Simeon I of Bulgaria

Simeon was born around 864 or 865, the third son of Boris I, the Bulgarian ruler who had accepted Christianity for his people in 864 ^[1]. His birth therefore coincided almost exactly with the conversion of Bulgaria, and his upbringing reflected the new orientation of the state toward the Christian world of Constantinople rather than the old pagan traditions of the Bulgar khans ^[2].

As a younger son not expected to rule, Simeon was sent to Constantinople in the 870s to be educated, probably with a career in the church in mind. He studied at the imperial capital during the cultural revival associated with Patriarch Photius, absorbing rhetoric, theology, and the classics of Greek literature ^[3]. The tenth century diplomat Liutprand of Cremona later recorded that the Byzantines called him a half Greek because of his learning ^[1]. Any account of Simeon I of Bulgaria facts has to begin with this paradox: the empire's most dangerous enemy was formed by the empire's own schools.

After roughly a decade in Constantinople, Simeon returned home and entered a monastery, likely the one near the capital Pliska where scholars expelled from Moravia had gathered. There he worked among the disciples of Cyril and Methodius who were adapting Christian texts into the Slavonic tongue, an experience that shaped his later cultural program ^[2].

Boris I abdicated in 889 and withdrew to a monastery, leaving the throne to his eldest son Vladimir. The new ruler proved a disaster in his father's eyes. Vladimir leaned toward the old Bulgar aristocracy and, according to the sources, attempted to restore pagan practice while aligning Bulgaria with the East Frankish kingdom ^[1].

In 893 Boris emerged from retirement, deposed and blinded Vladimir, and summoned an assembly, traditionally located at Preslav, to settle the succession. Simeon was released from his monastic vows and placed on the throne ^[4]. The same assembly is associated with two lasting decisions: the transfer of the capital from Pliska, with its pagan associations, to Preslav, and the confirmation of Slavonic rather than Greek as the language of the Bulgarian church and state ^[2].

Simeon was not yet thirty when he took power. The Byzantines may have expected a bookish former monk to be a pliable neighbor. Within a year of his accession they learned otherwise ^[3].

The first conflict began over commerce. In 894 the Byzantine government shifted the market for Bulgarian goods from Constantinople to Thessalonica and placed it in the hands of two Greek merchants who imposed heavy duties. When his protests were ignored, Simeon invaded Byzantine Thrace ^[1]. Emperor Leo VI answered by paying the Magyars to attack Bulgaria from the north, and their raids forced Simeon into temporary retreat. He responded in kind, arranging with the Pechenegs to strike the Magyars, whose defeat pushed them permanently westward into the Pannonian plain, where they founded Hungary ^[4]. In 896 Simeon crushed a Byzantine army at Bulgarophygon in Thrace and secured a favorable peace with annual payments from Constantinople ^[1].

The great crisis of his reign opened in 913. The Byzantine regency for the child emperor Constantine VII stopped the payments, and Simeon marched to the walls of Constantinople. The patriarch Nicholas Mystikos received him outside the city and performed a ceremony that Simeon treated as an imperial coronation, though the Byzantines later disowned it ^[3]. When the regency changed hands and repudiated the arrangement, war resumed. On 20 August 917, at the river Achelous near Anchialos on the Black Sea coast, Simeon destroyed a large Byzantine army in one of the bloodiest battles of the age ^[4]. A further victory at Katasyrtai near Constantinople soon followed.

For the next decade Bulgarian armies dominated the Balkans, raiding to the Gulf of Corinth and taking Adrianople more than once. Simeon adopted the title emperor, in Bulgarian tsar, of the Bulgarians and the Romans, a direct claim to the Byzantine inheritance ^[5]. Yet the prize eluded him. Constantinople could not be taken without a fleet, and his attempt to coordinate an assault with the Fatimid rulers of North Africa collapsed when Byzantine agents intercepted the negotiations ^[1]. A personal meeting with Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos in 923 or 924 produced a truce but no lasting settlement.

Simeon's wars are only half the story. Among Simeon I of Bulgaria achievements, the cultural program he directed from Preslav has proved the most durable. He gathered around his court the ablest disciples of Cyril and Methodius, including Constantine of Preslav, John the Exarch, and the monk Chernorizets Hrabar, and set them to translating and composing in Old Church Slavonic ^[2].

The output of the Preslav Literary School and its counterpart at Ohrid under Clement was remarkable: biblical and liturgical translations, sermons, chronicles, and original works such as John the Exarch's Shestodnev, a treatise on creation, and Hrabar's spirited defense of the Slavonic letters ^[6]. Compilations prepared for the ruler himself, later copied in Rus as the Izbornik of 1073, carried Byzantine learning into the Slavic world. Most historians place the development of the Cyrillic alphabet, which gradually replaced the older Glagolitic script, in Preslav circles during Simeon's reign ^[2].

The capital itself was rebuilt on an ambitious scale. Byzantine style palaces, the celebrated Round Church with its gold ground mosaics, and workshops producing painted ceramics made Preslav a showpiece of the new Christian monarchy ^[6]. This period, remembered as the Golden Age of medieval Bulgarian culture, fixed the literary language that would serve Orthodox Slavs from the Balkans to Kievan Rus for centuries ^[5].

Simeon married twice. Nothing certain is known of his first wife, who bore his eldest son Michael; the boy was later placed in a monastery and excluded from the succession. His second wife was the sister of George Sursuvul, the boyar who would serve as guardian to the next ruler. She was the mother of Peter, who succeeded his father, and of the younger sons Ivan and Benjamin ^[1].

The final years of the reign brought continued fighting on several fronts. Serbia, which had oscillated between Bulgarian and Byzantine patronage, was invaded and annexed outright around 924 after repeated changes of allegiance among its princes ^[4]. A campaign against Croatia ended badly, with a Bulgarian army defeated by King Tomislav around 926, one of the few clear military setbacks of Simeon's career ^[5].

Simeon died suddenly on 27 May 927, reportedly of heart failure, while preparing yet another campaign against Constantinople. He was in his early sixties and had ruled for thirty four years ^[1]. Within months his son Peter concluded a peace treaty with Byzantium, sealed by marriage to the emperor's granddaughter Maria Lekapene and by Byzantine recognition of both the Bulgarian imperial title and an independent Bulgarian patriarchate ^[3].

Judgments on Simeon have always been divided, and any balanced Simeon I of Bulgaria biography must weigh both sides. His wars brought the First Bulgarian Empire to its greatest territorial extent, stretching at its height from the Adriatic hinterland to the Black Sea, and forced Constantinople to treat a Slavic ruler as an imperial equal ^[4]. Critics, beginning with Byzantine writers of his own era, argued that decades of campaigning exhausted the country and left it vulnerable; Bulgaria fell to Byzantine conquest within a lifetime of his death, in 1018 ^[3].

The cultural legacy is less contested. The Slavonic literary language codified at Preslav and Ohrid became the shared written medium of Orthodox Slavdom, and the Cyrillic script that emerged from his scriptoria is today the official alphabet of countries from Bulgaria to Russia and, since 2007, one of the official scripts of the European Union ^[2].

In Bulgaria Simeon remains a national touchstone. His name marks streets, schools, and the northeastern town of Veliki Preslav's archaeological reserve, and the phrase Golden Age still evokes his court ^[6]. When Bulgaria's last king, born in 1937, was christened Simeon II, the choice deliberately reached back a thousand years to the monk turned tsar who had made a young Christian state the rival of an ancient empire ^[7].