A Concise History of Bulgaria Read online

  St Edmund Hall, Oxford

  October 2004

  A Note on Transliteration

  a

  b

  v

  g (always hard)

  d

  e (or é at the end of proper nouns)

  zh (but has been transliterated ‘dj’)

  z

  i

  i

  k

  Λ l

  m

  n

  o

  p

  r

  s

  t

  u (long)

  f

  h (but ‘kh’ in Russian and proto-Bulgarian words)

  ts

  ch

  sh

  sht (but ‘shch’ in Russian words)

  û

  iu

  ya

  The Bulgarian lands: main rivers and mountains.

  1 The Bulgarian lands from prehistory to the arrival of the Bulgarians

  The lands which now constitute the state of Bulgaria were amongst the first in Europe to witness the emergence of organised, social life. Settlements existed in these lands as early as the middle palaeolithic period, from c. 100,000 to 40,000 BC. In neolithic times the population gradually forsook their caves for the plains where they began to work the land. By the third millennium BC they were cultivating non-food crops such as flax and had become adept at metal-working. In the sixth millennium BC an unknown people were producing objects of great originality and which experts consider to be the products of a spontaneously generated rather than an imported culture. This culture, in which the chief object of veneration appears to have been the mother goddess, reached its zenith in the fourth millennium BC.

  By the end of the third millennium BC the lands to the east of the Morava–Vardar valleys were falling under the cultural influence of the Thracians. An Indo-European people, the Thracians lived in a loosely organised tribal society. They were masters of metal-working, particularly with silver and gold. Many spectacular hoards have been unearthed in present-day Bulgaria at sites such as Panagiurishte, Velchitrun and Vratsa, and many more remain to be excavated. In addition to a high level of proficiency in metal-working the Thracians were renowned for their horsemanship. Music too was an essential feature of Thracian culture for Orpheus himself was an early Thracian king who managed to unite the disparate tribes of Thrace and Macedonia for a short period. This was a considerable feat in that the Thracians showed little disposition towards political cohesion and cooperation, Herodotus once noting that if the Thracians could only unite and subordinate themselves to one leader they would be invincible. As is so often the case in the Balkans, it was external pressures rather than internal inclinations which brought about political unity.

  Map 1.1 Ancient sites in present-day Bulgaria.

  Plate 1.1 A Mother Goddess figure produced by the unidentified people who thrived in the Bulgarian lands during the sixth millenium BC.

  These pressures came from the Greeks who established mercantile centres and colonies along the Black Sea coast. The Greeks held the Thracians in low esteem, unjustifiably so because not only were the Thracians their equal in crafts and horsemanship, they also began minting coins at much the same time as their haughty southern neighbours. The Persian invasions of the Balkans in the sixth and fifth centuries BC were a much more serious threat than Greek cultural arrogance. This external danger brought about the Odryssian kingdom which united the Thracian tribes of the central Balkans.

  The Persian storm was weathered but in the fourth century BC another threat appeared, this time from within the Balkan peninsula. The powerful new Macedonian state soon clashed with the Thracians. The latters’ cultural achievements continued but they suffered chronic political weakness; they accepted Macedonian domination, and Thracian archers and horsemen formed a significant proportion of the army which Alexander the Great took to the frontiers of India. After the disappearance of the Macedonian danger came one much more ominous.

  Landing first in the west of the Balkans to suppress pirates in the third century BC, the Romans spread inexorably inland. By the first century AD the entire peninsula south of the Danube was under their control. For a while they allowed a truncated Thracian kingdom to continue as a client state but eventually that too disappeared. The Thracian language survived in remote areas until the fifth century AD and their worship of the horse was continued by later inhabitants of the area; and some scholars still see the ‘mummers’ found in parts of the south-west of present-day Bulgaria as a relict of Thracian culture.

