The crusaders believed their oaths were made invalid when the Byzantine contingent under Tatikios failed to help them during the siege of Antioch ; Bohemund, who had set himself up as Prince of Antioch, briefly went to war with Alexios in the Balkans, but was blockaded by the Byzantine forces and agreed to become Alexios ' vassal by the Treaty of Devol in 1108.

It remained in Byzantine hands during the period of crisis in the 7th – 8th centuries, when most of the Balkans and the Greek mainland were overrun by Slavic invasions.

After Stalin took political control of most of Eastern Europe and began to subvert other governments in the Balkans, Attlee's and Bevin's worst fears of Soviet intentions were realized.

The Byzantine Empire ultimately fell to Ottoman Turks in the 15th century and as a result Ottoman colonies were established in the Balkans, notably in Macedonia, the Peloponnese and Crete.

After the Huns in the 4th century invaded the territories of the Gothic King Ermanaric, which at its peak stretched between the Danube and the Volga river, and from the Black to the Baltic Sea, thousands of Goths fled into the Balkans, defeating the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople and sacking Rome in 410, while thousands of Germans were crossing the Rhine.

The Illyrians (; or Illyri ) were a group of tribes who inhabited the Western Balkans during classical antiquity.

* 1878 – League of Prizren is established, to oppose the decisions of the Congress of Berlin and the Treaty of San Stephano, as a consequence of which the Albanian lands in Balkans were being partitioned and given to the neighbor states of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece.

Gold and silver were mined in the Balkans, Anatolia, Armenia, Cyprus, Egypt and Nubia.

In April 1939, Ribbentrop received intelligence that Britain and Turkey were negotiating an alliance intended to keep Germany out of the Balkans.

Because of the Balkans were rich in raw materials like iron, zinc and above all oil that could help Germany survive a British blockade, it was viewed as highly important by the Allies to keep German influence in the Balkans to a minimum, hence British efforts to link British promises to support Turkey in the event of an Italian attack in exchange for Turkish promises to help defend Romania from a German attack.

Part of the Ottoman territories in the Balkans ( such as Thessaloniki, Macedonia and Kosovo ) were temporarily lost after 1402, but were later recovered by Murad II between the 1430s and 1450s.

When the French revolution created strong nation states, the criminal gangs moved to other poorly controlled regions like the Balkans and Southern Italy, where the seeds were sown for the Sicilian Mafia-the lynchpin of organised crime in the New World.

He was also involved in the Balkans Campaign, parachuting into Yugoslavia to evaluate the various resistance groups operating against the Nazis, and determining after meeting with him that Tito's were the most effective.

In the same age, the fortifications of the city were rebuilt in order to better defend against the growing instability in the Balkans.

It is a matter of debate whether Proto-Romanian developed among Romanized people that were left behind in Dacia by the Roman withdrawal or among Latin-speakers in the Balkans South of the Danube.

Although vampiric entities have been recorded in many cultures, and may go back to " prehistoric times ", the term vampire was not popularized until the early 18th century, after an influx of vampire superstition into Western Europe from areas where vampire legends were frequent, such as the Balkans and Eastern Europe, although local variants were also known by different names, such as vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania.

Roger Collins believes the Visigoths were a creation of the Gothic War of 376 – 382 and began as a collection of foederati ( Wolfram's " federate armies ") under Alaric I in the eastern Balkans, composed of largely Tervingi with Greuthungian and other barbarian contingents.

" However, a famine broke out and Rome was unwilling to supply them with either the food they were promised or the land ; open revolt ensued leading to 6 years of plundering and destruction throughout the Balkans, the death of a Roman Emperor and the destruction of an entire Roman army.

Specific cases were recorded in the northern Balkans on 25 December, in the city of Split.

Simultaneously, Christian communities were transported from newly conquered lands in the Balkans into Thrace and Anatolia.

After several wars with the Khazars, the Bulgars were finally defeated and they migrated to the south to the north and mainly to the west into the Balkans where most of the other Bulgar tribes were living in a state vassal to the Byzantine Empire since the 5th century.

However, they did accept that ' Major Martin ' was genuine, and several Wehrmacht divisions were routed away from Sicily and southern Italy to the Balkans, making Operation Husky on the night of July 9 / 10, 1943 the least costly seaborne invasion of World War II.

