Uprising of Asen and Peter (1185): The Second Bulgarian Empire

The Uprising of Asen and Peter was a revolt that broke out in 1185 in the Balkan Mountains of northern Bulgaria against the rule of the Byzantine Empire. Led by two brothers from the region of Tarnovo, it ended more than 160 years of Byzantine control and created the state historians call the Second Bulgarian Empire. That empire became one of the leading powers of south-eastern Europe in the 13th century.

Background: Bulgaria under Byzantium

The First Bulgarian Empire, founded in 681, had once rivalled Constantinople. Under rulers such as Simeon I the Great it dominated much of the Balkans. But a long war with Emperor Basil II ended in Bulgarian defeat, marked by the Battle of Kleidion in 1014, and by 1018 the whole country had been annexed.

For the next century and a half, Bulgarian lands were run as Byzantine provinces. Local elites kept some influence, and the Bulgarian church survived as the Archbishopric of Ohrid under Greek leadership. Earlier revolts, such as those of Peter Delyan in 1040-1041 and Constantine Bodin in 1072, had failed.

By the 1180s the Byzantine Empire was weakened. The death of Manuel I Komnenos in 1180 was followed by palace coups, the brutal reign of Andronikos I and a Norman invasion that sacked Thessaloniki in August 1185. In September 1185 Isaac II Angelos seized the throne. Imperial authority in the northern Balkans was stretched thin.

Causes of the revolt

The spark was money. To pay for his marriage to Margaret, daughter of King Béla III of Hungary, in late 1185, Isaac II imposed an extra levy on the provinces. According to the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates, in the region of the Haemus (the Balkan Mountains) this was collected in livestock, which hit the herding communities of the area hard.

Two brothers from the area, Theodore and Asen, went to the emperor’s camp at Kypsela in Thrace. They asked to be enrolled in the army and granted an estate, a type of land grant known as a pronoia. Isaac refused. Choniates reports that Asen argued so boldly that he was struck in the face on the orders of the emperor’s uncle, the sebastokrator John Doukas. The brothers returned home humiliated and ready to rebel.

The deeper causes were broader: heavy taxation, resentment of Byzantine officials, the memory of the old Bulgarian state, and the obvious weakness of the government in Constantinople.

What happened

At first many locals hesitated. To rally them, the brothers built a house of prayer dedicated to Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki, a hugely popular warrior saint. Choniates writes that they had people in a state of religious frenzy announce that Demetrius had abandoned Thessaloniki, recently sacked by the Normans, and come to help the rebels. The message was clear: God now favoured the rising.

Theodore was proclaimed tsar and took the name Peter, consciously recalling Peter I, the 10th-century tsar of the First Bulgarian Empire. Tarnovo, a town on steep hills above the Yantra River, became the centre of the new state, and its fortress of Tsarevets grew into a royal citadel.

Isaac II marched north in 1186. His army forced the rebels to retreat north of the Danube, but the brothers returned with help from the Cumans, a Turkic nomadic people of the steppe. Mountain passes and fast cavalry raids made the rebels hard to defeat. In 1187 Isaac besieged Lovech without success and accepted a truce that recognised the rebel state in practice. Asen’s youngest brother, Kaloyan, was sent to Constantinople as a hostage.

The war for survival

Fighting continued for years. When the Third Crusade under Emperor Frederick Barbarossa passed through the Balkans in 1189, Peter and Asen offered him a large force against Byzantium in return for recognition, though Frederick did not take up the alliance. In 1190 Isaac II invaded again and besieged Tarnovo. On his retreat his army was ambushed in a mountain pass, usually identified as the Tryavna pass, and the emperor barely escaped.

The Bulgarians then went on the offensive, raiding Thrace and Macedonia. They won at Arcadiopolis in 1194 and near Serres in 1196. Success brought internal tension. In 1196 Asen was murdered by a nobleman named Ivanko, who fled to the Byzantines. Peter was killed by conspirators in 1197.

The throne passed to Kaloyan, who had escaped from Constantinople. He ruled until 1207 and turned the rebel state into a regional power.

Key people

• Peter (Theodore): the elder brother, proclaimed tsar at the start of the revolt; ruled in the Preslav area for part of his reign while Asen held Tarnovo.
• Asen (Ivan Asen I): the main military leader and co-ruler from about 1190. The ruling family is named the Asen dynasty after him.
• Kaloyan (Ioannitsa): the youngest brother, tsar from 1197 to 1207, who won papal recognition and defeated the Latin crusaders.
• Isaac II Angelos: Byzantine emperor from 1185 to 1195 whose tax policy provoked the revolt and whose campaigns failed to crush it.
• Niketas Choniates: a Byzantine official and historian whose account is the main narrative source.

Consequences

Kaloyan sought recognition from the papacy. In 1204 a papal legate crowned him king and confirmed the head of the Bulgarian church as primate. The same year, crusaders captured Constantinople in the Sack of Constantinople. When the new Latin emperor, Baldwin I, refused Kaloyan’s friendship, Bulgaria allied with Byzantine Greeks in Thrace and crushed the Latins at the Battle of Adrianople on 14 April 1205, capturing Baldwin, who died in captivity.

The state reached its height under Asen’s son Ivan Asen II (ruled 1218-1241). After his victory over Epirus at Klokotnitsa in 1230, Bulgaria controlled much of the Balkans, and in 1235 the church of Tarnovo was recognised as a patriarchate. Later the empire weakened through Mongol pressure, civil wars and division, and it fell to the Ottomans in 1393-1396.

Legacy

The Second Bulgarian Empire produced a rich culture of churches, monasteries and painting. Tarnovo became a centre of Orthodox learning, and works such as the Boyana Church frescoes date from this period. In modern Bulgaria the revolt is remembered as a national revival, and a large monument to the Asen dynasty was unveiled in Veliko Tarnovo in 1985, for the 800th anniversary.

The question of the brothers’ origins remains sensitive. Byzantine sources call them Vlachs, ancestors of modern Aromanians and Romanians, while their state used Bulgarian titles, language and church traditions. Most historians now see the rising as a joint movement of Bulgarians and Vlachs with Cuman support.

Timeline

• 1018: Basil II completes the Byzantine conquest of the First Bulgarian Empire.
• 1185, September: Isaac II Angelos becomes Byzantine emperor.
• 1185, autumn: Theodore and Asen are refused by Isaac II and begin the revolt; Theodore is proclaimed Tsar Peter (some date this to 1186).
• 1186: Isaac II’s first campaign drives the rebels north of the Danube; they return with Cuman allies.
• 1187: Isaac fails to take Lovech and accepts a truce; Kaloyan goes to Constantinople as hostage.
• 1190: Isaac’s retreat from Tarnovo ends in a disastrous ambush in a mountain pass.
• 1196: Asen is murdered by the boyar Ivanko.
• 1197: Peter is murdered; Kaloyan becomes tsar.
• 1205, 14 April: Kaloyan defeats the Latin Empire at Adrianople.

Why it matters

The uprising of 1185 brought Bulgaria back onto the map of Europe after more than a century and a half. It showed how quickly Byzantine power in the Balkans could collapse, and the state it created shaped the region’s politics, religion and culture until the Ottoman conquest.