he three nations can claim possession of Macedonia. From an ethnographic
point of view the Slav population of Macedonia (there were always and are
still many non-Slav elements) was originally the same as that in the other
parts of the peninsula, and probably more akin to the Serbs, who are pure
Slavs, than to the Slavs of Bulgaria, who coalesced with their Asiatic
conquerors. In course of time, however, Bulgarian influences, owing to the
several periods when the Bulgars ruled the country, began to make headway.
The Albanians also (an Indo-European or Aryan race, but not of the Greek,
Latin, or Slav families), who, as a result of all the invasions of the
Balkan peninsula, had been driven southwards into the inaccessible
mountainous country now known as Albania, began to spread northwards and
eastwards again during the Turkish dominion, pushing back the Serbs from
the territory where they had long been settled. During the Turkish
dominion neither Serb nor Bulgar had any influence in Macedonia, and the
Macedonian Slavs, who had first of all been pure Slavs, like the Serbs,
then been several times under Bulgar, and finally, under Serb influence,
were left to themselves, and the process of differentiation between Serb
and Bulgar in Macedonia, by which in time the Macedonian Slavs would have
become either Serbs or Bulgars, ceased. The further development of the
Macedonian question is treated elsewhere (cf. chap. 13).

The Serbs, who had no permanent or well-defined frontier in the east,
where their neighbours were the Bulgars, or in the south, where they were
the Greeks and Albanians, were protected on the north by the river Save
and on the west by the Adriatic. They were split up into a number of
tribes, each of which was headed by a chief called in Serbian _[)z]upan_
and in Greek _arch[=o]n_. Whenever any one of these managed, either by
skill or by good fortune, to extend his power over a few of the
neighbouring districts he was termed _veliki_ (=great) _[)z]upan_. From
the beginning of their history, which is roughly put at A.D. 650, until
A.D. 1196, the Serbs were under foreign domination. Their suzerains were
nominally always the Greek emperors, who had 'granted' them the land they
had taken, and whenever the emperor happened to be energetic and powerful,
as were Basil I (the Macedonian, 867-86), John Tzimisces (969-76), Basil
II (976-1025), and Manuel Comnenus (1143-80), the Greek supremacy was very
real. At those times a