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 HOSTILE EACES NOT ASSIMILATED 187 though not the most important, of the evils which weakened the Empire. The second fact associated with the mischief caused by Divisions the Latin conquest, which contributed to the decay of the Balkan m empire, is that such conquest prevented the assimilation peninsula, of the various peoples occupying the Balkan peninsula. Even at the best period of the empire that population had always been strangely diversified. Albanians and Slavs had been there from very early times, side by side with Greeks and the race known as Wallachs, each of the four races having a distinct language. The influence of good administration and the strong hand of the central power kept these races in order. They had the usual tendency to hostility one towards the other, but until the Latin conquest good government and the Greek language, that of the Church and administration, were always a force tending to break down the boundaries between them and to incorporate isolated sections in the Greek-speak- ing community. But at all times their mutual jealousies constituted, as indeed they do now, the most difficult factor in the problem of the government of the Balkan peninsula. 1 This difficulty had been enormously increased by the Latin conquest. The populations were harassed everywhere by native rebellions and by foreign invaders : Greek pretenders to the empire who refused to recognise the crusading kings : crusading knights who settled in Greece after the expulsion of Baldwin : adventurous soldiers of fortune from Italy : freebooters from the Catalan Grand Company: Venetians and Turks : and lastly by dissensions between the emperors themselves, the most hurtful of which were between Canta- cuzenus and John. 1 Mr. D. G. Hogarth in The Nearer East (London, 1902), on pp. 280-1, speaks of the country as a ' Debateable Land distracted internally by a ceaseless war of influences, and only too anxious to lean in one part or another on external aid.'. . . 'Macedonia has been torn this way and that for half a century.' The whole chapter on 'World Belation' is valuable and suggestive. The same diversity of interests and hostility arising from differences in race and religion is well brought out in the best recent book on Turkey in Europe, by Odysseus.