A Concise History of Bulgaria Read online

  Ivan Asen II took the second Bulgarian kingdom to its greatest geographic extent and to the height of its power. He also did much to develop its capital, Tûrnovo. The kingdom went on to produce one of the masterpieces of mediaeval Balkan art: the frescoes in Boyana church near Sofia, begun in 1259, which are now a UNESCO protected monument and which deserve to be numbered amongst the greatest artistic attainments of the Slavonic world.

  The political situation did not reflect the artistic world. In the early fourteenth century Bulgaria was forced for a while to acknowledge Tatar tutelage, and the Magyars were once again a danger, having taken Vidin in 1261, the year in which the Greeks finally drove the Crusaders out of Constantinople. Internally no strong monarch appeared and by the end of the thirteenth century the kingdom was on the point of disintegration, not least because of incessant feuding among its nobility. It was also beset by another debilitating heresy, hesychism, whose adherents called for the rejection of all social activity and for a life devoted to hesychia, or silent contemplation and prayer; this, its adherents argued, was the only condition in which God’s true light could be perceived. Maybe it was; but it did little to help repel invaders.

  In the fourteenth century two new invaders added to Bulgaria’s difficulties: the Serbs from the west and the Ottomans from the south. There were flashes of recovery as when Tsar Mihail Shishman (1323–30) contained the Serbian threat for a while before losing his life on the battlefield near Kiustendil. The last monarch to achieve any form of stability was Ivan Alexander (1331–71). He recovered some lost territory whilst his lands enjoyed a welcome economic recovery caused in part because the landing of Ottoman forces on the Aegean coast had pushed trade routes northwards into the Bulgarian lands, and in part because he was able to improve relations with Serbia. It was during Ivan Alexander’s reign that Bulgaria produced another of the great treasures of Slavonic art: the four gospels which bear his name and are now in the British Museum. Commissioned in 1355 the gospels, with their 367 miniatures, were completed in the extraordinarily short period of one year.

  Plate 2.3 The Christ child, detail from the frescoes at Boyana near Sofia which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The frescoes, which date from 1259, are remarkable for their sophistication and realism.

  Plate 2.4 Tsar Ivan Alexander and his family from the Ivan Alexander Gospels now in the British Museum. The tsar is holding the sceptre and is surrounded by his sons, Ivan Shishman who reigned from 1371 to 1395, and Ivan Stratsimir. The tsar’s wife, the Tsaritsa Theodora, is described as the ‘Newly Enlightened’, a reference to her conversion to Christianity from Judaism. The tsar is described as ‘Autocrat of all Bulgarians and Greeks’. To the tsaritsa’s right are: Duke Constantine, the tsar’s son-in-law; the tsar’s eldest daughter, Kera Thamara, the wife of Constantine; Keratsa, another daughter of the tsar; and Desislava, the tsar’s youngest daughter.

  Despite this, however, the costs of Ivan Alexander’s wars were high and taxes had to be raised. At the same time his preoccupation with external affairs meant that the tsar could not check the seepage of political power from the centre to the landowning aristocracy. Once again the main victims were the peasantry.

  After the death of Ivan Alexander, Bulgaria was no longer the master of its own fate. This would be settled by the looming contest between the two major Balkan powers: Serbia and the Ottoman Turks. In the 1360s the latter had taken Adrianople, whence they began to push up the Maritsa valley. In 1389 the issue was decided when the Serbs were broken in the battle of Kosovo Polje. Bulgaria’s defeat came shortly afterwards. After a three-month siege, Tûrnovo capitulated in July 1393. The patriarch was shut up in a monastery, the dynasty deposed, the great aristocrats dispossessed and the state dissolved. Resistance continued in Vidin for three more years but it too was eclipsed in 1396. Bulgaria as a state was not to exist for almost half a millennium.

  3 Ottoman rule in the Bulgarian lands

  The vigorous but self-righteous Christians of the Victorian era created the impression that their co-religionists under Ottoman domination had suffered continual persecution for five hundred years. It was not so. Ottoman history is certainly not free from terrible incidents of hideous outrage, but in Europe these were occasional. Many, if not most, followed acts of rebellion and if this does not excuse the excess it perhaps goes some way to explain it. Other outbursts were spontaneous, localised and random, the result usually of a peculiar combination of personal, political, social or economic factors. It would be unwise to imagine the Ottoman empire as some form of lost, multi-cultural paradise, but on the other hand it would also be wrong to deny that at some periods in its history the empire assured for all its subjects, irrespective of religion, stability, security and a reasonable degree of prosperity.

  Ottoman Society and Administration

  If the Christians of the empire at times enjoyed the blessings of peace and relative prosperity they were never given equality of status with Muslims. The Ottoman empire was a theocracy. Its head of state, the sultan, was also caliph, or the representative of God on earth and the supreme Muslim religious authority; he was pope as well as emperor. Non-Muslims were discriminated against in a variety of ways: they paid higher taxes than Muslims; Christian churches could not be as high as mosques; Christians could not wear the sacred colour green; no attempt could be made to proselytise amongst Muslims; at times, Christians had to dismount from their horses when a Muslim passed the other way; Christians could not carry arms; they could not become tanners because that was Mohammed’s trade; and, most importantly, Muslim law was always superior to any other.

