Byzantine Culture

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The Byzantine–Bulgarian Wars

From Asparukh's crossing in 680 to the fall of the Second Bulgarian Empire — the long contest between Constantinople and Bulgaria, its battles, conversions, and cultural consequences.

No neighbour occupied Byzantine attention for as long as Bulgaria. From 680, when a Bulgar confederation established itself south of the Danube on Roman soil, to 1018, when Basil II annexed the last of it, and again from 1185 to 1396 under a restored Bulgarian empire, the two states fought, traded, intermarried, converted one another’s populations and competed for the same imperial idea. Three Byzantine emperors were killed by Bulgarians. One Bulgarian ruler was raised in Constantinople and wanted the Byzantine throne.

The conflict is also, unusually among medieval wars, one in which the loser won something lasting: Bulgaria adopted Byzantine Christianity, law, art and court ceremonial, and became the channel through which all of it reached Serbia and the Rus.

Arrival, 680–681

The Bulgars were a Turkic-speaking confederation from the steppe north of the Black Sea. In the 670s, under pressure from the Khazars, a group under Asparukh moved west to the Danube delta. In 680 the emperor Constantine IV attacked them, mishandled the campaign in the marshy terrain of the Dobrudja, and was defeated. The treaty of 681 conceded territory south of the Danube and an annual payment — the first time the empire recognised a foreign state on land it considered Roman.

The new polity was a minority Bulgar aristocracy ruling a largely Slavic population, and within two centuries the Bulgar language had disappeared into Slavic.

The Eighth and Ninth Centuries

Relations alternated between alliance and open war with little warning. Khan Tervel helped break the Arab siege of 717–718 and was rewarded with the title kaisar — the first foreigner to receive it. Constantine V then campaigned against Bulgaria nine times between 755 and 775.

The most shocking Byzantine defeat came in 811. The emperor Nikephoros I invaded, sacked the Bulgar capital Pliska, refused terms, and was ambushed in a mountain pass on the return march. The army was destroyed and the emperor killed — the first Roman emperor to die in battle against a foreign enemy since Valens at Adrianople in 378. Khan Krum had the skull mounted in silver and used it as a drinking cup at feasts, an act the Byzantine chroniclers recorded with horror and which was, in steppe terms, an honour to a worthy opponent.

Krum then took Adrianople, deported its population, and appeared before the walls of Constantinople in 813, where an attempt to assassinate him during negotiations failed and made matters worse. He died in 814 while preparing a full assault.

The Conversion, 864

The decisive turn was religious. Boris I, ruling a state caught between two Christian empires, accepted baptism in 864 with the Byzantine emperor Michael III as his godfather, taking the name Michael.

Boris negotiated hard first. He opened talks with Rome in 866, sending Pope Nicholas I a famous list of 106 questions about Christian practice — whether Bulgarians might keep wearing trousers, what to do about their horse-tail battle standard, whether it was permissible to eat on the ground. Nicholas’s replies survive and are one of the best documents of a society being asked to change its habits wholesale. Boris was shopping for the best terms, and specifically for an autonomous church with its own archbishop. When Rome refused, he returned to Constantinople, which conceded more.

The consequence was enormous. Bulgaria received the Slavonic liturgy from the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, expelled from Moravia, who were welcomed at Pliska and later at Ohrid; the Cyrillic script was developed in Bulgaria in this generation; and Bulgaria became a literary culture in its own language, as described in the Cyrillic alphabet and the Byzantine missionaries.

Simeon the Great, 893–927

Boris’s son Simeon had been educated in Constantinople and knew exactly what he wanted: to be emperor of the Romans and Bulgarians, in Constantinople.

He fought Byzantium for most of his reign, won a crushing victory at Achelous in 917 — one of the largest battles of the Middle Ages, on a battlefield where the bones were still visible seventy-five years later according to a Byzantine visitor — and repeatedly appeared before the walls of the capital. He never took it, because he had no fleet.

In 913 he extracted a coronation of some kind from the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos outside the walls, and later adopted the title tsar (from caesar) and had a Bulgarian patriarchate proclaimed. He also presided over a golden age of Slavonic letters at his capital Preslav, commissioning translations of Greek theology and history on a large scale. Byzantine culture was being absorbed by the state trying to conquer Byzantium, which is the recurrent irony of the whole relationship.

Simeon died in 927, and his successor Peter made a lasting peace, married a Byzantine princess, and was recognised as tsar.

The Conquest, 971–1018

The First Bulgarian Empire ended in two stages. In 971 John I Tzimiskes, having defeated a Rus invasion of Bulgaria under Svyatoslav, annexed the eastern half and paraded the Bulgarian regalia in a triumph at Constantinople. The western half survived under Samuel, and the resulting thirty-year war with Basil II is treated in Basil II and the Battle of Kleidion.

