the then pagan or polytheist Roman Emperor Tiberius Caesar (reign 14-37 A.D.), because Jesus had proclaimed Himself to be the spiritual King of the Jews and therefore above Caesar in authority over the Roman province of Judea. If Jesus was crucified on April 3, 33 A.D., when a solar eclipse could be observed from Jerusalem, it might be because Pontius Pilate was afraid of Tiberius Caesar, since Pilate had been appointed from 26-36 A.D. the Procurator of Judea, Samaria, and a part of Idumea by Tiberius' Prime Minister and Commander or Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Lucius Aelius Sejanus, who had been executed in 31 A.D. on the orders of Tiberius for trying to overthrow him as Roman Emperor in a failed attempt at a palace coup d'état or putsch. See Sejanus and the Chronology of Christ's Death by Gary De Lashmutt.
In ancient times, the land that is now part of the largely mountainous and forested nation of Albania was home to several Illyrian tribes, namely the Ardiaei, Albani, Amantini, Enchate, and the Taulantii, as well as the closely related Thracian tribes. Archaeologists have found evidence that from around 2500 B.C. onwards, what is now central and southern Albania was inhabited by Greek tribes. The Illyrian tribe known as the Illiri lived on the borderlands of Albania and Montenegro, and were close neighbors to the Greek tribes. Around 1000 B.C. onwards the Illyrian tribes moved into central and southern Albania, in the process linguistically assimilating many of the Greek tribes into the ancient Albanian language. Albania, as was also once most of the former Yugoslavia, was once part of the Roman province of Illyricum, which was in official existence from 27 B.C. to 69/79 A.D. Illyria was the name the ancient Romans gave to the western part of the Balkan Peninsula inhabited in ancient times by the Illyrian tribes, that was split by the Romans in 10 A.D. into the province of Pannonia to the north, and Dalmatia to the south, the latter of which had a coastline along the Adriatic Sea. Before the Sunni Muslim, Ottoman Turks conquered Albania during the 1400's A.D., the northern Albanians (Gheg dialect) were Roman Catholics, while the southern Albanians (Tosk dialect) were Eastern Orthodox. Most of the Gheg Albanians live north of the Shkumbin or Shkumbî River, while most of the Tosk Albanians live south of that river. During the long Turkish rule over Albania, a majority of the Albanians converted to Islam while retaining the Albanian language, which adopted many Turkish words. A minority of Albanians today are Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, although Christianity was never firmly established in the mountainous and forested nation of Albania, as was also the case with what today is now the nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, largely because of the difficulty of travel and communications in rugged terrain. In 1967, the year that the then Communist dictatorship of Albania outlawed all religious groups and seized their property, about 70% of the Albanians were Sunni Muslims, 20% were Eastern Orthodox, and 10% were Roman Catholics (2). Albania was ruled by the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha from 1944 to 1985, while Yugoslavia was ruled by the ethically half Croat, half Slovene dictator Josip Broz Tito from 1944/45 to 1980. These two World War Two Allies fell out after the war over the issue of the largely Albanian region of Kosovo in Serbia, because Tito could never afford to antagonize the Serbs, who made up about 40% of the population of the former Yugoslavia during the 1980's, as compared to the Russians who made up about 52% of the population of the former Soviet Union in the 1980's. See History of Albania. The Albanian language evolved from the ancient Illyrian languages that largely went extinct from the 100's to 600's A.D., due to Hellenization by the Ancient and Byzantine Greeks, Romanization or Latinization by the Ancient Romans, and Slavicization by the South Slavic ethnic groups. The Illyrians began to migrate into the Balkans from their original homelands in the prairies of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine located north of the Black and Caspian Seas after around 2000 B.C. The Illyrian tribes of what is now Albania and the former Yugoslavia were conquered by the ancient Romans in three military campaigns carried out between 229 to 168 B.C. During the late 500's and early 600's A.D. the Slavic Slovene, Croat, Serb, and Bulgarian ethnic groups moved south of the Danube River and began to absorb the Illyrians into their language and culture.
The Indo-European Thracians conquered the pre-Indo-European Caucasian peoples of what is now the nation of Bulgaria around 1500 B.C. onwards, having arrived from their original homeland in what is now southern Russia and the eastern Ukraine. Several waves of Slavic tribal migration from around 550 to 650 A.D. coming from The Ukraine, southern Poland, the southern part of the former East Germany, and from Slovakia, resulted in the Slavicisation of the Thracians over the course of several subsequent generations. In the 680's A.D. the Turkic Bulgars conquered the Slavic Bulgarians, before they too eventually became Slavicized in language. See History of Bulgaria. The Bulgars were a Mongolic-Turkic or Ural-Altaic people, related to the Volga River Tatars and Chuvash people of what is now part of The Russian Federation. Today, the big majority of Bulgarians are Eastern Orthodox in faith.
The Asian part of what is now Turkey in ancient times was known as Asia Minor or Anatolia by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Some of the chapters in the New Testament Book of Revelation was addressed by its author to the then minority Christian communities living in seven prominent Greco-Roman cities situated along what today is the Aegean shores of Turkey, with the New Testament Book written from circa 90 to 110 A.D., in order to encourage the early Christians who had been persecuted during the reigns of the pagan or polytheist Roman Emperors Nero (54-68 A.D.) and Domitian (81-96 A.D.), and after the Jewish Temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. The north-west coastal lands of Anatolia had been settled by the Indo-European Greeks of the Achaean-Achaian-Mycenaean culture from 2000 B.C. onwards. The original homeland of the horse-riding and herding Indo-Europeans was in the prairies located in the lands north of the Black and Caspian Seas, in what is now southern Russia and the eastern Ukraine, part of the vast Eurasian grasslands that stretch eastwards as far as Outer and Inner Mongolia, and also to Manchuria. The citizens of the ancient city of Troy in north-west Anatolia, located a short distance from the Dardanelles or Hellespont Strait that provides a maritime access to the Sea of Marmara (Propontis), the Bosporus Starit, and the Black Sea (Pontos Euxinos), were Mycenaean Greeks. From 1200-800 B.C. the lands along the west coast of Anatolia were settled by Greeks from the Balkan Peninsula speaking the Aeolic, Ionian, and North-West/Doric dialects. In 334 B.C. the southern Greek Macedonian Emperor called Alexander the Great (reign 336-323 B.C.), conquered Anatolia from the Achaemenid Persian-Iranian imperial dynasty that had seized western Anatolia from the Kingdom of Lydia in 546 B.C. during the reign of the Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great (559 to 529 B.C.). Alexander the Great's conquests opened up the interior of Anatolia or Asia Minor to the settlement and culture of the Greek city-states situated at the mouths of the Anatolian rivers that flow westwards into the Aegean Sea. From 395 to 1453 A.D., Anatolia was a part of the officially Greek-speaking East Roman/Byzantine Empire. The Greek language was spoken daily in the western and southern parts of Anatolia, while in the northern and eastern parts were spoken the Caucasian but non-Indo-European Georgian language, the Indo-European Armenian language, a distant cousin of the North-West/Doric Greek dialect, and the Indo-European, Western Iranian Kurdish dialect. During the time of the Byzantine Empire, the Greeks, Armenians, and Georgians were Christians of the Eastern Orthodox denomination, while the Iranian-speaking Kurds were and still are Sunni Muslims, in contrast to the Persian-Farsi Iranians of Iran proper, who today are Shiite Muslims. The Indo-European Iranians or Aryans began to arrive in what is now Iran from about 1500 B.C. onwards, while the Indo-European Armenians arrived in what is now Armenia from around 2000 B.C. onwards. See History of Iran, Kurds, and Armenians. The Kurds live in areas adjacent to each other in the modern day nations of Ural-Altaic Turkey, Farsi Iran, Arabic Iraq, and Arabic Syria. The ancestors of the modern day Georgians have inhabited the southern Caucasus mountain ranges and the northern part of the Anatolian Peninsula since the Neolithic or New Stone Age (10,000 to 4,500 B.C.). The Georgian language is a Caucasian non-Indo-European language related to that spoken by the Svans, Mingrelians, and Laz. The soldiers of the Seljuk Turkish dynasty, fighting as horse archers, lancers, and scimitar swordsmen, defeated the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert on Anatolian soil in 1071 A.D. at a time when the Byzantine Empire was engulfed by civil war, and by 1081 A.D. they had overrun a large part of the Anatolian Peninsula. The Ottoman Turkish dynasty began with Sultan Osman the First, who reigned from around 1299 to 1326. The Muslim Ottoman Turks began to conquer the remainder of Byzantine Anatolia, as well as the Balkan part of the Byzantine Empire from Osman I onwards, helped greatly by the fact that the Byzantine Empire had to endure four major protracted civil wars during the 1300's.
The Turks originally were horse-riding and herding pastoralists who came from what is now the grasslands and semi-deserts of the nation of Turkmenistan in Central Asia, a former republic of the Soviet Union, and before that a province of the Czarist Russian Empire, having been conquered by the Russians in the 1800's. They had been converted to Sunni Islam during the 700's A.D. by invading Muslim Arabs. The Turkish language is part of the Ural-Altaic language family that includes Hunnish-Mongolian and Manchurian. Turkification was the cultural, religious, and linguistic shift that occurred when the previous inhabitants of once Byzantine Anatolia adopted the Turkish language and Muslim religion, and intermarried with the Turkish invaders over the course of several generations. Genetic research carried out by archaeo-geneticists has revealed that the Turkish invaders were an elite minority who imposed their language and religion on the previous inhabitants of Anatolia. Muslims collect a poll or head tax known as the Jizya from non-Muslims in nations where the Muslims have come to form a majority, while Muslims themselves pay a poor rate known as the zakat for social welfare purposes. The rights of non-Muslim minorities in majority Muslim nations are often severely curtailed while at the same time they are forced to live under the brutal, puritanical, harsh, and theocratic Muslim law known as the Sharia, in accordance with the teachings of the Muslim holy books known as the Quran or Koran, Sunna or Hadith, and Sira. See Rights of Non-Muslims in an Islamic State by Samuel Shahid, Answering Islam Home Page. Sharia law includes such extreme corporal punishment as flogging, stoning to death, beheading, amputation, and crucifixion. The Sunna or Hadith even has accounts of the Prophet Muhammad ordering his opponents to be burnt to death. See Islamism.
