Download PDF | Vasilka Tăpkova-Zaimova - Bulgarians by Birth_ The Comitopuls, Emperor Samuel and Their Successors According to Historical Sources and the Historiographic Tradition,2018.
346 Pages
Introduction , Kiril Petkov
Problems and Periods At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the finest British historians, Lord Acton, in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, advised his colleagues to “study problems in preference to periods.” A century later, his recommendation is more relevant than ever. In a sense, it has become even easier to follow. Since the days of Lord Acton, practitioners of history have become quite adept in spotting problems in the murky currents of history, and bringing them up for scrutiny.
The epistemology of the later twentieth century accelerated this trend. History moved from knowledge of the facts to knowledge about the facts, shifted focus from status to change, and abandoned positivist narratives to embrace the infinite varieties of meaning. In the process, the discipline embedded itself even deeper in the principal intellectual currents of the time as these responded to social, economic, and political developments. For the discerning mind, the result is a polyphony of interpretations on any given subject matter. For the uninitiated observer, the chorus of differing voices may appear a disturbing cacophony.
For the earnest student of history, however, the intricacies of the trajectory from “how it actually was” presented by immediate witnesses, to the “it depends” verdict of modern historiographies, competing on methodological, theoretical, national, or ideological grounds, is above all a terrific opportunity to comprehend the essence of history as the meaningproducing discipline par excellence. The present volume, the fruit of painstaking labor by one of the most erudite Bulgarian scholars of the medieval Balkan and Byzantine history, showcases well these vicissitudes of history.
It offers to the English-speaking public the definitive collection of commented primary material for the reconstruction of the last half of a century of the early medieval Bulgarian state; and in doing so, it presents the reader with a rather instructive picture of the way history operates. Set against the background of southeastern Europe, one of the most contentious areas to reconstruct the medieval past, the collection of written sources translated and commented here is an object lesson not just for the aspiring medievalist, but for the reflecting historian in general. The period covered by the sources is a dramatic one.
In the last quarter of the tenth century, the Bulgarian state, carved out from Byzantine territories on the lower Danube in 680, and comprising an area in the European southeast, which at different points of its history spread across the borders of the modern states of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, and Turkey, suffered a major setback. A resurgent Byzantium, under a series of capable and determined military emperors, launched a relentless offensive that culminated in 971 in the capture of the Bulgarian capital of Preslav and the re-conquest of the central and eastern Bulgarian lands north of the Haemus (the Stara Planina Mountains), the geological backbone of the country.
The last male members of the Bulgarian ruling dynasty, Tsar Boris II and his brother Roman, were seized and transferred to Constantinople, where they were divested of imperial authority. The Byzantine triumph was incomplete, however. Resistance continued in the southwest of the deeply wounded state, and the head of the Bulgarian ecclesiastical establishment, the patriarch, moved there his residence, transferring the aura of legitimacy to the defiant leaders of the local aristocracy. Chief among them were David, Moses, Aaron, and Samuel, the four sons of a count (komes) named Nikola, the administrative-military governor of one of the ten districts into which the early Bulgarian state had been divided.
Initially, the comitopuls (“sons of the count”) upheld the rights of the Bulgarian dynasty, now in exile. Soon, the situation changed. The two eldest brothers died, the Byzantines attempted to sow discord among the comitopuls by dispatching the captured heirs to take over the movement, an internecine strife ended in the wiping out of most of Aaron’s line for sympathy with Byzantium, and the surviving dynastic heir, Roman, went back to Constantinople after a short stint with his subjects.
That cleared the field for the youngest comitopul, Samuel, who assumed the traditional title of the Bulgarian rulers, tsar (emperor), and founded a new, short-lived dynasty. Samuel, his son Gabriel Radomir, and his nephew, John Vladislav, attempted to recover lost Bulgarian territories and led a series of successful campaigns, stymying for a while the Byzantine advance. By all accounts, it was an epic struggle, with many twists and turns, a protracted, debilitating fight between unequally matched opponents. For a while, it seemed that the Bulgarians would recover, as Samuel and his son made deep inroads to the south, into Thessaly, established suzerainty over the Serbian prince of Duklja, John Vladimir, in the west, and held onto territories ruled from Bdin (modern Vidin) in the northwest of the old state.
