A Concise History of Bulgaria Read online

  In a development which was parallel to the conversion in time and its equal in importance, an alphabet for use in the Slavonic languages emerged in the mid to late ninth century. The origin of this development is thought to be a request in 862 from the ruler of Moravia for an alphabet for use amongst his own people so that the influence of the Franks and Germans could be contained. Little is known of the origins of the Cyrillic alphabet, and what is known is extremely contentious, but its creation is generally acknowledged to be the work of two Salonika-born monks, Cyril and Methodius.

  The introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet was of enormous importance. More than any other development it prevented the absorption of the Bulgarians by the Greeks to their south or the Franks to their west. It enabled the Bulgarians to create their own literature. And this they did with great rapidity. Kliment of Ohrid (Kliment Ohridski), who died in 896, and after whom Sofia university is named, established a thriving school of learning which embraced theological and many other studies and which attracted over three thousand students in its first seven years. The new alphabet also facilitated the production of important secular texts such as a legal code, Zakon Sudnii Liudim; and without an alphabet it is difficult to imagine how the Bulgarian state could have carried out administration in the Slavo-Bulgarian language. Above all, however, the new alphabet enabled the Bulgarian church to use Slavo-Bulgarian as the language of the liturgy, and had it not been able to do this it would have been impossible for the Bulgarian church to escape total Greek domination.

  That Slavo-Bulgarian, or as we shall call it henceforth, Bulgarian, should become the language of the state and the Bulgarian church was decreed by an assembly of notables in 893.

  The Reign of Simeon the Great (893–927)

  The assembly which decreed that Bulgarian should be the language of the state and the church, also accepted as ruler Simeon, who had come to power by a palace coup. In that he was not exceptional in the history of mediaeval Bulgaria, but he was the only monarch in those centuries to be accorded the epithet ‘the Great’.

  Simeon, who was brought up in Constantinople, originally intended to pursue a religious life and had been tipped as a prime candidate for the leadership of the church in Bulgaria. Despite his association with Constantinople Simeon spent much of the early part of his reign at war with the empire and with his other neighbours. He extended the boundaries of Bulgaria westwards to the Adriatic, south to the Aegean and north-westwards to incorporate most of modern Serbia and Montenegro. Twice he led his armies to the walls of Constantinople itself; on the second occasion he was forced to raise his siege only because of pressure from the Magyars in the north, where in fact Simeon witnessed the loss of almost all Bulgarian territory beyond the Danube. In 896 he concluded a peace with the empire which agreed to accept the independence of the Bulgarian church. Thirty years later, at the end of further wars, a second treaty confirmed this and recognised Simeon as basileus, that is, king or tsar; the only other monarch to whom Constantinople extended such recognition was the Holy Roman Emperor.

  Simeon made a further significant change when he moved the Bulgarian capital from Pliska to the nearby Preslav. In the new capital the pagan tradition would be less strong. Preslav saw Bulgarian art and literature flower with unprecedented brilliance, Simeon having for long surrounded himself with men of letters such as the Monk Hrabr, John the Exarch and Konstantin of Preslav.

  That flowering of literature was helped by the twenty years of peace and prosperity which followed the treaty of 896 with Constantinople. The prosperity of those golden years was based to a considerable degree on the close and healthy commercial relations with the empire, though trading links with Venetia and the west were also developing. The good times could not last, however, and the final years of Simeon’s reign were again clouded by war, primarily against Constantinople.

  The End of the First Empire, 896–1018

  Simeon died in 927 having nominated his second son, Petûr, as his successor. Petûr’s reign was of exceptional duration – he remained king until 970 – but these were years of decline for Bulgaria. As usual, there were wars to be fought, though these were now defensive rather than expansionist, the chief threat being the Magyars in the north. There were also continuing clashes with the imperial power to the south. This almost constant warfare inevitably weakened the state.

