It gave the Slavic world its alphabet and the Byzantine Empire its worst nightmares — not once, but twice. Between the Danube and the Aegean, Bulgaria built a medieval empire that humbled emperors in Constantinople, and then did it all over again four centuries later.
The empire in images
The rise
The Bulgars were steppe warriors who crossed the Danube around 680 under Khan Asparuh and settled the lands of today's northeastern Bulgaria. In 681 the Byzantine emperor, exhausted by wars on other fronts, signed a treaty recognizing the new Bulgarian state — the founding act of a country whose name has survived, unbroken, for more than thirteen centuries.
The decisive turn came in 864, when Khan Boris I accepted Christianity — a calculated move that plugged Bulgaria into the Byzantine cultural world while asserting its independence from it. Boris secured an autonomous Bulgarian church, and his successors welcomed the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, the missionaries to the Slavs. In their monasteries, scholars shaped the Cyrillic script — named for Cyril — which would carry literacy, law, and liturgy across the Slavic world.
The zenith
Under Simeon I the Great (r. 893–927), Bulgaria reached its first zenith: a Golden Age of literature centered on the new capital Preslav, and an empire stretching from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. Simeon styled himself “Emperor of the Bulgarians and the Romans,” besieged Constantinople itself, and came closer than any ruler before the Ottomans to seizing the Byzantine throne by force of arms.
The second act began in 1185, when the brothers Asen and Peter led an uprising against Byzantine taxation and restored the Bulgarian Empire with its capital at Tarnovo. Under Ivan Asen II (r. 1218–1241) the empire again dominated the Balkans, its merchants trading from Venice to the Black Sea, its churches and fortresses crowning the hills of Tarnovo — the “Third Rome” of Bulgarian memory, centuries before Moscow claimed the title.
The fall
The first empire died at the hands of Basil II, the Byzantine emperor history calls the Bulgar-slayer. At Kleidion in 1014 Basil annihilated the Bulgarian army and ordered 15,000 prisoners blinded — every hundredth man left with one eye, to lead the rest home. The Bulgarian tsar reportedly died of shock at the sight. By 1018 the first empire was gone, absorbed into Byzantium.
The second empire fell more slowly, ground down by Mongol raids, Hungarian and Serbian pressure, and finally the Ottoman advance. Tarnovo fell in 1393 after a three-month siege; the last Bulgarian stronghold, Vidin, fell in 1396. Bulgaria would not be free again for nearly five centuries — but it never forgot it had once been an empire.
The legacy
The alphabet is the empire that never fell. Cyrillic is used today by more than 250 million people, from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar — every Russian novel, every Bulgarian street sign, a daily echo of Preslav's scriptoria. Bulgaria's medieval statehood also gave modern Bulgaria its founding myth: when independence was restored in 1878, the new state reached straight back to Simeon and Asen for its legitimacy.
And there is the matter of the name. Few European states can trace their name to the seventh century; Bulgaria can. Thirteen centuries of “Bulgaria” on the map — empires rose and vanished around it, but the name endured, which may be the strangest victory of all.
The name of Bulgaria has outlasted thirteen centuries — longer than most of the empires that tried to erase it. There are worse definitions of victory.