First Bulgarian Empire

A province taken

formationDrafted from Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983)

In 680 the emperor Constantine IV took an army and a fleet north to deal with a group of Bulgars who had crossed the Danube into imperial territory. The campaign failed; the emperor left, the army panicked, and the Bulgars followed them south. In 681 Byzantium signed a treaty recognising the new state and agreeing to pay it an annual subsidy.

The manner of it matters. This is not a migration into a vacuum. It is a province of the eastern Roman empire taken by force and then conceded by treaty, some forty-five years after the Arab conquests had stripped the empire of Syria and Egypt, by a state that could not fight on two frontiers and knew it.

Two populations

The Bulgars were a Turkic group out of the steppe north of the Black Sea, with the cavalry and the political vocabulary of one: a khan, a clan aristocracy, and the institutions of the western steppe.

The population they came to rule was Slav, agricultural, and had been settling across the Balkans for a century as imperial control receded.

The army was both of them: Bulgar horse and Slav levy. So was the state's central problem for two centuries, which was that a Turkic cavalry aristocracy and a Slav peasantry had no reason to think of themselves as one people. It was eventually solved by converting, in a language the Slavs spoke, which dissolved a distinction that neither war nor administration had.

The subsidy

The state's second-largest source of income was the empire it had taken a province from.

Byzantium paid Bulgaria an annual subsidy under a series of treaties from 681 onward. Withholding it is the stated cause of at least two wars, including the one in which Nikephoros I lost his army and his skull. From Constantinople's side this was ordinary business: a rich state paying people to go away is cheaper than a poor state fighting them, and the empire did it wherever it could. From this side it was structural. A polity founded on a treaty and funded partly by an annuity from its principal enemy will spend two centuries in a peculiar relationship with that enemy, and it did.

What the sources are

Almost everything written about Bulgaria for its first two centuries was written by Byzantines: by the enemy, in Greek, mostly after the fact. Fine is careful throughout about the difference between what they say and what can be established, and the difference is large.

The state itself is not in doubt. The interior of it is. There are Bulgar inscriptions — a set of stone texts in Greek letters recording treaties, building works and lists of officials, which are the only substantial thing the state wrote about itself before the conversion — and after 893 there is a literature. The two centuries between are Byzantine chronicles and archaeology.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · PlusUA · CC BY-SA 4.0

It is why nobody can say how the throne was supposed to pass. The eighth century is a sequence of khans deposed and killed, recorded by outsiders who did not care why, and no source anywhere states a rule about who was eligible. A pattern of violence is not a constitution, and it should not be read as one.

Krum

expansionDrafted from Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983)

Krum ruled from about 803 to 814 and did three things that between them turned a frontier khanate into a power.

He destroyed what was left of the Avar khaganate. Charlemagne was destroying it from the other side in the same years — the Frankish armies took the fortified ring in Pannonia in 795 and 796 and carried the accumulated Byzantine subsidies of two and a half centuries west in ox-carts — and Bulgaria took the eastern half and roughly doubled in size. The Avars had been the dominant power on the middle Danube for two hundred and fifty years. Between the Franks and the Bulgars they stopped existing inside a decade, and there is nobody left who wrote in their language.

He issued a law. The Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine lexicon, preserves a summary: penalties for false accusation, for theft, for giving shelter to a thief, and an order that the vineyards be uprooted, which is either a prohibition on drink or a scorched-earth measure depending on which reading you take. It is the earliest legislation attested from this state and it survives only because an enemy's dictionary happened to summarise it, which is a fair description of how most of what is known about early Bulgaria reaches us.

And he killed an emperor.

811

Nikephoros I marched on Pliska in 811 with a large army, took the capital, sacked it, and turned for home through the mountains. Krum blocked the passes with palisades and destroyed the army in the Varbitsa defile. The emperor was killed, his son was carried away mortally wounded, and Krum had the skull lined with silver and used it as a drinking cup.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Across roughly fifteen hundred years of Roman and Byzantine emperors, three died at enemy hands in the field: Valens at Adrianople in 378, Nikephoros in the Varbitsa pass in 811, and Constantine XI on the walls of his own city in 1453. The middle one was killed by a Balkan khanate a hundred and thirty years old.

