Sailing from Byzantium (22 page)

Against this pagan/Turkic influence among the nobility were balanced the couple of hundred Greek priests now spreading the word among the Slavic peasantry. Yet, they answered not to Boris but to the patriarch of Constantinople and the Byzantine emperor.

Both the boyars and the priests, in other words, constituted potent internal threats to Boris’ own authority. Until a solution could be found, Boris’ rule would amount to a balancing act between these opposing forces.

Cut to the northern shore of the Danube River in the year 885, perhaps seven or eight months after Methodius’ death. It is winter. A contingent of Frankish soldiers has escorted a little band of his ragged and downcast disciples to the river, which is not blue but slate gray. Their leader is Clement, and with them also is Clement's lieutenant, Naum. They have likely been imprisoned for the past few months somewhere, perhaps in Svatopluk's palace at Nitra.

With them now they have their precious books and probably little else. They cross the Danube on a flimsy raft held together by ropes made of bark, and when they step off the raft into the cold water that laps the far shore of the river, they are on Bulgarian soil.

The death of Methodius and the expulsion of his followers from Moravia sealed the fate of the Slavonic legacy in central Europe, though in a few isolated pockets it hung on as late as the eleventh century. But Boris knew a good thing when he saw one, and he wasted no time in inviting the missionaries to his capital, Pliska, where he offered them accommodations at the homes of some of his prominent supporters.

He also held what appears to have been a series of confidential meetings with them, which resulted in a careful plan to establish and promote the Slavonic liturgy in Bulgaria. Owing to the success of this plan, Clement and Naum would eventually be venerated as Orthodox saints and the saviors of the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition.

The Slavonic liturgy offered the perfect solution to Boris’ problems. As other Slavic rulers would discover, it held out all the benefits of membership in the emerging Byzantine Commonwealth, yet in theory at least it allowed them a high degree of religious and political independence. It also gave due place to Slavic pride, and helped Boris forge a new national identity based on common worship in a common language. Now for the first time we can truly begin to speak of a Bulgarian people, rather than of Slavs and Bulgars in uneasy coexistence.

Aside from Boris’ political reasons for embracing the Slavonic liturgy, a number of other factors combined to give the tradition a better chance in its new environment than it ever had in Moravia. While the Moravians and other Slavs were able to understand the Old Church Slavonic that Cyril had created, it was based not on their own spoken dialect but on that shared by the Macedonians and Bulgarians, and so in Bulgaria it enjoyed a simple linguistic advantage. Bulgaria, in
that sense, was its home turf; Old Church Slavonic is sometimes called “Old Bulgarian.”

And as Byzantium's next-door neighbor, Bulgaria was close enough for easy access. While this worked for the Greek priests who still came into Bulgaria, it also worked for the Bulgarian priests who now increasingly went to Constantinople for their training in Slavonic. Like Boris, Basil and his successors knew a good thing when they saw it, and they offered the Slavonic mission their full support. This policy was well known at the time, since one of Basil's envoys, stopping in Venice and seeing a group of Methodius’ former disciples offered up for sale as slaves, was so confident of the emperor's blessing that he bought them and sent them back to Constantinople. From there, they most likely ended up rejoining their brethren in Bulgaria.

Finally, Clement and Naum themselves were both Bulgarian by birth, though they had spent much of their adult lives outside their homeland. Clement was probably in his middle to late forties, which would put his birth sometime around 840. Naum was perhaps ten years older. Both are known to have accompanied Cyril and Methodius to Rome in 868, where they were ordained as priests, and so presumably both had returned to Moravia with Methodius and stuck by him through all the years of adversity.

Naum stayed in Pliska, teaching and carrying on the seemingly endless work of translating, while Clement went to the other end of the country, to the region of Lake Ohrid in southwestern Bulgaria (now Macedonia). Where Pliska in the Dobrudja was probably still largely Turkic in population, the Macedonian hinterland was entirely Slavic. As a result of the two priests’ efforts, both soon turned into major centers of Slavonic culture. Ohrid in particular, where Clement is said to have taught 3,500 students over the next thirty
years, became a hub from which the Slavonic tradition would radiate outward to nearby Serbia and eventually to the Rus in the far north.

