DYNASTY OF ASENOVTSI ~ LETTER CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN KALOJAN AND INNOCENT III

Ever since the time in the sixth century when the Serb tribes crossed the Danube, they necessarily played a part in the history of the Balkan peninsula. The reader will recall that they settled in small separate organizations or clans, that they were rude barbarians living by hunting and herding but also, in growing measure, by agriculture, and that they were drawn into the circle of Greek civilization when, in the ninth century, they accepted the form of Christianity represented by Constantinople. We have thus far had chiefly to do with the Slavs of the lower Danube who, conquered by the Mongolian Bulgars, fused with their masters and created the Bulgar state. The history of the first Slav state of Balkania, its greatness under the Tsars Simeon and Samuel, and its final overthrow (1018) by Emperor Basil, the Bulgar-killer, has received our close attention.

The Slavs to the west of the Bulgars for a long time founded no state and, continuing to live in scattered groups, were dangerous neither to the Bulgars nor the Greeks. Starting with a passionate and natural preference for their ancient tribal organization with its local independence, they were confirmed in their conservatism by the mountainous character of the country, which made communication difficult and tended to confine each tribe within a closely circumscribed district. When, in the ninth century, under the auspices of the missionary movement associated with the names of the Apostles Method and Cyril, Christianity with its close-spun and far-reaching ecclesiastical ties penetrated the mountains, it helped to develop a growing sense of nearness and kinship, of which irrefutable evidence was presently supplied in the adoption by the upland clans of a common name, the name of Serbs. A similar movement toward association among the tribes still farther west, at the head of the Adriatic, led to the adoption by them of the designation Croats. Essentially the same peoples racially, that is, South Slavs, Serbs and Croats have been divided down to our own day. The chief reason is to be found in the circumstance that the Croats took their Christianity and civilization not, like the Serbs, from Constantinople but, like the German tribes, from the great western hearth of faith, from Rome. Not only did the Catholic Croats thereby become separated in fundamental ways of thought from the Orthodox Serbs, but, geographically close to Central Europe and in active, cultural exchange with it, they fell into gradual political dependence on their nearest neighbor, Hungary. By virtue of these associations the fate of the Croats became tied up with the peoples to the west and north of them and has been relatively little affected by developments in Balkania. The Croats will therefore only occasionally engage our attention, while the Serbs, holding the very heart of the mountainous interior, will be found to supply one of the main strands of Balkan history.

For four hundred years, from Heraclius in the seventh century to Basil II in the eleventh, the Serb tribes lived in fairly amicable relations with their powerful neighbor, the Greek empire. Their heads, called zupans, as a rule acknowledged the suzerainty of the Greek rulers and even paid them an occasional tribute. As the conduct of local affairs, involving justice and taxes, remained in the hands of the tribes, they looked upon themselves as substantially independent and were fully justified in so doing. This happy condition of primitive liberty was first threatened not by the Greeks but by the Bulgars. Under the rulers, Boris and Simeon, the rising Bulgar state attempted to extend its boundaries westward and for a time brought much of the Serb area under Bulgar control. To meet this unwelcome pressure the Serb chiefs
sought the alliance of the Greeks, who, equally exposed with the Serbs to the movement of Bulgar conquest, readily joined hands with the threatened Slavs. We have followed the turns in this struggle for hegemony to the final victory of the Greek empire, which in 1018 destroyed its Bulgar rival and absorbed its territory.

Most likely the end of Bulgaria filled the Serb tribes with delight. But with the Bulgar threat removed, a new danger loomed above the horizon in the strengthened Byzantine state now exercising an unchallenged ascendancy in the peninsula. The Greek and in point of fact the Basilian sovereigns, full of a haughty sense of power, were no longer minded to be content with the the Bulgar old meaningless vassalage of the Serbs. Thinking to give it a more substantial character, they began to bring pressure to bear which, by deeply irritating the native tribes, gradually terminated the era of cordiality and precipitated a struggle on the part of the Serbs for full independence. The Serb movement started when, shortly after the death of Basil II in 1025, the signs of disorganization in the Greek state began to multiply. Successes of the Serbs who, familiar with the pathless mountains and narrow gorges of their home, inflicted severe losses on the Greek troops, are reported by the chroniclers as early as 1040. On the strength of these victories a Serb zupan of the coast region went the bold length of assuming the title king and the style of an independent sovereign; but throughout the eleventh century and even during the twelfth the military resources of the Byzantine empire proved on the whole to be such that the Greeks in the long run always succeeded in forcing the Serbs to admit their inferior status.

It should be understood that the information which has come down to us regarding the Serb people during the early medieval centuries is very fragmentary and unsatisfactory. We know, however, for certain that, by the eleventh century, not only the movement of resistance to the Greek empire was well under way but also that the necessities of the struggle for existence against the Greeks as well as against the neighbors to the north, the Magyars, were beginning to consolidate the scattered tribes into larger units. More particularly in two areas, the one located on the Adriatic coast between the lake of Scutari and the bay of Cattaro, the other in the mountainous interior along the Ibar river, definite steps were taken toward improved political organization.