What it settled

Not the war, which went on. What it settled is that the Balkan question could not be closed by a campaign.

Byzantium had been trying since 681 — the treaty of that year was itself a concession made under exactly this pressure — and 811 established that a Bulgarian state in the mountains could absorb the loss of its capital and destroy the army that took it. The empire's answer for the next two centuries was diplomacy, subsidy and mission, which were the instruments it was best at, and it did not attempt a war of conquest again until Basil II, two hundred years later.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Balcon del Mundo · CC BY-SA 2.0

Krum himself besieged Constantinople in 813 and died the following spring, reportedly of a haemorrhage, while preparing another attempt. The sieges failed for a reason no Bulgarian ruler ever solved. An army of steppe cavalry and peasant levies could destroy a field army in a mountain pass and had no means whatever of assaulting the walls of Constantinople, which nobody got through until 1204, and then only from the water.

The baptism

peakDrafted from Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983)

Boris was baptised in 864 with the Byzantine emperor standing as his godfather, and then spent four years trying to get out of the consequences.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The problem was not the faith. It was that a church is an administration, and an archbishop appointed from Constantinople is a Byzantine official inside a Bulgarian state. Boris understood this immediately and asked for a patriarch of his own. Constantinople refused. He wrote to Rome instead.

The hundred and six questions

What survives from that manoeuvre is one of the most revealing documents of the early medieval Balkans. In 866 Boris sent Pope Nicholas I a list of questions about how to be a Christian country, and the papal reply — the Responsa ad consulta Bulgarorum, a hundred and six answers — survives entire.

They are not theology. They are a new state asking what it is now allowed to do. May we go on wearing trousers. May we eat before communion. What do we do about our custom of a man having several wives. May we continue to punish a soldier who is unready for battle. What should be done with the ancestral stone we swear by. May we still consult a book of divination before a battle. What happens to our ancestors, who died unbaptised.

Nicholas answered all of them, at length, and mostly with unexpected latitude — trousers were a matter of indifference, the stone was not — and the tone throughout is of a man who knows he is competing for a kingdom and does not want to lose it over clothing.

What Boris got

He played the two churches against each other for four years and got, in 870, a Bulgarian archbishopric under Constantinople with a great deal of autonomy — less than the patriarchate he wanted and considerably more than the Greek bishopric he had been offered.

Then in 886 the pupils of Cyril and Methodius arrived. Their mission to Moravia, sent out from Constantinople to preach in Slavonic, had been broken up by Frankish clergy who objected to the language; the survivors were sold as slaves or expelled. Boris took them in, gave them land and pupils, and set them to work at Preslav and at Ohrid.

That is the decision everything else turns on. A Bulgarian church in Greek would have been a Byzantine institution operating inside Bulgaria. A Bulgarian church in a language the population actually spoke was something no empire had a mechanism for — and Obolensky's argument, that what Byzantium built in eastern Europe was a commonwealth held together by liturgy and script rather than by authority, begins in the gap between those two facts.

Abdication, and the return

Boris retired to a monastery in 889 and left the throne to his eldest son Vladimir, who spent four years trying to reverse the conversion and restore the old cult.

Boris came out of the monastery, deposed him, blinded him, put his younger son Simeon on the throne, and went back.

A state in which a retired monk can depose and blind a reigning ruler and install a different son has not written down who inherits, and the reason it has not is not an accident of what survived. There was nothing to write down. Authority in this house sat wherever its most formidable member happened to be standing, and in 893 that was a cell.

Preslav, and the alphabet

peakDrafted from Obolensky, History of Civilization (1971)

In 893 a council at Preslav moved the capital there from Pliska, made Slavonic the language of church and state, and expelled the remaining Greek clergy.

