Second Bulgarian Empire

A tax and two brothers

Drafted from Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (1987)formation

In 1185 the emperor Isaac II Angelos levied a special tax across the Balkans to pay for his wedding. Two brothers from the Tarnovo region, Theodore and Asen, went to him to ask for a grant of land and were refused; Asen was slapped in the face. They went home and raised a revolt.

It failed. They crossed the Danube, came back with Cuman cavalry, and by 1189 had a state with a capital, a crown and a patriarch.

What they said they were restoring

Not a new kingdom. The brothers took the title tsar, were crowned at Tarnovo, and had the relics of the First Bulgarian Empire's saints — Ivan of Rila among them — moved to the new capital, which is the medieval way of saying that this is the same country.

The claim was not that a new dynasty had succeeded an old one. It was that the country had resumed. And there is no date on which that happened: 1185 is a revolt over a tax, not a restoration ceremony, and the men who started it were asking for an estate rather than for an empire.

Whether the claim was true is a fair question and it is not one the sources can settle. The Asens were probably not descended from the First Empire's dynasty and almost certainly said they were. What is certain is that after a hundred and sixty-seven years of Byzantine administration there was a Bulgarian ruler with a Bulgarian title in a Bulgarian capital, with the old empire's saints in his cathedral — and that everybody involved, including Constantinople, understood what was being asserted.

The Cumans

The brothers' decisive asset was hired cavalry from across the Danube.

The Cumans were a Turkic steppe people holding the plain north of the Black Sea, and for the first thirty years of the Second Empire they are the arm that wins its battles — horse archers who could beat Byzantine and, shortly, Frankish heavy cavalry by feigning flight and turning. They were paid, they married into the Asen family, and they eventually settled inside the state, which is roughly what the Bulgars had done to the Slavs five centuries earlier and is a fair description of how states in this region got made.

Beside them the revolt inherited an instrument from the government it had displaced: the pronoia, a grant of the revenue of an estate in return for service. Byzantium had developed it, the Greek government in exile at Nicaea was arriving at the same thing independently in the same decades, and Bulgaria simply kept using what the imperial administration had left in place.

What it took off Byzantium

The Balkans north of the Balkan range, permanently, twenty years before the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople.

The empire's collapse is usually dated to 1204, when the crusaders took the city, or to the civil wars of the 1340s. This went before either of them, and it went for the price of a wedding tax and a slap.

A crown from Rome

Drafted from Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (1987)expansion

Kalojan, the youngest of the Asen brothers, ruled from 1197 and wanted two things his brothers had not got: recognition, and Constantinople.

The recognition he obtained from a direction nobody in Tarnovo had used before. In 1199 he opened a correspondence with Innocent III, and the letters survive on both sides. Kalojan asked for an imperial crown and a patriarch, citing the precedent of Simeon and Peter and pointing out that his ancestors had held the title. Innocent offered a royal crown and a primate, not an imperial one and not a patriarch, in exchange for recognising papal authority. Kalojan took it, and a legate crowned him at Tarnovo in November 1204.

Both sides understood they were describing different transactions. The papal register calls him king; his own charters call him emperor.

Why a lapsed union was worth five years

The union with Rome lasted about a generation. The patriarchate was restored on Orthodox terms in 1235 and the papal connection was dropped, and it would be easy to file the whole episode as a manoeuvre that came to nothing.

Kalojan plainly did not think so, and he was the one paying for it. He conducted a five-year negotiation, accepted terms he then reinterpreted, and got the two things a European ruler needed — a crown and a church — conferred by the one office in the west whose authority to confer them nobody in Latin Europe would dispute.

That is the whole point of the transaction and it does not depend on the union surviving. An Orthodox ruler in the Balkans could get a crown from Constantinople, which would attach conditions and consider it revocable, or from Rome, which was a thousand miles away and had no means of enforcing anything. The second was a better deal, and Kalojan took it, and then kept the crown and returned the obedience.

1205

Six months after the coronation, the crusaders who had taken Constantinople the previous year marched on Adrianople, and Kalojan destroyed them.

The Cuman horse archers feigned flight and drew the Frankish knights into a pursuit; the pursuit was broken up and ridden down; the emperor Baldwin I was captured and died in a Bulgarian prison. The Latin empire of Constantinople never rebuilt a field army capable of offensive war, and it had been in existence for sixteen months.

A state twenty years old, founded by two provincial brothers over a wedding tax and a slap, destroyed the army that had just taken Constantinople — in the same year its ruler was crowned by a papal legate, and using cavalry hired from the steppe.

