Download PDF | Kiril Petkov - The Voices of Medieval Bulgaria, Seventh-Fifteenth Century_ The Records of a Bygone Culture-Brill Academic Pub (2008).
593 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues and former teachers from Veliko Tarnovo, from whom I have learned so much, and to my colleagues from Sofia and various historical and archaeological institutes in Bulgaria. Express thanks should go to my friends Rossina and Kazimir Popkonstantinovi for their assistance with most of the epigraphic material translated here, their hospitality, and their remarkable sense of humor and nonchalance. Stephen Baisden prepared the maps, putting much effort and professional expertise to represent the many textual references to otherwise obscure southeast European placenames into a fine visual aid. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Tsvetelin Stepanov, who spared so generously from his time to help me expunge from the manuscript several blunders and typos. What errors remain are all mine.
I dedicate this volume to the memory of Jordan Andreev (1939-2008), my teacher, mentor, and inspiration ever since I made my first steps in the profession. Rest in peace, Voevoda.
INTRODUCTION
The records of a medieval culture in one volume? The historian of Western Europe (and the Middle East, China, and many other medieval cultures) will raise an eyebrow in justified disbelief. After all, just a single cartulary of a Western monastic foundation or the works of a respectable Middle Eastern or Chinese chronicler of the past fill volumes many times this one’s size. So do the records left behind by the model civilization of the European southeast, Byzantium.
Regrettably, this is not the case with medieval Bulgaria. The vestiges of the past that can be legitimately called “voices of medieval Bulgarians,” that is, original works produced by and for Bulgarians from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries and now extant as writings and images on stone, parchment, paper, metal, bone, or plaster are very few indeed. Six original royal charters, several scores of laconic stone inscriptions, a hundred or so even shorter graffiti, a couple of concise historical accounts, less than a handful of apocryphal works, two dozen saints’ lives and eulogies, two notary records and as many adaptations of Byzantine legal codes (!), and a good amount of casual scribal and marginal notes: this is almost all that remains from the seven centuries of Bulgarian state tradition, from the formation of the Danubian Bulgar state in 680 to the suppression of its last remnants by the Ottomans in the early fifteenth century. There are no monastery or cathedral cartularies, no court records, no full-length historical works, no town archives, no notary books, no treatises on government or politics: in short, nothing of what constitutes the indispensable staple of the historian of the Middle Ages in most cultures.
Has there been more? It does seem so. Vague references to cartloads of manuscripts burned in the kitchens of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Greek bishops who took over the leadership of the Bulgarian Church during the Ottoman centuries, and dim recollections of single valuable books and precious family records hastily buried under the floors or hidden in the walls of long forgotten and now crumbled churches suggest that yes, there has been more. The chances of new evidence coming to light, however, are increasingly remote. Scholars are reduced to assigning blame for the extinction of the once verifiably rich literary and documentary tradition while having to come to terms with the fact that mostly ecclesiastical monuments are extant—above all, the standard fare of liturgy. Except for an exciting new find of a stone inscription or graffiti, dug out by the shovel of the archeologist, there is not much more to hope for. The political, social, economic, and cultural history of medieval Bulgaria, a flourishing civilization in its own right, which at one time comprised most of the European southeast, has to be written on the basis of foreign, predominantly Byzantine sources and conjectures made on the meager original records there are. And except for the historian of language, not much else is available to the diligent student of the Bulgarian medieval experience and achievement. The foreign evidence is overwhelmingly superior. Without Byzantine chroniclers such as Theophan and Patriarch Nicephoros, Skylitzes-Kedrinos, Nicetas Choniates, George Acropolites, Pachymeres, John Kantakuzenos, to name but a few, without some Frankish annals, records of the Papal chancery, without the crusaders Robert de Clary and Geoffrey de Villehardoine and, say, the records of the archbishopric of Ohrid and the commercial books of the citizens of the Italian maritime republics, Venice and Genoa, the Bulgarian Middle Ages would be an almost total mystery.
And yet, the voice of the foreigner ought not to supplant the voice of the native. The original Bulgarian records result from seven centuries of state life, the product of solid political institutions built, quashed, and then rekindled, a robust economy supporting a vibrant urban life, and an almost constant military effort for both supremacy and survival, as well as a long-established literary tradition which left a deep impact on the rest of the Balkan and Slavic literatures. The tip of the iceberg now swept under the tides of time and political vicissitudes, such evidence testifies, among other things, to the unique features of Bulgarian historical consciousness, political custom, and religious sensibility as well as the culture’s conformity to the broad currents of medieval Europe’s cultural development and evolution. A good example of the former would be the Bulgar, and then the Bulgarian stone annalistic, a phenomenon without a parallel in Byzantium and the medieval West. A no less pertinent case for the latter are the Lies of the eleventh- and twelfth-century saints, witnesses for the outburst of spiritualism that seized the hearts of Western Catholics in the same period to rejuvenate Christianity with a new vigor.
