ABSTRACT
The term "Balkans" gained currency only after the middle of the nineteenth century following the use, in 1808, by the German geographer Johann August Zeune, of the word Balkanhalbinsel (Balkan peninsula), and the publication, in 1831, by Major George Thomas Keppel, earl of Albemarle, of a book entitled Narrative of a Journey across the Ba/can. I The area to which the name "Balkans" alIudes previously lacked a general name. In classical antiquity, the western portion was calIed Illyricum. The eastern portion was called Thrace. Medieval European travelers knew several Balkan regions as Romanie, while the Ottoman Turks called the eastern and central portions Rumelia. Both names derive from the history of the Balkans as part of the Roman Empire. In the eighteenth century, European travelers called most of the area Turkey-in-Europe, in obvious reference to its inclusion within the Ottoman Empire since the fourteenth, mid-fifteenth, or early sixteenth century. A narrow region along the Adri-
atic coast remained Venetian from the Middle Ages to the time of Napoleon, and during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries a northwestern area was joined to the Habsburg dominions.
