The career of Alexander the Great marks the entrance of Europe in the grand contention of Empires on the Old World stage. It had been the “Middle East” and China, with Europe a wilderness of troublesome but otherwise unimportant barbarians.
Alexander changed that, taking European culture, by military means, all the way to India.
The Chinese, always peering beyond their western borders toward the trouble that they knew was going to be eventually coming, took notice of the changes. But that’s another story.
At their time of maximum expansion, the Achaemenid Persians, whom Alexander conquered completely, occupied parts of the Balkans and directly threatened the Greeks of Greece proper. They failed in their attempts to take Greece, but they owned Thrace, now parts of Northern Macedonia and Bulgaria.
The Kings of ancient Macedon had been vassals of the Persians for a while, but they broke free and began to consolidate, first regionally, then they started making plans to expand. They weren’t sure what direction they were going to try to expand in first, maybe Greece to the south, maybe some Persian weak zone to the east. They didn’t consider expanding west. It was all forest there, little barbarian tribes, no money, no gold, who cared?
The scheming and planning was being done by the Macedonian King Phillip II. He got assassinated before he was able to put any grand designs into play. His son, Alexander III, immediately picked up the reins and charged forward into history.
The Greeks back then had this thing that everyone who wasn’t them was a “barbarian,” meaning their languages all sounded like