In 889 Boris abdicated in favor of his oldest son, Vladimir, resigning his earthly power to pursue the contemplative life of a monk. The resentful boyars had been biding their time, and they now mounted a last-ditch defense of their pagan and Turkic birthright, intimidating the weak-willed Vladimir into reversing course. Over the next several years Bulgaria was dominated by a reaction against Christianity and Byzantium, in which priests were persecuted and the regime allied itself politically with the Franks. Finally, Boris came out of retirement and put his foot down. After removing Vladimir from power and having him blinded, Boris installed his third son, Symeon, on the throne.

Devoutly Orthodox, Symeon had spent much of his youth in Constantinople, where he enjoyed at least some of the fruits of a Byzantine education. Under his long rule, the Slavonic tradition in Bulgaria would return to the rapid growth it had enjoyed under Boris. However, if the Byzantines thought that Symeon's accession was going to usher in a period of peace and friendship between the two neighbors, they had sadly underestimated Symeon's world-class ambitions.

ymeon the Great stands out as medieval Bulgaria's strongest and most determined ruler, an energetic visionary whose acquisitive ardor would nearly bring Byzantium to its knees. In a reign that lasted more than three decades, Symeon never once broke his gaze from the shimmering fascination of Constantinople, Tsargrad, as the Slavs knew it, the city of the caesars. He strove to emulate Byzantium, yet at the same time he longed to seduce it, to win it, and ultimately possess it.

Born around the time his father, Boris, converted to Christianity, the mid-860s, Symeon was raised as a Christian and was sent to Constantinople for religious training as a boy of thirteen or fourteen. He spent a decade studying in a monastery in the Byzantine capital, returning to Bulgaria a few years after the arrival of Clement and Naum and Boris’ adoption of the Slavonic liturgy.

On returning to Bulgaria from his Byzantine sojourn, Symeon entered a monastery founded by his father in the city of Preslav, near Pliska in the Dobrudja but a bit closer to
Constantinople. There he took a leading role in the translation movement that was rapidly augmenting the amount of Greek religious literature available in Slavonic. Preslav was predominantly Slavic and Christian, while Pliska was a holdout of the Turkic and pagan boyars. When Boris installed Symeon on the throne, the old khan also arranged for Symeon to rule from Preslav as his capital.

Symeon added to the number of monasteries and churches his father had already built there, and Preslav and Bulgaria entered a period of growth and prosperity. Trade between the two neighbors throve under a series of liberal commercial treaties. In addition to raw materials such as honey, fur, and wax, Bulgaria now boasted artisans who produced many fine goods. Bulgarian craftsmen were especially famous for their coveted tile work, which soon became a favored luxury import of the Byzantines.

Boris had gone to great lengths to avoid military confrontations with his powerful neighbor. Symeon appears to have sought them out from the start. If he was looking for an excuse for war, he didn't have long to wait. Within a year of Symeon's accession, influential Byzantine merchants used their clout with the emperor to have Byzantine trade laws changed to Bulgaria's disadvantage. Symeon protested strenuously and was ignored. Immediately, he invaded Byzantine territory with a large army, inflicting a crushing defeat on the Byzantine force sent to repel him and ravaging the Thracian countryside around Constantinople.

The main Byzantine army was occupied in the east, and so the Byzantines fell back on a time-honored diplomatic
ploy that had worked for them many times in the past: they bribed a warlike barbarian tribe, the Magyars, to attack Symeon's army from the rear. Symeon sued for peace, but— going the Byzantines one better—he also arranged for an even more warlike tribe of barbarians, the Pechenegs, to fall upon the Magyars from the rear. When they did so, the Bulgarians hit the Magyars from the front, with the result that the Magyars were trounced and fled in disarray to the Hungarian plain.
^∗
Symeon then inflicted another sharp defeat on the Byzantines.

In case anyone in Byzantium missed the point of his diplomatic maneuvering, Symeon sarcastically drove it home in the negotiations over prisoners of war. The emperor Leo VI, he observed, had impressed everyone the year before by predicting a solar eclipse.
^†
He was rumored to have great astronomical knowledge. If the emperor's knowledge was so wonderful, Symeon told the Byzantine ambassador, then the emperor should also be able to say whether Symeon intended to return the prisoners. “So prophesy one thing or the other, and if you know my intentions, you shall get the prisoners as reward for your prophecy and your embassy, by God!”

