British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The Eastern Mediterranean in the Thirteenth century:
identities and allegiances
Abstract
Bulgaria
Dr Dimiter Angelov
The paper provides an overview of Bulgarian sources dating or dateable to the period 1204-61 and examines some methodological issues of identity which could be of interest to a prosopography of the Byzantine world (1204-61). While being important for the reconstruction of some episodes of medieval Bulgarian history (and less so of Nicaean history and the history of diplomacy) in the first half of thirteenth century, the Bulgarian sources have limited prosopographic value. The sources will be categorized, and specific examples will be cited from the body of texts composed at the time of the creation of an autocephalous Bulgarian patriarchate in 1235. How are we to distinguish between a 'Byzantine' and a 'Bulgarian' in the post-1204 period? Thirteenth-century sources (both Greek and Bulgarian) demonstrate the existence of distinct Bulgarian ethnic identity juxtaposed against a 'Greek' (always in Slavic and sometime in Greek sources) or 'Roman' (commonly in Greek sources) Byzantine identity. There are numerous cases of ethnically-based construction of 'self' and 'the other' in diverse Greek and Bulgarian sources in the period, with an occasionally floated notion of a shared orthodoxy. It is futile, in my view, to try to determine whether attitudes of "attraction" or "repulsion" (to use Obolensky's terminology) prevailed in the period. A lot depended on author, context, and occasion. One can attempt to differentiate between a 'Byzantine' and a 'Bulgarian' by examining issues of self-consciousness, external labelling, name, language, and political allegiance. Specific examples will be presented of the application of these criteria and the inevitable pitfalls associated with each of them, given the nature of the available source material. This discussion can raise broader issues related to the methodology of the prosopography of the Byzantine world in the period.