Macedonia & Illyria
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In the Illyrian Wars of 229 BC and 219 BC, Rome overran the Illyrian settlements in the Neretva river valley and suppressed the piracy that had made the Adriatic unsafe. In 180 BC the Dalmatians declared themselves independent of the Illyrian king Gentius, who kept his capital at Scodra, located on Lake Skadar (Shkodra Lake) in northwestern Albania. The name of the city Shkodër, also known as Scutari and Skutari, is derived in folk etymology from Latin scutarii, literally "shieldmakers", referring to a Roman legion created by Constantine.
Given by the numerous Thracian names in Illyria, tribes were most likely in turn pushed eastwards by Celtic or Germanic tribes from the northwest while the movement of the Greeks to the south and the Phrygian migration from Thrace into central Asia Minor. The Dorians deemed Hercules as an important heroic/historical ancestor and have called their invasions of Greece as the "return of Hercules." Roman sources from the 2nd century BC (during the time of the Illyrian-Roman wars) have called Queen Teuta's Illyria as a half-Hellenic country. Illyrians related to Albainian is related to the language of the Illyrians of a Hellenic dialogue and a less developed forms of Greek culture. The Villanovan culture was the earliest Iron Age culture of central and northern Italy, abruptly following the Bronze Age Terramare culture and giving way in the 7th century to an increasingly Orientalizing culture influenced by Greek traders, which was followed without a severe break by the Etruscan civilization. Villanovan cultural origins, but perhaps not all its peoples, lay in the Eastern Alps, with connections to the Halstatt culture.
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Shkodër (Albania) was founded around the 4th century BC. This was the site of the Illyrian tribe Labeates as well as the capital of the kingdom of King Gentius and that of Queen Teuta. In the yeare 168 BC, the city was taken by the Romans and it became an important trade and military route. Teuta's pirates extended their operations southward in the Ionian Sea, westward along the coast of Italy, and were soon feared as the terror of the Adriatic. Under the leadership of Burebista (70-44 BC) the Dacians (Hallstatt) became a powerful state which threatened even the regional interests of the Romans. The Dacian state sustained a series of conflicts with the expanding Roman Empire, and was finally conquered in 106 AD by the Roman emperor Trajan, during the reign of the Dacian king Decebalus soon Hadrian's Wall was built. Severus defends Britain and repairs Hadrian's Wall in 208. The next year, the third century began with St. Alban, first British martyr. Faced by successive invasions of the Goths and Carpi, the Roman administration withdrew in 271. |
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In 513 BC, south of the Danube, the tribal confederation of the Getae were defeated by Darius during his campaign against the Scythians (Herodotus IV.93). Over half a millennium later, the Getae (also named Daci by Romans) were defeated by the Roman Empire under Emperor Trajan in two campaigns stretching from 101 to 106, and the core of their kingdom was turned into the Roman province of Dacia. The Gothic and Carpic campaigns in the Balkans during 238–256 forced the Roman Empire to reorganize a new Roman province of Dacia south of Danube, inside former Moesia Superior.
Pliny in his Natural History tacitly implies a stricter usage of the term Illyri, when speaking of Illyri proprie dictii ("Illyrians properly so-called") among the native communities in Roman Dalmatia. Illyrians has come to refer to a broad, ill-defined group of peoples who inhabited the western Balkans (from northern Epirus to southern Pannonia) and even perhaps parts of Southern Italy in classical times into the Common era, and spoke Illyrian languages and movement of Illyrian tribes from the lowlands of central Europe (modern Hungary), towards South Eastern Europe and the Balkan peninsula.
The northeastern portion of Italy and the Alps was also once home to an indigenous group known as the Euganei. They superceded and later mixed with the group that came to be known as the Veneti and the Armorican States. The extent of their territory before their incorporation by the Romans is uncertain. It was at first included in Cisalpine Gaul, but under was known as the tenth region of Italy or Celtiberia. In 1101, during the Crusades, Shkodër later fell to the hands of the Albanian feudal family of the Balsha followed afterwards by the Dukagjini control who surrendered the city to the Venetian rule, forming a coalition against the Ottoman Empire through the large Dalmatian Kingdom with many neighboring Albanian tribes.