Kalojan then spent three years taking Thrace and was murdered outside Thessalonica in 1207 by his own commander, probably at his wife's instigation. The state he had made was the strongest power in the Balkans and had no rule whatever for who came next.

The Comans turned back

Drafted from Villehardouin, Memoirs of the Crusades (1908)expansion

A year after the crusaders took Constantinople, the Bulgarian tsar destroyed their army outside Adrianople and took the Latin emperor alive. The fullest account of it was written by a man who was in the camp that day, and who spent the rest of the chronicle explaining what had gone wrong.

Villehardouin calls him Johannizza, King of Wallachia and Bulgaria. He is Kaloyan, the younger of the two brothers whose revolt had made the state twenty years earlier.

How he was invited

The Latins had spread themselves across Thrace, each baron attending to his own new lands. Villehardouin's account of what the local population did about it is brief and bitter:

Now the Greeks, who were very disloyal, still nourished treachery in their hearts … They took envoys therefore privily, from all the cities in the land, and sent them to Johannizza, the King of Wallachia and Bulgaria, who was still at war with them as he had been aforetime. And they told Johannizza they would make him emperor, and give themselves wholly to him, and slay all the Franks. So they swore that they would obey him as their lord, and he swore that he would defend them as though they were his own people.

The Greek cities of Thrace, having just lost their empire to a crusade, offered the imperial title to the Bulgarian king they had been fighting, on condition that he get rid of the Franks. He accepted.

Two days

The military part is the clearest description anywhere of what happened when western heavy cavalry met steppe horse-archers, and it is clearer because the Frenchman telling it knew exactly what his own side had done wrong.

On the Wednesday of Easter week Kaloyan sent his Cumans running past the Latin camp. The Latins poured out after them for a full league, very foolishly; when they turned to come back, the Cumans began shooting, and wounded a great many horses. The barons were summoned to the emperor's quarters that evening, agreed that they had dealt foolishly in chasing people so lightly armed, and resolved that next time they would form up in front of the camp and wait, and not move. It was proclaimed through the host that nobody was to leave his post for any cry or tumult that might come to his ears.

On the Thursday the Cumans ran up to the tents again. Count Louis of Blois went out first and followed them, sending word to the emperor to come after him. Alas! how ill did they keep to what had been settled the night before! They pursued for at least two leagues, closed with the Cumans, and chased them a long way. Then the Cumans turned back on them and began to cry out and to shoot.

Louis was wounded twice and unhorsed, and a knight dismounted to give him his own horse. His men told him to get away. He said: The Lord God forbid that ever I should be reproached with flying from the field, and abandoning the emperor.

Baldwin recalled his people and told them he would not fly either. Villehardouin, who was guarding the camp and not in the fighting, says that those present bear witness that never did knight defend himself better with his hands. Then:

There on the field remained the Emperor Baldwin, who never would fly, and Count Lewis; the Emperor Baldwin was taken alive and Count Lewis was slain.

He follows it with a list of the dead by name — a bishop, two brothers of counts, a dozen knights — and notes that there were many more the book does not mention.

What it established

The Latin emperor of Constantinople died in Bulgarian captivity at Tarnovo. The manner of it was disputed for centuries and Villehardouin does not know; what he knows is that Baldwin never came back.

Nothing else in the Second Bulgarian Empire's history matches it. Within fifteen months of the Fourth Crusade's triumph, the state the crusaders had built was beaten in the field by a kingdom most of them had not heard of, its emperor was a prisoner, and the Greek cities that had invited the victor in were finding out what that cost — Kaloyan turned on Thrace and depopulated it, and the same chronicle records him doing it.

What the chapter is evidence of is not Bulgarian greatness. It is that the balance in the Balkans after 1204 was not between a Latin empire and a Greek one. There was a third power in it, it had Cuman cavalry on contract, and for a few years it was the strongest thing on the peninsula.

Klokotnitsa

Drafted from Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (1987)peak

In March 1230, at Klokotnitsa on the Maritsa, Ivan Asen II destroyed the army of Epirus and captured Theodore Komnenos Doukas, who had crowned himself emperor at Thessalonica and was, at that moment, the man most likely to retake Constantinople.

Theodore was blinded, reportedly for conspiring afterwards. Bulgaria absorbed Macedonia, Albania and most of Thrace, and for about a decade held everything between the Danube and the Aegean except the capital and the Peloponnese.

