The court

The palace offices did not constitute a single post but a group of dignities and positions surrounding the tsar. Although some of their duties resembled personal service, medieval monarchy drew no clear line between the ruler’s household and central government. Together with the imperial chancery, the court was where decisions were prepared, envoys received, dignities conferred, and access to the monarch regulated. Palace officials were therefore courtiers, dignitaries, and participants in government at the same time.

The Byzantine palace supplied the principal model for this system. Its ceremonial order, known as taxis—an ordered hierarchy of people, places, and actions—was understood as an earthly reflection of the order of heaven. A dignitary’s rank was expressed not only by his title but also by the position he occupied in relation to the emperor during audiences, festivals, and religious ceremonies. Service to the ruler consequently acquired political and religious significance: the court visibly demonstrated who stood close to supreme authority and how society as a whole was arranged in relation to it.

The conditions for adopting this model in Bulgaria emerged as early as the tenth century. Symeon I’s assumption of the imperial title and its recognition under Peter I laid the foundations of a Bulgarian political ideology closely related to that of Byzantium. Preslav, and later Tarnovo, were presented as imperial cities capable of rivalling Constantinople. The first Asen rulers even sought recognition from Frederick I Barbarossa for the “crown of the Greek empire.” These imperial claims became more pronounced after Ivan Asen II’s victory at Klokotnitsa in 1230 and the restoration of the Bulgarian patriarchate in 1235.

Under Constantine Tikh Asen, Tarnovo was praised as a stronghold of Orthodoxy against the ecclesiastical policy of Michael VIII Palaiologos and as a kind of New Constantinople. This ideology provided an appropriate setting for a court constructed on Byzantine lines. The Bulgarian system was not an exact copy, however. The tsardom lacked the resources needed to support the large personnel and exceptionally elaborate ritual of the court at Constantinople. Moreover, palace power in Byzantium was balanced by the army, the Church, the provincial aristocracy, and certain older institutions, while government in Bulgaria was more strongly concentrated around the monarch and his immediate entourage.

The surviving sources do not permit the reconstruction of a complete list of the palace offices at Tarnovo. Liturgical texts associated with the literary work of Patriarch Euthymios contain prayers for the tsar, his “palace,” his attendants, and the army. The Slavonic word polata could denote either the palace or the people serving within it. The spurious Zograf chrysobull, whose narrative is set in the reign of Leo VI the Wise, uses the phrase “Ѡ САМОГО ЧРЪТОГА ЦРѢКА”—“from the royal chamber itself.” Although the document is not authentic, the Bulgarian word chertog, meaning a palace or royal chamber, reveals how its compiler imagined the ruler’s court. Hagiographical accounts of the reception of relics in the capital likewise mention boyars and prominent men, but they usually do not allow the courtiers to be distinguished from the rest of Tarnovo’s aristocracy.

A particularly important piece of indirect evidence is provided by George Akropolites and Theodore Skoutariotes. When Theodore Komnenos Doukas proclaimed himself basileus at Thessalonica, he appointed despots, great sebastokrators, domestikoi, protovestiarioi, and other representatives of imperial rank. The narrative mocks his ignorance of established ceremonial order and describes some of his actions as “Bulgarian” and “barbarous.” This hostile characterization does not demonstrate the existence of an entirely separate Bulgarian system. It points instead to an attempt to reproduce Constantinopolitan forms that, in the eyes of Byzantine observers, were being applied incorrectly. The account indirectly reflects court practice at Tarnovo, where the ruler of Thessalonica may have encountered a similar but already adapted model.

Palace posts combined office with dignity. The domestikos, protovestiarios, and other officials had particular duties, but their titles also determined their position in the hierarchy and their proximity to the tsar. Some of the highest dignities could be conferred only by a ruler claiming imperial rank. During the fourteenth century, officials attached directly to the Byzantine palace gained greater importance, and a comparable tendency is plausible in Bulgaria, where personal access to the tsar offered considerable political influence. Bulgarian evidence is nevertheless too limited to establish the exact order of offices, their everyday responsibilities, or the names of all their holders. Nor do surviving collective palace seals, coins, or sets of insignia illustrate the system as a whole.

A significant difference between the Byzantine and probable Bulgarian models concerned eunuchs. In the earlier Byzantine Empire, several palace offices were reserved principally or exclusively for them. These included the parakoimomenos, the attendant who slept near the imperial bedchamber; the protovestiarios, originally the head of the ruler’s wardrobe; the papias, who guarded and administered the palace; and attendants at the imperial table. Eunuchs also held other positions in central and provincial government and could occasionally become senior churchmen or military commanders. This continued despite secular and ecclesiastical prohibitions against castration and despite frequently hostile public attitudes.

The Byzantine hierarchy distinguished between office and title. Eunuchs could hold almost any administrative post, but certain supreme dignities symbolically associated with imperial authority remained closed to them. In palace ceremonial they surrounded the basileus as representations of the angelic powers: they covered their faces with their white sleeves, supported visitors during audiences, and presented the insignia of authority at coronations. They also participated in rites by which a ruler returning from a campaign passed from the image of a warrior to that of a Christian emperor. Their presence formed part of an eastern court ideology that presented the monarch as a living icon of the divine order.

There is no direct evidence for eunuchs at the courts of Preslav or Tarnovo. The presence of offices of Byzantine origin, such as protovestiarios, does not prove that their Bulgarian holders were eunuchs. After the eleventh century, the role of eunuchs diminished even in Byzantium, particularly under the Komnenoi and as Western influence increased during the age of the Crusades. The Slavonic terms kazhenik and skopets emphasized physical mutilation and carried negative meanings rather than the angelic symbolism of Byzantine ritual. In the absence of positive evidence, eunuchs cannot be regarded as a usual or important component of the Bulgarian court.

Bulgarian palace culture spread through the Orthodox Church, translated literature, contacts with Byzantium, and the retinues of Byzantine princesses who married Bulgarian rulers from the reign of Peter I onwards. The conscious effort of the tsars to present Bulgaria as an Orthodox empire and Tarnovo as an imperial city was decisive. The model first developed at Preslav was restored and modified in the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire. The sources record no formal abolition of the palace offices; as a general institutional environment, they disappeared with the dissolution of the Bulgarian royal courts during the Ottoman conquests at the end of the fourteenth century.