In the coastal region a state arose called Zeta, while in the interior another raised its head, which from its central stronghold received the name of Rascia; and as the sponsor and chief of each of these creations appeared a new official with the title Grand zupan. Undoubtedly this dignitary represented a logical development from the ancient tribal chief, the zupan, and was set above the other zupans as their overlord, at first only for the limited period of some special emergency like war. Having proved his worth against the enemy, he was enabled to capitalize his renown by making his office more or less permanent. Grand zupans of both the Zeta and Rascia districts come and go amidst a confusion which the scanty records refuse to clear up until we reach the second half of the twelfth century. Then, with apparent suddenness, a Grand zupan of Rascia began a startlingly successful activity forever memorable in Serb annals because it joined together for the first time nearly all the Serb tribes. I am referring to Stephen Nemania in whom the Serbs honor the founder of their political greatness.

Over Stephen Nemania too, in spite of his importance, documents throw but a grudging light. Though descended from ancient Serb chief tarns, he apparently did not inherit but usurped the power in the Ibar region, where lay the zupanate of Rascia. In any case the role of usurper comports well with the audacious energy which marked the man. If we assume, as is usually done, that he became Grand zupan of Rascia around 1165, we may credit him with a reign, marked by dogged purpose, of more than a quarter of a century, for he resigned the throne — of this date we are certain — in 1196. In those thirty years of power he either drove all the other zupans and grand zupans from office or made them bow down before his might, thus for the first time merging the coast and mountain districts into a political whole. The unification, largely the result of one man's enterprise and vision, admits of no dispute, but touching the steps of the interesting process we are left very much in the dark.

In organizing the Serbs as a nation, Stephen had primarily in mind the freeing of them from the ancient and easy but, latterly, galling Greek yoke. This was no new idea for, as we have seen, the struggle for Serb independence had been intermittently going on since the days of the last Basilians, that is, for a hundred years before Stephen's time. Stephen in a restless, ambitious way engaged in many wars with the Byzantine empire, and on these wars, reported by Greek chroniclers, we are much better informed than on the purely domestic concerns of the Serbs. A bold warrior, the Serb chief at times won important victories over his enemies, but, viewing his campaigns in the long perspective of his reign, we become aware that, for all his being head of a united Serbia, he was not yet a match for the heir of the Roman strength. On more than one occasion he was obliged to make peace with the Byzantine ruler by the most abject surrender. Doubtless he looked toward independence as toward the Promised Land, but he did not live to enter it and he closed his reign as he began, the vassal of the Greek state. After a lifetime of intense activity he made up his mind to bid farewell to strife and, resigning his power into the hands of his son, he withdrew — a characteristic medieval ending — to a monastery on Mt. Athos in order to prepare himself for death by prayer and contemplation.

The solid achievements of Stephan Nemania, coupled with the reputation for holiness to which his monastic retirement gave birth, accumulated such prestige around his name that he was enabled to found a dynasty. It lasted for two hundred years and carried the Serb state to its medieval apogee. Stephen's crowned king, successor, also called Stephen (1196-1228), was a prudent diplomat and warrior who realized his father's dream of Serb independence without the necessity of striking a blow. His reign befell in the time when the Latin West through the agency of the Fourth Crusade put an end to the Greek empire (1204), thereby accommodatingly, though quite unintentionally, promoting the interests of Serbia. Automatically, on the fall of Constantinople, the struggling Slav state became free and Stephen was enabled to concentrate his attention on making that freedom as secure as possible by means of a general recognition by his neighbors. As we have seen, his father, as a Greek vassal, was never anything but a Grand zupan; the son aspired to the title king. As in his eyes and in those of his contemporaries only the church had authority to grant this highest dignity, he opened negotiations with the pope at Rome, which in 1217 led to his being crowned by a papal legate king of Serbia. However, the Serbs were Orthodox, not Catholic Christians, and Stephen shrewdly argued that if the western blessing was good, the eastern was still better. He consequently appealed to the patriarch of Constantinople, who, in dire straits just then, in fact, owing to the Latin conquest of Byzantium, in painful exile in Asia Minor, made concessions which he would not have entertained for a moment in his more prosperous days. Without wholly severing the Serb church from the Greek patriarchate, he nevertheless gave it a national character and unity by putting it under the king's younger brother, Sava, as archbishop. Then, in 1222, he authorized a second coronation, conducted by Sava in strict accordance with the rites of the Orthodox church.

Sava, considered a very holy man in his time, became after his death St. Sava, a cloudy, legendary figure working countless miracles and worshiped as one of the leading patrons and heavenly intercessors of his people. In a superstitious age the reputation for holiness of this scion of the ruling house added to the security of the Nemania dynasty in hardly less degree than the double coronation of Stephen I and the adoption of the mystic and authoritative title king. It should be observed that the royal successors of Stephen Nemania all bear the name Stephen, though often, for purposes of distinction, with another name attached. They clung to the name, partly because by means of it they emphasized their descent from the founder of the state, and partly because they desired to gain the protection of St. Stephen,
the proto-martyr of the Christian faith, whom the Serb people worshiped as their patron-saint. Taking stock of the long reign of Stephen I, we cannot refuse him our regard as an energetic promoter of his people's fortunes, for he left a state and a church free, or as good as free, from Greek control.