  There were also important internal explanations for the decline of Bulgarian power. Throughout the country there had been if not the expectation then at least the hope that the new reign would bring about a return to the golden days of peace. This illusion was shattered by the Magyar invasions. The disappointed nobility dreamed of a return to the old days, whilst the increasingly Byzantinified court harboured is own solutions. The church, meanwhile, fell to corruption and self-enrichment.

  The latter development had a profound effect amongst the silent masses of the population. The tenth century saw a steady increase in the economic and social power of the landowner, partly because the central authority of the state was not as great as it had been under Boris and Simeon. One landowner whose property had been greatly extended was the church. Whilst the few grew rich, times became ever harder for the poor. Inevitably alienation set in.

  Since the conversion to Christianity many Bulgarians had been left insufficiently educated in and therefore insecurely committed to their new church. It was no longer possible to revert to paganism, even if that had been desired, but this did not mean that unquestioning obedience had to be given to the official church: if the alienated could not revert to paganism they could at least escape into heresy. Heresy had entered Bulgaria with Christianity itself. First among the unofficial doctrines to arrive were those brought by Syrians and Armenians, and very soon hermitism became popular amongst the religiously committed; Bulgaria’s national saint, Ivan Rilski (John of Rila), was a hermit who was born between 876 and 880 and died in 947. Hermitism obviously indicated a willingness to withdraw from the world and its problems, and this sense of ‘internal migration’ or dissociation from the temporal world was further encouraged by the greatest and most lasting of the heresies to enter Bulgaria: bogomilism.

  Plate 2.1 Tsar Simeon defeating the Byzantines, a miniature from the Madrid manuscript of the Chronicles of Ivan Skilitsa, 12–13c., in the National Library of Spain, Madrid.

  The bogomils argued that the entire visible world, including mankind, was the creation of Satan; only the human soul was created by God who sent his son, Christ, to show humanity the way to salvation. The bogomils believed the gratification of all bodily pleasures to be an expression of the diabolic side of creation, and therefore they preached a formidable asceticism which enjoined poverty, celibacy, temperance and vegetarianism. The few peripatetic ‘Holy Ones’ who lived up to these exacting precepts were greatly respected by the general body of the population, who were painfully aware of the contrast between these ‘Holy Ones’ and the official clergy. The bogomils also questioned the social order by preaching that man should live in communities where property was shared and individual ownership unknown, and in which all men would be levelled by an equal participation in agricultural labour. The bogomils had no formal priesthood, though each district or area had a dyado or elder (literally a ‘grandfather’), and there were loose links between different regions.

  The bogomils satisfied a spiritual hunger amongst the peasant masses. There was a need amongst the recently converted for an explanation of the increasingly harsh conditions in which they found themselves. The teachers and priests of the official church were neither as able nor as committed as the ones brought in by Boris and Simeon, and the many who felt abandoned by a clergy apparently more interested in self-enrichment than in the well-being of its flock naturally found more to respect in those who practised the exacting doctrine they preached. Because bogomilism was very much a reaction to mounting social pressures its popularity increased in times of hardship. This was understandable; in such times it was more easy than ever to believe that
the temporal world was entirely the creation of the Evil One.

  Bogomilism has been unfairly criticised for causing all or most of the misfortunes which befell mediaeval Bulgaria, but bogomilism, in declaring all institutions irredeemably evil, did implicitly condemn any effort to improve those institutions as in the long run irrelevant. For this reason bogomilism was essentially negative and did not give rise to any reformist movement or pressures, nor did it stimulate the creative intellectual revolution which the questioning of the Catholic church produced in the west.

  The end of the tenth century saw the first Bulgarian kingdom decline rapidly to a tragic end. Wars continued with clashes with Kievan Rus in the north and, inevitably, resumed conflict with Constantinople in the south. In 971 Preslav was taken as the empire conquered much of eastern Bulgaria. The Bulgaria of Krum, Boris and Simeon was finished. The capital moved between a number of western centres before settling in Ohrid. Byzantine influence had always been less noticeable in the western section of the Bulgarian kingdom and by the mid-980s there was resurgence with the Bulgarians retaking much of the territory they had lost south of the Danube. Under the leadership of Tsar Samuil (997–1014) Bulgaria expanded further into present-day Albania and Montenegro, but it was a false dawn. Bulgarian successes had come about primarily because Constantinople was again preoccupied with the Arab threat to its possessions in Asia Minor. A military victory in 1001 freed Constantinople of this concern and the emperor, Basil II, could turn his full attention to the Bulgarian problem; his efforts in this direction were to earn him the grim title, ‘the Bulgar-slayer’.

