1.Simeon's Great City
Preslav became the capital in 893, when Simeon came to the throne, and was soon called "the great city of Preslav". According to an apocryphal chronicle Simeon spent twenty-eight years building it. Like Pliska, the city had an Inner and an Outer Town ringed by two concentric walls, but its area was four to five times smaller — a sign that the state was shifting to another model, now Christian and Byzantine. The idea was plain: Preslav was to be for the Bulgarians what Constantinople was for the Byzantines, the residence of the first tsar outside the imperial city.
The Bulgarian cross-domed church was born in Preslav — more than twenty such churches have been excavated, and the Round (Golden) Church was at once a monastic and a royal foundation. The city was also famed for its stone sculpture and for its painted ceramics, which appeared like a firework at the end of the ninth century and died out in the first decades of the tenth. They faced walls and floors in place of costly marble, adorned aristocratic tables in place of gold plate, and entered every home in the form of icons — most famous of all is the ceramic icon of St Theodore from the Patleina monastery.
Eight monasteries are known around the capital — four in the Outer Town and four outside the walls. In them and in the palace worked the writers of the Preslav school, led by Simeon himself, among them Constantine of Preslav and the monk Khrabar. Their language shows strong Greek influence, but it was here that literary Old Bulgarian and the Cyrillic script were forged, later to become the common heritage of the Orthodox Slavic world.
2.The Fall of 971
In April 971 Emperor John Tzimiskes marched against Prince Sviatoslav of Kiev, who held Preslav. His scouts reported that the Balkan passes were unguarded, and his advance force — 5,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry according to Skylitzes and Zonaras — crossed unseen, probably through the Varbitsa pass. The whole Byzantine army numbered some 40,000–45,000 men.
The capital was strongly fortified, but the main blow probably fell from the north, where the ground is level and the gap between the outer and inner walls is narrowest. The Byzantines climbed scaling ladders, opened the main gate and poured into the Outer Town; the last resistance was at the palace gate, where 150 Byzantines fell. The emperor ordered the inner city to be set on fire. Tsar Boris II was captured, while part of the defenders under Sveneld broke through the ring and withdrew towards Drastar.
3.Ioannoupolis under Byzantine Rule (971–1185)
After the conquest Preslav was renamed Ioannoupolis — after the victor. At first it formed part of a theme called "Thrace and Ioannoupolis", then of "Ioannoupolis and Dorostolon", whose first strategos was the protospatharios Leo Sarakinopoulos. Seals found in the city suggest that the strategos probably resided at Drastar, but Preslav remained a military centre — one seal belongs to Adrian, tourmarch of Preslav, making the city the seat of a tourma of about a thousand men.
4.The Failed Attempt of 1185–1186
When Asen and Peter raised their revolt, their first objective after the proclamation in Tarnovo was the old capital. Nicetas Choniates describes Preslav as a very old city, built entirely of baked brick and mostly enclosed by the Haemus. The rebels, however, judged a siege too dangerous and gave up. Ivan Božilov sees the march as an attempt at a coronation in Simeon's city — the clearest statement that the rising was not a revolt but a restoration of the tsardom. The failure at Preslav pushed the brothers to choose Tarnovo as their capital.
5.Tsar Peter's Domain (1190–1197)
Preslav was nonetheless not lost to the new tsars. Around 1190–1191, as Asen took real power, Peter received a domain of his own around the old capital and kept all the outward marks of royal dignity. According to one account the archbishop crowned Peter, who then handed the government to Asen and withdrew to Preslav. George Akropolites and Theodore Skoutariotes call the lands around the city "Peter's country" — a name that tradition preserved long afterwards.
When Ivanko murdered Asen in 1196 and seized Tarnovo, Peter raised an army from his Preslav lands, marched on the capital and besieged it. Ivanko managed to slip an envoy through the siege lines to Constantinople, but no help came and he fled; power passed wholly back to Peter, who was himself killed in 1197.
6.The City of the Old Throne (Thirteenth–Fourteenth Centuries)
Under the Second Empire Preslav never regained its status as capital, but it bore the honorific "prototronos" — the city of the old throne. It was the centre of a district of its own which, unlike most others, never became a semi-independent domain and remained under the direct rule of Tarnovo. In the charter by which Ivan Asen II granted the merchants of Dubrovnik freedom of trade in 1230, the city is listed together with the district of Karvuna.
There are traces of the new tsars in the city itself: a lead seal of Tsar Boril has been found in Preslav. Around the old capital, in the years of Constantine Tikh Asen, worked the writer Vasa the Grammarian, closely linked to the local higher clergy. Building, though, now followed other models: the cross-domed churches with mixed supports known as the "Preslav type" were no longer built in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.
Preslav became a battlefield again during Ivaylo's rebellion. The Byzantine commander Michael Glabas Tarchaneiotes took the fortress on his way from Varna towards Tarnovo but was halted before Byalgrad. When the rebels recovered Preslav, Glabas came back, took it a second time and pursued Ivaylo's retreating forces towards Cherven and Drastar. In 1388, during Ali Pasha's great campaign against the north-eastern Bulgarian lands, the Ottomans took Preslav together with Shumen, Madara and Provadia — the end of the city of the old throne as a Bulgarian fortress.