Founding of the Second Empire (1185–1197)

In that atmosphere of imperial strain, the restoration of the Bulgarian state began not as an isolated outburst but as the most consequential Balkan challenge to Byzantine authority after 1185. The immediate background was unmistakable: the Norman seizure of Thessaloniki in August 1185, the panic it produced in Constantinople, and the visible weakness of an empire already shaken by war, intrigue, and the succession of usurpers. It was in this moment that Theodore and Asen, later known as Peter and Ivan Asen, appeared at Kypsela before Isaac II Angelos and asked to be enrolled in imperial service and granted a mountain district in the Haemus as a pronoia. The request was refused; Asen’s protest was met with insult, and the brothers withdrew to their home region around Tărnovo. The humiliation became the spark. By late 1185 they had returned to the northeast, and the revolt they now raised was not a mere local disturbance but a declared break with imperial rule, nourished by the memory of the old Bulgarian kingdom, by grievances over taxation, and by the conviction that the time had come for freedom.

The first phase of the movement unfolded in a charged ideological atmosphere. The brothers strengthened Tărnovo and erected a church dedicated to Saint Demetrius, making use of the story that the saint had abandoned Thessaloniki and had come to the Bulgarians as their protector. This was no incidental adornment, but a powerful political message: divine favor had shifted, and with it the right to rule. The proclamation of Peter as tsar, marked by the placing of the purple boots and the taking of the imperial name, gave the rebellion a public and dynastic form. Whether Peter or Asen was first crowned in the church, the new order quickly took shape around both brothers, with Peter associated with the ritual beginning and Asen with the practical direction of war. In the spring of 1186 they emerged as the leaders of a state in the making, and the uprising spread with surprising speed across the lands north of the Balkan range, where they seized small fortresses and settlements and established a base beyond the reach of immediate Byzantine control.

Isaac II responded with force, but his campaigns only revealed the limits of imperial power. He advanced personally into the Balkans in 1186, forcing the rebels to withdraw north of the Danube, yet he failed to secure the mountain strongholds or leave a lasting occupation behind him. The brothers used the respite well. Crossing to the north of the river, they recruited Cumans and soon returned with a stronger mounted force, restoring their position in Bulgaria and carrying the war into imperial territory. The struggle now became one of movement and attrition. Byzantine commanders attempted to contain the rebellion, but Alexios Branas, sent against the insurgents, was drawn away by his own ambitions, and the imperial campaign lost its momentum. By 1187 the Bulgarians were operating in Thrace with growing confidence; they struck at Lardea, threatened the imperial army near Beroe, and ravaged the countryside around Philippopolis. The war had ceased to be a desperate uprising and become a prolonged contest over the political map of the northern Balkans.

The next turning point came with Isaac II’s renewed offensives in 1187 and 1188. In the late autumn of 1187 he reached Triaditsa but was forced back by winter, and in the spring of 1188 he returned for another attempt, laying siege to Lovech for three months without success. He did capture the empress and take the youngest brother Kaloyan as hostage, yet these gains could not disguise the failure of the campaign. The pressure on the empire was compounded by the wider movement of the Third Crusade. In 1189, as Frederick Barbarossa’s army crossed the Balkans and reached Niš, Bulgarian envoys appeared before the crusaders and offered assistance against Isaac II. The episode showed how rapidly the restored Bulgarian leadership had learned to use the international crisis of Byzantium to its own advantage. By this time the rising was no longer confined to the mountain zone or to partisan raids; it had become a political fact recognized by friend and enemy alike, and the old imperial claim to the region was increasingly untenable.

The decisive consolidation of the new state came with the defeat of Isaac II in the pass of Tărnovo in 1190. The emperor marched north in force, hoping to crush the rebellion by a direct advance into the heart of the Bulgarian lands, but he was lured into the mountainous terrain where the Bulgarians held the advantage. The imperial army was shattered in the pass, and Isaac barely escaped with his life. That defeat transformed the war. From this point the Bulgarians were able to act not simply as rebels but as rulers defending and enlarging their realm. By the early 1190s the state possessed its own hierarchy and titulature; Bulgaria had a tsar and an archbishop, and Byzantine opposition now aimed at the state itself rather than at the legitimacy of a title. Around 1192 or 1193 the restored kingdom already stretched across major parts of Moesia, Thrace, Macedonia, and lands north of the Danube, and Ivan Asen had emerged as the senior ruler, even if Peter remained associated with the royal house in Preslav and the symbolic beginnings of the revolt.

