Episode 289 - Kaloyan, Tsar of Bulgaria

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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 289

Kaloyan, Czar of Bulgaria

Across the last few episodes we've seen several men fail to fill the role of Emperor of Constantinople.

The two Byzantines still carrying that title couldn't find a way to counter the Latins, while the two leading crusaders were both lost in battle against Bulgarian forces who knew the land much better than they did.

Before its sack, Constantinople had been like the sun.

Everyone in the Balkans, Western Anatolia, and the Aegean were in its orbit.

The Fourth Crusade had blotted it out, destabilizing the gravitational pull which the city had exerted over the region.

Now there was a vacuum.

Either someone could fill that space and restart the dead star, or the lands of the Empire would fragment and different power centers would begin seizing control for themselves.

This sounded like good news to the Bulgarians.

With Constantinople's power gone, the greatest threat to their existence had been eliminated.

There was nothing to stop them developing their home base into a prosperous and peaceful land.

But then again, the Bulgarian state was not like Byzantium.

It wasn't a bureaucratic institution designed to protect a Bulgarian homeland.

It was closer to a tribal organization, where leading families competed with each other for prominence, one which relied on a strong man to hold everything together.

If such a figure happened to be riding high when Constantinople fell, then it's possible he could dream the impossible dream.

Rather than reinforce his regional power base, he could seize the Dead Star for himself, reignite it, and become the first ever Emperor of the Romans and Bulgarians.

The Tsar of Bulgaria received the news of Constantinople's fall with mixed emotions.

The humiliation of his state's great rival was a definite boon to his cause, but Calyan had many concerns on his mind.

His fledgling kingdom remained vulnerable despite the collapse of Byzantine power, and he wasn't at all sure if a Latin Empire based on the Bosphorus was going to be a positive development for his people.

Caloyan was born around 1170 to a family of Vlak chiefs who were operating reasonably happily within the Roman world of Manuil Komninos.

As best we can tell, his baptismal name was Ivan, but since his older brother had the same name, he was known to most of his kin as Joannista, Little Ivan.

In Greek, his name was understood as John, and in his positive press he was known as John the Handsome, Kalos Ioannis, as in Kaloyan.

And since that's what I called him before I researched all of this, we'll stick with it.

As his press in Roman circles got worse, he was rebranded as Skylo Iochanes, John the Dog.

Around the time he was 15, his older brothers Peter and Arsen launched their rebellion against the Romans, laying claim to the historic heritage of the Bulgarian state.

The forces of Isaac Angelos responded, and in 1188 they captured Arsene's wife.

In order to secure her release, Kalyan was dispatched to Constantinople as a hostage.

He seems to have escaped or been released at some point in the next few years.

When his older brother Arsene was murdered at Trinovo in 1196, Peter quickly had Caloyan elevated to rule with him, a smart move since Peter died shortly afterwards.

Caloyan was able to see off a serious usurpation attempt and secure his position as Tsar by the end of 1197.

The next few years were incredibly busy.

Caloyan continued the war with the Romans until Alexius Angelos Komnenos agreed to peace and the recognition of his realm.

He also led his forces westward towards Belgrade, both to reward his followers and secure his border with Hungary and Serbia.

This proved tough as the Hungarians were opposed to the establishment of a new kingdom along the Danube.

They had spilt a lot of blood in their wars with Manuel Komninos, and after his death they had grabbed the fortresses along the southern bank of the Great River.

To see an expansionist Bulgarian state on their doorstep was not what they wanted, and so the King of Hungary sent troops to oppose them, allied with the Serbian state, which was also trying to establish itself further south.

Kaloyan also had to manage his Cuman allies with care.

The steppe riders were the key to his military success.

The Vlak cavalry and Bulgarian foot soldiers were perfectly competent, and could go toe-to-toe with their Balkan rivals, but the nomads gave them a cutting edge they otherwise lacked.

The Cumans, like all steppe confederations, were not easy to control.

They had raided Bulgarian lands on a couple of occasions, and so Caloyan had to ride this particular tiger very carefully.

He married a Cuman bride as evidence of his commitment to keeping them on side.

Amidst all this conflict, Kaloyan entered lengthy negotiations with the papacy.

Not only had he used this as a bargaining chip in simultaneous negotiations with the Byzantines, but Caloyan had watched the passage of the Third Crusade through the Balkans.

He knew that it was the Latins who were the coming power in Europe, and it was important to be on their side.

Legitimacy granted by the Pope was vital.

It would protect him from attack and make it harder for the Catholic Hungarians to remain bellicose.

Calayan emerged from these challenges with his reputation greatly enhanced.

Since becoming a teenager, his life had been on fast forward.