In the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, the Greeks, with the half-hearted and self-interested support of the British, French, and Italians, all of whom were war weary after the ordeal of World War One (1914-1918), tried to regain the western third of the Turkish Peninsula that had been part of the Byzantine Empire from 395 to 1453 A.D., before the conquests made by the Seljuk and Ottoman Turkish dynasties in the 1000's, 1300's, and 1400's A.D. At the time of the Greco-Turkish War, there was a large population of Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christians living in western Turkey, as there also was of Turkish-speaking Muslims in Greece. The Russian/Soviet Bolsheviks, who had come to power in the largely Slavic but multi-ethnic, Eastern Orthodox Empire of Czarist Russia in November 1917, were engaged in a civil war in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1920 with the White or anti-communist Russian imperial factions, with the Whites receiving half-hearted and self-interested support from the British, French, Germans, Americans, Japanese, and Czecho-Slovaks. Because of the support that the French and British gave to the Russian Whites, the Russian Communists or Reds allied with the Turks during the Greco-Turkish War years of 1919-1922, although they eventually returned to the old rivalry between Czarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey over control of the lands surrounding the Black Sea, the Bosporus or Strait of Constantinople, the Sea of Marmara, the Hellespont or Dardanelles Strait, the Aegean Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, as well as over the nations of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus Mountain ranges. After the defeat of Greece by Turkey in 1922, a population exchange took place between Greece and Turkey, with about 1 million Greeks living in Turkey emigrating to Greece, and about half a million Turks living in Greece emigrating to Turkey.
The modern day nation of Romania was once part of the Roman province of Dacia from 106 to 275 A.D., with the heart of Roman Dacia being located in the modern day Romanian region of Transylvania, which translates from Latin as "the land between the forests." Transylvania is a plateau surrounded by the forested Carpathian-Moldavian and Transylvanian Alps, as well as by the Bihor Mountains, and in ancient times the fertile and well watered plateau of Transylvania was itself more forested than it is today. The surrounding mountains of Transylvania are forested with beech and oak trees, while the high plains or plateau of Transylvania are good grazing fields for herds of sheep, goats, and cattle. The river valleys of Transylvania are used to grow large crops of wheat, bean, corn, tobacco, potato, and rice, although only wheat and beans were available before the Great Age of European exploration and colonization that was triggered by the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in the years 1492-1493, a voyage that set off a chain reaction of events leading to the interconnected global village we live in today (3). The very rich gold mines located in the Bihor Mountains (Apuseni Mountains in Latin) of Romania was an incentive for Dacia's conquest by the ancient Romans. Miners from the Roman province of Dalmatia were brought in to work the Dacian gold mines. Located near the Roman town of Alburnus Maior in Dacia, the gold mines flourished in the years from 131 to 167 A.D. Over time, the Roman Dacian gold reserves became depleted because mining technology and techniques in ancient times were far less developed than that of today, and the mines at Alburnus Maior ceased production in 215 A.D. The gold mines of Alburnus Maior were to be re-opened after the Roman era when mining technology and techniques became more advanced. In 2006, the Romanian gold mine of Roșia Montană, called Alburnus Maior in Roman times, closed, and during the 2010's a Canadian mining firm expressed interest in re-opening it after geological surveys revealed that it still contained a large amount of gold reserves at deeper levels. The Canadian proposal was eventually rejected by the Romanian government after widespread opposition within Romania over fears of pollution to its river systems that the mining operations would cause, as well as destruction of the mining tunnels dating back to the Roman era. Roșia of the Mountains is a gold mining region of Romania known as the Golden Quadrilateral of Transylvania since the Neolithic or New Stone Age. During the reign of the Roman Emperor Trajan from 98 to 117 A.D., a time when the Roman Empire reached its greatest geographical extent, the Dacian mining town of Alburnus Maior was developed by Illyrian colonists brought by the Romans from the southern part of the Roman province of Dalmatia. Roșia Montană today lies in the Romanian county of Alba, located in western Transylvania. In addition to its very rich gold mines, Dacia also possessed silver, iron, copper, and salt mines dating back to the period of the Dacian kings before the Roman conquest. The Romans under Emperor Trajan launched two military campaigns of conquest against the Dacians, the first from 101 to 102 A.D., and the second from 105 to 106 A.D. At the successfull conclusion of their second campaign, the Romans seized the royal treasury of the Dacian King called Decebalus, amounting to 500,000 pounds (226,800 kilograms) of gold and 1,000,000 pounds (453,600 kilograms) of silver. The Roman province of Dacia included what today is the Romanian regions of eastern and south-eastern Transylvania, Banat, and Oltenia. See Roman Dacia. Trajan's Dacian Wars secured for the Roman Empire the rich gold mines of Dacia that contributed 700 million denarii per year to the Roman economy. Remains of Roman mining activities are still visible in Romania to this day, especially at Roșia Montană. The Dacians before their conquest by the Romans were a Thracian people, speaking a dialect of the Indo-European language family known as Thraco-Illyrian, of which the Albanian language is the only surviving spoken and written member to this day. The Romanian language developed from the Vulgar or vernacular Latin spoken by the Romanized Dacians, many of whom intermarried with the Roman colonists who settled in Dacia. The Roman colonists came from many different provinces of the Roman Empire, with the majority of them being from the Balkan Peninsula. Roman Dacia was an El Dorado for the Roman colonists because of the rich gold and silver mines located in the province, and the Romans invested heavily in it as a result. The name Romania in Latin means "the land of the Romans." Most of the Romanians today belong to the Eastern Orthodox denomination of Christianity, although some of them are Eastern Orthodox known as Greek Catholics or Uniate Orthodox who acknowledge the doctrinal and administrative authority of the Pope.
The Romanian language belongs to the Romance or-Vulgar/Vernacular Latin derived languages spoken by the people known as the Aromanians when the Balkans was part of the Roman Empire. Before their conquest by the Romans, the Aromanians spoke the Indo-European Thracian-Illyrian or Thraco-Illyrian dialects. The Aromanians can be found living in Romania, northern and central Greece, central and southern Albania, North Macedonia, south-western Bulgaria, Montenegro, in the Dinaric Mountain ranges of Croatia, in the northern tenth part of the Peninsula of Istria that belongs to Slovenia, and in Serbia. The Slavic Croats call the Aromanians Morlachs or Vlachs, while the Hellenic Greeks call them Vlachs. The Aromanian language, which has many dialects of its own, has borrowed many words from the Indo-European Celtic, Slavic and Greek languages, as well as from the Ural-Altaic/Finno-Ugric Hungarian or Magyar language. The Slavs invaded the Balkans from around 550 to 650 A.D., while the Magyars invaded from 894 to around 1000 A.D. The big majority of Aromanians today are Eastern Orthodox Christians, while a minority of them are Roman Catholics, especially those among them who live in parts of Slovenia and Croatia. Many past generations of Aromanians became linguistically and culturally assimilated by the Slavs, Hungarians, Greeks, and Albanians.
The Romanian topographical region of Transylvania was part of the independent Dacian Kingdom from 168 B.C. to 106 A.D., and then part of the Roman province of Dacia from 106 to 275 A.D. The Romans found part of the hidden royal treasure hoard of the Dacian King Decebalus in the Strei River, which amounted to 165,500 kilograms of gold and 331,000 kilograms of silver. The Romans utilized the gold mines of Dacia to fund the economy and military of the Roman Empire, and built access roads and forts to protect them. The forts soon developed into towns. In the late 800's A.D. the Hungarian/Magyars, coming from their original homeland in Kazakhstan where they had been known as the Madjars, invaded and conquered western Transylvania. From around 900 to 1200 A.D. the Hungarians went on to conquer Transylvania in five stages. Most of the Romanians living in Transylvania today are Eastern Orthodox Christians, although a large minority of the Transylvanian Romanians have been Greek Catholic Christians since the 1700's A.D. The Hungarian minority living in Transylvania, located mainly in the center of Transylvania and well away from the Hungarian border, are Roman Catholic Christians, although a large minority of the Transylvanian Hungarians are Calvinist Christians. The continental Saxon German minority in Transylvania are Lutheran Christians, while the Danube Swabian German minority in Transylvania are Roman Catholic Christians. See Religion in Romania. The continental Saxon Germans were brought to Transylvania by the Kings of the Kingdom of Hungary (1000 to 1527 A.D.) to work the gold and silver mines of Romania, as were the Swabian Germans during the time of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire (1527-1867-1918). For a time, Transylvania was a client and tributary province of the Sunni Muslim, Ottoman, but non-Arabic Turkish Empire from 1526 to 1699, and then a province of the Austrian Habsburg Empire from 1699 to 1867. In 1867, under the Dual Monarchy of the Austrian-German Habsburg Empire, Austria and Hungary divided up the imperial provinces between themselves, with Transylvania being awarded to the Hungarian section, an arrangement that lasted until the end of World War One in 1918. In 1918, Transylvania was reunited with the rest of Romania. In 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, National Socialist/Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy forced Romania to cede to Fascist Hungary Northern Transylvania, but Northern Transylvania was reunited with Romania in 1944 when the Soviet Red Army forced the retreating military forces of Nazi Germany and Fascist Hungary out of Romania. See History of Transylvania.
