Decades of collaboration between the Romans and Bulgars come under threat as frictions flare on the frontier, and instead of diffusing tensions, two ambitious leaders seek to secure their legacy.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to A history of Romania.

Season 2, Episode 13: The collapse of concord

Last time, we finally introduced the Romanians into our story. This new people formed out of the Romanics of the Balkans, whose unique religion, culture, and sense of common descent distinguished them from surrounding peoples. Over the course of the eighth century, their Romance language morphed into Ancient Romanian, which led them to identify more closely with each other and to be perceived as a distinct community by outsiders, thus forming a new ethnicity: the Romanians.

Romanian communities lived in villages sprinkled from the Carpathians to the Balkan Mountains, meaning that they weren’t confined to the borders of any of the region’s states, be it the Avar khaganate, the Bulgar khanate, or the Roman empire. Indeed, the Romanians had emerged on lands which had been lost to the empire, and over which the Avars and Bulgars later established their authority. While they were forced to pay a regular tribute of agricultural goods to these horsemen whenever they made their regular rounds, for the rest of the year, they didn’t much interact with their nomadic overlords and managed themselves autonomously.

Romanian communities produced everything they needed themselves, and bartered with neighbours in nearby villages for anything else they wanted. But these communities also engaged in more distant trade, namely with merchants in the Roman empire. Evidence of such long-distance commerce comes from coins found on the plains on either side of the Danube, as well as in the Carpathian Mountains – areas which were inhabited by the Romanians, amongst other populations. Archeologists have unearthed coins minted during the reigns of emperors ruling from 717 onwards into the 760s. Those years correspond with the period of collaboration between the Bulgars and Romans initiated by Tervel’s treaty in 716, which we explored two episodes back. The coins are mostly made of bronze with a few made of silver, which suggests that they were used for small commercial transactions, since gold coins would’ve been used for tribute between rulers.

While Tervel’s treaty with the Romans had stipulated an official port of trade at Mesembria, the two sides didn’t have the resources to patrol the entire length of their frontiers, and enterprising traders could use the old Roman roads of the region to travel with their goods. In the case of Romanian communities, their shepherds were used to trekking between the mountains and the plains of the region, crossing frontiers and avoiding authorities. As these shepherds drove their herds from one area to another, it’s not impossible to imagine that they’d bring a mule or two along with them. These beasts of burden could carry panniers filled with surplus agricultural goods from their village, such as wheat, millet, cheese, tallow, leather, wax, and honey. Once this convoy reached a Roman town, they could barter these goods for manufactured ones: amphorae filled with oil and wine were highly coveted, as were crosses made in imperial workshops, and indeed, just such objects have been found in villages beyond the empire’s borders north of the Danube.

Of course, this period of peace and trade was also beneficial for the Bulgars. By the middle of the eighth century, the noble boyars no longer needed to rely on their herds for sustenance, since they received everything they needed from the yearly tribute collected from their subjects, plus their trade with the Romans. Whereas in the early eighth century, most of them would’ve migrated with their herds during the summer and hunkered down in earthen homes during the winter, in the second half of the century, they would’ve lived in permanent settlements year-round. The best example of this is the khan’s residence at Pliska, which became permanently occupied and reinforced with three enclosures around this time.

In fact, all of Bulgar society started to settle down. While the khan and his boyars got used to living comfortably in their homes supplied by tribute, their less prosperous dependents began to farm. Some spread out to find suitable land and even settled beyond the Danube. Archeologists have found Bulgar settlements along the left bank of the river, but never more than 20 kilometers away from it – basically half a day’s ride. In effect, the Bulgars kept to the plains along the riverbank where they felt at ease and close to their brethren on the other side. They didn’t much penetrate the dense forests covering the region between the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains; these were mainly inhabited by Romanians, and while they provided tribute to the Bulgars, they were mostly allowed to manage their own affairs.

As the Bulgars were enjoying the fruits of their lands and of their subjects, news reached the khan’s court that thousands of Roman colonists had begun to arrive in Thrace. Bulgar agents noted that these colonists were not just being given lands to farm, but were also expected to serve in the army, and that new fortifications were being erected along the border as well. Something was afoot, and the khan didn’t like it one bit.

