Melnik

Melnik was one of the oldest and most important towns of the south-western Bulgarian lands. Its fortress was built after the district was joined to the First Empire and appears in the sources as early as the tenth and early eleventh centuries; crafts and an episcopal see grew up around it. In 1014, after his setback at Strumitsa, Basil II turned back towards Thessaloniki and on the way laid siege to Melnik, which surrendered after a short siege.

In the twelfth century the town was also known as a hearth of heresy. Western writers describing the organisation of the dualists name three of their "churches" in the Bulgarian lands: Melnik, Bulgaria and Dragovitia.

Soon after Kaloyan's death Melnik was in the hands of Tsar Boril, who installed a governor there. The French chroniclers call him the "bailli Burille" — Boril's bailiff — and he was probably the sebastos Vasiliy Vambulinos. When the Latins besieged Serres at the end of 1208, its Greek inhabitants preferred to hand the city to the Bulgarians and sent envoys precisely to Boril's governor at Melnik.

By this time the town was also home to Greeks from Plovdiv, resettled there on Kaloyan's orders. Their descendants, such as Nicholas Manglavites, would play an important part in Melnik's fate half a century later.

In 1211, while Boril's troops were fighting the Latins near Thessaloniki, his cousin Alexius Slav, the ally and son-in-law of Emperor Henry, took Melnik and made it his main residence. In his charter of 1220 Slav himself says that he moved from Tsepina to "this our domain of Melnik", and he founded a monastery of the Virgin in the town. The choice was no accident: Melnik guarded the roads of the Struma valley, and George Akropolites calls the fortress strong and almost impregnable to every enemy.

According to Akropolites, once he had taken Melnik Slav became an autocrat and submitted to none of his neighbours — now an ally of the Latins, to whom he was related by marriage, now siding with the Bulgarians by blood, and at times with Theodore Komnenos. After the death of his first wife, Henry's illegitimate daughter, and especially after the alliance between Henry and Boril in 1213, Slav was isolated; he later married the daughter of the Byzantine noble Theodore Petraliphas, brother-in-law of Theodore Komnenos.

Slav's Melnik was a cosmopolitan town. His sigillion is written in Greek, and the monks to whom the despot entrusted the monastery bear Greek names. Among the town's notables were more than five hundred refugees from Plovdiv — senior officials, soldiers and monks who had left the city after the Latins took it — and they created a distinctly Greek intellectual milieu in Melnik. After the battle of Klokotnitsa in 1230 Ivan Asen II conquered Slav's lands, and the former lord of Melnik seems to have lived out his days at the court of Tarnovo as an honoured kinsman of the tsar.

After Klokotnitsa Melnik came within the tsardom and became the centre of an administrative district that included Serres. This rule lasted only until Ivan Asen II's death. In 1246, when the Nicaean emperor John III Vatatzes advanced into Macedonia, he besieged Serres and soon took it, helped by the Bulgarian noble Dragota. Melnik surrendered voluntarily straight afterwards — again with Dragota's help, and with that of Nicholas Manglavites, a descendant of the Plovdiv Greeks resettled by Kaloyan.

Vatatzes made the young Michael Palaiologos — the future emperor Michael VIII — military governor of Melnik and Serres. The local Bulgarians, however, did not accept foreign rule. In 1255 the people of Melnik, led by the same Dragota who had once handed the town to Nicaea, tried to throw off Byzantine rule and return to Bulgaria. Tarnovo sent no help and the attempt failed.

In the fourteenth century Melnik was a Byzantine town, but it did not escape the turmoil. Around the 1320s the son of the grand logothete Theodore Metochites who governed Melnik briefly seceded from the empire together with his brother, the governor of Serres.

In early spring 1342 the forces of John Kantakouzenos took Melnik and Kantakouzenos left his brother-in-law John Asen as its governor. His stay was short: the troops of the Serbian magnate Hrelja besieged the town, having first cut off its food supply, and John Asen, threatened with famine and with no hope of relief, surrendered Melnik. Hrelja kept the fortress when he returned to Stefan Dušan's overlordship in the summer of 1342. After his death at the end of that year an heir of his tried to hold Melnik, but early in 1343 Dušan sent an army and took the town for himself. Soon the metropolitan see of Melnik also passed under the Serbian patriarch at Peć.