Dubrovnik Charter of Ivan Asen II

The charter names the roads. In granting Ragusan merchants freedom to trade "throughout my empire", Ivan Asen II lists the lands they may pass through — and that list is one of the few direct statements of how far Bulgarian authority actually reached after Klokotnitsa.

It is also the earliest evidence of Bulgaria as a party to Adriatic commerce rather than a hinterland of it.

It is the document in which the term хора is clearest, used both for a whole state — the republic of St Blaise, or Bulgaria — and for a district within the empire. The Albanian land appears alongside the хори but is named by its people rather than by its chief town.

Issued to the Ragusan merchants just after Klokotnitsa (1230), when Odrin, Thessalonica and Albania had come under Bulgarian rule; in Byzantine diplomatic terms it is a lesser act, an orismos (prostagma) rather than a full chrysobull. Its list of provinces is in effect a map of the empire at its widest extent. The signature — “tsar of the Bulgarians and the Greeks” — is the second surviving use of that title, matching the Vatopedi charter. The parchment stayed in the Dubrovnik archive until it vanished in 1817; it resurfaced and was given to the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg in 1836, where it remains.