What was happening is that the Roman emperor at the time, Konstantinos V, had led two major incursions into the caliphate at a moment when the Muslim world was riven by civil war. His raids in 745 and 751 had been quite successful, but Konstantinos’ goal hadn’t been to reconquer lost territory; rather, he had wanted to depopulate the eastern frontier to make it harder for the Muslims to mount attacks from those regions. And so, during his expeditions, the emperor had captured tens of thousands of people in the caliphate, including Armenians and Syriac-speaking Christians, and now resettled them in Thrace to strengthen his Balkan holdings and create a bulwark against the Bulgars.

When khan Kormisosh heard about these moves, he demanded an indemnity from the emperor, arguing that fortifying the border violated the treaty of 716. Konstantinos refused – why would he pay the Bulgars to settle people in his own realm? The two sides came to an impasse. The khan and the emperor could’ve reached an agreement to maintain the ties between their two polities. But that’s not what happened.

Emperor Konstantinos was feeling confident after his triumphs in the East, and with the Muslim threat temporarily muted, he wanted to expand the empire’s influence in the Balkans. He wasn’t about to back down and concede anything; if the khan wanted to fight, well, he was welcome to face his seasoned soldiers. On the other side, khan Kormisosh had probably seen Tervel’s exploits against the empire and the caliphate when he had been a young man, and now that he was entering old age, he might’ve wanted to secure his own legacy, as his predecessor had done. And it might be that his nobles, having lived in a time of peace but been raised with tales of war, wanted a chance to prove themselves as warriors. In short, both sides could’ve avoided conflict, but both sides wanted it.

The khan made the first move. In 755, he saddled his horse, renounced his people’s forty-year treaty with the Romans, and led his warriors into Thrace. The Bulgars rode thunderously through the countryside straight for Constantinople, while looting churches, taking prisoners, and killing those who resisted. The emperor assembled his army before the Long Wall of Thrace, a fortification some sixty kilometers from the capital. The two sides clashed at this crucial juncture, and though we lack details, the Bulgars suffered a heavy defeat in which they lost numerous fighters. The survivors were forced to ride back north beyond the Balkan Mountains while being harried by Roman troops.

Energised by his victory, Konstantinos decided to deal a decisive blow to the Bulgars and to end this war on his terms. He spent the remainder of the year organizing his army as well as a large navy of five hundred ships. Some of these were warships, but most were transports carrying troops destined for the Bulgar homeland.

The following year, this fleet sailed along the Black Sea coast all the way to the mouth of the Danube, then split up to navigate its swampy streams, and reunited upriver. Now at the northern edge of the Bulgar realm, the Romans disembarked from their ships and fell on unsuspecting Bulgar and Slavic settlements, plundering homes, burning fields, taking numerous captives, and killing many more. This destructive campaign was mainly meant as a distraction, though, because the main thrust was coming from the south, with the emperor himself leading an army to crush the Bulgar forces.

The khan decided that he couldn’t defend two fronts at once, so he assembled all his warriors and marched them to meet the emperor. The two armies clashed at the border fort of Marcellae – and the Bulgars were again routed. Khan Kormisosh died soon after this second defeat, and he was succeeded by a member of his clan, Vinekh, who had, in fact, led the forces at the battle of Marcellae.

This new khan set out to quickly obtain peace with the empire, because he simply couldn’t continue the war: his army had lost thousands of men, those who remained were exhausted, and many had family members who had been captured or killed by the Romans. And so, Vinekh sent envoys to the emperor promising to uphold the peace, to forfeit his annual subsidies, and to provide his own children as hostages. Konstantinos accepted the offer, but only in as much as it gave him time to prepare for a second campaign. It seems that, having beaten the Bulgars in battle and ferried troops on their territory, Konstantinos felt confident that he could completely defeat them; his aim now became to restore the empire’s position in the Balkans and throw the Bulgars back beyond the Danube.

Accordingly, Konstantinos spent the next two years preparing his final offensive. He used the army he’d wielded against the Bulgars to subjugate the Slavic tribes of Thrace and Macedonia who lived outside of the empire’s control. His inroads into the mountainous interior were part of his larger goal of strengthening the empire’s Balkan provinces. And with every Slavic village that accepted his suzerainty, the emperor received more supplies and warriors for his army.