Obolensky, History of Civilization (1971) · Nikolov2010 · CC0

The literary schools that followed — Preslav in the east under Naum, Ohrid in the west under Clement — produced translations of the Greek fathers, original Slavonic homilies and hagiography, a treatise on the alphabet by a monk called Khrabr defending Slavonic letters against the argument that only Hebrew, Greek and Latin were fit for scripture, and the script.

Which alphabet

Two alphabets were involved and they are commonly confused, which matters, because only one of them was made here and it is not the one named after the man who came.

Cyril devised Glagolitic for the Moravian mission: a genuinely new alphabet, not obviously derived from anything, invented to write Slavonic sounds that Greek had no letters for. It came to Bulgaria with his pupils.

National Library of Russia, Saint Petersburg · Obolensky, History of Civilization (1971) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

Cyrillic was developed afterwards, at Preslav, and it is a different object — Greek uncial letters used for the sounds Greek had, plus a set of Glagolitic letters kept for the sounds it did not. It is easier to write, it looks like Greek, and it displaced Glagolitic within a century in the east while Glagolitic survived in Croatia for another eight hundred years.

Obolensky, History of Civilization (1971) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

It is written today by something over two hundred and fifty million people, and the name commemorates a man who did not make it.

Whose alphabet it is

Cyrillic was made in Bulgaria, by scholars a Bulgarian ruler had rescued and employed, in a programme whose whole purpose was to build a church Constantinople could not run.

And its parent is Greek. That is not a quibble: the letters are Greek uncials, used for the sounds Greek already had, with a handful of Glagolitic characters kept for the sounds it did not. Anyone who can read Greek capitals can read half of a Cyrillic page without being taught. The alphabet designed to make a church independent of Constantinople looks, at a glance, exactly like Constantinople's.

That is the joke buried in the thing, and it was not an accident. Glagolitic — Cyril's invention, owing nothing visible to any existing script — was the genuinely independent alphabet, and Bulgaria had it, and Bulgaria dropped it. What Preslav wanted was not a script that looked like nobody else's. It was a script that looked like the prestige script of the Christian east, and could be written quickly by a scribe trained in Greek, and carried a Slavonic liturgy.

Glagolitic survived where the pressure was different. In Croatia, on the Adriatic, in the shadow of Latin rather than of Greek, priests went on writing it for another eight hundred years, precisely because it did not look like the alphabet of the power next door.

Two alphabets for one language, and each of them survived in the place where resembling the neighbour was the more useful option.

What went out of Preslav

Bulgaria did not invent Slavonic Christianity. It is the reason Serbia and the Rus have it.

What went out of Preslav and Ohrid was a complete package — a liturgy, a scriptural corpus, a body of law, a hagiography and an alphabet, all in a language a Slav speaker could follow. Serbia took it. The Rus took it: the conversion of about 988 was supplied from Bulgaria, in Bulgarian books, by clergy trained in Bulgarian schools, and the literary language of Russia until the eighteenth century descends from what was written at Preslav.

Obolensky's term for the result is the Byzantine commonwealth, and his point is that Byzantium supplied the model and never controlled the thing. Bulgaria is where the model stopped being Byzantine.

Simeon

peakDrafted from Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983)

Simeon had been sent to Constantinople as a boy and educated there, in Greek, at the imperial school. The Byzantines called him hemiargos — half-Greek — and meant it as a description rather than an insult. He had been intended for the church and came home when his brother was deposed to take a throne instead.

He spent thirty-four years at war with the empire that educated him, and what he wanted from it was not territory.

The title

Simeon wanted to be emperor, in Constantinople, crowned by the patriarch. Not an emperor of Bulgaria: the title he used was basileus of the Bulgarians and the Romans, and the seals survive with it on them.

That is a claim on the Byzantine imperial office itself, and it is the earliest of the three serious ones. The Latin emperors took the title with the ceremonial in 1204 and Mehmed II took it with the city in 1453. Simeon took it with neither. He never held Constantinople and was never crowned in it, and he organised thirty years of foreign policy around being the man who would be — which is the point worth holding onto about the whole business. What made the office worth claiming was not that it could be won. It was that everybody in the eastern Mediterranean agreed it was the office.

