The Bulgars and the Slavs in early medieval Bulgaria. The perspective of Byzantine sources

Abstract

The article aims to resolve the issue of what Byzantine historians, from Theophanes and Nicephorus (eighth/ninth centuries) to John Zonaras (the first half of the tenth century), knew about the Bulgarian-Slavic relations as existing within the Bulgarian state until Krum’s rise to power (796/802). The Byzantine sources containing references to the rise of the Bulgarian state and its history until the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries shows that, except for theworks by Theophanes and Nicephorus, none of those sources referred to the Slavs’ presence in the lands captured by the Bulgars at the end of the seventh century and the Slavic-Bulgarian relations. Containing unique information about the Slavs at the time of the creation of the Bulgarian state, Nicephorus’ Historia Syntomos, and Theophanes’ Chronographia, were certainly known and used by other Byzantine authors. However, with the passage of time, they were not used directly. It sufficed for the intermediary chronicler to omit the passage pertaining to the Slavs and, consequently, it did not find its way into later works that referred to the rise of the first Bulgarian state. As the source material presented above shows, the first known Byzantine author to make such an omission was George the Monk, as long as, of course, he can be assumed to have drawn directly on Theophanes’s testimony and not on the epitome of his work (the Monk was active half a century later than Theophanes).