Virgino Charter

Contested, reworked, probably not authentic — and still one of the most heavily used documents for the Bulgarian southwest, because it preserves the administrative vocabulary of the state better than almost anything genuine.

It is where officials are listed by rank with the sevasts at their head; where the terms хора and област carry an institutional sense, naming the districts of Prilep and Polog; where Macedonia appears as "долная земля", the lower land; and where the treasury term дѣлмононъ occurs. Read carefully, against the Serbian charters it derives from, it is a description of how the empire was governed.

It also carries a dynastic claim: in it Tsar Constantine Asen calls Stefan Nemanja his grandfather — the same web of Bulgarian and Serbian kinship the donor portraits at Boyana assert for his cousin, the sebastokrator Kaloyan.

The surviving text is a Serbian reworking whose relation to King Stefan Uroš II Milutin's charter of 1300 for the monastery of St George Gorgos is not in doubt. Because of that, every detail has to be tested individually against the Serbian documents before it can be claimed as Bulgarian.