  Roman rule was characteristically efficient and strict, giving the Balkan peninsula a unity and stability enjoyed neither before nor since. Under Roman law and the firm grip of the legions the provinces of Moesia, the area between the Balkan mountains and the Danube, and Thrace, from the Balkans to the Aegean, prospered. The new system of roads bound the Balkans together on both a north–south and an east–west axis. At the crossroad of important diagonal routes across the peninsula was to be found the city of Serdica, the site on which Sofia now stands. Other cities flourished, not least Trimontium, now Plovdiv, whose magnificent Roman theatre was discovered only in the 1970s when a new road was being built.

  With Roman rule, eventually, came Christianity and when the empire was divided in 395 Moesia and Thrace became part of the eastern empire focused on Constantinople (Byzantium). For the next millennium and a half the city was to play a hugely important role in the history of the Bulgarian lands.

  Plate 1.2 A one-handled vase from the Vratsa treasure, between 380 and 350 BC. The vase, 9 cm in height, illustrates the Thracian prowess in horsemanship.

  By the fourth century Roman power was weakening. Internal problems were compounded when tribes from the Asiatic steppes raided the north-east of the Balkans. In the following century ultimately fatal damage was inflicted on the Roman body politic by a series of such invaders who included the Alani, the Goths and the Huns, all of whom were enticed by the prospect of looting the fabled wealth of Byzantium. They failed in that aspiration and soon moved out of the Balkans in search of fresh plunder, but if these invaders were transient, the Slavs who also first appeared in the fifth century, were not. They were settlers. They colonised areas of the eastern Balkans and in the seventh century other Slav tribes combined with the Proto-Bulgars, a group of Turkic origin, to launch a fresh assault into the Balkans. The Proto-Bulgars originated in the area between the Urals and the Volga and were a pot-pourri of various ethnic elements, the word Bulgar being derived from a Turkic verb meaning ‘to mix’. What differentiated the Proto-Bulgars from the Slavs was that they had, in addition to a formidable military reputation, a highly developed sense of political cohesion and organisation. In 680 their leader, Khan Asparukh, led an army across the Danube and in the following year established his capital at Pliska near what is now Shumen. A Bulgarian state had appeared in the Balkans.

  Map 1.2 The Roman empire in the Balkans.

  Plate 1.3 The Roman theatre in Plovdiv which came to light only in the 1970s during the construction of a new inner city road.

  2 Mediaeval Bulgaria, 681–1393

  Two main problems confronted the new Bulgarian state at the end of the seventh century: the need to establish clearly defined and secure borders; and the need to weld together the two main human components of the state, the Proto-Bulgarian conquerors and the conquered Slavs. The second of these two problems was eventually to be resolved, but the first was seldom out of consideration for more than a few years; this problem was to be a persistent feature of Bulgarian states, modern as well as mediaeval.

  The new state commanded a powerful position. From Pliska it could control the north–south routes through the eastern passes of the Balkan mountains and along the narrow lowland coastal strip. In the north, however, its extensive territories beyond the Danube inevitably led it into conflict with both the tribal groups milling around in the plains to the north-east, and with the succession of states which were established on the nor
th-western borders. For the leaders of mediaeval Bulgaria, however, the most persistent and pressing problem was defining Bulgaria’s relations with the great power to the south. The first mediaeval Bulgarian state was to be destroyed by Byzantium; the second was to fall to Byzantium’s successor, the Ottoman empire.

  Bulgaria under the Khans, 681–852

  After its foundation in 681 the new state enjoyed almost a century of growth. Initial tensions with Byzantium were contained and regulated in a treaty of 716 which awarded northern Thrace to Bulgaria and was unusual in the mediaeval era in that it contained purely economic clauses. Immediately after the treaty the Bulgarian state assisted Byzantium in the latter’s conflict with the Arabs in Asia Minor. By the middle of the eighth century part of the Morava valley had been added to Bulgaria which then included much of what is now southern Romania and parts of present-day Ukraine.

  By this time the Black Sea was a virtual Byzantine lake, and in this sector it went virtually unchallenged by Bulgaria because Bulgaria never developed a sizeable sea-going force. Even if the strategic need for a such a force had been recognised it is doubtful if anything effective could have been done to act upon that need; the Bulgarian state had a relatively low technological base and the degree of planning and coordination needed to produce a navy would have been difficult to achieve in an economy which did not even mint its own coins, preferring instead to rely on Byzantine currency.

