Best outcome for the Balkans?

Roman Empire survives as united, no Schism of 1054 or Ottomans never invade Balkans.
Because having a power vacuum dominated by Hungary would be much more peaceful then a united Balkans under the Ottomans? And im not sure whether a united church would be enough to stop Byzantine decline (its only a few decades until Manzikert).
 

archaeogeek

Banned
More succesful League of Lezha/Principality of Albania, less succesful Hungary fails to incorporate Croatia in the crown of Saint Stephen. Religious nationalism is toned down in the 19th century, Russia less succesful in the Balkans. Something close to San Steffano Bulgaria.

And that gives a situation where Albanians are actually seen as a serious people before 1912, less of a cultural divide between the "slavonic" nations. Serbia is not a russian puppet. A larger Bulgaria which incorporates then majority Bulgarian Macedonia and which will break from Russia within the decade even as Russia thought it had acquired a good little puppet.

Greece loses Thessaloniki :p

Multinational empires are an entertaining idea in theory, but they're still empires, and right of conquest won't make things stable much once nationalism kicks in.
 
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As an inhabitant of those parts there is a general concensus Ottoman invasion created the background for current "chaos" causing massive movements of peoples creating a hodge-podge of ethnic groups from Sutla river to Balkan mountain.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
As an inhabitant of those parts there is a general concensus Ottoman invasion created the background for current "chaos" causing massive movements of peoples creating a hodge-podge of ethnic groups from Sutla river to Balkan mountain.

The massive movements of people were already started by and encourage by the Byzantines.
The plagues added more as it's the reason half of Athens' population was albanian by the 4th crusade.
 
The Balkans were already pretty messy by the time the Turks arrived, what with the Byzantines and the Hungarians pressuring local princes, but certainly the Ottoman conquest shifted a LOT of people around.

I don't know however if the solution is simply not shifting people as much as it is to not have the place become a proxy battlefield for great powers; that would help almost as much.
 
The massive movements of people were already started by and encourage by the Byzantines.
The plagues added more as it's the reason half of Athens' population was albanian by the 4th crusade.

I guess that was confined to eastern balkans. In the west there weren't any mayor migration until second half of the 15th century and first quarter of the 16th century when Turkish raids/conquests enslaved and took away considerable number of people and forced even greater numbe to move westwards across the Adriatic and northwards into Carniola, Styria, Burgenland and Moravia. Some of those that remained converted to Islam and some of the homes abandoned by the refugees were settled by orthodox people fleeing from further east.
 
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