The independent, Indo-European Thracian Kingdom of Dacia (82 B.C. to 106 A.D.), was subjected to the Roman Emperor Trajan's military campaigns of 101-102 and 105-106 A.D. that was aimed with the intention of seizing the Dacian gold mines of Transylvania, with the Roman capture of the famous treasure of the Dacian King Decebalus being its most memorable outcome. The Romans soon exploited the rich ore deposits of Dacia, with gold and silver being especially plentiful, and which was found in great quantities in the Western Carpathian Mountains. See The History of Romania. The Free Dacians were those Dacians who lived outside the provincial borders of Roman Dacia in what is now the Romanian geographical regions of Walachia, Moldavia/Moldova/Bessarabia, Dobruja, Bukovina, and parts of the Banat. After the Roman Emperor Aurelian (reign 270-275 A.D.) withdrew the Roman troops and civil administration stationed in Roman Dacia to the Roman provinces of Moesia and Thrace located to the south of the Danube River, the Dacians living outside the former Roman-Dacian provincial borders joined with the Romano-Dacians to form a vernacular Latin-speaking Daco-Roman ethnic group who in time became the forebears of the modern day Romanian people. The reason why Roman Emperor Aurelian withdrew from Dacia was because its gold mines had become less profitable as it became more expensive to dig deeper over time with the limitations presented by the then state of Roman gold mining technology and techniques. In addition, the salient or bulge formed by the Roman provincial borders of Dacia could be attacked from three sides by the Germanic and Iranian tribes or ethnic-dialect groups living outside the Roman imperial frontiers. In the centuries following the Roman withdrawal from Dacia, various Indo-European Germanic and Slavic, as well as Mongolic-Turkic/Ural-Altaic/Finno-Ugric peoples such as the Huns, Avars and Hungarian-Magyars, invaded and subjugated/enslaved/enserfed the Romanized Dacians/Romanians, with the Slavs and Hungarians contributing many words to the vocabulary of the Romanian Vulgar or vernacular Latin. Since ancient times, the surplus population among the Romanians living in the forested mountains and hills, and the partly forested and partly farmed plateaus of the regions of Transylvania and Bukovina, have emigrated in a steady trickle into the Romanian lowland plains belonging to the regions of Banat, Walachia, Dobruja, and Moldavia (4). When the Roman legions and civil administration withdrew from Dacia, the majority of the peasantry remained behind, and the Dacian peasantry had become heavily Romanized during the years of the Roman occupation from 106 to 275 A.D. (169 years), because the rich gold and silver mines of Dacia had encouraged large scale Roman colonization, as well as intermarriage and polygamous concubinage between the Roman colonists and the colonized, once Thracian-speaking Dacians, with the Roman colonists being mainly miners, towns-folk and rural villa estate owners (5). Both Latin and Thracian are members of the Indo-European language family. The Romanians became Christianized by Greek Eastern Orthodox missionaries and traders sent from the provinces of the East Roman or Byzantine Empire from the 300's A.D. until the conquests made by the Hungarian Magyars in the 900's and 1000's A.D. The Hungarian Magyar monarchy converted to Roman Catholicism in 1000 A.D. The forested Bihor Mountains and the Carpathian-Moldavian and Transylvanian Alps separate the Romanian plateau of Transylvania from the lowland plains of Romania that border the Black Sea. The Carpathian Mountains are crossed by using the many narrow passes found in it (6). When the Roman military and civil admininistration withdrew from Dacia/southern and central Romania in 275 A.D., the majority of the vernacular Latin-speaking commoners stayed behind, with many of them living at the time close to or among the then densely forested valleys that were often located in the hilly and mountainous terrain of Transylvania. The story of the infamous vampire Count Dracula of Transylvania is very loosely based on the life of the ethnically Romanian and originally Eastern Orthodox Christian Vlad Drăculești the Third of the House of Basarab (1428/32 to 1476/77 A.D., Voivode (Prince, Duke, Count, Warlord) of Walachia in 1448, 1456 to 1462, and 1476 to 1477, a region of Romania immediately to the south of the Romanian region of Transylvania. King Matthias Corvinus I (reign 1458 to 1490) forced Vlad the Third to convert to Roman Catholic Christianity while Vlad was a prisoner in Hungary from 1462 to 1476. Vlad the Third was also known as Vlad Țepeş, i.e. Vlad the Impaler. Vlad the Third was called Drăculea or Dracula because he belonged to the chivalric crusading order known as the Order of the Dragon (Dracul in Romanian, Latin Societas Draconistarum, i.e. "Society of the Dragonists"), founded in 1408 by The Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary called Sigismund von Luxembourg (reign 1387 to 1437), the latter of whom was born in the German city of Nuremberg in 1368, the capital of the German region of Franconia, now part of the largely Lutheran Protestant region of Upper or northern Bavaria. The Order of the Dragon took its name from The legend of Saint George and the Dragon, which itself came from the account of The War in Heaven recorded in Chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation in The New Testament Bible, where it is written that the loyal angels of God led by the Archangel Michael ejected out of heaven the rebel, fallen angels or demons led by the dragon and serpent in the Gareden of Eden known as The Archangel Lucifer, Satan, or The Devil, after the ascenscion of Jesus Christ back to Heaven following His resurrection from the dead. Vlad the Third was nicknamed the Impaler because he executed by impaling to death the Muslim Ottoman Turkish prisoners of war whom he had defeated in several battles, i.e. by driving a sharp wooden stake through their anus and out of their chests. Vlad the Third was a boy and teenage hostage of the Ottoman Turkish Sultans Murad the Second and Mehmed the Second the Conqueror during the 1440's, and had been repeatedly raped by his bisexual Turkish captors, which explains his acts of revenge or repayment of evil with evil against the Muslim Turks. Later Vlad Dracula's impaling through the anus was transformed into the legend that vampires could only be killed by driving a wooden stake through their heart. Saint George and The Archangel Michael are the patron saints of Knights, military personnel, and law enforcement officers because of The New Testament passages of Luke 3:12-14, Luke 20:19-26, Matthew 5:38-42, John 19:10-11, Romans 13:1-7, I Peter 2:13-20, Ephesians 6:5-9, I Corinthians 7:20-24, and Hebrews 13:17, which teach that all the authorities on Earth are appointed by God to enforce law and order, and so are therefore not to be resisted. The Apostle Saint Paul twice taught that whoever teaches that Jesus Christ is not God Himself in the body of a man (John 1:1-5) are accursed and the agents of Satan, the latter of whom can disguise himself as an angel of light (II Corinthians 11:1-15 and Galatians 1:6-9). The Sunni Muslim, Ottoman Turks, conquerors of the Greek Byzantine or East Roman, Eastern Orthodox Christian Empire, tried to conquer as much as possible during the lifetime of Vlad the Third the then Roman Catholic Christian, Holy Roman Empire. See Vlad the Impaler. The Muslims believe that Jesus Christ is the Word of God, as taught in The Gospel of John 1:1-5, and is the second most important prophet in Islam after Muhammad, but is not God Himself in the body of a man, as is taught in John 1:1-5. Here are a following selection of chapters and verses from the Muslim Bible known as the Koran or Quran that support the Muslim doctrine of Jihad or Holy War aimed ultimately at Islamic world conquest: Quran 2:191-193, 3:151, 8:12, 8:39, 9:5, 9:29, 9:29, 9:33, 9:73, 9:123, 25:52, 47:3-4, 48:17, 48:29, 61:4, 61:10-12, and 66:9. See (a). The Quran's Verses of Violence, (b). Myths of Islam: Muslims Believe in Jesus, and (c). Myths of Islam by TROP (The Religion of Peace).Org. While medieval Christian crusaders shouted "Deus lo Vult" or "God wills it," medieval and modern day Muslim Jihadists or holy warriors shouted and still shout "Allahu Akbar," i.e. "God/Allah is great." See Myths of Islam-Jihad Means 'Inner Struggle' by TROP.Org.
