Family Tree of the Second Bulgarian Empire
23 reigning rulers across four dynasties — with their consorts, kin and the family's Byzantine branch
The Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1396) was ruled by four successive dynasties — the Asen, Terter, Smilets and Shishman houses — from the uprising of the brothers Peter and Asen against Byzantium to the fall of Tarnovo to the Ottomans. This family tree charts every tsar and their relatives across those two centuries, together with the Asens in Byzantium: the descendants of Ivan Asen III, who lived on in Constantinople as the noble Asanes family. Switch between the houses with the tabs, expand a branch to follow a line, and select any name for their reign, family ties and the primary sources behind each fact.
Reigning ruler: Kaliman Asen II
- Parents
Kaliman Asen II was a Bulgarian tsar of the Asen dynasty whose entire known reign fell in 1256. He belonged to a collateral male branch of the ruling house: his father was the sebastokrator Alexander, younger brother of Tsar Ivan II Asen. Since Ivan II Asen was a son of Ivan I Asen, Kaliman was a grandson of one of the founders of the restored Bulgarian Empire and a first cousin of his predecessor, Michael II Asen. This ancestry gave him a dynastic basis for claiming the crown, but the manner in which he acquired it—by killing Michael and seizing power—made his accession an act of violent usurpation as well as a contest between branches of the same family.
Kaliman's lineage connected him directly to the political tradition inaugurated at Tarnovo in 1186 by Ivan I Asen and Theodore-Peter. That tradition treated imperial authority as, in an important sense, the patrimony of the ruling family. The historical discussion quoted in the dossier recalls Michael Psellos's generalization that the Bulgarians chose leaders from the imperial race, while later formulations allowed the throne to pass to a ruler's son, brother, or other relative. Such principles did not establish an unambiguous order of primogeniture: they could legitimate several related claimants at once. Kaliman's brief career illustrates the resulting tension between membership in the imperial house, actual possession of the capital and crown, and acceptance by the political elite.
His father Alexander had himself experienced an earlier Asenid succession crisis. After Kaloyan's death and Boril's accession in 1207, Alexander and his elder brother, the future Ivan II Asen, were secretly taken first among the Cumans and then to the land of the Rus'. Ivan returned with Rus' mercenaries, captured Tarnovo after a siege lasting several months, and became tsar in 1218. Alexander subsequently bore the elevated court dignity of sebastokrator. Nothing in the supplied evidence establishes when or where Kaliman was born, who his mother was, where he was raised, or what offices and lands he held before 1256; nor can his father's exile be converted into evidence that Kaliman himself shared it.
The prestige available to Kaliman through his family was considerable. Ivan II Asen had defeated Theodore Komnenos at the Battle of Klokotnitsa on 9 March 1230, extended Bulgarian authority over much of the Balkans, adopted the style “tsar of Bulgarians and Greeks,” patronized Mount Athos, and presided over the restoration of the Bulgarian Patriarchate in 1235. His administration combined Bulgarian officials and bishops with the retention of some Roman, or Byzantine, authorities in newly acquired territories. Documents associated with his reign include grants to Vatopedi, Iviron, Zograph, the Protaton, and the Great Lavra of Saint Athanasius, as well as the Dubrovnik Charter; the excerpts also attribute to 1230 the first Bulgarian gold coin, primarily an ideological and commemorative issue. Kaliman inherited the memory of this imperial achievement, not its undiminished power.
The political setting of 1256 was markedly less favorable than that of Ivan II Asen's apogee. After Ivan's death in June 1241, Kaliman I reigned from 1241 to 1246, while the first Tatar invasion of Bulgaria is dated to 1242–1243. Michael II Asen then ruled from 1246 until 1256. In 1246 Emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes seized Bulgarian territories in Thrace and Macedonia, and the decade as a whole brought the loss of Macedonia and much of Thrace and the Rhodopes. Braničevo and Belgrade in the north-west remained under mounting external pressure. A Bulgarian agreement with Dubrovnik is listed for 1253, but it belonged to Michael's reign, not Kaliman's.
Immediately before Kaliman's coup, Bulgaria had fought an unsuccessful war against the Empire of Nicaea from 1254 to 1256. The excerpts do not identify a battle, fortress, or command held by Kaliman during that conflict, and therefore he cannot securely be credited with either its operations or its conclusion. What can be said is that the failed war compounded territorial contraction and political dissatisfaction under Michael II Asen. Kaliman exploited this disturbed situation in 1256, murdered his cousin Michael, and proclaimed himself Bulgarian ruler. No exact day, location, method of assassination, or list of accomplices is supplied, and an accession ceremony at Tarnovo cannot be described from the surviving evidence.
Kaliman's claim rested on authentic Asenid descent through the male line, at a moment when the direct male line of Ivan II Asen was being extinguished by Michael's death. Yet blood relationship alone did not confer uncontested legitimacy. By killing the reigning tsar, Kaliman removed the most immediate dynastic rival but also deprived himself of an orderly succession and evidently failed to obtain durable support among the boyars. His seizure of power thus combined a plausible hereditary qualification with the political liabilities of regicide. The contrast with Ivan II Asen's secure accession after the fall of Boril was stark: the sources indicate no comparable consolidation behind Kaliman.
A year-by-year account of the reign necessarily consists of the single year 1256. During that year Kaliman killed Michael II Asen, assumed the title of tsar, held power for only a few months, and was then overthrown and killed. The evidence does not permit these events to be divided reliably into particular months. There is no attested legislation, provincial appointment, court reorganization, assembly, rebellion with a recorded leader, or progress through named cities that can be placed within his reign. Its brevity is not merely a feature of later narrative compression; it is central to understanding why almost no independent governmental record can be attached to him.