  Plate 2.2 Hermitism was strong in mediaeval Bulgaria: the arrow indicates the entrance to the monastery church of Gospodev Dol near the village of Ivanovo in the Rusé district.

  The end for the first Bulgarian state came when the Bulgarian and imperial armies met in Macedonia in 1014. On the slopes of Mount Belassitsa fifteen thousand Bulgarian troops were captured. Legend has it that ninety-nine out of every hundred were blinded; the remainder were left with one eye to guide their comrades back to their leader who died three days after seeing his stricken soldiers. Many centuries later nationalist enthusiasms and passions were to be fired by this story. Whether it were true or false, there was no doubting the fact that four years after the battle the Bulgarian state collapsed and the country was incorporated into the Byzantine empire.

  The first Bulgarian empire had achieved much. It had created a Bulgarian nation from the Proto-Bulgarians and the Slavs. As in the merging of the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons to produce the English, the process was neither easy nor rapid, yet by the beginning of the eleventh century there was a nation, a state, a language, a literature and a church, all of which were clearly Bulgarian. But the kingdom, despite the brilliance of a few of its rulers, also suffered grave weaknesses. The introduction of Christianity and the consolidation of boyar power which followed soon afterwards, required Bulgaria to undergo a fundamental reordering of its values and beliefs, and to adapt to far-reaching social changes. The Bulgarians were required to absorb in a few decades processes which in other lands lasted centuries, and inevitably the strains and fissures ran deep and far. The bogomils grew strong on such strains and fissures, and their dismissive attitude to the temporal world hardly encouraged full-scale commitment to the state in danger. The first Bulgarian state was also in some respects surprisingly backward. Not only did it fail to produce a navy but it failed to see the dangers of geography. Given its position in the Balkans the Bulgarian kingdom was exposed to threats from the south, the north-east and the north-west. There was perhaps folie de grandeur in the assumption that all these enemies could for ever be contained, and it was certainly a mistake, albeit an understandable one, to assume, as many Bulgarian leaders did, that danger could be circumvented by playing one enemy off against another. This folie de grandeur was all the greater when one takes into account that the kingdom was always heavily influenced by Byzantium and by Byzantine practices. The Bulgarian aristocracy aped that of its southern neighbour; the state and church administrations were similar to those of the empire, as was the tax system; the kingdom used mainly Byzantine currency; and even the vocabulary of administration, commerce and much of public life were derived from the empire.

  Bulgaria under Byzantine Rule, 1018–1185

  In his treatment of the defeated Bulgaria Boris was as moderate in victory as he had been implacable in battle. Most importantly for the Bulgarians, the Bulgarian church was allowed to continue as a separate national institution. Headed by a patriarch in Ohrid the Bulgarian church included much of present day Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and Macedonia. Basil’s moderation, however, did not survive him. The Ohrid patriarchate increasingly fell under Greek influence, and the Bulgarian bishops were no longer allowed to elect their patriarch from amongst themselves. The tax system changed for the worse. Before, taxes had been levied mainly in kind but now, to feed the army, the government had to have recourse to forced purchases at fixed prices with taxes then being paid in cash not kind. A new form of land-holding was introduced: the proniya. The holders of this land had the right to its produce but could not pass it on by inheritance; they therefore worked it and its peasants for all they could get out of it in the time available; many of them were absentee landlords who used bailiffs who in turn took their share of the profits. In 1040 Petûr Delyan, a descendent of Samuil, collected an army and took the chief Bulgarian town, Skopje, and soon came to dominate Thrace, Epirus and Macedonia. His revolt was not a nationalist movement but a protest against worsening social conditions, and it was joined by some oppressed Greeks. In 1041 Delyan was betrayed by his allies, blinded, and later captured by Byzantine troops amongst whose ranks were Varangians under the command of Harald Hardrada, later prince of Norway and the founder of Oslo.