By 759, Konstantinos was happy with the progress he’d made against the Slavs, and he felt ready to renew his war against the Bulgars. He thus disregarded the peace signed three years earlier and ordered his army into the khanate. Vinekh quickly gathered his warriors and rode into the Balkan Mountains, since the narrow, rugged terrain could negate the Romans’ numerical superiority. As Konstantinos marched his army through a gorge, Vinekh’s riders fell on them and caused heavy casualties.

The emperor was forced to retreat all the way to Constantinople, but the khan didn’t harry his army on the way back. You see, the Bulgars had routed the Romans because they were on the defensive in territory they knew well; but Vinekh knew they’d be unlikely to win a pitched battle on Roman soil given the losses his army had suffered over the past four years. So, he instead decided to negotiate from a position of force right after his victory. Though we lack details, Vinekh may have pushed for the restoration of the treaty of 716, which would’ve given him subsidies and reestablished trade relations with the empire.

But the khan’s conciliatory approach drew the ire of many boyars. In their minds, they had just won a resounding victory over the Romans, and it was unacceptable that the khan wanted to negotiate. No, what was needed was action – to keep the momentum going and kick the Romans while they were down. And so, in 761, a number of boyars stormed into Vinekh’s residence and murdered him along with his family. Thereafter, they proclaimed one of their own as leader, a man named Telets.

Telets needed a grand army to confront the Romans, and so he sent riders to demand recruits from all the Slavic communities under his dominion. Understandably, many of these communities refused to send their young men to die for the khan. Roman writers attest that 208,000 Slavs left their homes and sought asylum in the empire; that number is an exaggeration, but it speaks to the scale of Slavic dissent against the Bulgars.

You see, tensions had been building between the two groups for decades. The Slavs constituted the majority of the khanate’s population, so much so that Slavic had become the lingua franca of the realm by this time. The Bulgars, meanwhile, still spoke their Turkic tongue, and were of two minds about their Slavic subjects.

One faction favoured collaboration with the Slavic chiefs who had been allowed to govern their communities and lead their warriors in support of the Bulgars, since such loyal leaders could prove a great asset to the khan. The other faction disliked the influence which the Slavs wielded in the army, and wanted to keep them out of court affairs and decisions, so as to maintain the dominant position of the traditional Bulgar elite.

Roman sources present relations with the empire as the main point of contention in Bulgar politics at this time: do we collaborate or fight? But that, of course, is from the Roman perspective. Scholars suggest that the relationship between the Bulgar rulers and their Slavic subjects could’ve been just as important, if not more so.

It might be that the issue of relations with the empire and that of relations with the Slavs converged: the war party led by Telets may have pushed for a hostile stance towards the Slavs – hence their reluctance to fight for him – whereas the peace party represented by the murdered Vinekh may have sought to collaborate with the Slavs.

We don’t know how much support Telets received from his Slavic subjects, but we do know that he needed to go to war – and soon. So, the bellicose khan gathered his loyal warriors and led them on a raid in Thrace. Yet he didn’t repeat Kormisosh’s mistake of heading for Constantinople; rather, the raid was meant to provoke the emperor. Telets soon returned home, fortified his border, and awaited an imperial counterattack that he would face on his territory.

But emperor Konstantinos wasn’t about to do what his enemy wanted him to do. Instead, he again sent a fleet to the mouth of the Danube – this time numbering a massive eight hundred ships – where it disembarked a cavalry force of several thousand soldiers who rode southwards down the coast. Meanwhile, the emperor himself mustered an army in Thrace and marched it northwards, thus creating a pincer movement. In 763, the two Roman forces met at Anchialus, a city on the Black Sea coast near Mesembria. In June of that year, the khan spurred his warriors onwards and attacked the emperor’s forces. The battle lasted from morning until dusk; the tide only turned when Telets’ Slavic subjects deserted him for the emperor, such that the Bulgars lost the field with heavy casualties.

Emperor Konstantinos returned to Constantinople in triumph to celebrate his victory, parading in full armour as he brought back Bulgar prisoners and plunder from the campaign. Meanwhile, Telets – a warmonger who’d lost the war – was murdered by his boyars and replaced with another man named Sabin. This new khan tried to negotiate a peace with Konstantinos before the next campaign season when the emperor could march his victorious army into the khanate, but talk of peace was anathema to the war party. Bulgar nobles convened a council in which they denounced the khan, accusing him of enslaving them to the Romans. Sabin knew the fate of his two predecessors, and so decided to flee to keep his life. He gathered his family and relatives and rode to the Roman city of Mesembria as an exile.

