Report of his Mission to Constantinople – Byzantine Relations with Northern Peoples in the Tenth Century
Byzantine relations with Bulgaria were complicated in the early years of the tenth century: more complicated than many historians have allowed.
The Bulgarian Tsar Symeon (c. 894-927) has been portrayed by both Byzantine and modern authors as an aggressor intent on capturing Constantinople from which he might rule a united Byzantine-Bulgarian empire. However, recent scholarship (notably the work of Bozhilov and Shepard) has questioned this, and maintained that Symeon’s ambitions were more limited until the final years of his reign, the 920s, when he engineered a series of confrontations with the Byzantine Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos (920-44). (We will cover these years elsewhere: see the letters of Nicholas Mystikos and Theodore Daphnopates.) Symeon’s died on 27 May 927, and his successor Peter (d. 967) immediately launched a major invasion of the Byzantine administrative district of Macedonia.
The same time razing the fortresses
As one of four sons such a show of strength would have been necessary to secure the support of his father’s boyars. However, the Bulgarian troops withdrew swiftly, at the same time razing the fortresses that they had held until then in Thrace, and this early performance was not repeated. Instead, it heralded forty years of apparent harmony and cooperation between the two major powers in the northern Balkans.
Report of his Mission to ConstantinopleThe reason for the withdrawal, and the centrepiece of the enduring Bulgarian Byzantine accord was the marriage in 927 of Peter to Maria Lecapena, granddaughter of the (senior) ruling emperor Romanus I Lecapenus.Peter has generally been held to have presided over the dramatic decline of Bulgaria. Thus Browning (1975: 194-5) concludes his stimulating comparative study with the observation ‘the grandiose dreams of … Symeon ended in the dreary reality of Peter’s long reign, when Bulgaria became a harmless Byzantine protectorate’. Such interpretations focus on Bulgaria’s military prowess, comparing Symeon’s successes with his son’s inactivity, and draw heavily on Byzantine narrative sources.