In other words, Symeon would return the prisoners if the ambassador could tell him whether he intended to. This was an ancient logical conundrum of the sort with which any educated Greek was well familiar. Drawing on his Constanti-nopolitan education, the Bulgarian ruler was proclaiming his intention to out-Byzantine the Byzantines.

Symeon's military and diplomatic prowess wrung significant concessions from the Byzantines in the treaty that concluded the war in 897, and the ensuing peace lasted
for sixteen years, until the year after Leo VI's death in 912. During that time, however, Symeon hardly stood pat. Taking advantage of Byzantine reverses at the hands of the Arabs, Symeon expanded Bulgaria's territory south and west, occupying the new lands bit by bit, each encroachment carefully calculated to be just short of worth going to war over.

Leo's successor, his brother Alexander, reversed Leo's policy of appeasement, insulting Symeon by cutting off the tribute payment stipulated by the peace treaty, but dying only a year after coming to power, before Symeon could really demonstrate how eager he was for a scrap. In Constantinople, power devolved upon a council of regents, whom Alexander selected to stand in for his successor, Leo's sickly seven-year-old son, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.

From this inauspicious beginning, incidentally, Constantine VII would grow up not only to rule as emperor but also to compose the major historical source for this period, the
De Administrando Imperio,
“On Ruling the Empire.” A sort of primer for emperors put together from Byzantine diplomatic reports, it covers the early history of many of Byzantium's neighbors, including the Bulgars and Serbs.

Constantine VII's regents now had to deal with the full force of Symeon's wrath. They were led by the imperious patriarch of Constantinople, Nicholas Mysticus, whose influence would soon be challenged by Leo's widow and Constantine's mother, the empress Zoe, currently exiled to a monastery
^∗
The regents’ difficulties were heightened when the commander of the army revolted. As Byzantium floundered,
Symeon once again marched his Bulgarians right up to the big walls, where they set up camp.

The war that ensued, the second and last of Symeon's wars of emulation, lasted a decade and a half. Aside from Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, our view of it comes largely from the many letters written to Symeon by Nicholas Mysticus over its duration. The correspondence shows the war almost as a duel between these two strong-willed individuals. By turns flattering, cajoling, conciliatory, didactic, blandly menacing, and directly threatening, Nicholas over the years offered Symeon almost every comfort but the one he sought. The patriarch stood resolute that never could Symeon, a Christian perhaps but still a barbarian, occupy the Byzantine throne.

Like ambitious kings in the West, Symeon coveted the title “emperor of the Romans” above all else. At the symbolic heart of this second war lay Symeon's mysterious “coronation” by Nicholas Mysticus in September 913, soon after the Bulgarians’ arrival before the city walls. But it seems to have been as emperor of the Bulgarians, not the Romans, that Nicholas crowned Symeon. More satisfying at the time would have been the betrothal of Symeon's daughter to the young Constantine VII. Being the father-in-law of an emperor was a well-established stepping-stone to the Byzantine throne, as Symeon would have known, and recognition as an emperor, even if only of the Bulgarians, was at least a step in the right direction.

Symeon was appeased for the moment and withdrew to await developments. He probably figured time was on his side. But the following year, the empress Zoe emerged from her monastery, ousted Nicholas Mysticus from the regency, and, taking over the regency herself, repudiated Symeon's new title and the betrothal agreement. This brought the
Bulgars crashing back down on Byzantium, and when Symeon captured the important city of Adrianople in Thrace, Zoe was forced to reaffirm both title and betrothal in exchange for getting Adrianople back. For several years, the war continued on a low level as each side engaged in diplomatic maneuvering, searching for allies to attack the other.

Then the Bulgarians scored a great victory at Achelous, on the Black Sea, virtually wiping out the Byzantine army. Zoe's regime was discredited. But from Symeon's perspective the victory only made things worse. Another regime change took place in Constantinople, as the admiral Romanus Lecapenus seized power and had his own daughter married to Constantine VII.