  Because temporal society and the state had, in the Muslim conception, so obvious a religious nature most of the imperial administration was placed on a religious basis. Under a system introduced in 1454, the year after Constantinople had fallen to the Ottomans, the population was divided according to creed. Each separate religious group, or millet, was allowed to regulate its internal affairs. This meant not merely the organisation of their own religious life but also such issues as education, property law and family law. The head of a millet was the head of the religious group in question and he represented that community before the sultan and the Sublime Porte, or Ottoman government. The head of a millet was held responsible by the latter for the good behaviour of his flock who would be expected to pay their taxes and, where necessary or appropriate, to provide troops for the army or navy. In larger settlements which included different religious communities the different millets continued to operate, so Ottoman rule therefore accepted separate jurisdictions within the same territorial unit. Originally there were four millets: the Muslim, the Orthodox, the Armenian Christian and the Jewish, the latter functioning from 1454 but not being officially recognised until 1839. Others were added later and to be awarded the status of a separate millet was a major achievement for any group. Although the non-Muslim millets enjoyed internal self-administration, they were subordinate to the Muslims; any legal dispute involving a Muslim had to be tried by Muslim law.

  The millet system meant for the most part that Christian communities did not suffer pressures to convert to Islam, and although conversions, some of them involuntary, did take place, religious intolerance of the sort which plagued most of western and central Europe in the reformation and counter-reformation never became official policy in the Ottoman empire. Nor, at least in the early centuries of Ottoman rule in Europe, did official policy-makers recognise any concept of ethnicity. This created difficulties because the administrators did not recognise that their system of categorising people by religion was not shared by others. They did not realise that all Orthodox Christians were not ‘Greeks’, that the Bulgarians and the Serbs had had their own national churches with a fully developed system of ecclesiastic administration and their own distinctive forms of liturgy and religious art. Because the Greeks for much of the period of Ottoman rule dominated the Orthodox church, the non-Greeks were in effect second-class citizens in a second-class millet.

/>   Map 3.1 The Bulgarian lands under Ottoman rule.

  Plate 3.1 Christian children taken under the devshirme and turned into janissaries, from an incunabulum in the National Library, Vienna.

  In its heyday the military power of the empire was based on the timar. This was land held from the sultan in return for which the spahi, or tenant, was required in time of need to provide men for the imperial armies, the number of men varying directly with the amount of land held. The spahi also had various local government responsibilities. Land not held as timars could be in the hands of the sultan, his family or of a few influential members of the empire, and on this so-called hass land the tenants, Christian or Muslim, were free from most or sometimes all forms of taxation. Another crucially important category of land was the vakûf. Vakûf land was that whose income had by bequest been allotted to a charitable foundation. Initially this had been primarily to secure the upkeep of mosques or Islamic schools, but in later years Christian churches and monasteries could also hold vakûf land.

  For those Christians not living in villages which enjoyed tax privileges the main levies were the poll tax and a tax levied in lieu of military service. There was also the devshirme. The devshirme was levied at intervals of between one and seven years, and it brought in not cash but Christian boys aged between seven and fourteen. The boys were chosen for their physical and mental ability and were taken from their families and villages to be converted to Islam and then given a rigorous education and military training, after which they entered the ranks of the janissary corps. For almost two centuries after the conquest of Constantinople the janissaries, forbidden to marry, formed the highly trained and totally disciplined élite of the Ottoman army. They also played an important part in the imperial administration; at times they remembered and favoured their home villages, and there are even records of villages requesting that the devshirme be levied on them in the hope that in future years such favours would be paid, but for the most part this tax in human kind was a dreaded feature of Ottoman rule until the late seventeenth century; the last full levy in the Bulgarian lands was in 1685.

  The Bulgarian Population under Ottoman Rule

  Shortly after the Ottoman conquest the Christian Bulgarians formed about a third of the total population of the empire in the Balkans, though precise figures are impossible to obtain because Christians living in privileged villages or on hass estates were not recorded because they did not pay taxes. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Christian Bulgarians were only about 8 per cent of the total population. There were four main reasons for this relative decline. The first, and by far the most important, was that the empire expanded into the remainder of the Balkans and into Hungary thus greatly increasing the total population without adding many Bulgarians to its number. The second was persecution, especially following outbreaks of political or social unrest. The third was disease and pestilence. The fourth was the conversion of some Christian Bulgarians to Islam.