The war party then elected Toktu to lead them, but it didn’t manage to consolidate its position; the peace faction was still influential and contested Toktu’s ascension. We lack details about the tensions between the two sides, but it’s clear that the khanate was embroiled in internal chaos. Within a few months, the bellicose Toktu was forced to flee northwards by his opponents, but was caught before crossing the Danube, and executed. The peace party then installed their man on the throne: Pagan.

Pagan managed to convince his boyars that they could not resist the Roman army; if they were to avoid yet another defeat, they needed to sue for peace. And so, Pagan came before the emperor with his boyars, begging for clemency. The Romans still saw the Danube as the border of their empire, and the Bulgars as “barbarians” who had been entrusted with protecting imperial land. As such, Konstantinos harangued Pagan and his boyars as rebels against their legitimate sovereign; but despite his heated talk, the emperor ended by saying that he was willing to make peace.

Pagan returned home, content to have secured his realm, and looking to rebuild it. But he barely made it back when, in 768, the Romans broke their promise, surprised the Bulgars, crossed the mountain passes unopposed, and marched into the heartland of the khanate. Konstantinos had only agreed to the “peace” to buy time, because after seeing the disunity amongst the Bulgars, he was convinced that this was the perfect time to fully and finally defeat them. With the element of surprise, the Romans made it to the core of the khanate between the Balkan Mountains and the Danube, set numerous settlements on fire, and even came in the vicinity of Pliska itself.

The Bulgars accused Pagan of being naïve and incapable of defending them – and so murdered him. But despite losing their leader, the Bulgars were nevertheless able to defend their capital, and the Romans didn’t capture Pliska. Konstantinos’ army simply didn’t have the numbers and resources to fully defeat all Bulgar forces and to occupy all their settlements. The emperor realized that this campaign would not be the one to bring final victory; he would have to come back. In 767, he concluded an advantageous treaty with Telerig, the new khan. We don’t know the terms of the treaty, except that the two sides agreed not to attack each other.

Our sources make no mention of the Bulgars for the next few years, which is always a good sign that a war wasn’t happening. Konstantinos was preoccupied with domestic affairs and was waiting for the right moment to strike. Telerig, meanwhile, had just won some much-needed breathing room, and focused on healing his realm. After twelve years of nearly constant fighting, the Bulgar khanate was exhausted. Many of its warriors had perished, and those who remained had all seen the countryside around Pliska burn. It was the closest they’d come to being defeated and expelled north of the Danube, which would mean losing all they had acquired, becoming destitute, and then what? Be at the mercy of the Khazars from which their ancestors had fled.

No, if the Bulgars wanted to survive, they all needed to come together: those who had been pro war and those who had been pro peace, those who had wanted to collaborate with the Slavs and those who had wanted to exclude them, those who had betrayed each other and those who had denounced each other. Their fates were all bound in one.

As such, Telerig spent much of his reign building support amongst the boyars. That probably meant that different sides made compromises to work together, which could’ve included greater participation for the Slavs in the khanate, since the boyars needed all the help they could get.

Telerig’s coalition fortified the border as best it could, knowing that Konstantinos could renew hostilities at any moment. And well, six years later in 774, that’s exactly what he did.

The emperor assembled his largest expedition yet and employed his favourite pincer strategy: he himself led a major army from the south, while he sent a navy of two thousand ships to the mouth of the Danube. That immense number is four times larger than the first fleet he’d employed, which suggests that this time, he was taking no chances. Whereas he’d been unable to capture Pliska before, he now brought an overwhelming force to bear to break Bulgar resistance and bring their realm under his direct dominion.

But when the fleet reached the port at Odessos, Konstantinos halted the campaign, for unknown reasons. We could speculate a thousand possibilities: maybe he fell ill, maybe he faced some insubordination, maybe his army had received fewer supplies than expected. Whatever the reasons may be, Konstantinos drew up a peace treaty with Telerig, in which both sides agreed not to attack each other.

