Macedonian Empire

“ Macedonia has been severally called Æmonia, Mygdonia, Pæonia, Edonia, Æmathia, &c. The inhabitants of Macedonia were naturally warlike, and though in the infancy of their empire they were little known beyond the borders of their country, yet they signalized themselves greatly in the reign of Philip, and added the kingdom of Asia to their European dominions by the valour of Alexander. The Macedonian phalanx, or body of soldiers, was always held in the highest repute, and it resisted and subdued the repeated attacks of the bravest and most courageous enemies. Livy, bk. 44.—Justin, bk. ”

“ Our homeland of Macedonia was once one of the most glorious countries. The Macedonian people laid the first foundations of the art of war. Alexander the Great with his victorious phalanxes spread Aristotle's enlightenment into the Asian continent and thus civilized humanity. Yet our homeland so glorious in the past is now in danger of being dismembered and even obliterated, for we, the Macedonians have neglected our nationality, and the other nations are demanding our country as theirs, seeking to subject our great nation which in the past shone so brightly in her independence. ”

“ As regards the common people, nothing whatever was changed in their condition. They had never, as in Greece, formed a political body, and there was no Macedonian city. Apparently everything took place by popular consent, but the army was the Macedonian people. Philip frequently harangued his troops; a proceeding that offered no danger, since the soldiers of a bellicose chief never withhold from him their approbation. Macedonia was a nation of soldiers; hence its government, maintaining a permanent army and engaged in perpetual wars, could be none other than a military monarchy. ”

“ Our aim for the Macedonian Uprising is by no means a secret. It is the liberation of Macedonia, the land of the glorious Slav educators and teachers, SS. Cyril and Methodius, which has suffered under the Turkish yoke for centuries. Therefore, anyone who does not fight for her liberation, but has an eye to the main chance, has no place in the uprising. ”

“ Owing to the perpetual wars which had for so many generations drained the manhood of Macedonia there was a serious lack of men of military age, and under Philip's own rule vast numbers had perished in the naval battles against the Rhodians and Attalus and in the campaigns against the Romans. ”

“ Everything which has been provided by the kindness of heaven or by the care and forethought of their king, the Macedonians have in full and overflowing measure. You must have the courage which your ancestors had when after subjugating the whole of Europe they crossed over to Asia and opened up by their arms an unknown world, and never ceased to conquer until they were hemmed in by the purple ocean and there was nothing more to conquer. Ay, but now it is not for the remotest shores of India but for the possession of Macedonia that Fortune has called us to this contest. ”

“ It can be said of the Macedonian rule that it as little resembled that of Asiatic despotism as its people were far removed from the bondage of slavery. “Macedonians are free men,” says an ancient writer. Not penestæ like the mass of the populations of Thessaly, not helots like the Spartans, they were a peasant race, holding independent and hereditary property and possessing a common system of laws and local courts, but all bound to give military service when called upon by the king of the land. ”

“ Before the Turkish conquest Macedonia had been sometimes under Bulgarian rule, as in the times of Simeon, Samuel, and John Asen II, sometimes under Serbian, especially during the height of Serbian power in the fourteenth century, while intermittently it had been a province of the Greek Empire, which always claimed it as its own. On historical grounds, therefore, each of the three nations can claim possession of Macedonia. ”

“ Had his defeat in battle made the war one of extermination? "An enemy in arms one is bound to meet with ruthless hostility; towards the conquered the greatest minds show the greatest clemency. You think that kings of Macedon are a danger to the liberties of Greece. If that nation and kingdom were swept away, Thracians, Illyrians, Gauls, savage and barbarous tribes, would pour into Macedonia and then into Greece. Do not, by removing the danger closest to you, open the door to greater and more serious ones." ”

“ But there are reasonable grounds for thinking that the Imperial government is well intentioned towards the different nationalities of Macedonia. History enables all nations to see the mistakes they have made and to avoid repeating them. The present uprising has been most instructive both for us and for the Turks. ”

“ Using the influence of their Patriarchate in Constantinople, the Greeks have imposed their language on schools and churches in many parts of Macedonia where there are no Greeks to be found. It is natural for the Greeks to make use of all the resources of diplomacy to maintain the position they held in Macedonia during the Middle Ages, especially from the time of the Turkish conquest of Macedonia, and to defend Greek interests in Macedonia not only from Greece itself but also from the great powers, because they do not want the Slav element to gain power. ”

“ Above all, in their unity and the confidence inspired by this military system, the Macedonian races had the consciousness of possessing great efficiency in war, and an ethical strength resulting from a firm social organisation at the head of which was the king himself. The peasant population of this kingdom provided the king with hardy, tractable material from which to form his soldiers, and the nobility furnished in the hetæri higher military officials that were distinguished for zeal and a sense of the dignity of their calling. ”

“ The Macedonian question is in the hands of the Great Powers, who have taken upon themselves the task of introducing into Macedonia reforms assuring to the population of this country a development at once more orderly and more free. ”

“ The prospect of a booty such as passed all the dreams of avarice, the hope of ransacking the treasuries into which all Asia had poured its wealth for generations, had drawn adventurers from all points of the compass. The only difficulty that the recruiting officers had was in choosing. The king was determined that the strength of his army should be his own Macedonians. A sturdy race, untouched by the luxury which had corrupted the vigour of more civilized Greece, they supplied a material of the most solid value. ”

“ All our efforts might fail to bestow upon him an ideal government—there are not the makings of a harmonious nation in Macedonia. But politics are, after all, a mere fraction of life. While Servia earns the contempt of the civilised world, the Servian peasant sows in hope and reaps in peace, keeping for winter evenings the tale of murdered forbears and ravished ancestors. The Macedonian villager is ignorant. But his leaders have heard of a far-off England which twenty-five years ago flung them back under the heels of the Turk, after Russia had won their freedom at San Stefano. ”