  The lack of a navy ruled out expansion along the Black Sea coast either to the north or the south, just as the chaos of the steppe area made impossible any territorial gains to the north-east; the natural direction of movement for the Bulgarian state was therefore to the north-west and the south-west. In the north-west the collapse of the Avar kingdom created a vacuum into which Bulgaria’s rulers gladly advanced, this taking their frontier up to the river Tisza; Transylvania too became part of Bulgaria. Expansion to the south and south-west was not so easy. Some of Macedonia had been taken late in the eighth century but only at the cost of losing part of Bulgaria’s possessions in Thrace. Khan Krum (803–14) determined to remedy this. In 811 he took the recently fortified Sredets (now Sofia) from the Byzantines, went on to seize Nesebûr on the Black Sea coast, and then marched as far as the walls of Byzantium itself. This was a characteristically vicious war in which, in 811, the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus became the first of his rank for almost five hundred years to lose his life on the battlefield; Krum encrusted his deceased enemy’s skull in silver and used it as a drinking goblet.

  In 814 his successor, Khan Omurtag (814–31), concluded a peace which gave Bulgaria some territory in the Tundja valley, and later in his reign he was able to add Belgrade (Singidunum) and its surrounding district to his kingdom. In the second quarter of the ninth century Bulgaria, taking advantage of Byzantium’s preoccupations with the iconoclast controversy and with threats to its power in Asia Minor, expanded into Macedonia, a predominantly Slav area which welcomed this alternative to Greek, Byzantine domination. By the middle of the century Ohrid and Prespa were incorporated into Bulgaria as was much of southern Albania; Byzantine power in Europe was now confined to western Albania, Greece, the southern Vardar valley and Thrace.

  Omurtag, however, was not merely a warrior. He continued Krum’s work in introducing a proper legal system into Bulgaria and he was an avid builder, his most notable achievement in this regard being the reconstruction of Pliska after the city had been burnt in 811. There are more extant inscriptions to Omurtag than to any other mediaeval Bulgarian ruler.

  The Reign of Boris I (852–888) and the Conversion to Christianity

  The celebration of Omurtag is perhaps surprising in view of the achievements of Boris I who in his three and a half decades of power was to impose huge and portentous changes on his realm and its inhabitants.

  Boris was no less a warrior than his famous predecessors but his most important act was to impose Christianity upon Bulgaria. He did this in part to escape immediate military embarrassments and in particular to relieve pressure from the Byzantine armies, but there were also other long-standing causes, both domestic and external, for his decision.

  In the first place, almost the entire civilised world was by now Christian, with only distant tribes such as the Letts and the Finns outside the Christian community; if Bulgaria were to be accepted as an equal amongst the powerful states of Europe, east and west, it would have to become part of their cultural and religious community. Even more importantly, conversion, it could reasonably be hoped, would help bridge the gap between the two main ethnic groups in Bulgaria, the Proto-Bulgarians and the Slavs. This gap still existed although the languages had merged into a Slavo-Bulgarian in which the Slav tongue of the conquered masses predominated.

  Map 2.1 Bulgaria’s borders during the first kingdom, 681–1018.