The Hungarian Magyars gradually conquered the Romanians of Transylvania in stages from around 900 to 1200 A.D. The Roman Catholic and Calvinist Hungarian nobility ruled the Transylvanian Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic-Uniate Orthodox Romanians as serfs or landed tenant slaves until Romania recovered Transylvania in 1918, after the Hohenzollern monarchy of Romania declared war in 1916 on the Central Powers nations of Hohenzollern-Prussian dominated Germany, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Bulgaria, and Ottoman imperial Turkey during World War One (1914-1918). The Lutheran and Catholic branches of the German Hohenzollerns, the Austrian Catholic Habsburgs, and the Lutheran German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha were royal dynasties, and the Sunni Muslim Ottomans were the ruling dynasty of the Turkish Empire. The current British royal family called itself the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until renaming itself the House of Windsor in 1917 during World War One, but it was loyal to the Allied Cause in both World Wars One and Two, with the infamous exception of King Edward the Eighth, reign 1936, who understandably enough was worried more by Communist Russia than Nazi Germany, because the Russian Communists had overthrown and then murdered the Eastern Orthodox Russian Royal family of the Romanov dynasty in the years from 1917 to 1918, and the Romanovs were closely related to the Prussian-German Hohenzollerns and the British Windsors. To varying degrees all the royal and princely dynasties of Europe have intermarried with each other over the centuries, often for geopolitical reasons in the years when European monarchs and princes were anything but mere ceremonial figureheads as they are today. Many of the Romanian nobility and middle class intermarried with the Hungarian nobility and middle class during the long centuries when Hungary ruled the Romanian region of Transylvania, and in the process they learnt the Hungarian language and adopted Hungarian personal names in a process known as Magyarization. In the Second Vienna Award of 1940, sponsored by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during World War Two (1939-1945), Fascist Hungary seized Northern Transylvania from Romania, and held it until it was reunited with Romania after the Soviet Red Army drove out the military forces of the Axis European nations of Hungary and Germany. The Hungarian ethnic minority living mainly in central Transylvania, mainly Roman Catholic in religion but with a large Calvinist minority since the Protestant Reformation of 1517-1648, were eager Axis collaborators. The Hungarian Fascist political party called The Arrow Cross enthusiastically helped the Nazis from March/October 1944 to April 1945 in deporting the Jews of Northern Transylvania and Hungary, most of whom died in the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps, with the more healthy Jews worked close to death as slave labor before being gassed to death. When Romania was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944, the Romanian Fascist political party called The Iron Guard also helped the Nazis in deporting the Jewish minority of Romania to the gas chambers of the extermination camps, as well as to the penal labor or slave labor concentration camps. The Lutheran German continental Saxon and Catholic German Swabian minorities of Northern Transylvania were also enthusiastic collaborators with the occupying military forces of Nazi Germany during World War Two. Both Fascist Hungary and Fascist Romania sent military forces to fight alongside the forces of Nazi Germany during their invasion of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944, largely under the duress of Nazi Germany, which needed to boost its manpower as much as possible. The Nazi German Third Reich (January 30-March 5-March 23-July 14, 1933 to May 8/23, 1945) had annexed a rather willing German-speaking Austria on March 12, 1938, and Austria had been detached from the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Austro-Hungarian Empire since the end of World War One on November 11, 1918. Austria had become separated from the German Confederation (1815-1871) after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Adolf Hitler had been born on April 20, 1889, in the Austrian town of Braunau-am-Inn (Braunau-on-Inn), located just south of the German state of Bavaria, from which it is separated by the Inn River. Hitler had fought with the army of The Second German Reich (1871-1918) on the Western Front in France during World War One, reaching the rank of lance corporal. The First German Reich was The Holy Roman Empire of 962 to 1806 A.D. The ultra-nationalist Hungarian Fascists as part of their self-serving propaganda which they used in justifying their territorial demands upon Romanian Transylvania, argued that when the Romans withdrew from Dacia in 275 A.D. they allegedly took with them the big majority of the Romanized Dacians, and then resettled them in their provinces south of the Danube River, with the former Roman province of Dacia located to the north of the Danube River. According to the Hungarian propaganda, the resettled Romanian Dacians did not begin to move back into the nation of Romania, including its region of Transylvania, until after 1150 A.D., sometime after the Hungarians began their invasion and conquest of Transylvania after 1000 A.D. See Origin of the Romanians. The work of archaeo-geneticists and archaeologists in recent times has disproven this Hungarian wishful thinking, finding a significant amount of DNA or genes of Roman colonists from the other provinces of the Roman Empire who settled in Dacia during Roman times, and who often intermarried or sexually intermingled with the Dacians, often in the polygamous concubinage sort of relationship between a Roman master and a Roman slave, servant, or villa-manorial serf. See Romanians. DNA testing and archaeological research in recent times has revealed that the English have a substantial amount of Pre-Indo-European but Caucasian, Ice Age Basque ancestry, and that the subsequent invasions of Britain and Ireland by the Indo-European speaking Celts, Latin Romans, Germanic Anglo-Saxons, Germanic Viking Scandinavians, and Norman French were of elite male warrior minorities who intermarried extensively with the prehistoric, originally hunter-gathering Basques who were widespread in western and south-western Europe during the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age (2,000,000 to 8000 B.C.) and the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age (8000 to 3000 B.C.). The Neolithic or New Stone Age (8000 to 3000 B.C) began with the farmers of the Middle Eastern river valleys, followed by the Indo-European pastoralists who originally came from the steppes and prairies of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine during the Copper (6500 to 3000 B.C.), Bronze (3000 to 1000 B.C.), and Iron Ages ( 1000 B.C. to 100 A.D.). According to the research of the archaeo-geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer about 5.5% of the English have Anglo-Saxon genes, and about 2% of the English have Norman French genes. About 50% of the words used in the English language are derived from the Norman French Latin vernacular (i.e. Latinized Danish Vikings), while 20% are derived from the Germanic Anglo-Saxon dialects. Roman Britain (43 A.D. to 410 A.D.) was a far flung frontier and overseas province of the Roman Empire that was never profitable, and that is why when the Romans left in 410 A.D. it continued to be mainly Celtic-speaking among the Romano-British peasantry, as well as largely Celtic and/or Greco-Roman pagan or polytheist in religion. When the Romans left Britain to participate in a series of civil wars fought in the western half of the Roman Empire from 407 to 411, 413, 421, 423-425, 427, and 432 A.D, at the same time it was being invaded by Germanic, Iranian, and Hunnish-Mongol tribes, the Romano-British reverted to tribal civil warfare and warlordism, and this disunity was exploited by the invading Germanic Anglo-Saxons who went on to conquer Britain in gradual stages from around 450 to 580 A.D. One of the Romano-British warlords was known as Ambrosius Aurelianus or Riothamus, the semi-legendary King Arthur, who flourished around 500 A.D, and who for a while halted the advance of the Anglo-Saxons, at least during his lifetime, after which the Romano-British again relapsed into civil warfare and collaboration with the Germanic Anglo-Saxons. Unlike the Germanic, Iranian, and Hunnish-Mongol tribal invaders of the wealthier and more intensely Latinized and Christianised Roman provinces of Gaul/France, Iberia/Spain and Portugal, and Italia/Italy, and who went on to learn the Roman vernaculars of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian that were associated with the grandeur and glory of the Roman Empire, and who also soon converted to Christianity, the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain largely looked down upon the British Celtic dialects as the language of still largely pagan peasants spoken in a post-Roman land torn by civil war and warlordism, foreign invasions, and economic collapse, in other words post-Roman Britain for a long time was a failed state. It was easier for the Germanic Franks, Visigoths, Burgundians, Ostrogoths, Vandals, and Sueves, as well as for the Iranian Alans and Mongolic Huns, to conquer in larger numbers by horseback on land the Roman provinces of Gaul or Gallia (France), Hispania (Spain and Portugal), and Italia (Italy), than it was for the Germanic Angles, Saxons, Jutes, East and West Frisians, and the Franks to conquer the Roman province of Britannia (England and Wales) by ship, because the island of Britain has been separated from continental Europe by sea since the melting away of the last Ice Age. See Myths of British Ancestry. Unlike Roman Britain, Roman Dacia/Romania in the largely forested and mountainous Balkans was a very valuable source of gold and silver for the Roman imperial budget, economy, and military spending, and was also a source of manpower to be recruited for the multi-ethnic Roman military. The reason why the region of northwestern Gaul/France known as Armorica remained a largely Gaulish-Celtic speaking enclave during the long period of Roman rule, was because it has thin, rocky soils, and was therefore neglected economically by the Romans. The Gaulish-Celtic speakers of Armorica were reinforced by British-Celtic speaking war refugees in the 400's and 500's A.D. who were fleeing the civil wars, warlordism, and Germanic invasions happening in post-Roman Britain at the time, and who went on to rename Armorica Brittany, i.e. "Little Britain." The now English regions of Cornwall, Wales, and Cumbria, which were not to be conquered by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons and Norman French until several centuries after 600 A.D., remained Celtic-speaking areas despite having been long under Roman rule, largely because of their hilly and mountainous terrain.
The modern day nation of Moldova (also known as Moldavia and Bessarabia), was formerly one of the 15 republics that made up the Russian dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or U.S.S.R. from 1940 to 1991. The large majority of Moldavians are ethnically Romanian, separated from the Romanian region of Moldavia that lies to the west of the Prut River from the former Soviet republic. In ancient times, the former Soviet republic of Moldova was inhabited by those independent Dacian tribes living outside the Roman province of Dacia, the latter of which is now the Romanian region of Transylvania. In the 1939 Soviet-Nazi Non-Aggression Pact or Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed between Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, Moldavia lying east of the Prut River and west of the Dniestr River was ceded to the Soviet Union. On June 28, 1940, the Soviet military crossed west of the Dniester River and seized from Romania the regions of Hertza, Moldavia east of the Prut River, and Northern Bukovina, with about half of the seized areas being transferred to the Soviet republic of The Ukraine, with the independent nation of Ukraine retaining that half to this day, a half that has been extensively settled/invaded by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians since 1812 and 1940. The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggresion Pact ended on June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany launched its massive Blitzkrieg (Lightning War) invasion known as Operation Barbarossa against the Communist Soviet Union. The Empire of Romanov Czarist Russia had once before seized Romanian Moldavia east of the Prut River in 1812 at a time when Romania was divided between the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This annexed area of Moldavia was reunited with Romania in November 1918 at the conclusion of The First World War. The imperial Russian Czars of the Romanov dynasty had been overthrown by the Russian Social Democrats led by Alexander Kerensky in March 1917, and in November 1917 the Russian Provisional Government led by Kerensky was overthrown by the Russian Bolsheviks or Communists led by Vladimir Lenin, the latter of whom withdrew industrially backward Russia in March 1918 from participating in the diastrous Russian war effort against Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Turkish Empire. When the Soviet Red Army ejected the army of Nazi Germany from Moldavia east of the Dniester River in 1944, the Soviet Union retained the lands it had seized from Romania in 1940. See History of Moldova (Moldavia or Bessarabia). The modern day Russian puppet state of Transnistria or Trans-Dniester is a state that broke away from the former Soviet Republic of Moldova after a relatively brief war fought in 1992, helped by the backing of the Russian military. The Russian dominated Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. Transnistria or Trans-Dniester is a narrow strip of land located east of the Dniester River, sandwiched between the former Soviet Republics of Moldova and The Ukraine. The United Nations, with the exception of The Russian Federation, regards Trans-Dniester as legally belonging to the nation of Moldova. Trans-Dniester has seen large scale settlement/invasion by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians since 1812 and 1940. Because the former Soviet Republic of Moldova belonged before 1812 to Romania, and again from 1918 to 1940, the nation of Moldova should be reunited with the nation of Romania, although it would be impractical and dangerous for Romania to make