Vidin

The city on the Danube, heir to Roman Bononia, entered Bulgarian history early: a medieval note added to the Manasses Chronicle relates that the first Bulgarians to cross the river did so by way of Bdin. Around 1002–1003 Vidin was besieged by Basil II. The defenders fought fiercely with the incendiary mixture known as "Median fire", and the city fell only after an eight-month siege. In one of his charters for the Archbishopric of Ohrid the emperor praises the diocese of Vidin for opening its roads to him — a hint that without help from within the fortress would hardly have been taken.

In the centuries that followed the epithets for the city stayed the same: in medieval texts Bdin is the "valiant and renowned city", one of the great towns on the banks of the Ister. When Ivan Asen II granted the merchants of Dubrovnik the right to trade throughout his realm in 1230, Bdin stood first in the list of towns and districts. Dubrovnik's caravans passed this way on the road to Wallachia.

After the restoration of the tsardom the north-western fortresses of Belgrade, Braničevo and Vidin were disputed between Bulgaria and Hungary. By 1204 Kaloyan had taken advantage of Hungary's difficulties to recover all three; in the thirteenth century Vidin grew into the chief frontier stronghold on the Danube.

Between 1211 and 1213 a rebellion broke out in the city, led by three Cuman officers. It quickly spread across the whole north-west and Tsar Boril could not put it down on his own. Boril asked the King of Hungary for help; the Hungarians defeated the rebels on the River Ogosta, besieged Vidin and took it. The causes of the revolt remain unclear — local separatism, discontent with Boril's failures, or perhaps a movement in favour of the young Ivan Asen.

In 1232, while Ivan Asen II was occupied in the south, the Hungarians took Belgrade and Braničevo and laid siege to Vidin. The tsar's brother, the sebastokrator Alexander, came to its relief and was defeated before the walls, but the defenders held the fortress and the Hungarians withdrew across the Danube.

In the years of turmoil after Ivan Asen II's death Vidin broke away from Tarnovo for the first time. The Rus' prince Rostislav Mikhailovich, having failed to take the capital, withdrew to Vidin and proclaimed himself tsar of the Bulgarians; Hungary recognised his title. In 1260 Constantine Tikh took advantage of Rostislav's absence to recover the city and its province, but the very next year a Hungarian army under Stephen V drove the Bulgarians out again and restored Rostislav.

After Rostislav's death Vidin passed to the despot Jacob Svetoslav, who accepted Hungarian overlordship — most scholars say in 1263. The despot steered between the two sides: in 1265 he accepted Tarnovo's suzerainty; in 1266 the Hungarians took Vidin after a short siege — no later than 23 June — and subjected it again, and in Hungarian documents of that same year Jacob Svetoslav is already styled tsar of the Bulgarians. Around 1275–1276 Queen Maria, who had earlier solemnly adopted him, had him poisoned.

The sources do not say what became of the city immediately afterwards. Most likely the leading men of Vidin kept their independence behind the walls of the fortress while Tarnovo was convulsed by Ivaylo's rebellion.

By the early 1280s the lord of Vidin was Shishman — a boyar of Cuman origin with the title of despot, linked by marriage to the descendants of the Asens. He relied on the Tatar khan Nogai, and Tatar contingents served in his armies.

In 1292, urged on by Nogai, Shishman invaded Serbia, plundered the country and burned the monastery of Žiča. King Milutin struck back, routed Shishman's army, besieged Vidin and soon took it; the despot fled across the Danube to Nogai. The Tatar khan's displeasure, however, forced Milutin to come to terms: Shishman recovered his domain and married the daughter of the Serbian nobleman Dragoš, while his son Michael was married to Milutin's daughter Anna-Neda.

In this period the despotate of Vidin was the largest semi-independent domain in the Bulgarian lands. A Dominican friar wrote in 1308 that Bulgaria was a great empire in itself, that its capital was Vidin and that all its emperors were called Shishman. Serbian tutelage was short-lived, however, and the lords of Vidin gradually turned back to their natural centre — Tarnovo.

Michael Shishman was already ruling Vidin before 1308. He most probably received the title of despot from his cousin Tsar Theodore Svetoslav; a Venetian document of about 1313 calls him despot of Bulgaria and lord of Vidin. When the Terter line died out in 1322–1323, the boyars of Tarnovo chose him as tsar — the most powerful noble in the country, son-in-law of the Serbian king and a descendant of the Asens. The election reunited the two halves of Bulgaria, and his half-brother Belaur, also a despot, was made governor of Vidin.

In the summer of 1330 Tsar Michael set out from Tarnovo (19 June) towards Vidin to join forces with Belaur and his Tatar allies, then turned south to Velbazhd, where he was killed. Belaur, marching from Vidin towards the Struma, is said by tradition to have beaten the pursuing Serbs at Izvor.

After the coup in Tarnovo in the spring of 1331 Belaur refused to recognise the new tsar, Ivan Alexander, and raised Vidin and the Danube lands in a revolt that reached the Timok and the Morava. Ivan Alexander first dealt with the Byzantines at Rusokastro, and by the end of 1331 or the spring of 1332 he had crushed the rising and restored his authority over Vidin. Belaur fled and died in exile. Years later John Kantakouzenos would threaten Ivan Alexander that he could stir up a new revolt centred on Vidin.

