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Browning, Byzantium & Bulgaria[edit]

Browning, Robert. (1975). Byzantium and Bulgaria: A Comparative Study Across The Early Medieval Frontier. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02670-5. DF552.B7 B9

p. 15: "The Byzantine empire and Bulgaria in the ninth and tenth centuries did not resemble each other closely. If one undertakes a comparative study of them, it is not in order to distinguish the differences between two societies which appear to have advanced much the same distance along the same road, as one might compare say, Lübeck and Venice in the thirteenth century, Rome and Carthage in the third century B.C., or the Roman empire and Han China. The obvious counterpart to the middle Byzantine empire in such a comparison is the Abbasid Caliphate. An examination of their resemblances and their differences would be well worth undertaking. But it would be beyond the capacity of the present writer. And some of the essential preliminary researches are still unattempted [sic]."
p 15: "The first reason for examining Bulgaria and Byzantium together is their geographical proximity. At the period in question they divided the Balkan peninsula between them and had a long common frontier. What difference did it make to an individual or a community to be on this or that side of the long frontier?"
p 15: "As we introduce further historical considerations, fresh points of contrast emerge. The Byzantine empire was the direct continuation of the Roman empire of classical times, with a political and administrative tradition running back uninterrupted for many centuries. The Bulgarian Kingdom was a relatively new arrival on the political map of medieval Europe. As a newcomer, it had open options, and could within certain limits choose the role it was to play. For the Byzantines there was little choice."
p. 15: "Another way of looking at the matter is suggested by the fact that the territory of the Bulgarian Kingdom had all - with the exception of the Transdanubian area, which was soon lost - formed a part of the Roman empire until the age of the successors of Justinian, and was reabsorbed into the Byzantine empire again at the beginning of the eleventh century. Did the few centuries of separation from the great Mediterranean world state lead to irreversible chages in the structure and functioning of society in these lost provinces? The question is an interesting one, and the answer may throw light on some aspects of the history of western Europe, where the separation was a permanent one."
- PETER'S COMMENT: 1. I don't know which Transdanubia does the author refer to. Transdanubia as in modern day Western Hungary was never held by Bulgaria. Wallachia and Moldavia were a part of Bulgaria from some point in the seventh century - I don't know precisely when, but definitely before the traditional date of establishment of Danubian Bulgaria in 681. Modern day Eastern Hungary and Transylvania were added after 804 and the destruction of the Avar Khaganate. All of these territories were gradually lost between the beginning of the Magyar invasion at the end of the ninth century and the reign of Samuel in the late tenth century. 2. The Balkan hinterland was already separated from the Mediterranean world during the Slavic settlement of the Balkans. Byzantium didn't directly control the territory on which Bulgaria was established or any other parts of the Balkans except the coastlines, the part of Thrace closest to Constantinople and Via Militaris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_lands_across_the_Danube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire#/media/File:Byzantiumby650AD.svg - Peter
p. 16: "In medieval terms the Byzantine empire - like the Muslim caliphate - was an economically advanced state, a super-power. Bulgaria belonged to the underdeveloped world. ...There were striking differences. Some of the features of Bulgarian society recall the barbarian west rather than the Mediterranean lands of ancient culture. ...It was the reflection of Byzantine civilisation in Bulgaria which served in its turn as model for Serbia and, more important, for Kievan and later Muscovite Russia. Thus the relations between Byzantium and Bulgaria in the ninth and tenth centuries were of far more than local and contemporary significance. It was through them that certain lasing features of the Orthodox Slavonic world were formed, features which have had an effect upon the development of European history down to our own day."
pp 16-17: "Looked at from another point of view, the Kingdom of Bulgaria was another barbarian successor state, comparable to Merovingian Gaul, Visigothic Spain, or perhaps Anglo-Saxon England. Yet, quite apart from its later reabsorption into the empire, Bulgaria differed in a number of important respects from most of the western successor states. There was far less continuity than in Gaul or Spain, as witnessed by the fact that Slavonic and not Greek or Latin became the current speech of the people ad the language of the state and church. It may be that the most valid comparison is with Anglo-Saxon England. But the differences are many. Bulgaria was always a single, centralised state, not a group of principalities and ephemeral kingdoms. And Bulgaria was not remote from the ancient centre of the empire, like England, but right on its threshold, so that Bulgarian armies could again and again threaten Constantinople itself."
p 17: "There are thus a number of considerations which might make a comparative study of Bulgaria and Byzantium in the ninth and tenth centuries of more than narrow special interest. One is bound next to ask whether there is enough evidence to permit a valid comparison. There are certainly great gaps inn the evidence available to us. Neither for Byzantium nor, still less, for Bulgaria, have we the kind of detailed economic documentation that exists, for instance, for contemporary China of the late T'ang period. Can we say anything useful about such matters as taxation, trade, or distribution of wealth? In the present writer's view we can, by seeing which of a limited number of possible models fit the known facts."
pp 17-18: "The archaeologist can provide useful material for the historian in this field. But there are certain snags. Byzantine archaeology has traditionally tended to concern itself above all with churches and their decorations. This is not unexpected, as until recently most Byzantine archaeologists were by training art historians...In a few special cases there has bee complete and thorough excavation and recording of large inhabited areas...but much of the medieval material from these admirable excavations is still unpublished. Bulgarian archaeology is in may ways more highly developed. The Hungarian Kanitz and Czech Jireček provided reliable descriptions of ancient remains even before Bulgaria obtained its independence from the Ottoman empire. After independence patriotic feeling provided a stimulus to the investigation of the country's past. Another stimulus was provided by Russian interest in a country which had contributed so much to Russian civilisation and which lay on the direct route to the Bosphorus. The Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople carried out major excavations in a number of Bulgarian sites, and in particular at Aboba, which is generally identified with the ancient Bulgar capital of Pliska. The Czech scholar Karel Škorpil played an important part both in this work and in the training of Bulgarian archaeologists. In fact few Bulgarian ancient or medieval historians had not some archaeological training and experience."
p. 18: "The most important epigraphic monuments of the Bulgarian Kingdom have been edited in exemplary fashion by V. Beševliev. There is as yet no corpus of Byzantine inscriptions. However, there are some difficulties. The most important is that scarcely any site or monument form the early medieval period has so far been reliably dated. Thus all dates established by archaeological evidence must be regarded with some scepticism. And in particular the attribution of one monument to the late Roman period and of another to the Bulgarian period is often dependent on subjective considerations. We cannot yet distinguish with any sureness between the handiwork of provincial Roman architects of the age of Justinian and that of Bulgarians - or Byzantines - working for King Boris."
p. 18: "Another shortcoming of our evidence is that we see Bulgaria almost exclusively through Byzantine eyes. The period under study is covered by a series of Byzantine historians and chroniclers whose narratives survive - Theophanes the Confessor, George the Monk, Genesius, the Continuators of Theophanes - as well as by contemporary Byzantine official writings such as the legal enactments of Basil I and Leo VI and the treatises on foreign policy - De Administrando Imperio - and on palace ceremonies of Constantine VII Porphryogenitus, and by the letters and occasional compositions of several of the principal participants in the events - Photius, Arethas, Nicolaus Mysticus, Leo Choirosphaktes. From Bulgaria we have no historical narrative, no administrative texts, no personal documents, apart from some diplomatic correspondence of King Symeon in Greek. What survives in Old Slavonic is mainly translations or adaptations of religious works. But the prefaces to these often contain information on contemporary Bulgarian life. There is also a Bulgarian law code in Slavonic."
p. 19: "From western Europe we have odds and ends of minor observations on Bulgaria and the Bulgarians, and the very important but scrappy and disconnected Responsa of Pope Nicholas I to the queries addressed to him by King Boris shortly after his conversion. There is consequently a great deal that we do not know about Bulgaria. Apart from its rulers, few men or women emerge as credible, rounded personalities. The floodlight of history did not play on Bulgaria as it often did on Byzantium."
pp 21-24: the author goes on to give a bunch of exposition and background info on the development of Thrace (i.e. Bulgaria) during ancient times, with the increasing Greek/Hellenistic influence well before the Roman Empire conquered the region. Oddly enough he does not mention the conquests of Philip II, but he does mention the Kingdom of Macedonia by name as being the power that dominated the area before Rome. He also mentions the Illyrians to the west centered in Albania.
pp 23-24: Here he mentions the ethnic diversity in the Balkans during Roman times, including the "Goths, Basarnae (probably a Celtic-speaking people), Carpi, Sarmatians, Scythians, Alans (probably all Iranian speaking) and others being found among the Thracians or Illyrians."
pp. 24-25: stuff about Roman roads and garrisons, and how the Roman roads were used in the early medieval period as routes for migrating peoples, who held them and passed along them freely, although they had difficulties patrolling the areas between the roads.
pp 25-26: info on the Danube frontier and Roman garrison there.
pp 26-28: the barbarian invasions of the Balkans during the 4th and 5th centuries AD, including the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and of course the Huns.
pp 28-29: the Balkans are devastated by these invasions and Roman garrisons are no longer able to ensure peace, safety, security, or collective prosperity for the inhabitants of the region. Ostrogoths lay siege to Byzantine cities and destroy some of them before they are convinced to move to Italy by the Byzantine emperor (i.e. Theodoric attacking and replacing the usurper Odoacer in Rome).
p. 29: "In 493 the Bulgars, a Turkic people who had been useful allies of the empire in the reign of Zeno, and who had earlier probably formed part of the Hun confederation, crossed the Danube, advanced into Thrace and killed a Roman general in battle. This raid was followed by others by the Bulgars and by other peoples from north of the frontier. In 499 a Bulgar raiding force in Thrace destroyed two thirds of a Roman army of 15,000 which had been sent to halt them. In 502 Thrace was once more invaded, and great quantities of booty ad prisoners were taken across the Danube without any attempt at resistance by the field army; the frontier army was usually helpless once the frontier had been penetrated. It is significant of the new military situation in the second half of the fifth century that by 469 a new wall was built reaching from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara about forty miles from Constantinople, following the same line as the present-day Çatalca fortifications."
pp 29-30: "The capital was no longer protected by the new army on the Danube, and the territory between the Danube and the new Long Walls was regarded as expendable if the worst came to the worst. In the meantime the short-term danger represented by the Bulgars was evaded by the customary method of enrolling some of them as foederati in the Roman army and paying the others to make war on a people living to the east of them in Bessarabia or the nearby Ukraine, the Antae. Though the Antae may have owed much of their political organisation ad some of their ruling class to the Iranian Sarmatians, who had long lived north of the steppe zone in Eastern Europe, the testimony of contemporary witnesses and the evidence of personal names make it clear that actors now appear upon the Balkan scene who will play the principal part in subsequent events there. A brief digression on their previous history may therefore be appropriate."
p 30: "The Advent of the Slavs"; "The speakers of Slavonic had been settled in the area of the upper Vistula and middle Dnieper since the fourth millennium before our era. In this region, where forest and steppe mix, they slowly developed their peculiar culture. The use of bronze was gradually adopted during the second millennium by diffusion from their southern neighbours. They practised a mixture of stock-breeding and agriculture adapted to the conditions of their homeland...Their settlements were small, often on river terraces, their humble houses were often partly sunk in the ground for warmth in the long cold winter. From the beginning of the first millennium B.C. the Slavs were in contact with Iranian-speaking peoples of the steppe zone who may have exercised some kind of overlordship over them, first the Cimmerians, and later the Scythians. They are probably to be identified with the 'Scythian ploughmen' of whom Herodotus speaks (4.17). It was during the period of Scythian predominance, about the middle of the first millennium B.C. that the Slavs appear to have learnt the use of iron. After this long period of contact with Cimmerians and Scythians, to which are to be attributed a number of Iranian loanwords in common Slavonic, there followed a period during which the Slavs were subject to penetration and displacement by invaders."
- PETER'S COMMENT: 1. Placing Proto-Slavic in the fourth millennium before our era would make it as old as Proto-Indo-European from which it descended. Wikipedia gives this suggestion for the earliest Slavic-speaking culture: "According to Polish historian Gerard Labuda, the ethnogenesis of Slavic people is the Trzciniec culture[35] from about 1700 to 1200 BC." Since Proto-Slavic is unattested, it's more or less guesswork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Slavic - Peter
pp. 46-47: "The history of the Bulgars in this period is extremely obscure, the names of their leaders are badly transmitted in our scanty sources, and any reconstruction of the course of events is hypothetical. The mysterious Kuver, a high officer under the Avars who, with the aid of a body of Romans who had been settled for two generations north of the Danube and of some Slav tribes, rebelled against the Khagan, moved south into former Roman territory and gave siege to Thessalonika, has been thought by some to be a son of this Kubrat; his date is about the third quarter of the seventh century. The mention in the rock inscription at Madara, probably dating from the reign of Khan Tervel, of 'my uncle in Thessalonika' suggests that Kuver was indeed a Bulgarian and a son of Kubrat. If so, his establishment in former Roman territory overrun by the Slavs is a close parallel to what had happened in the north-east Balkans. It was there that Asparukh, according to tradition another son of Kubrat, ruled over the main body of the Bulgars just north of the Danube delta. Pressed by the growing power of the Khazars to the east, he and his people were forced to take refuge in an island in the delta. The emperor Constantine IV saw in this move a threat to the Black Sea coastal strip still held by the Byzantines, and perhaps to Thrace. A campaign was mounted, perhaps in concert with the Khazars, to oust the Bulgars from their refuge. The campaign was bungled, the emperor withdrew to Mesembria with gout, the army broke up in disorder, and the Bulgars were able to break out of the delta and establish themselves in eastern Moesia. A late source puts their numbers at 10,000 fighting men. There they subjected the Slav tribes of the area, obliging them to pay tribute and settling them on the frontiers of the territory which they controlled. The Byzantines were in no position to do anything about this new invader of what had been their territory. They may indeed have welcomed the Bulgars as a counterpoise to the Avars, much as Heraclius had welcomed the Croats and the Serbs. At any rate they came to terms with the Bulgars, and signed a treaty granting to Asparukh all the land between the Danube, the Balkan range and the sea, as well as an annual subsidy. This treaty, probably signed in 680, marks the first formal recognition by the Byzantine government of the existence of a foreign state on what had been imperial territory, but perhaps too much should not be made of this. It is likely that the organisation of the first European theme, that of Thrace, was a reaction to the new situation created by the arrival of the Bulgars in the Balkans."
p. 47: "The Bulgars seem to have inherited from their nomad past a complex and stable social and military hierarchy, recalling that of the Orkhon Turks at the same period. They were organized into tribes, and the hereditary chief of one of the tribes, that of Dulo, acted as leader of the whole confederacy. Under the leader or Khan were a number of ministers belonging to the tribal nobility bearing different titles and with more or less clearly defined responsibilities. There were two classes of nobles, though the precise distinction between them escapes us. The army was the whole Bulgar male population, presumably organised in tribal contingents, and supported by the forces of the Slav tribes which the Bulgars controlled and with whom they were very closely linked from the start. For their strong sense of ethnic unity did not prevent them mingling with the Slav communities, with whom in any case they must have been in contact since the early sixth century. It is possible to distinguish Slav and Bulgar sites from the Dark Ages. The Bulgars seem to have lived in round, yurt-like houses inherited from their steppe past, and to have inhumed their dead, while the Slavs lived in square, half-underground houses with a stove in one corner, and cremated their dead. Different types of pottery are associated with the two peoples. But we soon find evidence of mixed settlements; as none of these settlements can be dated with any certainty, too much importance should perhaps not be attached to this archaeological evidence, but it should not be altogether neglected."
pp. 47-48: "The Bulgars established their capital at Pliska, between the Danube and the Balkan chain, where the ruins of a late Roman city provided building material. There they built a complex of public buildings for the Khan and his court, surrounded by an earthwork perimeter wall within which the whole Bulgar people could probably find shelter. They no doubt used the forced labour of Byzantine captives and of the surviving Roman population, especially to construct the heavy stone buildings. The original Bulgar state was confined to a corner of the north-eastern Balkans, from the Danube to the Balkan chain, and from the Black Sea to the Avar frontier, which may have followed the line of Iskǔr. It is not known how much territory Asparukh controlled to the north of the Danube but it may have been quite extensive."
p. 48 "Asparukh's son and successor Tervel formed an alliance with the exiled Byzantine emperor Justinian II in 705 and helped to restore him to Constantinople. This was a gamble, but one which came off, and it increased the power and influence of the Bulgar state. Tervel was welcomed to Constantinople and given the rank of Caesar, a title which only recently had marked out it s bearer as heir apparent to the reigning emperor. It still implied a close relationship with the emperor: Tervel was no doubt baptised, but there was no wholesale conversion of his people. More important, Tervel was given the area of Zagoria, probably the region between the Balkan range and the Gulf of Burgas. But the coastal cities of Mesembria, Develtos, and Anchialos remained in Byzantine hands. So the situation remained throughout most of the eighth century. The iconoclast emperor Constantine V fought a series of campaigns against the Bulgars without dislodging them from their land, though he may have recaptured part of the territory ceded by Justinian II. In 784 the empress Irene was able to make a peaceful progress from the Byzantine naval base at Anchialos to Berrhoea (Stara Zagora), without provoking any hostile reaction from Bulgaria. In the west Bulgar expansion was firmly blocked by the Avars. But they did make tentative moves south-westwards, towards Macedonia, where Kuver had tried to establish himself in the previous century, and where the Slav population was relatively independent of Byzantien and Avar power alike. In 789 a Byzantine general was killed by the Bulgars while reconnoitring [sic] disputed territory in the Struma valley. However, in the early years of the ninth century two events took place which transformed the situation of the Bulgar state. The crushing defeat of the Avars in Pannonia in 796 by Charlemagne's son Pippin led to the speedy disintegration of the Avar state, and opened the way to westward expansion for the Bulgars. And the old royal house of Dulo was replaced, we do not know exactly how, by a new dynasty, that of the Pannonian Bulgars, who had revolted against their Avar lords after 796. The new ruler Krum, succeeded Khan Kardam in 802 or 803."
p. 49: "The immediate effect of the collapse of Avar power was the extension of Bulgarian territory far to the west, as far as the Theiss, where it marched with the land of the Franks. Most of this new territory was inhabited principally by Slavs, over some of whom the Pannonian Bulgars had established overlordship. Frightened by this increase in Bulgarian power, and perhaps hoping by a show of strength to divert Bulgaria westwards, the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus set out in 807 to invade Bulgaria. A further motive for the Byzantine resumption of hostilities was probably fear of Bulgar influence on the Slav populations of peninsular Greece and Macedonia. There had recently been a revolt by some of the Slav tribes of the Peloponnese which had been put down with great severity. However Nicephorus got no further than Adrianople before he had to return to the capital to deal with a plot against him. Krum, whether he had harboured aggressive intentions previously or not, realised that he had better strike first. Rather than throw himself against the ring of fortresses protecting eastern Thrace, he moved against Macedonia, where he could probably count on the support of much of the Slav population. In 808 he swept down the Struma valley, defeated a Byzantine army, and took 1,100 pounds of gold intended as army pay. But the way to Macedonia was blocked by a series of Byzantine strong points in western Thrace, of which Serdica was the principal. In 809 Krum captured Serdica, killed its garrison of 6000 and demolished its walls. As yet the Bulgars were not interested in holding fortified positions themselves. Nicephorus' reaction was to march through the mountains and sack and burn Krum's capital of Pliska in the autumn of the same year. The main theatre of operations was transferred to Thrace. In 811 Nicephorus again captured Pliska, destroying the royal palace, which was probably of wood, and making a display of barbarity - we hear of Bulgarian babies being thrown into threshing machines. Krum apparently made overtures for peace, but Nicephorus was obdurate in the euphoria of victory."
pp. 49-50: "However, the Bulgarian army had not been destroyed. As Nicephorus and the Byzantines, laden with booty, wound their way through the mountains on their return journey they were caught in an ambush and the whole army, with its commander, perished. It was the first time for nearly six hundred years that a Roman emperor had been killed in battle. The Byzantines had not only lost their best fighting men, they were utterly demoralised and could not understand what had gone wrong. The Bulgars did not waste time. Krum attacked the key Byzantine cities around the Gulf of Burgas. Develtos was taken, the inhabitants of Anchialus fled. Panic spread into Thrace, where there was wholesale flight from the fortress city of Philippopolis. Krum, anxious not to overstretch his resources, proposed peace. It is interesting to note that his envoy, Dargomer, bore a Slavonic name. The emperor asked for the restoration of the status quo ante bellum. Krum pressed on, and by autumn 812 had taken Mesembria, the major port on the west coast of the Black Sea, with magnificent natural and artificial defences. He did not remain there, but dismantled the walls and retired to Pliska for the winter. In the next year he defeated the main Byzantine field army, and by July was at the walls of Constantinople. Though the Bulgars had made great progress in siegecraft, they were unable to tackle the superb fortifications constructed by Theodosius II four centuries earlier. And as they had no fleet, they could not hope to starve the city to surrender. Nevertheless Krum maintained the siege for nearly two years. It may be that he did not realise the impasse into which he had got himself. But it is possible that he hoped to profit by a coup d'état within the beleaguered city which would bring to power an emperor willing to make concessions to the Bulgars. He seems to have been well aware of the disaffection of some units of the army, and may have had contacts within the walls. What is clear is that he had no intention of taking over Constantinople. There were abortive negotiations, ending in an attempt by the Byzantines to assassinate Krum. More important, while the Khan besieged Constantinople, his generals were mopping up the remaining Byzantine cities of Thrace. Adrianople surrendered in autumn 813, Arcadiopolis (Lüle Burgaz) in the ensuing winter. How events might have turned out we shall never know, for Krum died suddenly in April 814 while preparing a new attack on Constantinople, and the Bulgarian army withdrew."
pp. 50-51: "Krum was succeeded by his son, Omurtag, but apparently only after quelling a revolt of the old Bulgar nobility. The details escape us. It is this which explains Omurtag's failure to press home the favourable military position established by his father. In the winter of 815-16 he concluded a treaty with the emperor Leo, valid for thirty years, which arranged the exchange of prisoners—in particular those taken from the Thracian cities and transported to Bulgaria —and fixed the frontier, which was more or less that determined by Justinian II and Tervel a century earlier. Incidentally this treaty is hardly mentioned by the Byzantine historians and chroniclers, but is imperfectly preserved on a stele which probably stood originally in the palace at Pliska, and is now in the Archaeological Museum in Sofia."
p. 51: "In the main the Thirty Years Peace was maintained. The Bulgars did not seek to expand into eastern Thrace, which would inevitably bring them up against the problem of the capital and its impregnable fortifications. They dug a great ditch and rampart along the frontier from Develtos to the Maritsa near Simeonovgrad, which they kept permanently manned. The cities which Krum had taken from the Byzantines—Serdica, Philippopolis Develtos, Anchialos etc.— were left deserted, in a kind of no-man's-land. Only Mesembria and Adrianople were rebuilt by the emperor. Presumably this reflects a lost clause of the treaty. In the meantime the Bulgars directed their attention westward, into territory not covered by the treaty, and to building a great new royal residence at Preslav in the years following 821. Omurtag concerned himself principally with the northern part of his kingdom, which lay north of the Danube, and with his relations with the Franks. In his reign, a modern Bulgarian historian has written, Bulgaria became one of the Great Powers of Europe. Omurtag's successor, his youngest son Malamir, took up hostilities against the empire, provoked by a Byzantine plan to sail up the Danube and remove a community of Greek prisoners settled north of the river. In 836 he annexed the unfortified city of Serdica and put in a Bulgarian garrison. He was clearly establishing himself on the road to Macedonia. On the termination of the Thirty Years Peace he sent troops into the Struma valley at the time when the Byzantines were hampered by a revolt by the Slavs of the Peloponnese. There seems to have been a large-scale westward expansion into the largely ungoverned country of northern Macedonia, which led to a war with Serbia in 839-42, but the details are inaccessible to us. In Thrace itself Philippopoli and Philippi were annexed by the Bulgars, and the surrounding Slav populations absorbed into the Bulgarian state. There seems to have been a truce which probably granted to the Buglars the right to expand into Macedonia, an expansion which the Byzantines could not in any case hinder. Khan Malamir died in 852 and was succeeded by his nephew Boris, the son of his elder brother. With the accession of Boris beings the century which forms the subject of the present comparative study. Before closing this historical introduction, we must glance again at the situation in the southern part of the Balkans, peninsular Greece."
pp. 51-52: "In he seventh century the Byzantines were in no position to devote attention to Greece, which lay off the main lines of communication of the empire. We hear of Sklavinia in various parts. The effective range of Byzantine control was confined to a zone in central Greece around Thebes, Athens and Corinth, and to a series of ports with their immediate hinterland—Thessalonika, Nauplia, Monemvasia, Patras. The islands of the Aegean and the Ionian islands also remained firmly in Byzantine hands, at any rate until the loss of Crete to the Arabs in about 826. Areas outside Byzantine control were not necessarily inhabited entirely by Slavs, as has been remarked. The Slav communities in Greece neither established a political unity of their own nor had one superimposed upon them from outside, as happened to those of the northern Balkans under the Avars and Bulgars. They lived in tribal units, each governed by its council, and forming ephemeral alliances among themselves for particular purposes. Within this tribal society the beginnings of a military aristocracy were forming, and this new ruling class was often strongly attracted by the prestige of the Greek way of life. Even for the ordinary tribesmen, contact with Greeks must often have been close. The needs of trade brought Slav peasants to the Greek cities and Greek merchants to the Slav villages. And there were certainly Greek peasant communities surviving in various parts of Greece out of the reach of Byzantine state power. So a gradual process of Hellenisation and naturally of Christianisation, whose steps we cannot trace, began early and continued uninterrupted. Byzantine society was not racist. A Slav who spoke Greek and was an orthodox Christian found few doors closed to him."
p. 53: "By the middle of the ninth century, then, the Slavs of peninsular Greece and southern Macedonia ha formed no political society of their own, and were well on the way to absorption into the life of the Byzantine world, which soon led to loss of their national identity and their language, except for a small pocket in the mountains of the southern Peloponnese. In the northern Balkans the situation was very different. There the Slav settlers had been united under the power of the Bulgar state, a state in which from the beginning the Slavs had played a major role, and in which by the middle of the ninth century the fusion of the Bulgar and Slav ruling groups had made considerable progress; the Bulgars had partly forgotten their original Turkic language and had adopted that of their Slav fellow-citizens. It is probably more than accidental that the line dividing the two regions of the Balkan peninsula coincides closely with that marking the northern limit of the cultivation of the olive. It is a line which separates two very different styles of life, the Mediterranean and the central European."