an attempt to reunite with the Russian protected state of Transnistria. The Bulgarian region of South Dobruja, in contrast to the Romanian region of North Dobruja that lies north of the Danube River, had been seized by Romania from Bulgaria after the end of The Second Balkan War in 1913. In 1913, only about 2% of the population of South Dobruja was ethnically Romanian, while 56.8% of the population of North Dobruja was ethnically Romanian. In the 1940 Treaty of Craiova sponsored by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the then Kingdom of Bulgaria, at the time heavily influenced by the Bulgarian Fascist political party known as the Orange Guard, regained South Dobruja. In 1940, the Romanians living in South Dobruja were forcibly expelled into Romania, while the Bulgarians living in North Dobruja were forcibly expelled into Bulgaria. During the early Iron Age (800 to 500 B.C.), the Black Sea coastal plains of Dobruja had been inhabited by the Thracian tribe known as the Getae, close linguistic cousins of their neighbors to the west known as the Dacians, the latter of whom were the pre-Romanized ancestors of the modern day Romanians. The Slavic Bulgarians invaded and settled in southern Dobruja after around 602 A.D., followed in the 680's A.D. by the Mongolic-Turkic Bulgars, the latter of whom became Slavicized in language within a few generations. In 1944, when the Soviet Red Army ejected the army of Nazi Germany from Bulgaria, South Dobruja was retained by Bulgaria with the permission of the Soviets. The Russians had liberated Bulgaria from Turkey in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, and Russian Armies had reached as far as the Straits of Constantinople located along the shores of the the Ottoman Turkish capital of Istanbul, before being pressured to evacuate from Turkish occupied East Thrace by Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Germany in 1878 was not quite yet the industrial and military giant it was to become by the start of World War One in 1914, when it threatened to become the sole superpower in continental Europe. The British navy became worried after 1898 when Germany embarked on a massive build up of its naval forces, in particular in its battleships and submarines (7). Germany had become united in 1871 under the leadership of the Lutheran Hohenzollern dynasty of the German state of Brandenburg-Prussia, after defeating France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, a war won for Germany by the technologically superior artillery, railway systems, telegraph, and military General Staff of Brandenburg-Prussia. See Italy and Vichy France in World War Two: The Reluctant German Allies. The Russians and Turks had for centuries prior to 1878 been rivals over who would control the Black Sea, The Balkan Peninsula, the Straits of Constantinople, the Aegean Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, and the Caucasus, and Germany's ally Austria-Hungary came to compete with Russia over control of the Balkans after the Turks began to lose control over that region after 1878. The Slavic Bulgarians share borders with their ancient rivals the Turks and Romanians, who also happen to be the ancient rivals of the Slavic Russians. The Slavic Bulgarians are also old rivals with the Slavic Serbians over the region of North Macedonia, and the Bulgarians are also old rivals with the Hellenic Greeks over the ancient Greek regions of South Macedonia and western Thrace. Both the Greeks and Bulgarians would like to control the East Thracian region of Turkey in Europe, conquered by the Turks from the Byzantine Greeks in the 1300's and 1400's A.D. Serbia is an old ally of Russia since the time of the collapse of the once Turkish controlled Balkans from 1877 to 1913, and Greece, a former victim of Turkey, as well as of Bulgaria, is allied to the Russians because of the old imperial rivalry between Russia and Turkey. Romania, a victim of past Hungarian and Bulgarian aggression, is an old ally of Serbia, because Serbia too has been victmized in the past by Hungarian and Bulgarian agression, although the Romanians have also been victimized in the past by Russian aggression, while Serbia in the past has benefited from Russian military intervention directed against Turkish, Austro-Hungarian, and German aggression, but not against Bulgarian aggression. The Slavic Serbs, Montenegrins, North Macedonians, and Bulgarians are Byzantine derived Eastern Orthodox Christians like the Slavic Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and so are the Latin Romanians and the Hellenic Greeks. All of the above mentioned ethnic groups are speakers of the Indo-European language family.
The Blitzkrieg or Nazi Lightning War in 1941 and 1942 had seen the capture of vast amounts of territory in the European part of Russia, that was only halted by the sheer geographical size and population of the Soviet Union, as well as by its bitterly cold winters, the same factors that had been the undoing of the French Napoleonic invasion of 1812. Joseph Stalin in the 1930's had executed or imprisoned many of the top Red Army officers, for he feared that they might have tried to remove him from power, and had replaced them with incompetent and inexperienced officers whose loyalty he could be assured of (8). Nevertheless, the brutality of the Germans towards the people of the Soviet Union, whom they regarded as Slavic sub-humans or untermenschen (under-men), in sharp contrast to the Germanic ubermenschen (over-men, supermen), meant that the Nazis soon lost their initial support from the Soviets, many of whom at the beginning welcomed them as liberators from the harsh Communist regime (9). This latter factor in hardening Soviet resistance, and the vast industrial potential of Russia located safely out of Nazi reach east of the Ural mountain ranges which separates European from Asian Russia, meant that Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was ultimately doomed to failure. In sharp contrast to the situation in Russia during World War Two, Russia during World War One had a shortage of everything except manpower, for at that stage of its history it was still a largely underindustrialized country (10). Russia's military and economic disasters during World War One largely contributed to the two revolutions of 1917 and its surrender to Germany in early 1918. Stalin during the 1930's had forced a program of industrialization and collectivization of agriculture for the Soviet Union, that had resulted in a sharp decline in agricultural output and millions of deaths in a famine (11). The inefficient communist system, which ignored the free enterprise laws of supply and demand, meant that the Soviet Union until its demise in 1991 was seldom if ever self-sufficient in food production, and was dependent on imported wheat from such countries as The United States, Canada, Argentina, and Australia (12). The Communist system, because it ignored the free market laws of supply and demand, meant that Soviet industry regularly produced shortages and surpluses. The shortages led to inflation in real terms via a black market, and the surpluses led to Soviet factories running at a loss and having to be ultimately subsidized by taxpayers (13). "In March 1941 the Russian military asked Stalin to agree to the call-up of reserves for re-training. Stalin refused on the grounds that it might have provided the Germans with an excuse for provoking war. At this time German reconnaissance planes made daily flights over Soviet territory and provided the Germans with detailed pictures of the Russian defences. Stalin issued strict orders that the planes were not to be fired on. When the Soviet commander at Kiev ordered some of his troops to occupy sections of the frontier fortifications which had not yet been completed, he received the order from Moscow that his actions might provoke the Germans to attack, and was ordered to reverse his decision immediately" (14). "Stalin regarded the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939 as a time-gaining stop-gap, but the time-span proved much shorter than he anticipated. His chief mistake was in overestimating the period he had available for preparation, and he was genuinely surprised when the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. On June 6, 1941 Stalin approved a plan for the shift-over of Soviet industry to war production; this timetable called for the completion of the plan by the end of 1942" (15). "In the period 1939-1941, Russian industry was not put on to a war footing: many types of new weapons, tanks, and aircraft, which had already been tested and were superior to their German equivalents, were not put into production; some proven weapons, such as the 44-mm. anti-tank gun, were actually withdrawn from service; the reorganisation of armoured units was not carried through; troop training was still on a peacetime basis" (16). World War Two ended in 1945, and the Cold War between the largely capitalist, democratic United States and the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union began soon after, a war which was to last until 1991. The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, and then went on to explode its first hydrogen bomb in 1953. The Americans exploded their first atomic bomb in 1945, followed by the explosion of their first hydrogen bomb in 1952. Since Vladimir Putin came to power in The Russian Federation in 2000, there has been a tense and mistrustful cold peace between The United States and Russia, especially after Russia's annexations in part of The Ukraine in 2014, and Russia's participation in the Syrian Civil War since 2015 on President and dictator Bashar al-Assad's side, who like his deceased father Hafez al-Assad is a long time rival of the pro-American Israel. Sunni Muslim, Ural-Altaic Turkey, and Shiite Alawite Muslim controlled, Arabic Syria, have been old rivals since the Middle Ages.
Before the Finno-Ugric/Ural-Altaic, Hungarian Magyar tribes arrived in what is today the land of the nation of Hungary between 894 to 1000 A.D. from their ancestral Madjar tribal homeland located in present-day Kazakhstan, Hungary was part of the Roman province of Pannonia, located in the Great Danubian Plain of south-eastern Europe, a well-watered, fertile, and highly productive agricultural land. In addition to Hungarian, the Finno-Ugric language family also includes Chuvash and Bashkir spoken in parts of Russia in between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains, as well as Finnish and Estonian. The Magyars or Hungarians lived in the region of Russia between the Volga and Ural Rivers from 3000 B.C. to 500 A.D., but by the 890's A.D. some of them had invaded and settled in what is now Hungary. Until 955 A.D., when they were finally checked and defeated by the continental Saxon German and Roman Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Otto I the Great at the Battle of Lechfeld in southern Germany, the Magyars raided on horseback as mounted archers, lancers, and swordsmen all over Europe, like their distant cousins the Huns and Avars had done before them. The Magyar royal family and aristocracy converted to the Roman Catholic denomination of Christianity in 1000 A.D. (17). The Roman province of Pannonia, officially in existence from 20 A.D. to 107 A.D., is now included in the nations of western Hungary, eastern Austria, northern Croatia, northwestern Serbia, northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, and northern Slovenia. The Pannonians were a group of Illyrian Indo-Europeans. They were invaded by Celtic tribes in the 300's B.C. The Romans conquered the Pannonian tribes from 35 B.C. to 9 B.C. From 400 to 1000 A.D. the Vernacular Latin spoken by the Pannonians gradually went extinct. After the West Roman Empire (395-476 A.D.) fragmented and declined because of civil warfare and foreign invasions, Pannonia became invaded and occupied by the Mongol-Turkic or Ural-Altaic Huns and Avars, the Iranian Alans, Sarmatians, and Scythians, the Germanic Lombards, Gepids, and Ostrogoths, and the Slavic Croats and Serbs, before finally being invaded by the Finno-Ugric, Hungarian Magyars. See History of Hungary Before the Hungarian Conquest. The Magyar or Hungarian military tactics were similar to those used by their other nomadic and pastoralist linguistic cousins of the Eurasian steppes known as the Huns (Xiong-nu), Avars, Pechenegs, Cumans, Bulgars, Turks, and Mongols, as well as that used by the Indo-European, Iranian-Aryan Eurasian steppe pastoralists known as the Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans. The military tactics of the Eurasian steppe semi-nomads was to use their light cavalry to shoot arrows from a long distance using composite recurved bows from horseback in surprise flank attacks, encirclements, and feigned retreats, followed up by a charge of their heavy cavalry using lances. Both the light and heavy cavalry were armed with sabres or scimitar swords for personal sidearms. The bone reinforced reflex bows of the semi-nomads could fire up to a distance of 60 to 70 meters or 200 to 230 feet. The body armor of the Eurasian steppe nomads were breastplates, backplates, and helmets made of lacquered leather or overlapping metal scales. The Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan also known as Temjüin (reign 1206-1227 A.D.) divided up his armies into units of tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands, and Emperor Attila the Hun (reign 434-453 A.D.) probably did the same with his armies. See Hungarian Prehistory. The Hungarians or Magyar tribes crossed the Carpathian Mountains from the steppes and pairies of what is now The Ukraine and entered The Carpathian Basin in 895/896 A.D. under the leadership of King Árpád. The Asiatic Magyar invaders were a small warrior-elite minority that ruled over a largely farming and herding Caucasian population living in what today is the nation of Hungary. Over the following generations they intermarried with their subjugated Caucasian population, adopted their sedentary way of life, and converted to the Roman Catholic denomination of Christianity. The Asiatic Huns themselves had living under their rule many subjugated Germanic, Slavic, and Iranian tribes, as well as Romanized provincials, all of whom the Huns forced to serve in their armies and to pay tribute or protection money. After Attila the Hun died in 453 A.D., his sons began a civil war in their father's empire over who should become the next Emperor of the Huns, and this gave the subjugated non-Huns the courage to rise up and overthrow their Hun masters. The Huns in the generations following the death of Attila became absorbed into the Caucasian race of Europe through intermarriage.