Who it decided the Roman empire for

Three Greek governments claimed to be the Roman empire after 1204: Nicaea in Anatolia, Epirus in the western Balkans, and Trebizond on the Black Sea. In the 1220s Epirus was the strongest of them. Theodore had taken Thessalonica from the Latins in 1224, had himself crowned emperor in it, and was moving towards Constantinople.

Klokotnitsa removed Epirus from that competition in an afternoon. Nicaea, the weaker claimant, took Constantinople thirty-one years later against no serious Greek rival — and it was in a position to because a Bulgarian tsar had destroyed the serious Greek rival for reasons of his own that had nothing to do with Nicaea.

The restoration of the Byzantine empire in 1261 was made possible, indirectly and unintentionally, by a Balkan ruler whose lifelong policy was to prevent one.

What Ivan Asen II did with it

He styled himself emperor of the Bulgarians and the Greeks, which is exactly the claim Simeon had made three hundred years earlier and had died without making good. He had the victory carved on a column in the church of the Forty Martyrs at Tarnovo, where the inscription still is, and it says in so many words that all the land from Adrianople to Durazzo was his and that the Franks held only Constantinople.

He minted. He married a daughter to the Latin emperor's heir and was nearly made regent of the Latin empire, which would have put a Bulgarian tsar in charge of the crusader state his father had beaten. He negotiated with Nicaea, restored the Bulgarian patriarchate on Orthodox terms in 1235 with Nicaean and eastern recognition, and besieged Constantinople in alliance with Nicaea and then broke off the alliance because he preferred a weak Latin emperor to a strong Greek one.

That last decision is the interesting one and it looks like the right call. A restored Byzantine empire was the only power that could threaten Bulgaria's position, and Ivan Asen spent his last years preventing one.

One reign

He died in 1241. The Mongols raided the Balkans the following year, Bulgaria began paying tribute to the Golden Horde, his son was a child, and the state never held Macedonia again.

The whole of it — the Aegean coast, the Albanian ports, the empire of the Bulgarians and the Greeks — lasted about eleven years and depended entirely on one man being alive. What survives of it is a column in a church at Tarnovo with the boundaries cut into the stone, listing land the state held for a decade and never saw again.

The swineherd

Drafted from Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (1987)contraction

In 1277 a peasant called Ivaylo, who had kept pigs, raised the countryside of north-eastern Bulgaria against the Mongol raids the government was not stopping, beat the Mongols in the field, then beat the royal army, killed the tsar in the battle, and was crowned tsar himself at Tarnovo.

He married the dowager empress, Maria, who was a Byzantine princess and the previous tsar's widow, in order to make the thing legal. He reigned about two years. Byzantium sent an army and a candidate of its own against him, he beat that too, and he was finally undone by a siege at Silistra in which he was blockaded by Mongols for three months while a rival was installed behind him. He went to the Mongol khan Nogai to ask for help and was killed at a feast.

Why it matters more than two years suggests

A two-year peasant reign that ended with the throne going back to an aristocrat looks like an interruption rather than a hinge. It is a hinge because of what it was a verdict on.

The Mongol raids across the Danube were annual. The government paid tribute to the Golden Horde and did not fight. The villages that were burned had no protection from a state whose entire justification for taxing them was that it protected them — and then a man who kept pigs raised those villages and beat the Mongols that the tsar's army had not engaged.

The aristocracy removed him and did not fix the thing he had risen about. Bulgaria went on paying the Golden Horde for another twenty years.

The company he is not in

Men from outside the ruling house take thrones all over the medieval world, and almost always with a faction behind them. A slave soldiery makes one of its own sultan; a general deposes a king; a governor's son is proclaimed by the army. What is unusual here is that nobody in the political or military class installed Ivaylo. He assembled his own following out of the countryside, won two wars with it, killed the reigning tsar in a battle, and was crowned in the capital — and then married the dead man's widow, a Byzantine princess, because he understood perfectly well that winning was not the same as being legitimate.

He was right to worry about it. The marriage did not save him, and the aristocracy waited him out.

What it says about the throne

Bulgaria in these two centuries had a hereditary principle that nobody had written down and that was honoured about half the time. The throne changed hands something over twenty times between 1185 and 1396, and four tsars were assassinated in the first forty years alone.

That is not the same as an openly factional succession, where the competition has rules and everybody knows who is entitled to enter it. This was a court in which a swineherd could be crowned because he had an army and had married the right widow — which is what happens when there is no rule at all, rather than a bad one.

The Mongols

The tribute Bulgaria paid the Golden Horde ran for decades and shaped everything that follows, and it is worth noticing that it is the exact reverse of the arrangement the first Bulgarian state had enjoyed.