Why he could not take it

He beat Byzantine field armies repeatedly — at Bulgarophygon in 896, at Acheloos in 917, which was one of the worst defeats the empire suffered in the period — and reached the walls of Constantinople more than once. In 913 the regency brought him inside the city, the patriarch put something on his head that the Bulgarian sources call a crown and the Greek sources call a headpiece, and the arrangement was repudiated within months.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The walls are the answer, and they always were. A land army without a fleet cannot take Constantinople. Simeon understood this perfectly and sent to the Fatimids in 922 to hire one; the embassy was intercepted at sea by the Byzantines, who then bought the Fatimids off. Bulgaria had cavalry and it had levies and it never had ships, and that single absence is the exact limit of what the state could achieve in three hundred and thirty-seven years.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Unknown artist · Public domain

927

Simeon died in 927 with the war unwon and his son Peter made peace within months.

The terms gave Bulgaria almost everything the thirty years had been about, except the throne: Byzantium recognised the title of tsar — the Slavonic form of caesar, and a rank below basileus but above every other ruler Constantinople dealt with — recognised an autocephalous Bulgarian patriarchate, and sent a princess.

It is the high point of the state and it is the end of its expansion. Peter reigned forty-two years in peace and the sources, which are Byzantine and hostile and later Bulgarian and nostalgic, agree on almost nothing about them except that nothing much happened.

What was happening underneath those forty-two quiet years is the one thing this state produced that outlived it by four centuries and reached the south of France.

The Bogomils

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983)

Some time in the reign of Peter, in the middle of the tenth century, a priest called Bogomil began preaching in Bulgaria that the visible world was made by the devil.

The doctrine that grew from it is dualist: two principles, a good God who made souls and an evil one who made matter, with the material world — bodies, buildings, property, the cross, the sacraments, the church itself — belonging to the second. Its practical programme followed: no churches, no icons, no priests beyond the initiated, no baptism by water, and a general refusal of the authority of anyone whose authority rested on things.

A presbyter named Cosmas wrote a treatise against them which is the main source, and his complaint is revealing. The Bogomils, he says, teach their followers not to obey their lords, revile the wealthy, hate the tsar, ridicule the elders, condemn the boyars, regard those who serve the emperor as loathsome, and forbid every serf to work for his master.

National Library of Serbia, Belgrade · Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

It went a long way

Bulgaria persecuted it. Byzantium persecuted it — Alexios I had the Bogomil leader Basil burned in the hippodrome around 1100, and Anna Komnene describes it.

It spread anyway: through Byzantine Thrace and Anatolia, into Serbia, into Bosnia where the local church was accused of it for two centuries, across the Adriatic into northern Italy, and into Languedoc, where the Cathars held a recognisably related doctrine and where the Albigensian Crusade was launched to destroy them in 1209.

British Library, London · Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Workshop of the Boucicaut Master · Public domain

How direct that transmission was is argued about and the argument is not settled. What is not in doubt is that a set of ideas that begins in tenth-century Bulgaria is being burned for in southern France two hundred and fifty years later.

What it was for

Cosmas's list is the useful part, because it says what the doctrine was doing rather than what it taught.

A tenth-century Bulgarian peasant had a landlord, a tax collector, a priest and a tsar, and a body of teaching arrived which held that the visible world and everything commanding obedience in it belonged to the devil. Refusing the church followed from the theology; refusing the boyar followed from the same premise without any further argument being needed. That is why it kept spreading through persecution, and why every state it reached persecuted it. It was a complete answer to authority that did not require an army.

The state's own position is worth being clear about. Bulgaria did not export this. Bulgaria hunted it, Byzantium hunted it, Serbia hunted it, and it travelled anyway — along trade routes, in the baggage of refugees, through exactly the channels no government controlled. It is the one thing a polity cannot take credit for and cannot be blamed for either: an idea that got out.

The reach of it

Two hundred and fifty years after a priest in the reign of Peter began preaching in a Balkan village, the pope was raising an army to destroy people in Languedoc who believed something very like it, and the Cathar perfecti of Toulouse and Albi were refusing the sacraments on the same grounds Cosmas had complained about.