No battle or campaign can securely be assigned to Kaliman as reigning tsar. Klokotnitsa on 9 March 1230 remained the great military landmark of his dynasty, while the unsuccessful Bulgarian-Nicaean war of 1254–1256 formed the immediate background to his accession, but neither should be presented as his personal achievement. The excerpts name no army raised by him, no siege conducted under his authority, and no fortress taken or defended during his months on the throne. The absence of such information is especially notable because the sources for the Asenids generally preserve foreign-policy events more readily than internal conditions.
The same limitation governs Kaliman's diplomacy. No embassy, alliance, treaty, marriage negotiation, or exchange of prisoners is attributed to him. The 1253 agreement with Dubrovnik preceded his rule, and the documentary tradition of Ivan II Asen—including the Dubrovnik Charter and the Athonite grants—cannot be projected onto the nephew's son. There is likewise no evidence that Kaliman negotiated with Nicaea after the war of 1254–1256, addressed the mounting danger to Braničevo and Belgrade, or established a relationship with any neighboring ruler. His overthrow came too quickly for a recognizable foreign policy to emerge in the quoted record.
Kaliman's ecclesiastical and internal policy is equally obscure. He ruled a state whose patriarchate had been restored in 1235 and whose church had been a central instrument of Asenid imperial ideology. Under Ivan II Asen, Bulgarian metropolitans and bishops had been installed in conquered regions, while patronage extended to Mount Athos and the Church of the Holy Forty Martyrs at Tarnovo. No patriarchal appointment, council, foundation, donation, persecution, or jurisdictional measure is recorded for Kaliman. Nothing justifies attributing to him either a reversal or a continuation of a specific ecclesiastical program beyond the institutional continuity necessarily implied by his brief possession of the crown.
The economic record is no fuller. Kaliman inherited a kingdom weakened by the loss of productive and strategically important territories in Macedonia, Thrace, and the Rhodopes, but the sources provide no figures for taxation, revenue, trade, military expenditure, or landholding during his reign. No charter regulating merchants is attributed to him, and the supplied numismatic evidence assigns him no coinage. Ivan II Asen's gold issue and commercial privileges demonstrate what sovereign economic representation could look like in the dynasty's stronger period; they do not prove that Kaliman struck gold, silver, or copper coins in 1256. Even if currency continued to circulate under his authority, no monetary reform can safely be attached to his name.
Nothing is known from the established evidence about a wife or children of Kaliman Asen II, and no spouse, offspring, or sibling should be supplied conjecturally. Consequently, he cannot be credited with a marriage policy or with preparing an heir. This absence was politically consequential: after his fall there was no known son presented as the continuation of his branch. His immediate successor was Mitso Asen, the son-in-law of Ivan II Asen, whose claim therefore derived through marriage into the senior dynastic line rather than through descent from Kaliman.
Kaliman's authority collapsed within months of his accession. He was deposed and killed in 1256, but the supplied sources do not identify the perpetrators, the place of his death, or the precise circumstances of the overthrow. It is therefore unsafe to turn his end into a detailed palace conspiracy or to connect it to a particular foreign intervention. What is clear is that his seizure of the throne had failed to create a stable coalition. Michael II Asen's murder was followed not by restored unity under the collateral Asenid branch but by another violent vacancy and a broader contest for legitimacy.
Mitso Asen succeeded Kaliman, but the succession did not settle the crisis. A civil war between the rival claimants Mitso and the boyar Constantine Tikh is dated to 1256–1257. Constantine's eventual selection opened a new stage in the monarchy; he ruled as Constantine Tikh Asen from 1257 to 1277. The struggle revealed the weakened capacity of Asenid blood alone to determine possession of the throne: one claimant was connected to Ivan II through marriage, while another emerged from the boyar aristocracy and assumed the Asen name. Kaliman's regicide and rapid destruction were thus an immediate prelude to the final fragmentation of the old dynasty's uncontested hereditary authority.
Kaliman Asen II is significant less for policies he implemented than for the dynastic crisis his career exposed. His story marks the distance between the expansive monarchy of 1230 and the territorially diminished, politically unstable Bulgaria of 1256. He possessed eminent ancestry and the imperial title, yet neither prevented his overthrow. His reign demonstrates that succession in the Second Bulgarian Empire depended upon a conjunction of royal blood, elite support, military control, and political success; descent without consolidation could produce only a transient kingship. His death intensified, rather than resolved, the competition among dynastic branches, in-laws, and powerful boyars.
The evidentiary base must finally govern any assessment. The Bulgarian chronological narrative states succinctly that in 1256 Kaliman II killed Michael II Asen and proclaimed himself ruler, while the Asen genealogy establishes him as the son of sebastokrator Alexander. The Nicaean historian George Akropolites, otherwise a fundamental authority for thirteenth-century Bulgarian-Nicaean affairs, does not even identify Kaliman by name as a distinct ruler in the account summarized here. Niketas Choniates, Theodore Skoutariotes, the Synodikon of Boril, the Bulgarian continuation of Constantine Manasses, charters, inscriptions, and Athonite documents illuminate the dynasty's earlier history but furnish no comparably detailed portrait of Kaliman. Modern narratives, including the scholarly syntheses represented in the dossier, must therefore reconstruct his place from chronology and genealogy rather than from a sustained contemporary biography. Any account extending beyond his parentage, the murder of Michael, his brief seizure of power, his overthrow and death in 1256, and Mitso's succession would exceed what these sources securely establish.