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For many centuries Europe has been boiling with intricate antagonisms between ethnic groups which started well before Roman times and found a propitious terrain with relgious wars.

The Balkan region, with its numerous people of different origins and montainous zones offering secure shelters soon became an area of explosive conflicts. The setting up of new borders during the 19th Century amplified a dangerous deadlock.

The origins of the present tensions can be found in the fall of Constantinople on May 29th 1453. This date marked the end of the Middle Age period while the Turkish flag started to float on Saint Sophia church transformed into a mosque.

The Byzantine empire resisted during many centuries against the Turks originating from Asian tribes which had adopted the Islamic faith. The fall of Constantinople was a terrible blow for the Christian world but was finally the result of a lonstanding opffensive led by the Moslems.

One should recall that in 1346, the then Emperor John Cantacumene who was facing internal quarrels had called upon the Moslems to help him quash a Serb rebellion.

Thanking Okhan, the chief of the Ottomans, John offered him to marry his daughter Theodora. This union was designed to secure peace but the Moslems increased their presence in Serbia and fought Christian monarchs.

The Turks won several battles et advanced towards East and West of the Balkans. The mast famous battle, now taken as a pretext by the Serbs to expel Albanians from the Kosovo region, took place on June 13th 1389 on the so-called Field of the Blackbirds in Kosovo Polje near Pristina. The armies of Prince Lazar were crushed by the troops of Muhrad 1st and such defeat became a legend for the Serbs who considered Kosovo as their Jerusalem and as the cradle of their nation.

The Serbs waited therefore for their revenge while the Turks occupied part of Albania and of Romania before advancing towards Hungary. In 1396 they defeated 60,000 Hungarians who had gathered to stop them.

In 1442, 15,000 Hungarians stopped the Turks in Sinaia and forced Muhrad II to a retreat. However Muhrad was soon back on the move and occupied Central Albania and the region of Sofia.

During the first half of the 15th Century the Turks gained more territories but applied at the same time a tolerant policy in the areas they conquered. Non-Moslems could keep their faith but could not be armed nor work for the Turkish Administration.

Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Moldavians, Christians, Jews and other people living in the areas controlled by the Turks lived freely the only restriction being that the domes of Church could not be erected higher than those of mosques.

It was Mehmet II who conquered Constantinople in 1453 after a 45-day siege during which the Christian defenders were taken by surprise by a Turkish armada that arrived unnoticed by land to block the entrance of the Bosphorus. The Turkish victory tolled the knell of the Byzantine Empire while Mehmet soon tried to invade the rest of Europe. Six years later his troops invaded Serbia but Belgrade resisted.

At the start of the 16th Century, the Balkans were almost entirely occupied by the Turks. Then Podiebrad, the King of Bohemia, offered an alliance to Louis 11th , King of France. His idea was to form a common army, a kind of European Council, an arbitrary tribunal and a joint capital the seat of which would change every five years.

King Podiebrad was a Hussite, a follower of Jan Hus, the Czech religious Reformer, who had taken Prague from the Catholics and his contacts with Louis 11th failed as a result of their different religious stands ;

In addition, Russia was expanding its territories and soon sought a passage to the Black Sea. After the Thirty-Year war, the Christians went back fighting against the Turks whom they finally defeated before the walls of Vienna in 1683.

Such victory was largely due to the assistance of Polish King Jan Sobieski whose troops crushed enemy lines ensuring total victory. Vienna was thus saved and the Moslem threat was thwarted for good.

The Balkans became the ground for wars waged by the Austrians and the Russians. Austria occupied Bosnia, Serbia and Dalmatia while Russia seized Crimea. Two important ports, Odessa and Sebastopol, were created by Czar Peter the Great while at the end of the 18th Century the Habsburg and Romanov dynasties were sharing what had been part of the Turkish Empire in the Balkans.

Facing a series of defeats after 1686, the Turks had used repressive measures against the populations of the region, notably the Serbs who had had to flee Pec(Kosovo) to seek refuge in the South of Hungary in 1690.

The kosovo region was then filled with Moslem Albanians while thousands of people facing persecutions had been forced into exile in other areas.

The first Serb insurrection took place in 1804 and 50 years later the Turks were forced to grant Serbia its autonomy. However nationalist feelings soon filled deep hatred. After 1820, the Greeks rose against the Turks and founded their own kingdom with Othon von Wittelsbach, a Bavarian prince, as their sovereign.

From then on, the Balkans became a terrain for many foreign interventions notably during the Crimean War when Serbia came under the protection of the then main powers.

In 1876, the first Balkanic war erupted and lasted two years after the uprising of the Bulgarians against the Turks. This finally led to the founding of the kingdom of Bulgaria in 1908. Meanwhile, taking advantage of their alliance with the Russians, the Serbs occupied the Kosovo region but were forced to withdraw the region after killing thousands of Moslems who then avenged themselves with the massacre of 30,000 Serbs.

The Turks had had the habit of not defining precise borders while European nations were obsessed with the idea of forming limits though the Balkan region was not suitable for the drawing up of frontiers. In 1912 and 1913 a new war enabled Albania to proclaim its independence while the Serbs reconquered the Kosovo area and obtained control over Central Macedonia via the Treaty of London.

The situation worsened after the First World War with the absurd Treaty of Versailles, the consequences of which led to a dramatic conflict twenty years later.

The Versailles Treaty was pure illusion as it enabled the dismembering of many nations and the foundation of States in which people could not live in harmony such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Austria was then reduced to 1/19 of its previous superficy, Hungary by two thirds while three millions Hungarians became Romanians, Bulgaria lost part of its territory which was surrendered to Greece before becoming Turkish, the Germans of Silesia were transferred to Poland while Germany was humiliated.