RESTORATION AND RISE OF
THE BULGARIAN STATE AND ITS HEGEMONY ON THE BALKAN PENINSULA 1185-1246
The spark that kindled the Bulgarian liberation insurrection in the spring of
1185 was the heavy special taxes imposed in the Bulgarian lands with a view to
meeting the exorbitant expenses on the occasion of the Byzantine emperor's
dynastic marriage with the juvenile Hungarian princess. Sporadic, not
well-planned riots broke out in the southern Bulgarian Black Sea littoral, the
Balkan Range area and in Macedonia. Engaged in severe battles with the Normans,
Byzantium failed to suppress these riots on time. This made the rebels even more
audacious. The sources shedding light on these events are rather scanty, but
there is some secondary evidence that the idea to restore the Bulgarian state
had quickly pushed to the background the initial economic motives of the
unrests. There was a provision in the Bulgarian law that the Bulgarian throne
should be ascended only by persons of royal descent. This must have made riot
leaders approach two remote descendants of the Simeon dynasty, the brothers
Assen and Theodor - military and administrative governors of a region in Moesia
at the time. The brothers, however, were hesitant in responding to the rebels'
ideas. The military confrontation with the still mighty empire kept everyone
alert. Thus, they tried to achieve the goals of the movement by peaceful means.
Assen and Theodor were sent to see the emperor at his military camp on the
Aegian coast. They asked to be appointed military and administrative governors
of all Bulgarian lands which would probably give them a certain taste of
autonomy within the empire. The emperor's consent would have committed them to
incorporating the rebels' combat forces into the emperor's army7 then at war
with the Normans.
One could hardly think of a better proposal which would so well come up to
the interests and save the reputation of both parties to the conflict. It is
known, though, that wisdom and sagacity are qualities not often inherent to
politicians. In that case, too, the emperor not only rejected the idea but also
literally slapped Assen in the face. The Bulgarians returned to their
fortifications in the mountains which, according to a Byzantine chronicler, had
busily been renewed and reinforced.
It seems, however, that a large proportion of the Bulgarian people was still
reluctant to tread the path of open confrontation with the imperium. On that
account, the two brothers did something which may look strange by today's
standards but was fully justified by the spirit of that epoch. At the time of
the Norman seizure of Thessalonica (1185), a group of Bulgarians managed to
salvage and transfer to the Balkan mountain fort of Turnovo the icon of St.
Demetrius - the most worshiped military patron in Byzantium. Assen and Theodor
erected a church in Turnovo, accommodated the icon in there and, during the
official inauguration in November 1186, announced that St. Demetrius had turned
his eyes away from Byzantium and would thereafter be the patron of Bulgaria and
the Bulgarian army. Gripped by a flush of inspiration a multitude of warriors
immediately proclaimed Theodor a tsar of Bulgaria. As such he goes by the name
of Peter. Assen assumed the command of the Bulgarian armies. Then the Bulgarian
contingents left Turnovo and rode swiftly to the old Bulgarian capital of
Preslav where tsar Peter had remained. Assen stayed back in Turnovgrad to govern
his and his brother's patrimonium there.
Turnovo was soon to assume the functions of a capital city, for the real
power was in the hands of Assen. He was, incidentally, also given the title of
tsar of Bulgaria in 1187.
It During the first year of the rebellion only the regions of Moesia and
Wallachia had their independence from Byzantium restored. In the subsequent
year, however, the armies of the Bulgarians made an entry into the formerly
Bulgarian southern territories. And, while Macedonia - the kernel of the
Bulgarian resistance against the Byzantine aggression in the 10th and the 11th
centuries, was freed without any particular difficulty, battles waged in Thrace
could be compared, by scope and severity, only with those at the time of the
so-called Bulgarian epic. There followed about a ten-year period of alternating
twists: at times the Bulgarian troops reached the neighborhood of Constantinople
and Thessalonica - the two main cities of the empire and, at times, the
Byzantines led battles in Moesia. At one stage the Bulgarians had just gained
superiority in the fighting when the seeds of discord yielded their fruit that
fell among the Bulgarian palace aristocracy. In 1196, tsar Assen I (1187-1196),
a victim of a plot, was murdered. Shortly after, his brother tsar Peter
(1189-1197) suffered a similar fate. The conspirers did not succeed in
consolidating their power.
