The History as Source and as Polemic

The Slavo-Bulgarian History assessed honestly from both sides. On one side stands its immense value: it is the founding act of modern Bulgarian national consciousness, a work whose historical importance is out of all proportion to its size. On the other stands its character as history: it is a polemic before it is a record, dependent on uncritical sources, freighted with legendary and erroneous matter, and written to persuade rather than to establish fact. Per METHODOLOGY §4, this file presents each side in its strongest form and does not collapse the one into the other.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

Why Both Sides Must Be Held

There is a temptation, in a collection devoted to a saint, to treat his great work only in the register of praise; and an opposite temptation, in a source-critical register, to treat it only as a catalogue of errors. Both are failures of honesty, because the History is genuinely two things at once, and its greatness and its unreliability are not in different parts of the book but in the very same sentences. The passages that made it a national treasure — the ringing assertions of Bulgarian antiquity and glory — are exactly the passages a critical historian must flag as unproven or false. To honor the book is to hold both facts together, and that is what METHODOLOGY §4 requires: the strongest form of each side, without adjudication (Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 1 and 6, on precisely this doubleness).

The Case for Its Immense Value

The strongest case for the History’s value does not rest on its accuracy at all, and this is the key to reading it rightly.

It gave a people back a usable past. Its achievement was to restore to the Bulgarians a connected, proud narrative of themselves — that they had been a great nation with tsars, a patriarch, letters, and saints — at a moment when that memory had all but died (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface; Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 3). A people cannot awaken to a self it does not remember; the History supplied the self.

It named the awakening’s program. The appeal to know one’s own nation and language, the resistance to Hellenization, the fusion of Bulgarian nationhood with Orthodox faith — these became the themes of the whole Revival, and they were first articulated here (see Father of the Bulgarian Revival) (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1).

It was written for the people, in the people’s tongue. By writing in a Slavonic close to living Bulgarian rather than in Greek or high Church Slavonic, Paisiy made an argument in his very medium and gave an impulse to the modern Bulgarian literary language (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; see Writing the Istoriya, 1762).

It worked. The measure of a founding text is its effect, and the History’s effect is not in doubt: it stands at the head of a movement that ended, a century later, in a Bulgarian Church and a Bulgarian state (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3–4). On this view — the view of the national tradition and of much scholarship — the History is to be judged as a foundational and formative act, and by that standard it is among the most consequential books in Bulgarian history (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). Its value is as a deed, not as a chronicle.

The Case for Its Unreliability as History

The strongest case on the other side is equally plain, and it is made not by the book’s enemies but by Bulgarian scholarship itself, from the nineteenth century onward.

It depends on uncritical sources, at a remove. Its framework of Slavic and Bulgarian antiquity comes largely from Mauro Orbini’s Il regno degli Slavi (1601) and its ecclesiastical matter from Baronius’s Annals — both read in Petrine-era Russian translations (see The Search for the Sources). Orbini in particular was a patriotic and famously uncritical compiler, generous with legend; Paisiy inherited his data, his exaggerations, and his errors, and had few means to test them (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The History’s scholarship is only as sound as its sources, and its sources were not sound.

It contains legendary and erroneous matter. The History mixes genuine historical memory with legend, misattribution, and inflation; its chronology is often loose, its identifications sometimes wrong, its claims of Bulgarian primacy and greatness frequently unsupportable by the evidence (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). Nineteenth-century Bulgarian historians — the founders of critical Bulgarian historiography, such as Marin Drinov — already recognized that Paisiy’s book could not be used as a reliable factual authority and had to be superseded by source-based history (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6, on the critical historians’ assessment of Paisiy).

It is polemic, not inquiry. The History was not written to find out what happened but to prove a case — the dignity of the Bulgarian nation against the Greeks (and, in places, the Serbs) (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface and appeal; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). Its method is that of the advocate: it selects, heightens, and argues. Its anti-Greek polemic, and its competitive claims of Bulgarian priority over other Slavs, are shaped by that purpose, and they carry the distortions that purpose brings. As a document of national self-assertion this is its strength; as history it is its weakness.

Modern historiography has assessed it accordingly. Contemporary scholars — Daskalov foremost — treat the History not as a source for medieval Bulgaria (for which it is worthless, being derivative and unreliable) but as a source for the eighteenth century and for the history of Bulgarian national consciousness: it tells us little about Tsar Simeon and much about the mind of the man who wanted to remember him (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1 and 6). This is the settled scholarly place of the book: a monument of national awakening and a document of its own age, not an authority on the past it narrates.

Holding the Two Together

The two assessments do not cancel; they coexist, because they answer different questions. Is the History a reliable account of the Bulgarian past? No — it is derivative, legendary in places, and polemical throughout, and no serious historian uses it as a factual authority. Is the History one of the most valuable books in Bulgarian history? Yes — because its value was never its accuracy but its effect: it gave a forgotten people back the memory and the pride from which a nation grew (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1 and 6). The honest reader honors it as what it is — a great and formative act of the spirit, dressed in the garments of a history it does not, as history, sustain. To praise its accuracy would be to misunderstand it; to dismiss it for its inaccuracy would be to misunderstand it worse. Per METHODOLOGY §4, the collection reports both judgments in their strength and leaves the reader to hold them together, as the book itself compels.

This double vision also disciplines how the History is used elsewhere in this collection: its account of the Bulgarian tsars, saints, and church is reported as Paisiy’s account — what he wrote and why — and not asserted as established medieval fact, exactly as METHODOLOGY §3.5 prescribes for legendary material (see Content and the Famous Appeal).

See Also

• The Search for the Sources — the Orbini and Baronius dependence at the root of the unreliability
• Content and the Famous Appeal — the argument and the appeal, read as Paisiy’s own
• What Is Known of His Life — the same source-critical discipline applied to the biography
• Father of the Bulgarian Revival — the “value” side, developed
• Assessment — the final balancing of the man, the book, and the saint

References

• Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The preface and appeal as polemic; the claims of Bulgarian antiquity and primacy; the fusion of nation and faith.)
• Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The doubleness of the History; its dependence on the uncritical Orbini and on Baronius via Russian translation; its legendary and erroneous matter; the critical historians’ — Drinov’s — verdict; the modern scholarly placement of it as a source for the eighteenth century and for national consciousness rather than for the medieval past.)
• Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The History as the recovery of a usable past; its place at the head of the Revival; the medieval reality it distorts.)
• METHODOLOGY.md §4 and §3.5, this repository. (Both-sides on live assessment; the reporting of legendary material as attributed claim rather than fact.)