In the end, Byzantine resources turned out to be too much for the truncated state. In 1014, after a major defeat, the Byzantine emperor Basil II reputedly had thousands of captured Bulgarian soldiers blinded, earning himself the name of Bulgar-Slayer, and sent them back to Samuel; the embattled tsar was not able to bear the sight, suffered a heart attack, and passed away. Pressure mounted, and as it did, internal strife further weakened the dynasty. After a few months’ reign, Samuel’s heir, Gabriel Radomir, was assassinated by his cousin, John Vladislav (the one remaining son of Aaron), who assumed the tsar’s title.
But the new ruler was not in a position to stem the progress of the formidable Byzantine military machine. In 1018, after his death during a diversion campaign against the Adriatic port of Dyrrachium (modern Durrës in Albania) the last existing foci of resistance were extinguished. Later attempts at revolts by surviving members of the new dynasty and their nobility (last in 1074) were suppressed. By the early 1040s, it was all over. The remaining Bulgarian princes and high aristocracy were integrated into the multi-ethnic Byzantine upper classes and rapidly assimilated.
The Bulgarian state disappeared for nearly two hundred years, only to be restored in 1185–87 under a new dynasty, the Asenids, who ruled through the later medieval centuries. The memory of the comitopuls, however, remained an integral part of the medieval Bulgarian state tradition, and was duly recalled both in the later medieval Bulgarian historical record and in the early modern historical reconstructions of the Byzantine, Slavic, and Balkan history. Such is the narrative that can be reasonably reconstructed from sources of all kinds and shapes collected in this volume, dating from the days of the comitopuls through the early modern period.
The sources agree on the key point. Indigenous, Byzantine, Arab, Russian, Serbian, Latin, and other witnesses are unanimous: the tsars from the comitopul dynasty considered themselves Bulgarians by birth; claimed to have continued the Bulgarian state tradition, temporarily suspended in the northeast of the old state’s territory; their subjects, nobility, commoners, and armies were Bulgarian; their institutional and administrative arrangements and nomenclature were those of the Bulgarian state; and their Church and Patriarch were the same old Bulgarian ecclesiastical establishment, ministering to the needs of their flock in Old Bulgarian (otherwise known as Old Church Slavonic).
They were acknowledged as bearers of the Bulgarian state tradition by the Asenids’s ideologues. The Bulgarian clergy kept them in the Bulgarian traditional memory through the two hundred years of Byzantine control, and throughout the long centuries of the Ottoman rule over the territories populated by Bulgarians. For the pre-modern observers, that was all there was to the story. Why then, had the half-century run of the comitopuls dynasty generated heated historiographical debates and turned the comitopuls era from a period into a problem? As modernity dawned upon the region, and modern polities took shape and developed first romantic, antiquarian, and then ideologically nationalist and regional historiographies, and as history and its related disciplines themselves matured intellectually, parts of the story began to change subtly.
Out of the simple cloth of the early historical tradition new narratives were woven. The manners, in which the latter reconstructed the accounts of the medieval people are indicative of the accomplishments, as well as the shortcomings, of modern history-making. And while this volume enables modern students of history with no command of the bewildering variety of languages of the primary material to reconstruct the era of the comitopuls on their own, the sources contain several pitfalls, which should be carefully considered by the scholar. The first issue, transpiring at the very outset of the collection, is the tantalizing paucity of indigenous, contemporary written sources of the region. This is a headache with which the medieval historian is quite familiar, but it is perhaps nowhere more troubling than in the Balkans.
Moreover, what exists is rarely a product of the indigenous tradition. All that is available for half a century of history fits on a postcard: a handful of official stone or fresco inscriptions, commemorative and funeral, incomplete, damaged, and laconic. On the one hand, these may be taken as a natural continuation of the traditional Bulgar, and then Bulgarian, manner of chronicling on stone, a custom documented from the early days of the Bulgar(ian) state and practically absent from neighboring Balkan cultures. On the other hand, cultural contamination, independent innovation, and conscious imitation for legitimacy’s sake cannot be excluded.
The scholar is thus forced to contextualize on assumptions, and the relevance of the latter is in the eye of the beholder. Apart from direct official indigenous sources, there are the much later narratives of the popular tradition. Three problems suggest themselves here. First, these accounts while possibly circulating in the immediate aftermath of the events upon which they reflect were committed to writing much later, most likely centuries after the events. Second, most of them are in the guise of “historical apocrypha,” a mixed genre, which only needs a fragment of historical reality to insert in the providential frame that so appealed to its public—and that fragment need not be coming with its original context.