Byzantium had paid Bulgaria an annual subsidy for three centuries to keep it quiet, and the withholding of it started wars. Three hundred years later Bulgaria was paying a steppe power to be left alone, and failing to be left alone, and a pig-keeper had to do the fighting.

Tarnovo

Drafted from Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (1987)aside?What aside means

Tarnovo sits in a loop of the Yantra with rock on three sides, and the Asens fortified two hills of it — Tsarevets for the palace and the patriarchate, Trapezitsa for the aristocracy and the churches. It was the capital for two hundred and eleven years and it was, for the last fifty of them, the most productive literary centre in the Orthodox Slav world.

The last school

Patriarch Euthymius, who held the see from 1375 until the city fell in 1393, ran a school at Tarnovo that did something narrow and consequential: it revised the Slavonic texts.

Four hundred years of copying since Preslav had produced drift — variant spellings, variant grammar, variant readings of scripture, and translations made in the tenth century that no longer matched the Greek anybody could check them against. Euthymius and his circle went back to the Greek, retranslated, standardised the orthography, and issued corrected texts.

Then the Ottomans took the city, and the school scattered.

Where it went

Its members went to Serbia, to Wallachia and Moldavia, and to Russia. Cyprian and Gregory Tsamblak, both trained in that circle, became metropolitans of Kiev and of all Rus; Constantine of Kostenets went to Serbia and wrote the first Slavonic treatise on grammar and orthography for a Serbian despot.

What they carried was the Tarnovo revision, and it became the standard. The Russian church books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are in the orthography Euthymius fixed. The historiography calls this the second South Slavic influence, to distinguish it from the first — the alphabet, the liturgy and the books that went out of Preslav and Ohrid to Serbia and the Rus four hundred years earlier, in the same direction, from the same country.

What that was and was not

It is worth being exact, because the achievement is easy to overstate and easy to miss.

Euthymius did not invent an alphabet; the letters are the letters Preslav had settled four hundred years earlier. He did not convert anybody; Serbia and Russia had been Orthodox for centuries. What his school did was editorial — go back to the Greek, retranslate where the old version had drifted, fix the spelling, and issue a text that could be copied without compounding the errors.

That is unglamorous and it is the work that keeps a literature usable. A scriptural and liturgical corpus copied by hand for four hundred years decays; somebody has to sit down with the originals and stop the decay, and if nobody does, the tradition slowly becomes a set of local variants that cannot be checked against anything.

The circle at Tarnovo did that for the whole Orthodox Slav world in the last twenty years before the Ottomans took the city, and then carried the corrected text out with them when it fell.

Bulgaria did this twice, four centuries apart, and on both occasions the export happened because the state producing it was being destroyed. The books left because the scholars had to.

1396

Drafted from Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (1987)end

In 1330 the Serbs destroyed a Bulgarian army at Velbazhd and the tsar Michael Shishman was killed in the field. Serbia under Stefan Dušan became the dominant Balkan power for the following thirty years and took Macedonia, Thessaly and Epirus while the Byzantine empire fought its own civil wars. Bulgaria spent those decades as the junior partner in somebody else's ascendancy.

Then it did the thing that made the ending certain. Ivan Alexander divided the state between two sons, one at Tarnovo and one at Vidin, and they did not cooperate — not against each other, particularly, and not with each other at all.

What walked into that

The Ottomans crossed into Europe permanently in 1354, ferried across the Dardanelles by one side in a Byzantine civil war that had hired them.

What they found in the Balkans was a peninsula in which nobody could combine. Serbia's empire had dissolved into principalities after 1371. Byzantium was bankrupt and fighting itself. Bulgaria was two states with one dynasty. The Ottoman advance is often described as irresistible and it was not: it was methodical, it took forty years, and at every stage it faced opponents who could not be brought to act together for a season.

Sofia fell in 1382. Tarnovo fell in 1393 after a three-month siege. Vidin held on until 1396, and fell when the crusade assembled in western Europe to relieve it was destroyed at Nicopolis on the Danube — a defeat so complete that it ended serious western intervention in the Balkans for a generation.

The church

The Bulgarian patriarchate was abolished and the Bulgarian church placed under the patriarch of Constantinople.

That is worth pausing on, because it is the same argument being settled a fourth time. Boris had extracted an archbishopric from Constantinople in 870 by playing Rome against it. Simeon had extracted a patriarchate in 927 by thirty years of war. Kalojan had got a primate out of Innocent III in 1204 and Ivan Asen II had got the patriarchate restored on Orthodox terms in 1235.