  This has long been a contentious issue. There is no doubt that pressures for conversion were stronger amongst the Bulgarians than amongst other Balkan Christians because Bulgaria was more densely settled by Ottoman/Muslim elements than anywhere else; furthermore, the Bulgarians were at the very centre of the European section of the Ottoman empire, commanding the military and trade routes into central Europe and the defensive ring around Constantinople itself. Nor is there any doubt that some Bulgarian landowners accepted the faith of the conquerors in order to retain their property. The great aristocrats had been dispossessed immediately after the conquest but the lower nobility remained, merging gradually into the ranks of the spahis. Some Christian communities may also have been tempted into Islam by the prospect of easier tax burdens and the privileges which belonging to the dominant religion could offer. There were additional cases where Christian villages were enticed into Islam by being offered the freedom to loot and pillage local church or monastic property. Finally there were cases of enforced, violent conversion. There were a number of such instances in the third quarter of the seventeenth century in the Rhodope mountains. The motivation for this sudden outburst of militancy amongst the Muslims is unclear. This was a time when Islam seemed to be resurgent with the sultan’s armies soon to press forward to Vienna, and the conversions could in part be explained by the exhilaration which this resurgence bred. A more sober explanation might be that the Ottoman military planners were anxious not to leave the passes through the Rhodopes in the hands of non-Muslims in view of the critical nature of the forthcoming campaigns; but this seems a risky strategy as the forcibly converted might be less reliable than Christians left in peace, besides which to forcibly convert relatively large areas to Islam would reduce the number of taxpayers, and this at a time when the imperial government was desperately short of revenue.

  Of those who did convert, some, especially the landowners, were absorbed into the Muslim world and became entirely Islamicised and Turkified. Many converted villages, on the other hand, retained their Bulgarian language, folk traditions and costumes. The Bulgarian-speaking Muslims became known as Pomaks.

  Most Bulgarians, Muslim or Christian, lived in villages. Most of these villages were small with between 150 and 200 inhabitants. Larger settlements were known, Kotel, for example, having over 2,500 in 1648, but these were rare. Villages were run by the family elders who chose from amongst themselves officials such as the local village headman, called in Bulgarian kmet (mayor) or sometimes even knyaz (prince), names which represented a continuum with the pre-conquest officials; by the nineteenth century many local prominenti, many of whom had recently acquired wealth and property, were known by the somewhat pejorative and Turkish-based, chorbadjiya (soup-provider). Ottoman officials seldom visited villages other than to collect taxes, including, of course, the devshirme. A number of communities, the so-called privileged villages, was granted freedom from taxation and left to order their own affairs in return for providing specified services to the sultan or his officials. A number of such villages were made responsible for guaranteeing safe passage for troops and traders through local mountain passes. Other tasks were more unusual. Some had to procure birds for the sultan’s falconries and one, Dedovo, was required to provide two barrels of water per day from its spring for the nearby city of Plovdiv. The experience gained by these villages in self-administration were, centuries later, to be useful in organising the schools and other institutions which so helped the Bulgarian national revival.

  In the seventeenth century only about one in fifty Christian Bulgarians lived in towns. This was in part because in the early and frequently violent days of the Ottoman occupation urban Bulgarians had fled or had been driven from their homes; villages, especially the remoter ones in the mountains, provided relative security and greater opportunities to continue living a Christian, Bulgarian life. As Ottoman society evolved its trade became dominated by the Greeks, Jews and Armenians, though in the seventeenth century Bulgarian traders were active as far afield as Transylvania, even if many of them were described as or even called themselves ‘Greek’.

  Plate 3.2 Bulgarian peasants from an incunabulum in the National Library, Vienna.

  The centres of Ottoman towns were generally occupied by administrative or military buildings, but in the surrounding areas were the mahalla or small urban districts. These were frequently based on ethnic identity, sometimes on occupation, and infrequently on both: in some larger towns, therefore, there would be a Christian shoe-makers’ and a Muslim shoe-makers’ district. In the mahalla the streets were narrow and the houses faced inwards onto courtyards rather than outwards onto the street.

  In urban economic activity the esnaf, or guild, played a dominant role. The structure of the esnaf, with its ranking of apprentice, journeyman and master, and its ruling council elected by and from local masters, was similar to the structure of guilds in western Europe, and like those in the west they provided welfare for their members, but in the Ottoman empire the esnaf was subject to a great deal of inter
ference from local officials of the central government; there was little of the fierce independence which frequently characterised western guilds. Many, but not all, esnafs had both Christian and Muslim members. After the initial decades of Ottoman rule Christian guilds encouraged the building or repair of many churches and other religious institutions, the church of Sveta Petka in Sofia, for example, being redecorated by the local saddle-makers’ esnaf. Bulgarians were prominent in the textile guilds, those in Sofia being famous for dress-making and the production of hooded cloaks.

  Although many Bulgarian guilds flourished under Ottoman rule the conquest had been a cultural as well as a political disaster for the Bulgarian nation. Not only did the state disappear and the church fall subject to the domination of Constantinople, Bulgarian language and literature seemed also to die. Bulgarian had once ranked with Greek, Latin and Arabic as the major tongues of the civilised European world, and it had produced a flourishing literature of secular as well as sacred works. But when, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great compiled her samples of 279 languages and dialects, included in which were some North American Indian tongues, Bulgarian was not mentioned, nor was Joseph Dobrovský, ‘The Father of Slavicists’, familiar with it, whilst the treatment of it in afaik’s history of the Slavic languages and literature, published in 1826, is cursory and flawed.