The last years of the reign were marked by both success and internal fragility. In 1195 Ivan Asen won a major victory over the Byzantines near Serres, a triumph that confirmed the endurance of the restored kingdom and the ability of its ruler to project power deep into Macedonia. But the internal balance of the ruling family was then shaken from within. In 1196 Ivan Asen was murdered by Ivanko, who seized Tărnovo and sought Byzantine support, hoping to turn the capital into the springboard for a wider recovery of imperial control over Moesia. The conspiracy failed to produce a lasting settlement, but it exposed the vulnerability of the new monarchy. A year later, in 1197, Peter also died, reportedly at the hands of conspirators. With the second brother gone, the throne passed to Kaloyan, the youngest of the brothers and the one who had once been held hostage in Constantinople. His accession closed the founding phase of the Second Bulgarian Empire: from the revolt in 1185 to the dynastic succession of 1197, Bulgaria had moved from defiance to restoration, from scattered insurgency to a recognized royal power anchored at Tărnovo and ready to enter a new stage of Balkan politics.

The war for the restoration of Bulgaria began not as a set-piece confrontation but as a frontier rising that very quickly acquired the character of a mobile mountain war. When Theodore and Asen returned from their failed appeal to the imperial court, they did not begin by facing the Byzantines in the open plain. Instead, they fell back on the terrain that gave the rebels their greatest advantage: the Balkan Mountains, their defiles, and the small fortresses scattered through difficult country. There, in places already held by armed Bulgarian bands, the brothers gathered men, hardened the revolt into a disciplined movement, and gave it a religious and political centre in Tarnovo, which they fortified and marked out as a capital by raising a church to Saint Demetrius. From the start the struggle depended on speed, local knowledge, and the ability to move between strongpoints and ravines faster than the imperial armies could close on them. The new Bulgarian war effort was not simply an uprising of peasants; it was anchored in boyar leadership, buttressed by mountain fortifications, and increasingly supported by Cuman horsemen from beyond the Danube, whose mobility would prove decisive in the years that followed.

The first imperial response came in a series of dispatches rather than a single decisive blow, and the early campaigns show how difficult it was for Byzantium to grasp the scale of the rebellion. Isaac II first sent his uncle John Doukas, then John Kantakouzenos, and then Alexios Branas, but none of these expeditions restored imperial control. The rebels were already established in the Balkan heights, where the natural barriers of the mountains served as fortifications, and Byzantine troops that advanced carelessly could be drawn into ambush. Kantakouzenos suffered a serious reverse after failing to take proper precautions, and Branas, though he penetrated rebel territory, turned aside from the campaign for his own ambitions. The imperial army was therefore not facing a single, fixed enemy, but a shifting coalition of local bands, mountain garrisons, and Cuman allies, all operating on ground that made ordinary imperial methods of war hard to apply. In response to the rebellion’s growth, the emperor had to enlarge his own forces, drawing on provincial troops and military grants, but the result was still an improvised war in which commanders could become suspicious of one another, revolt could spread within the field army itself, and imperial pressure was constantly diluted by fear of conspiracy.

The campaign of 1186 showed both the strengths and the limits of Byzantine arms. Isaac II led a large army in person, expecting that the sheer weight of imperial force would be enough to restore order, but the rebels had already had time to organize themselves, strengthen their positions, and retreat when necessary. He drove the Bulgarian forces, including Peter and Asen, north across the Danube, yet he did not follow through by occupying and garrisoning the mountain fortresses that remained in rebel hands. That omission was crucial. Once across the river, the brothers recruited more Cumans and returned with a substantial allied force, turning the war back into a struggle of raids and counter-raids. The imperial heartland in Thrace became vulnerable to rapid incursions, and the fighting spread beyond the river frontier into a wider zone of instability. By 1187 the Byzantines were again forced on the offensive, but even when Isaac advanced to Adrianople he was confronted by Cuman tactics that relied on apparent flight and sudden reversal. The Byzantines won that encounter only narrowly, and the emperor, unwilling or unable to press the pursuit deep into Bulgarian-held country so late in the season, left part of his force to winter at Sardika and withdrew to Constantinople. The war had become a grinding contest of endurance rather than a march toward a final battle.

The most dramatic imperial attempt to reverse the Bulgarian advance came in 1190, when Isaac II marched against Tarnovo itself. By then the capital had already been transformed into a defended stronghold, its walls and towers visibly improved since the earliest days of the uprising. The emperor advanced along the coast through the Black Sea cities and then through the eastern passes of the Balkans into northern Bulgaria, reaching Tarnovo after a long march and laying siege to the city. Yet the siege, even if it pressured the young state severely, could not produce a breakthrough. Tarnovo’s defences, the mountainous approaches, and the defenders’ capacity to exploit the terrain prevented a quick victory. The campaign ended in disaster for the emperor in the Trevnenski pass, where the Bulgarians shattered the imperial army by forcing the struggle into broken country, a setting in which mounted movement, order of battle, and command cohesion all worked to the advantage of the defenders and their Cuman partners. The defeat at the pass marked a turning point. It was not merely a lost battle but a signal that the empire could no longer treat the Bulgarian war as a punitive expedition; the rebels had become an established military power able to destroy an emperor’s field army in the mountains.