As lean as the original evidence is, gathering it in a single volume of translations is still a challenge. ‘The voices of the medieval Bulgarians now extant are often precious nuggets hidden in the vast landslide of works translated from the Greek. Extracting them by necessity deprives them of context. This deficiency can only partly be offset by the short words preceding the translation of the record. Several later medieval works, the products of the fourteenth-century trend for rectification and beautification of earlier writings, for example, are the delight of the expert in south Slavic languages, but loose much if not all of their luster and meaning in translation. Next, the quite voluminous and popular genre of apocrypha contains mostly either direct and close Old- and Middle Bulgarian translations of their Byzantine Greek prototypes or compilations from different Greek works conveying their ideas in a different but still conventional manner. For these reasons, as much as I have striven to present the works in full translation, a selective approach had to be adopted in many cases. Nevertheless, as of the time of this volume’s publication, the texts that follow are a fully representative, and in most cases comprehensive, collection rendering the original voices of medieval Bulgaria in modern English.
The fullest collection is that of seal and ring inscriptions. ‘The bulk of them are royal seals, of which exemplars for practically all Bulgarian rulers are extant, with several variants in some cases. The few rings and ring-seals of magnates and ecclesiastical dignitaries are chance survivals.
The stone records tradition—annals, funeral and building inscriptions, dedicatory and triumphal notes on stone—is equally full and is supplemented with a exhaustive inventory representing the growing group of grafhti. Stretching in an almost uninterrupted chain from the beginning of the eighth to the early fifteenth century this genre has been the subject of intense study and excellent editions. And while the stone annals reflect the official positions of church and state, the numerous graffiti shed light on the literacy level of the populace, their fears, desires, and preoccupations.
The records properly called documents—the output of royal and noble chanceries—are presented in full. In addition to the genuine charters, treaties, and privileges issued by the Bulgarian tsars and the sole charter of a great noble, I have included excerpts from a few forgeries dating from the centuries of Ottoman rule of the Bulgarian lands, for they were based on now lost originals.
In a sense, the migration of history writing from stone to parchment (and later paper), which occurred after the conversion to Christianity and the development of a literary tradition in Old Bulgarian (Slavic) is a regrettable fact. The stone annals, on walls, columns, and slabs, still stand. ‘The native historical record on perishable material, referred to by such illustrious figures as the Bulgarian Tsars Kaloyan and Ioan Alexander, is all but non-existent. This volume gathers practically all that can be termed “original history writing” during the medieval centuries. To the scholar of conventional history writing and annalistic, the record would be meager indeed, and the boundaries of the genre might appear quite stretched-out and elastic. I have tried, however, to present all—and in full—of the mediums which register the dimensions of the medieval Bulgarian historical consciousness; a single omission is Constantine of Preslav’s wholly compilatory work “Histories,” a short universal annals directly translated from the Greek. The lengthy scribal and marginal notes with historical content that I have included, the excerpts from saints’ Lives with purely historical content, and the later medieval compilations based on earlier works I collected here do testify to the blurred boundaries or incomplete mastery of the native genre of history writing. They also provide valuable clues, I would argue, for the presence of a pervasive and elaborate historical tradition that unfortunately appears to be lost to us. The high medieval eschatological annals based on the folk tradition are an important segment of this genre; the entire collection of these annals is presented here, illustrating what appears to be a specifically Bulgarian way of making sense of history in the absence of a native state institution.
The Lwes and eulogies of Bulgarian saints and domesticated Byzantine holy figures are next in terms of volume. The diligent student of Slavic letters will notice that there are two substantial omissions in this group: the Long Lies of the Slavic apostles in the beginning of the tradition and the several saintly Lives (re)worked by Patriarch Euthymius in the latter part of the fourteenth century, at its end. The reasons are the selection benchmarks of this volume. The Long Lives, while extremely valuable for setting off the subsequent outburst of creative literary energy on Bulgarian soil and by Bulgarians, are not an original Bulgarian product. Euthymius’ output, on the other hand, while original and Bulgarian, is more valuable for its style and language, the province of the expert in Slavic language and letters. It shines in Middle Bulgarian with its “weaving of wreaths of words,” but yields little otherwise, and its brilliance is lost in translation. Similar is the case with the works of Euthymius’s disciples, Cyprian and Gregory ‘Tsamblak. I have, therefore, extracted the snippets or larger segments of these foremost literati’s voluminous works that afford a glimpse at their stylistic approach, their composition skill, and the few comments on contemporary or past historical occurrences that they chose to weave into the accounts. Notably present in this group, however, are the Lives of Bulgarian personages that have reached us in Byzantine Greek versions: the Long Life of Clement of Ohrid and the Lives of the fourteenth-century Bulgarian hermits and hesychasts Theodosius and Romil. While their authors and medium are not Bulgarian, they rest on and render authentic Bulgarian experiences.