As recent studies have demonstrated (on the Vision of Prophet Isaiah, for example), making them meaningful requires bringing together a large amount of contexts, and this can be a life-time pursuit. In the end, it would still be arguable how much of what they tell us is murky memory, and how much fantasy. Modern psychology suggests that the same part of the brain that is responsible for memory supports imagination. Third, no matter their historicity, such accounts are subject to the conventions of transmission and content of popular culture.
Central figures, actions, and expectations are all conventionalized in a trans-cultural framework that leaves little room for particularities. In this, they fit well Peter Burke’s outline of the principal aspects of pre-modern popular culture; this, in turn, means that reading them for specifics is a futile exercise; then again, it may not be. There is simply no way to tell it one way or another. In short, the scarcity of the sources and their inherent shortcomings do not allow the construction of a coherent and discrete heuristic framework that would encompass them all. To avoid, or minimize the impact of pure guesswork, historians are both free and constrained (depending on approach) to “open” the interpretive environment and insert the direct references into any outside context they considered relevant, based on their skill, knowledge, methodology, and/or ideological preference.
The unfortunate and inevitable result of this predicament is to make interpretation the only viable heuristic approach to the immediate primary material. The introduction of inter-disciplinarity (involving linguistics, literary studies, art, Biblical exegesis and, above all, the disciplines dealing with material culture, archeology and sigillography) has ameliorated the situation somewhat, but the basic premise still applies. The overwhelming amount of material thus comes from outside of the indigenous tradition, in this case, from contemporary Byzantine authors.
This is the principal historical tradition, and its impact on later reconstructions is overwhelming. Where conscientious and detailed, Byzantine historians recorded a trove of information, from which the modern scholar can distill an adequate account of the last years of the Bulgarian state. Many of them, however, are unabashedly apologetic, frequently outright hostile, and not always thoroughly informed; they also seldom had it as a purpose to chronicle contemporary developments for history’s sake. Their task was primarily the glorification of the reigning emperor and the strength of the Byzantine state: much of what did not meet that relevancy test was left out.
This also explains why, for example, the records they compiled, and practically the entire written documentation (with very few notable exceptions, such as Basil II’s immunity charters for the ecclesiastical domain of the conquered state) is political history. The modern reader is thus severely limited in the attempt to comprehend the epoch’s social, cultural, and economic arrangements. There is simply not enough written evidence for that.
This sad state of affairs can be attributed to the thoroughness, with which the victorious Byzantines suppressed the native record, or simply to the fact that not much was written during the period. The early medieval Bulgarian and Byzantine societies were not notarial cultures. Here as elsewhere, later Byzantine sources and modern-day archaeology come to the rescue; but their contributions can only partially alleviate the dearth of information. But even the scrutiny of the richest and most interested Byzantine authors is not without snags.
A good many of them work within the tradition of legitimizing the Byzantine state as an organic outgrowth of the marriage between the classical Roman political legacy and Greek culture. As a result, their use of place and ethnic names is often thoroughly classical. For Leo the Deacon and John Geometres, for example, the Byzantine opponents are barbarians, Mysians, Scythians, and Thracians, while the imperial Byzantines are Ausonians: all long extinct populations of the ancient and classical Balkans and southeastern Europe, which the archaizing trend of the Byzantine literati called back to life on the pages of their erudite reflections. Such usage has fueled speculations as to what, exactly, did an author mean when referring to “Thracians,” for example, on any given occasion.
If motivated by factors other than legitimate scholarly suspicion, such hypercriticism tends to omit the fact that a good deal of witnesses do, as Michael Attaleiates did, clarify their archaic nomenclature by adding the contemporary identity of the population in question. Relatively rich as the Byzantine tradition is, no single author could keep up with the slowly evolving toponymy of the region, both in terms of time and space. This too, complicates matters, as a compiler like Paolo Ramusio refers to the region of Vlachia in what is modern Thessaly in Greece.
That there was a substantial Vlach population in Thessaly, which earned it the name “Great Vlachia” is a well-known fact of the Byzantine nomenclature of the period: but which Byzantine source was he using, for what period did his source locate that Vlachia, and where was it located in the region Ramusio was discussing, is debatable. Given the modern multi-national make-up of the core territories controlled by the comitopuls, and the almost certain multi-layered identities of many of the protagonists in the accounts, it is not a surprise that ethnicity has emerged as one of the murkiest and most disputed category of the identity-oriented currents of history making for both pre-modern and modern authors. Modern English terminology does not make things easier. This collection uses the standardized concepts of “race” and “nation” to convey categories used by Byzantine and other authors.