After 1190 the war broadened again into raids, counter-offensives, and diplomatic manoeuvre around the battlefield. Isaac II sought to coordinate pressure from the north with help from Hungary, but before his plan against Bulgaria could be executed, the empire’s internal politics collapsed around him. In the meantime the Bulgarians pressed their advantage. By the middle of the decade the fighting had reached the southern approaches of the Balkans and the great routes through Thrace, where an imperial army moved against them with forces drawn from Anatolia was destroyed near Arcadiopolis. That victory opened central Thrace to Bulgarian and Vlach advance and showed how far the conflict had shifted beyond the narrow defence of the Balkan frontier. The war also produced a series of opportunistic blows around the edges of the struggle. When Ivan Asen was later murdered by Ivanko, the balance of force in the capital was immediately contested: Peter raised troops from his Preslav lands, marched on Tarnovo, and besieged it, while Ivanko, unable to break the encirclement, sought Byzantine aid. A Byzantine relief force under Isaac Comnenus then ran into a Cuman raiding detachment on the Struma, was defeated, and saw its commander captured and taken to Tarnovo, where he died in prison. By the time Peter himself was murdered in 1197, the war had made clear that the restored Bulgarian state survived not through one decisive victory alone, but through a sustained military system: mountain defences, rapid cavalry alliances, raid warfare, and the ability to survive imperial offensives that repeatedly failed to hold the ground they briefly conquered.

The restoration of Bulgarian statehood in 1185–1197 was not conceived as the sudden birth of a new political organism, but as the reassembly of an old one. From the outset the movement of Asen and Peter stood inside the political world of the Empire even as it challenged that world, and its goal was the recovery of a sovereign order that had been destroyed in 1018 and preserved thereafter in memory, grievance, and expectation. When the brothers’ cause was proclaimed at Tarnovo in 1186, the city was still a newcomer to Bulgarian political life, yet it was immediately made into the stage on which the old state could be re-enacted. The language of the movement was therefore one of restoration rather than invention: Bulgaria was to be made again into a царство, a kingdom with its own ruler, its own centre, and its own political dignity, not merely a rebellious frontier district detached from Byzantium.

That ambition shaped the central power of the new state from the beginning. Tarnovo was not simply a residence; it was intended as a capital in the imperial sense, a place whose court would echo Constantinople and embody the same claim to ordered sovereignty. The political imagination behind the restoration was deeply conditioned by the Byzantine model, but it was not submissive imitation. It was a deliberate appropriation of the imperial form, a “opening” of the Orthodox empire at home, so that the restored Bulgarian realm could present itself as the rightful continuation of the political world of the ancient tsars. The claim to imperial dignity stood at the centre of this design, and the question of ecclesiastical headship belonged to the same order of ideas. In a polity that understood itself as the rebirth of a Christian empire, the authority of ruler and church could not be wholly separated; the restoration of statehood implied the restoration of the full symbolic architecture of rule.

Yet the new monarchy did not begin with a blank slate. Its first practical labour was to take over the machinery already in place in the lands it controlled. The inherited Byzantine provincial organization was not smashed and replaced; it was appropriated, continued, and adapted. The first visible concern of the Asenids was not abstract ceremony but administration: fortresses had to be held, garrisons installed, and the flow of taxes secured. In the areas that came under Bulgarian control, the rulers placed soldiers, στρατηγοί, and collectors of the state revenues, revealing how closely military command, regional government, and fiscal extraction were linked in the earliest phase of the state’s consolidation. The administrative vocabulary of the new regime was heavily Hellenized, which shows not only the prestige of Byzantine forms but also the practical continuity of offices and procedures after the break with imperial authority. The restored kingdom was built by taking over an imperial apparatus already present on the ground and making it serve a new sovereign.

This continuity extended downward into local power. The sources of the period do not present a polished hierarchy fully differentiated into court and province, but they do show a state that depended upon men able to command, administer, and collect. The new order could not function without local elites who knew the land, the fortresses, and the obligations of rural and urban communities. Around the brothers gathered an entourage that must have included such regional figures, for the restoration could not have been sustained by dynastic will alone. In this sense the boyar element was not external to state-building: it was part of the social skeleton on which the restored monarchy rested. The kingdom was forged not merely by the charisma of the princely brothers, but by the incorporation of local notables into a serviceable hierarchy of command, one in which loyalty to the ruler, control of strongholds, and participation in the collection of dues all reinforced one another.