Symeon found himself decisively preempted on his hoped-for ascent to the Byzantine throne. He was predictably enraged, all the more so when Romanus had himself crowned co-emperor in 920. Romanus, not Symeon, was now the effective Byzantine emperor. Symeon rudely refused to answer Romanus’ letters, acknowledging only those from Nicholas Mysticus. Burning with frustration, Symeon demanded that Romanus abdicate in his favor. Once again, Nicholas’ own verbose missives, carefully styled with exquisitely infuriating condescension, offered everything to Symeon but that.

Symeon now controlled the Balkans. Over the next several years, he rampaged through rural Thrace, repeatedly burning and pillaging right up to the walls of Constantinople. Yet, he could not break through. In desperation he even turned to an infidel, the Fatimid caliph of Egypt, who apparently agreed to provide the needed naval fleet, but when Symeon assembled his army before the walls the Muslims failed to show.

Finally the stalemate brought both sides to the negotiating table, in a personal summit meeting between Symeon
and Romanus. Because mutual suspicions ran so deep, they met on a specially constructed pier in the Golden Horn, just outside the city walls, so that Symeon could get there securely by land and Romanus could come from inside the walls by boat. Symeon's retinue made a point of conspicuously hailing him as emperor, but the Byzantine chroniclers who recorded the meeting (embellishing their accounts with firm, compelling speeches from Romanus and garbled, incorrect Greek from Symeon, both probably made up by the chroniclers) left no word on the outcome. All we're told is that an omen occurred: “They say that two eagles flew overhead while the emperors were meeting and cried out and copulated and that they immediately separated from each other and one went toward the city while the other flew toward Thrace.” This may reflect a peace settlement of some kind, and it seems to put the two “emperors” on an equal footing with each other, which is interesting.

If there was a peace agreement, it didn't last long, as perhaps the omen also retrospectively suggests, with the eagles going their separate ways after copulating. After annexing Serbia outright in 924, Symeon would appear to have begun styling himself “emperor of the Bulgarians and Romans.” At least, that's the clear implication in a letter to him from the emperor Romanus, written in 925 after the death of Nicholas Mysticus that May. Any original document in which Symeon may have called himself that has not survived. However, a seal from Symeon's administration does survive on which the Bulgarian ruler calls himself “emperor of the Romans.” Though its exact date is uncertain, this seal would seem to reflect Symeon's own highest aspiration.

On the other hand, if he did crown Symeon emperor of the Bulgarians, Nicholas Mysticus isn't seen calling him that in the surviving version of his letters, which all (like those of
Romanus) address Symeon only as “prince.” Symeon had pushed things so far, perhaps, that despite having crowned him, Nicholas may have thought better of addressing him as “emperor” of anything. Nicholas expunged all reference to the coronation in his own letters, editing them for posterity by removing allusions to an event that had become an embarrassment to him.

Having annexed Serbia, Symeon next set his sights on his powerful new neighbor to Serbia's west, Croatia, but met a sharp defeat in 926 at the hands of that Slavic kingdom's greatest medieval ruler, King Tomislav. Despite this chastening, the following spring Symeon readied a huge invasion force and marched toward Constantinople. In May 927, as he once again led an army toward the walls that had so effectively thwarted his life's ambition, Symeon's heart gave out. He was 63.

Symeon's obsession had cost his people dearly, for the years of warfare left Bulgaria devastated and broke. Though the country recovered, it would be decades before Bulgaria was a power in the Balkans again, and never the way it had been under Symeon. Serbia, annexed by Symeon, broke away right after Symeon's death. Symeon's son and successor, Peter, signed a peace treaty with Byzantium acknowledging the emperor Romanus as his “spiritual father,” in return for which Peter was confirmed in the title accorded to Symeon, “emperor
(tsar)
of the Bulgarians.”
^∗
In addition, Peter was rewarded with a prestigious marriage to Romanus’ granddaughter, a Byzantine princess.

Forty years of peace followed between Byzantium and Bulgaria, during which Christianity in Bulgaria continued to
grow and prosper. The biggest development of Symeon's reign was a new Slavonic alphabet, ironically called Cyrillic, which originated in Bulgaria decades after Cyril's death and may have been invented by Methodius’ disciple Clement of Ohrid (though most scholars now doubt this). Based much more closely on Greek letters, it was also far simpler than Glagolitic, and now began rapidly to replace it in Old Church Slavonic literature.