He had been forced to learn quickly how to be a soldier, leader, and diplomat all at once.

He was juggling domestic and international concerns, all while wearing a massive target on his back.

It was now that news arrived that the Fourth Crusade was camped outside the walls of Constantinople.

The Tsar sent an embassy to ask the Latins if they would grant him the recognition he desired.

He knew they were on a papally sanctioned mission, and so might have the authority to confirm him in his rights as monarch.

In exchange, he was more than happy to send troops to aid them in their siege.

But, as I mentioned two episodes ago, the Latins were taking their cue from their Byzantine allies, like Alexius Angelos.

The Romans spoke dismissively of the Bulgarians as cattle rustlers and rebels, and the Latins concurred.

The response Caloyan received was that he should leave imperial territory, or he would be forced to.

This was not what he wanted to hear at all.

A few months after Constantinople fell, Kaloyan finally got what he wanted, a crown from the Pope.

A papal legate entered Trinovo and crowned him as King of the Bulgarians and Vlaks.

The pontiff refused to acknowledge the title Tsar, since that meant emperor, and there were only meant to be two of those.

However, the Latins at Constantinople don't seem to have heard, understood, or cared that the Bulgarians were now under the pontiff's spiritual authority.

And to be fair, nothing had yet changed in Bulgaria itself.

Its clergy continued to use the Orthodox rite and would never fully align themselves with Catholic practice.

So it was that the new Emperor Baldwin remained belligerent, that Caloyan made an alliance with Byzantine officials in Thrace, and that the two sides clashed in april twelve oh five outside Adrianople.

The victory which Caloyan won could not have been more crushing.

Baldwin was in chains, most of his knights were dead, and the Latins were fleeing with haste back to Constantinople.

The question now was how to follow up this magnificent victory.

As Latin resistance melted before him, he must have had an idle thought or or two about whether a direct assault on Constantinople might succeed.

But such dreams were easily brushed aside.

Without naval support, such an attack would have been fruitless.

The land walls remained formidable, and the Venetian fleet dominated the Golden Horn.

But what about Thessaloniki?

The Empire's second city was now wide open, and capturing it would be the greatest victory in Bulgarian history.

The Tsar allowed most of his Cuman allies to roam free across Thrace in the aftermath of the battle.

Some made it to the vicinity of Constantinople, pursuing fleeing Latins, looting and pillaging as they went.

Caloyan led the rest of his army west towards the city of St.

Demetrius.

As his route became clear, messengers raced south into Greece, desperate to find King Boniface, who was off besieging Naplion.

As we talked about last week, there was panic inside Thessaloniki, and some Slav rabble rousers actually chased the authorities into the citadel.

Was the city about to be sacked again by a foreign army?

Fortunately for Boniface and the Roman population, the fortress of Ceres bought them some time.

Seres guarded one of the approaches to Thessalonica, and Boniface's men held it against Caloyan's attack.

It took several days for the defenders and the local Byzantines trapped inside to run out of food and surrender.

The terms of the deal meant that if those inside opened the gates voluntarily, they would be allowed to leave unharmed.

We don't know exactly what happened next, but when they emerged from the stronghold, Caloyan appears to have broken his word, enslaved most of them, and had them deported north.

As I say, we don't know exactly what happened, but many Romans concluded that the Tsar couldn't be trusted and would never be welcome as their new overlord.

Remember that some Byzantine officials and soldiers were now marching with the Tsar, which was a complication in the normal Bulgarian operating procedure.

In order to keep his Vlaks, Bulgarians, and Cumans happy, Calyun usually allowed them to take whatever they wanted from Roman lands, but now he had to consider the feelings of those who'd switched sides.

It was another difficult balancing act.

The army moved on to Veria, to the west of of Thessalonica, and a similar scene played out.

Calyan was capturing the forts he needed to isolate the city, but he was also taking Roman captives and dragging them away.

Boniface managed to race back from Greece and reoccupy his city, which for the time being warded Calyan off.

The Tsar didn't want to risk all he'd gained by pushing his men too far.

The summer was slowly passing, and so he turned away from Thessaloniki and began to make his way north.

He wasn't going home without another prize, though, and so he headed towards Philippopolis, one of the major Byzantine towns of Thrace.

The citizens of this region had been terrorized by the Bulgarians for two decades now, so had no incentive to join his side.

The Latin commander abandoned the city as the Tsar approached, recognizing that resistance was futile, but a Byzantine general named Alexius Aspietes stood firm and tried to rally the population to defend their city.

This seems to have angered Calyon, who presumably felt that he was doing the Romans a favour by driving the Latins out.

Various stories are told about the siege.