Law and taxation were among the earliest and most urgent questions of the restored state. The movement’s leaders justified their break with Byzantium not as arbitrary revolt but as release from an unlawful power. If the emperor on the Byzantine throne was a usurper, then the oaths binding subjects to him had no moral force; political obedience could be dissolved by the illegitimacy of the ruler who demanded it. This was more than rhetoric. It gave the restoration a juridical language and helped transform armed resistance into a claim to rightful sovereignty. At the same time, the fiscal dimension of rule was unmistakable. From the beginning the Asenids treated taxation as a core function of statehood, and the inherited Byzantine fiscal order was preserved precisely because the state needed it. The struggle for freedom was therefore also a struggle over who had the right to levy dues, who controlled the revenue of fortresses and districts, and whose law defined obligations in the land.

Seen in this light, the first years of the Second Bulgarian Empire were years of institutional reconstruction under the pressure of war. The capital was being created while battles were still being fought; central authority was being imagined while local administration was being seized; fiscal order was being reactivated while the political legitimacy of the old imperial order was being denied. The state that emerged between 1185 and 1197 was thus neither a simple continuation of pre-Byzantine Bulgaria nor a fresh invention. It was a restored monarchy fashioned out of Byzantine forms, Bulgarian memories, and the necessities of conquest. Its machinery was old in structure but new in allegiance, and that combination gave the second empire its distinctive character from the very beginning.

The restoration of Bulgarian rule was conceived from the start as more than a military revolt or a dynastic challenge. In the language of the day it was a release from bondage, a liberation granted by God, and this sacral framing gave the new power its earliest legitimacy. The proclamation in Tarnovo in 1186 was therefore not only a political declaration but also a spiritual one: the brothers presented their cause as the awakening of a people whose kingdom had not vanished from memory, only been suppressed. That is why the rhetoric of the first Asenids was so strongly tied to the idea of divine will and to the conviction that the Bulgarian state had a lawful place in the order of Christian rulers. The revolt was born in a world where political right and sacred right were inseparable.

No symbol was more important in this religious politics than St Demetrius of Thessaloniki. The sack of Thessaloniki by the Normans in 1185 was readily read as a celestial sign: a mighty city had fallen, imperial order had been shaken, and the saint who had long guarded the city was believed to have withdrawn his protection. That story travelled quickly and acquired a second life in Tarnovo, where the Asenids built a prayer house dedicated to the saint and where an icon of St Demetrius was present. The transfer of the saint’s cult from Thessaloniki to the new Bulgarian center gave the uprising a dramatic sacred drama: the patron of an abandoned imperial city became the guarantor of the new Bulgarian capital. Tarnovo was thus not merely a fortress city; it was being fashioned into a holy place where the renewed kingdom could present itself under saintly protection.

This sacralization of power also extended to the question of church authority. The restoration of the state implied, from the very beginning, the restoration of the full political and spiritual dignity that had belonged to old Bulgaria before 1018. The Asenids’ claims, as they emerged in the first years of the revolt, point toward the same ideal later expressed with such clarity in the language of imperial and ecclesiastical legitimacy: the Bulgarian ruler belonged to the line of kings whose authority had once been accompanied by a Bulgarian church head of equal rank. In other words, the kingdom was imagined not as a partial autonomy under Byzantine oversight, but as a complete Christian polity with its own sovereign and its own higher church order. Even before this could be institutionalized, the aspiration itself mattered, because it united throne, altar, and people in a single historical claim.

The religious world in which this restoration unfolded was already marked by deep tensions. Long before 1185, Bulgarian society had known both the discipline of monastic withdrawal and the appeal of heretical teaching, especially Bogomilism, as responses to oppression, poverty, and spiritual unease. The revival of Bulgarian statehood did not erase that background; it emerged from it. Monasteries and hermitages remained crucial as places where memory, prayer, and social identity could be preserved, while the rise of a new political center at Tarnovo gave such institutions a fresh importance. The early Asenid regime had every reason to cultivate saintly patronage and ecclesiastical prestige, because in a society accustomed to seeing spiritual authority as a rival to imperial power, the church could either stabilize the new order or expose its fragility.

Written culture, too, was bound up with this recovery of political memory. The most important texts for understanding the spirit of the age are not courtly chronicles from the new dynasty, but older writings that preserved the idea of Bulgarian kingship as an enduring and almost prophetic truth. The Bulgarian apocryphal tradition, with its vision of a future ruler who would gather Bulgarian and Greek lands, kept alive the memory of a kingdom that had not been extinguished in the minds of its people. Such texts did not merely preserve nostalgia; they offered a language in which the restoration of 1186 could be understood. They connected past and future through a literary imagination that treated kingship, land, and Christian destiny as one continuum. In that sense, the renewed state was born not only from arms and alliances, but also from memory, prophecy, and the written word.