Both, however, are fully modern concepts, and are only approximations to the meaning the sources use to designate large, culturally defined groups. In most cases, the sources give us precious little to make an informed decision about the character of the identity to which they refer. We are left in the dark on the criteria that an eyewitness or later compiler would be using; meanwhile, they could be working with any base for determining the category—cultural (language, name register), geographical (territory), and political (polity affiliation). In such matters, translations, this one included, are normally only a starting point to identify a problem-area: any study purporting adequate reconstruction will need to scrutinize the original terminology of the authors in the contexts they employ it.
Against this backdrop, it bears repeating that Byzantine authors have as a benchmark their fairly complex notion of imperial identity, which was in most cases hybrid rather than ethnically and culturally monolithic, especially where the upper classes were concerned. The modern reader will do well to keep this in mind, and consider that the populations described by the Byzantines are not, for the better part, to be judged by the same standard (again, nobility excluded), as well as discern carefully between ascribed versus self-conscious expressions and designations of identity. A good example is Stepanos of Taron’s suggestion that the comitopuls were Armenian.
This has led a modern author to proclaim the dynasty Armenian by descent, on rather flimsy grounds: the name register of the dynasty (which is decisively drawn from the Old Testament), and the latter re-settlement of their Byzantinized descendants in Byzantine Armenia. The fact is, however, that Byzantine political strategy was to relocate co-opted nobility as far away from any “home base” loyal to them as possible, and that the mere presence of the last identifiable descendants of the comitopuls in Armenia must have sufficed to give rise to a popular tradition about them, which Stepanos converted into ethnic affiliation.
Of a different register, but potentially misleading in the same vein, is the imperial myopia, so solidly established within the Byzantine historical tradition that the reader approaching the era of the comitopuls from within it would hardly notice. For the Byzantine authors had every reason to consider the sniffing out of the dynasty of the comitopuls, on the one hand, as a re-conquest of imperial lands lost time ago, but legitimately Byzantine nonetheless and, on the other, as suppression of recalcitrant nobility that disregarded political hierarchy and the fact that Bulgarian state tradition, however legitimate it might have been, had been officially extinguished. Hence their standard, if loaded, characterization of the events as “revolt,” “rebellion,” “uprising,” or “secession.”
The very term comitopuls that the sources employ, adopted in this collection as a convenient designation of the dynasty, is already delegitimizing the dynasty’s claim to the leadership of the Bulgarian state tradition, suggesting, as it did, affiliation with a relatively low level of the administrative hierarchy. Byzantine terminology had a strong political hierarchy built within it. Defining the line of Count Nikola after Samuel as comitopuls (rather than tsars) and describing their actions as a “revolt” (rather than expressing the continuity of the Bulgarian state tradition after the old dynasty faltered, and mere dynastic change) is part and parcel of the Byzantine political ideology, which modern accounts need to take into consideration.
Later Slavic writers picked up the same delegitimizing tone in the tradition about the martyrdom of Prince John Vladimir. The dramatic story of his affiliation with the dynasty and his murder, a political case of a slippery vassal potentate who attempted to gain independence and to shift his loyalties as his overlords came under pressure, is cast in terms of personal feelings, rather than an act committed for reason of state. A problem in its own right, the imperial bias in the discourse on the movement of the comitopuls gets exacerbated in some modern national(ist) historiographies. If the comitopuls “revolted,” and subsequently founded a new dynasty, the argument goes, this must be because they were just waiting on the Byzantines to suppress the Bulgarian state, which was foreign to them from the very beginning.
In that reading, “Bulgaria” and “Bulgarians” are conventions akin to “Byzantine,” indicating nothing more but political affiliation and obfuscating indigenous cultural and ethnic identities. The thinking is fallacious, as it disregards the cultural production of the region, the entire written record of the period, which stresses the continuity of the Bulgarian state tradition within the regime of the comitopuls, and the political agenda of the Byzantine imperial sources, to list but a few clusters of evidence. Thus the problem of contorted source criticism gets compounded by the problem of ideological bias. “New dynasty” becomes an equivalent of “new state:” a conceptually dubious conflation, which the contemporary evidence emphatically rules out.
The case of John Vladimir is suggestive also of a more common problem, visible in the trajectory of medieval historical memory in general and that of the dynasty of the comitopuls more specifically, and its diffusion in various strands of the medieval and early modern historiography.