Cameron, the Byzantines[edit]

Cameron, Averil. (2006). The Byzantines. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-20262-2.

p. 35: "The Bulgars were originally a Turkic people who had appeared in the Byzantine sphere in the seventh century; they merged with the existing Slav population from the late seventh century, and established the 'First Bulgarian Empire' with its capital at Pliska, west of Varna in modern Bulgaria, using Greek for its early inscriptions. The Bulgars were a major threat to Byzantium in this period, especially under Krum and Symeon, although by the 860s Bulgaria had been Christianised, and by the later ninth century disciples of the Byzantine missionaries, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, introduced the Slavonic alphabet for the translation of the Bible and for liturgical use; Byzantine influence in Bulgaria was now strong, and by the early tenth century the capital had moved to Preslav. The Byzantines also had to deal with the Rus', Vikings who came south from Scandinavia and besieged Constantinople in 860, an event memorably described by the Patriarch Photius. The Rus' established their capital at Kiev and in settling mingled with the existing Slav population. By the tenth century formal trade agreements between Byzantium and Rus' allowed Russian merchants to visit Constantinople every year selling furs, wax and honey. This was a world transformed from that of late antiquity."
p. 38: "Constantine VII's successors Nikephoros II Phokas (963-69) and John Tzimiskes (969-76) (who staged a coup and murdered Nikephoros, after helping hi to seize the throne) energetically pursued the recovery against the Arabs, regaining Crete, Cyprus, Tarsos, Mopsuestia, Antioch and Aleppo; the advance was continued by Basil II (979-1025), who invaded Syria in 999."
p. 38: "Basil II also adopted a successful offensive strategy against Bulgaria, and has been known traditionally as 'the Bulgar-slayer', although the legend that this title conveys was a creation only of the later twelfth century. Basil's campaign against the Bulgarians under Tsar Samuel began with defeat in 986, but in 1014 he won a great victory, after which he is said to have blinded 14,000 captives. The territory ruled by Samuel was reorganised into two Byzantine themes, Paristrion and Bulgaria, and direct Byzantine rule imposed. Basil died in 1025, and had never married. He had carried forward a great expansion of Byzantine influence that had begun in the second half of the ninth century and gathered pace in the tenth. As well as reclaiming Bulgaria for Byzantium, Basil also successfully campaigned in the north and the east, and by the time of his death the empire stretched from Italy to Mesopotamia, and included the whole of Anatolia; in the north its border was the Danube, recalling the territorial extent of the high Roman Empire."

Chary, History of Bulgaria[edit]

Chary, Frederick B. (2011). The History of Bulgaria. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-0-313-38446-2. DR67.C64 2011

Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria[edit]

Crampton, R. J. (2005) [1997]. A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN-13 978-0-521-85085-8. DR67.C72 2005

NOTE: if it seems as though the page numbers jump several at a time or include many of them at once, that's because paragraphs are being stretched over intermediary pages with photos, graphs, maps, and other pictures.

Chapter 1: the Bulgarian lands from prehistory to the arrival of the Bulgarians[edit]

p. 1: "The lands which now constitute the state of Bulgaria were amongst the first in Europe to witness the emergence of organised, social life. Settlements existed in these lands as early as the middle palaeolithic period, from c. 100,000 to 40,000 BC. In neolithic times the population gradually forsook their caves for the plains where they began to work the land. by the third millennium BC they were cultivating non-food crops such as flax and had become adept at metal-working. In the sixth millennium BC an unknown people were producing objects of great originality and which experts consider to be the products of a spontaneously generated rather than an imported culture. This culture, in which the chief object of veneration appears to have been the mother goddess, reached its zenith in the fourth millennium BC.
pp. 1-3: "By the end of the third millennium BC the lands to the east of the Morava-Vardar valleys were falling under the cultural influence of the Thracians. An Indo-European people, the Thracians lived in a loosely organised tribal society. They were masters of metalworking, particularly with silver and gold. Many spectacular hoards have been unearthed in present-day Bulgaria at sites such as Panagiurishte, Velchitrun and Vratsa, and many more remain to be excavated. In addition to a high level of proficiency in metalworking the Thracians were renowned for their horsemanship. Music too was an essential feature of Thracian culture for Orpheus himself was an early Thracian king who managed to unite the disparate tribes of Thrace and Macedonia for a short period. This was a considerable feat in that the Thracians showed little disposition towards political cohesion and cooperation, Herodotus once noting that if the Thracians could only unite and subordinate themselves to one leader they would be invincible. As is so often the case in the Balkans, it was external pressures rather than internal inclinations which brought about political unity."
pp. 3-4: "These pressures came from the Greeks who established mercantile centres and colonies along the Black Sea coast. The Greeks held the Thracians in low esteem, unjustifiably so because not only were the Thracians their equal in crafts and horsemanship, they also began minting coins at much the same time as their haughty southern neighbors. The Persian invasions of the Balkans in the sixth and fifth centuries BC were a much more serious threat than Greek cultural arrogance. This external danger brought about the Odryssian [sic] kingdom which united the Thracian tribes of the central Balkans."
p. 4: "The Persian storm was weathered but in the fourth century BC another threat appeared, this time from within the Balkan peninsula. The powerful new Macedonian state soon clashed with the Thracians. The latters' cultural achievements continued but they suffered chronic political weakness; they accepted Macedonian domination, and Thracian archers and horsemen formed a significant proportion of the army which Alexander the Great took to the frontiers of India. After the disappearance of the Macedonian danger came one much more ominous."
p. 4: "Landing first in the west of the Balkans to suppress pirates in the third century BC, the Romans spread inexorably inland. by the first century AD the entire peninsula south of the Danube was under their control. For a while they allowed a truncated Thracian kingdom to continue as a client state but eventually that too disappeared. The Thracian language survived in remote areas until the fifth century AD and their worship of the horse was continued by later inhabitants of the area; and some scholars still see the 'mummers' found in parts of the south-west of present-day Bulgaria as a relict [sic] of Thracian culture."
p. 4: "Roman rule was characteristically efficient and strict, giving the Balkan peninsula a unity and stability enjoyed neither before nor since. Under Roman law and the firm grip of the legions the provinces of Moesia, the area between the Balkan mountains and the Danube, and Thrace, from the Balkans to the Aegean, prospered. The new system of roads bound the Balkans together on both a north-south and an east-west axis. At the crossroad of important diagonal routes across the peninsula was to be found the city of Serdica, the site on which Sofia now stands. Other cities flourished, nowt least Trimontium, now Plovdiv, whose magnificent Roman theatre was discovered only in the 1970s when a new road was being built."
pp. 4-5: "With Roman rule, eventually, came Christianity and when the empire was divided in 395 Moesia and Thrace became part of the eastern empire focused on Constantinople (Byzantium). For the next millennium and a half the city was to play a hugely important role in the history of the Bulgarian lands."
pp. 5-8: "By the fourth century Roman power was weakening. Internal problems were compounded when tribes from the Asiatic steppes raided the north-east of the Balkans. In the following century ultimately fatal damage was inflicted on the Roman body politic by a series of such invaders who included the Alani, the Goths and the Huns, all of whom were enticed by the prospect of looting the fabled wealth of Byzantium. They failed in that aspiration and soon moved out of the Balkans in search of fresh plunder, but if these invaders were transient, the Slavs who also first appeared in the fifth century were not. They were settlers. They colonised areas of the eastern Balkans and in the seventh century other Slav tribes combined with the proto-Bulgars, a group of Turkic origin, to launch a fresh assault into the Balkans. The Proto-Bulgars originated in the area between the Urals and the Volga and were a pot-pourri of various ethnic elements, the word Bulgar being derived from a Turkic verb meaning 'to mix'. What differentiated the Proto-Bulgars from the Slavs was that they had, in addition to a formidable military reputation, a highly developed sense of political cohesion and organisation. In 680 their leader, Khan Asparukh, led an army across the Danube and in the following year established his capital at Pliska near what is now Shumen. A Bulgarian state had appeared in the Balkans."