  Bulgaria remained an integral part of the Byzantine imperium until the late twelfth century. There had been a few outbreaks of unrest, mainly social in origin, and it was clear that a sense of Bulgarian cultural identity and separateness survived. Ironically this was in part due to bogomil influence. Bogomil ideas tended to be absorbed more easily by the Slavs than the Greeks and this hindered the assimilation of the former by the latter. It also prevented any commitment to the ruling state or church.

  The Second Bulgarian Empire, 1185–1393

  In the 1180s the Normans, who had already dislodged the Byzantines from Sicily, attacked imperial territory in Greece and along the Adriatic. In retaliation to this and other threats the imperial government was forced to increase taxation and conscription levels. It was more than many Bulgarians could bear. In 1185 two landowners from near Tûrnovo, Petûr and Asen, requested an alleviation of the new burdens along with concessions for themselves. Not only were they refused, one of them had his face slapped by a Byzantine courtier. News of this humiliation helped feed the already healthy fires of revolt and soon most of eastern Bulgaria had taken to arms and Petûr and then Asen had been proclaimed tsar in Tûrnovo.

  Map 2.2 Bulgaria’s borders during the second kingdom, 1185–1393.

  The second Bulgarian kingdom, based on Tûrnovo, was to last for two centuries. Like its predecessor it fluctuated in size but it was seldom free either from external dangers or crippling internal divisions. It was stabilised by Tsar Kaloyan who ruled from 1197 to 1207. Much of his reign was spent in warfare. His first military achievement was to drive the Magyars out of north-west Bulgaria and in 1202 he concluded a much-needed peace with Constantinople. By now, however, a new factor had disturbed the delicate balance of power in the Balkans: the Crusaders. In 1204 they took Constantinople and proclaimed the Bulgarians their vassals. This effrontery Kaloyan demolished the following year in a fierce battle near Adrianople, the present-day Edirne. By 1207 Kaloyan had reconquered most of Macedonia but he was to be betrayed and murdered that year when laying siege to Salonika.

  Unlike many Bulgarian rulers Kaloyan backed his military might with skilful diplomacy. That he was able to defeat the Crusaders wa
s in no small measure due to an agreement he concluded in 1204 with the pope which did much to guarantee Bulgaria’s western frontier. The essence of the agreement was that the Bulgarians would recognise the supreme authority of the bishop of Rome, though there was little actual papal interference in Bulgarian ecclesiastical affairs. Bulgaria, in fact, despite its endless political and territorial disputes with Constantinople, remained part of the Orthodox Christian east which had finally broken with the Catholic west in the schism of 1054.

  In the disturbed years at the end of the twelfth century bogomilism had flourished and in 1211 a council in Tûrnovo, having heard the bogomil case, condemned the heresy and initiated severe persecution of it. This was relaxed when Bulgaria again found relative security and stability in the reign of Ivan Asen II (1218–41). Ivan Asen II further reduced the Magyar threat to Bulgaria but his main achievement was to destroy the power of the despot of Epirus, Theodore Angelus Comnenus, who sought to drive the Crusaders from Constantinople. In 1230 at the battle of Klokotnitsa, near the present-day Haskovo, Theodore Angelus was captured and his extensive territories incorporated into Bulgaria which now spread from the Black Sea to the Aegean and the Adriatic.

  Like Kaloyan, Ivan Asen II was an adept diplomat. In concluding a treaty with them against the Crusaders he was prepared to allow the Greeks the lion’s share of any conquests that might be made, and in return he insisted upon only one condition: that the independence of the Bulgarian church and its patriarch be recognised by the Greeks. Having secured this, Ivan Asen successfully negotiated with Rome for the complete restoration of the independence of the Bulgarian church in 1235.