The dominant narrative of the era of the comitopuls, the Byzantine historical record, filtered through a variety of other traditions, due to factors ranging from it being the authoritative tradition in the eastern Mediterranean world to there being simply nothing else available on the time and subject in question. Echoes of the Byzantine accounts are thus traceable in a roster of other historical traditions, as a norm in a fragmented, truncated, and frequently distorted manner. The latter fact needs to be kept in mind though, as there is very little ground to believe that distant (in time and space) Arab, Armenian, or Latin authors would have had access to more adequate records than Byzantine eyewitnesses. It is imperative to remember that taking bits and snippets of the grand Byzantine narrative preserved in such distant sources in isolation from the tradition that generated them, the Greek-speaking Byzantine historiography, as independent and trustworthy evidence, is only justifiable if they could be verified within the context that produced them in the first place.
To avoid such “insights” becoming yet another problem (as in the case of Stepanos) one needs to work with the entire written record of the comitopuls, an undertaking of some difficulty when working with sources in a variety of languages. Herein lies one of main contributions of this collection, as it allows the discerning scholar to grasp the range of the evidence in full before deciding whether following an insight derived from a single author is worth pursuing.
This conclusion obtains for the medieval sources properly so defined; the projection of the historical record of the comitopuls into the early modern period generates problems of its own. The uncritical approach of the early modern worthies, Romantic re-creators of the Slavic past or simply antiquarians with a taste for dramatic action, is well known. A signal part of their reflections is the tendency to moralize, within the context of the normative ethics of their time, or, perhaps more problematic for the history they claimed to unveil, their ideological agendas. Blasius Kleiner, for example, reflects upon the suspected betrayal of Aaron, referred to by the Byzantine sources as “sympathy for the empire,” in the context of his concept of the intrinsic kinship of the Slavic peoples and traditional notions of fratricide.
Against such a backdrop, Aaron’s collaboration, a political crime, which ended with capital punishment, is glossed over. Instead, Samuel’s action in enforcing state self-preservation at the cost of shedding closest kin’s blood (fully in the tradition of Prince Boris’s extirpation of the entire clans of the nobles who rose against him after the conversion to Christianity), is seen as personal clash, and condemned simply as fratricide. Kleiner eschewed concrete political context in the name of the larger ideological stance of Slavic unity—and from that point of view, Samuel too, is condemned as committing the treachery of eliminating close kin. In the same vein of disregarding specific political context (here most likely due to lack of knowledge) is the reduction of political matters to personal relations in the case of the love story between Samuel’s daughter and the Byzantine commander of Dyrrachium by Kleiner.
Like him, Du Cange, too commits the same fallacy of interpreting affairs of state—strategic marriages of members of the ruling dynasty—through the prism of love stories. The same moralistic, pietistic, and providential attitude transpires in the ground-breaking work of the father of the Bulgarian national revival, the monk Paisius, for whom Samuel had clearly became morally “corrupted” to kill his family (brother); that brought God’s wrath on his head and his ultimate downfall. For Paisius, who advocated Bulgarian unity as the indispensable condition for the restoration of the Bulgarian state, church, and nation after long centuries of Ottoman rule, there simply was no excuse for fratricidal struggles among Bulgarians.
Moral considerations enter the story on an even larger scale, as the antiquarians pass a verdict on Basil II, a Christian slaughtering and blinding other Christians— both Orthodox in this case. Moral reduction occasionally gives way to outright invention—witness Mauro Orbini’s Slavic prince “Sabotin”—as the antiquarians were confronted with lacunae in the record and had recourse to popular memory; as we have seen, its reliability is highly questionable. The antiquarian approach persisted well into the nineteenth-century Slavic Romantic historiography, as documented by Jovan Rajić, who– much like Mauro Orbini and Kleiner—took a medley of Byzantine sources and added the romantic elements in an uncritical compilation of old and new.
To conclude these notes, the collection that follows presents both the expert and the uninitiated reader with three accomplishments. It gathers translations of practically all the evidence, of numerous languages and provenance, necessary to grasp a specific historical occurrence, the dramatic half of a century of struggle that accompanied the fall of the early medieval Bulgarian state. It enables the scholar to put in the various contexts of the written tradition, with the turning of a few pages, any individual piece of evidence that had caught his or her eye. And it illustrates, in an uncompromising way, the crucial importance of sound methodology to any reconstruction of the medieval past in general, and of that of southeastern Europe in particular.
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