The Search for the Sources

The research behind the History. To write a connected account of the Bulgarian past, Paisiy had to assemble it from scattered materials: the Slavonic chronicles and saints’ lives preserved in the Athonite libraries, the manuscripts of Hilandar and Zograph, and — decisively — two printed Western works he read in their Russian translations, Mauro Orbini’s Il regno degli Slavi and the Annals of Caesar Baronius. In 1761 he traveled to the Habsburg lands, to the Serbian ecclesiastical center at Sremski Karlovci, in search of exactly such books.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

A History to Be Assembled

Paisiy’s problem was not that of a modern historian choosing among an abundance of sources but that of a man trying to reconstruct a lost story from fragments. There existed, in the mid-eighteenth century, no continuous history of the Bulgarians. What survived was dispersed: Church Slavonic chronicles and chronographs; lives of the Bulgarian and Slavonic saints; liturgical and hagiographic texts; a few older Bulgarian materials preserved in monastic copies; and, on the other side, the learned histories of the West and of Russia, in which the Slavs and the Bulgarians appeared as part of a larger story (Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 1; MacDermott, A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885, Allen & Unwin, 1962, ch. 2). Paisiy’s achievement — and, as the source-critical section argues, also the root of the History’s unreliability — was to weld these into a single narrative driven by a single purpose (see The History as Source and as Polemic).

He tells the reader something of his labor. In the preface he speaks of the pains he took to gather his materials, of searching much and finding little in one place, and of his zeal to collect what pertained to the Bulgarian people and their tsars and saints (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface). The autobiographical note of the researcher — the traveler who has hunted through libraries and questioned those who might know — is one of the few glimpses the History gives of its author’s method.

The Athonite Manuscripts

The first body of material lay to hand on the Holy Mountain. The libraries of Hilandar, Zograph, and the other monasteries held Church Slavonic manuscripts — chronicles, saints’ lives, liturgical books, and older Bulgarian texts preserved in monastic copies (MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 2; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). From these Paisiy drew the specifically Bulgarian and Slavonic substance of his book: the memory of the tsars of the First and Second Empires, the conversion under Boris, the work of the disciples of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, and the Bulgarian saints — above all St. John of Rila, whose life he retold at length. The monasteries also preserved the sense, largely lost in the plains, of the Bulgarian people as heirs of a Slavonic Orthodox culture; the Athonite setting is inseparable from the book’s content.

The Journey to Sremski Karlovci, 1761

The Athonite materials were not enough for the kind of connected, dated, “learned” history Paisiy wanted to write — one that could stand beside the Greek and other national histories and answer them. For that he needed the printed scholarship of the age, and in 1761 he traveled north out of the Ottoman heartland into the Habsburg lands, to Sremski Karlovci (Karlowitz) in the Srem region — the seat of the Serbian Orthodox metropolitanate and a center of Slavonic Orthodox learning within the Habsburg Empire (MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 2; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “Paisiy of Hilendar”). The journey is generally connected with his duties as a taxidiot as well as with his research; whatever its immediate occasion, it gave him access to a library and to printed books unavailable on Athos, and it was there, or in connection with that journey, that he encountered the two Western works that most shaped the History (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1).

Orbini and Baronius — Read in Russian

Two printed books are the acknowledged pillars of the History’s framework, and it is a fact of the first importance — often missed — that Paisiy read both not in their originals but in Russian translations made in the era of Peter the Great.

The first was Mauro Orbini’s Il regno degli Slavi (“The Kingdom of the Slavs”), a sweeping and patriotic history of the Slavic peoples published in Italian at Pesaro in 1601 by the Ragusan (Dubrovnik) Benedictine Orbini. Orbini’s book was a celebration of Slavic antiquity and greatness, generous with its claims and uncritical with its sources, and it had been translated into Russian at the order of Peter the Great and printed in 1722 under a Russian title (commonly abbreviated as the Kniga istoriografiya); it was this Russian version that Paisiy used (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 2). From Orbini Paisiy took much of his framework of Slavic — and within it Bulgarian — glory and antiquity, and also, inevitably, much of Orbini’s uncritical and legendary matter.

The second was the Annals of Caesar Baronius (Cesare Baronio, 1538–1607), the Oratorian cardinal whose Annales Ecclesiastici was the great Roman Catholic ecclesiastical history of the Counter-Reformation. Baronius, too, had reached Paisiy through the Slavonic East: an abridged version had been translated (via the Polish adaptation of Piotr Skarga) into Church Slavonic/Russian and printed in Moscow in 1719 under the title Deyaniya tserkovnaya i grazhdanskaya (“Ecclesiastical and Civil Deeds”), and it was this that Paisiy consulted (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). From Baronius he drew ecclesiastical-historical material and chronology.

The dependence on Russian translations is doubly significant. It shows, first, the debt of the Bulgarian Revival to the Russian printing and scholarship of the Petrine age — the books that carried Western learning into the Orthodox Slavonic world came through Russia (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 3). It shows, second, why the History‘s scholarship is at the mercy of its sources: Paisiy inherited not only Orbini’s and Baronius’s data but their errors, their legends, and their partialities, at a further remove through translation, and had few means to check them (see The History as Source and as Polemic). His genius was not critical but constructive and rhetorical: he took what these books gave and forged from it an argument addressed to his own people.

The Materials and the Purpose

It is characteristic of Paisiy that the search for sources was not disinterested. He gathered not to know for its own sake but to arm his people with a usable past — to prove, against the Phanariot dominance and the Hellenizing tide, that the Bulgarians had once had tsars, a patriarch, letters, and saints, and had a name to be proud of (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface and appeal; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The materials were chosen and read in the light of that purpose. This is at once the strength and the weakness of the History: the strength that gives it its fire and its historical importance, and the weakness that makes it, as history, a polemic before it is a record. The search for the sources was the search for a case; and the case, more than the accuracy, is what changed Bulgaria.

See Also

References

  • Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The preface on the labor of gathering materials; the purposeful, polemical selection of sources.)
  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (Orbini and Baronius as the pillars of the History; the crucial fact that Paisiy used the Petrine-era Russian translations — Orbini’s Kniga istoriografiya, 1722; Baronius’s Deyaniya tserkovnaya, 1719; the Russian mediation of Western learning; the purposeful research.)
  • MacDermott, Mercia. A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962. (The Athonite manuscript sources; the 1761 journey to Sremski Karlovci; Orbini and Baronius.)
  • Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (The journey to Sremski Karlovci in 1761 and the search for sources.)
  • Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The Russian channel of Western learning into the Bulgarian Revival.)