The first decade of the Second Bulgarian Empire therefore belongs to the history of spiritual reconstruction as much as to that of political revolt. Between 1185 and 1197, the Asenids worked to anchor their authority in holy symbols, in the cult of a major martyr, in the rhetoric of divine freedom, and in the revived memory of an old imperial tradition. Their rule had not yet produced the full institutional flowering that later generations would associate with Tarnovo as a patriarchal and cultural capital, but the foundations were already being laid. The new kingdom began by claiming not only territory and tribute, but also the right to stand before God and men as the rightful continuator of Bulgarian Christian statehood.

The economic world in which the Second Bulgarian Empire was founded was one of insecurity, movement, and rapid reorientation. The uprising of Asen and Peter did not begin from a long-established urban core but from Tarnovo, a place that had earlier played little role in Bulgarian political life. Its sudden emergence as the centre of resistance is itself revealing: the new monarchy was born not from an old administrative capital, but from a fortified locality whose greatest asset was strategic position. In the first years of restoration, power depended less on settled institutions than on the ability to hold a defensible hilltop, command the approaches across the Balkan, and keep open the lines by which men, supplies, and news could move. The wars with Byzantium made this even more urgent, for the conflict was fought not only in battlefields but across roads, passes, and the spaces between towns.

Agriculture remained the hidden foundation of all this activity. The sources for 1185–1197 do not preserve a detailed account of harvests, rents, or village obligations, yet the very endurance of the uprising and the repeated campaigns of the brothers show that the countryside continued to sustain political action. An armed movement that began in the spring of 1186 and survived repeated imperial expeditions could not have lived on warfare alone; it needed food, transport animals, and a rural population able to support men in arms. The restoration of the kingdom therefore implied, from its beginning, the reactivation of agrarian resources in the lands north of the Balkan and around the new centre in Tarnovo. What the narrative makes plain is that the struggle was not fought in an economic vacuum: it unfolded in a landscape where control of the countryside, and of the routes linking it to fortified places, was a prerequisite for political survival.

Towns mattered above all as nodes of control rather than as autonomous commercial communities. Tarnovo’s rise from obscurity was coupled with the transformation of older fortresses into hard points in a defensive system. The army of Isaac II Angelos could move through open country, but the passage of the mountains and the approach to the interior were checked by fortified places that had to be forced, bypassed, or neutralized. The strength of the new Bulgarian regime lay precisely in its ability to turn such places into a barrier. This is also why the economic life of the early restored state must be understood through the lens of circulation: whoever controlled the passes and the towns controlled access to markets, tribute, and provisioning. The great lesson of these years was that the geography of exchange and the geography of war were inseparable.

The early Asenid polity was still too new and too embattled for its economic order to be fixed in a fully developed documentary form. The first decade does not present a mature fiscal system in the surviving narrative tradition; rather, it shows a sovereignty in the making, one that had to establish itself politically before it could regularize taxes, dues, and property rights. Yet the very language of restoration carries economic weight. To declare the revival of the Bulgarian kingdom was to claim the authority to receive obedience, command resources, and detach the country from imperial burdens. In that sense, the founding of the state already implied a reordering of landholding and obligation: loyalties were being transferred, the old imperial claim to revenue was being challenged, and a new royal centre was asserting itself over people, routes, and settlements. The charters of the first decade are absent from the record, but the restoration itself tells us what they would have had to do: define the ruler’s right to command, protect, and exact, in a world where political freedom and economic control were newly joined.

The foreign policy of the new Bulgarian movement was born in a landscape already transformed by crisis. When Theodore and Asen appeared before Isaac II Angelos at Kypsela in the autumn of 1185, they did not come as open rebels but as petitioners seeking a modest mountain district in the Haemus as a pronoia for service. Their rebuff, and the humiliating blow dealt to Asen by the emperor’s uncle, turned a request for imperial favour into a rupture with Byzantium. Yet the episode only makes sense against the wider Balkan setting: Byzantium was reeling from Norman pressure from the west and from Serbian and Hungarian advances in the central Balkans, while imperial authority in the provinces had become brittle enough for local strongmen, frontier lords, and ambitious communities to test its limits. The Bulgarian rising therefore began not in isolation but in a region where the old order was visibly failing, and where every neighboring power had begun to treat the imperial frontier as negotiable.