The annexation of 1018 was followed by a settlement designed to be tolerable: taxation in kind, the preservation of the autocephalous archbishopric of Ohrid, and Byzantine titles for the Bulgarian nobility. It held for a generation, then broke down when payment in coin was demanded, producing revolts in 1040–1041 and 1072.

The Second Bulgarian Empire, 1185–1396

In 1185 two brothers, Peter and Asen, raised a revolt in the Balkan mountains — the immediate grievance being a tax levied for an imperial wedding. The empire, distracted and badly led under the Angeloi, failed to suppress it. By 1186 a restored Bulgarian state existed at Tarnovo.

Its most dangerous moment for Byzantium came after 1204. Tsar Kaloyan, having been rebuffed in his offer of alliance by the new Latin emperor, destroyed the Latin army at Adrianople in April 1205 and captured the emperor Baldwin I, who died in captivity at Tarnovo. Bulgaria briefly became the strongest power in the Balkans under Ivan Asen II (1218–1241), whose realm ran from the Adriatic to the Black Sea.

Both states then declined together, squeezed by Serbia in the fourteenth century and conquered by the Ottomans within a generation of each other: Bulgaria’s capital Tarnovo fell in 1393, the last Bulgarian territory in 1396, and Constantinople in 1453.

What the Wars Produced

A shared civilisation. Bulgarian church architecture, painting, court titles, legal codes and monastic practice are Byzantine in origin, adapted locally. The reverse traffic was smaller but real: Slavonic literature, developed in Bulgaria, carried Byzantine texts to Serbia and Russia in a form the Greeks themselves could not have supplied.

A rival imperial claim. Simeon’s and Ivan Asen’s use of the title tsar established the principle that the Byzantine imperial idea could be transplanted. The Serbian ruler Stefan Dušan did the same in 1346; Moscow would do it in a different form, as the Third Rome describes.

A strategic exhaustion. Three centuries of Balkan campaigning consumed resources the empire needed on its eastern frontier. The most sympathetic reading of Byzantine policy is that Bulgaria was too close to the capital to be tolerated as an independent power; the least sympathetic is that the empire spent its strength destroying a neighbour that had already adopted its religion and much of its culture, and then had nothing left when the Seljuks arrived.

The Wars in Sequence

The relationship is easier to hold in mind as a chronology than as a narrative.

DateEvent
680–681Asparukh defeats Constantine IV; Bulgar state recognised south of the Danube
717–718Khan Tervel helps break the Arab siege; receives the title kaisar
755–775Constantine V campaigns nine times against Bulgaria
811Nikephoros I sacks Pliska, is ambushed and killed; Krum makes a cup of his skull
813–814Krum takes Adrianople, appears before Constantinople, dies preparing an assault
864Boris I accepts baptism from Constantinople
893–927Simeon’s wars; victory at Achelous in 917; the title tsar
971John I Tzimiskes annexes eastern Bulgaria
986Basil II routed at Trajan’s Gate
1014Kleidion; Samuel dies
1018Bulgaria annexed; Ohrid archbishopric preserved
1040–41, 1072Revolts after the tax settlement is withdrawn
1185Peter and Asen revolt; Second Bulgarian Empire founded
1205Kaloyan destroys the Latin army at Adrianople
1230Ivan Asen II defeats Epiros at Klokotnitsa; Bulgaria dominant in the Balkans
1393–96Ottoman conquest of Bulgaria

Krum’s Cup

The best-known image from these wars deserves a note, because it is usually told as an atrocity and was something more specific.

After the destruction of Nikephoros I’s army in the passes in 811, Krum had the emperor’s skull lined with silver and used it as a drinking cup at feasts, offering it to his Slavic chieftains.

Byzantine chroniclers recorded it with horror, and it has been repeated ever since as evidence of barbarism. In steppe practice — attested among the Scythians by Herodotus and among later Turkic peoples — drinking from a defeated enemy’s skull is an honour paid to a worthy opponent and a claim on his strength. Krum was making a political statement to his own nobility about what he had accomplished, in a vocabulary they understood.

That does not make it less grim. It does mean that reading it as gratuitous savagery misses what was being communicated.

Why the 1018 Settlement Held and Then Failed

Basil II’s terms were deliberately generous, and the reasons for both the generosity and the eventual failure are instructive.

The concessions — taxation in kind rather than coin, the preservation of the autocephalous archbishopric of Ohrid, Byzantine titles and estates for the Bulgarian nobility — were designed to make annexation tolerable to the people who could otherwise organise resistance. They worked for about twenty-five years.

The failure came in the 1040s when the treasury, under pressure, converted the tax obligation to coin. In an economy where most transactions were in kind, this was not a technical adjustment: it forced peasants to sell produce for currency they had no reliable access to, at whatever price a buyer offered. The effective increase was severe.

Two major revolts followed, and Byzantine authority in the Balkan interior was never secure again. The pattern — a conquest made durable by concession, then destabilised by a fiscal decision taken for unrelated reasons in the capital — recurs often enough in Byzantine provincial history to count as a structural weakness.

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