The Ottoman Conquest Of Bulgaria

In 1352 a detachment of Ottoman Turks sailed through Hellespont, now the Dardanelles - the strait separating Europe from Asia, and took Tsimpe, a small Byzantine fort. That is considered to have marked the beginning of the fresh offensive of Asiatic Islamism against the Christian civilization of Europe. The first two assaults at the beginning of the 8th century and at the turn of the 13th century were beaten off by the Christian political powers of the East - Bulgaria, Byzantium and Russia. The third storm, however, led to centuries long confrontation causing, at different times, utmost bracing of all European energies directed at checking the Muslim invasion. It was eventually stopped and fought back for ever no nearer than Vienna. This happened in 1683 and was drowned in seas of European blood. Bulgaria and all the other medieval Christian states in the Balkans were ruined in the twists of this dramatic clash between the European and the Asian civilizations during the l4th-l5th centuries.

0The reasons of the political downfall of the Christian South- east of Europe lay, first and foremost, in the extreme political particularism and lack of political trust among the Christia Balkan powers which prevented them from building up a strong perennial military and political alliance against the common enemy. The combat potentialities of the Bulgarian people alone, a people which at that time took up three quarters of the territory of the Balkan Peninsula, would have been sufficient to throw the Muslim invaders back to Asia. The Bulgarians failed to offer efficient resistance, because of their being split into several state formations and their being frequently involved in intricate political chicanery both between themselves and with close and not so close Christian neighbors. It would be true to say the same about the rest of the Balkan countries - Serbia and Byzantium, which had been divided into several independent feudal possessions towards the middle of the 14th century.

A young and vigorous centralized Islamic monarchy, drawing on the resources of Asia's boundless womb and elated by the Islamic martial ideology - an ideology aspiring to fix the banner of Mohammed on all lands of the 'unfaithful' and to establish a world- embracing Islamic empire, was already confronting the disunited ranks of Bulgaria and the other Balkan feudal states.

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The Bulgarian People Under The Rule of the Ottoman Empire 15th-18th CC