Telerig of course knew that this was not a peace, but a truce until Konstantinos was ready to strike again. So, later that same year, the khan sent an army into Macedonia to raid the land, capture as many of its inhabitants as possible, and resettle them in the border regions of his realm. The Bulgar army was ambushed by the Romans, though, and suffered a resounding blow. The emperor then sought to follow up his success with yet another pincer invasion of the khanate, but his fleet was battered by contrary winds, and many ships were sunk, forcing him to return to the capital.

Telerig then sent a secret envoy to Konstantinos, informing him that, due to internal dissent, he needed to flee the khanate and, like other khans before him, he hoped to be received as an exile. All he needed was a list of Roman agents in the khanate who could help him safely escape. Konstantinos was overjoyed at the news and gave Telerig the information he needed – and the khan immediately used it to imprison the Roman agents within his realm and execute them. Furious, the emperor began preparing yet another invasion – but he died unexpectedly of a fever in 775, and his plans evaporated.

Konstantinos had tangled with eight consecutive khans without deviating from his aim. He had struck the Bulgars like a battering ram again, and again, and again; and when the final blow was about to land, the battering ram collapsed mid-swing.

Thankfully for the Bulgars, the new emperor was immediately faced with an invasion from the caliphate and couldn’t focus on the Balkans. More importantly, he didn’t have a vendetta against the Bulgars like Konstantinos, and he wanted peace in the Balkans. The mortal danger for the Bulgars thus passed.

Ironically, though, Telerig did end up seeking refuge in Constantinople just two years later, when he was ousted by a rival faction. We have no details about this infighting; perhaps now that the unifying threat represented by Konstantinos was gone, the previous factional rivalries between the boyars remerged. What we do know is that Telerig accepted baptism in Constantinople, received the title of patrikios, and married a cousin of the new emperor’s wife.

Telerig’s successor, Kardam, rallied his warriors and invaded Roman territory. A number of skirmishes ensued and, in 778, the Bulgars killed the military commander of Thrace. The Romans were unable to effectively counterattack since they were preoccupied with the caliphate, but the Bulgars too didn’t have the resources to pursue their offensive further. Both sides were content not to attack one another.

Kardam’s incursion may have been a protest against the empire for giving refuge to Telerig, but more likely, it was a show of force, both to the Romans and to the Bulgars. He had shown the Romans that his warriors were still a formidable force, and he had shown the Bulgars that he could lead them to victory.

Indeed, Kardam maintained his dominant position for two decades until his death, which was quite a change from the last two decades which had witnessed eight, short-lived khans. Those years of chaos had seen clans turn against one another as they supported one faction or the other; it had seen settlements and fields burned to the ground; and it had seen families decimated, with fathers and sons lost in battle, mothers murdered in raids, daughters taken in captivity, and the eldest and the smallest ones finished by starvation. The calm during Kardam’s reign gave families the opportunity to replant their fields, rebuild their homes, and grieve. It gave the clans the chance to reknit relations with one another. It gave the realm time to heal.

Though the khanate was devastated and exhausted, it still stood. The Romans were stronger now in the northern Balkans than at any point since the reign of Maurikios, but they had united the Bulgar ruling classes in their hatred of them. Whereas in the middle of the eighth century, the Bulgars had been allies of the Romans who had collaborated with them over multiple generations, they were now suspicious of their southern neighbour; the empire could strike at any time, so the Bulgars had to remain constantly vigilant.

Those two decades of warfare had made the khanate more internally united as well. The factional infighting which had paralyzed the realm, heightened its social tensions, and seen repeated coups and assassinations had given way to conciliation between the clans as they faced a common threat. Moreover, a large number of Bulgar leaders and warriors had died in the fighting, such that subsequent khans had increasingly leaned on their Slavic chieftains to fill the ranks of the army. As a matter of survival, the Bulgars had come to rely more and more on the Slavs, listening to their advice, entrusting them with commands, and respecting their needs. The Slavic chieftains had thus gained a voice in the khanate.

As such, the second half of the eighth century had been quite transformative for the Bulgar realm, and this period also brought some consequential changes north of the Danube. The Avars of the Carpathian basin had, like the Bulgars, begun to settle down and they too had to contend with a powerful neighbour with imperial ambitions.

Next time, we’ll return to the Avars to explore the evolution of their khaganate and see them stare down their own colossal nemesis: the Franks.