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Mountains, was won from the Greeks, and John Assen was powerful
enough to dream of entering into alliance with the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa. An assassin’s sword, however, ended John Assen’s life
prematurely. He was followed on the throne by his brother Peter.
He, too, was assassinated, and was succeeded by his brother Kalojan,
who had all the warlike virtues of John Assen, and re-established the
Bulgarian Empire with territories which embraced more than half the
whole Balkan Peninsula. Seeking to add to the reality of power some
validity of title, Kalojan entered into negotiations with the Pope of
Rome, made his submission to the Roman Church, and was crowned
by a Papal nuncio as king.
It was about this time that Constantinople was captured by the
Crusaders, and Count Baldwin of Flanders ascended the throne of
the Caesars. The Greeks, driven from their capital but still holding
some territory, made an alliance with Kalojan, and once again Greek
and Bulgar fought side by side, defeating the Franks and taking the
Emperor Baldwin prisoner. Then the alliance ended—never, it seems,
can Bulgar and Greek be long at peace—and a war raged between the
Greek Empire and Bulgaria, until in 1207 Kalojan was assassinated.
A brief period of prosperity continued for Bulgaria while John
Assen II. was on the throne. He was the most civilised and humane
of all the rulers of ancient Bulgaria, and there is no stain of a
massacre or a murder remembered against his name. He made wars
reluctantly, but always successfully. An inscription in a church at
Tirnova records his prowess:
In the year 1230, I, John Assen, Czar and Autocrat of the Bulgarians,
obedient to God in Christ, son of the old Assen, have built this most
worthy church from its foundations, and completely decked it with
paintings in honour of the Forty holy Martyrs, by whose help, in the
12th year of my reign, when the church had just been painted, I set out
to Roumania to the war and smote the Greek army and took captive
the Czar Theodore Komnenus with all his nobles. And all lands have I
conquered from Adrianople to Durazzo, the Greek, the Albanian, and the
Servian land. Only the towns round Constantinople and that city itself
did the Franks hold; but these too bowed themselves beneath the hand of
my sovereignty, for they had no other Czar but me, and prolonged their
days according to my will, as God had so ordained. For without Him no
word or work is accomplished. To Him be honour for ever. Amen.
John Assen II. was a great administrator as well as a great soldier.
Whilst he declared the Church of Bulgaria independent, repudiating
alike the Churches of Rome and of Constantinople, he tolerated all
religions and gave sound encouragement to education. With his
death passed away the last of the glory of ancient Bulgaria. Her story
now was to be of almost unrelieved misfortune until the culminating
misery of the Turkish conquest.
Internal dissensions, wars with the Venetians, the Hungarians,
the Serbs, the Greeks, the Tartars,—all these vexed Bulgaria. The
country became subject for a time to the Tartars, then recovered
its independence, then came under the dominion of Servia after
the battle of Kostendil (1330). The Servians, closely akin by blood,
proved kind conquerors, and for some years the two Slav peoples
of the Balkans kept peace by a common policy in which Bulgaria,
if dependent, was not enslaved. But the Turk was rapidly pouring
into Europe. In 1366 the Bulgarian Czar, Sisman III., agreed to
become the vassal of the Turkish Sultan Murad, and the centuries
of subjection to the Turk began. After the battle of Kossovo the grip
of the Turk on Bulgaria was tightened. Tirnova was captured, the
nobles of the nation massacred, the national freedom obliterated. The
desire for independence barely survived. But there was one happy
circumstance:
“It is a noteworthy fact,” writes a Bulgarian authority, “that the
Osmanlis, being themselves but little civilised, did not attempt to
assimilate the Bulgarians in the sense in which civilised nations try to
effect the intellectual and ethnic assimilation of a subject race. Except
in isolated cases, where Bulgarian girls or young men were carried off
and forced to adopt Mohammedanism, the Government never took
any general measures to impose Mohammedanism or assimilate the
Bulgarians to the Moslems. The Turks prided themselves on keeping
apart from the Bulgarians, and this was fortunate for our nationality.
Contented with their political supremacy and pleased to feel themselves
masters, the Turks did not trouble about the spiritual life of the rayas,
except to try to trample out all desires for independence. All these
circumstances contributed to allow the Bulgarian people, crushed and
ground down by the Turkish yoke, to concentrate and preserve their own
inner spiritual life. They formed religious communities attached to the
churches. These had a certain amount of autonomy, and, beside seeing
after the churches, could keep schools. The national literature, full of the
most poetic melancholy, handed down from generation to generation
and developed by tradition, still tells us of the life of the Bulgarians
under the Ottoman yoke. In these popular songs, the memory of the
ancient Bulgarian kingdom is mingled with the sufferings of the present
hour. The songs of this period are remarkable for the Oriental character
of their tunes, and this is almost the sole trace of Moslem influence.
“In spite of the vigilance of the Turks, the religious associations served