Five centuries of Bulgarian rulers had fought Constantinople for control of their own church and had won every round. Constantinople won the last one in 1393 without fighting at all, because a Muslim conqueror preferred to deal with one Christian hierarchy rather than several, and the one he chose was the Greek.

Two hundred and eleven years

There was no Bulgarian state again until 1878.

The second Bulgarian empire lasted about as long as the first had, and it is the lesser of the two by most measures — smaller at its widest, shorter at its peak, and without a single durable institution to set beside an alphabet. It had one great reign of eleven years, one legendary battle it won against the crusaders, one peasant who briefly wore the crown, and a school of editors working in the last twenty years before the walls came down.

Then five hundred years of somebody else's empire, during which the country's own name survived mainly as the name of a province.

They had to be taught who they were

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

Five centuries is long enough to forget.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Bulgarian people, in Forbes's flat description, consisted entirely of peasants. There was no Bulgarian upper class, no middle class, no professional class. Such educated Bulgarians as existed lived somewhere else — in Bucharest, in Odessa, in the Russian and Romanian cities where money and printing presses were. And the church, which under the Ottoman settlement of 1393 answered to the patriarch of Constantinople, was in Greek hands, and its hierarchy competed with the Turkish administration in suppressing any suggestion that Bulgarians were a nation.

Then Forbes writes the sentence that says what a national revival actually involves:

not only was nothing known at that time about Bulgaria and its inhabitants in other countries, but the Bulgars had themselves to be taught who they were.

Taught by whom

By émigrés, in other people's countries, with other people's money.

A history of Bulgaria was published by a Bulgarian in Moscow in 1829. The first school inside Bulgaria opened in 1835 and others followed quickly. Two committees did most of the work and did not agree about the method: the one at Odessa wanted educational and religious reform and a gradual, peaceful regeneration; the one at Bucharest wanted immediate political emancipation by violence if violence was required.

Both were funded by merchants. A nation with no aristocracy left had to be reassembled by its traders, from outside its own borders, starting with a schoolbook.

The church came first

The ecclesiastical question was settled before the political one, and by the people themselves.

The Porte had promised in 1856 that there would be Bulgarian bishops and that the Bulgarian language would be recognised in church and school, and had not delivered. So in 1860 the Bulgarians simply stopped recognising the patriarch of Constantinople. There was an attempt the same year to place the Bulgarian church under Rome instead — the exact manoeuvre Boris had tried in 866 and Kalojan in 1204 — and Russian opposition killed it.

In 1870 the Turkish government, alarmed by the agitation, established the Bulgarian Exarchate: a free and national Bulgarian church under an Exarch who would reside in Constantinople, Bulgaria itself still being a Turkish province. The Greeks staved it off for two years and in 1872 the Exarch was installed in Constantinople anyway.

So the church was restored eight years before the state was, in the capital of the empire that ruled the country, by permission of a sultan. Five hundred years after Constantinople finally won the argument about who ran the Bulgarian church, it lost it again — and this time to a decision of the Ottoman government.

What the church defined

The Exarchate mattered more than a jurisdictional detail should, because in the Ottoman system a religious community was the unit that existed. Nationality had no administrative meaning; confession did.

That is why the boundaries of the Exarchate became the boundaries of the claim. Where a village went over to the Bulgarian church it was, for practical purposes, a Bulgarian village, and where it stayed with the patriarch it was Greek. The Macedonian question — which occupied Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece for the next forty years and produced two Balkan wars — was in large part an argument about which parishes belonged to which hierarchy, conducted afterwards with rifles.

A nation reconstituted through a church ends up with a national question shaped like a diocese.

Tarnovo, 1908

Risings in 1875 and 1876 were put down with the massacres that turned European opinion; Russia went to war in 1877; and the Congress of Berlin the following year produced a Bulgarian principality considerably smaller than the one the Russians had drawn, still under Ottoman suzerainty.

Thirty years later that formality was ended, and where it was ended is the point.

On 5 October 1908, at Tarnovo — the ancient capital, the Asens' city, the place the Ottomans had taken after a three-month siege in 1393 — Ferdinand proclaimed the complete independence of Bulgaria under himself as king. The Bulgarian word he used for the title was tsar.

It is the same word Simeon spent thirty years at war to have recognised in 927 and Kalojan negotiated five years with a pope to obtain in 1204, resumed in the city where the second empire had been crowned, by a Saxe-Coburg prince, five hundred and twelve years after Vidin fell.