The partition of the Kingdom of Tarnovo and its gradual weakening coincided with the appearance of a terrible danger to which initially no one seemed to pay any particular attention. Under the pressure of the Turks after the 11th century, Byzantium had practically lost Asia Minor. It was the hobby of both the larger and the smaller Turkic Muslim states established there to wage war with the Christians (not that they left the people of their own faith alone).
In the 14th century Byzantium was shaken by dynastic struggles. The claimants to the throne did not hesitate to pay for Turkish mercenaries in support of their claims. Every spring, mounted Turkish companies crossed the Dardanelles and ravaged Thrace by destroying towns and villages. The so-called beylik of Osman gradually loomed above the host of minor Muslim states. The beylik was located on the border between Christianity and Islam. As a result, men in it accumulated considerable experience in war and plunder. Hundreds and thousands of free soldiers flocked there attracted by the rumours of successes reaped by the ruler and his heirs. It was from this motley and chaotic crowd that the Ottoman state managed to create a powerful, fanatic, and disciplined army.
In the middle of the 14th century the Turks availed themselves of a strong earthquake, which destroyed one of the Byzantine forts on the European shore of the Dardanelles. Just like Leander, their hordes crossed the Hellespont, but unlike him they did not perish in the waves. The attempts of the Byzantines to make them leave the fort of Tsimpe failed, and it became a base for the attacks and a connection with the Muslim territories in Asia. The plunderers no longer needed to cross the strait back and made their winter camp in the fertile plain of Eastern Thrace. The state of Osman’s heirs gradually spread along both shores of the Sea of Marmora. In 1364 the Ottomans conquered Adrianople, one of the most important cities in the European lands of Byzantium, located on the very rim of Bulgarian ethnic territories, and proclaimed it their capital. Thus they made it clear that their ambitions were targeted at the old continent.
The Balkan rulers didn’t even surmise that a new conqueror was knocking at their door, different from the ones that usually came and went. Instead of uniting their efforts, they continued their intermittent bickering. While the Ottoman hordes criss-crossed Thrace unimpeded, the Bulgarian ruler’s eyes were glued on his western border where the Serbian King Stephen Dushan was busy establishing yet another short-lived Balkan empire. Startled by the fact that his realm was the most endangered, one of the Byzantine emperors suggested an allBalkan cooperation against the aggressor, but his appeal was rejected with ridicule. Even the fact that two of his sons fell in battle with the Ottomans failed to bring John Alexander to his senses. What was more, the Bulgarian tsar tried to avail himself of Byzantium’s desperate situation and to annex two small Black Sea towns to his estate.
John Alexander died in 1371, leaving his state weak and partitioned, a mere shadow of former glory. His son – John Shishman, born of the second marriage with the Jewess Sarah – did everything he could to retain his birthright, but was not the ablest or most courageous of rulers. His reign began under ominous omens. One of the last attempts to stop the Ottoman invasion was made in the fall of 1371. Two Serb feudal lords with estates in Macedonia, Valkasin, and Uglesa, gathered a relatively large army and marched against the enemy. On the bank of the Maritsa River the over-confident brothers were surprised by the Ottomans and the battle became a slaughter. Encouraged by their victory, the Turkish bands spread across the entire peninsula “like a flock of birds of prey” as their contemporaries said. The Bulgarian ruler prudently became a vassal of the sultan, but this did not change the situation. His subjects and the bands he gathered fought desperately against the rapacious marches of the Ottomans who did not bat an eyelid before attacking the realm of their vassal. The Bulgarian fortresses fell one after another, frequently after desperately resisting for weeks.