“ With the abolition of the Macedonian monarchy the supremacy of Rome not only became an established fact from the Pillars of Hercules to the mouths of the Nile and the Orontes, but, as if it were the final decree of fate, it weighed on the nations with all the pressure of an inevitable necessity, and seemed to leave them merely the choice of perishing in hopeless resistance or in hopeless endurance. If history were not entitled to insist that the earnest reader should accompany her through good and evil days, through landscapes of winter as well as of spring, the historian might be tempted to shun the cheerless task of tracing the manifold and yet monotonous turns of this struggle between superior power and utter weakness, both in the Spanish provinces already annexed to the Roman empire and in the African, Hellenic, and Asiatic territories which were still treated as clients of Rome. ”

“ While then the Macedonian supremacy, if not remissly, was liberally exercised, the party interests in every Grecian state, the inveterate hatred everywhere of fellow-citizens to fellow-citizens, and the generally active and restless temper of the Grecian people afforded ground for that league against the confederacy of the Greek nations acknowledging the lead of Macedonia, which Demosthenes and Agis succeeded in forming. ”

“ Courageous Macedonian sons,
Our neighbors long to grab Macedonia for themselves, to tear it apart. Let us come together under our flag and remain only Macedonians, for only united as brothers can we free ourselves from despair under Turkish rule and remain ourselves on our land. Close your ranks and await the call for our general Macedonian uprising. With gun on shoulder and sword in hand, join our Macedonian army in the fight against the savage merciless pagans. Chase away all those who have joined with foreign interests and preach that "the sword does not cut the humble head." ”

“ This quick overview of the history of Macedonia, seems to me, not only confirms that we Macedonians have our own history and that we are a nation whose destiny developed related to the destinies of the other enamoring nations, but that there is in our history much that is self-existing and typical, like the self-ruled Ohrid archbishopy with its mission on the national education. ”

“ As a matter of course, the whole national party among the Asiatic as well as the European Greeks was now at heart Macedonian; not on account of isolated unrighteous acts on the part of the Roman deliverers, but because the restoration of Hellenic nationality by a foreign power involved a contradiction in terms, and now, when it was in truth too late, every one perceived that the most detestable form of Macedonian rule was less fraught with evil for Greece than a free constitution springing from the noblest intentions of honourable foreigners. ”

“ The history of Macedonia down to the time of Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, is involved in much obscurity. The early Macedonians appear to have been an Illyrian tribe, different in race and language from the Hellenes or Greeks; but Herodotus states that the Macedonian monarchy was founded by Greeks from Argos; and, according to Greek writers, twelve or fifteen Grecian princes reigned there before the accession of Philip, who took charge of the government about the year 360 B.C., not as monarch, but as guardian of the infant son of his elder brother. ”

“ In pointing to the above record of trials and sufferings in their struggle for liberty, it is not evident that the Macedonians have showed themselves worthy of being accorded the right of deciding their own fate - a privilege granted to Dalmatians, Croats, Slovenes, Tchecks, Armenians, Arabs, etc.? Must the Macedonian people be handled as chattels by their neighbors? ”

“ The Albanian is a born plunderer. War is his business, and pillage his pastime; and he is held in great dread by the Slav, Rouman and Greek inhabitants of Macedonia.
The Macedonian question is kept alive by several distinct forces. The warring racial elements—Slav, Greek, Rouman and Albanian—and common hatred of the christian inhabitants for the Turk cause constant turmoil and riot. The desire of Servia, Bulgaria and Greece to annex Macedonia no doubt also contributes to the local unrest. The influence of Russia must not be overlooked. ”

“ During all that time Macedonia had been undisturbed and a new generation had grown up, ripe for military service, and in the small wars with their Thracian neighbours, which exercised rather than exhausted them, they had been constantly trained and disciplined. The prospect of a war with Rome, which had during the whole period been cherished by Philip and then by Perseus, had led to everything being in a state of readiness and efficiency. The army performed a few movements, not as regular maneuvers, but simply in order to avoid the appearance of only standing under arms. ”

“ This agreement between the spheres of influence would unfailingly lead to the partition of Macedonia. This is why one of the prime duties of the Macedonian intelligentsia is once and for all to drive Serbian and Bulgarian propaganda out of Macedonia so that Macedonia can establish its own spiritual center, and free the Macedonians from this give and take relation with the neighboring Balkan states and peoples. Hence the need to forestall the partition of Macedonia and retain it as a province of Turkey. ”

“ He never lived to revisit Macedonia; but his achievements were on so transcendent a scale, his acquisitions of territory so unmeasured, and his thirst for further aggrandisement still so insatiate, that Macedonia sinks into insignificance in the list of his possessions. Much more do the Grecian cities dwindle into outlying appendages of a newly grown oriental empire. During all these eleven years, the history of Greece is almost a blank, except here and there a few scattered events. It is only at the death of Alexander that the Grecian cities again awaken into active movement. ”

“ Should it prove impossible to obtain, by persuasion or pressure, the assent of Serbia and Greece to the retention of ethnographical Macedonia by Bulgaria, an autonomous Macedonia might be set up, proper provision being made for the maintenance of order and for the repression of armed Serbian and Greek or Bulgarian 'propaganda' by an international force of gendarmerie. One advantage of an autonomous Macedonia would be that it would meet the wishes of the Macedonian Bulgars themselves, who would prefer autonomy to annexation outright by Bulgaria. ”