The first durable foreign alliance of the restored Bulgarian leadership was with the Cumans beyond the Danube. Once Isaac II’s initial intervention had been checked and the brothers had withdrawn north of the river, they returned with a sizable allied force drawn from the steppe. This was a decisive step, because it gave the revolt mobility, shock power, and strategic depth. The Cumans were not a decorative auxiliary; they made possible the transition from local insurrection to sustained war. Their presence also shows the political imagination of the brothers: the restoration of Bulgarian power was not to be confined within the narrow limits of the Balkan range but was to be built by exploiting every available anti-Byzantine resource north of the Danube. The alliance with the Cumans helped the Bulgarians shift the war into Thrace, where they could strike at imperial territory directly rather than wait behind mountain passes for another Roman expedition.

Against Byzantium the conflict unfolded in a series of escalating campaigns that steadily changed the balance of power. Isaac II’s first march in 1186 penetrated the Balkan passes and reached the centre of the revolt, but he failed to crush it. He then withdrew without restoring firm imperial control, and the brothers immediately resumed operations. Their forces appeared in several places in Thrace, avoiding decisive battle and striking where the imperial army was weak or absent. Bulgarian detachments raided around Lardea, won success near Beroe, and devastated the environs of Philippopolis, while Isaac, increasingly frustrated, tried to seize the initiative by carrying the war north of the Balkan range. His great expedition of 1188 ended in failure before Lovech; even if a settlement was reached, it did not undo the fact that the emperor had been unable to restore the old regime. By then the Bulgarian leadership had ceased to think in terms of local autonomy. Their aim was the reunification of Moesia and Bulgaria under one rule, and by the early 1190s foreign observers already described them as holding much of the country around the Danube, together with parts of Thrace and Macedonia. What had begun as a revolt had become, in effect, a revived state, with its own ruler and archbishop, no longer dependent on any external confirmation of legitimacy.

The most important diplomatic opening outside Byzantium came in 1189, when the army of Frederick I Barbarossa reached the Bulgarian frontier during the Third Crusade. Here the brothers tried to convert a passing great power into a strategic partner. Their envoys at Niš offered assistance against Isaac II and, in return, sought a dramatic political settlement: after a defeat of Byzantium, the imperial crown at Constantinople would be transferred to the elder of the two brothers. The proposal was ambitious, but it reveals how far Bulgarian diplomacy had moved beyond mere survival. The brothers were not asking for a limited frontier concession; they were trying to use the crusade to alter the structure of imperial power in the Balkans. Barbarossa’s courteous response raised hopes briefly, but he ultimately preferred an arrangement with Byzantium and continued toward the East rather than plunge into a Balkan war. The failure of that negotiation was a serious setback. It deprived Bulgaria of a powerful ally and forced the brothers to rely again on their own armies, their Cuman horsemen, and the continuing weakness of Byzantium itself. Still, the episode proved that the restored Bulgarian rulers could already speak in the language of great-power politics.

By 1195 and 1196 the foreign dimension of the struggle had become even clearer. Ivan Asen’s victory near Serres showed that the renewed Bulgarian monarchy was not simply defending a northern redoubt but was capable of offensive action deep in Macedonian territory. At the same time the change of emperors in Constantinople after the fall of Andronikos I did not bring peace; on the contrary, it sharpened Bulgarian distrust of Byzantine authority. Alexios III Angelos, like his predecessor, was viewed in Bulgarian political argument as another usurper, and this mattered because the Asenid claim to rule rested on the idea that such rulers had no moral right to obedience. The murder of Ivan Asen by Ivanko in 1196, apparently linked with Byzantine intrigue, showed how far imperial intervention had shifted from open campaign to clandestine destabilization. When Peter was then killed in 1197, the restoration passed to Kaloyan. The first phase of the revived empire therefore ended with a state that had survived the pressure of its great neighbour, secured steppe alliances, probed for crusader support, and emerged from two decades of Balkan turmoil as a power that could negotiate, raid, and claim on equal terms with the rulers around it.

The revival of the Bulgarian state after 1185 did not happen suddenly or by chance. It became the biggest challenge to Byzantine rule in the Balkans since that year. The immediate cause was clear: in August 1185, the Normans captured Thessaloniki, causing panic in Constantinople. The empire was already weak from wars, plots, and rulers being overthrown. At this moment, two brothers, Theodore and Asen—later known as Peter and Ivan Asen—went to Kypsela to meet Emperor Isaac II Angelos. They asked to join the imperial service and requested a mountain district in the Haemus (the Balkan Mountains) as a military grant called a pronoia. The emperor refused and insulted Asen. The brothers then returned to their home near Tărnovo, feeling humiliated. This insult sparked their rebellion. By late 1185, they were back in the northeast, leading a revolt that was no longer just a local protest but a clear break from Byzantine rule. Their cause was fueled by memories of the old Bulgarian kingdom, complaints about heavy taxes, and a strong belief that it was time for freedom.

