Ancient and Roman history (Thracian) soldier of the Achaemenid army, circa 480 BC.
Xerxes I tomb relief. . Indigenous
Thracians were divided into numerous tribes. The first
Greek colonies in coastal Thrace were founded in the 8th century BC. The first to take greater control of Thrace, in part or whole, were the
Achaemenian Persians in the late 6th century BC. The region was incorporated into their empire as the
Satrapy of Skudra, after the
Scythian campaign of Darius the Great. Thracian soldiers were used in Persian armies and are depicted in carvings of the
Persepolis and
Naqsh-e Rostam. Persians' presence in Thracia lasted up until the rise of the
Delian league. In the 4th century BC most of Thrace was conquered by
Philip II of Macedon and his son
Alexander the Great. Notably, Thracian troops are known to have accompanied Alexander when he crossed the
Hellespont which abuts Thrace, during the invasion of the
Achaemenid Empire. It then passed to
Lysimachus when Alexander's empire was divided between his generals. Lysimachus ruled as king up until his defeat from
Seleucus I Nicator in 281 BC at the
battle of Corupedium.
Thracians recorded no collective name for themselves; terms such as
Thrace and
Thracians were assigned by the Greeks. Divided into separate tribes, the Thracians did not form any lasting political organizations until the founding of the
Odrysian state in the 4th century BC. Like
Illyrians, the locally ruled Thracian tribes of the mountainous regions maintained a warrior tradition, while the tribes based in the plains were purportedly more peaceable. Recently discovered funeral mounds in Bulgaria suggest that Thracian kings did rule regions of Thrace with distinct Thracian national identity. During this period, a subculture of
celibate ascetics called the
Ctistae lived in Thrace, where they served as philosophers, priests, and prophets. Sections of Thrace particularly in the south started to become
hellenized before the
Peloponnesian War as Athenian and
Ionian colonies were set up in Thrace before the war.
Spartan and other
Doric colonists followed them after the war. The special interest of
Athens to Thrace is underlined by the numerous finds of Athenian silverware in Thracian tombs. In 171-168 BC, at the
Third Macedonian War the Odryssian king
Cotys IV allied to
Perseus of Macedon and following the subjugation of
Macedon to the Romans, Thrace also lost its independence and became a tributary to
Rome. Towards the end of the 1st century BC Thrace lost its status as a client kingdom as the Romans began to directly appoint their kings. Probably soon after the
Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Roman leader
Augustus sought to implement
indirect rule over Thrace through a large,
Hellenized client kingdom. The Romans removed the Odrysian-Astaean royal family from power, and put the entire kingdom under
Sapaean rule with
Bizye acting as the initial center of this reorganized polity. This situation lasted until 46 AD, when the Romans finally turned Thrace into a Roman province (Romana provincia Thracia). During the Roman domination, within the geographical borders of ancient Thrace, there were two separate Roman provinces, namely Thrace ("provincia Thracia") and Lower Moesia ("Moesia inferior"). Later, in the times of Diocletian, the two provinces were joined and formed the so-called "Dioecesis Thracia". The establishment of Roman colonies and mostly several Greek cities, as was Nicopolis, Topeiros, Traianoupolis, Plotinoupolis, and Hadrianoupolis resulted from the Roman Empire's urbanization. The Roman provincial policy in Thrace favored mainly not the Romanization but the Hellenization of the country, which had started as early as the Archaic period through the Greek colonisation and was completed by the end of Roman antiquity. As regards the competition between the Greek and Latin language, the very high rate of Greek inscriptions in Thrace extending south of
Haemus Mountains proves the complete language Hellenization of this region. The boundaries between the Greek and Latin speaking Thrace are placed just above the northern foothills of Haemus Mountains. During the imperial period many Thracians – particularly members of the local aristocracy of the cities – had been granted the right of the
Roman citizenship (civitas Romana) with all its privileges. Epigraphic evidence show a large increase in such naturalizations in the times of Trajan and Hadrian, while in 212 AD the well-known decree of emperor Caracalla (
constitutio Antoniniana), granted Roman citizenship to all the free inhabitants of the Roman Empire. During the same period (in the 1st–2nd century AD), a remarkable presence of Thracians is testified by the inscriptions outside the borders (extra fines) both in the Greek territory and in all the Roman provinces, especially in the provinces of Eastern Roman Empire.
Medieval history By the mid-5th century, as the
Western Roman Empire began to crumble, Thracia fell from the authority of Rome and into the hands of Germanic tribal rulers. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Thracia turned into a battleground territory for the better part of the next 1,000 years. The surviving eastern portion of the Roman Empire, later known as the
Byzantine Empire, with
Constantinople as its capital, retained control over Thrace until the 7th century when the northern half of the entire region was incorporated into the
First Bulgarian Empire and the remainder was reorganized in the
Thracian and
Macedonian themes.
The Empire regained the lost regions in the late 10th century until the Bulgarians regained control of the northern half at the end of the 12th century. Throughout the 13th century and the first half of the 14th century, the region was changing in the hands of the Bulgarian and the Byzantine Empire (excluding Constantinople). In 1265, the area suffered a Mongol raid from the
Golden Horde, led by
Nogai Khan, and between 1305 and 1307 the area was raided by the
Catalan company.
Ottoman period In 1352, the
Ottoman Turks conducted their first incursion into the region
subduing it completely within a matter of two decades and ruled it for five centuries in general peace.
Edirne became the capital of the
Ottoman Empire and after the fall of Byzantium in 1453,
Constantinople.
Modern history . . This photocopy came from a larger color map. In 1821, several parts of Thrace, such as
Lavara,
Maroneia,
Sozopolis,
Aenos,
Callipolis, and
Samothraki rebelled during the
Greek War of Independence. With the
Congress of Berlin in 1878, Northern Thrace was incorporated into the semi-autonomous Ottoman province of
Eastern Rumelia, which united with Bulgaria in 1885. The rest of Thrace was divided among
Turkey and
Greece at the beginning of the 20th century, following the
Balkan Wars,
World War I and the
Greco-Turkish War. In Summer 1934, up to 10,000 Jews were maltreated, bereaved, and then forced to quit the region (see
1934 Thrace pogroms). From
Bulgaria and
Romania between 1934 and 1938 a large wave of
Muslim immigrants called
Göçmenler went to
East Thrace. Today,
Thracian is a geographical term used in
Bulgaria,
Turkey, and
Greece. ==Notable people==