Scribe
The scribe was a sparsely attested official of the Second Bulgarian Empire, mentioned in the Virgina and Mraka charters and indirectly reflected in formulas from the Vatopedi and Mraka chrysobulls. He probably compiled tax records of persons and property, but there is no proof that he was a cadastral official of the Byzantine type. The office is important as rare evidence for the practical work of the Bulgarian fiscal administration.
The designation pisets is Slavic and derives from the verb “to write.” The Virgina and Mraka charters use it as the name of an official. Further evidence appears in the Vatopedi and Mraka chrysobulls—solemn rulers’ charters authenticated with a gold seal—where the prohibitions protecting privileged estates include the formula “ni pisati,” or “nor record.” This probably did not refer to an ordinary copyist in the ruler’s chancery: such a servant would not regularly operate in the provinces or be counted among the officials whose presence burdened protected communities. The context points instead to the recording of information for fiscal purposes.
The scribe has been identified with the Byzantine anagrapheus (ἀναγραφεύς) and apographeus (ἀπογραφεύς), officials who registered land, population, and tax obligations. Such an interpretation would imply that Bulgaria possessed a cadastre, meaning a systematic official register of real property and the taxes attached to it. This remains unproven. The Bulgarian state preserved many Byzantine administrative models, but maintaining a cadastre required a large and well-trained bureaucracy. The Serbian parallel is significant: the 1300 charter of King Milutin for the monastery of St George Gorgos near Skopje mentions a scribe twice, although no comparable cadastre existed in medieval Serbia. In the principalities north of the Danube, tax registers known as katastiseis or katastichoi appeared only in the fifteenth century.
A more cautious explanation is that the Bulgarian scribe compiled lists needed for the assessment and collection of taxes. These could have recorded both taxpayers and lands, properties, or other taxable assets. This would explain why his activity was prohibited on privileged estates without requiring the existence of a complete Byzantine-style cadastre. The sources do not reveal his precise rank, his place in the fiscal hierarchy, or the procedures he followed. No insignia, seals, or coins associated with the office are known. It is likewise impossible to determine when the institution ceased to exist.
A later list of Bulgarian saints appended to the Zograf Bulgarian History places “Erasmus, Bulgarian scribe” eleventh and “Angelarius the scribe” immediately after him. Nothing else is known about Erasmus or Angelarius, so their connection with the actual administration of the Second Bulgarian Empire is uncertain. The word also occurs in a colophon to a sixteenth-century Psalter, where the copyist calls himself a scribe. This example confirms the continued use of the term for someone who wrote or copied texts, but it does not demonstrate that the medieval fiscal office survived the end of the Bulgarian Empire.