Through a process known as Magyarization, the non-Hungarian nationals of what is now parts of Latinized, formerly Thracian-Dacian Romania, Slavic Serbia, Slavic Croatia, Slavic Slovenia, Germanic Austria, Slavic Slovakia, and the Slavic Ukraine, came to adopt the Hungarian culture and language, either voluntarily or due to social pressure, often in the form of a coercive policy. These neighboring non-Hungarian nationals had arrived in their respective homelands several centuries before the Hungarians, and in the case of Romania and The Ukraine, thousands of years before. Magyarization could result in rewards for achievements made in military campaigns, for example noble titles granted to some Romanian knezes (i.e. princes, dukes, counts, and barons) who entered the ranks of the Hungarian nobility, with some of them even converting from the Eastern Orthodox to the Roman Catholic and Calvinist denominations of Christianity. Many Romanian noble and middle class families became Magyarized in names and language, as did many of their counterparts among the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Austrians, Slovaks and Ruthenian Ukrainians. Hungary, situated in the Trans-Danubian Plains, also known as the Carpathian Basin, borders the nations of Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and south-east, Serbia to the south, Croatia and Slovenia to the south-west, and Austria to the west. In the post-World War One Treaty of Trianon (1920), Hungary lost 71% of "its" territory, 58% of "its" population, and 32% of the ethnically Hungarian population. Many of the ethnic Hungarians living outside the post-1920 borders had conquered the peoples of the nations bordering Hungary from around 900 to 1200 A.D., with these conquered peoples having lived in the conquered territories long before the arrival of the Hungarians. As mentioned before, some of these conquered peoples became Magyarized through more or less voluntary social climbing, appeasement, collaboration, and treason. From 1867 to 1918, under the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, Austria and Hungary divided up the provinces of the German-Austrian Habsburg Empire between themselves, while the Catholic German-Austrian Habsburg dynasty had the final say on defence and foreign policy concerning the Empire, known as The Holy Roman Empire until 1806 before being defeated by Napoleon Bonaparte I that year, the same year in which Napoleon defeated the north German state of Brandenburg-Prussia ruled by the Lutheran Hohenzollern dynasty. Before the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin from 896 to 955 A.D., the region was inhabited in the following order of invasion by Illyrian Pannonians, Celts, Romans, Germanic tribes, Huns, the Slavic Croats and Serbs, and the Avars. See History of Hungary.
King Stephen I of Hungary was baptised a Roman Catholic in 1000 A.D., and then went on to promulgate Roman Catholicism as the state religion of Hungary. After the Protestant Reformation began in Germany in 1517 with Martin Luther, most of the Hungarians converted to Lutheranism, and soon afterwards to Calvinism, the latter of which belonged more to the mainline Presbyterian than the evangelical Congregationalist variety. After around 1550 A.D., the Roman Catholic religious order of the Jesuits led the Counter Reformation campaign, with the result that a majority of the Hungarians again became Roman Catholics, although religious freedom was secured by the Hungarian nobles, with a large minority of them continuing to be Calvinist in their Christian denomination. By the conclusion of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in Europe, northern and eastern Germany remained largely Lutheran Protestant, while southern and western Germany, along with German-speaking Austria, remained largely Roman Catholic. By 1648, a large minority of what is now the nations of The Netherlands and Switzerland were Roman Catholics. Some localities scattered throughout the modern day borders of Hungary still have Protestant majorities, either Lutheran or Calvinist in denomination. The eastern regions of Hungary approaching the borders of the Romanian region of Transylvania, especially around the city of Debrecen (nicknamed the "Calvinist Rome"), are predominantly Calvinist in faith. The Hungarian landed and mercantile nobility usually imposed their faith upon their bonded tenants or serfs, servants, and employees. Members of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity can be found among Hungary's ethnic minorities, i.e. the Romanians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and Rusyns (i.e. Rusnaks, Carpatho-Ruthenians or Carpatho-Russians living in far western Ukraine). Some of the Romanian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn ethnic minorities living in Hungary are Greek Catholics or Uniate Eastern Orthodox who acknowledge the doctrinal and hierarchical authority of the Pope. The continental Saxon Germans living in Hungary are mainly Lutherans, while the Danubian Swabian Germans are Roman Catholics. The Slavic Croat minority living in Hungary are Roman Catholics. See Religion in Hungary. In 1941, with the approval of Nazi Germany, Hungary seized a part of the Serbian region of Vojvodina, as well as a part of Slovenia, where there were ethnic Hungarian minorities living since the early 900's A.D., even though the Slovenes and Serbs had arrived there before them in the late 500's and early 600's A.D. Slovenia during World War Two was divided up three ways between Fascist Hungary, Nazi Germany/Austria, and Fascist Italy. I believe that it is historically fair for the non-Hungarian ethnic minorities living within the borders of modern-day Hungary to accept living under Hungarian rule, while the Hungarian ethnic minorities living in the nations bordering Hungary should accept living under their host nations' rule.
"Ruthenia is a region in the western Ukraine. It lies on the southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains and on the neighboring south-west highland. Ruthenia covers 4,940 square miles (12,800 square kilometers). Uzhgorod is the region's chief city. During the Middle Ages, the region now called the Ukraine was known as Ruthenia. Later, the Ukrainians living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were called Ruthenians. Ruthenia became part of the nation of Czechoslovakia in 1919. Ruthenia has real military value because of its location near the borders of several nations. Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Russian dominated Soviet Union all tried to gain control of the region during the 1900's. In 1938, under the agreement called the First Vienna Award that was sponsored by Nazi/National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, Hungary took over a strip of Ruthenia along the southern border of the region. The rest of Ruthenia became a self-governing province within Czechoslovakia. Hungary, with the approval of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, took control of the rest of Ruthenia in 1939, a few months before World War Two began. Hungary lost the region to Czechoslovakia in 1945 when World War Two ended, and Czechoslovakia gave it to the Soviet Union later that year." (18). Because the Slavs have lived in the Ruthenian part of The Ukraine for far longer than the Hungarians, the Hungarian ethnic minority living there should accept living under Ukrainian rule.
"The Slavs are any of several groups of peoples, most of whom live in eastern Europe. They speak the related Slavic or Slavonic languages/dialects, a branch of the Indo-European language family. The first Slavs lived more than 5000 years ago (3000 B.C.). They occupied a region that now forms part of the north-western Ukraine and south-eastern Poland. From A.D. 200 to 500, they migrated to other parts of Europe. Some settled in what are now parts of western Russia and eastern and central Europe. Others migrated to the region of south-eastern Europe known as the Balkans. Historians classify the Slavs into three main groups - (a) eastern, (b) western, and (c) southern - based on the regions in which these people live. The Eastern Slavs consist of the Belarusians/Byelorussians, or White Russians; the Russians, or Great Russians; and the Ukrainians, or Little Russians/Border or Frontier Russians. The Western Slavs form a group that includes the Czechs; the Slovaks; the Poles; the Wends who are also known as the Sorbs, White Serbs, or Lusatians; and the Bielochrovats or White Croats. The White Serbs and White Croats border each other. The Southern Slavs or so-called Yugoslavs are composed of the Serbs, the Montenegrins, the Croats, the Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks, the Bulgarians, the North Macedonians, and the Slovenes. The closely related Serbo-Croatian dialects consist of Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian." (19) The South Slavs of the Balkans became separated from the West Slavs of what today is southern Poland, the southern part of eastern Germany, Czechia, and Slovakia after the Hungarian Magyars invaded and conquered what today is the nation of Hungary from 894 to around 1000 A.D. Most of the Slavs are either Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christians, a division that began with the division of the once pagan or polytheist Roman Empire into the West Roman Empire (395-476 A.D.) and the East Roman or Byzantine Empire (395-1453 A.D.). The Hungarian Magyars conquered what is now the Ukrainian region of Ruthenia in the late 800's A.D. The Germanic, Scandinavian Nordic/Norse Swedish Vikings were the first ones to unify the Slavic tribes of Russia, Byelorussia, and The Ukraine in the state called Kievan Rús that lasted from 862 to 1054 A.D. The Swedish Vikings in Russia, known as the Rús or Varangians, were able to conquer the medieval Slavic tribes of modern-day Russia, Belarus, and The Ukraine because they were in a disunited state, constantly warring and feuding with one another, and the Varangians took advantage of this by setting one Slavic tribe against another. In the process of conquering the Russian tribes, the Slavs often collaborated with the Swedish Vikings, and the majority of Swedish armies in Russia were made up of Slavic volunteers and conscripts, even among the commanders. The Swedish Vikings used the great and long river routes and lakes of European Russia to connect the Baltic Sea with the Black and Caspian Seas. Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rús converted to the Byzantine Eastern Orthodox Church in 988 A.D., with the Slavic and Swedish Viking Russians having previously been believers in the prehistoric Indo-European pagan or polytheist religions. Once economically, militarily, and technologically backward Russia was invaded many times throughout history by such peoples as the Mongols, Turks, Poles, Lutheran Christian Swedes, Napoleonic French, The Second German Reich (1871-1918) and Austria-Hungary (1806-1918), and most infamously by the Nazi German Third Reich (1933-1945). See The Vikings in Russia and Etcetera. Nobody would dare to invade the technologically advanced, nuclear-armed, petroleum and natural gas rich superpower that The Russian Federation has been since 1949/1953. Since 1991 the capital of Russia is Moscow, that of The Ukraine is Kiev, and that of Belarus is Minsk.
