History of North Macedonia

The ancient world

The Macedonian region has been the site of human habitation for millennia. There is archaeological evidence that the Old European (Neolithic) civilization flourished there between 7000 and 3500 bce. Seminomadic peoples speaking languages of the Indo-European family then moved into the Balkan Peninsula. During the 1st millennium bce the Macedonian region was populated by a mixture of peoples—Dacians, Thracians, Illyrians, Celts, and Greeks. Although Macedonia is most closely identified historically with the kingdom of Philip II of Macedon in the middle of the 4th century bce and the subsequent expansion of that empire by his son Alexander III (the Great), none of the states established in that era was very durable. Until the arrival of the Romans, the pattern of politics was a shifting succession of contending city-states and chiefdoms that occasionally integrated into ephemeral empires. Nevertheless, this period is important in understanding the present-day region, as both Greeks and Albanians base their claims to be indigenous inhabitants of it on the achievements of the Macedonian and Illyrian states.

At the end of the 3rd century bce, the Romans began to expand into the Balkan Peninsula in search of metal ores, slaves, and agricultural produce. The Illyrians were finally subdued in 9 ce (their lands becoming the province of Illyricum), and the north and east of Macedonia were incorporated into the province of Moesia in 29 ce. A substantial number of sites bear witness today to the power of Rome, especially Heraclea Lyncestis (modern Bitola) and Stobi (south of Veles on the Vardar River). The name Skopje is Roman in origin (Scupi). Many roads still follow courses laid down by the Romans.

Beginning in the 3rd century, the defenses of the Roman Empire in the Balkans were probed by Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Avars, and other seminomadic peoples. Although the region was nominally a part of the Eastern Empire, control from Constantinople became more and more intermittent. By the mid-6th century Slavic tribes had begun to settle in Macedonia, and from the 7th to the 13th century the entire region was little more than a system of military marches governed uneasily by the Byzantine state through alliances with local princes.

The medieval states

In the medieval period the foundations were laid for modern competing claims for control over Macedonia. During the 9th century the Eastern tradition of Christianity was consolidated in the area. The mission to the Slavs has come to be associated with Saints Cyril and Methodius, whose great achievement was the devising of an alphabet based on Greek letters and adapted to the phonetic peculiarities of the Slavonic tongue. In its later development as the Cyrillic alphabet, this came to be a distinctive cultural feature uniting several of the Slavic peoples.

Although the central purpose of the missionaries was to preach the Gospel to the Slavs in the vernacular, their ecclesiastical connection with the Greek culture of Constantinople remained a powerful lever to be worked vigorously during the struggle for Macedonia in the 19th century. About three-fourths of the inhabitants of the present-day Republic of North Macedonia have a Macedonian national identity. They are Slavic-speaking descendants of the Slavic tribes who have lived in the area since the 6th century. The long association of the area with the Greek-speaking Byzantine state, and the Greek claim to continuity with the ancient Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great, led the Greek state to claim that “Macedonia was, is, and always will be Greek.” Since the independence of the Republic of Macedonia in 1991, Greece on these grounds attempted to block the international recognition of the Republic of Macedonia by its constitutional name and to deny the Macedonians of the Republic of Macedonia and Greece the right to identify themselves as Macedonians.

What is less clear is the history of the emergence of a Macedonian national identity from a more general identity as Slavic-speaking Orthodox Christians as well as from a Bulgarian national identity, the latter of which developed before a Macedonian identity did. Among the short-lived states jostling for position with Byzantium were two that modern Bulgarians claim give them a special stake in Macedonia. Under the reign of Simeon I (893–927), Bulgaria emerged briefly as the dominant power in the peninsula, extending its control from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. Following a revolt of the western provinces, this first Bulgarian empire fell apart, but it was partially reintegrated by Samuel (reigned 976–1014), who set up his own capital in Ohrid (not the traditional Bulgarian capital of Preslav [now known as Veliki Preslav]) and also established a patriarchate there. Although the Byzantine state reasserted its authority after 1018, a second Bulgarian empire raised its head in 1185; this included northern and central Macedonia and lasted until the mid-14th century.

During the second half of the 12th century, a more significant rival to Byzantine power in the Balkans emerged in the Serbian Nemanjić dynasty. Stefan Nemanja became veliki župan, or “grand chieftain,” of Raška in 1169, and his successors created a state that under Stefan Dušan (reigned 1331–55) incorporated Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, all of modern Albania and Montenegro, a substantial part of Bosnia, and Serbia as far north as the Danube. Although the cultural heart of the empire was Raška (the area around modern Novi Pazar) and Kosovo, as the large number of medieval Orthodox churches in those regions bear witness, Stefan Dušan was crowned emperor in Skopje in 1346. Within half a century after his death, the Nemanjić state was eclipsed by the expanding Ottoman Empire; nevertheless, it is to this golden age that Serbs today trace their own claims to Macedonia.