First Bulgarian Empire

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The First Bulgarian Empire was born from a humiliation so complete that the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor could barely write it down. After a disastrous defeat in 680, the Emperor Constantine IV was compelled to sign a peace treaty, acknowledge a new state he had tried to destroy, and pay an annual tribute to people he called "unclean and newly emerged." It was the first time the Byzantine Empire had ever legally surrendered claims to part of its Balkan dominions. The state that extracted this concession would endure for nearly four centuries, stretch from the Dnieper River to the Adriatic Sea, and become the foremost cultural centre of Slavic Europe. Who were the Bulgars, where did they come from, and how did a mobile warrior people build one of the most consequential states of the medieval world?

• 2. Origins of the Bulgars

  ›

  The Bulgars were Turkic semi-nomadic warriors who flourished in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the Volga region during the 7th century. They spoke a form of Turkic and included among their number the tribes of Onogurs, Utigurs, and Kutrigurs. The first clear mention of them in written sources dates from 480, when they served as allies of the Byzantine Emperor Zeno against the Ostrogoths.

  For generations the Bulgars were pulled between powerful neighbours. The Avar Khaganate subjugated the Kutrigurs in the second half of the 6th century, and the Utigurs fell under the Western Turkic Khaganate. Between 630 and 635, Khan Kubrat of the Dulo clan managed to unite the main Bulgar tribes and break free from the Avars. He called his new confederation Old Great Bulgaria, and it stretched between the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the Caucasus. Kubrat had been baptised in Constantinople in 619 and concluded a lasting alliance with the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius.

  After Kubrat died between 650 and 665, his confederation unravelled under Khazar pressure. His five sons scattered in different directions. The eldest, Batbayan, stayed behind and eventually became a Khazar vassal. The second, Kotrag, moved north to found Volga Bulgaria. The fourth, Kuber, settled in Pannonia. The fifth, Alcek, travelled as far as central Italy. The third son, Asparuh, led his people west to the lower Danube, and it was his branch of the family that would plant the seed of the Bulgarian state.

• 3. Founding and First Crises

  ›

  Asparuh's Bulgars crossed the Danube into Scythia Minor, a nominally Byzantine province whose steppe grasslands suited their herds. When Constantine IV marched south with a large army and fleet in 680, he suffered a disastrous defeat at Onglos, a fortified swampy camp in or near the Danube Delta. The Bulgars crossed the Balkan Mountains, invaded Thrace, and in 681 forced the Byzantines to sign a peace recognising Bulgarian independence and obligating the Empire to pay annual tribute.

  The new state needed internal structure. The capital was fixed at Pliska, initially a colossal encampment of 23 square kilometres protected by earthen ramparts. The Seven Slavic tribes were relocated westward to guard the frontier with the Avar Khaganate, while the Severi tribe was resettled in the eastern Balkan Mountains to watch the passes to the Byzantine Empire. Khan Asparuh perished in battle with the Khazars in 700. His successor, Khan Tervel, proved immediately capable: he helped the deposed Byzantine Emperor Justinian II regain his throne in 705, receiving in return the Zagore region of Northern Thrace and the title Caesar, and later dispatched his army to help break the Arab siege of Constantinople in 717-718. The Bulgarians slaughtered between 22,000 and 30,000 Arabs before the walls of the city.

  With the death of Khan Sevar in 753, the ruling Dulo clan died out, and for fifteen years seven khans reigned in succession, all of them murdered. The "soldier Emperor" Constantine V launched nine major campaigns against Bulgaria during this period. He won battles at Marcellae in 756, Anchialus in 763, and Berzitia in 774, but lost at the Rishki Pass in 759 and to storms in the Black Sea. The devastation his campaigns brought actually united the Bulgarians: a council in 766 saw the nobility and the "armed people" denounce Khan Sabin with the words "Thanks to you, the Romans will enslave Bulgaria!" Khan Telerig, in a masterstroke of deception, tricked Constantine into revealing his spies at the Bulgarian court, then had them all executed. Constantine died in 775 during a retaliatory campaign. The crisis was only finally resolved when Khan Kardam won a decisive battle at Marcellae in 792 and forced the Byzantines once again to pay tribute.