In the early days, the rebellion had a strong ideological side. The brothers fortified Tărnovo and built a church dedicated to Saint Demetrius. According to legend, this saint had abandoned Thessaloniki and come to protect the Bulgarians. This was a powerful political statement: it suggested that divine favor had shifted from the Byzantines to the Bulgarians, giving them the right to rule. Peter was declared tsar (king), symbolized by wearing purple boots and taking an imperial name. This gave the rebellion a public and royal identity. Whether Peter or Asen was crowned first, the new leadership quickly developed around both brothers—Peter took part in the ceremonies, while Asen led the military efforts. By spring 1186, they were recognized as leaders of a new state, and their uprising spread quickly across the lands north of the Balkan Mountains. They captured small forts and villages, setting up a base beyond the immediate reach of Byzantine control.

Emperor Isaac II responded with military force, but his campaigns showed the empire’s limits. In 1186, he personally led an army into the Balkans and pushed the rebels north of the Danube River. However, he failed to capture the mountain strongholds or maintain a lasting presence. The brothers used this break to their advantage. They crossed the Danube, recruited Cuman horsemen (nomadic warriors from the steppes), and returned with a stronger cavalry force. They regained control in Bulgaria and even carried the war into Byzantine lands. The conflict became a war of movement and wearing down the enemy. Byzantine commanders tried to contain the rebellion, but Alexios Branas, sent to fight the rebels, was distracted by his own ambitions, causing the imperial campaign to lose momentum. By 1187, the Bulgarians were confidently operating in Thrace, attacking places like Lardea, threatening the imperial army near Beroe, and devastating the countryside around Philippopolis. What began as a desperate uprising had turned into a long struggle over control of northern Balkans.

Isaac II launched new attacks in 1187 and 1188. In late 1187, he reached Triaditsa but had to retreat because of winter. In spring 1188, he tried again, laying siege to Lovech for three months but failing to capture it. He did manage to take the empress prisoner and hold the youngest brother, Kaloyan, hostage. Still, these gains didn’t hide the campaign’s failure. The empire’s troubles were worsened by the Third Crusade. In 1189, when Frederick Barbarossa’s army crossed the Balkans and reached Niš, Bulgarian envoys approached the crusaders offering help against Isaac II. This showed how quickly the Bulgarian leaders had learned to use Byzantium’s crisis to their advantage. By then, the uprising was no longer just a mountain rebellion or hit-and-run raids; it had become a recognized political reality, and the old imperial claim to the region was increasingly weak.

The turning point came in 1190 with Isaac II’s defeat in the Tărnovo mountain pass. The emperor led a large force north, hoping to crush the rebellion by attacking the heart of Bulgarian lands. But the Bulgarians lured him into difficult mountain terrain, where they had the advantage. The imperial army was destroyed, and Isaac barely escaped. This defeat changed the war. From then on, the Bulgarians acted not just as rebels but as rulers defending and expanding their kingdom. By the early 1190s, the state had its own hierarchy and titles: Bulgaria had a tsar and an archbishop. Byzantine opposition now targeted the state itself, not just the legitimacy of its ruler. Around 1192 or 1193, the restored kingdom covered large parts of Moesia, Thrace, Macedonia, and lands north of the Danube. Ivan Asen had become the main ruler, although Peter still held symbolic importance in Preslav, linked to the rebellion’s origins.

The last years of this period brought both victories and internal troubles. In 1195, Ivan Asen won a major battle near Serres, showing the kingdom’s strength and his ability to project power deep into Macedonia. But the ruling family’s unity was shaken. In 1196, Ivan Asen was murdered by Ivanko, who took control of Tărnovo and sought Byzantine support, hoping to use the capital as a base to restore imperial control over Moesia. This conspiracy failed but revealed the new monarchy’s vulnerability. A year later, in 1197, Peter was also killed, reportedly by conspirators. With both elder brothers gone, the throne passed to Kaloyan, the youngest brother who had once been held hostage in Constantinople. His rise marked the end of the founding phase of the Second Bulgarian Empire: from the 1185 revolt to the dynastic change in 1197, Bulgaria had moved from rebellion to restoration, from scattered insurgency to a recognized royal power based in Tărnovo, ready to play a new role in Balkan politics.

The fight to restore Bulgaria didn’t start with a big, set-piece battle. Instead, it began as a frontier uprising that quickly turned into a mobile war fought in the mountains. After their failed request to the emperor, Theodore and Asen didn’t face the Byzantines on open plains. They retreated to the Balkan Mountains, where the rough terrain gave them an advantage. In areas already controlled by armed Bulgarian groups, the brothers gathered fighters, turned the rebellion into an organized movement, and made Tarnovo their political and religious center by building a church dedicated to Saint Demetrius. From the start, their war depended on speed, local knowledge, and the ability to move quickly between mountain strongholds and ravines, staying ahead of the slower imperial armies. This was not just a peasant revolt; it was led by boyars (noble landowners), supported by mountain fortresses, and strengthened by Cuman horsemen from beyond the Danube. The Cumans’ mobility would prove crucial in the coming years.