I have been more selective with works on Christian instruction. On the one hand, there are only a few examples of the voluminous output of Clement of Ohrid, Constantine of Preslav, and Joan Exarch that can be considered their original contribution. On the other, the contents of the genre are fairly stable and conventional. To avoid redundancy, only a few samples of Clement’s sermons, Joan Exarch’s compendiums, and Constantine’s poetry have been selected to testify to their author’s biblical erudition, profuse eloquence, and stylistic and compositional perfection.
Ecclesiastical records on dogmatic and doctrinal matters are scant in the Bulgarian tradition. The paramount source here is the Synodikon, complemented by Kosmas’ lengthy and informative anti-Bogomil treatise, and a few letters of Euthymius. The Bulgarian matters in these works are presented in full, as are the Bogomil ideas preserved in Latin sources.
I have been most skittish in the application of the selection criteria of this volume to one of the largest groups of sources: the apocrypha. Hundreds of works circulated in the medieval centuries in Old and Middle Bulgarian and enjoyed wide popularity: almost all of them were verbatim translations of Byzantine Greek texts of long standing. Consequently, I have omitted the great majority, preferring to include only a few texts that are recognized as genuine Bulgarian works. They too draw on Byzantine sources, but the native authorial touch is unmistakable.
The mentality presented in the apocrypha, the eschatological “prophesies” and annals, and some of the short saints’ Lives, informs what is loosely and perhaps incorrectly defined as popular culture: incantations and charms, superstitions, and vestiges of pagan belief. Not much of this genre is extant in writing, but the evidence is piling up: finds of prayers and incantations on lead amulets, for example, are growing and will soon be examined as an illustration of the Bulgarian reception of yet another strand of Byzantine and Near Eastern mentality going back to Antiquity.
Finally, a large group of genuinely Bulgarian voices comes from the people to whom we owe it all: the humble (or more exalted) scribes and clerks who endeavored to put down in writing what we now read. Several hundreds of their marginal notes populate the medieval manuscripts, with contents ranging from complaints about the unusually cold weather to eulogies of their royal patrons. I have limited the selection to those of them that offer time- and place-specific historical information and insights into to the mental world and preoccupations of their authors.
All translations in this volume are mine. Where previous translations exist I have consulted them and they are indicated in the introduction to the respective entry. The translations were made from critical editions of the texts; on a few occasions where editions did not exist or appeared confusing I have gone directly to the original manuscript or epigraphic source. The short introductions to the documents usually list the first and the most recent critical edition and translations into English, where they exist. The few words I offer to each document attempt to provide some context and starting points for analysis and interpretation. ‘The bibliography listed in the end 1s selective and intends to inform the reader of any English- and Western-language secondary works engaging the specific document and to direct the reader with a command of Bulgarian to the inquiries done by Bulgarian scholars.
In rendering Bulgarian personal and place-names I have preferred to keep the transliteration as close to the original as possible, using Ioan Asen instead of John Asen, Ilarion instead of Hillary, etc. Exception is made for St. John of Rila, for the Gallicized form of his name has become standard. Byzantine, Western, and Near Eastern personal and place names have been used according to the accepted conventions: Constantinople instead of “‘Tsarigrad” (“The City of the Emperor”), Thessaloniki instead of Solun, Constantine instead of Konstandin, Ioan instead of John or Ivan, and “Byzantines” instead of Romazoi or “Greeks,” the traditional Bulgarian form.
In the past hundred years or so, as the study of medieval Europe marked its turf as an area of legitimate inquiry, compartmentalization and fragmentation of the field became the norm. Western Europeanists, on the one hand, and Byzantinists and scholars of the various eastcentral, southeastern, and eastern European countries and cultures, on the other, hardly speak to one another. When they do, the level of discourse, perhaps to ensure mutual understanding, is not of the highest order. As of late, a good amount of fine scholarship dedicated specifically to southeastern Europe has made the boundaries between East and West, Catholic and Greek Orthodox, and those between Slav, Frank, and Byzantine, appear more permeable. Genuine discourse, however, will not be fully possible until each side has a solid grasp of the primary material available to the “other” scholarly traditions. It is the translator’s hope that the present volume will make a small step in this direction.
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