Chapter 2: Medieval Bulgaria, 681-1393[edit]

p. 9 "Two main problems confronted the new Bulgarian state at the end of the seventh century: the need to establish clearly defined and secure borders; and the need to weld together the two main human components of the state, the Proto-Bulgarian conquerors and the conquered Slavs. The second of these two problems was eventually to be resolved, but the first was seldom out of consideration for more than a few years; this problem was to be a persistent feature of Bulgarian states, modern as well as mediaeval [sic]."
p. 9: "The new state commanded a powerful position. From Pliska it could control the north-south routes through the eastern passes of the Balkan mountains and along the narrow lowland coastal strip. In the north, however, its extensive territories beyond the Danube inevitably led it into conflict with both the tribal groups milling around in the plains to the north-east, and with the succession of states which were established on the north-west borders. For the leaders of mediaeval [sic] Bulgaria, however, the most persistent and pressing problem was defining Bulgaria's relations with the great power to the south. The first mediaeval [sic] Bulgarian state was to be destroyed by Byzantium; the second was to fall to Byzantium's successor, the Ottoman Empire."
pp. 9-10: "After its foundation in 681 the new state enjoyed almost a century of growth. Initial tensions with Byzantium were contained and regulated in a treaty of 716 which awarded northern Thrace to Bulgaria and was unusual in the mediaeval era in that it contained purely economic clauses. Immediately after the treaty the Bulgarian state assisted Byzantium in the latter's conflict with the Arabs in Asia Minor. By the middle of the eighth century part of the Morava valley had been added to Bulgaria which then included much of what is now southern Romania and parts of present-day Ukraine."
p. 10: "By this time the Black Sea was a virtual Byzantine lake, and in this sector it went virtually unchallenged by Bulgaria because Bulgaria never developed a sizeable [sic] sea-going force. Even if the strategic need for such a force had been recognised it is doubtful if anything effective could have been done to act upon that need; the Bulgarian state had a relatively low technological base and the degree of planning and coordination needed to produce a navy would have been difficult to achieve in an economy which did not even mint its own coins, preferring instead to rely on Byzantine currency."
p. 10: "The lack of a navy ruled out expansion along the Black Sea coast either to the north or the south, just as the chaos of the steppe area made impossible any territorial gains to the north-east; the natural direction of movement for the Bulgarian state was therefore to the north-west and the south-west. In the north-west the collapse of the Avar kingdom created a vacuum into which Bulgaria's rulers gladly advanced, this taking their frontier up to the river Tisza; Transylvania too became part of Bulgaria. Expansion to the south and south-west was not so easy. Some of Macedonia had been taken late in the eighth century but only at the cost of losing part of Bulgaria's possessions in Thrace. Khan Krum (803-14) determined to remedy this. In 811 he took the recently fortified Sredets (now Sofia) from the Byzantines, went on to seize Nesebûr on the Black Sea coast, and then marched as far as the walls of Byzantium itself. This was a characteristically vicious war in which, in 811, the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus became the first of his rank for almost five hundred years to lose his life on the battlefield; Krum encrusted his deceased enemy's skull in silver and used it as a drinking goblet."
pp. 10-11: "In 814 his successor, Khan Omurtag (814-31) concluded a peace which gave Bulgaria some territory in the Tundja valley, and later in his reign he was able to add Belgrade (Singidunum) and its surrounding district to his kingdom. In the second quarter of the ninth century Bulgaria, taking advantage of Byzantium's preoccupations with the iconoclast controversy and with threats to its power in Asia Minor, expanded into Macedonia, a predominantly Slav area which welcomed this alternative to Greek, Byzantine domination. By the middle of the century Ohrid and Prespa were incorporated into Bulgaria as was much of southern Albania; Byzantine power in Europe was now confined to western Albania, Greece, the southern Vardar valley and Thrace."
p. 11: "Omurtag, however, was not merely a warrior. He continued Krum's work in introducing a proper legal system into Bulgaria and he was an avid builder, his most notable achievement in his regard being the reconstruction of Pliska after the city ahd been burnt in 811. There are more extant inscriptions to Omurtag than to any other mediaeval Bulgarian ruler."
p. 11: "The celebration of Omurtag is perhaps surprising in view of the achievements of Boris I who in three and a half decades of power was to impose huge and portentous changes on his realm and its inhabitants."
p. 11: "Boris was no less a warrior than his famous predecessors but his most important act was to impose Christianity upon Bulgaria. He did this in part to escape immediate military embarrassments and in particular to relieve pressure from the Byzantine armies, but there were also other long-standing causes, both domestic and external, for his decision."
pp. 11-13: "In the first place, almost the entire civilised world was by now Christian [sic!!!], with only distant tribes such as the Letts and the Finns outside the Christian community; if Bulgaria were to be accepted as an equal amongst the powerful states of Europe, east and west, it would have to become part of their cultural and religious community. Even more importantly, conversion, it could reasonably be hoped, would help bridge the gap between the two main ethnic groups in Bulgaria, the Proto-Bulgarians and the Slavs. This gap still existed although the languages had merged into a Slavo-Bulgarian in which the Slav tongue of the conquered masses predominated."
p. 13: "Christianity had taken root in the Balkans during the later period of the Roman empire, and when they entered the area and colonised it the Slavs to a large degree adopted the Christian religion of those whom they had subdued. This was much less true of the Proto-Bulgarians, especially the nobility and the rulers, who for decades remained steadfastly pagan. It was not that its Christian Slav subjects had presented any threat to the Bulgarian state. On the contrary they had provided the bulk of the armies which fought against Christian Byzantium, and they continued to guard the passes through the Balkan mountains, this being a vital service because if Byzantine forces had penetrated the Balkan range they could have strangled a Bulgarian state based on Pliska. The problem was potential rather than actual; the difference between the Christian and pagan could provide a dividing line which might be exploited by an external enemy, and which might deepen dangerously in times of internal difficulty. This problem had been compounded by the wars of expansion waged during the eighth and ninth centuries. The acquisition of territory south of the Balkans and in Macedonia had greatly increased the number of Slavs and Christians within the state, thus making the Proto-Bulgarians quite obviously a minority. Also the wars, especially under Krum, had brought into Bulgaria thousands of prisoners of war, most of whom were Christians. Given the slavery and misery into which most of these unfortunates were plunged they had little alternative but to take refuge in whatever consolations their faith could offer them. This set an impressive example to many of their captors. Omurtag was not one of them; he continued to persecute the Christians, primarily in order to preserve the faith of his predecessors, but he was fighting a losing battle. Christianity continued to spread and reached even his own family, with one of his sons taking the new faith."
pp. 13-14: "Omurtag had attempted to centralise the Bulgarian state, increasing the power of the ruler and diminishing that of the overwhelming Proto-Bulgarian boyars or nobility. Meanwhile, Byzantine Christianity was associated with a centralised, autocratic state. This truth was not lost on Boris and was one of the factors leading him to his decision in 864 to accept Christianity for himself and for all his subjects. A number of nobles reacted violently, stressing the decentralised traditions which were associated with paganism. Fifty-two of them were executed."
p. 14: "The conversion did not bring entirely satisfactory results for Boris. Bulgaria was made part of the Byzantine church and was denied the right to have its own, Bulgarian, patriarch or to appoint its own bishops. This strengthened existing fears in Bulgaria that, because in the empire the church would become an arm of the Byzantine state and would be used to interfere in the internal affairs of Bulgaria. Fears of potential subversion via the Byzantine church led Boris to ask if Byzantium's religious rival, Rome, would offer better terms. Emissaries were dispatched to enquire whether the pope would allow Boris to nominate the Bulgarian bishops and appoint a Bulgarian patriarch. At the same time, Boris requested clarification of certain points of doctrine and religious regimen: could, he asked, the Bulgarian tradition of the ruler eating alone with his wife and followers relegated to separate, lower tables, continue? On what days was it permitted to hunt? And could sexual intercourse be allowed on Sundays? The answers to these specific questions, including the latter, were comfortingly indulgent, but on the critical political issue of the appointment of a patriarch and of subordinate bishops, they were not. Rome was as adamant as Byzantium in its refusal to allow the nomination of bishops by the secular power; nor would Rome permit the Bulgarians to have their own patriarch, though the pope did consent to their having an archbishop, who would, however, be nominated by the pope. These terms were no better than those offered by the emperor in Byzantium and Boris therefore remained with the devil he knew. In 870 a council regulated the organisation of the church in Bulgaria which was to be headed by an archbishop chosen by and dependent upon the patriarch in Constantinople."
pp. 14-15: "The conversion caused other difficulties. The masses needed to be educated in their new faith, and though the Greeks sent missionaries to accomplish this task, they were too few in number. Furthermore, Slav and Proto-Bulgarian alike had been accustomed for the last two centuries to regard the Greeks as cunning but implacable enemies and therefore treated their new instructors with some suspicion. Nor did the indigenous population take kindly to the fact that the vast majority of the new clergy, especially its upper echelons, were Greek. With so many of the locals suspicious and/or ignorant of the new doctrines they were required to profess, it was hardly surprising that heresies rapidly gained a strong foothold in the Bulgarian lands. Some of them were to play a formative part in the later history of these lands. Nevertheless, despite these problems the conversion to Christianity was a watershed in the history of Bulgaria. Despite the many difficulties which it created it did facilitate the merging of the two constituent elements in the population. The Slavs could now more readily accept the state because it was Christian, and the Proto-Bulgarians had nothing to fear from Christianity because it was no longer divorced from the state and because it was no longer predominantly Slav or Greek. Thanks largely to the conversion, by the tenth century there were 'Bulgarians' as opposed to Slav and Proto-Bulgarian subjects of the Bulgarian state."
p. 15: "In the development which was parallel to the conversion in time and its equal in importance, an alphabet for use in the Slavonic languages, emerged in the mid to late ninth century. The origin of this development is thought to be a request in 862 from the ruler of Moravia for an alphabet for use amongst his own people so that the influence of the Franks and Germans could be contained. Little is known of the origins of the Cyrillic alphabet, and what is known is extremely contentious, but its creation is generally acknowledged to be the work of two Salonika-born monks, Cyril and Methodius."
pp. 15-16: "The introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet was of enormous importance. More than any other development it prevented the absorption of the Bulgarians by the Greeks to their south or the Franks to their west. It enabled the Bulgarians to create their own literature. And this they did with great rapidity. Kliment of Ohrid (Kliment Ohridski), who died in 896, and after whom Sofia university is named, established a thriving school of learning which embraced theological and many other studies and which attracted over three thousand students in its first seven years. The new alphabet also facilitated the production of important secular texts such as a legal code, Zakon Sudnii Liudim; and without an alphabet it is difficult to imagine how the Bulgarian state could have carried out administration in the Slavo-Bulgarian language. Above all, however, the new alphabet enabled the Bulgarian church to use Slavo-Bulgarian as he new language of the liturgy,a nd had it not been able to do this it would have been impossible for the Bulgarian church to escape total Greek domination."
p. 16: "That Slavo-Bulgarian, or as we shall call it henceforth, Bulgarian, should become the language of the state and the Bulgarian church was decreed by an assembly of notables in 893."
p. 16: "The assembly which decreed that Bulgarian should be the language of the state and the church, also accepted as ruler Simeon, who had come to power by a palace coup. In that he was not exceptional in the history of mediaeval Bulgaria, but he was the only monarch in those centuries to be accorded the epithet 'the Great'."
p. 16: "Simeon, who was brought up in Constantinople, originally intended to pursue a religious life and had been tipped as a prime candidate for the leadership of the church in Bulgaria. Despite his association with Constantinople Simeon spent much of the early part of his reign at war with the empire and with his other neighbours. He extended the boundaries of Bulgaria westwards to the Adriatic, south to the Aegean and north-westwards to incorporate most of modern Serbia and Montenegro. Twice he led his armies to the walls of Constantinople itself; on the second occasion he was forced to raise his siege only because of pressure from the Magyars in the north, where in fact Simeon witnessed the loss of almost all Bulgarian territory beyond the Danube. In 896 he concluded a peace with the empire which agreed to accept the independence of the Bulgarian church. Thirty years later, at the end of further wars, a second treaty confirmed this and recognised Simeon as basileus, that is, king or tsar; the only other monarch to whom Constantinople extended such recognition was the Holy Roman Emperor."
pp. 16-17: "Simeon made a further significant change when he moved the Bulgarian capital from Pliska to the nearby Preslav. In the new capital the pagan tradition would be less strong. Preslav saw Bulgarian art and literature flower with unprecedented brilliance, Simeon having for long surrounded himself with men of letters such as the Monk Hrabr, John the Exarch ad Konstantin of Preslav."
p. 17: "That flowering of literature was helped by the twenty years of peace and prosperity which followed the treaty of 896 with Constantinople. The prosperity of those golden years was based to a considerable degree on the close and healthy commercial relations with the empire, though trading links with Venetia and the west were also developing. The good times could not last long, however, and the final years of Simeon's reign were again clouded by war, primarily against Constantinople."
p. 17: "Simoen died in 927 having nominated his son, Petûr, as his successor. Petûr's reign waas of exception duration—he remained king until 970—but these were years of decline for Bulgaria. As usual, there were wars to be fought, though these were now defensive rather than expansionist, the chief threat being the Magyars in the north. There were also continuing clashes with the imperial power to the south. This almost constant warfare inevitably weakened the state."
p. 17: "There were also important internal explanations for the decline of Bulgarian power. Throughout the country there had been if not the exception then at least the hope that the new reign would bring about a return to the golden days of peace. This illusion was shattered by the Magyar invasions. The disappointed nobility dreamed of a return to the old days, whilst the increasingly Byzantified court harboured is [sic] own solutions. The church, meanwhile, fell to corruption and self-enrichment."
p. 17: "The latter development had a profound effect amongst the silent masses of the population. The tenth century saw a steady increase in the economic and social power of the landowner, partly because the central authority of the state was not as great as it had been under Boris and Simeon. One landowner whose property had been greatly extended was the church. Whilst the few grew rich, times became ever harder for the poor. Inevitably alienation set in."
pp. 17-18: "Since the conversion to Christianity many Bulgarians had been left insufficiently educated in and therefore insecurely committed to their new church. It was no longer possible to revert to paganism, even if that had been desired, but this did not mean that unquestioning obedience had to be given to the official church: if the alienated could not revert to paganism they could at least escape into heresy. Heresy had entered Bulgaria with Christianity itself. First among the unofficial doctrines to arrive were those brought by Syrians and Armenians, and very soon hermitism became popular amongst the religiously committed; Bulgaria's national saint, Ivan Rilski (John of Rila), was a hermit who was born between 876 and 880 and died in 947. Hermitism obviously indicated a willingness to withdraw from the world and its problems, and this sense of 'internal migration' or dissociation from the temporal world was further encoruaged by the greatest and most lasting of the heresies to enter Bulgaria: bogomilism."
pp. 18-19: "The bogomils argued that the entire visible world, including mankind, was the creation of Satan; only the human soul was created by God who sent his son, Christ, to show humanity the way to salvation. The bogomils believed the gratification of all bodily pleasures to be an expression of the diabolical side of creation, and therefore they preached a formidable asceticism which enjoined poverty, celibacy, temperance, and vegetarianism. The few peripatetic 'Holy Ones' who lived up to these exacting precepts were greatly respected by the general body of the population, who were painfully aware of the contrast between these 'Holy Ones' and the official clergy. The bogomils also questioned the social order by preaching that man should live in communities where property was shared and individual ownership unknown, and in which all men would be levelled [sic] by an equal participation in agricultural labour. The bogomils had no formal priesthood, though each district or area had a dyado or elder (literally a 'grandfather'), and there were loose links between different regions."
p. 19: He drones on forever about the Bogomils (not relevant for our channel so I'll skip this part).
p. 19: "The end of the tenth century saw the first Bulgarian kingdom decline rapidly to a tragic end. Wars continued with lashes with Kievan Rus in the north and, inevitably, resumed conflict with Constantinople in the south. In 971 Preslav was taken as the empire conquered much of eastern Bulgaria. The Bulgaria of Krum, Boris, and Simeon was finished. The capital moved between a number of of western centres before settling in Ohrid. Byzantine influence had always been less noticeable in the western section of the Bulgarian kingdom and by the mid-980s there was resurgence with the Bulgarians retaking much of the territory they had lost south of the Danube."
p. 20: "Under the leadership of Tsar Samuil (997-1014) Bulgaria expanded further into present-day Albania and Montenegro, but it was a false dawn. Bulgarian successes had come about primarily because Constantinople was again preoccupied with the Arab threat to its possessions in Asia Minor. A military victory in 1001 freed Constantinople of this concern and the emperor, Basil II, could turn his full attention to the Bulgarian problem; is efforts in this direction were to earn him the grim title, 'the Bulgar-slayer'."
p. 20: "The end of the first Bulgarian state came when the Bulgarian and imperial armies met in Macedonia in 1004. On the slopes of Mount Belassitsa fifteen thousand Bulgarian troops were captured. Legend has it that ninety-nine out of every hundred were blinded; the remainder were left with one eye to guide their comrades back to their leader who died three days after seeing his stricken soldiers. Many centuries later nationalist enthusiasms and passions were to be fired by this story. Whether it were true or false, there was no doubting the fact that four years after the battle the Bulgarian state collapsed and the country was incorporated into the Byzantine empire."
p. 21: "The first Bulgarian empire had achieved much. It had created a Bulgarian nation from the Proto-Bulgarians and the Slavs. As in the merging of the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons to produce the English, the process was neither easy nor rapid, yet by the beginning of the eleventh century there was a nation, a state, a language, a literature and a church, all of which were clearly Bulgarian. But the kingdom, despite the brilliance of a few of its rulers, also suffered grave weaknesses. The introduction of Christianity and the consolidation of boyar power which followed soon afterwards, required Bulgaria to undergo a fundamental reordering of its values and beliefs, and to adapt o far-reaching social changes. The Bulgarians were required to absorb in a few decades processes which in other lands lasted centuries, and inevitably the strains and fissures ran deep and far. The bogomils grew strong on such strains and fissures, and their dismissive attitude to the temporal world hardly encouraged full-scale commitment to the state in danger. The first Bulgarian state was also in some respects surprisingly backward. Not only did it fail to produce a navy but it failed to see the dangers of geography. Given its position in the Balkans the Bulgarian kingdom was exposed to threats from the south, the north-east and the north-west. There was perhaps folie de grandeur int he assumption that all these enemies could for ever [sic] be contained, and it was certainly a mistake, albeit an understandable one, to assume, as many Bulgarian leaders did, that danger could be circumvented by playing one enemy off against another. This folie de grandeur was all the greater when one takes into account that the kingdom was always heavily influenced by Byzantium and by Byzantine practices. The Bulgarian aristocracy aped that of its southern neighbour; the state and church administrations were similar to those of the empire, as was the tax system; the kingdom used mainly Byzantine currency; and even the vocabulary of administration, commerce and much of public life were derived from the empire."
pp. 21-22: "In his treatment of the defeated Bulgaria Boris [sic ???] was as moderate in victory as he had been implacable in battle. Most importantly for the Bulgarians, the Bulgarian church was allowed to continue as a separate national institution. Headed by a patriarch in Ohrid the Bulgarian church included much of present day Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, and Macedonia. Basil's moderation, however, did not survive him. The Ohrid patriarchate increasingly fell under Greek influence, and the Bulgarian bishops were no longer allowed to elect their patriarch from amongst themselves. The tax system changed for the worse. Before, taxes had been levied mainly in kind but now, to feed the army, the government had to have recourse to forced purchases at fixed prices with taes then being paid in cash not kind. A new form of land-holding was introduced: the proniya. The holders of this land had a right to its produce but could not pass it on by inheritance; they therefore worked it and its peasants for all they could get out of it in the time available; many of them were absentee landlords who used bailiffs who in turn took their share of the profits. In 1040 Petûr Delyan, a descendant of Samuil, collected an army and took the chief Bulgarian town, Skopje, and soon came to dominate Thrace, Epirus, and Macedonia. His revolt was not a nationalist movement but a protest against worsening social conditions, and it was joined by some oppressed Greeks. In 1041 Delyan was betrayed by his allies, blinded, and later captured by Byzantine troops amongst whose ranks were Varangians under the command of Harald Hardrada, later prince of Norway and the founder of Oslo."
p. 22: "Bulgaria remained an integral part of the Byzantine imperium until the late twelfth century There had been a few outbreaks of unrest, mainly social in origin, and it was clear that a sense of Bulgarian cultural identity and separateness survived. Ironically this was in part due to bogomil influence. Bogomil ideas tended to be absorbed more easily by the Slavs than the Greeks, and this hindered the assimilation of the former by the latter. It also prevented any commitment to the ruling state or church."
pp. 22-24 (map image on p. 23): "In the 1180s the Normans, who had already dislodged the Byzantines from Sicily, attacked imperial territory in Greece and along the Adriatic. In retaliation to this and other threats the imperial government was forced to increase taxation and conscription levels. It was more than many Bulgarians could bear. In 1185 two landowners from near Tûrnovo, Petûr and Asen, requestd an alleviation of the new burdens along with concessions for themselves. Not only were they refused, one of them had his face slapped by a Byzantine courtier. News of this humiliation helped feed the already healthy fires of revolt and soon most of eastern Bulgaria had taken to arms and Petûr and then Asen had been proclaimed tsar in Tûrnova."
p. 24: "The second Bulgarian kingdom, based on Tûrnova, was to last for two centuries. Like its predecessor it fluctuated in size but it was seldom free either from external dangers or crippling internal divisions. It was stabilised by Tsar Kaloyan who rule from 1197 to 1207. Much of his reign was spent in warfare. His first military achievement was to drive the Magyars out of northwest Bulgaria and in 1202 he concluded a much-needed peace with Constantinople. By now, however, a new factor had disturbed the delicate balance of power in the Balkans: the Crusades. In 1204 they took Constantinople and proclaimed the Bulgarians their vassals. This effrontery Kaloyan demolished the following year in a fierce battle near Adrianople, the present-day Edirne. By 1207 Kaloyan had reconquered most of Macedonia but he was to be betrayed and murdered that year when laying siege to Salonika."
p. 24: "Unlike many Bulgarian rulers Kaloyan backed his military might with skilful diplomacy. That he was able to defeat the Crusaders was in no small measure due to an agreement he concluded in 1204 with the pope which did much to guarantee Bulgaria's western frontier. The essence of the agreement was that the Bulgarians would recognise the supreme authority of the bishop of Rome, though there was little actual papal interference in Bulgarian ecclesiastical affairs. Bulgaria, in fact, despite its endless political and territorial disputes with Constantinople, remained part of the Orthodox Christian east which had finally broken with the Catholic west in the schism of 1054."
pp. 24-25: "In the disturbed years at the end of the twelfth century bogomilism had flourished and in 1211 a council in Tûrnova, having heard the bogomil case, condemned the heresy and initiated severe persecution of it. This was relaxed when Bulgaria again found relative security and stability in the reign of Ivan Asen II (1218-41). Ivan Asen II further reduced the Magyar threat to Bulgaria but his main achievement was to destroy the power of the despot of Epirus, Theodore Angelus Comnenus, who sought to drive the Crusaders from Constantinople. In 1230 at the battle of Klokotnitsa, near the present-day Haskovo, Theodore Angelus was captured and his extensive territories incorporated into Bulgaria which now spread form the Black Sea to the Aegean and the Adriatic."
p. 25: "Like Kaloyan, Ivan Asen II was an adept diplomat. In concluding a treaty with them against the Crusaders he was prepared to allow the Greeks the lion's share of any conquests that might be made, and in return he insisted upon only one condition: that the independence of the Bulgarian church and its patriarch be recognised by the Greeks. Having secured this, Ivan Asen successfully negotiated with Rome for the complete restoration of the independence of the Bulgarian church in 1235."
p. 25: "Ivan Asen II took the second Bulgarian kingdom to its greatest geographic extent and to the height of its power. He also did much to develop its capital, Tûrnovo. The kingdom went on to produce one of the masterpieces of mediaeval Balkan art: the frescoes in Boyana church near Sofia begun in 1259, which are now a UNESCO protected monument and which deserve to be numbered amongst the greatest artistic attainments of the Slavonic world."
p. 25: "The political situation did not reflect the artistic world. In the early fourteenth century Bulgaria was forced for a while to acknowledge Tatar tutelage, and the Magyars were once again a danger, having taken Vidin in 1261, the year in which the Greeks finally drove the Crusaders out of Constantinople. Internally no strong monarch appeared and by the end of the thirteenth century the kingdom was on he point of disintegration, not least because of incessant feuding among its nobility. It was also beset by another debilitating heresy, hesychism, whose adherents called for the rejection of all social activity and for a life devoted to hesychia, or silent contemplation and prayer; this, its adherents argued, was the only condition in which God's true light could be perceived. Maybe it was; but it did little to help repel invaders."
pp. 25-26: "In the fourteenth century two new invaders added to Bulgaria's difficulties: the Serbs from the west and the Ottomans from the south. There were flashes of recovery as when Tsar Mihail Shishman (1232-30) contained the Serbian threat for a while before losing his life on the battlefield near Kiustendil. The last monarch to achieve any form of stability was Ivan Alexander (1331-71). He recovered some lost territory whilst his lands enjoyed a welcome economic recovery caused in part because the landing of Ottoman forces on the Aegean coast had pushed trade routes northwards into the Bulgarian lands, and in part because he was able to improve relations with Serbia."
pp. 26-27: It was during Ivan Alexander's reign that Bulgaria produced another of the great resources of Slavonic art: the four gospels which bear his name and are now in the British Museum. Commissioned in 1355 the gospels, with their 367 miniatures, were completed in the extraordinary shot period of one year."
p. 27: "Despite this, however, the costs of Ivan Alexander's wars were high and taxes had to be raised. At the same time his preoccupation with external affairs meant that the tsar could not check the seepage of political power from the centre to the landowning aristocracy. Once again the main victims were the peasantry."
pp. 27-28: "After the death of Ivan Alexander Bulgaria was no longer the master of its own fate. This would be settled by the looming contest between the two major Balkan powers: Serbia and the Ottoman Turks. In the 1360s the latter had taken Adrianople, whence they began to push up the Maritsa valley. In 1389 the issue was decided when the Serbs were broken in the battle of Kosovo Polje. Bulgaria's defeat came shortly afterwards. After a three-month siege, Tûrnovo capitulated in July 1393. The patriarch was shut up in a monastery, the dynasty deposed, the great aristocrats dispossessed and the state dissolved. Resistance continued in Vidin for three more years but it too was eclipsed in 1396. Bulgaria as a state was not to exist for almost half a millennium."