In the days of the first king and of his immediate successors the affairs of the Balkan peninsula remained inextricably ensnarled. While the Latin emperor, as we have seen, was never anything more than a phantom, the Latin barons established in many parts, especially in the Hellenic south, were a very substantial fact, and the leading beneficiary of the Fourth Crusade, sea-faring Venice, assumed not only a prominent, but the leading role along the Adriatic and Aegean coasts. Moreover, the various centers of the revived Greek resistance, especially the empire of Nicaea, proved far from negligible, and when, in 1261, the Nicaean Greeks recaptured Constantinople, no intelligently manipulated Serb foreign policy could afford to neglect to reckon with their renewed power. But more important for Serbia, at least for the moment, than all these governments was Bulgaria, which, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, resolutely set about to rebuild its ancient fortunes.

Only monarchs of the prudent yet venturesome type of the founder could have steered the Serb ship of state safely among the rocks and shoals of so many Balkan rivalries. Unfortunately such capable pilots were the exception rather than the rule and, to make matters worse, perpetual divisions among the members of the reigning house, often involving prolonged civil war, delayed the consolidation of the royal authority. The loss of the king was the gain of the tribal chiefs and the nobility in general, with the result that that bane of Serbia, the spirit of tribal particularism, retained an alarming vigor. Under these circumstances the young state did not, in the century following Stephen Nemania and his son, move forward at the fast pace set by them. Throughout this period we may perhaps best think of Serbia as preparing for a new advance by a gradual improvement of its social and economic organization. When in the fourteenth century the advance occurred, it took a form which to understand requires us to take note of the contemporary development of the Slav neighbor to the east, Bulgaria.

For many generations after the crushing of Bulgaria (1018) by Emperor Basil II, the Byzantines exercised a more or less effective rule in the Bulgar lands without, however, arriving at their purpose of extinguishing the national memories cherished by the people. Then, toward the close of the twelfth century and after the passing of the vigorous dynasty of the Comneni, the long threatened disorganization of the Greek state became an indubitable fact. In these circumstances a single misstep sufficed to raise a storm. When a new and sadly necessitous emperor, Isaac Angelus, tried to levy an exorbitant tax on the Bulgarian provinces, for which moreover there was no warrant in tradition, he met with a resistance that almost overnight assumed the proportions of a revolution. The general rising befell in 1186. One hundred and sixty-eight years after the end of the First Bulgaria a second Bulgarian state made its appearance in the peninsula.

Champions and creators of the new state were two brothers, John Asen and Peter, of the city of Tirnovo, lying on the northern Balkan slope. It is likely that they were not Bulgars at all but Vlachs. In the twelfth century groups of a people called Vlachs were turning up mysteriously in many widely separated parts of Balkania. A noticeable feature about them was that they made their homes always in the mountains, never in the plains. Vlachs is the name given them by their Slav neighbors; but they called themselves by various designations and we now call them Rumans or Rumanians, recognizing in them the descendants of the Roman colonists and Latinized natives, who at the coming of the Slavs, back in the sixth century, had sought safety from the invaders by withdrawing to the uplands. As an important factor in the Balkan population we shall have to deal intimately with them at a later time. For the present we are content to note that many Vlachs, making a living as shepherds and peasants, dwelt on the slopes of the Balkan mountains and that, joined with the Bulgars of the plains, they rose in 1186 against the Greek empire. Though the question whether the brothers, John Asen and Peter, were of Vlach origin must be left open, we may confidently affirm that the Second Bulgaria was transfused, at least in its inception, with a strong Vlach element. In view of the general enthusiasm elicited by the revolution which they started, the two brothers courageously burned their bridges behind them, crowned themselves Tsars of Bulgaria, and set up their residence at Tirnovo.