One blames the city's bogomil population, a heretical Christian sect, for betraying the gates to the Bulgarians.

But whatever really happened, Calyon captured the city, executed the local leadership, and enslaved many of its inhabitants.

Calyon's strategy was becoming clearer.

He would eliminate eliminate any Latin garrisons he found and depopulate Thrace in favour of his own territory north of the Hemus Mountains.

Romans and their animals would be settled there to boost his own economy, while Thrace would become a wasteland which would be unable to resist his incursions or to provide the base necessary to support a Latin Empire.

He had one eye on Thessaloniki, but he needed conditions to be truly in his favour.

Those who bore the brunt of these actions were, of course, ordinary Romans.

It was they who would suffer the depredations of his army's marches.

Many of those who defected to Caloyan's banner began to have serious reservations.

The Bulgarians were freeing them of Latin rule, but at what price?

Perhaps they would be better off with the Westerners after all.

It seems like Caloyan didn't go home that winter, presumably he stayed at Philippopolis.

He was determined to make the most of this extraordinary opportunity.

As 1206 dawned, he led his men through the January weather to the southern coast of Thrace.

There he began attacking the forts which the Latins still held.

It's hard to know what to believe about the extent of this campaign.

The Latin historians name about half a dozen towns he either broke into or terrorized from the outside, while the Byzantine sources name a dozen or more.

At some, the Latin garrison was massacred, at others, the Roman population were enslaved and deported.

The raiding continued up to about thirty kilometers from Constantinople itself, a demonstration of Bulgarian power.

Was there a possibility that the Latins would give up and sail away?

Not really.

It would be too humiliating, and it would betray the sacrifice of all the crusaders who died for this cause.

The Latins accepted that Baldwin was now dead, and elected his brother Henry, or Henri, to replace him.

The new emperor gathered the forces he could muster and prepared to fight a guerrilla campaign against Calyan's men.

As you can imagine, the roads of Thrace were choked with refugees.

People were running in terror from the Bulgarian army and trying to find a safe haven.

Many flocked to Adrianople, whose sturdy walls seemed their best hope for survival.

The city had been the epicentre of the original revolt in favour of Calyan, but the mood had now turned against him.

If this was the alternative to Latin rule, then it was definitely the greater of two evils.

This was when Caloyan became John the Dog in the eyes of the Romans.

Interestingly, in Bulgarian circles, his amazing success led to the creation of a different nickname, the Roman Slayer, a deliberate repost to Basil II, whose campaigns he seemed to be reversing.

The men in charge of Adrianople agreed to switch sides and seek Latin help.

The new Emperor Henry had been having similar thoughts.

If his empire was going to survive, he had to incorporate the Byzantines into his command structure.

He found the ideal first responder in the figure of Theodore Vranas.

You may remember his father Alexius Vranas, who rebelled against Isaac Angelos from his base at Adrianople.

Vranas was one of the few rebels of that era who actually did march on the capital and try to seize the throne, where he was defeated in battle by Conrad of Monferrat, Boniface's older brother.

Stay with me.

Theodore had married Agnes, the daughter of the king of France, last seen as a child bride being married to filthy old Andronicus.

Agnes had stayed in Constantinople, gone native, and hooked up with Vranus.

This gave Theodore a huge advantage over his contemporaries.

His wife had a natural position within the Latins' feudal network, so they understood exactly where Vranas fit in their pecking order.

When the two sides made contact, Henry was more than happy to forgive the people of Adrianople for their betrayal and send them Vranas to act as their new governor.

The tide of battle finally turned that summer.

In June 1206, Caloyan tried to sack the city of Didimotecion on the road towards Adrianople.

Despite battering the walls with siege engines and diverting a river to cut off the water supply, the defenders held out, hopeful that reinforcements were on the way, and indeed they were.

The Emperor Henry was advancing cautiously towards their position.

Despite his numerical advantage, Calyan did not want to get trapped between the city and the oncoming Latin army, and so he abandoned his siege and moved north.

As he passed Adrianople, he was angry to discover that the city had turned against him.

This lengthened his supply lines and made his wagon train, filled with booty and slaves, more vulnerable.

His Cuman troops had already departed, and he was feeling vulnerable.

Slowly Henry closed the gap on him as the Hemus Mountains came into view.

Caloyan made it safely home, but his lieutenants were left to deal with the baggage train and were attacked by Henry's advancing army.

Panic spread, the Bulgarians fled, and thousands of Roman captives broke free their chains.

As they headed home, Henry continued to press north and sacked several Bulgarian fortresses along the coast.

His message was clear.

The Latin Empire was here to stay.

Frustrated by these developments, Calyan made plans for another assault on Roman Thrace.