Duichev, Greek sources on the history of Bulgaria[edit]

Duichev, Ivan et al. (1959). Sources on the History of Bulgaria. Volume III: Greek Sources on the History of Bulgaria. Part II Sofia.

p. 5-6: "And these main issues (which sources from the sixth century mention - Peter) are: the socioeconomic condition of the Balkan areas on the eve of the Slavic invasions, the fate of the old Thracian, Hellenized and Romanized population, the socioeconomic condition of the Slavic tribes, the invasions of the Slavs and their struggles with the forces of the Empire and finally the settlement of Slavic masses in the Balkan lands."

p. 9: The editors explain the disappearance of the Thracians not only with Barbarian invasions and natural disasters, but also with the constant recruitment of Thracians for every far-flung campaign which the Empire organizes. These soldiers would have taken high losses not only through combat, but also because of unfamiliar climates. Still, in an agrarian society only a tiny amount of the population serves in the army.

p. 23-26: Codex Justinianus: the legal profession is regulated and lawyers receive protection.

p. 26-27: Trade with Barbarians is forbidden; death penalty and property confiscation for providing Barbarians with weapons.

p. 27: Parents are allowed to sell their children and buy them back.

p. 28: Merchants forbidden from providing Barbarians with gold.

p. 29: When inheriting through fideicommissum, children take precedence of sons- and daughters-in-law and sons- and daughters-in-law take precedence over liberated slaves.

p. 29: Men with children who entered a second marriage have the right to use their first wife's property on behalf of their children.

p. 30: Curiales are not allowed to shirk from duty using statues of limitations (These are the hereditary members of the city council who were responsible for the collection and payment of taxes in full. Their office was seen first as an honor and then as a punishment. Their financial obligations were ruinous and they tried to hide from the government in any way possible. The government did all that it could to tie them to their positions - Peter.)

p. 30: Citizens have the right to appeal prefecture courts verdicts to the emperor.

p. 31: Taking the property of absent owners is illegal. 30 year statute of limitations applies.

p. 32: A third person who paid a debt to retrieve pawned objects can receive back what he has paid, but he doesn't have the right to the ownership of these objects.

p. 32: Transferring debts to a third party without the consent of the debtor is forbidden.

p. 33: Free people liberated from enemies have the right to claim their inheritance in order to pay back to ransom which was paid for them.

p. 33: Metics who were deported and whose property has been confiscated still have the right to inherit.

p. 33-34: Peasants are ruined, presumably due to Ostrogothic attacks in the 470s. Merchants and importers are subject to forced purchase of grain in order to supply the troops.

p. 34-36: Poll tax in Thrace is removed, property tax remains in force. Colons are tied to their lands and masters. People who take them in have to give them back together with everything they came in and also pay a fee to the owner. A similar rule applies to Illyricum. People there who harbor a slave have to pay a much bigger fee to the owner.

p. 36-37: Any sort of patronage over villages is forbidden. The villages in question are to be confiscated and the patrons, notaries and any middlemen who assist in harming state interests by taking over taxpayers are to be punished.

p. 37: Veterans who ended their service should not be tried in military courts.

p. 37-38: The amount of people in Illyricum who work for the government shouldn't exceed 100.

p. 38: High-ranking members of the military can only be tried by the court of the magister officiorum.

p. 40-42: Justinian's Novels: Church real estate should not be expropriated, exchanged or pawned to creditors, who should still accept regular pawns.

p. 42-45: Eventual candidates for positions in government pay bribes to those who promise or give these positions. These people take loans in order to pay the bribes. When they enter government service, they intend to pay back their loans with the interests and save something for after their term is over from the money they take from taxpayers. Such governors blame the increased tax burden on the state, release convicted criminals in exchange for money and punish innocents in order to please the guilty. They do this not only in financial cases, but also in capital ones. Various people come to the capital to complain about these abuses. The governors use the fact that they bought their positions as an excuse. That's why they should be appointed without any gifts.

p. 45-46: The amount of money which provincial governors should pay to high-ranking officials in the capital is strictly regulated.

p. 48: Cities on the left bank of the Danube are again under Roman rule during the reign of Justinian.

p. 50: The offices of prefect (civil) and strategos (military) in Thrace are combined in one under a praetor. He is given wide powers and a lot of responsibilities. According to the same law the new praetor will share power with the prefect. The sums which the praetor and his subordinates have to receive for expenses and the ones which the praetor have to pay to high-ranking officials are listed.

p. 58-61: No one who has loaned money to a farmer should take his land. The interest with which the farmers should be charged is listed. The extortionate conditions under which loans were given were widespread enough to be noticed by the emperor (allegedly some died from hunger because of this). His primary concern was probably not altruism, but the danger of losing taxpayers - Peter.

p. 65-67, 70: It is now allowed in some cases to sell church property in Moesia in order to ransom captives. Some people set parts of their property aside in order to pay for ransoming captives or feeding the poor with it.

p. 67: All should obey the provincial governors in criminal and financial cases, and cases should be tried there, and no one should be released on the basis of some privilege without an imperial order.

p. 68: Curiales who have received the dignity of a prefect should be released from the curia only when they actually enter this office.

p. 71-72: No one should be forced to give his property to a creditor. If possible, creditors could take property which the debtor would inherit in the future as a form of debt payment.

p. 73-75: Widespread debt cancellations under Justinian going 22 years back to be cancelled. The same for 8 years under Justin II.

p. 75-78: The provincial governors to be appointed without gifts by requests from the God-fearing bishops, the owners of estates and the citizens of the provinces sent to the pious Emperor, so that the appointed one should provide for the treasury. If they delay doing that, no one should complain from the governor if he collects taxes of any kind. The emperor goes on about how important the collection of taxes is and orders governors and their subordinates to be punished if they take anything for themselves.

p. 78-80: Infants were abandoned at churches, raised by the Church, taken back and then enslaved by their parents. The emperor orders their release.

p. 81-82: Tiberius II Constantine reduces taxes because of the poor economy.

p. 83-84: Children of mixed marriages between free people and adscriptios/colons inherit the status of the mother.

p. 84-86: Some people take soldiers on regular duty and employ them in private tasks. This is declared illegal and anyone involved in that in the future will be punished.

p. 98-99: John the Lydian: Equates tirones (new recruits in the Roman army) with the Triballi.

p. 102: "Scythian" incursions in Colchis, the Caucasus and Thrace somewhere around the 540s.

p. 105: Procopius of Caesarea: Some of the Goths don't leave for Italy with Theoderic the Great in 488, but remain in Thrace and serve in the Roman army.

p. 105-107, 109, 111-115, 117-123: Numerous Thracians mentioned by name who serve in wars against Persia, in Italy and elsewhere.

p. 107: Mundus - a Roman general of mixed Gepid/Hunnic origin assists in suppressing the Nika riots.

p. 110-111: A "Hunnic" attack dated at the end of 539 (by the editors) because of the appearance of some comet. They take 32 fortresses in Illyricum plus Potidaea on the Chalcidice Peninsula. They go back to their lands with 120 000 captives without meeting resistance. They also attack the Long Wall on the Thracian Chersonese and go around it through the sea, killing and enslaving many Romans while taking them by surprise. Some of them cross the Dardanelles and plunder the Asian side before going back with their spoils. In another attack they ravage Illyricum and Thessaly and capture the Thermopylae because they find a track around it.

p. 112-113: Gepids conquer the lands around Singidunum and Syrmium on both banks of the Danube.

p. 113: Goths settle in Thrace (under Zeno).

p. 113 - 116, 121: "Huns"/"Massagetae" (Kutrigurs/Bulgars) in the Roman army.

p. 115: Goths and Gepids fight around Syrmium in the 530s.

p. 116: Mundus leads an army against the Goths who hold Salona, taking Bessas with him, a Goth from Thrace.

p. 116: Goths and Gepids fight around Syrmium in 488.

p. 117: "Huns", Sclaveni and Antes in the army of Belisarius.

p. 122-123: Illyrian soldiers desert from the army in Italy because of Hunnic raids in Illyria. The war with the Goths strains the Imperial finances.

p. 123: The Sclaveni invade and plunder Thrace in 545, but are defeated by the Herules, who free their captives.

Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans[edit]

Fine, John. V. A., Jr. (1987). The Late Medieval Balkans: a Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest. Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-10079-3.

Madgearu, Byzantine Military Organization on the Danube[edit]

Madgearu, Alexandru. (2013). Byzantine Mlitary Organization on the Danube, 10th-12th centuries. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-21243-5.

Chapter: THE MILITARY ORGANIZATION OF THE DANUBE REGION; sub-chapter heading: The Theme of Sirmium and the New Bulgarian Theme on the Middle Danube[edit]

p. 95: "The Byzantine presence int he Middle Danube region became dangerous for the new Hungarian kingdom seeking expansion to the south, in the direction of the Danube, trade along which had been revived in the early 11th century. During his first reign (1038-1041), Peter Orseolo, king of Hungary, may have offered support to the rebels of the Bulgarian nobleman, Peter Delian, who claimed to be the son of the former emperor Gabriel Radomir and of his Hungarian wife, the sister of King Stephen I. The Bulgarian rebellion has started as a protest against the removal of the fiscal and religious privileges established by Basil II in 1018. By 1040, the rebels were already in control of important cities such as Nis and Skopje, and were moving on Thessaloniki. No Byzantine army was able to stop them, but a supposedly heir of the Bulgarian dynasty appeared in the person of Alusian, the son of the last emperor John Vladislav, to challenge Peter Delian. After joining the rebels, Allusian blinded Peter Delian and swiftly made peace with Emperor Michael IV."

pp. 95-96: "Hostilities with Hungary opened in 1059, when Belgrade was briefly taken by Hungarian troops, before Isaac I Comnenos' offensive from Serdica in that same year. The Hungarian attack was justified by the need to punish the Byzantines who had encouraged Pechenegs from the themes of Dristra and Bulgaria to raid southern Hungary. Another Hungarian attack took place in 1071, this time to punish the Pechenegs themselves, who had invaded the region around Sirmium. The Pechenegs were apparently encouraged to do so by the Byzantine commander of Belgrade, dux Nicota (Niketas). This duke was most likely the commander of the Sirmium province, ad not just the strategos of Belgrade. Despite the concentration of Byzantine and Pecheneg forces Sirmium, Nis, and Belgrade were taken by the Hungarians, the latter town after a siege that lasted three months. It is important to note that on both occasions the Hungarian attacks were in retaliation for Pecheneg raids form the Byzantine Empire."

p. 96: "The victory of the Hungarian king Salomon (1063-1074) was made possible by the difficult situation in the Empire in 1071, the year of the major defeat of the Byzantine army at Mantzikert at the hands of the Seljuk Turks. Following that, in 1072 the rebellion of Paradunavon started, which led to the secession of a large part of the province, and in that same year began another rebellion is mentioned in the theme of Bulgaria [sic]. The Bulgarian rebels were led by George Vojtech from Skopje, who bestowed the title of emperor on Constantine Bodin, the son of the Prince Mihailo Vojslav of Dioclea (1046-1081). Moreover, George took the name Peter in reference both to the 10th-century Bulgarian emperor Peter and to the rebel Peter Danlian. The rebels advanced to Nis and Ochrid, but they were defeated after a few months. It is very likely that the rebels had Hungarian support, much like in 1127 and 1149, when Serbs rebelled against Byzantium at the time of the Byzantine-Hungarian wars."

