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To: MarMema; FormerLib; Destro; Shqipo
Who said you did us any favors by saving Rome and the papacy? LOL. Is this true, Hermann? You were saved by the Albanians?

No more true than us being saved by the Serbs or the Romans of Constantinople or any number of other supposed saviors of the west.

The historical vignette provided in #13 is flawed in several respects. First, for example, it was the Serbs who "liberated" Albania in 1912, and then had the countryside of Albania "liberated" from them by the British/Austrian dominated peace conference and handed over to a group of Albanians who had never even considered revolting from the Ottoman Commonwealth.

Second, since the Albanians (and also Roman Greeks and Serbs and Hungarians) all failed in their quest to stop the Turk, its a little fatuous to pose them as saviors of the West. The West didn't spend the time the Turks wasted conquering the Balkans preparing its defences. Rather, it suffered the same catastrophic losses as the rest until the First and Second Battles of Vienna, and the Naval Battle of Lepanto, precisely because of its unprepared defences. The miracle of Lepanto was considered even more of a miracle because the Christian fleet was so much outgunned by the Muslims. The heterodox Bogomil tendencies of the people who would become Bosnak Muslims did not help either. They were a group of traitors in the midst.

Third, Rome was not an immediate target of Muslim operations. The Turks were more interested in expansion via land than overwater journies, being a steppe people, and not seafarers like the Greeks and Italians. Therefore, any route to Rome would need to first pass through Budapest, Vienna, then the Po Valley of Italy (Milan-Bologna-Venice). Seeing that the Turks never made it past the first obstacle out of the Balkans - Vienna -, its difficult to posit anyone but those who stopped them at Vienna - the German/Polish armies, as the saviors of the west. They were very likely also hindered by their ever expanding lines coming up out of the Balkans. The extension of Turkish rule further north and west than the roughly Trieste-Odessa line required an exponentially larger frontier for every mile of forward advance. The Turk simply was not capable of this considering his paucity of numbers (most of those who would become Turks in the future were then still Greek Romans not yet Islamicized and Turkified). Its simply a fact that the lines achieved were as far as they could logistically go, just as the similar lines achieved by the Romans in the Balkans were circa AD 100.

Some other Balkans historians are pinged for concurrence, amendment, reemphasis, etc.

98 posted on 04/20/2004 6:19:11 PM PDT by Hermann the Cherusker
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To: Hermann the Cherusker
I knew you would have this answer handy. Thank you.
99 posted on 04/20/2004 7:17:50 PM PDT by MarMema (next year in Constantinople!)
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