North Macedonia, a landlocked country of mountains, river valleys and lakes in the central Balkans, between Kosovo, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Albania, has been farmed since Neolithic villagers settled at Amzabegovo and Govrlevo about 6200 BCE. Bronze Age communities left the sanctuary of Kokino and the pile dwellings of the Bay of Bones on Lake Ohrid, and in the Iron Age the Paeonians held the valley of the Vardar (Axios), the Dardanians the north and the Lyncestians and Dassaretae the south-west, until Philip II of Macedon subdued the Paeonians about 358 BCE. Rome made Macedonia a province in 146 BCE, built the Via Egnatia, founded the colony of Scupi near modern Skopje and left the cities of Stobi and Heraclea Lyncestis. The emperor Justinian I was born near Skopje about 482, and from about 600 Slavic tribes settled the valleys of Macedonia beside the surviving Byzantine towns.

From the 9th century the Bulgarian rulers Boris I and Simeon brought the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, Clement and Naum, to Ohrid, where they taught in Slavonic. Samuel's state, centred on Prespa and Ohrid, fought Byzantium for decades until the defeat at Kleidion in 1014 and Basil II's entry into Ohrid in 1018; Byzantine sources and many historians see it as the last phase of the Bulgarian Empire, while North Macedonian historiography counts it among the early Macedonian states, and the dataset attributes both views. The Archbishopric of Ohrid, which survived until 1767, preserved the memory of the Ohrid school; Stefan Dušan was crowned emperor in Skopje in 1346; and the Ottomans took Skopje in 1392 and held the region until 1912, building the mosques, bazaars and hamams of Skopje, Bitola and Tetovo and receiving Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492.

In the 19th century the national revival, the Bulgarian Exarchate of 1870 and the rival propagandas of Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece made Macedonia a European question. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization led the Ilinden Uprising of 1903 and its Kruševo Republic, and its heritage is claimed in both Macedonian and Bulgarian historiography. After the Balkan Wars the Treaty of Bucharest of 1913 divided geographical Macedonia among Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria; present-day North Macedonia lay in Serbian Vardar Macedonia, then in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the Vardar Banovina of Yugoslavia, where the authorities treated the Slavic population as Serbs. Bulgaria occupied most of the territory in 1915–1918 and in 1941–1944, western Macedonia was joined to Italian-ruled Albania, and the Jews of Macedonia were deported to Treblinka in March 1943. In the war the Partisans created the Anti-fascist Assembly (ASNOM), which on 2 August 1944 proclaimed a Macedonian state in a federal Yugoslavia.

The People's and then Socialist Republic of Macedonia gave the country its standard Macedonian language, university, academy and church, and rebuilt its capital after the earthquake of 26 July 1963. After the first multiparty elections of 1990 an independence referendum was held on 8 September 1991 and Macedonia left Yugoslavia peacefully. Greece objected to the name and imposed an embargo in 1994, the Interim Accord of 1995 eased the dispute, an insurgency in 2001 ended with the Ohrid Framework Agreement, which gave the Albanian community wider rights, and the Prespa Agreement of 2018 led to the new name on 12 February 2019. The country joined NATO in 2020; it has been an EU candidate since 2005 and opened accession talks in 2022, which Bulgaria has made conditional on questions of history, language and identity that Skopje contests. Its population is now about 1.8 million, among them, in the census of 2021, about 58 per cent Macedonians and about 24 per cent Albanians. Explore the eleven ages below through selected events from the timeline.