p. 96: "The theme of Sirmium ceased to exist in the aftermath of the Hungarian attack of 1071. Niketas was its last commander. The region to the east and south from Belgrade remained under Byzantine control, but within the theme of Bulgaria. This results from the analysis of the seal of Nikephoros Batatzes, duke of Bulgaria, which was discovered in Moroviskos, a town which had previously been within the theme of Sirmium (see below). It is known that this dignitary was in office after 1075. The message sent to Moroviskos was addressed to a strategos under the orders of the duke of Bulgaria."

pp. 96-97: "Peaceful relations between the Byzantine Empire and Hungary were established in 1075 by Michael VII and Geza I (1074-1077), and sealed by means of the latter's marriage with Synadene, the emperor's cousin of the emperor. The empire was looking for allies in the aftermath of the catastrophe at Manzikert and the numerous mutinies in the Balkans. Under the circumstances, it was important to turn the northern neighbor into an ally. Geza I's favorable attitude towards Byzantium helped the case. The emperor conceded to Geza the peripheral region of Sirmium, in exchange for security for Belgrade down the stream. The region given to Hungary between Sava and Danube was known as Sirmia or Frankochorion. Since Roman antiquity, the city of Sirmium (modern Sremska, Mitrovica) had been an important economic, military and religious center, revived after 1018. Its abandonment meant a decreasing Byzantine presence in the Middle Danube region, and allowed Hungary to obtain a valuable strategic position, which may be used as a launchpad for any future wars with Byzantium."

p. 97: "Bozidar Ferjancic and Ferenc Makk believed that the Byzantines recovered Sirmium in 1075. Their main argument was the 1980 discovery in Macvanska Mitrovica of a seal of Alexios I Comnenos, who was then megas domestikos (commander of the western army). The seal could therefore be dated between the late 1078 and April 1081. But the general situation in the Empire at that time was so difficult that it is hard to imagine the recovery of a remote town such as Sirmium was a real concern or the imperial administration (sic). A different explanation was later offered for the presence of Alexios' seal in Macvanska Mitrovica: the message had been sent to the Byzantine bishop who continued dot reside in Sirmium, and more exactly in Macvanska Mitrovica, on the southern bank of the Sava, after the Hungarian conquest of 1071. However, it has not yet been noted that this seal is one of many attached to messages the megas domestikos Alexios sent out in 1080 during his war against the Normans led by Robert Guiscard. Such messages called for the assistance of the commanders residing in Preslav, Beroe, Tarnovo, Zlati Voivoda and Melnitsa. Does that then mean that Alexios was calling for help from a commander in Sirmium? Since there is no other proof that Sirmium was in Byzantine hands after 1071, the message may have been sent to the Hungarian king Ladislas I (1077-1095.)"

pp. 97-98: F. Makk has also maintained that the region around Belgrade was occupied again by the Hungarians in 1091, during Ladislas I's campaign into Croatia. Makk believed this region to have been the Messia mentioned in Ladislas I' title as rendered by a character of 1091, but Messia was in fact Bosnia, a land which was indeed conquered by Ladislas I in the course of his war against Croatia. This was in fact the interpretation favored by the Hungarian historian Gyorgy Gyorffy, to whom Makk also referred, even though he tried to identify Messia with the formerly Roman province of Moesia Prima, an identification for which there is however no evidence. There is in fact no proof that any specific knowledge of the location of the formerly Roman province had survived until the 9th-13th centuries. For instance, both in Bishop Pilgrim of Passau's forgeries of 971-991 and in the chronicle of Simon of Keza, the name Moesia is applied to Moravia.

p 98-99: "Everything, therefore, point [sic] to the conclusion that Sirmium remained in Hungarian hands after 1071, while Belgrade was under Byzantine rule. When the crusaders showed up in 1096, they are said to have entered the Byzantine territory in Belgrade. In fact, according to Albrecht of Aachen, there was a military commander of the theme of Bulgaria residing in that city: duce, Nichita nomine, principe Bulgaroru et praeside civitatis Belegravae. The same man appears in the chronicle of William of Tyre, as Bulgarorum dux. He was a namesake of the 1071 commander of the theme of Sirmium in 1071 and of the protoproedros Niketas Karykes or Karikes, who was a duke of the theme of Bulgaria. Following Robert Guilland, some have mistaken Niketas Karykes for Leo Nikerites, the last known commander of Paradunavon, even after the correct reading of their respective seals was published by Gunter Prinzing. Only Ivan Jordanov expressed doubts about the identification of duke Niketas mentioned in the western sources with Nikeas Karykes, on the grounds that the title of princeps could not have been the equivalent of protoproedros and that the Niketas of the western chroniclers is not named Karykes as well. Such arguments are not sufficient, however, for rejecting the possibility of duke Niketas being Niketas Karykes. The latter is known to have been the commander of the Bulgarian theme and of the city of Belgrade at the same time, which suggests a change of organization taking place at that time, no doubt in order to improve the defense. During the last decades of the 11th century, a duke of Skopje (Skopion) is mentioned, first in 1078 (Alexander Kabasilas) and then around 1100 (John Comnenos). This suggest [sic] that the large theme of Bulgaria was divided into two smaller provinces, under a duke residing in Belgrade. A similar action had taken place in 1059 when the duchy of Serdica was detached from Bulgaria. The northern part of the theme of Bulgaria was more exposed to Hungarian attacks, and it may be on that basis that Pecheneg groups were moved to Belgrade and its hinterland in the late 11th century. The Pechenegs were in military service under the command of the duke nd they had small boats (naviculas) to monitor traffic on the Sava and the Danube river, as indeed they did with the crusaders of 1096."

p. 99-100: "At some point before 1114, Alexios I Comnenos broguht another change to the administrative organization in the region, as he moved the headquarters of the Bulgarian theme from Belgrade to Nis (Nisos, the ancient NNaissos). That the province extended at that time as far north as Branicevo and Belgrade is mentioned by Anna Comnena. The retreat inside of the province, into the mountain region may reflect the same strategic concept which ha been applied to the eastern parts of the Balkans, when the emperor moved the defense line on the Stara Planina range of mountains. A duke of Nis under Emperor Alexios I, named Nikephoras Dekanos, is attested by three seals. Tadeusz Wasilewski believed that the duchy of Nis came into being after 1071, but at that time, as well as in 1096, the residence of the commander of the theme of Bulgaria was in Belgrade, not in Nis. It is in the former, not in the latter, that duke Niketas is said to have taken refuge when the crusaders of Peter the Hermit crossed the river. At that moment, Nis belonged to the southern Bulgarian theme, for the crusaders led by Walter the Penniless are said to have were [sic] encountered there another dux et princeps Bulgarorum. This strongly suggests that the transfer of the theme's headquarters from Belgrade to Nis took place sometime after 1096. The subsequent history of the duchy of Nis remains unclear until two other dukes are mentioned, one in 1147 (Michael Branas), and the other in 1153 (the future emperor Andronikos Comnenos). Both commanders appear in the sources at the time of the military confrontation with Hungary. However, because it is certain that Branicevo was under Byzantine administration in 1127, it may have belonged to the duchy of Nis."

pp. 100: "Before the headquarters of the Bulgarian theme were established in Belgrade, that city had its own strategos, who is mentioned in 1027, in the account of the pilgrimage of St. Simon of Trier returning from the Monastery Saint Catherine in Sinai. When he got to Belgrade, he was prevented by the princeps civitatis to enter Hungary...The princeps was most likely the strategos of the city. Another strategos resided in Branicevo, a town which emerged in the 9th century on the site of the ancient city of Viminacium, at the confluence between the Mlava and the Danube. Branicevo grew quickly in the 11th century, and became the main center of the defensive system in the region. Several seals suggest the existence of a strategos residing in Moroviskos (Moravon), a fortified settlement at the mouth of Morava (today Dubravica), which was occupied continuously between the 10th and the 12th century. The forts of Moroviskos and Branicevo were meant ot defend the Morava valley, the axis of the main road to Thessaloniki and Constantinople. Finally, the existence of a strategos in Nis is proved by the seal of the protopatharios Nikephoros Lalakon, which is dated after the mid-11th century."

p. 100: "In comparison with the katepanate of Paradunavon, the region to the west of Vidin appears as less important for the Byzantine strategy, at least until Hungary began to expand in Belgade-Branicevo area. This area will become a sensitive issue int he 12th century and later, when the place of the Byzantine Empire in confrontations with Hungary will be taken by the Vlach-Bulgarian Empire."

Mango, Oxford History of Byzantium[edit]

Warren Treadgold: The Struggle for Survival (641-780)[edit]

Treadgold, Warren. (2002). "The Struggle for Survival (641-780)," in The Oxford History of Byzantium, ed Cyril Mango, pp. 129-152. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-814098-3.

pp. 134-135: "Having made a truce with the Arabs, recovered Rhodes, and defeated the Slavs near Thessalonica, Constantine tackled the question of Monotheletism, which his father had determinedly left open... Meanwhile many of the Turks known as the Bulgars, whom their fellow Turks the Khazars had attacked from the east, crossed the Danube and migrated into Thrace. Though they were occupying land inhabited by Slavs and outside Byzantine control, Constantine realized that the Bulgars would make troublesome neighbours, and marched against them. At first he forced them back to the Danube delta. But when he withdrew from the campaign because of an attack of gout, his troops panicked and fled, and the Bulgars defeated them."
pp. 135: "The Bulgars quickly established themselves in northern Thrace, taking a few coastal towns that had been Byzantine. Constantine agreed to a peace that recognized their new borders, and as a defence against them created a new Theme of Thrace from the territory of the Opsician Theme. He must have felt that one war of attrition was all the empire could handle at the time; he could hardly have foreseen that the Bulgars would outlast the Arabs as a danger."
pp. 136-137: "The caliph soon struck at Byzantine Africa, where his troops seized Carthage in 697. Leontius promptly sent a naval expedition to recover the city, and it did so, but the next year the Arabs drove it out again. The defeated Byzantine force sailed back to Crete, where, rather than face responsibility for its defeat, it proclaimed an officer of the Carabisian Theme as emperor. Then the rebels sailed to Constantinople, besieged the city, and forced their way in. They slit Leontius' nose and installed their candidate as Tiberius III."
p. 137: "With scarcely anything to justify his usurpation, Tiberius tried to win an easy victory by raiding Arab Syria. The caliph, who had finished taking Byzantine Africa, retaliated by attacking the empire's eastern frontier. In 702 the Armenians rebelled against the caliphate, but despite Tiberius' best efforts the Arabs soon conquered both Armenia and some adjacent Byzantine territory. Meanwhile the deposed Justinian II escaped from Byzantine Crimea, where he had been exiled, and made his way first to the Khazars and then to the Bulgars, where the Bulgar khan gave him an army to lead against Constantinople. Contriving to enter, Justinian captured Tiberius and reclaimed his throne."
p. 137: "Mutilation and exile had obviously not improved Justinian's temper, but he acted more prudently after his restoration than might have been expected. Though he executed both Tiberius and Leontius, his own example had shown that mutilation was not enough to keep an emperor deposed. He soon became embroiled in wars with the Arabs and his recent allies the Bulgars, but he held his own until his former place of exile in the Crimea revolted against him with help from the Khazars. A naval expedition that he sent against the Crimea, presumably involving the Carabisian Theme, joined the rebels in proclaiming a new emperor, Philippicus. In 711 Philippicus sailed to Constantinople and overthrew and beheaded Justinian."
p. 137: "The least impressive usurper to date, Philippicus tried to repudiate the anti-Monothelete Sixth Ecumenical Council, which was unpopular in his native Armenia. He fared poorly in wars with the Arabs and Bulgars, and after two years was blinded by the Count of the Opsician Theme."
p. 138: "[In 717] Leo III took over an empire shaken by seven violent revolutions in twenty-two years and a recent civil war, and facing the most formidable assault on its capital it had ever seen. He had only a few months to prepare before an immense Arab army and navy, reportedly of 120,000 men and 1,800 ships, arrived to put the city under siege... No sooner had the Arab fleet arrived, however, than the Byzantines attacked it with Greek Fire. The losses the Arabs suffered frightened them into keeping the rest of their ships in port, so that the Byzantines could resupply the city by sea. Leo had made an alliance with the Bulgar khan, who sent raiders to harry the foraging parties of the Arabs. It proved extremely difficult to supply the huge Arab army with food. The winter was unusually bitter, tormenting the Arabs in their camp with unaccustomed snow and cold. Many of the besiegers died."
p. 138: "In spring 718 the caliph sent a new army and fleet as reinforcements. But when the fleet arrived, many of is crewmen, who were Egyptian or African Christians, deserted to the emperor. Leo ambushed the reinforcing army as it approached Constantinople, and its survivors fled without eve crossing the Bosphorus. The remaining besiegers, suffering from hunger, disease, and Bulgar raids, raised their siege after thirteen months. Though their army evacuated Anatolia without opposition, most of their fleet succumbed to storms, Byzantine attacks, and a volcanic eruption in the Aegean Sea as the ships passed by. Duly impressed by their devastating failure, the Arabs never made a serious effort to take Constantinople again. "

Paul Magdalino: The Medieval Empire (780-1204)[edit]

Magdalino, Paul. (2002). "The Medieval Empire (780-1204)," in The Oxford History of Byzantium, ed Cyril Mango, pp. 169-214. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-814098-3. DF522.O94 2002

pp. 171-172: "The empire in the decades around 800 was afflicted by humiliating military defeats, usurpations, and short reigns of emperors who all, apart from Irene, had bad relations with the Church. So bad had the situation become by 813 that a strong pressure group in Constantinople and in the army convinced the emperor Leo V that the solution lay in a return to the Iconoclasm that had seemingly guaranteed Leo III and Constantine V long reigns, a secure dynastic succession, and military success, above all against the Bulgars."
p. 172: "The empire's straitened circumstances derived not only from the constraints imposed by the superpowers to the east and west of it, but also, and more urgently, from the pressure of the medium-sized power to the north, with which it had to share domination of the Balkan peninsula. The greatest obstacle to the empire's revival was the presence to the south of the Danube of the Bulgar khaganate with its capital at Pliska and a southern frontier in the Hebros/Maritza valley only three days march from Constantinople. In 780 the Bulgar state had survived in close proximity to Byzantium for almost a century, taking advantage of the empire's internal problems and wars against the Arabs, an this survival had hardened it into an extremely tough political entity. Its Turkic ruling elite combined the military ferocity of the steppe people they had been with the agricultural resource base of the Slav peasantry they dominated, and with the skills of civilization acquired from Greek traders, captives, and defectors. The emperors Constantine V, Irene, and Nikephoros I all tried with some success to extend the area of imperial control in the frontier region of Thrace by fortification and resettlement,, but their work was undone when Nikephoros I and his army were trapped by the Bulgar khan Krum in a valley near Sardica (modern Sofia) in 811. Nikephoros became the first emperor since Valens (378) to die in battle against a foreign enemy; Krum followed up his victory by terrorizing Thrace and threatening Constantinople. His sudden death from a stroke (814) gave Byzantium a reprieve but the thirty-year peace concluded in 816 left the frontier where it had been in the mid-eighth century, and Krum's successors used the peace to expand northwestwards up the Danube and southwestwards towards the Adriatic."
pp. 172-175 (large pictures of Preslav on p. 173, and painted miniatures on p. 174): "The conversion of Bulgaria to Christianity was clearly inevitable; that Khan Boris (852-89, 893) baptized Michael in c.865, adopted the Christian religion in its Byzantine form, is seen as a triumph of Byzantine diplomacy. But it is questionable whether Byzantium would have undertaken the conversion if it had not been on the agenda of the Frankish Church and the papacy, or whether it was as advantageous to Byzantium as it was to Bulgaria. For all his deference to the emperor and patriarch in Constantinople, the convert-king used Christianity to define he separate identity of his kingdom, both culturally through the development of a Slavonic religious literature, and territorially through the establishment of new bishoprics under the jurisdiction of a semi-autonomous archbishop of Bulgaria. The new bishoprics were heavily concentrated in frontier areas, and thus served to define the partition of the Balkan peninsula to Bulgaria's advantage, as can be seen from the way the name Bulgaria came to apply to a vast swathe of territory stretching from what is now central Albania to the hinterland of Constantinople."
p. 175: "Things did not improve for Byzantium when the convert-king was succeeded by a son who had been destined for the monastic life and educated in Constantinople. Perhaps because of this background, Symeon seems to have gone out of his way to demonstrate to those of his subjects with a nostalgia for paganism that he was no cloistered Byzantine puppet. The effect of seeing Byzantium from the inside was certainly to make him want the empire, or something very much like it, for himself. Though committed in principle to peaceful coexistence with Byzantium, he spent more than half of his thirty-three-year reign at war with its rulers in retaliation for being cheated out of what he considered to be his legitimate expectations. From 913, when the Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos tried to appease him by performing some sort of coronation ritual on him outside the walls of Constantinople, he expected recognition as emperor (basileus in Greek, tsar in Slavonic) and a marriage between his daughter and the young Constantine VII. His ultimate ambition eluded him, but in pursuing it he matched Byzantium in diplomacy and constantly outperformed it in battle. And he did not ruin his country in the process: it is apparent that his son Peter inherited a kingdom which was as coherent and viable a military power as any in tenth-century Europe. As the price of peace with Peter after Symeon's death in 927 the emperor Romanos I was prepared to give Peter his granddaughter in marriage, to recognize Peter as basileus, to pay an annual tribute, and to accord patriarchal status to the Bulgarian Church."
pp. 175-176: "The peace established in 927 lasted forty years, by which time, a century after the baptism of Boris-Michael, Bulgaria was well on the way to becoming a permanent fixture among the states of Europe, at least as fixed as any of the Frankish kingdoms which remained from Charlemagne's empire. Yet Byzantium was fundamentally opposed to coexistence. After the overthrow of Romanos I in 944, Constantine VII denounced the marriage of Peter to Maria Lekapene as an anomaly. The view of Bulgaria in Constantine's treatise on foreign relations, the so-called De administrando imperio, is entirely consistent with that expressed some fifty years earlier by his father Leo VI in a survey of the military tactics of the empire's enemies: the Bulgar kingdom is pointedly left off the map, as a black hole at the centre of the empire's web of relationships in eastern Europe, neither Christian ally nor barbarian foe, but implicitly classed with the barbarian nations to the north of it, and identified as a target for their attacks. Indeed, tenth-century Byzantine rulers had no scruples about inciting pagan peoples to attack Christian Bulgaria. The Magyars and the Pechenegs were used against Symeon; in 967, the emperor Nikephoros II, deciding not to renew the treaty with Peter, engaged the Rus under Sviatoslav of Kiev. Sviatoslav greatly exceeded his brief by occupying Bulgaria and reducing it, under Peter's son Boris, to a protectorate of the vast East European empire that he now proposed to rule from the Danube. However, this Rus occupation made it possible for Nikephoros' successor, John I Tzimiskes, to subsume the liquidation of the Bulgarian kingdom in his victorious campaign against Sviatoslav in 971: the ceremony which stripped Boris of his royal insignia was a part of the triumph which Tzimiskes celebrated on his return to Constantinople. The Bulgarian capital, Preslav, was made the headquarters of a Byzantine military governor. However, the decapitation of the Bulgarian state left much of the organism intact, especially in the west. During the civil wars which followed Tzimiskes' death in 976, the Bulgarian elite rallied under the leadership of the sons of an Armenian official, one of whom, Samuel, made himself the ruler of a revived Bulgarian kingdom centred first on Prespa and then on Ochrid. It took Basil II (976-1025) the greater part of his reign to destroy Samuel's dynastic regime."
p. 176: "The conquest of Bulgaria brought much additional territory, removed a major threat to the hinterland of Constantinople, and restored overland communications between the Aegean and the Adriatic. The Balkan wars of John I and Basil II made the empire a superpower on two continents. Yet those wars were hard fought, and could not have been won if the empire had not, in the meantime, improved its position on other fronts, especially in the east where the frontier with Islam had advanced significantly between 931 and 968. This was partly the result of a great increase in military efficiency, but it was also due to the political decline of the empire's great imperial neighbours. Whereas Byzantium in the year 1000 was clearly recognizable as the state it had been in 800, only bigger and stronger, the empires of Harun al-Rashid and Charlemagne were looking somewhat altered and greatly the worse for wear. Both the Abbasid caliphate and the Carolingian empire had fractured into smaller units and the dynasties which had created them had lost effective power."