• 4. Territorial Expansion

  ›

  Under Khan Krum, who ruled from 803 to 814, Bulgaria doubled in size. Between 804 and 806 the Bulgarian armies finished off the Avar Khaganate, which had already been crippled by the Franks in 796, and a new border was established along the middle Danube or the Tisza River with the Frankish Empire. Krum then turned south. In 809 his forces captured Serdica, the city now called Sofia. In 811 the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus I sacked and burned the capital Pliska, but on the way back his army was destroyed at the battle of the Varbitsa Pass. Nicephorus himself was slain, and his skull was lined with silver and used as a drinking cup.

  Krum drove toward Thrace. In 812 he took the Black Sea port of Messembria. In 813 he defeated the Byzantines at Versinikia and offered a generous peace, but during negotiations the Byzantines tried to assassinate him. The Bulgarians responded by pillaging Eastern Thrace and seizing Adrianople, resettling its 10,000 inhabitants north of the Danube. Krum prepared 5,000 iron-plated wagons to carry siege equipment for a planned assault on Constantinople itself, but died suddenly on the 14th of April 814 before the campaign could begin.

  Krum was not only a conqueror. He issued the first known written law code of Bulgaria, establishing equal rules for all peoples living within the country's borders. His successor Khan Omurtag concluded a 30-year peace treaty with the Byzantines, establishing borders along the Erkesia trench between Debeltos on the Black Sea and the Maritsa valley. Bulgaria by the 820s controlled Belgrade, whose modern name first appeared in the sources as Alba Bulgarica. Under Khan Presian, who ruled from 836 to 852, the Bulgarians took most of Macedonia. The borders of the empire reached the Adriatic Sea near Valona and extended as far south as the Rhodopes and the plain surrounding Thessaloniki.

• 5. Christianity and Cultural Power

  ›

  Boris I, who came to the throne in 852, presided over a decade of military setbacks: wars against the Byzantine Empire, Eastern Francia, Great Moravia, the Croats, and the Serbs, followed in August 863 by forty days of earthquakes, a failed harvest, famine, and a locust invasion. Yet Boris I converted to Christianity in 864, taking the baptismal name of his godfather Emperor Michael.

  His reasons were calculated. Pagan states were increasingly surrounded by Christian powers that could use religion as an excuse for aggression. Christianity would also cement the monarch's authority above the nobility, since a Christian king ruled by the grace of God rather than as first among equals. Boris I initially sought a mission from East Francia rather than Byzantium, knowing that a more distant sponsor was less likely to interfere. When the Byzantine Emperor Michael III responded by invading Bulgaria, Boris accepted Orthodox Christianity as part of the settlement.

  He then played Rome and Constantinople against each other for years, submitting 115 questions to Pope Nicholas I and receiving two bishops in return. Neither the Pope nor his successor agreed to grant an autonomous Bulgarian Church. The threat of Bulgaria shifting toward Rome made Constantinople more flexible; in 870, at the Fourth Council of Constantinople, the Bulgarian Church was recognized as an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church. Boris crushed a rebellion of 52 leading boilas who opposed Christianisation, executing them along with their families. When his own son Vladimir attempted to restore paganism after Boris abdicated in 889, Boris came out of retirement, deposed and blinded him, and convened the Council of Preslav in 893. That council moved the capital from Pliska to Preslav, expelled Byzantine clergy, and replaced Greek with Old Bulgarian as the language of the liturgy.

  The Council of Preslav accelerated a cultural transformation already underway. Boris I had sponsored the disciples of Cyril and Methodius to create a literature in Old Bulgarian. The capital Preslav became the birthplace of the Early Cyrillic alphabet. Old Church Slavonic, written in these new letters, began spreading north and eventually became the lingua franca of much of Eastern Europe. By 927 the Bulgarian Patriarchate had been officially recognized as fully independent. The literature produced there spread across Slavic Europe in ways that outlasted the empire itself.

• 6. The Golden Age of Simeon I

  ›

  Simeon I, who ruled from 893 to 927 and became known as Simeon the Great, declared war on Byzantium in 894 when the Byzantines moved the Bulgarian market from Constantinople to Thessaloniki, where Bulgarian merchants faced higher taxes and lost direct access to eastern goods. Simeon defeated the Byzantine army in Thrace. The Byzantines turned to the Magyars for help; the Magyars scored two victories over the Bulgarians, but Simeon allied with the Pechenegs further east and in 895 inflicted a crushing defeat on the Magyars along the Southern Bug River. Hemmed in by the Pechenegs, the Magyars were forced to migrate west and eventually settled in the Pannonian Basin, founding what would become the Kingdom of Hungary.