Whether there is a continuous line between them is argued about and has not been settled. The resemblance is close and the geography is plausible; a shared doctrine is not the same as a documented transmission, and the case for one has been made and contested for a century.

What is not in doubt is that the most consequential thing this state produced was something it spent a century trying to suppress.

A brass chain

contractionDrafted from Cremona, The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (1930)

In the summer of 968 the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor sat down to dinner in Constantinople and found a Bulgarian placed above him. He wrote a report about it that is one of the angriest documents of the tenth century, and in the course of being furious he recorded exactly what Bulgaria's standing was.

The seating

Liudprand of Cremona had come to negotiate a marriage between Otto I's son and a Byzantine princess, and the embassy was going very badly. He was housed in what he calls a detestable dwelling, kept under guard, and argued with at length. Then he was invited to the imperial table for the feast of the Apostles:

Cremona, The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (1930) · Unknown artist · Public domain

I found placed above me on my side of the long narrow board the Bulgarian envoy. He was a fellow with his hair cut in Hungarian fashion, girt about with a brazen chain, and, as I fancy, just admitted into the Christian faith: the preference given to him over me was plainly meant as an insult to you, my august masters.

He left the table. Two court officials came after him — the emperor's brother, who was marshal of the court, and the chief secretary — and explained, in words Liudprand reproduces because he thought they proved his case:

When Peter king of the Bulgarians married Christopher's daughter, a mutual agreement was sworn to on both sides, to the effect that envoys of the Bulgarians should with us be preferred, honoured and esteemed above the envoys of all other nations. What you say is true: the Bulgarian envoy over there has his hair cut short, he has not washed himself, and his girdle consists of a brass chain. But nevertheless he is a patrician and we are definitely of opinion that it would be wrong to give a bishop, especially a Frankish bishop, the preference over him.

They then refused to let him go back to his lodgings and made him eat with the emperor's servants at an inn.

What that was worth

Liudprand thought he was recording an outrage. What he recorded is a treaty provision.

The marriage is the peace of 927 — Peter's, to the granddaughter of Romanos Lekapenos, which bought Bulgaria the title of tsar and its own patriarch. What Liudprand's evening adds is that the settlement had a protocol clause nobody else records, and that forty-one years later it was still being enforced at the imperial table, against the ambassador of the western empire, by officials who regarded his objections as beside the point.

Cremona, The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (1930) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

A treaty term about seating is not a small thing. Precedence at that court was the public statement of where every foreign power stood, and Bulgaria had negotiated first place in it and kept first place in it for two generations.

Liudprand's own contempt is the best evidence of how binding it was. The Byzantines agreed with him about the man's hair, his washing and his belt. They seated him above the Frankish bishop anyway, because he was a patrician of the empire and the agreement said so.

The rest of the evening

The emperor, having been told Liudprand valued his table, sent a consolation dish: a fat goat which he had eaten from himself, stuffed with garlic, onion and leeks, and swimming in fish sauce. Liudprand wished his masters could have seen it, being sure the sight would have banished any doubts they had about Byzantine luxury.

Eight days later, when the Bulgarians had left the city, he was made to dine at the same table again.

The date

The passage is worth dating precisely, because of what was about to happen.

Liudprand was in Constantinople in June 968. In that same year the emperor whose officials had insisted on the seating paid Sviatoslav of Kiev to come down the Danube and attack Bulgaria. Peter died the following January, and what the Rus began the Byzantines finished themselves.

So the last recorded occasion on which the peace of 927 was honoured is a bad-tempered Italian bishop being placed below an unwashed Bulgarian at a feast, in the months between the decision to destroy the kingdom and the arrival of the army hired to do it.

Samuel

contractionDrafted from Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983)

In 971 John Tzimiskes took Preslav, captured the tsar Boris II, brought him to Constantinople and had him publicly stripped of the imperial insignia in a ceremony designed to end the Bulgarian empire. The eastern half of the state was annexed and the patriarchate was suppressed.