Miller and Nesbitt, Peace and War in Byzantium[edit]

McGrath, Stamatina. (1995). "The Battles of Dorostolon (971): Rhetoric and Reality", in Peace and War in Byzantium: Essays in Honor of George T. Dennis, S.J, pp. 152-164, eds Miller, Timothy S; Nesbitt, John. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. ISBN 0-8132-0805-X. DF543.P43 1995

Fine, John V. A. (1995). "A Tale of Three Fortresses: Controversies Surrounding the Turkish Conquest of Smederevo, of an Unnamed Fortress at the Junction of the Sava and Bosna, and of Bobovac" in Peace and War in Byzantium: Essays in Honor of George T. Dennis, S.J, pp. 181-197, eds Miller, Timothy S; Nesbitt, John. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. ISBN 0-8132-0805-X. DF543.P43 1995

Prokopios, Wars of Justinian[edit]

Prokopios. (2014). The Wars of Justinian, trans H. B. Dewing, ed Anthony Kaldellis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. ISBN 978-1-62466-170-9. DF 572.P79213 2014

Sevcenko, Byzantium and the Slavs[edit]

Sevcenko, Ihor. (1991). Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University Press; Napoli: Instituto Uiversitario Orientale. ISBN 0-916458-12-1.

p. 3: "Throughout more than a thousand years of their history, the Byzantines viewed their state as heir to the Roman Empire, which pretended to encompass the whole civilized world. It followed that the Byzantine state, too, was a universal empire, claiming rule over the whole of the civilized world; that Byzantine emperors were by right world rulers; that the Byzantines were Romans; and that they were the most civilised people in the world. True, they had improved upon their Roman ancestors in that they were Christians; also, by the seventh century the Latin component had all but disappeared from their highbrow culture, which from then on was essentially Greek; but, like ancient Romans, the Byzantines felt entitled to pour scorn on those who did not share in the fruits of civilization, that is, on the barbarians. The best thing these barbarians could do was to abandon their bestial existence, and to enter - in some subordinate capacity of course - into the family of civilized peoples headed by the Byzantine emperor. The way to civilization led through Christianity, the only true ideology, of which the empire held the monopoly. For Christianity - to be more precise, Byzantine Christianity - meant civilization."

pp. 3-4: "Throughout a millennium of propaganda, these simple tenets were driven home by means of court rhetoric - the journalism of the Middle Ages - of court ceremonies, of imperial pronouncements and documents, and of coinage. The Byzantine emperor claimed certain exclusive rights. Until the thirteenth century at least, he did not conclude equal treaties with foreign rulers; he only granted them privileges, insignia, and dignities. In correspondence with certain foreign states, he issued 'orders', not letters. He claimed the exclusive right to strike gold coinage (other people's...gold coins were at first imitations or counterfeits; only in the thirteenth century did the western ducat replace the bezant, for almost one thousand years the dollar of the Mediterranean world). As the Byzantines were not blind, they had to accommodate themselves to the existence of other states besides their own. To fit them into their system they had to elaborate the concept of Hierarchy of Rulers and States, taken all together, ideally encompassed the whole world. The emperor headed this hierarchy; he was surrounded by subordinates, who would stand in an ideal family relationship to him: the English ruler was only his friend; the Bulgarian, his son; the Rus' one, his nephew; Charlemagne was grudgingly granted the position of a brother. Or else these rulers would be given titles of varying importance: ruler, ruler with power, king, even emperor. But never - not until the fifteenth century, if at all - Emperor of the Romans."

p. 4: "By the ninth century, the following truths were held to be self-evident in the field of culture: the world was divided into Byzantines and barbarians, the latter including not only the Slavs - who occupied a low place on the list of barbaric nations - but also the Latins; as a city, the New Rome, that is, Constantinople, was superior to all others in art, culture, and size., and that included the Old Rome on the Tiber. God has chosen the Byzantine people to be a new Israel: the Gospels were written in Greek for the Greeks; in His foresight, God had even singled out the Ancient Greeks to cultivate the Arts and Sciences; and in Letters and Arts, the Byzantines were the Greeks' successors. 'All the arts come from us' exclaimed a Byzantine diplomat during a polemical debate held at the Arab court in the fifties of the ninth century. A curious detail: this diplomat was none other than the future Apostle of the Slavs, Constantine-Cyril. Cyril's exclamation implied that Latin learning, too, was derived from the Greeks. The Greek language, the language of the scriptures, of the church fathers, also of Plato and Demosthenes, was rich, broad, and subtle; the other tongues, notably the Slavic, had a barbaric ring to them; even the Latin language was poor and 'narrow'."

p. 4-5: "The Byzantines maintained these claims for almost as long as their state endured. Even towards the very end of the fourteenth century, when the empire was little more than the city of Constantinople in size, the Byzantine patriarch lectured the recalcitrant prince of Muscovy on the international order. The prince should remember - so the patriarch explained - that he was only a local ruler, while he Byzantine emperor was the Emperor of the Romans, that is, of all Christians. The fact that the emperor's dominions were hard-pressed by the pagans was beside the point. The emperor enjoyed special prerogatives in the world and in the Church Universal. It therefore ill behooved the prince to have discontinued mentioning the name of the emperor during the liturgy."

p. 5: "By the end of the fourteenth century, such a claim was unrealistic, and, as is to be deduced from the Byzantine patriarch's closing complaint, it had bee challenged by the Muscovite barbarian. But throughout more than half of Byzantine history, such claims worked. Why?"

pp. 5-6: "The first reason why they worked was that for a long time the claims were objectively true. In terms of the sixth century, Justinian, under whose early rule the large-scale Slavic invasions occurred in the Balkans, was a world emperor, that is, a ruler holding sway over the civilized world. In the east, his dominions extended beyond the upper Tigris River; they skirted to the western slopes of the Caucasus. In the north, Byzantium's frontier ran across the Crimea, and along the Danube and the Alps. The empire had a foothold in Spain, it controlled the coast of North Africa and much of Egypt, it dominated today's Israel, Lebanon, and a great deal of Syria. Now let us skip half a millennium. In the time of Basil II (d. 1025), under whose reign the Rus' accepted Christianity, the situation was not much worse: it was even better in the east, where the frontier ran beyond Lake Van; for a stretch, it hugged the Euphrates. Antioch and Latakia were still in Byzantine hands; in the North, the Crimea was still crossed by the Byzantine frontier, and the Danube and the Sava were the frontier rivers - thus in this sector, too, Byzantium possessed as much as Justinian did. In the West, parts of southern Italy with the city of Bari were under Byzantine sway. In the ninth and tenth centuries, which were decisive for the Byzantinization of the Slavs, the empire's capital at Constantinople was, with the possible exception of Baghdad and Cairo, the most brilliant cultural center of the world as not only the Slavs, but also western Europe, knew it. Its patriarchs were Greek scholars and politicians. Its prelates read and commented upon Plato, Euclid, and even the objectionable Lucian; its emperors supervised large encyclopaedic enterprises; its sophisticated reading public clamored for, and obtained, reeditions of old simple Lives of Saints, which were now couched in a more refined and complicated style. The Great Palace of Constantinople, covering an area of ca. 100,000 square meters, was still largely intact and functioning. The pomp of the court ceremonial and of the services of St. Sophia, then still the largest functioning building in the known world, was calculated to dazzle barbarian visitors, including Slavic princes or their emissaries. Byzantine political concepts influenced western mediaeval political thinking down to the twelfth century; the western symbols of rule - scepter, crown, orb, golden bull - owe a debt to Byzantium. The mosaics of Rome, of St. Mark in Venice (thirteenth century) and of Torcello near Venice (twelfth century), of the Norman churches in or near Palermo (twelfth century), are reflections of Byzantine art, and some of them were executed by Byzantine craftsmen."

p. 6: "The renascence of theological speculation in the High Middle Ages was stimulated by the imperial gift which arrived from Byzantium at the court of Louis the Pious in 827. The gift was a volume of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, in Greek, of course. This work, translated twice into Latin, the second time by Johannes Scotus Eriugena (d. 877), spurred subsequent western theological speculation. It is difficult to imagine a western church without a organ - yet, this instrument, too, arrived from Byzantium in 757 and 812. On the latter occasion, the Byzantines refused to leave the organ with the Westerners, who attempted to copy it in secret, but only later successfully reproduced it. The silk industry was introduced to the west in the middle of the twelfth century, as a result of a Norman raid on Central Greece - the Normans abducted Byzantine skilled laborers from Thebes and settled them in their dominions. Even the fork seems to be a rediscovery of Byzantine origin - an eleventh-century Greek-born dogissa introduced forks to Venice, to the great honor of a contemporary ecclesiastic. No wonder that the Slavs experienced the influence of Byzantium: the West, which could fall back upon refined Latin traditions, experienced it, too, long after Byzantium's political domination over parts of Italy had ceased. So much for the first reason - Byzantine claims worked because they were objectively valid."

p. 6-7: "The second reason why the Byzantine claims of superiority worked was that they were accepted as valid by the barbarians, whether western or Slavic, even after they had ceased to be objectively valid. The usurpation of Charlemagne occurred in 800. But he, the ruler of Rome, did not call himself emperor of the Romans - he knew that this title, an all that it implied, had been preempted by the Byzantines. It was not until 982 that the titulature 'Imperator Romanorum' appeared in the West. And it was only with Frederick I Barbarossa (second half of the twelfth century) that a logical consequence was drawn from this titulature by a western ruler. Since there could be only one Emperor of the Romans, the Byzantine emperor should not be called by this title - he was to be called only what in fact he had been for a long time: the rex Graecorum. But did Frederick reflect that the very concept that there should be only one emperor was a Byzantine heritage? The Slavs were much slower to be weaned from Byzantium and never drew a conclusion similar to that of Frederick. With them, emulation of Byzantium was always but another form of Byzantium's imitation. True, Symeon of Bulgaria in the early tenth century and Stephen Dusan of Serbia in the mid-fourteenth assumed the title of Emperor of the Bulgarians and Greeks or of the Serbians and Greeks, respectively. But they did not think of proclaiming a Slavic counterpart to the Western doctrine Rex est Imperator in regno suo and thus downgrading the Byzantine emperor. Rather, they dreamed of supplanting him by taking Constantinople and seating themselves on his throne; and the same fantasy occurs in one text produced in thirteenth-century Rus', Slovo o pogibeli russkoj zemli."

p. 7: "Short of supplanting the Byzantine emperor, many a Balkan ruler aimed at securing for himself the prerogatives of that emperor, or attempted to imitate imperial pomp and usage. Ways of doing this were varied. One instance was by having a patriarch of his own: in the ninth century, the newly converted Boris of Bulgaria wanted to have one; around 900, Symeon of Bulgaria succeeded in setting one up; so did Stephen Dusan of Serbia in the mid-fourteenth century, not without resistance on the part of Byzantium. Another instance was by striking gold coins: the Bulgarian tsar Ivan Asen II (d. 1241) managed to do it, but he appeared o his coins in the garb of a Byzantine emperor with Christ on the reverse; another, by having the court hierarchy bear Byzantine aulic titles: Stephen Dusan named sebastorators and legothetes; yet another, by assuming the epithet 'second Justinian' on the occasion of the proclamation of new laws; still another, by looking to Byzantium as a reservoir for prestigious marriages - between the thirteenth century and the fall of Bulgaria in 1393, we count eight Greek women among 21 Buglarian tsarinas; another, by patterning one's own capital after Constantinople: Symeon of Bulgaria's Preslav copied the Imperial City, as, by the way, did Prince Jaroslav's Kiev in the 1030s."

p. 7: "In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muscovy, the attitude towards Byzantium and its patriarchate was less than friendly; but when the Muscovite bookmen began to formulate a indigenous state ideology, they drew heavily upon Byzantine sources, in particular upon a Mirror of Princes written in Greek for the emperor Justinian in the sixth century; and they called Moscow 'the reigning city', a formula by which the Byzantines usually referred to Constantinople. In sum, throughout their Middle Ages, the Balkan and to a considerable extent the East Slavic ruling elites were beholden to the Byzantine model in the matter of political concepts."

pp. 7-8: "The Byzantine cultural impact did not presuppose the existence of friendly relations between Byzantium and the Slavs. Sometimes it looked as if the more anti-Byzantine the Balkan Slavs - like the Normans of Sicily - were in their political aspirations the more Byzantinized they became; they fought the enemy with the enemy's own weapons. What the Byzantine cultural impact did presuppose was the acceptance - both by the producers and the receivers of cultural values - of the Byzantine world view and civilization as superior to all others."

p. 8: "The Christianization and cultural Byzantinization of the Balkans was a pivotal event. It affected both the medieval and the post-medieval history of the Balkans and of eastern Europe; what is more, its effects are with us today. Whether the consequences of this event should be considered as beneficial or baneful is a matter of judgment that depends on the historian's own background and on the modern public's political views. It remains that the Christianization of the Balkans not only determined the cultural physiognomy of Serbia and Bulgaria, but also prepared and facilitated the subsequent Byzantinization of the East Slavs, an event which, along with the Tartar invasion, contributed to the estrangement of Rus' from the European West. In the light of the preceding remarks, however, the Byzantinization of the South and East Slavs should be viewed just as an especially successful an enduring case of Byzantium's impact upon its neighbors, whether in Europe or in the Near East."

pp. 8-9: "It was an especially successful case on two counts. First, when we speak of those Balkan Slavs who experienced the strongest influence of the Byzantine culture, we mean Serbs and Bulgarians. But we forget that these formed the rear guard, as it were, of the Slavic populations that had penetrated into the territory of the empire. In the late sixth century, the Slavs attacked the outer defenses of Constantinople; around 600, they besieged Thessalonica. About the same time, they reached Epirus, Attica, and the Peloponnesus; by the middle of the eighth century, the whole of Greece - or, at least, of the Peloponnesus - 'became slavicized,' to use the expression of a text written under the auspices of a tenth-century Byzantine emperor. Slavic raiders reached Crete and other Greek islands. We do hear of Byzantine military campaigns aiming at the reconquest of the lands settled by the Slavs, but judging by the paucity of relevant references in our sources, it is wise to conclude that these campaigns were not too frequent. And what remained of those Slavs? About 1,200 place-names, many of them still existing; some Slavic pockets in the Peloponnesus attested as late as the fifteenth century; about 275 Slavic words in the Greek language; erhaps a faint Slavic trace or two in Greek folklore. Nothing more. In matters of cultural impact, the ultimate in success is called complete assimilation. When it comes to mechanisms that facilitated this spectacular assimilation, we must keep i mind the role played by the upper strata of the Slavic society, for by the end of the ninth century the Slavs were already socially differentiated. In my opinion, it was this Slavic elite, as much as the Byzantine missionaries, that served as a conduit in the transmission of Byzantine culture to the Slavic population at large."

p. 9: "Second, Byzantium held more than its own in its competition with Rome over the religious allegiance of the Balkan Slavs. For historical reasons,, which had some validity to them, the Church of Rome laid jurisdictional claims to the territory of ancient Illyricum, that is, roughly the area on which the Serbs, Croats, and some Bulgarians (Slavic and Turkic) had established themselves. Croatia and Dalmatia were the only Byzantine areas where western Christianity was victorious in the ninth century. The Serbs were first Christianized by Rome about 640, but only the second Christianization took permanent roots there. It occurred in the seventies of the ninth century and it was due to Byzantine missionaries, later aided by the Bulgarians. For a while, the newly converted Bulgarian ruler Boris-Michael flirted with Pope Nicholas I; but in 870, the Bulgarians entered the Byzantine fold, and they have remained there ever since."

p. 9: "True, the Cyrillo-Methodian mission in Moravia and Pannonia, which originally was staged from Byzantium, ended in failure shortly after 885, when Methodius's pupils were expelled and supplanted by the German clergy of Latin rite. But if this was a failure, it was a qualified one: the Moravian and Pannonian areas had never belonged to Byzantium."

