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.
Shishman
- Parents
- Siblings
Shishman was a son of Tsar Michael III Shishman Asen from his first marriage to Anna-Neda, and the younger brother of the short-reigned Tsar Ivan Stefan. After the coup of 1331, which deposed his line and raised up his cousin Ivan Alexander, Shishman sought safety in flight — first among the Tatars, then in Byzantium.
His settling in Constantinople provoked a diplomatic clash. Tsar Ivan Alexander insistently demanded that the fugitive be handed over to him and even issued an ultimatum. The matter was so important that the synkletos convened over it under the presidency of Patriarch John XIV Kalekas. On behalf of Empress Anna of Savoy, the grand domestic John Kantakouzenos refused — it did not befit, he declared, the Roman emperors to surrender those who had sought refuge with them — and in turn put counter-demands to the Bulgarian embassy.
Shishman remained in Constantinople, but his later fate is unknown — the sources lose sight of him amid the new Byzantine civil war.
- “Шишман … е син на цар Михаил III Шишман Асен от първия му брак.”— Genealogy and Prosopography of the Asen Dynasty 1186–1460, p. 142