GEOGRAPHY has provided an easy land-route from Western Asia to Europe; and in the Middle Ages men made full use of it. The great Byzantine roads ran from Armenia and the Saracen frontier over the highlands of Asia Minor, then still fertile and flourishing, down to the narrow sea and the Imperial City. Beyond they ran on again, through the wilder Balkans, to the Danube and to the Adriatic Sea. Along these roads year after year journeyed Armenians, crowded out from their own narrow valleys, eager to join in the busy life of the Capital or to find fresh lands for exploitation amongst the guileless peoples of Europe.

The Balkan peninsula in the ninth century was fit ground for them. In the days of the old Roman Empire it had been amongst the richest provinces of Europe, its countryside studded with busy market-towns and breeding a sturdy peasantry. Its inhabitants, Latin-speaking except in the mountains of the West where a primitive tongue now called Albanian lingered and in the coastal ports of the Greeks, formed the best soldiers in the Roman army. When the Visigoths crossed the Danube and Valens fell at Adrianople this prosperity declined. Invader after invader, Goth, Hun or Avar, overran its pastures; its harvests seldom were allowed to ripen. The population grew smaller, and retired more and more to the mountains, to Pindus in the south and, in greater numbers, to the Carpathians beyond the Danube, to emerge, as Vlachs or Roumanians, after very many centuries. But few of the warlike raiders from the East remained; the empty places were taken by a gentler race, the Slavs.