In the Middle Ages, when frontiers in the Balkans were, if possible, even more fluid than they have been in recent times, Macedonia was most frequently under the rule of the Greeks. It was, however, held by Bulgaria from about 860 to 1018 and again for some years in the thirteenth century; and from about 1260 down to the Turkish conquest in 1389 it belonged to the Serbian empire. From these rather brief periods of tenure both nations draw their claims to ‘historic rights’ over Macedonia today, and a fund of proud historic memories which lend warmth and passion to those claims. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria promoted himself to be ‘Tsar’ in imitation of the Bulgarian tsars of the Middle Ages who ruled over Macedonia. The Prince Regent of Serbia today addresses the Macedonians as “sons of Stephen Dushan,” in allusion to the great Serbian emperor of the fourteenth century whose capital was Üsküb in Macedonia. It seems undeniable that the period of Serbian rule made a much deeper impression on the country than did the Bulgarian. Not only is Macedonia strewn with churches, monasteries, and works of art recalling the great days of Serbia, while similar Bulgarian monuments are almost totally lacking; but the wonderfully rich ballad literature, through which alone the Macedonian Slavs express whatever historic memories they have, dwells exclusively upon the heroes of the Serbian past, with never the mention of a Bulgarian. At any rate, the ensuing five hundred years of stagnation and isolation under Turkish rule afforded the Macedonians ample time to forget which of their kinsmen they preferred to be associated with, and to lose whatever national consciousness they had possessed. When the Serb and Bulgarian national revivals began in the early nineteenth century, Macedonia was more or less no-man’s-land; and either movement might sweep the field, provided it got started early enough. Fortune seemed for a while to be with the Bulgarians. For many years all of Russia’s powerful influence was cast in their favor, since Russia regarded the Serbs as Austria’s protégés. The Turks also thought it very clever to favor the Bulgarians, who seldom or never revolted, against the Serbs who never did anything else but rebel. Hence the Bulgarians got the start, and for some decades they could conduct religious, educational, and nationalist work in Macedonia, while Serb influences were in the main barred out. What particularly helped the process of Bulgarization was the formation in 1870 of the independent Bulgarian (or Exarchist) church, a body which could offer the Macedonian Slavs the things which they seem to have craved above all others at that time: emancipation from the Greek clergy, and the church service in a tongue which they could understand. Hence a general stampede to the Exarchist church, restrained only by the calculation that it was materially more expensive to get christened, married, or buried by that businesslike