The ruler of the kingdom of Vidin, John Sratsimir, failed to overcome the old hostility and didn’t extend a helping hand to his brother, although he could hardly have been of any assistance. Or perhaps he hoped to put off the inevitable end at least for his own subjects.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the downfall of the Bulgarian kingdom coincided with a hitherto unseen flourish of culture. The throne of the patriarch was occupied by one of the most prominent writers of the age, Euthymius. An adherent to the religious and philosophical movement of hesychasm, he was also a great philologist who made a linguistic reform of literary Old Slavonic. Besides Bulgaria, the reform was also adopted by neighbouring countries, which used variants of Old Slavonic, including Serbia, Wallachia, Moldavia, and Russia. The large edifice of Kilifarevo monastery rose near the capital and housed dozens if not hundreds of monks who copied and illuminated manuscripts. The emergence of a number of heresies and sects, which questioned the ruling dogmas of the Orthodox Church, was also indicative of rampant ideological changes. After the fall of the kingdom of Tarnovo a number of writers escaped mostly to the north, in the lands of Wallachia, Moldavia, and the Russian state. Some rose to high ecclesiastic ranks in their new countries (one of them became metropolitan of Kiev), others left their names in the literature and art of other nations.
In 1393 Sultan Bayazid decided to terminate once and for all the formal autonomy of the kingdom of Tarnovo. He besieged the city but, to their honour, the Bulgarians did not give up their capital without a fight.
Tsar John Shishman was somewhere in the realm gathering an army, which failed to appear by the walls of the besieged city, but Patriarch Euthymius inspired the defenders. After three months of considerable effort the resistance was crushed, and the victors promptly slew the aristocracy by the dozen. Hundreds of others were forced to resettle in outlying territories of the already emerging Ottoman Empire, as they were regarded as potential leaders of future revolts. The patriarch himself was exiled in Bachkovo monastery where he died several years later.
The fate of the last Bulgarian tsar is unclear, although he was probably beheaded in the camp of the Ottoman sultan at Nikopol in 1396. One of his sons converted to Islam and became an Ottoman commander. Another fled to the west.
Ecclesiastic Book, 12th century
In the middle of the 14th century quite a few Bulgarians were literate, albeit on an elementary level. There were schools with some churches and monasteries and probably also with the palace of the ruler or even at the courts of some feudal lords. Children began to study approximately around the age of seven. It was generally accepted that, unlike the church schools, those at the monasteries provided better and more comprehensive education. Students used to write the letters carefully and painstakingly on wax tablets called panikida. It was assumed that three or four years sufficed to achieve elementary literacy.The Psalter and the Horology were used as the fundamental textbooks. The best students went to acquire even higher education at the monasteries on Mt. Athos, or in Constantinople, and some even studied in Western Europe. Historians have calculated that on the eve of Tarnovo’s fall under Ottoman rule up to 30%n of the male population in the capital were literate, i.e. they could probably sign their names, possibly read, and on rare occasion – write. Some monasteries and the aristocratic palaces had libraries of several dozen and even hundreds of books. Most were written on parchment, and paper appeared at the end of the 13th century. These books were far from cheap. One 13th century lover of knowledge gave five perpera for two books, a sum for which he could have bought himself a house in the town, or 1.0 hectare of land.Alas, the manuscripts that remain from those times are but too few. Destroyed during the Ottoman invasion, they disintegrated from age, burned together with churches and monasteries, or were simply left to rot due to ignorance before, in more recent times, they were exported from the Balkans by educated and cultured Europeans to whom the tight of small nations to stand by their traditions was non-existent, the resulting that the few remaining manuscripts are strewn across the continent.
In the memory of the people John Shishman remained not so much a martyr embodying the ideal of Christian humility as a defendant of the faith against the invaders. One of his generals had a still extant inscription made on- a steep crag in the Balkan range, which reads:
I, sebastos Ognyan, was cephalic during the reign of Tsar Shishman and 1 suffered much evil. It was at this time that the Turks waged war on us and I sided with Tsar Shishman.
The remaining two portions of Bulgaria, the kingdom of Vidin and the Dobrotitsa’s principality, soon fell too. At the end of the 14th century a foreign domination of different language and faith was imposed on Bulgaria to remain for nearly five centuries. And it seemed the Bulgarian territories were cut off from European development.
Forever!
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