The two assassinated royal brothers - liberators of Bulgaria, had a third
brother who ascended the Bulgarian throne as tsar Kaloyan (1197-1207). Having
suppressed the strong boyar opposition, the young Bulgarian ruler declared war
on Byzantium in 1199. By 1202 he succeeded in liberating the parts of Thrace,
Macedonia and the Black Sea littoral still under Byzantine rule. This time
Byzantium's attempts to repeat its 9th- 11th century experience of using the
Hungarians against the Bulgarians, failed. In 1203 the Hungarian imperial troops
were defeated and some parts of the central Danubian tableland, which had been
taken away from the Bulgarians during their agony at the beginning of the 11th
century, were restituted to the Bulgarian state.
Meanwhile tsar Kaloyan was well-aware of his country's serious international
isolation. A conflict with the Latins interpolated into the conflict with
Byzantium which had permanently been seething with the help of the Hungarians,
always at hand for a revenge. For this reason, as early as 1199, he wrote to
Pope Innocent III to propose subordination of the Bulgarian church in return for
his being crowned as a sign of the legitimacy of his reign. The negotiations,
conducted with perfect diplomatic skill by both parties, ended in 1204. Tsar
Kaloyan received from Rome a crown, a sceptre and a blessing for his title as a
king while the Bulgarian archbishop Basil was consecrated as primate of the
Bulgarian church. This act enabled tsar Kaloyan to declare illegal all Hungarian
revenge-seeking intentions with respect to Bulgaria, already a fully fledged
Catholic country and even, with the Pope's blessing, to strike a preventive
stunning blow on the Hungarians in Transilvania and Serbia.
At that juncture, in 1204 Bulgaria's perennial enemy - the Byzantine empire,
unexpectedly collapsed. Debilitated by the 20- year long hostilities with the
Bulgarians, it yielded to the pressure of and eventually fell to the crusaders
in the Fourth crusade. The foundations of the political prodigy of Western
Europe, the Latin empire, were laid in conquered Constantinople. The new state
quickly got down to occupying almost all Byzantine territories in Europe and
Asia Minor.
Tsar Kaloyan was anxious to negotiate a settlement of the borderline dispute
with the Latin emperor Baldwin of Flanders (1204- 1205). However, the Latins'
reply was haughty and rude. They said that, as far as they were concerned,
Bulgaria was an illegitimate political formation and that its territory, as part
of the former Byzantine empire whose heirs-at-law they thought to be, would
belong to them by rights. They informed Kaloyan in a sarcastic fashion that
their coming was imminent. Kaloyan's plea to Pope Innocent III to bring the
crusaders to their senses took no effect at all.
In that situation the Bulgarian ruler, who surely did not like being at the
tail-end of events, decided to strike first. In the spring of 1205 a rebellion,
inspired by tsar Kaloyan, broke out in Latin Thrace. Only when the Latin army
besieged the main city of the region, Adrianople (present-day Edirne), did the
crusaders see, in spell-binding amazement, that the fortress walls had Bulgarian
standards fixed on top. Surviving Byzantine nobility had to recognize the
supremacy of the Bulgarian tsar. Soon after, the Bulgarian army also arrived at
the walls of Adrianople. Confident of their invincibility, the knights raided
the Bulgarian army on 14 April 1205 and sustained tremendous losses and a
defeat. On that day, in the vicinity of Adrianople, emperor Baldwin was taken
prisoner and the that day. It marked the end of the reveries of some West
European political circles about their enduring presence in the East. For, the
Adrianople disaster was a death blow to the infant empire which did, never
again, succeed in assuming the role of a primary political power in the European
East and which, after a painful agony six decades long, was to disappear
completely from the political stage.
During the couple of years that followed, the Bulgarian contingents struck
fresh and severe blows on the crusaders. The last of the Fourth crusade leaders,
Boniface of Montferrat, 'king' of Thessalonica, got slain in a battle with the
Bulgarians. The Byzantine aristocracy, confused by and frightened of Bulgaria's
triumphant marches which had already pushed it forward again as a predominant
power in the Balkans, backed out of its alliance with the Bulgarians, and, as a
result, was completely done away with in Thrace. A legend was circulated among
the few survivors in which Kaloyan was seen as the Providence itself retaliating
the evil caused to the Bulgarians in the beginning of the 11th century.
In October 1207 tsar Kaloyan besieged Thessalonica. On the eve of the battle,
the Bulgarian tsar died in circumstances which are rather vaguely described in
the various sources. According to some he had died of heart failure and,
according to others, he had been ambushed and murdered. Boril, Kaloyan's nephew
and the only adult descendant of Assen's House, was set on the throne.