  Christianity had taken root in the Balkans during the later period of the Roman empire, and when they entered the area and colonised it the Slavs to a large degree adopted the Christian religion of those whom they had subdued. This was much less true of the Proto-Bulgarians, especially the nobility and the rulers, who for decades remained steadfastly pagan. It was not that its Christian Slav subjects had presented any threat to the Bulgarian state. On the contrary, they had provided the bulk of the armies which fought against Christian Byzantium, and they continued to guard the passes through the Balkan mountains, this being a vital service because if Byzantine forces had penetrated the Balkan range they could have strangled a Bulgarian state based on Pliska. The problem was potential rather than actual; the difference between Christian and pagan could provide a dividing line which might be exploited by an external enemy, and which might deepen dangerously in times of internal difficulty. This problem had been compounded by the wars of expansion waged during the eighth and ninth centuries. The acquisition of territory south of the Balkans and in Macedonia had greatly increased the number of Slavs and Christians within the state, thus making the Proto-Bulgarians quite obviously a minority. Also the wars, especially under Krum, had brought into Bulgaria thousands of prisoners of war, most of whom were Christians. Given the slavery and misery into which most of these unfortunates were plunged they had little alternative but to take refuge in whatever consolations their faith could offer them. This set an impressive example to many of their captors. Omurtag was not one of them; he continued to persecute the Christians, primarily in order to preserve the faith of his predecessors, but he was fighting a losing battle. Christianity continued to spread and reached even his own family, with one of his sons taking the new faith.

  Omurtag had attempted to centralise the Bulgarian state, increasing the power of the ruler and diminishing that of the overwhelmingly Proto-Bulgarian boyars or nobility. Meanwhile, Byzantine Christianity was associated with a centralised, autocratic state. This truth was not lost on Boris and was one of the factors leading him to his decision in 864 to accept Christianity for himself and for all his subjects. A number of nobles reacted violently, stressing the decentralised traditions which were associated with paganism. Fifty-two of them were executed.

  The conversion did not bring entirely satisfactory results for Boris. Bulgaria was made part of the Byzantine church and was denied the right to have its own, Bulgarian, patriarch or to appoint its own bishops. This strengthened existing fears in Bulgaria that, because in the empire the church was seen as an arm of the state, the church in Bulgaria would become an arm of the Byzantine state and would be used to interfere in the internal affairs of Bulgaria. Fears of potential subversion via the Byzantine church led Boris to ask if Byzantium’s religious rival, Rome, would offer better terms. Emissaries were dispatched to enquire whether the pope would allow Boris to nominate the Bulgarian bishops and appoint a Bulgarian patriarch. At the same time, Boris requested clarification of certain points of doctrine and religious regimen: could, he asked, the Bulgarian tradition of the ruler eating alone with his wife and followers relegated to separate, lower tables, continue? on what days was it permitted t
o hunt? and could sexual intercourse be allowed on Sundays? The answers to these specific questions, including the latter, were comfortingly indulgent, but on the critical political issue of the appointment of a patriarch and of subordinate bishops, they were not. Rome was as adamant as Byzantium in its refusal to allow the nomination of bishops by the secular power; nor would Rome permit the Bulgarians to have their own patriarch, though the pope did consent to their having an archbishop, who would, however, be nominated by the pope. These terms were no better than those offered by the emperor in Byzantium and Boris therefore remained with the devil he knew. In 870 a council regulated the organisation of the church in Bulgaria which was to be headed by an archbishop chosen by and dependent upon the patriarch in Constantinople.

  The conversion caused other difficulties. The masses needed to be educated in their new faith, and though the Greeks sent missionaries to accomplish this task, they were too few in number. Furthermore, Slav and Proto-Bulgarian alike had been accustomed for the last two centuries to regard the Greeks as cunning but implacable enemies and therefore treated their new instructors with some suspicion. Nor did the indigenous population take kindly to the fact that the vast majority of the new clergy, especially its upper echelons, were Greek. With so many of the locals suspicious and/or ignorant of the new doctrines they were required to profess, it was hardly surprising that heresies rapidly gained a strong foothold in the Bulgarian lands. Some of them were to play a formative part in the later history of these lands. Nevertheless, despite these problems the conversion to Christianity was a watershed in the history of Bulgaria. Despite the many difficulties which it created it did facilitate the merging of the two constituent elements in the population. The Slavs could now more readily accept the state because it was Christian, and the Proto-Bulgarians had nothing to fear from Christianity because it was no longer divorced from the state and because it was no longer predominantly Slav or Greek. Thanks largely to the conversion, by the tenth century there were ‘Bulgarians’ as opposed to Slav and Proto-Bulgarian subjects of the Bulgarian state.