Under pressure from his second wife, Ivan Alexander disinherited his firstborn son Ivan Sratsimir in favour of Ivan Shishman and compensated him with the old domain of the Shishmanids — Vidin and its province, with the title of tsar. The note in the Gospels of Metropolitan Daniel of Vidin, copied in 1352 "in the great and populous city of Bdin", does not yet speak of an independent ruler; Ivan Božilov therefore concludes that Sratsimir settled permanently in the city between 1352 and 1355–1356.

Within a few years Ivan Sratsimir had made himself an independent Balkan ruler. In the note to the Bdin Miscellany of 1359–1360 he is the "autocrat tsar of the Bulgarians and Greeks", while in his own Brașov charter he calls himself more modestly "ruling tsar". Following the example of the first Asens, he furnished his capital with holy relics and patronised letters, aiming to make Vidin a rival to Tarnovo.

Few works of Vidin's literature survive, but they are remarkable. The Gospels of Metropolitan Daniel (1352) are now in the British Library. The Bdin Miscellany, compiled between 1 September 1359 and 31 August 1360 at the commission of Queen Anna, contains thirteen lives and martyrdoms of women saints — Theodora, Thecla, Barbara, Juliana, Empress Theophano, Mary of Egypt and others — and a description of the holy places of Jerusalem. It is the earliest precisely dated Bulgarian manuscript written without the nasal letters.

Early in 1365 King Louis I of Hungary, who himself claimed the title of king of Bulgaria, demanded that Ivan Sratsimir acknowledge himself his vassal. The "tsar of the Bulgarians and Greeks" refused, and the Hungarians marched on 1 May. On 30 May they were before Vidin, and on 2 June 1365 they took the city — in just four days, before any help could arrive. Ivan Sratsimir and his family were captured and held in the castle of Humnik (today Bosiljevo in Croatia), and within three months the Hungarians had overrun the whole realm.

Vidin became a Hungarian province, governed first by Benedict Himfi and then by the voivode of Transylvania, Dionysius Lackfi. Hardest of all for the people of Vidin was forced conversion to Catholicism: the Franciscans "baptised" some 200,000 people — nearly a third of the realm's population. Two scribes, Dragan and Rayko, left a note in a copy of the Apostle saying that the book was written in the days when the Hungarians held Vidin and the people suffered great sorrow.

The occupation became a European problem. In 1366 the Byzantine emperor John V Palaiologos, returning from Buda, was held up at Vidin because Ivan Alexander refused to let him cross his lands — the pretext for Amadeus of Savoy's campaign along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Under one agreement the Bulgarian tsar was to pay 180,000 florins to the Wallachian voivode Vladislav Vlaicu to free Vidin. In 1368 the townspeople rose against the Franciscans and with their help Vlaicu took the city, but six months later the Hungarians recovered it. Only in the autumn of 1369 did King Louis release Ivan Sratsimir and restore him to Vidin as his vassal, while his two daughters went as hostages to the Hungarian court.

After Ivan Alexander's death on 17 February 1371 Ivan Sratsimir did not contest his brother's throne in Tarnovo, but he made his own independence formal. The last thread binding him to Tarnovo was the church. As early as 1371 the Patriarchate of Constantinople entrusted the metropolitan of Vidin with the administration of Triaditsa (Sofia), and in July 1381, at the tsar's request, the Synod elected the hieromonk Kassian metropolitan of Vidin. Vidin passed under Constantinople and broke with the Patriarchate of Tarnovo.

The letter-writing manual of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of 1386 shows that in Byzantine eyes the two tsardoms were by now equals. The sources do not confirm any war between the brothers — the stories of one rest on legend. Among the writers of Vidin in these last years the outstanding figure was Metropolitan Joasaph, a follower of the Tarnovo school and author of an encomium of St Philothea. According to Schiltberger there were by then "three Bulgarias" — one of them with its capital at Vidin.

After Ali Pasha's campaign of 1388 Ivan Sratsimir was forced to acknowledge himself an Ottoman vassal and to accept a Turkish garrison in his capital. Shielded by the tsardom of Tarnovo, Vidin was relatively safe, but the peace was only temporary.

Vidin outlived the fall of Tarnovo in 1393. In the second year after it, Joasaph relates, the tsar sent his son and co-ruler Constantine, together with the metropolitan, to Tarnovo "on royal business". The only known result of the mission was the transfer of the relics of St Philothea, kept in Tarnovo since Kaloyan's day, to Vidin.

In the summer of 1396 the crusading army of King Sigismund of Hungary appeared on the lower Danube. Ivan Sratsimir broke his oath to the sultan and opened the gates — according to Schiltberger, who took part in the campaign, the city, which he calls the capital of Bulgaria, surrendered willingly, and the king left 300 horse and foot in it. The people of Vidin helped to overpower the Ottoman garrison, as did those of neighbouring Rahovo.

The rout at Nicopolis on 25 September 1396 sealed the city's fate. Bayezid turned on Vidin and probably in the last months of 1396 — the Anonymous Bulgarian Chronicle gives 1397 — took the fortress. Ivan Sratsimir was carried off to Bursa, where he died a captive, while his son Constantine escaped and carried on the struggle from exile. Joasaph grieved over something else: better that the sun had gone out, he wrote, than that the voice of Euthymius should fall silent.