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.
Michael Asen
- Parents
- Children
- Siblings
Michael Asen was the eldest son of Tsar Ivan Asen III (John III Asen) and Irene Palaiologina. As a young man he was among the Asen kinsmen around his sister Maria and his brother-in-law Roger de Flor — in 1304–1305 he stayed in the Catalan camp at Gallipoli and accompanied Emperor Michael IX to Adrianople.
Around 1327 Michael was appointed Byzantine governor (together with his cousin, the protovestiarios Andronikos Palaiologos) of the region around Berat and "the rest of Macedonia." In the decisive war between the two emperors Andronikos II and Andronikos III, he took the side of the old emperor and was one of the chief commanders on the Macedonian theatre. At the start of 1328, after Andronikos III entered Thessalonica, Michael seized the fortress of Prosek, but the Serbs soon took it from him by deceit.
Michael Asen left Byzantium and emigrated alone to Serbia. By around 1330 he had settled in the village of Kučevišta near Skopje, where a donor inscription bearing his name survives in the church of St Saviour; he was buried at Hortiatis east of Thessalonica. He was probably the father of Avraam and Yaroslav Palaiologos Asen; it is possible that after his move he remarried and had a daughter Irene, named in an epitaph from Doiran (1362).
- “[Михаил Асен] е най-големият син на Йоан III Асен и Ирина Палеологина [Асенина].”— Genealogy and Prosopography of the Asen Dynasty 1186–1460, p. 259