The Slavic Slovaks arrived in what is now Slovakia from neighboring Poland in several waves from circa 400 to 600 A.D. In 907 A.D. the Hungarians/Magyars conquered Slovakia, with some of them settling there. Some of the Slovaks subsequently became Magyarized. In the First Vienna Award of 1938 sponsored by Nazi/National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, a large part of southern Slovakia became annexed by Fascist Hungary. This annexed area of Slovakia was returned to the Slovaks in 1945 by the Soviet Red Army. See History of Slovakia. Most Slovaks are Roman Catholics, while a large majority of Hungarians are too.
During the late Iron Age, what is now Austria was occupied by the Hallstatt Celtic culture from around 800 B.C. onwards, as was what is now southern and western Germany. Similarly, the West Slavs occupied what is now the eastern part of Germany, specifically the German lands east of the Saale and Elbe Rivers from around 600 A.D. onwards, having conquered the Germanic tribes living there, many of whom had migrated into the western and eastern provinces of the Roman Empire during the late 300's, 400's and 500's A.D. (Polabian Slavs), at a time when the western provinces of the Roman Empire were torn by civil wars from 383-388, 392-394, 397-398, 407-411, 413, 421, 423-425, 427, and 432 A.D. See (a). The Decline and Fall of the Western Roman Empire; (b). Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire; (c). The Decline and Fall of the Byzantine Empire; (d). List of Roman Civil Wars and Revolts; List of Roman Usurpers; (e). List of Byzantine Revolts and Civil Wars; (f). List of Byzantine Usurpers; (g). Roman Usurper; (h). The Battle of Manzikert (1071 A.D.); (i). Andronikos Doukas (cousin of Michael VII); (j). Roman Army; (k). Late Roman Army; (l). Byzantine Army; (m).Roman Navy; (n). Byzantine Navy; (o).The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9 A.D.); (p). Arminius/Hermann; (q). Germanicus Caesar; (r). The Battle of Idistaviso-The First Battle of Minden-The Battle of the Weser River (16 A.D.); (s). The Battle of the Angrivarian Wall (16 A.D.); and (t). The Battle at the Harzhorn around 235 A.D. The Germans began to conquer, colonize, and culturally and linguistically assimilate the West Slavs of what is now the eastern part of Germany in gradual stages from around 1150 A.D. onwards. See The Great Polabian Slav Uprising of Eastern Germany in 983 A.D. The current Polish-German post-1945 border along the Oder-Western Neisse Rivers is the border that existed between Germany and Poland around 1200 A.D. (20) The result of the 1945 border changes and forcible ethnic expulsions between Poland and Germany, sponsored by the Soviet Union, as Arnold Toynbee wrote, "was to cancel the ethnic effects of a thousand years of German, Polish and Lithuanian conquest and colonization and to restore the ethnic map to something like the status quo ante A.D. 1200." (21). Poland also was stripped of lands in what is now Belarus and The Ukraine by the Soviet Union, areas that the Poles had conquered many centuries before. "The Teutonic Knights was the name of an organization of German crusaders that arose in Europe during the 1100's A.D. The Teutonic Knights were organized for service in the Holy Land, i.e. the part of the Middle East known as the Levant (for example the infamous fallout between Duke Leopold V of Austria and the Anglo-Norman French King Richard I the Lionheart at Acre/Akko in Palestine/modern day Israel, during The Third Crusade of 1189-1192 A.D, as well as the lack of cooperation between King Louis VII of France and The Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III of Germany in The Second Crusade of 1147-1149 A.D.). The Teutonic Knights modeled their organization after two earlier crusading orders founded by the French/Latinized Franks, i.e. the Knights Templars and the Knights Hospitalers. In the 1200's, the Teutonic Knights shifted their activities to central and eastern Europe, where they tried to convert to Roman Catholicism, and also control, the then pagan people of what became Prussia (related to the Lithuanians and Latvians), Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia (the latter related to the Finns). The power and influence of the Teutonic Knights spread throughout central and eastern Europe. In the 1300's the Teutonic Knights lost much of their power, and finally the Poles, Lithuanians, and Russians overthrew them. In 1525, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, Albert of Hohenzollern, converted to Lutheranism and changed the Order from a religious to a so-called 'civil', quasi-masonic, aristocratic-military organization for the social class of German-Prussian military aristocrats known as the Junkers or Junkherrs (i.e. 'Young Masters/Lords'). See The German National People's Party or Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP. In 1618, the Order's territory passed to the Hohenzollern Elector (i.e. a duke of the Catholic-led Holy Roman Empire) of Brandenburg-Prussia, ruled from the capital of Berlin." (22) Today Lithuania and Poland is mainly Catholic, while Latvia, Estonia, and Finland is mainly Lutheran. Poland itself was partitioned in 1772, 1793, and 1795 by Lutheran Brandenburg-Prussia, Catholic Austria-Hungary, and Czarist, Eastern Orthodox Russia. (23)
The early Iron Age B.C. Hallstatt Celtic culture of what is now Austria, Bavaria, Swabia (Baden-Württemberg), Liechtenstein, Switzerland, The Czech Republic (Czechia), Slovakia and northern Italy (Cisalpine Gaul), was one of the first Celtic cultures besides the La Tène culture in Transalpine Gaul (France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and western Germany) and northern Hispania (Spain, Andorra and Portugal). (24) The Celts invaded and settled in northern Italy in the 300's B.C., and they had done the same in northern Spain and Portugal in around 900 B.C., and again in around 600 B.C. (25) The continental European Celts invaded and settled in what is now the islands of Britain and Ireland in the 500's B.C. (26) See Celticisation. What is now Austria was known to the Romans as the Celtic kingdom of Noricum (around 800 to 400 B.C.) At the end of the first century B.C (100 to 1 B.C.), the Austrian lands south of the Danube River became part of the Roman Empire, incorporated in around 40 A.D. as the Roman province of Noricum. The main Alpine pass between northern Italy and Austria is the Brenner Pass. Italy's first Indo-European invasion by the Celtic-related Latins/Italiots occurred around 2500 B.C., the second around 2000 B.C., the third around 1500 B.C., and the fourth around 1000 B.C. Celtic itself is a sub-branch of the Indo-European Germanic languages, and the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian-Aryan languages belong to the Satem branch of the Indo-European language family, while Germanic, Celtic, Italic, and Greek are part of its Centum branch. See History of Italy. In the 500's A.D., Austria, the Northern Italian region of the South Tyrol, and Bavaria, was settled by the Germanic Bavarii tribe. Around 800 A.D. the Frankish Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne or Karloman established in Lower Austria the outpost of the Avar March (Awarenmark) to hold back the advances of the Slavs and Mongolic Avars. East of the River Enns an outpost of the Duchy (Herzog) of Bavaria was established, and which bordered Hungary. The Hungarian Magyars settled the Austrian border province of Burgenland in the 900's A.D., several centuries after the Germanic tribe of the Bavarii had first arrived there. The Bavarian outpost was known in Latin as the Marchia Orientalis or March/Frontier of the East. In 976 A.D. the Margraviate of Austria was officially established, ruled by the Marquis, Margraves, Marchgrafs (Frontier or Border Counts) of the Babenburg dynasty. The Eastern March (eastern borderland) was known in German as Ostarrîchi or Eastern Realm, hence Austria or in German Österreich. The first mention of Ostarrîchi is in a document written in 996 A.D. See History of Austria and History of Germany. German-speaking Austria was "forcibly" annexed rather willingly by its people into the Nazi German Third Reich on March 12, 1938, until the end of World War Two in Europe on May 8, 1945, with the war in East and South East Asia, as well as Micronesia, ending with the official surrender of Fascist Japan on September 2, 1945. Austria-Hungary and Germany were allied with each other in World War One, as they also were in World War Two. Provided there is a referendum in both Germany and Austria, and provided that both nations while holding the referenda are multi-party democracies governed by the rule of law and human rights, it would be a sensible and fair idea to unite German-speaking Austria with Germany. The majority of Austrians today are Roman Catholics, as are also the southern and western Germans, while the eastern and northern Germans are mainly Lutherans. Since the 1990's onwards, Germany and Austria, like the rest of the prosperous nations of insular and continental western, central, and northern Europe, as well as that of the former British colonies of Canada, The United States, Australia, and New Zealand, have become increasingly secular and post-Christian societies, with an increasing percentage of its citizens declaring themselves to be atheist, agnostic, and irreligious or nominal Christians with each new census. The growing Middle Eastern, African, Central Asian, South Asian, and South East Asian Muslim minorities in these western nations are going in the reverse direction, with an increasing number of Muslims identifying with the Muslim fundamentalism and Islamo-Fascism of the petroleum and natural gas rich nations of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran today is a Persian, Shiite Muslim, theocratic and authoritarian nation, while Saudi Arabia is a Sunni Muslim, Arabic, absolutist monarchy, with a smaller population than Iran, but with a far larger petroleum and natural gas reserve than that possessed by Iran since the Iranian Revolution of February 1979. See (a). Islamism; (b). Islamofascism; (c). Relations Between Nazi Germany and the Arab World; (d). Antisemitism in Islam; (e). Muhammad's Views on Jews; (f). Religious Views of Adolf Hitler; (g). Sharia; and most revealingly (h). Muslim Opinion Polls: A Tiny Minority of Extremists? by TROP (The Religion of Peace).Org.