That should have been the ending. It was not, because the western half of the country declined to accept it and went on for another forty-seven years.

The comitopuli

Four brothers, the sons of a provincial governor, held the mountains of Macedonia and went on holding them. Three of them died over the following decade and the fourth, Samuel, ruled until 1014 — first in somebody else's name and then in his own, with a patriarch he re-established, a capital at Ohrid, and a state running from the Adriatic to the Black Sea at its widest.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Explorer1940 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Whether this is the same polity is a real question. Samuel used the imperial title, restored the patriarchate, was recognised as tsar by a pope, and was treated by Constantinople as the Bulgarian empire rather than as a rebellion inside a Byzantine province. The Bulgarian tradition treats the continuity as unbroken. Some Byzantine and some modern accounts treat the western state as a different object with an inherited name.

Fine takes it as continuous and so does this account. The capital moved twice in three hundred years — Pliska, Preslav, Ohrid — and the third move is the argument in one word: a state that relocates its throne and its patriarch to a mountain lake after losing its heartland is a state in retreat, not a new one.

Forty years

Basil II came to the throne in 976 and spent essentially his entire adult reign on Bulgaria. Not in one campaign: in annual expeditions across four decades, taking a fortress at a time, buying the local aristocracy, and returning the next year to do it again. It was attrition rather than battle, and it is the least dramatic and most effective thing any Byzantine emperor ever did to a neighbour.

Samuel fought it competently for most of it and won some of it — he destroyed a Byzantine army at the Gates of Trajan in 986, in a pass, in the manner of Krum a hundred and seventy-five years earlier, and Basil escaped with difficulty.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Kleidion

In 1014, at Kleidion, Basil trapped the Bulgarian army in a defile and destroyed it.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The Byzantine account says he blinded the prisoners — fourteen thousand of them — and left one man in a hundred with a single eye to lead the rest back to Samuel, who is said to have died of the shock two days later.

Whether that is what happened is a question about the sources rather than about the war, and it belongs on the far side of the surrender. What belongs here is what the war was.

Four decades of annual campaigning by the richest state in the Mediterranean against a mountain polity that could not be reached quickly and would not stop. Basil never married, had no children, and left no dynasty. What he had instead was Bulgaria — and the empire's territorial peak and its succession crisis arrive in the same decade for that reason, because the man who produced the first spent the years that would have produced the second in the mountains of Macedonia.

Bulgaria surrendered in 1018 and the empire had a Balkan frontier on the Danube for the first time in three hundred and thirty-seven years. Fifty-three years after that it lost Anatolia at Manzikert. The two facts are usually told separately, and the second one is what four decades in Macedonia had left no time or money to prevent.

1018

endDrafted from Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983)

Basil II spent the years from 976 to 1018 destroying Bulgaria, and he did it almost annually, by attrition: a fortress a season, the local aristocracy bought where it could be bought, and a return the following year to do it again. Very little of it makes a good story. All of it worked.

The state he was destroying was not the one Simeon had ruled. The eastern half had been annexed in 971 and the imperial insignia publicly stripped off its tsar in Constantinople; what Basil spent forty years on was the western half, run from Ohrid by a family of provincial governors who had declined to accept that the empire was over.

Kleidion

In 1014 Basil trapped a Bulgarian army in a mountain pass at Kleidion and destroyed it. According to the Byzantine account he then blinded the prisoners — some fourteen thousand of them — leaving one man in a hundred with a single eye to lead the rest home, and Samuel died two days after they arrived.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Unknown artist · Public domain

That story needs handling, and not out of squeamishness.

The figure is unverifiable and comes from a chronicle written a century after the event. The epithet Basil is universally known by — Boulgaroktonos, the Bulgar-slayer — is not contemporary either: it first appears in the twelfth century, well after he was dead, and it was then taken up with enthusiasm by nineteenth-century Greek nationalism and, from the opposite direction and for opposite purposes, by Bulgarian.