The Greek empire, though tottering to its fall, could still offer resistance and the cause of the new tsars was not immediately succeeded by won. In the renewed grim struggle between Greek and Bulgar we meet the familiar ruthless devastation by each of the other's hands, coupled with the usual domestic acts of perfidy and treason. Despite of defeats inflicted on the Greeks, John Asen and Peter were none too secure. Then, a sign of fierce divisions at home, they were in rapid succession murdered by some of their own followers. But, instead of collapsing with this loss of its champions, the Bulgar rebellion actually gained increased strength by virtue of the accession of a third brother known variously as John, Johannitsa, and Kalojan (handsome John). The new tsar, who reigned for the decade from 1197 to 1207, combined great gifts of mind with the remorseless cruelty of a beast. His hatred of the Greeks, the ancient enemies of his race, was an appetite that grew with feeding and led to a harrying of Thrace and Macedonia and to a slaughter of their inhabitants that must have gone far toward reducing these regions to a desert. As an example of his methods we may note the case of the city of Varna, where, after crushing a brave resistance, he had the whole population driven into the moats and buried alive. Let it in justice be observed that this report comes to us from an enemy source and may be an " atrocity " manufactured by the Greeks in order to bring their enemies into ill-repute. Such propaganda methods, familiar enough in these days of the newspaper, were already known and vigorously practiced in the thirteenth century. When all deductions are made, Kalojan still seems amply to merit the title, Slayer of the Greeks, to which apparently he ardently aspired in order to win the same immortal luster as the Greek sovereign of an earlier century, admiringly hailed by his countrymen as the Bulgar-killer. After some years of Tsar Kalojan's murderous activity the Greek empire, at the end of its resources, was constrained to open negotiations. In 1201 a peace was signed, by virtue of which Kalojan became undisputed master of the whole territory between the Danube to the north and the Rhodope mountains to the south. Bulgaria was again a Balkan power.

The heavy hammer-blows of the three brothers largely help explain why the Greek empire went down so unresistingly before the Fourth Crusade, which in the period 1203-04 stepped in to finish what the Bulgar revolution had begun. With the capture of Constantinople the ancient Byzantine state disappeared, at least for a while, to make room for a Latin empire set up on the ruins. Tsar Kalojan, who, as may be readily believed, shed no tears over the demise of his hated foe, prepared to extend the hand of friendship to the new emperor, Baldwin of Flanders. But the Latins, treating him as a half-savage usurper, peremptorily demanded his submission. Blind with rage, the tsar mobilized his forces and, in the spring of 1205, won a battle near Adrianople, in which he not only administered a stinging defeat to the crusaders but also captured Baldwin himself. It was this disaster more than any other one thing which at its very birth threw the Latin empire on a sick-bed. The victorious tsar did not long survive his triumph. The wild license of his warrior chiefs, to which his two older brothers had already fallen victim, brought about his own end also. In 1207, with the connivance of his faithless wife, he was murdered by one of his captains.

An interesting episode of Kalojan's reign of politico-ecclesiastical nature deserves to be mentioned. Indubitably he owed his throne primarily to his own and his brothers' prowess but, like many another conqueror, he felt that he needed a higher sanction than mere force in order to perpetuate his rule. We have recounted the similar case of the ruler of Serbia, Stephen I, who, in spite of his actual exercise of the sovereignty, did not feel secure till he had won the blessing of the pope. On seizing the throne Kalojan appealed to the Roman pontiff, and in 1204, only a few months after the capture of Constantinople, was crowned at Tirnovo in the presence of a papal legate, though the actual ceremony was conducted by the newly appointed head of the Bulgar church. The pope apparently received pledges to
the effect that, as a return for the papal favor, the Bulgar church should be brought into the Roman fold. But once in possession of the pope's blessing, Kalojan with characteristic perfidy forgot his commitments to St. Peter's chair. The Bulgars were Orthodox, the Bulgar clergy fanatically so, and the cunning Kalojan in all likelihood never had the least intention of affronting the religious prejudices of his people in order to swell still further the already excessive authority of the church of Rome.

The difficulties of a state like Bulgaria, brought together by conquest, were fully illustrated after Kalojan's death. Its composite racial elements, Bulgars, Greeks, and Vlachs, refused to blend, and the turbulent members of the nobility, who had risen to influence and power on the tide of war, seized every opportunity to make themselves independent of the central authority. The death of the terrible tsar caused a general bursting of bounds with resulting anarchy which lasted until the son of John Asen and nephew of Kalojan managed to win recognition under the name of John Asen II (1218-41). If not the most energetic, John Asen II proved to be the most talented and cultured member of his line, the so-called Asenid dynasty. Without concerning ourselves with the labyrinthine policies of his day, which it is difficult to imagine anything less profitable, let us be content to note that John Asen ruled a Bulgaria which, territorially, was easily the leading state of the peninsula. Doubtless, too, it was for the time being the most flourishing of the Balkan states, for the tsar, very different in this respect from most of his royal contemporaries, had at least an inkling that life is properly concerned with the productive occupations and the arts, and that, in order to practice them to any advantage, a people needs to have peace and the blessings of a regulated administration.

