xi. j THE RACES OF THE DANUBE. 231 



career of Slavonic Turkey becomes almost a blank 

 until the beginning of the present century, when the 

 uprising of the Serbs against the Janissaries, under 

 the leadership of the eccentric and infamous Kara 

 George, reopened the Eastern Question, and perhaps 

 heralded the rise of a new national life among the 

 southern Slavs. 



This sketch of the Danubian peoples has of course 

 been but the merest outline. I have not attempted, 

 and should indeed feel quite incompetent, to do more 

 than define, by a few salient facts, the ethnological 

 relations of these peoples and their position in the 

 general history of Europe. Even so rudimentary an 

 outline as this, however, would be incomplete without 

 some allusion to the very important part played by 

 the Danubian Slavs in the origination of the Protes- 

 tant revolt against the ecclesiastical supremacy of 

 Rome. The circumstances under which the Bul- 

 garians were converted to Christianity were such that 

 during their brief political and literary eminence in 

 the tenth century they became the arch-heretics of 

 Europe. The Manichaean heresy, suggested by the 

 ancient theology of Persia, in which the Devil 

 appears as an independently existing Principle of 

 Evil, had always been rife in Armenia ; and it was 

 partly by Armenian missionaries, belonging to the 