After 1180 BC, the Hittite empire disintegrated into several independent " Neo-Hittite " states, subsequent to losing much territory to the Middle Assyrian Empire and being finally overrun by the Phrygians, another Indo-European people who are believed to have migrated from The Balkans.

With the Balkans more or less pacified, Alexios could now turn his attention to Asia Minor, which had been almost completely overrun by the Seljuq Turks.

* 193 – Septimius Severus is proclaimed Roman Emperor by the army in Illyricum ( in the Balkans ).

Lured by Austria-Hungary's promises for territorial gains from Bulgaria ( in return for concessions in the Western Balkans ), Milan IV declared war on Bulgaria on 14 November 1885.

However, it was clear that the central geopolitical position of Bulgaria in the Balkans would inevitably lead to strong external pressure by both World War II factions.

It is possible that Bonaparte envisaged Aboukir Bay as a temporary anchorage: on 27 July he expressed the expectation that Brueys had already transferred his ships to Alexandria and three days later issued orders for the fleet to make for Corfu in preparation for naval operations against the Ottoman territories in the Balkans, although the courier carrying the instructions was intercepted and killed by Bedouin partisans.

At its core, the term " Balkans " are States that have been shaped by membership of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire.

If Diocletian ever did enter Rome shortly after his accession, he did not stay long ; he is attested back in the Balkans by 2 November 285, on campaign against the Sarmatians.

Early twentieth-century study of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans by Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated the paratactic model used for composing these poems.

Kollár's interest in linguistic and cultural diversity was aroused by the situation in his native multi-lingual Kingdom of Hungary and his roots among its Slovaks, and by the shifts that began to emerge after the gradual retreat of the Ottoman Empire in the more distant Balkans.

In the 1920s, Fascist Italy pursued an aggressive foreign policy that included an attack on the Greek island of Corfu, aims to expand Italian territory in the Balkans, plans to wage war against Turkey and Yugoslavia, attempts to bring Yugoslavia into civil war by supporting Croat and Macedonian separatists to legitimize Italian intervention, and making Albania a de facto protectorate of Italy, which was achieved through diplomatic means by 1927.

After the devastating 1354 earthquake, the Greek city of Gallipoli was almost abandoned, but swiftly reoccupied by Turks from Anatolia, the Asiatic side of the straits, making Gallipoli the first Ottoman position in Europe, and the staging area for their expansion across the Balkans.

The Pannonian basin then was occupied by the Gepids, whilst various Gothic groups remained in the Balkans also.

After 1453, the Byzantine tradition was carried on in regions previously influenced by its religion and culture — in the Balkans and Russia, Georgia in the caucasus, and, in the Greek-speaking realm, on Crete.

Post – World War I Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Near East had borders carved out by the Allies that left many of the new states in that region unsatisfied due to minority populations and conflicting historical claims.

During Justinian's reign, the Balkans suffered from several incursions by the Turkic and Slavic peoples who lived north of the Danube.

The ancient languages of the local Thraco-Illyrian people had already gone extinct before the arrival of the Slavs, and their cultural influence was highly reduced due to the repeated barbaric invasions on the Balkans during the early Middle Ages, accompanied by persistent hellenization, romanisation and later slavicisation.

He established the Empire by building up a society and government in the newly conquered city of Adrianople ( Edirne in Turkish ) and by expanding the realm in Europe, bringing most of the Balkans under Ottoman rule and forcing the Byzantine emperor to pay him tribute.

The Byzantine commander of the Bursa fort, called Evronos Bey, became a commander of a light cavalry force and even his sons and grandsons served Ottoman Empire in this capacity to conquer and hold many areas in Balkans.

The " Skythai " successfully invaded the Balkans in the early months of 268, and Aureolus, a commander of the cavalry, declared himself an ally of Postumus, and the new emperor at Milan.

Finally he was transferred in December 1914 to assume to post of commander of the forces in the Balkans with his headquarters at Peterwardein.

Following his return from the Balkans in October 1992 MacKenzie was appointed commander of the army in Ontario.

Its first commander was French General Paul Prosper Henrys, previously the commander of French forces in the Balkans.

1st Mountain Division commander, Generalleutnant Walter Stettner Ritter von Grabenhofen, overseeing anti-partisan operations in Montenegro, in The Balkans, June 1943

Keppler continued as its regimental commander throughout the operations in the West, Balkans and in Russia.