The Bulgarian Lands Under the Ottomans

The world into which Paisiy was born: the Bulgarian lands after nearly three and a half centuries of Ottoman rule, governed within the millet system through a Greek-speaking ecclesiastical hierarchy, their medieval empire and its saints half-forgotten, and their language without schools or printed books. This context — political subjection compounded by cultural and ecclesiastical Hellenization — is what makes the Slavo-Bulgarian History legible as an act of recovery.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Ottoman Conquest and Its Long Aftermath

The medieval Bulgarian state fell to the Ottomans in stages at the end of the fourteenth century. The Second Bulgarian Empire, with its capital at Tŭrnovo, was extinguished when the city fell in 1393; the western Bulgarian realm centered on Vidin followed in 1396, and with it the last vestige of Bulgarian political independence disappeared for nearly five hundred years (Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 2, on the conquest; MacDermott, A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885, Allen & Unwin, 1962, ch. 1). The date 1393 became, in later Bulgarian memory, the beginning of what the Revival generation would call the “Turkish yoke” (tursko robstvo) — a term whose polemical charge should be noted, but which names a real subjection: the Bulgarian lands were absorbed directly into the Ottoman state as the province closest to the capital, without even the tributary autonomy that the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia retained (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 2–3).

By the time of Paisiy’s birth around 1722, this order was in its fourth century. The Bulgarians were a peasant people, overwhelmingly rural, without a native nobility — the medieval boyar class had been destroyed, killed, exiled, or assimilated to Islam in the generations after the conquest (MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 1; Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3, on the social structure of the Bulgarian lands). What remained was a Christian peasantry, its life organized around the village and the parish church, ruled by Ottoman administration and taxed under the fiscal regime of the empire. The absence of a native educated or ruling class is central to understanding the Revival: there was, in the early eighteenth century, almost no Bulgarian secular literature, no Bulgarian schools beyond rudimentary church literacy, and no printing in the vernacular (Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 1, on the pre-Revival cultural situation).

The Millet System and Ecclesiastical Rule

The Ottoman state organized its non-Muslim subjects not by nationality — a category foreign to it — but by confession, in the institution later called the millet system. Orthodox Christians of every language — Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Albanians, Arabs — belonged to a single “Rum millet,” the community of Orthodox Christians, whose civil head before the Ottoman authorities was the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (Kitromilides, “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans,” European History Quarterly 19, 1989, pp. 149–192; Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3). Within this system the Patriarchate of Constantinople exercised, on the Sultan’s authority, not only spiritual jurisdiction but a wide civil authority over the Orthodox population — the administration of much of family law, the collection of certain taxes, the running of the church courts.

For the Bulgarians this had a decisive consequence. Their own medieval church institutions were progressively abolished and their jurisdiction transferred to Constantinople. The autocephalous Bulgarian Patriarchate of Tŭrnovo had already been suppressed at the conquest; the last independent Bulgarian ecclesiastical center, the Archbishopric of Ohrid, was abolished by the Ottoman authorities in 1767, only a few years after Paisiy completed his History, and its territory placed directly under Constantinople (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “Ohrid, Archbishopric of”). The Serbian Patriarchate of Peć had been abolished in 1766 for the same reason. By the later eighteenth century, therefore, all the Orthodox of the Bulgarian lands were under a hierarchy appointed from and answerable to Constantinople.

Phanariot Dominance

The men who staffed that hierarchy were, in the main, Greeks — and increasingly the wealthy, educated Greek families of the Phanar, the district of Constantinople around the Patriarchate that gave its name to the “Phanariots.” The bishops sent to the Bulgarian dioceses were most often Greek-speaking, celebrated and preached in Greek, and — this is the grievance the Revival would seize upon — showed little concern for the Slavonic liturgical inheritance or the Bulgarian tongue of their flocks (MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 2; Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3, on the “Greek” church and Bulgarian resentment). It is important not to flatten this into a simple national oppression read back from the nineteenth century: much of the higher Greek clergy understood itself as serving the whole Orthodox millet, and Greek was the language of Orthodox learning across the Balkans, aspired to by educated Bulgarians themselves (Kitromilides, “‘Imagined Communities’,” 1989; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1, cautioning against anachronism). But the effect on Bulgarian cultural memory was real. Greek was the prestige language of the church and of commerce; ambitious Bulgarians were drawn to it; and Slavonic learning, where it survived, survived chiefly in the monasteries — above all on Mount Athos.

It is precisely this pull toward Greek that Paisiy would attack. The phenomenon he denounces — Bulgarians ashamed of their language, preferring to be taken for Greeks — was not invented by him; it was the ordinary upward path in an Orthodox world where high culture spoke Greek (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). His History is, at bottom, a protest against that path.

The Lost Memory of the Medieval Empire

The deepest wound the context inflicted was on memory. The Bulgarians of the early eighteenth century had, for the most part, lost the recollection of their own medieval greatness — the First Bulgarian Empire of Tsar Simeon in the tenth century, whose court at Preslav had been a center of Slavonic letters; the conversion of Boris and the reception of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius; the Second Empire of Tŭrnovo; the line of Bulgarian tsars and patriarchs; the native saints (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 1–2; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). This history survived in fragments — in monastic manuscripts, in the memory of a few saints such as St. John of Rila, in place-names — but it had ceased to be a living, connected story that ordinary Bulgarians could tell about themselves. The connection of Ss. Cyril and Methodius and the Slavonic letters to the Bulgarians in particular had faded (see Ss. Cyril and Methodius).

The absence of that memory is what Paisiy set out to repair. His book does not merely record facts; it seeks to give a subjected and Hellenizing people back the knowledge that they had once had tsars, a patriarch, letters, and saints of their own. Whether the history he told was accurate in its particulars is a separate question, treated at length in this collection’s source-critical sections (see The History as Source and as Polemic). What matters for the foundations is that the History answered a genuine void: it addressed a people who, in R. J. Crampton’s phrase for the wider Revival, had to be reminded that they were a nation at all (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3). The greatness of the eighteenth-century Bulgarian situation, and the pathos of Paisiy’s book, lie in that void — a Christian people intact in faith and custom but severed from the memory of its own past, ruled in politics by the Ottomans and in the church by a hierarchy that spoke another tongue.

See Also

• Paisiy of Bansko — the origins of the monk born into this world
• Content and the Famous Appeal — Paisiy’s answer to Phanariot dominance and lost memory
• Toward a Bulgarian Church — how the grievance against Phanariot rule became the Exarchate struggle
• St. John of Rila — the Bulgarian saint whose memory survived the eclipse
• Ss. Cyril and Methodius — the enlighteners and the Slavonic letters at issue

References

• Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The conquest of 1393–1396; the millet system; Phanariot ecclesiastical rule; the lost medieval memory; the Revival’s task.)
• MacDermott, Mercia. A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962. (The Ottoman conquest and social order; the destruction of the native nobility; Greek ecclesiastical dominance.)
• Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The pre-Revival cultural situation; the pull toward Greek; the caution against anachronism.)
• Kitromilides, Paschalis M. “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans.” European History Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1989): 149–192. (The millet system; the Orthodox commonwealth and Greek as its language of learning.)
• Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (The abolition of the Archbishopric of Ohrid, 1767; institutional dates.)