However, in the eternal human welter called Balkan history, a relatively prosperous period like that of John Asen II has never been anything more than an interlude. He was scarcely whelmed by dead when the old anarchy broke loose which his descendants proved incapable of mastering. By 1258 the Asenid dynasty had gone out in dishonor. As always and everywhere, political feebleness seemed almost magically to create enemies on every hand. For one item a new Mongolian horde, the Tartars, establishing itself in the south-Russian plain, adopted the habit of almost annually overrunning Bulgaria with fire and sword. Quick to profit by every opportunity, the Hungarians, planted on the middle Danube, renewed their ambitious attempts to extend their control to the lower course of the Danube. Of course the Greek empire, weak though it might be, was prompt to seize an opportunity to wrest territory from a still weaker neighbor. And finally the Serbs, elated by the achievement of political unity, undertook to push into Macedonia, even then a doubtful border-land between Bulgaria and themselves. The successive adventurers upon the Bulgar throne following the end of the Asenids, their plots against local rivals and their rivals' plots against them, the endless wearisome chain of treason, violence, and murder, have no historical significance beyond confirming that the Second Bulgaria, like the First, was essentially an unsound fabric gnawed by every kind of social and political disease. Let us grant, as in justice we must, that the Balkan peninsula, more than any other part of Europe, was thrown into recurrent turmoil by overwhelming invasions from without, which will have to be set down by the judicious inquirer as historical accidents, utterly beyond human control. We have recounted many such invasions, among which the Tartar invasion of the thirteenth century figures as no light affliction. In fact the repeated invasions of the swift-moving Tartar horsemen wrought a terrible havoc and must be adduced as a leading cause of the gradual disintegration of the Second Bulgaria. But with every allowance made for contributory factors, we are yet driven to the conclusion that the Bulgar people of the close of the thirteenth century had failed to develop that minimum of moral stamina and institutional stability which history proves to be essential to the maintenance of a commonwealth, tolerably ordered and measurably
civilized.

Confronted with unsolvable outer and inner difficulties, Bulgaria inevitably dropped to its setting. In the fourteenth century one of her tsars, alarmed by the forward movement which carried the Serbs far into Macedonia, resolved to drive them out again. The Serb monarch of the time was Stephen, called Dechanski, from a famous church built by him at Dechani in western Serbia. On July 28, 1330, he met the Bulgar host at Kyustendil (Velbuzd), in the upper Struma valley, and won a
complete victory. The tsar himself was slain and the Bulgar army scattered to the winds. It is true that the Serbs did not now assume the government of Bulgaria; they even recognized a new Bulgar sovereign and left him undisturbed in the exercise of all authority of a purely local character. However, it was substantially as a vassal state of victorious Serbia that Bulgaria lived on for another half century, when she was extinguished wholly by a more terrible enemy than the Serb, the Ottoman Turk. From every essential point of view the Second Bulgaria sank into the grave at Kyustendil, while over the whole Balkan interior shone the unchallenged might of Serbia.

We have now reached the period of the greatest bloom of the Serbian state, a period which modern Serbs still look upon with passionate pride. The victory over Bulgaria marks its beginning. However, King Stephen Dechanski, who won the battle of Kyustendil, did not live long to enjoy his triumph. The Nemania line, like all the royal lines of the peninsula, was torn by bloody family feuds and presents a story repeating in cold fact all the mythical horrors of the ancient house of Atreus. Stephen Dechanski, who had in his youth been blinded by a revengeful father, was in his old age overthrown and murdered by his son, the twenty-two-year-old Stephen Dushan. It is Stephen Dushan (1331-55) who gave the Serb state its greatest extent and luster. Looking about in the peninsula in the days of Stephen Dushan, we may easily convince ourselves that the moment was favorable for the achievement of Serb primacy. Hungary, the mid-Danubian power, whose ambitious designs frequently threatened Serbia, was just then absorbed in its struggle with Venice for the possession of the Adriatic coast. Bulgaria, already reduced to vassalage, was completely helpless; and the remaining Balkan power of any dignity, the Byzantine empire, was plagued with every disease of a dying state.

As if the narrow boundaries, the economic misery, and the diminished productive energy of the Greek empire were not unhappiness enough, there broke out in Stephen Dushan's time a civil war between rival emperors of the two houses of Paleologus and Cantacuzenus, which lasted with little interruption for fifteen years and which, with a minimum of expense and effort to the Serbs, delivered all the western districts of the empire into their hands. By leisurely occupying Macedonia, Albania, Epirus, and Thessaly while the ambitious imbeciles from Constantinople and their selfish adherents chased each other in a circle around Thrace, Stephen Dushan doubled the area of his state.

He could now look forward with considerable confidence to the time when, having picked up the poor remainder of the Greek empire, he would send out his commands from the marble palace of the emperors on the Golden Horn. Undeniably, in respect of the Greek provinces which he added to the Serb mass, Stephen
Dushan appears less as a conqueror than as a lucky bystander. The suspicion that his power was rather showy than solid can not be suppressed and draws further nourishment from its astonishingly swift collapse after his death. However, the mighty spell still exercised over his countrymen by Stephen Dushan's name is only partially due to his enlargement of Serb territory at the expense of Byzantium. With a natural turn for pomp and grandeur he divined that nothing impressed the average man like high-sounding titles and gorgeous ceremonies. As heir of his Nemanian predecessors and by the operations of fortune, coupled, it is true, with great personal initiative and a prudent diplomacy, he had risen to the top of the heap in the peninsula. According to the historic concepts which ruled the consciousness of all the inhabitants of Balkania and which were inherited from the days of the Imperium Romanum, political over-lordship expressed itself in the title of emperor, of which the Slav equivalent was tsar. As long as the Byzantine state was the dominating power in the peninsula, it seemed natural and proper that the Byzantine chief should wield the imperial scepter with its implications of universal Balkan rule; when, as under Simeon, the Bulgar state exercised the widest sway, the Bulgar sovereign felt justified in arrogating the imperial title to himself; and when, as now, a Serb king was in possession of almost all the Balkan land, it seemed no more than right to him and to his followers that his title should be brought into exact correspondence with the facts.