Tsar Boril (1207-1218) possessed none of the diplomatic or military abilities
of the three royal brothers. A number of discontented boyars - regional
governors in Macedonia, Thrace and the Rhodopes refused to obey the central
power and set up autonomous feudal possessions. The exhausted Bulgarian state
could not counteract a Latin raid in 1208 and lost Thrace. The Hungarians were
also on the offensive from the west. As late as 1214 Boril succeeded in
defeating the invaders. The hostilities with the Latins and the Hungarians were
discontinued by the intercession of the Pope, while peace was being consolidated
by dynastic marriages. Opposition against Boril was gaining momentum which was
due to the tsar's political and military ineptitude, as well as to his suspected
complicity in the plot that had resulted in tsar Kaloyan's death.
In 1217 the legitimate heir to the Bulgarian throne - the son of tsar Assen
I, by name Ivan Assen II, returned from exile in the Russian principality of
Galich where he had been sent as a juvenile at the time of Boril's ascension to
the throne. Now Ivan Assen was at the head of a company of Russian mercenaries.
One after the other the fortresses opened their gates to him. Boril shut himself
up in the capital city of Turnovo which took until the spring of 1218 to fall.
Boril was deposed and blinded, and Ivan Assen began his I reign as a Bulgarian
tsar.
The young sovereign differed from his predecessor in his extraordinary
statecraft skills. From the very beginning of his reign he had to cope with a
rather complex foreign political situation. The bipolar pattern of political
relations, i.e. Byzantium versus Bulgaria, which had been typical of the
development of the European East for centuries on end, was substituted by a
conglomerate of state formations with equal power and ambitions: the Latin
empire, Byzantium's successors Epirius and Nicaea, Bulgaria, Serbia, and
Hungary. By choosing to negotiate (this approach was not common in medieval
political affairs all that much), rather than to get bogged down in unrestrained
military confrontation, tsar Ivan Assen II succeeded in attaining goals almost
as high as those achieved by Simeon the Great and tsar Samuel. His diplomatic
marriage with the daughter of the Hungarian king guaranteed the return of
Belgrade and Branichevo - territories in the central Danubian tableland which
had been detached from Bulgaria earlier on. Ivan Assen II also had the region of
Upper Thrace returned under a Treaty of alliance with the Latin empire.
In 1230 Bulgaria was raided by the troops of the Epims despotate. Its despot,
Theodore Comnenus, who regarded himself a legitimate heir to the Byzantine
emperor's throne, was defeated in a pitched battle near the village of
Klokotnitsa and was taken prisoner. The Bulgarian state occupied all his realms
and thus, once again, became an unrivaled power on the Balkans. Similar to the
situation back in the 10th century, its territory comprised almost the whole of
the Balkan Peninsula.
During the subsequent ten years of his rule, the Bulgarian tsar became famous
for his expert maneuvers among the rest of the political powers on the
peninsula, not allowing even one of them to dispute Bulgaria's hegemony. The
status quo was preserved until the tsar's death in 1241. Even in the last months
of his life Ivan Assen II managed to demonstrate the potentialities of Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian army crushed hordes of Tatars who had been invincible until that
time. It is worth reminding that the Tatars, obsessed with the Asian mania for
world hegemony, had already engulfed all state formations west of the Urals
including Russia, had defeated and unmanned Hungary and were then heading
towards Bulgaria in order to cover their flank - a prerequisite needed for their
planned invasion of Western Europe. But in 1241 the Bulgarians routed the Tatars
which took the edge off their intended aggression against Western Europe once
and for all. They remained a major political power for long centuries ahead but
their ambitions did, never again, stretch beyond the borders of Eastern Europe -
the lands reached thusfar.
The territorial expansion of the Bulgarian state within the boundaries of the
Bulgarian ethnos had created favorable conditions for its successful economic
and cultural development. From that time on, the Bulgarian economy took an
active part in the all- round exchanges with the economy of Western Europe. Ivan
Assen II signed many agreements with European political formations which helped
regulate their trade with the East. Fully restored in 1235, the Bulgarian
patriarchal became the only institution of the Eastern Orthodox religion to be
backed up by a well-established political power, bearing in mind the collapse of
Byzantium and Russia as it really was at that time. Thus, it gained enormous
authority with the whole of the East. The cultural exchanges initiated by the
intellectual circles in the bosom of the Bulgarian church became an example to
follow for the intellectuals of the East
Veliko Tarnovo Asenova krepost
Map of Bulgaria XII-XIII AD
