The British Isles furnish us with four or five different nationalities. The people of the north of Ireland are really lowland Scotch of Germanic descent, while the other three-fourths of Ireland is inhabited by Celts. To make the difference all the greater, the Celts are almost universally Catholics, while the Scotch-Irish are Protestants. The people of the north of Scotland are Gaels, a Celtic race having no connection in language or blood with the people of the southern half of that country. The Welsh are a Celtic people, having no relationship with the English, who are a Germanic people. The Welsh and the Cornish of Cornwall and the people of highland Scotland are the descendants of the ancient Britons and Gaels who inhabited the island when Julius Caesar and the Romans first landed there. Then five hundred years afterwards, as has already been told, came great swarms of Germans (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), who drove the Britons to the west and north, and settled the country now known as England. After these, you will recall, came a number of Danes, another Germanic people, who settled the east coast of England. Two hundred years later, the Normans came from France. These Normans had been living in France for a century or two, but had come originally from Norway. Normans, Danes, Angles, and Saxons all mixed to make the modern English. Together, they fought the Scotch, the Welsh and the Irish, and having conquered them, oppressed them harshly for many centuries.
Southeastern Europe, 975 A.D.
But it is in the southeastern corner of Europe that one finds the worst jumble of nationalities. Six hundred years before Christ, the Greeks and their rougher cousins, the Thracians, Macedonians, and Dacians inhabited this district. When one of the Roman Emperors conquered the Dacians about 100 A.D., he planted a large Roman colony north of the Danube River. Then came the West Goths, who swept into this country, but soon left it for the west of Europe. Next came the Slavic tribes who are the ancestors of the modern Serbs. Following these, came a large tribe which did not belong to the Indo-European family, but was distantly related to the Finns and the Turks. These people were called the Volgars, for they came from the country around the River Volga. Before long, we find them called the Bulgars. (The letters B and V are often interchanged in the languages of south-eastern Europe. The people of western Europe used to call the country of the Serbs Servia, but the Serbs objected, saying that the word servio, in Latin, means “to be a slave,” and that as they were not slaves, they wanted their country to be called by its true name, Serbia. The Greeks, on the other hand, pronounce the letter B as though it were V.)
A strange thing happened to the Volgars or Bulgars. They completely gave up their Asiatic language and adopted a new one, which became in time the purest of the Slavic tongues. They intermarried with the Slavs around them and adopted Slavic names. They founded a flourishing nation which lay between the kingdom of Serbia and the Greek Empire of Constantinople.
North of the Bulgars lay the country of the Roumani (ro͞o mä′nï). These people claimed to be descended from the Roman Emperor’s colonists, as was previously told, but the reason their language is so much like the Italian is that a large number of people from the north of Italy moved into the country nearly a thousand years after the first Roman colonists settled there. From 900 to 1300 A.D., south-eastern Europe was inhabited by Serbians, Bulgarians, Roumanians, and Greeks.
A Typical Bulgarian Family