Moved by these considerations, Stephan Dushan carefully laid his plans. As we have repeatedly seen, in the minds of medieval men the church was as important or even more important for the control of human affairs than the state, with which it was on terms of intimate association. Taking in hand the church, Stephen conferred upon the archbishop of the Serb establishment, autonomous since the days of St. Sava and the first king, the title patriarch. By this act the Serb church was for the first time completely severed from the Greek church with the result that the new patriarchate, with its seat at Ipek, looked upon itself as fully equal in authority, if not in the dignity conferred by years, to the older patriarchates of Constantinople and Ochrida. This measure accomplished, the king in 1346 ordered the patriarch, who by virtue of his title was supposed to have gathered round his person something of the glamour attaching for ages to the great titulary of Constantinople, to crown him Tsar at Skopje (Uskub). This town in central Macedonia became Tsar Stephen's capital in correct recognition of the fact that a Serb hegemony over Balkania, in order to be effective, would have to establish itself on the Vardar line in Macedonia, the great north-south thoroughfare. The full title he chose for himself was Tsar of the Serbs and Greeks, by which composite form he clearly served notice that he did not think of himself as a narrow national sovereign but as the heir of Constantinople.

Without question the city on the Bosporus was his final goal. But weak as the Byzantines were, their great stronghold could not be taken without the cooperation of a fleet. Fully aware of the fact, Stephen was willing to bide his time but, biding, death overtook him at the early age of forty-six (1355). Apparently he died in his own realm after a brief illness. It is not improbable that he was collecting an army at the time in preparation for a final and exterminate expedition against the Greeks, but no document exists throwing the faintest light on either his last designs or the manner of his death. In view of these uncertainties the social psychologist will be deeply interested in the popular Serb legend, which came to envelop the personality of Stephen Dushan like a brilliant halo and which represented him as finding his death mysteriously, most likely from Greek poison, while leading a victorious army against the imperial city on the Golden Horn.

The Serb tsar, who undoubtedly possessed great administrative and organizing gifts, left a monument behind for which historians owe him sincere thanks. He had the laws and customs of his country assembled in a famous Code, which unrolls a very detailed picture of the state of Serb society in the fourteenth century. Since the time in the sixth century when the Slav barbarians, organized in tribes and practicing a primitive form of communism, had burst into the peninsula, important changes had taken place. Undoubtedly the greatest single advance was represented by Christianity. Since its coming the nearby Byzantine empire, hearth of the new religion, had exercised an irresistible attraction, and when the Nemania kings undertook to build a state, they naturally took the highly organized government on the Bosporus as a model. The great changes in the political and social structure effected by the direct and indirect influence of Byzantium are accurately recorded in the Code of Stephen Dushan. It assigns to the sovereign a dominant position, for he is regarded as the owner of the land and its inhabitants, and the fountain-head of law. Such is the theory of the code, plainly of Byzantine origin and miles removed from the tribal conceptions of primitive Serb society. In practice, however, exactly as among the Greeks in post-Basilian days, instead of being absolute, the sovereign power was seriously limited by the great dignitaries of the church and state. The Serb dignitaries, moreover, resembling in this respect the feudal magnates of the West, met from time to time in a national assembly or parliament, by virtue of which they exercised a considerable check on the sovereign. It is further certain that their pretensions to rule were powerfully strengthened by their hereditary possession of large landed estates. These ample properties were worked by tenants, of whom some were free and others serf, and who, a peasant mass, constituted the overwhelming majority of the Serb population. Under cover of the centralized and feudal forms, both of relatively recent origin, the native Serb institutions, embracing the family and village, stubbornly continued to flourish. This is a most important circumstance to keep in mind, for when, owing to the Ottoman conquest, of which we are presently to hear, the central government was wiped out, family and village government, the really vital elements of Serb institutional life, unobtrusively persisted, thereby enabling the people to preserve their racial integrity in the teeth of a crushing subjection to a body of Asiatic conquerors.

