Shumen

Shumen was built on hard-to-reach, naturally defended ground at the edge of the Shumen plateau. The site was inhabited as early as the early Iron Age, and a Roman and early Byzantine town stood on it, destroyed in the barbarian invasions of the late sixth and early seventh centuries. The medieval town grew up on its ruins and by the twelfth to fourteenth centuries had taken its full shape.

Excavations have revealed a complex system of defences. The inner fortress had its own wall, and a large barracks building within it shows that a military detachment was permanently stationed there. The rest of the town was also walled, and later a third, outer line of defence was built — an example of the additional fortification medieval builders resorted to when a town grew beyond its old walls. In the quarter, sunken houses set some distance apart, so that the spaces between them served as streets, have been excavated, as well as houses at ground level with one, two or three rooms.

At the end of the thirteenth century, when the tsardom of Tarnovo was subject to Tatar domination, Shumen lay exposed to devastating raids from the north. To these years probably belongs an inscription found in the fortress: a certain George writes that he looked down and up and prayed to God to deliver the people from the Tatars. The brief prayer is one of the most immediate testimonies to the fear in which the people of north-eastern Bulgaria lived in the time of Nogai.

In the fourteenth century Shumen was a significant economic and strategic centre. Its ties with the royal court are attested by the so-called Shumen inscription from the reign of Tsar Ivan Shishman. In it a certain Sratso writes that by royal command he came to the town of Shumen as scribe of the great epikernes Sratsimir. The epikernes was a high court dignitary, and Sratsimir, probably a kinsman of the royal house, is also known from a Byzantine document of 1344. The inscription is undated, but Ivan Shishman's name places it between 1371 and 1388, probably early in that span.

In 1388 the grand vizier Ali Pasha crossed the Balkan range, took Chenge (Asparuhovo), Provadia and the northern fortress of Venchan, then turned west and entered Shumen and the fortress of Madara without resistance. The Ottoman historian Idris Bitlisi writes that the lands between Shumen and the Danube were taken by force and turned into a Turkish province with Muslim officials and judges. Life on the hill continued for some time after the conquest, despite heavy damage to the walls and buildings, and Shumen kept its importance under Ottoman rule.