Despite his Byzantine education Simeon did not love the Greeks, and Luitprand, the historian, writes: “Simeon fortis bellator, Bulgariæ prœcrat; Christianus sed vicinis Græcis valde inimicus.” This hostility to the Greeks found frequent expression, and Simeon with his host appeared before the walls of Constantinople. On classic ground, at Achelous, the Greeks were vanquished by the Bulgarians, and Simeon hastened to besiege the Emperor in his own strong City.
Down by the Golden Horn on the plain outside the Gate of Edirné, Tsar Simeon met Romanus Lecapenus, the Emperor of the East, at the place where King Crum of Bulgaria had been asked to confer with Leo V, the Armenian (813-820), and had narrowly escaped the arrows of the archers treacherously concealed in ambush. Vying with the Greeks in the splendour of their display the Bulgars took jealous precautions against a similar surprise, and deep mistrust informed the spirit in which their sovereign dictated terms of peace. “Are you a Christian?” asked the humbled Emperor. “It is your duty to abstain from the blood of your fellow-Christians. Has the thirst for riches seduced you from the blessings of peace? Sheathe your sword, open your hand, and I will give you the utmost measure of your desire.”
But peace was not for long. Simeon’s successors by their jealousies undermined the strength of the kingdom, and when next the Bulgarians met the Greeks in battle they were easily defeated by Basil II, called Bulgaroktonos. A terrible home-coming theirs; through snow and ice the remnant of Bulgaria’s manhood struggled on in little bands of a hundred at a time, each company following the voice of a single leader, as they groped their way through darkness—they were blinded. They had escaped from the clemency of a Christian Emperor, by whose orders only one man in each hundred retained the sight of one eye.
Then for over a century Bulgaria remained subject to Byzantium, until two Bulgarian chiefs—Peter and Asan—rose in revolt against Isaac Angelus (1185-1195), and spread the fire of rebellion from the Danube to the hills of Macedonia and Thrace. So Isaac and his brother, Alexius III (1195-1203), were forced to recognize Bulgaria’s independence.
Such hopeless rulers as Alexius IV and V and Nicolas Canabas made easy the conquest of Byzant by the Latins in 1204. Calo John, King of Bulgaria, sent friendly greetings to Baldwin I, the new Emperor of the East, but these provoked an unexpected answer. Baldwin demanded that the rebel should deserve his pardon by touching with his forehead the footstool of the imperial throne. So trouble broke out again. Again war was waged, with all its attendant savagery, and Calo John reinforced his army by a body of fourteen thousand horsemen from the Scythian deserts. A fierce battle at Adrianople resulted in the total defeat of the Emperor, who was taken prisoner. His fate was for some years uncertain, and even the demands of the Pope for the restitution of the Emperor failed to elicit any other answer from King John save that Baldwin had died in prison. For years the conflict raged, till Henry, the second Latin Emperor of the East, routed the Bulgarians. Calo John was slain in his tent by night, and the deed was piously ascribed to the lance of St. Demetrius.
In the fourteenth century another foe threatened Bulgaria and all Eastern Europe. Amurath with his Janissaries was closing in upon Constantinople. He beat the Greek Emperor at Adrianople in 1361, and made this town his base of operations against Bulgaria, which country he harried until Sisvan, the Tsar, obtained peace at the price of offering his daughter in marriage to Amurath. But peace did not ensue, and Sisvan had to flee before Ali, and surrendered at Nicopolis.