On turning to consider the towns, we are at once struck by a startling difference between Serbia and the Byzantine empire. Large, numerous, and important among the sea- faring Greeks, they were both rare and small among the inland Serbs, and the handful of merchants and artisans who inhabited them were largely foreigners and an unimportant though, it must be admitted, a steadily increasing factor in the life of the nation. Taking in the whole of Serb society as revealed by the Code, one gets the impression that, in obedience to general forces operative on the Bosporus and throughout the peninsula, it had begun to assume forms curiously like those of western feudalism. However, in the Latin West feudalism was, in the fourteenth century, already disintegrating under the mighty impulse of the rising cities, while no urban movement of any consequence as yet made itself felt in the inaccessible Serb hills, where foresters, trappers, and plowmen, a manifestly backward society, maintained an almost uninterrupted sway. A final resemblance to the feudal West, deserving of mention, was furnished by Stephen Dushan's army. A part of it was made up of the great lords, who brought into the field with them the required contingent of their followers, but, in addition to this feudal body, the tsar commanded
a mercenary army, composed of foreigners and brought to as many companies as his fluctuating means permitted. On these mercenaries, who constituted a heavy cavalry and who were excellently trained, fell the brunt of the fighting. They supply an interesting clue to Dushan's success as an empire-builder.

When Tsar Stephen was succeeded by his young son, Urosh, Serbia falls mild-mannered and without any of the talents of mind and character essential to a ruler of men, the lofty Serb structure successor, almost at once showed signs of going to pieces. With the strong hand removed, the many non-Serb elements, Greeks, Bulgars, and Albanians, held together by no other bond than force, drove violently apart. Among the Serbs themselves the ancient tribal spirit was still powerful, and though it had recently been somewhat curbed by means of a super-imposed royal administration, it had without question received fresh nourishment by the general drift toward feudalism. With little difficulty the great dignitaries of the state, noblemen more or less identical with the old tribal chiefs, the zupans, could set up virtually independent sovereignties the moment the central power showed signs of losing its grip.

As chance would have it, at the very time when feudal anarchy was making ready to apply its deadly acid to Tsar Stephen's too personal creation the Peninsula was confronted with the gravest crisis of the whole medieval period. The Turk peril, threatening since the days of Manzikert (1071) but relieved by the victories of the emperors of the Comnenus line, was once more becoming acute. At the precise time at which Stephen Dushan, enthroned in the Macedonian uplands, was cogitating how to seize what was left of the Roman heritage, a new tribe of Turks, the Ottomans, having brought northwestern Asia Minor under their control, were moved to entertain an exactly identical plan. Shortly before the death of the great tsar they succeeded in gaining (1354) a foothold on the European side of the Dardanelles. The Turks were in Europe! They were at the gates of Constantinople! And at this breathless moment the only Christian state which seemed to have the strength to defend the peninsula dissipated its energies by falling into feudal confusion. Therefore the Turk invasion met only scattered and weak resistance and inaugurated a new epoch of Balkan history.

On coming to the end of the Byzantine epoch we may, as from a height, look back over the long road which we have traveled. It covers a period of eight hundred years. In all that time the Byzantine empire with its good and bad fortune, with its constructive labors and destructive passions, is the natural focus of interest. Unable in the first place to keep the Slavs from settling in the peninsula, it was equally unable to hinder them from gradually forming two political centers of resistance, Bulgaria and Serbia. A three-cornered struggle followed, and while on the whole the Byzantine empire was oftenest in the ascendancy, Bulgaria, twice, and Serbia, once, had their triumphant, though brief innings. And yet throughout that long time of conflict and, for the most part, passionately embittered conflict, the three political groups had in many important respects been drawing together. The ancient and highly developed Byzantine state had gradually transferred a large part of its religion, its literature, its arts, its legal and administrative institutions, in short, its civilization, to the younger Slav societies. It is no exaggeration to say that in matters constituting the essential basis of significant human intercourse the Balkan peoples, almost against their will and certainly without particularly perceiving it, had, in the course of the Middle Age, been brought to something like a common cultural denominator. And yet the remaining differences, involving race and language and the ineradicable human instinct for political self-expression, sufficed to produce the unceasing struggle of which we have been the astonished spectators.

And now, a little past the middle of the fourteenth century, there was introduced into the human welter another element certain to intensify the strife. The Turks, Asiatic and Mohammedan, entered the peninsula and made themselves its masters. By breaking all resistance they could, for a time at least, produce a superficial appearance of peace and unity, but since they neither could nor did destroy the Balkan peoples, they were sure to be confronted with open or latent warfare during all the centuries of their Balkan occupation. Moreover the Turks, as Moslems and non-Europeans, would probably resist that measure of assimilation to a common type which Time had imperceptibly effected among the Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgars. They would remain obstinately alien and therefore the struggle among the
Balkan peoples, cruel enough in the medieval period, was sure to wax more cruel and more irreconcilable in the years to come. Add that other races, like the Rumans (Vlachs) and Albanians, submerged and quiescent in the Middle Age, were rousing themselves from slumber and making ready to claim their just place in the sun, and the troubles ahead were certain to present an embroilment unique in the annals of Europe.

— L. Leger, Cyrille et Methode. Etudes historiques sur la conversion des Slaves au Christianisme.

— C. Jirecek, Das Fuerstenthum Bulgarien. Seine Bodengestaltung, Natur, Bevoelkerung.

— P. F. Kanitz, Donau-Bulgarien und der Balkan. Historisch-geog-ethnogr. Reise-studien aus den Jahren 1860-79.