pp. 9-10: "Before its collapse, the Cyrillo-Methodian mission did forge the most powerful too for indirect Byzantinization of all Orthodox Slavs: it created - or perfected - the Old Church Slavonic literary language. The Byzantinized Slavic liturgy did continue in Bohemia - granted, in a limited way - until the very end of the eleventh century; and the expelled pupils of Methodius found an excellent reception in late ninth-century Bulgaria and Macedonia, in centers like Preslav and Ohrid, from where they continued and deepened the work of Christianizing ad Byzantinizing the Bulgarian and Macedonian Slavs. Occasional attempts on the part of the thirteenth-century Serbian and Bulgarian rulers to play Rome against Constantinople had no durable effects. True, both the Serbian Stephen the First-Crowned and the Bulgarian Kalojan, tsar of Bulgaria, obtained their royal crowns from the pope (1217 and 1204, respectively). But their churches, although autonomous, remained in communion with the Byzantine patriarchate in exile (1220 and 1235, respectively); they even remained under its suzerainty, in spite of the fact that at that time the Latin Crusaders resided in conquered Constantinople and the Byzantine empire was just a smallish principality in Asia Minor, fighting for its survival."
- PETER'S COMMENT: 1. A country called Macedonia didn't exist during the Middle Ages and the Slavs themselves didn't know the name "Macedonia". The border between Bulgaria and Byzantium was extended gradually to the southwest because of Bulgarian expansion and Byzantine resurgence coming from Greece and at the time of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission Macedonia was divided between the two countries. The Slavs in Macedonia never revolted against Bulgarian rule. During the later years of the First Bulgarian empire Macedonia became the core area of the country and both of the Bulgarian revolts against Byzantine rule after that encompassed Macedonia. This situation stood in stark contrast with the Serbs, who mounted a successful resistance since the very beginning. With that I consider the Macedonian Slavs assimilated into the Bulgarian ethnicity from early on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presian_I_of_Bulgaria#/media/File:Bulgaria_under_Presian.png - Peter

p. 10: "The loss of Moravia and Pannonia by the Byzantine mission was amply compensated for by a gain in another area which (except for the Crimea) ha never been under the actual Byzantine government: I mean the territories inhabited, among others, by the East Slavs. There, too, the field was not uncontested, for Rome had sent its missionaries to Kiev in the middle of the tenth century. In addition, Byzantium had to struggle there with other religious influences, Islamic and Jewish. It emerged victorious: the ruler of Kiev adopted Christianity for himself and his people in 988/9, and the act was sealed by the prince's marriage with the Byzantine emperor's sister. In retrospect, the Christianization and concomitant Byzantinization of the East Slavs was the greatest success of the Byzantine cultural mission. Churches in Byzantine style still stand in Alaska, and in Fort Ross in California; this marks the furthest eastward advance of Byzantine Christianity under the auspices of a predominantly East Slavic state."

p. 10: "The cultural Byzantinization of the Orthodox Slavs was also an especially enduring case of the Byzantine impact on Europe. Chronologically speaking this Byzantinization, as opposed to complete assimilation, started with the ninth or tenth century, depending on the area, and it lasted long after the fall of he empire in 1453, down to the eighteenth and the nineteenth century. Paradoxically enough, after 1453, new possibilities of expansion were opened to Byzantine culture, the culture of an empire that was no more."

p. 10: "Before 1453, the history of the relations between Byzantium and the Slavic churches and states was that of intermittently successful attempts to shake off the administrative tutelage of the Byzantines. Now, both the Balkan Slavs and the Byzantines were subjects of the Ottoman Empire; in the eyes of the Ottoman conquerors these peoples, all of them Christian, formed one entity, Rum milleti, that is, 'Religious Community (or Nation) of the Romans' - a name coined in good Byzantine tradition. To the Ottomans, the patriarch of Constantinople was now the head (civilian and ecclesiastical) of all the Christians in the Ottoman Empire."

p. 10: "Although their circumstances were reduced, the patriarchs were in some areas of activity heirs to the Byzantine emperors, and the Greek church was a depository and continuator of many aspects of Byzantine culture. This culture had now the same, if not better, chances of radiation among the Balkan Slavs as before, because both the Greeks and the Slavs were now united within the same Ottoman territory."

p. 11: "The churches in the Balkans were administered from Constantinople, especially since the late seventeenth-century, when Phanariote Greeks had obtained great influence at the Sublime Porte. From that time on, native Greeks, rather than Hellenize Slavs, began to be installed as bishops. The historical Slavic Patriarchates of Pec and Ohrid were abolished in the second half of the eighteenth century (1766 ad 1767, respectively). Dates marking the official independence of the Bulgarian and Serbian churches from Constantinople coincide roughly with the achievement of political independence by those countries. This rule of the patriarchate of Constantinople, often unwisely exercised, created much bad blood between the Greeks and Bulgarians in the nineteenth century. By that time, the elite of the Balkans was looking to Vienna, Paris, and westernized St. Petersburg for inspiration. But down to the eighteenth century, Greek - that is , post-Byzantine - culture, largely represented by Greek or Hellenized churchmen, was the highest culture in the area."

p. 11: "Eastern Europe, too, very slowly moved away from Byzantium. The Tartar invasion of the 1240s first cut and then weakened contacts with the West, and brought about a falling back upon those forms of local cultural heritage that were in existence in the forties of the thirteenth century. This heritage had been mostly Byzantine; now, it was being preserved and elaborated upon, but not substantially enriched. The Ukraine and Belorussia were reopened to western influences somewhat earlier than the other areas, as they gradually fell under the domination of Catholic Poland-Lithuania, especially from the fourteenth century on. But even there the union of Churches did not occur until some two hundred and fifty years later (I am referring to the Union of Brest in 1596), and it was only a limited success, even from the Catholic point of view."

p. 12: "In Moscow, the jurisdictional dependence on the Patriarchate of Constantinople continued until 1448. When the break came, it was motivated by the accusation that Byzantium was not Byzantine enough, that it had fallen away from the true faith by compromising with the Latins at the Council of Florence (1439), while the true Byzantine Orthodoxy was from now on to be preserved in Muscovy. The establishment of an independent patriarchate in Moscow had to wait until 1589. Its confirmation necessitated the assent of other patriarchs, but it was easily obtained from the impecunious Greeks. Western influences penetrating through the Ukraine were present in seventeenth-century Muscovy, but it was only Peter the First, ascending the throne as Tsar and Autocrat, Byzantine style, and leaving it in death as August Emperor, western fashion, who put an end to the Byzantine period in the history of the Russian cultural elite, but not in the history of the Russian lower classes."

Shepard, Emergent Elites[edit]

Shepard, Jonathan. (2011). Emergent Elites and Byzantium in the Balkans and East-Central Europe. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4094-0364-7. DF547.E852 S54 2011

Theophanes the Confessor[edit]

Theophanes the Confessor (1982). The Chronicle of Theophanes: an English Translation of Anni Mundi 6095-6305 (A.D. 602-813), trans and ed Harry Turtledove. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812278429 D17 .T513 1982

INTRODUCTION SECTION BY THE EDITOR[edit]

p. vii: "There is, it is said, an old Chinese curse: 'May you live in interesting times.' This is a malediction most relevant to the later Roman, or, as it is usually known by this time, the Byzantine Empire of the seventh and eighth centuries. In 602, the Empire's eastern heartland had virtually the same makeup of territories as it had had three centuries before: the Balkan peninsula, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. In addition, the coast of north Africa, southern Spain, Sicily, and a large part of Italy were in Byzantine hands, thanks to the reconquests of Justinian I (527-565)."
p. vii: "These reconquests, though, had cost the Empire far more in men and wealth than it could hope to realize from the regained land. At the beginning of the seventh century its overextended frontiers collapsed, and the next 120 years were little more than a desperate struggle for survival. The great imperial capital, Constantinople, was besieged three times: in 626 by the Persians and Avars, and in 674-678 and 717-718 by the Arabs. The latter, newly unified by Islam, wrested Syria and Palestine (638), Egypt (641), and north Africa (698) from the Byzantines; Byzantine Spain had fallen to the Visigoths by 631, but in 711 the Arabs conquered them as well. While the Byzantines fought grimly and all too often unsuccessfully to hold the line in the east, great numbers of Slavs established themselves in the Balkans, to be joined near the close of the seventh century by the Bulgars, a people originally of Turkic descent. For all the Empire's travails, though, the Persians, Byzantium's long-time rivals for dominance in the Near East, doubtless would have been happy to exchange fates. The Sassanid state, even more debilitated than the Byzantines by their mutually destructive war of 602-628, was entirely under Arab rule by 651."
p. vii-viii: "Had Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire not survived, the history of the world would have been incalculably different. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon envisions Oxford dons learnedly expatiating on the Koran rather than the Bible had the Arabs won the Battle of Tours against the Franks. The destruction of the Byzantine Empire would have made some such picture likelier yet. With Constantinople gone, what could have stopped the Arabs from sweeping into southeastern Europe—and bringing Islam with them? Their faith, rather than Christianity, might well have taken root among the Balkan Slavs and spread north to the people who would become the Russians, leaving Christendom as an isolated, backwards appendage to a Eurasia largely Muslim. Though the medieval west little appreciated it one of Byzantium's most important historical roles was precisely this, a bulwark against the expansion of Islam."
p. viii: "After the failure of the great Arab assault of 717-718, it became clear that the Byzantine Empire would not fall to outside attack. Nevertheless, the Empire was far from peaceful during the eighth century. It was caught up in a great religious upheaval over the propriety of the use of images in church worship—the iconoclastic controversy—which had social and political implications as profound as the theological. A measure of the iconoclast's fury may be seen in the paucity of icons from Byzantine territory which predate the struggle. Only in places like St. Catherine's monastery on Mt. Sinai (which in the eighth century was in Muslim territory ad hence beyond the reach of the iconoclasts) have pre-iconoclastic icons survived until the present in any numbers."
p. viii: "The monastic chronicler Theophanes was born in the midst of the dispute over images, at some time in the period 752-760. He was the son of high-ranking and wealthy parents, Isaac and Theodote by name. In later years his family would become related to the Macedonian house, the dynasty which ruled Byzantium for almost two hundred splendid years (867-1056). Isaac and Theodote were as pious as they were rich, and favored the use of images within the Byzantine church. Theophanes' father outwardly concealed his iconophilic sentiments well enough to keep the trust of the arch-iconoclast Emperor Constantine V (741-775). After Theophanes was orphaned while still young, the Emperor saw to his education and upbringing.
p. viii-ix: "During the reign of Constantine V's son and successor, Leo IV (775-780), Theophanes acquired the honorific title of spatharios. During his youth he had been betrothed to Megalo, the daughter of a Byzantine patrician. They were briefly married, but their union does not seem to have been more than a polite fiction designed to circumvent the iconoclastic government's opposition to monasticism: monks were among the staunchest backers of the icons. When iconoclasm and anti-monasticism lost momentum with the death of Leo IV, the two pious partners separated to pursue the monastic way of life. Theophanes founded a monastery near Sigriane on the Asian shore of the Sea of Marmora, and dwelt therein, much of the time in poor health, until 815 or 816. At that time iconoclasm revived under Leo V, the Armenian (813-820). Theophanes, like most monks, refused to sanction the destruction of images; for his opposition, he was imprisoned in Constantinople and then exiled to the island of Samothrake, where he died in 818. To this day, the Greek church recognizes him as a confessor, one who, though not suffering the trials of a martyr, nevertheless lived a life of outstanding holiness under difficult circumstances."
p. ix: "Were it not for the chronicle he left behind, however, Theophanes would be little more than a footnote on the pages of Byzantine history. Throughout the long history of the Byzantine Empire, there were two distinct approaches to historiography, that of the historians per se and that of the chroniclers. These differed from each other both intellectually and linguistically. Beginning in the time of Justinian I with Prokopios (if one neglects the largely vanished historians of the fifth century) and extending through the work of Kritoboulos (who recorded the achievements of Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople), Byzantine historians dealt with discrete chunks of time, usually a half-century or less, which they are treated in considerable detail."
p. ix-x: "It was normal Byzantine practice to have only one historian for any given period, each succeeding the author taking up his task where his predecessor had laid it down. There are occasional exceptions to this rule. One is the late sixth century, where Menander Protector, Theophanes of Byzantium (not our chronicler), and John of Epiphaneia each wrote an independent continuation of the work of Agathias. Not one of these three has survived intact. Another exception is the troubled mid-eleventh century, where Michael Psellos and Michael Attaleiates produced works of widely differing approach and political persuasion."
p. x: "Unlike the situation in the medieval West, in Byzantium knowledge of the classical past was not lost, nor did it become the sole preserve of the church. Byzantine historians were highly educated men. They were quite familiar with a wide range of Greek authors, upon whom they drew for concepts, vocabulary, and even, on occasion, for spellings long archaic in the time during which they themselves wrote. The great ancient historians, Herodotus and, especially, Thucydides, served as their models. In many ways this was admirable; it gave Byzantine historians a detachment and a sophistication of analysis almost totally absent from contemporary western European and Islamic historiography."
p. x: "Byzantine imitations of the classics, though, brought its own problems. The historians of the Empire did their best to imitate their magnificent forerunners not only in approach but also in style, and here they stumbled badly. The Greek language had changed greatly between the 'golden age' of Athens and the time of the Byzantine Empire, and it was no more natural for a Constantinopolitan of, say, the tenth century A.D. to write Thucydidean Attic Greek than it would be for a modern historian to try to express himself in the idiom of Thomas North, the sixteenth-century translator of Plutarch whose work Shakespeare used. Worst yet, the influence of rhetoric on Greek literature made an unusual and convoluted style desirable. Striving for orateness in a language not quite their own, Byzantine historians commonly produced works which, while rich in data, are neither easy nor pleasant to read."
p. x-xi: "Because of the changes in the Greek language, the historians of the Empire were not much more accessible to most of its own citizens than they are to nonspecialists of today. To meet the interest of the modestly educated Byzantine majority in its past, chroniclers arose. The earliest surviving example is John Malalas, a younger contemporary of Prokopios. Chroniclers' work differed from that of their more learned colleagues in several ways. Most chroniclers treated events from the creation of the world to their own time. Their accounts of times long before their own drew heavily on the Bible, ecclesiastical authors, and the works of earlier chroniclers usually somewhat less upon historians unless these latter were excerpted in a chronicle. Theophanes is an exception here, for he was sophisticated enough to draw directly upon and simplify such authors as Prokopios and Theophylaktos Simokatta, whose history covers the reign of the Emperor Maurice (582-602). Later Byzantine chroniclers, even such eminent men as George Kedrenos in the eleventh century and John Zonaras in the twelfth, seem to have used Theophanes as their guide rather than the primary sources he himself employed. It would not be amiss to note here that attitudes towards what we today would consider plagiarism were far different throughout the ancient and medieval times. It was thought perfectly proper to adopt for one's own use large segments of another author's work without giving any source citation whatsoever."
p. xi: "Theophanes' chronicle is unusual in that it does not commence with the Creation, but rather deals with the period from 284 to 813: from the accession of Diocletian to that of Leo V. The reason for this is that Theophanes' Chronographia is a continuation of the work of George the Synkellos, a fellow monk who had brought his own chronicle from Adam up to A.D. 284 at the time of his own death, probably in 810 or 811. A recent stimulating article proposes that Theophanes was no more than the final editor and compiler of a chronicle actually composed by George, who, it argues, lived on for a couple of years after his supposed death date and continued to write during that time. Because the Chronographia refers to the Emperor Leo V as 'pious' and as a 'legal Roman emperor' (de Boor edition, p. 502; this translation, pp. 180-81), its terminus ad quem is taken to be no later than late 814 (the date of the second outbreak of iconoclasm), leaving too short a time, supposedly, for Theophanes to have completed the work form his commencement after George's death."
p. xi-xii: "It is, however, quite doubtful that the Chronographia was actually finished by late 814. When fulminating against the iniquities of the arch-iconoclast Constantine V, the author remarks that he is making a list of the Emperor's transgressions, 'so that it may be a clear aid for men in the future and for those wretched arrogant manikins who re now stumbling into the loathsome and evil doctrine of the supreme lawbreaker' (de Boor edition, p. 413, this translation, p. 104—italics added). This can only refer to the second period of iconoclasm initiated by Leo V and his backers, and clearly shows the author of the chronicle was writing at least into 815, well past any proposed death date for George the Synkellos. That Leo V is termed 'pious' and a 'legal Roman emperor' bespeaks no more than a lack of revision in the text, as is evident in many other places; indeed, Leo III, the initiator of iconoclasm, is himself once termed 'pious' (de Boor edition, p. 396; this translation, p. 88)."
p. xii: "There is a second telling argument against George the Synkellos' authorship of the Chronographia. Whoever its author may be, he is entirely ignorant of much of the material for the reigns of Herakleios, Constantine III, and Heraklonas, which appears in Nikephoros' Historia Syntomos (Brief History), which covers the period 602-769; it is better written and more nearly impartial than the Chronographia, but far more obscure in chronology and, especially after 641, much less detailed. The Historia Syntomos seems to have been composed sometime between 775 and 797, and probably before 787. Now, George earned his sobriquet by serving as synkellos under the patriarch Tarasios (784-806). Nikephoros, the author of the Historia Syntomos, was also Tarasios' protégé, and in fact succeeded him as patriarch , serving from 806 until his ouster by Leo V in 815. He and George must have known each other well. If George the Synkellos was the author of the chronicle usually ascribed to Theophanes, why did he not make use of Nikephoros' already existing chronicle in his own composition? The fact that Theophanes was isolated at Sigriane strongly serves to increase the likelihood of his authorship of the Chronographia."
p. xii: "Chroniclers were less sophisticated than historians. Where historians, following their classical exemplars, made a genuine effort to capture the underlying causes of events, chroniclers were content with more simplistic explanations. Thus Theophanes ascribes the explosive expansion of the Arabs and the successes of the Bulgars to divine chastisement of the Byzantines because of the multitude of their sins, and for Constans II's abandonment of Constantinople for Italy and Sicily entirely blames the hostility of the people of the capital, ignoring the desperate situation of the Byzantine West at the time."
p. xii-xiii: "Both because they were intended for a broad, relatively little-educated audience and because their authors were themselves less learned than historians, Byzantine chroniclers do not partake of the pseudo-classical stylistic convolutions and archaizing vocabulary in which the historians so delighted. In these matters, Theophanes' work is typical of the genre; indeed, if measured by classical standards, many of his constructions are not even grammatically correct. He frequently uses genitive absolutes having the same subject as their main verb of his sentence, a construction irregular and abnormal in the classical tongue..."
p. xiii: "Theophanes' vocabulary is far from classical and, interestingly, becomes steadily less so as his chronicle approaches his own time. In the early part of his wok, derived from authors of the fourth and fifth centuries, there are few words not found in Liddell and Scott's A Greek-English Leixon, while scores of such words appear in that part of the Chronographia treating the seventh and eighth centuries. Many of these, especially terms dealing with the government and the military, are derived from Latin; in their own eyes, of course, the Byzantines were Romans, and called themselves such. The church and its institutions borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic, while Arabic, Persian, and the speeches of the Empire's Turkic and Slavic northern neighbors also left their marks on the language Theophanes wrote."
p. xiii-xiv: "Our chronicler is not stylistically impressive. He is for the most part what might best be described as an efficient prose, with the occasional purple passage, especially where his theology is touched (e.g. his vitriolic denunciations of Constantine V). His sentences consist, for the most part, of a simple basic unit accompanied by one or more participial phrases or genitive absolutes. This uncomplicated structure is no doubt deliberate, and designed to make his chronicle more broadly comprehensible. Theophanes can, and on occasion does, abandon it in favor of a more complex phraseology. As his simplification of such difficult authors as Prokopios and Simokatta shows, he himself was reasonably at home with the difficult Byzantine high style, and purposely avoided it in his own writing."
p. xiv: "To carry this point a step further, it must be emphasized that it would be altogether unfair to expect Theophanes to conform totally to linguistic standards obsolete for a millennium and more. If languages do not die, they change. That Theophanes' work bears even limited comparison to classical Greek is a mark of the tenacious conservatism of the written, as opposed to the spoken, tongue—a problem which still applies to modern Greek. The spoken tongue in Theophanes' time was much closer to modern spoken Greek than to the ancient language, and only a relatively small part of this shift shows itself, even in popular works like that of the monk."
p. xiv: "From the preceding discussion, the question must inevitably arise: if Theophanes' chronicle is unexciting to read and largely derived from previous sources, why should it be bothered with at all? For the first three centuries and more of this work (i.e. for the period 284-602), the chronicle is of very limited independent historical value, as we have in the original most of the authors from whom the monk borrowed. There are occasional snippets of information unknown elsewhere but on the whole this early part of the work is no more than a major supplement to more nearly contemporary sources."
p. xiv-xv: "For the period 602-813, however, just the opposite is true. Almost all of Theophanes' sources have themselves perished, leaving his chronicle as the indispensable guide to a time crucial in the evolution of the Byzantine Empire. The seventh and eighth centuries are so barren of surviving historical literature (or, in fact, literature of any sort) that they have been termed, with justice, 'the dark age of Byzantium.' The reasons for this scarcity of sources are not hard to understand. As we have seen, the seventh century was for Byzantium a time of almost continuous dire warfare. While great deeds aplenty were done, there was scant leisure to record them. The iconoclastic controversy which followed was, if anything, more damaging to literary survival than the previous strife had been. While in power (726-780), the iconoclasts did their best do destroy the writings of their opponents, and when those who favored images returned to a position of authority, it was the turn of iconoclastic literature to see the torch."
p. xv: "After Simokatta brought his history to an end with the overthrow and murder of Maurice in 602, no historian whose work survives would labor for more than two hundred years, and with the Byzantine historical tradition thus running dry, Theophanes was compelled to make do with such other materials as were available to him. He used George of Pisidia's epic poetry on Herakleios' defense of the Empire against the Persians as a source for the reign of that Emperor; his long excursus on monotheletism is drawn from the vita of St. Maximus the Confessor. For the history of the later seventh century and first half of the eighth, Theophanes used a chronicle probably written by the patrician Trajan (a work now lost) and an equally perished anonymous monastic work written after the death of Constantine V, both of which are also recognized as sources for the historical works of the patriarch Nikephoros. A newly-published monograph on the reign of the Emperor Constantine VI (780-797) has referred to the existence of a biography of that Emperor and a separate chronicle as sources for Theophanes' treatment of him, unfortunately without documenting the suggestion."
p. xv-xvi: "In addition to using these surviving, lost, and hypothetical Greek works, Theophanes' chronicle is uniquely valuable because it also employs a Greek translation of a late eighth-century chronicle originally written in Syriac. This is the source from which Theophanes obtained his surprisingly accurate information on events in Muslim-held territory. Passages paralleling this chronicle's contributions to Theophanes occur in the works of the much later Syriac writers, Michael the Syrian and Bar Hebraeus; the original, once more, has not survived. The most likely means of transmission of this chronicle to Theophanes was by the monks who, fleeing Muslim persecution, arrived in Constantinople via Cyprus from the Holy Land in 813. Another possibility, raised by Mango in the same article in which authorship of the Chronographia is ascribed to George the Synkellos, is that George, who was himself at one time a resident of Palestine, brought a copy of this chronicle with him to Constantinople and either translated it into Greek or had it translated."
p. xvi: "Where Nikephoros' chronology in the Historia Syntomos is casual, that of Theophanes is far and away the most elaborately developed of any Byzantine chronicler's. In this he emulated George the Synkellos' careful chronological schema, and for the seventh and eighth centuries provides much of our chronological framework for Byzantine affairs. His work is in the form of annals, the events of each year being listed separately. As his work continues that of George the Synkellos, he employs the same world-era as did that monk: the Alexandrian era, which dates the creation of the universe to September 1, 5493 B.C. Most earlier authors who used the Alexandrian era dated the Creation at the vernal equinox rather than on September 1, but the Byzantine year began on the latter date, and Theophanes uses it as the first day of his year (there is a minority opinion, headed by Vénance Grumel, which feels that Theophanes sometimes begins his years on March 25, but the evidence does not seem to favor his hypothesis)."
p. xvi: "Each year's events, then, in Theophanes' chronicle, are headed by an annus mundi, a year [since the Creation] of the world to which they are assigned. To convert an annus mundi of Theophanes to a date A.D., subtract 5492 if it is between January 1 and August 31, or 5493 if between September 1 and December 31. From time to time Theophanes provides his own dates A.D.. This method was not a usual Byzantine practice; we should not be surprised to learn that his conversion factor from annus mundi to A.D. differs from ours. His years A.D. begin, like any Byzantine years, on September 1, and differ from the annus mundi by exactly 5,500. In this translation, Theophanes' annus mundi is converted into modern reckoning in parentheses beside it; while Theophanes lists them, his dates 'A.D.' are retained, but should be ignored."
p. xvi-xvii: "Along with the annus mundi, Theophanes also always reports the regnal year of the reigning Byzantine Emperor, that of the ruler of Byzantium's eastern neighbor (first the Sassanid king of Persia, then the Arab caliph), and that of the patriarch of Constantinople. These three dates are almost always quite accurate, especially, of course, the first and third. Theophanes also reports as much information as he can on the reigns of the other four patriarchs—the patriarchs of Rome (that is, the Popes), Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Through the end of the sixth century, he has fairly thorough data on all these sees, but the Slavic penetration into the Balkans and the Arab conquests in the Near East progressively disrupt his knowledge of the various patriarchal successions, and for the seventh and eighth centuries his information on the patriarchates no longer under Byzantine control is sketchy and not always accurate. Still, it can be seen that he is, to the best of his ability, constructing a thorough and most elaborate chronological skeleton on which to place his chronicle's flesh."
p. xvii "There is yet another method Theophanes uses throughout the Chronographia to keep track of time: the indiction. This was originally a fifteen-year cycle for the reassessment of taxes. Though obsolete in that sense long before Theophanes' time, the fifteen-year cycle itself survived to become a Byzantine means of reckoning time: it was common practice to date any event by saying that it took place in, for example, the sixth year of the indiction cycle, which was usually shortened to simply the 'sixth indiction.'"
p. xviii: "The profound influence Theophanes' work had on later Byzantine chroniclers has already been mentioned. They used the Chronographia not only as a source of information but also as a model of what a chronicle should be; it is a pity more of them did not emulate the monk's meticulous establishment of chronology. Theophanes' chronicle was also of great importance to western medieval historical writing. A papal librarian, Anastasius, translated Theophanes from Greek into Latin int he second half of the ninth century, perhaps half a century after the death of the author. Anastasius' translation was widely read and used in its own time, and has not lost its importance to scholars to this day. The papal librarian's work was translated from a manuscript of Theophanes older than any which is yet extant, and is therefore an important aid in establishing the proper text of the chronicle."
p. xviii-xvix: "Theophanes has never before been rendered into English, even in part. There is a German translation of the period 717-813, published as Bilderstreit und Arabersturm in volume six of the series Byzantinische Geschictsschreiber (Graz, 1957). The present translation of the period 602-813 (that is, the period for which Theophanes is of chief independent historical value) is based on the standard edition of the work, edited and with commentary by C. de Boor (Leipzig, 2 volumes, 1883, 1885). The numbers in the left margin of the translation indicate the pagination in volume I of de Boor's edition: volume II consists of an edition of Anastasius' translation of Theophanes, as well as a most valuable and thorough commentary and indices."
p. xix: "A final perplexity facing the translator of Byzantine Greek lies in his method of transliterating proper names and toponyms. Where a person or place has a well-known English version (e.g. John, Jerusalem), I have used it. Most other names have been transliterated from Greek into English without a detour through Latin (Herakleios, not Heraclius). Exceptions are those names and titles of Latin origin (e.g. Valentinus, cubicularius), which are rendered in latinized form. Also excepted are most names of Arabic origin, which are given in their native form rather than disguised by hellenized spellings and nominal endings, as is Theohanes' usual practice."

