Ohrid

Illyrian Lychnidos lay on the Via Egnatia — the great road from the Adriatic to Constantinople — and survived the settlement of the Slavs. Under the First Empire the city grew into an economic and cultural centre. Here worked Clement, later called "of Ohrid": his monastery of St Panteleimon on the hill above the lake was the main hearth of his activity, and its scriptorium enriched Bulgarian letters with sermons, encomia and liturgical services. The establishment of the cult of Cyril and Methodius is also largely Clement's work.

When Clement was consecrated bishop in 893, his place as teacher and organiser of literary life at Ohrid was taken by Naum. After seven years of busy work he withdrew to the monastery of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel he had built on the rocky south-eastern shore of the lake — today's St Naum.

At the end of the tenth century Tsar Samuel moved his capital from Prespa to Ohrid. The city lay on two hills, bounded by the lake to the south and west, and defended on the east and north by a stone wall into which — especially at the gates — dressed blocks from the older ancient wall were built. When Basil II entered Ohrid in 1018 he was greeted with songs of praise and applause. According to Skylitzes the palaces of the Bulgarian tsars and their treasures stood there — crowns of pearls, gold-woven robes and a hundred kentenaria of gold — which fell into the victor's hands.

By his charters Basil II created an autocephalous archbishopric which in documents and seals was always called "Bulgarian", though scholars know it as the Archbishopric of Ohrid because its seat was there. It was subject directly to the emperor, not to the Patriarch of Constantinople, and embraced the bishoprics of the former Bulgarian lands — Serdica, Prespa, Devol, Kastoria, Pelagonia, Debar and others.

The first archbishop, John, was a Bulgarian, formerly abbot of a monastery in the Debar district. His successor, Leo of Paphlagonia, former chartophylax of St Sophia in Constantinople, was "the first of the Byzantines" on this throne; under him Ohrid's church of St Sophia was built or repainted. Later another archbishop named John refused to crown the rebel Nikephoros Basilakes, who wanted the head of the autonomous church to legitimise his claims. Around 1090 the throne passed to Theophylact, a native of Euboea and pupil of Michael Psellos, whose letters and Life of Clement are among the chief sources for the Bulgarian lands of the time.

The revolt of Asen and Peter did not reach Macedonia, and Ohrid remained Byzantine. The brothers did not want their church subject to a Byzantine archbishop, so they removed the Bulgarian lands from his authority and in 1187 raised the bishop of Tarnovo to archbishop, appointing Asen's close supporter Basil to the post.

After 1204 Ohrid became a bastion of Orthodoxy against the Latins. In 1206, when the papal legate Benedict arrived in Thessaloniki to press for union, a synod of Greek clergy met at Ohrid under the archbishop's chartophylax, Demetrios Chomatenos. Around 1208–1209 Strez and the Serbs seized much of Macedonia — whether Ohrid too is disputed. By 1216 the city was held by the Epirote ruler Theodore Komnenos, who in 1216 or 1217 installed Chomatenos as archbishop.

Chomatenos became Theodore's most loyal ally. He refused to recognise the autocephaly that Nicaea granted the Serbian church in 1219 — which cut the archdiocese almost in half — and insisted that under Basil II's charters no patriarch had any right to meddle in its affairs. Between 1224 and 1227, most probably in 1225, the archbishop of Ohrid crowned Theodore Komnenos emperor of the Romans, and in the quarrel with Nicaea he called the Nicaean patriarch simply "the bishop of Nicaea", arguing that Ohrid, as heir of Justiniana Prima, ranked above him.

The battle of Klokotnitsa in April 1230 destroyed Theodore Komnenos' state. Ivan Asen II conquered Macedonia and Ohrid was under Bulgarian rule again — for the first time since 1018. This was the age when the Bulgarian tsardom reached three seas, and when the city of Clement and Samuel once more belonged to a Bulgarian tsar. The archbishopric continued to exist, but now within a state whose church was recognised as a patriarchate in 1235.

Bulgarian rule lasted only until Ivan Asen II's death. In 1246, when John Vatatzes stripped the boy-tsar Michael II Asen of his lands south of the Balkan range, the despot Michael II of Epirus occupied western Macedonia together with Ohrid, and the city was later taken by the Nicaeans.

In the fourteenth century Ohrid was Byzantine, then Serbian. In the reign of Andronikos III the wife of the protovestiarios Andronikos was arrested there, and with her, it seems, the wife of the fugitive Michael Asen. Under Stefan Dušan the city was governed by the tsar's deputy Mladen, founder of the Branković family. His son Branko Mladenović held Ohrid within a principality of his own in western Macedonia, and his heir Vuk Branković lost the city in the time of King Vukašin.