So the single most famous fact about this war is a number nobody can check, attached to a nickname nobody used at the time, kept alive because two modern nationalisms both had a use for it. What is not in doubt is that a battle was fought at Kleidion, that the Bulgarian army was destroyed in it, that Samuel died within months, and that the state surrendered four years later.

Something atrocious happened in that pass. The specific atrocity everyone can name may be a later century's contribution.

The surrender

Ivan Vladislav was killed outside Dyrrachium in 1018 and the resistance ended without a final battle. Basil went through Bulgaria receiving submissions, Samuel's widow and family came in, and the aristocracy was given Byzantine titles and taken to Constantinople.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · подпоручикъ · CC BY-SA 3.0

Three hundred and thirty-seven years after Constantine IV conceded a province he could not hold, the empire had its Danube frontier back.

It had taken the whole adult reign of its most capable emperor to get it, and it kept it for a hundred and sixty-seven years.

A refuge for patriotism

afterlifeDrafted from Forbes, The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey (1915)

Basil II, having spent forty years on the conquest, governed the result with a light hand. Forbes's judgement is that he treated the territory more as a protectorate than a possession: taxes levied in kind rather than coin, the existing arrangements left largely alone, the nobility conciliated.

After his death it stopped being like that.

The see at Ohrid

The Bulgarian patriarchate, established at Ohrid in 972, was reduced to an archbishopric. In 1025 the see was given to a Greek, who lost no time in eliminating the Bulgarian element from positions of importance throughout the diocese.

That is the sentence to sit with, because the institution survived and its purpose was inverted. The church Boris had spent four years negotiating for and Simeon had extracted from a defeated empire — the thing that made Bulgarians a people rather than two populations sharing a country — went on existing for the next seven and a half centuries as a Greek-run instrument for making them something else.

The nobility went the other way. Many were transplanted to Constantinople, where, Forbes says, their opposition was numbed by the bestowal of honours. It is the oldest method there is and it is remarkably cheap: a court title, an estate, a place in a ceremonial that was the most impressive in the world, and a Bulgarian boyar's grandson was a Byzantine.

What the eleventh century did to the ground

The Balkans in these years were crossed by everyone.

Pechenegs and Cumans came over the Danube repeatedly, invited by Greeks against Bulgars and by Bulgars against Greeks, and the pattern was always the same: the barbarians stayed longer and did more damage than had been bargained for, and left some of their number behind as settlers nobody had asked for. Emperors planted colonies of Armenians and Vlachs. The Normans arrived in 1081. The crusaders came through in 1096 and behaved so badly that the population of the peninsula was permanently disinclined to sympathise with the cause.

Forbes, The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey (1915) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The ethnographic map of the Balkans that everyone would later fight about was substantially made in the century after Bulgaria stopped existing, by an empire moving populations around a province it had won and could not garrison.

The heresy takes the job

And the Bogomils grew.

Forbes's account of why is the useful one: under the weight of the Greek administration and the turmoil of the invasions, the heresy became a refuge for patriotism and an outlet for its expression. There was no Bulgarian state to be loyal to and no Bulgarian church to belong to, and there was a doctrine holding that all visible authority belonged to the devil, preached in Slavonic, by people who owned nothing.

Alexios Komnenos persecuted it bitterly, and the persecution did what persecutions of this kind reliably do. It spread west from its centre at Philippopolis into Serbia, and from Serbia into Bosnia, where the local church was accused of it for the next two centuries — and further, across the Adriatic and eventually into Languedoc.

So the two things this state built that outlasted it both went on working with the state gone. The church it had fought Constantinople for spent seven hundred years as Constantinople's instrument. The heresy it had spent a century persecuting became the vehicle for the loyalty the church could no longer carry, and travelled a thousand miles doing it.

1185

The interruption lasted a hundred and sixty-seven years, which is long enough for nobody alive to remember the thing that ended.

Then two brothers from the Tarnovo region fell out with the imperial government over a tax, and there was a Bulgarian state again — with the title of tsar resumed, a patriarch at a new capital, and the bones of the first empire's saints carried to Tarnovo to make the point that this was not a new country.