Translated from french by Grok

Political disunity, or multiple centers of power, makes Greece an easy prey for its enemies, despite the awareness of its unity that defines the Greek as: “of the same blood, same language, common sacred objects, same customs.” This observation comes from Herodotus, and it refers to an era—the Persian Wars—when Macedonia marked the outermost boundaries of compact Hellenism.

It took more than a millennium for Hellenism, in a new framework, to find political union. The solid structures of the state and the vitality of the ecclesiastical organization of Byzantium ensured the cohesion of the Empire’s multifaceted world: they gave Hellenism the ability to integrate, through its intellectual supremacy and cultural framework, diverse peoples and populations living on Byzantine territories—including Macedonia, which had now become a central province of the multiethnic and ecumenical Byzantine Empire.

The “God-saved and guardian of martyrs,” the “beautiful Thessaloniki,” quickly became the center of national resurgence, an expression of the continuity of civilization and a source of Hellenism’s intellectual brilliance in the Balkans.

No historical distortion, no seemingly scientific attempt can today shake the conviction that the state is, as Renan said, the awareness of the solidarity that unites its members. The preservation of national unity, Renan continues, is based on shared sacrifices, shared interests, shared goals, a shared past and a shared future—independent of any biological or racial criterion. We call Greeks, Isocrates already wrote, those who share “not birth but thought,” or rather “those who share our education or common nature.”

Like every great empire, the multinational Byzantine Empire found its cohesion through the “common thought” of its citizens; it based its unity on a unified cultural factor, on general agreement about essentials—which in Byzantium was called Orthodoxy, Hellenism, and Greekness. It was within and through these that the original civilization of the first European empire of the Middle Ages developed.

Christianization (ensuring religious unity), Hellenization (ensuring linguistic unity), and Romanization (ensuring social unity) were the fundamental prerequisites for individuals and peoples to enter Byzantine society. It was through this three-pronged process that the Byzantinization of foreigners who settled in the Empire during certain periods took place. This was the path gradually followed by the Slavs of Macedonia and the rest of Greece in their effort to acquire homes with a cultural tradition, as well as the framework of a developed society and urban life.

Of course, there is no need to dwell on the fact that despite the upheaval caused by numerous barbarian attacks and Slavic invasions, despite the corruption and mistreatment suffered by the native populations, the Byzantine Greeks preserved their vitality—which, with Constantinople’s help, of course, enabled them to assimilate the newcomers. Thus the Slavs of Macedonia, the former fierce and ruthless invaders, “adopted the Roman way of life,” campaigned “against the states that fight the Romans,” and through “holy baptism” conformed to the “Christian people”—i.e., they identified with the Byzantines.

It is this mechanism of integrating foreign populations through the Greek element of the region—this expansion of Byzantine society—that I have tried to analyze using all the sources that contemporary scholarship makes available to Byzantinists. Let us hope that this will somewhat reduce the countless supposedly scientific publications that, not only in Europe but also in Japan and Latin America, still today speak of the Slavization of Greece and especially of Macedonia. To the theory of Slavization there is only one scientific response: Byzantinization, “our glorious Byzantinism,” as Cavafy would say.

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