  In 896 the Byzantines were routed at the Battle of Boulgarophygon and accepted a peace that recognised Bulgarian dominance of the Balkans, restored Bulgaria's most-favoured-nation trade status, abolished commercial restrictions, and obligated the Byzantine Empire to pay annual tribute. When the Byzantine emperor Alexander discontinued the tribute payments in 913, Simeon pressed his greatest ambition: to be recognised as Emperor and to create a joint Bulgarian-Roman state by conquering Constantinople. At the Battle of Achelous in 917 the Bulgarian army dealt a crushing defeat to the Byzantines. The chronicler Theophanes Continuatus wrote that "a bloodshed occurred, that had not happened in centuries", and Leo the Deacon witnessed piles of bones on the battlefield fifty years later.

  Simeon then pushed deep into Byzantine territory, seizing Adrianople and capturing Thebes, the capital of the Byzantine theme of Hellas in southern Greece. In 924, after the Serbs ambushed a small Bulgarian army, Bulgaria annexed Serbia entirely. Simeon sent envoys to the Fatimid caliph Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi Billah in Mahdia in 922, seeking Arab naval support to assault Constantinople from the sea. The caliph's emissaries were captured near the Calabrian coast by the Byzantines, and the Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos bought off the Arabs with generous gifts. Without a fleet, Simeon could not storm Constantinople. He died in May 927, controlling nearly all Byzantine possessions in the Balkans. His successor Peter I negotiated a peace that recognised him as Emperor of Bulgaria, sealed it with a marriage to Romanos's granddaughter Irene Lekapene, and ushered in forty years of stable relations.

• 7. Decline and the Bulgar Slayer

  ›

  The Bulgarian Empire that Peter I inherited was surrounded on all sides. Magyar raids devastated the country between 934 and 965. The growing insecurity, combined with the expanding power of the landed nobility at the expense of the peasantry, gave rise to Bogomilism, a dualistic heretical movement that spread in later centuries to the Byzantine Empire, northern Italy, and southern France. In 965 the Byzantines discontinued tribute payments, and in 968 they incited the Kievan Rus to invade. The Kievan Prince Svyatoslav I defeated the Bulgarian army and established his capital at Preslavets on the Danube. Peter I abdicated and died; his son Boris II had little choice but to cooperate with Svyatoslav.

  The Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimiskes eventually defeated Svyatoslav and compelled him to leave the Balkans in 971. In the process, the Byzantines seized Preslav and forced Boris II to ritually abdicate in Constantinople, proclaiming Bulgaria a Byzantine province. The western regions remained free, regrouping around four brothers known as the Cometopuli. By 976, the youngest, Samuel, held all power. The rightful heir Boris II's brother Roman escaped Constantinople and was recognised as emperor, while Samuel commanded the army.

  Samuel proved a formidable general. In 986 he decisively defeated the new Byzantine Emperor Basil II at the Battle of the Gates of Trajan, and Basil barely escaped with his life. The Byzantine poet John Geometres wrote: "The Istros Bulgaria took the crown of Rome." Samuel expanded south, annexing Thessaly and Epirus and plundering the Peloponnese. In 997, following Roman's death, Samuel was proclaimed Emperor. He established friendly relations with Stephen I of Hungary through a marriage alliance.

  After 1000, Basil II turned the war around through methodical annual campaigns, sometimes fighting all twelve months of the year rather than the customary short campaigning season. In 1001 he seized Pliska and Preslav; in 1003 Vidin fell after an eight-month siege. In 1014 at the Battle of Kleidion, some 14,000 Bulgarians were captured. Basil ordered 99 out of every 100 men blinded, leaving every hundredth soldier one eye to lead the rest home. When the blinded army arrived at Samuel's residence in Prespa, Samuel suffered a heart attack and died two days later, on the 6th of October. Resistance continued under Gavril Radomir and Ivan Vladislav, but after Ivan Vladislav fell during the siege of Dyrrhachium, the Bulgarian nobility surrendered to Basil II. By 1018 the First Bulgarian Empire had ceased to exist. The Bulgarian Patriarchate was demoted to the Archbishopric of Ohrid but retained its sees and a degree of autonomy, and the Old Church Slavonic literary tradition it had nurtured continued to travel north and west long after Basil II earned his epithet "the Bulgar Slayer."