THE CHRONICLES[edit]

[THIS PART IS ODA'S JOB!]

Treadgold, the Byzantine Revival, 780-842[edit]

Treadgold, Warren. (1988). The Byzantine Revival, 780-842. Stanford: Standford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-1462-2.

pp. 18-19: "To the north, the Bulgars posed a less serious threat than the Arabs, but they were still menacing enough. A race of pagan Turkish warriors, the original Bulgars had made vassals of the native Slavs and Romanians of the lower Danube basin. They did not have an organized state of the same sort as the Byzantines and Arabs, and their numbers, even including their much more numerous vassals, were probably less than a million. But most of the time the Bulgar khan was able to field an armyt hat was a match for the emperor's. In 780, however, after several sharp defeats at the hands of Constantine V, the Bulgars were less threatening than usual, because their army was not yet back to full strength and they were squabbling among themselves. Though Constantine had certainly not crushed Bulgaria, he had provoked his heirs with a breathing space before the Bulgars could recover."
p. 19: "West of the Bulgars were tribes of independent, pagan Slavs, whose lands the Byzantines called 'Slavinias'. The Slavs, who had no unified organization of any kind and were not particularly numerous or warlike, had migrated into Greece some two hundred years before, when the empire had faced more serious invasions elsewhere and the local population had been too small to defend itself. They had pushed the Byzantines out of the entire Greek peninsula except for the walled city of Thessalonica, a few coastal bases, and the theme of Hellas. In the rest of what we call Greece just enough Greek speakers and Christians remained to keep most towns from being utterly abandoned and their names forgotten. Any permanent reacquisition of the Slavinias in Greece would be a problem less of military conquest than of establishing a loyal population of sufficient size to hold the land. In the past no emperor had had a proper opportunity to attempt the resettlement of Greece with Byzantine subjects, especially because much of the land the empire still held had itself been depopulated. But in 780, with the Bulgars quiescent, things were beginning to change."
pp. 91-92: "In November [788], just before the expedition to Benevento landed in Italy, the Bulgars attacked a Byzantine army for the first time since the reign of Constantine V. Philetus, strategus of Thrace, had advanced to the new frontier of his enlarged province on the Strymon River, apparently pursuing Irene's plans for gradual annexation of the Slavic lands to the west. Since he expected no significant opposition from the Slavs, who seem never to have offered any, Philetus encamped without posting sentries. But he had not reckoned with the Bulgars to the north. A Bulgar force took him by surprise and killed him and many of his army. Though the enemy did not follow up their victory, they had already endangered Irene's acquisitions in Thrace. Worse still for Irene, this defeat was likely to give the impression to both Byzantines and Bulgars that she was losing the advantage over the Bulgars that Constantine V had achieved."
pp. 92-93: After summarizing the defeat of Byzantine forces in Calabria, near Benevento, against the Franks under Grimoald (loyal to Charlemagne): "In Thrace, Irene apparently concluded that the empire's expanded territory had too long a frontier for a single commander to defend and divided the theme into two parts. The eastern part, which continued to be called Thrace, included the frontier with the Bulgars and the main routes to the frontier from Constantinople. The remaining territory, the new theme of Macedonia, included the frontier with the Slavs in the west and its approaches from the capital. Irene simply divided the 6,000 men of the old theme of Thrace equally between the two without raising the official strength of the troops in the area; but by appointing two commanders and staffs instead of one she increased the flexibility of the empire's defense on the two frontiers. Further, by naming the new theme 'Macedonia' she implied that it was a base for further conquests, because Macedonia proper was actually the Slav-held land to the west of the frontier."
p. 98: "The young emperor [Constantine VI], just twenty years old, was eager to show that he could fight. In April 791, five months after his proclamation, he staged a campaign against the Bulgars, doubtless meant to recall his grandfather's many Bulgarian campaigns. Constantine commanded the army in person. Shortly before he reached the Bulgarian frontier, near the Byzantine fort of Probatum, the Bulgars came to meet him under their khan, Kardam. It was late in the day, and the two armies fought only a brief and indecisive battle before nightfall interrupted them. Then, strangely, both withdrew during the night, reportedly each from fear of the other. Perhaps Constantine was unwilling to risk defeat and was satisfied with showing the Byzantine standard, while the Bulgars, who had been forced to defend themselves, were not really prepared to fight and settled for a draw."
p. 100: "Ignoring his problems with the Armeniacs, that July [in 792] Constantine returned to the Bulgarian front. The khan Kardam had been raiding the border areas of the theme of Thrace, apparently in the first raids there since Irene had rebuilt and fortified Beroea-Irenopolis and Anchialus eight years before. Because these two strongholds were nearly a hundred miles apart, Constantine decided to rebuild another between them at Marcellae. He may well have planned this campaign as a peaceful ceremonial tour to inaugurate his new foundation, modeled on the visit that he and Irene had paid to their refoundations in 784. Appropriately for such a tour, he brought along, besides the tagmata and the armies of the themes of Thrace and Macedonia, a number of courtiers and extensive court trappings reminiscent of Irene's traveling orchestra. Unluckily for Constantine, on July 20 Kardam appeared outside Marcellae's new walls with the entire Bulgar army. Constantine was not prepared to fight such a large force; yet his reputation would suffer if he retreated."
pp. 100-101: "Among those in the imperial camp at Marcellae was the court astrologer Pancratius, who assured the emperor that if he fought he would win. Many reasonable Byzantines took such prophecies into account, but, realizing that some prophecies proved false, they also considered more mundane factors. Apparently relying quite blindly on Pancratius's prediction, Constantine sallied out at once against the enemy and lost disastrously. He himself managed to escape to Constantinople, but the Bulgars severely mauled his army, killed many stranded courtiers and imperial bodyguards, and captured the imperial tent and baggage, including money, horses, and assorted ceremonial equipment. Among the dead were Constantine V's old friend Michael Lachanodracon, the strategi Nicetas and Theognostus, who apparently commanded the themes of Thrace and Macedonia, and the inaccurate astrologer. By August some officers and soldiers of the tagmata who had fled to the capital, disillusioned with Constantine VI, met and hastily decided to proclaim Constantine V's son Nicephorus, priest though he was. When the young emperor heard of the plot, he found himself in a desperate position."
p. 102: "The Armeniacs' rebellion ha its effect on the empire's ability to defend itself. During the revolt Constantine ha apparently agreed to pay the Bulgars an annual tribute to procure peace in Thrace, which he continued to pay after the revolt was over. Soon after the Armeniacs were put down, the Arabs, based at their rebuilt stronghold of Adata, began to take advantage of the confused and demoralized state of the Byzantine troops on the frontier."
p. 146-147: "In 807 Nicephorus began to follow up his easy success in the Peloponnesus with an attempted annexation and settlement of lands farther north in the Balkan peninsula. Though the Bulgars would be annoyed, they were not comparable in power to the Arabs, and Nicephorus was quite willing to fight them. Besides, for the present the Bulgars were busy with wars to the north, where the dismemberment of the Avar khanate by Charlemagne had provided them with easy marks for conquest. While in the long run Nicephorus may have thought of driving the Bulgars out of the Balkans entirely and restoring the Danube frontier as it had been in the sixth century, for now he seems merely to have wanted the Bulgars cowed so that he could get on with the work of retaking the land to their south that was held by the Slavs. He accordingly prepared to lead an expedition against them in the spring of 807, without any provocation that has been recorded. It was to be the beginning of a great project that he would continue for the rest of his reign."
p. 147: "The emperor embarked upon his first expedition against the Bulgars with a force of some size in the spring of 807, but he never reached Bulgaria. When he came to Adrianople, the headquarters of the theme of Macedonia, Nicephorus learned of a conspiracy against him among his bodyguard and the tagmata, who naturally were taking part in the campaign. The conspirators, apparently junior officers, came fro Nicephorus's home territory of Cappadocia. Nicephorus had no trouble in foiling their plans, and punished them by whipping, confiscation, and exile. Possibly the conspirators were bitter about the devastation of their homelands in Cappadocia the previous year, and certainly the Arab successes and Nicephorus's humiliating peace had made the emperor look more vulnerable. THough after discovering the conspiracy Nicephorus returned to Constantinople, he apparently left some troops in the area under the strategus of Macedonia. These and the army of the theme of Macedonia, without attacking the Bulgars directly, soon advanced into Slavic territory to the west."