— C. Jirecek, Staat und gesellschaft im mittelalterlichen Serbien (Denkschriften d. kais. Akademie d. Wissenschaften. Phil-Hist. CI. Band 56, 58).

— F. P. Kanitz, Das Koenigreich Serbien und das Serbenvolk. Von der Roemerzeit bis zur Gegenwart.

— Robert Lee Wolff. Second Bulgarian Empire: Its Origin and History to 1204. (Speculum, Volume 24, Issue 2, April 1949, 167-206)

(i). Graffito portrait of Stoyan Shangov. S. S. Shangov was writer and editor of tabloid newspaper "Vecherna Poshta" (Evening Post) from the period before WW I. His popularity sometime grew so big that Tsar Ferdinand invited him as courtier at the Palace.

Addendum: I think it's fair here to give tribune to the other side — whether belligerent or not — and say something on the allegations that seemingly the "Second Bulgarian Kingdom", XII to XIV cc., was short-lived and fleeting (as presented by some Serbian [Stanoe Stanoevich] and Romanian [Nicolae Banescu] historians, plus their Western apologies). Certainly those writings are outdated today but in the first half of XX c. realities sounded otherwise. Thus R. L. Wolff's article in "Speculum" (1949) and F. Schevill's chapter from "History of the Balkan Peninsula" (1922) procure the facts in axiomatic manner in the case that Bulgarians didn't have well-written documents on that particular historical period. Instead the achievements and grandeur of the "First Bulgarian Kingdom" are superimposed (also ephemeral early Medieval state), so that the new Internet reader asks, "Where the fuck is Bulgaria?"

These shouldn't detain much attention today and since our aim has been to make few lay statements, not to write scholarly article, we proceed further to process our book archive with occasional notes. This time we present to public another rare and forgotten book on Bulgarian Medievistics (written 1921 but never cited as reference, so that English language authors should know). Authors here are S. S. Shangov and Damian Gyulov and if better information on the titular had been available this important monograph on the "Second Bulgarian Kingdom" shouldn't have been neglected so long (128 pp. + full letter correspondence between Pope Innocent III and Tsar Kalojan [1197-1207]; excerpted are some 20 letters from Migne's "Patristica Latina" and translated in Bulgarian on various occasions in the text with commentaries).

We further explored the identity of the Bulgarian authors — two very obscure names from the intelligentsia of that country which were literally dug out from piles of secondary documentation. Stoyan Shangov (d. 1924) was a journalist by profession, one of the first newspaper magnates in Bulgaria from the 1900s. His "Vecherna Poshta" (Evening Post) had highest circulation in the period before World War I and second only after doyen journalist Bernhard Kohn and his "Bulgarski Targovski Vestnik" (Bulgarische Handelszeitung). Kohn was an Austrian and worked at license for the "Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce" and its publishing organ. Shangov was a private entrepreneur and had keen interest in "yellow" literature. He published in the supplement of his newspaper translations from popular adventure (gothic) novels by celebrities such as Eugene Sue, Viktor Falk, George Bourne, Rocambole, etc. He made big money but died early after the Great War.

The other author was priest Damian Gyulov, Catholic congregationalist and editor-in-chief of the bulletin "Calendars of St. St. Cyril and Methodius" (28 issues, from 1921-1948). Catholic community in Bulgaria from the period between the Wars was not large — some estimates of the brethren show the number at a. 50 000. The last President of the Congregation was father Evgeni Bosilkov (as we know the Catholic priests were sentenced by People's Court in 1947, put to prison or death, and the Pope's legate expelled from Bulgaria). The fate of priest Damian Gyulov is unknown.

Let us continue with the straight text of the book at hand, "Dynasty of Asenovtsi ~ the letter correspondence between Tsar Kalojan and Pope Innocent III". We already mentioned Nicetas Choniates as primer source for this epoch. He was a Greek and though very circumstantial, he always was on the Byzantine side. Thus it appears from his writings that the whole wrongful attitude towards the crumbled Eastern Empire was God's wrath, both for nobility and populace. He was aware of the Schism with the Latins and the cause of the Crusades was state-of-war against Byzantium. He implicitly mentioned that the Dodge of Venice, Duke Enrike Dandolo, was firstly blinded by the greeks of Constantinople while on merchant mission and then came back with his fleet at the Golden Horn for revenge. More details are available in the book and pointed out ad passim. We wish to connect here these primary sources — together with Villehardouin and de Clari — and concede that enough authorities were gathered by Shangov / Gyulov to devise a viable story of some 130 pages. Many scholarly books and articles from Russian authors are also debated in the book.

As a finale to this commentary we shall state in unequivocal manner the Bulgarian character of the Asenovtsi reign. Expressly in the book is delegated the ethnic origin of the royal brothers Asen, Petar and Kalojan — they were "chope, shope" from the region between Serdica and Nissus, also they had the blood of "duces bulgarorum", etc. The debility of all other allegations is obvious. Modern historians and authorities from second half of XX c. (Francis Dvornik, L. S. Stavrianos and others) are imperative in their commentaries for the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, ditto.