Here are a selection of religiously intolerant and violent chapters and verses from the Muslim Bible known as the Koran or Quran that support the Muslim doctrine of Jihad or Holy War aimed ultimately at Islamic world conquest: Quran 2:191-193, 3:151, 8:12, 8:39, 9:5, 9:29, 9:29, 9:33, 9:73, 9:123, 25:52, 47:3-4, 48:17, 48:29, 61:4, 61:10-12, and 66:9. See (a). The Quran's Verses of Violence and (b). Myths of Islam by TROP (The Religion of Peace).Org. These chapters and verses from the Quran explain the conquests carried out by the Arab Muslim armies from as far west as Spain to as far east as Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent in the one hundred years after the death of Muhammad in 632 A.D., as well as those led by Muhammad himself against the then pagan/polytheist, Jewish, and Christian tribes of the Arabian Peninsula from 622 to 632 A.D. Muhammad fled the Arab city of Mecca in 622 A.D., now located in the oil and gas rich nation of Saudi Arabia, after its citizens became angry at him for his attacks on their polytheist religion. See (a). Organization of the Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC); (b). Arab Lobby in the United States; and (c). Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Muhammad gained sanctuary in an Arab city to the north of Mecca called Yathrib (now called the city of Medina, in modern day Saudi Arabia) in 622 A.D., and soon won over its citizens to the religion of Islam. From Medina Muhammad led military campaigns of conquest with the aim of unifying the desert and oases tribes of Arabia, and in 630 A.D. he returned in triumph to Mecca. Upon his return to Mecca his followers who went by the name of Muslims purged the religious temple known as the Kaaba of all of its pagan idols and statues, and converted it into a Muslim shrine. The reason why the early chapters of the Quran are peaceful while the latter ones are violent and warlike is because at first Muhammad's Muslim followers were a powerless minority, and only later they became a powerful majority. The latter chapters of the Quran overrule and abrogate the earlier chapters. The reasoning behind abrogation in the Quran is that it is alright for Muslims to practice Muda'rat (Sunni Muslims) or Taqiyya (Shiite Muslims), i.e. deception and lying towards non-Muslims in order to gain their trust and so thereby make them let their guard down, and thereby make it easier for Muslims to later on defeat non-Muslims when they have been reduced to an impotent minority. In Quran Chapter 3, verse 54, it is written that "and they (the disbelivers) schemed, and Allah schemed (against them): and Allah is the best of schemers." See Quran Chapters and verses 16:106, 3:28, 9:3, 40:28, and 2:225 for other approvals for Muslims to lie to non-Muslims for the purposes of defeating them. Jesus Christ in The New Testament of the Christian Bible in Matthew 5:37 quite categorically condemned lying, teaching us that our Yes be Yes, and our No be No, because whatever differs from this standard is a sign of Satan's will. See Taqiyya or Muda'rat: Deception and Lying in Islam by TROP.Org. Disparaging remarks against the Jews and Christians for failing to recognize the Prophet Muhammad as the last prophet sent by God, called Allah by the Muslims, and whom Muhammad taught is the same God called Yahweh by the Jews and Christians, can be found in Quran Chapters and Verses 2:88, 2:121, 4:46, 4:160, 5:13, 5:33, 5:41, 5:51, 5:60, 5:64, 5:73, 5:78, 6:146, 16:118, 17:4, 20:48, and 62:6. See Islam: References to Jews in the Koran by Jewish Virtual Library - A Project of AICE. The Muslim Sunna or Hadith, which is the recorded sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, are even more brutally Anti-Semitic/Anti-Jewish than the Quran. For example:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (the Boxthorn tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews. (related by al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim) - Sahih Muslim, 41:6985, and 41:6981-6984; Sahih al-Bukhari 4:56:791 and 4:52:177.See Antisemitism in Islam. The Quran teaches that all non-Muslims will go to Hell. See Quran chapters and verses 3:85, 3:10, 66:6, 18:103-106, 4:150-152, and 22:19-22 for example. See Is the Quran Hate Propaganda by TROP.Org. A disillusioned former Catholic convert to Islam, who eventually ended up leaving Islam, has posted an article on the internet in which he claimed that many translations of the Koran or Quran from the Arabic language into foreign languages are deliberately deceitful in order to lull potential converts to Islam into a false sense of security. See Former Catholic Convert to Islam: Study Islam and Leave It by J.J., 21 November, 2008, in Islam-Watch.Org.
As distinguished Orientalist G.E. von Grunebaum has written:
It would not be difficult to put together the names of a very sizeable number of Jewish subjects or citizens of the Islamic area who have attained to high rank, to power, to great financial influence, to significant and recognized intellectual attainment; and the same could be done for Christians. But it would again not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of persecutions, arbitrary confiscations, attempted forced conversions, or pogroms (i.e. massacres)." G.E. Von Grunebaum, "Eastern Jewry Under Islam," Viator, 1971, page 369.By the 1900's A.D., the status of the dhimmi (i.e. non-Muslims) in Muslim lands had not significantly improved. H.E.W. Young, British Vice Consul in Mosul (a city now in Iraq), wrote in 1909:
The attitude of the Muslims towards the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed.Middle Eastern Studies, 1971, page 232. See Jews in Islamic Countries: The Treatment of Jews, Updated September 2011. By Jewish Virtual Library - A Project of AICE; and Rights of Non-Muslims in an Islamic State by Samuel Shahid, Answering Islam Home Page.
(1). Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of the West: The Slow Death of the Roman Superpower, Paperback Edition published in 2010 by Phoenix, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd, London, United Kingdom, pages 91, 110, 119, 120, 121, 141-142, 15-153, 205, 212-214, 210 and 260, 282, 296, 299-300, 303-304, 307, 310-331, 347, 356, 359-360, 372, and 409. Adrian Goldsworthy, In the Name of Rome: The Men Who Won the Roman Empire, Paperback Edition published in 2004 by Phoenix, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd, London, United Kingdom, pages 177, 407, and 423-424. Adrian Goldsworthy, The Complete Roman Army, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London, first paperback edition 2011, page 214. Roger Collins, Early Medieval Europe: 300-1000, The Macmillan Press Ltd, London, United Kingdom 1991, pages 44 and 89-90. Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: The Life of a Colossus, first published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, paperback edition published in 2007 by Phoenix, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd, London.
(2). Wayne S. Vucinich., A.B., M.A., Ph.D., Professor of History, Stanford University. Albania, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume A, Number 1, page 291.
(3). Vojtech Mastny., Ph.D. Professor of International Relations, Boston University. Transylvania, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume T, Number 19, page 325.
(4). Constantin C. Giurescu, Transylvania in the History of Romania: An Historical Outline. The Garnstone Press Limited, United Kingdom, 1969, pages 9-19, 20-21, 27-28, 31, 33-43, 59, Chapter 5, 75-77, 86-89, 93, 95-97, 102-104, 106, 109-112, 116-117, and 119.
(5). Paul MacKendrick, The Dacian Stones Speak, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, The United States of America, 1975, pages 4-5, 19-20, 42, 44-45, 50-51, 67-68, 70-72, 79, 88, 90, 106-107, 123, 126-127, 142-143, 161, 166-167, 172, 180, 182, 186, 199, 205, 210-211, 215-222.
(6). M. Kamil Dziewanowski., L.L.M., Ph.D., Profesor of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Carpathian Mountains, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume C-Ch, Number 3, page 182.
(7). Robert O. Paxton, Robert O. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, Orlando, Florida, U.S.A., Second Edition, Updated Printing, 1991, Chapters 2 and 14.
(8). Bernhard Chiari (2011), "Die abgewendete Katastrophe", Damals (in German) 43 (6): pages 32-37.
(9). Robert O. Paxton, Robert O. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, Orlando, Florida, U.S.A., Second Edition, Updated Printing, 1991, pages 456 and 461.
(10). Paxton, pages 106-108, 127-128.
(11). Paxton, pages 344-348.
(12). Paxton, pages 599 and 642.
(13). William G. Dewald., Economist, U.S. Department of State, Ph.D. "Capitalism", page 157, The World Book Encyclopedia, Volume C-ch, No.3, 1987, Chicago, U.S.A.
(14). History of the Twentieth Century, Purnell-BPC Publishing, 1969.
(15). H.E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: the Siege of Leningrad, Macmillan, 1969.
(16). History of the Twentieth Century, Purnell-BPC Publishing, 1969.
(17). Steven Bela Vardy, B.S., M.A., Ph.D., Professor and Chairman, Department of History, Duquesne University; Director, Duquesne University History Forum; Adjunct Professor of East European History, University of Pittsburgh. Magyars, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume M, Number 13, page 58.
(18). Vojtech Mastny., Ph.D. Professor of International Relations, Boston University. Ruthenia. The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume Q.R, Number 16, page 540.
(19). Vojtech Mastny., Ph.D. Professor of International Relations, Boston University. . The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume S-Sn, Number 17, page 416b.
(20). Robert O. Paxton, Robert O. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, Orlando, Florida, U.S.A., Second Edition, Updated Printing, 1991, pages 523-524.
(21). Arnold Toynbee and Veronica M. Toynbee, editors, The Realignment of Europe, (Oxford, 1955), page 7.
(22). Bryce Lyon., A.B., Ph.D. Barnaby C. and Mary Critchfeld Keeney Professor of History, Brown University. Teutonic Knights, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume T, Number 19, page 145.
(23). Adam Bromke, Professor of Political Science at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Poland, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume P, Number 15, pages 538-541.
(24). B. Wailes, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. Celts, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume C-Ch, Number 13, pages 253-254.
(25). Herbert M. Howe, A.B, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Gaul, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume G, Number 8, page 70 and Stanley G. Payne, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Spain, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume So-Sz, Number 18, page 582.
(26). Vernon F. Snow, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Professor of History at Syracuse University. England, The World Book Encyclopedia, 1987, U.S.A., Chicago, Volume E, Number 6, page 246.