The following spring, 1207, he rushed to Adrianople to try and capture the city before the Latins could respond.

Apparently he brought thirty-three large counterweight trebuchets to batter the walls, but Theodore Vranas led a resolute defence.

His people worked through the night to repair the destruction inflicted on different sections of the wall, and after a month Calyan called off the siege and his Cuman allies disappeared north of the Danube now that the easy pickings were gone.

Henry was also active.

Taking a leaf from the book of Nicephorus Phokas, he ignored Calyan's army and attacked the Bulgarian forts south of the Hemas Mountains, trying to draw the Tsar away from Latin strongholds.

Then, with autumn approaching, the Emperor met up with King Boniface to exchange oaths of allegiance.

This brings us to the events that closed last week's episode.

On his way home to Thessalonica, Boniface was killed in an ambush by Caloyan's men.

When he received the king's head, Caloyan knew his chance had come.

He marched his army of ten thousand straight for Thessaloniki.

With Boniface dead, the city would be vulnerable.

He had waited for an opportunity like this.

He could either sack the city and take the rich harvest home, or occupy it and attempt to force the Romans to acknowledge him as their new master.

The precedent had been set by the Norman sack twenty years earlier.

The city could be taken.

It was that event, after all, which had provided the spiritual justification for the Bulgarian revolt.

that St.

Demetrius had abandoned the Romans and had relocated to Trinovo, Kalyan's capital.

The Bulgarians bypassed the city's surrounding forts and went straight for the jugula.

Inside the city, faction fighting again threatened to leave the people defenseless.

There were Romans and Slavs intriguing against the Latins and infighting amongst the Westerners themselves.

But Margaret, Boniface's widow, remained nominally in charge, and the one thing everyone could agree on was that they did not want to surrender to Caloyan.

The Tsar focused his attack on the north of the city.

The plan was to fill in the moat with wood and other debris and then attempt to scale the wall with ladders.

The northern moat was quickly filled up as trebuchets pounded the walls above.

It was autumn, and the attack had to be pressed before supplies began to run out.

Then suddenly, in the middle of the night, a cry went up from the Tsar's camp.

Kalayan was dead.

The siege was immediately called off, and the Bulgarians returned home.

Predictably, in the aftermath of this shocking turn of events, the Bulgarian realm fell into conspiracy and civil war.

Their opportunity to become masters of the Balkans had passed.

The Latins and Romans strengthened their alliance, and the Emperor Henry held on to his throne.

The great strength and great weakness of states like Bulgaria is their dependence on the competence, charisma, and longevity of one man.

Caloyan was about thirty-seven years old and seemed a healthy specimen.

Later on, a Roman historian said that he died of pleurisy, and as ever in the medieval world, ill health is always a safe safe bet in cases of sudden death.

But the rumour at the time was that the Tsar had been killed, perhaps by one of his boyars, his noblemen, who had already stirred up some trouble in Trinovo the previous year.

Or was it one of the Romans, still serving the Tsar, but now determined to prevent him from capturing Thessalonica?

Or maybe

it was St.

Demetrius, who had turned his back on the Bulgarians and returned his favour to the city on the Aegean.

The latter was widely reported and believed at the time, and not just in Roman circles.

One scholar argues that had Calyan died of natural causes, the stories of murder would not have spread so quickly.

Who can say?

But the legend that Demetrius had visited the Tsar's tent that night and delivered a fatal blow is a tale which gripped the Balkan imagination.

The image of the saint eliminating Kaloyan can be seen in at least five Balkan churches and on many icons.

It's a backhanded tribute to the impressive figure that Kaloyan cut.

When he was growing up, the idea of reviving the Bulgarian Empire was just a fantasy.

By the time he died, the thought that a Bulgarian Tsar might annex the Roman Empire was not so far-fetched.

The thought that his rapid rise to power was one laced with sin, and that God had delivered his judgment at the gates of Thessaloniki, was one which gained wide currency.

For now, then, the Balkan theatre of war had reached stalemate.

The Latins had clung on to their new possessions in Thrace and Greece.

The Bulgarians were off to kill one another until a new strong man emerges, and the Romans breathed a sigh of relief that they weren't going to be slaughtered next spring.

It wasn't clear to anyone in the Balkans what the future had in store.

No one seemed strong enough to step into Manuel Komninos' long vacated shoes.

But of course the Roman world was not just in Europe.

Across the waters in Anatolia, a new power was emerging.

one that could conceivably dominate the entire west coast.

If that was to happen, then Constantinople would be but a short boat ride away.

Next time, we go back once more to the fall of New Rome and follow a different vantage point.

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What changed for the team today?

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Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

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