This book deals with the Serbian-Bulgarian and the Bulgarian-Macedonian historiographical controversies over the Middle Ages. They regard a wide range of issues from the settlement of the Slavs in the Balkans to the Ottoman conquest that are traced from their beginning in the 1870s to the present day. The strategies and tactical steps, the arguments put forward by the authors in defence of their national positions, and the rhetoric are analysed.

The work reveals the critical potential of (the history of) historiography. This field has been sadly neglected by historians of the Balkan region, who still consider it "auxiliary" to history proper. While in a few noteworthy exceptions a given national historiography is critically treated "from within," the present book engages transnationally with several historiographies and the controversies they produced, which also present points of intersection of their master narratives.