Second Bulgarian Empire

Politics and institutions

The Second Bulgarian Empire began as a tax revolt. In 1185 the brothers Peter and Asen demanded relief at Tarnovo, were refused, and raised the Bulgarians and Vlachs of the Balkan mountains; Peter took the crown, and the mountain capital held against imperial reconquest. The state they built was a tsardom of boyars and mountain fortresses, its prestige fought for in titles and marriages: Kaloyan pressed Rome for a crown and received one from a papal legate in 1204; Ivan Asen II married into the families of Hungary and Epirus and struck coins calling himself tsar of the Bulgarians and the Greeks. After 1241 the Asen line faded into regencies and boy tsars; the Terter and Shishman dynasties held a smaller realm, divided by appanages, until Tarnovo fell in 1393 and Vidin in 1396.

Economy and finance

The second empire lived on the same rivers and roads as the first, and on the Black Sea. Tarnovo commanded the Yantra gorge; Varna and the coastal towns carried grain, hides, wax and honey to Venetian and Genoese merchants, whose treaties with the tsars fixed tolls and quarters. Ivan Asen II could strike coins in the Byzantine manner, and the court's building programs — the churches on Tarnovo's cliffs, Ivan Alexander's painted Gospels of 1356 — presupposed a landed aristocracy and a working tax system. Mongol tribute after the 1240s drained both, and the fourteenth-century appanages of Tarnovo, Vidin and Dobruja spent their revenues on separate little courts rather than a common army.

Society and culture

Tarnovo styled itself a second Constantinople, and its culture made the claim plausible. The Bulgarian patriarchate, restored with the state, was recognized at Tarnovo in 1235; the Church of the Forty Martyrs held the royal tombs; and in 1259 the frescoes of the Boyana Church — the sebastocrator Kaloyan and his wife with lifelike, almost modern faces — were painted, among the most human portraits of medieval Europe. The fourteenth century belonged to the Tarnovo school: Patriarch Euthymius reformed the orthography of Church Slavonic and wrote the lives of the saints, hesychast monks spread from Mount Athos through the Bulgarian monasteries, and the illuminated manuscripts of Ivan Alexander's court traveled to Russian libraries, carrying Bulgarian styles eastward.

Military and frontiers

The empire's armies won their place with cavalry and Cuman bowmen. Kaloyan's victory at Adrianople in 1205 took the Latin emperor Baldwin captive; Ivan Asen II's march to Klokotnitsa in 1230 shattered the Epirote army of Theodore Doukas in a single afternoon. But the state that could beat Latins and Greeks could not beat the steppe: Mongol columns crossed the Danube from 1241, and tribute to the Golden Horde became permanent. Serbia's rise under Stefan Dušan cut away Macedonia, and the Ottomans learned the Balkans in the same decades. The battle of Maritsa in 1371 opened the pass; Tarnovo withstood a three-month siege in 1393 behind its walls, and Vidin, the last appanage, fell in 1396.

Foreign relations

The second empire's diplomacy worked every angle the first had taught it. Kaloyan exchanged embassies with Innocent III for a royal crown and church union on paper, then made war on the Latin Empire his chief business. Ivan Asen II balanced Byzantium of Nicaea — which recognized his patriarchate in 1235 — against Hungary, Epirus and the Latin remnants. The Mongol century turned Bulgaria into a tributary; the Serbian empire of Dušan turned Bulgaria into a neighbor to fear; and the Ottoman advance made vassalage the last diplomacy of the Shishman tsars, who paid tribute, sent sisters to the sultan's court, and fell anyway, one appanage at a time.

Legacy and influence

The Second Empire is the direct ancestor of modern Bulgaria's symbols: its capital, Tarnovo, is the national shrine, and its patriarchate the ancestor of the Bulgarian church that survived the Ottoman centuries underground. Euthymius's orthography became the classical standard of Church Slavonic, carried to Russia by refugee scribes; the Boyana frescoes are on UNESCO's list as European painting before the Renaissance. The fall of 1393–96 became the great rupture of national memory — five centuries without a state, kept alive by the church and the spoken language — and the revival of 1878 consciously re-founded Bulgaria on the second empire's map, with its constitution drafted at Tarnovo.