The Byzantine response came in several smaller campaigns rather than one decisive attack. Early efforts showed how hard it was for Byzantium to understand the rebellion’s size. Isaac II first sent his uncle John Doukas, then John Kantakouzenos, and finally Alexios Branas, but none of these commanders restored imperial control. The rebels were already well established in the mountains, where natural barriers acted as defenses. Byzantine troops who advanced carelessly were vulnerable to ambush. Kantakouzenos suffered a serious defeat because he failed to take precautions, and Branas abandoned the campaign to pursue his own ambitions. The imperial army faced not a single enemy but a shifting mix of local bands, mountain garrisons, and Cuman allies, all fighting in terrain that made usual Byzantine tactics ineffective. To fight the growing rebellion, the emperor had to gather more troops from provinces and grant military lands, but the war remained improvised. Commanders distrusted each other, revolts spread even within the imperial army, and pressure on the rebels weakened because of fear of conspiracy.

The 1186 campaign showed both Byzantine strengths and weaknesses. Isaac II led a large army, hoping sheer force would end the revolt. He pushed the rebels, including Peter and Asen, north across the Danube but failed to occupy and garrison the mountain forts still held by the rebels. This was a crucial mistake. Once north of the river, the brothers recruited more Cumans and returned with a strong allied force, turning the war into a series of raids and counter-raids. The imperial heartland in Thrace became vulnerable to fast attacks, and fighting spread beyond the river frontier. By 1187, the Byzantines were on the offensive again, but even when Isaac reached Adrianople, he faced Cuman tactics of feigned retreat and sudden counterattack. The Byzantines narrowly won that battle, but the emperor, unwilling or unable to pursue the enemy deep into Bulgarian lands late in the season, left part of his army to winter at Sardika and returned to Constantinople. The war had become a long, exhausting struggle rather than a quick conquest.

The most dramatic Byzantine attempt to stop the Bulgarian advance came in 1190, when Isaac II marched against Tarnovo itself. By then, the city had become a strong fortress, with improved walls and towers since the uprising began. The emperor advanced along the Black Sea coast and through the eastern Balkan passes into northern Bulgaria, reaching Tarnovo and laying siege to it. Despite the pressure, the siege failed. Tarnovo’s defenses, the mountainous terrain, and the defenders’ skill in using the landscape prevented a quick victory. The campaign ended in disaster for the emperor in the Trevnenski pass, where the Bulgarians crushed the imperial army by forcing the fight into broken, difficult terrain. In such conditions, mounted troops, battle order, and command worked in favor of the Bulgarians and their Cuman allies. This defeat was a turning point. It showed that the empire could no longer treat the Bulgarian war as a simple punishment; the rebels had become a strong military power capable of destroying an emperor’s army in the mountains.

After 1190, the war continued with raids, counterattacks, and diplomatic moves around the battlefield. Isaac II tried to coordinate pressure from the north with help from Hungary, but before this plan could be carried out, internal politics in the empire collapsed. Meanwhile, the Bulgarians pressed their advantage. By the mid-1190s, fighting reached the southern Balkans and important routes through Thrace. An imperial army from Anatolia was destroyed near Arcadiopolis, opening central Thrace to Bulgarian and Vlach advances. The war had moved far beyond defending the Balkan frontier. It also included opportunistic attacks on the edges of the conflict. When Ivan Asen was murdered by Ivanko, the power struggle in the capital intensified: Peter raised troops from Preslav, marched on Tarnovo, and besieged it. Ivanko, trapped, sought Byzantine help. A Byzantine relief force under Isaac Comnenus was defeated by a Cuman raiding party on the Struma River, and its commander was captured and died in prison in Tarnovo. By the time Peter was killed in 1197, it was clear that the restored Bulgarian state survived not through one big victory but through a sustained military system: mountain defenses, fast cavalry alliances, raid warfare, and the ability to survive repeated imperial attacks that failed to hold territory.

The restoration of Bulgarian statehood between 1185 and 1197 was not the sudden creation of a new political system, but the rebuilding of an old one. From the start, the movement led by Asen and Peter was part of the empire’s political world even as it challenged it. Their goal was to recover a sovereign kingdom that had been destroyed in 1018 but lived on in memory, grievances, and hopes. When their cause was announced in Tarnovo in 1186, the city was new to Bulgarian politics but was immediately made the stage for reviving the old state. The language of the movement was about restoration, not invention: Bulgaria was to be made again into a kingdom with its own ruler, center, and dignity, not just a rebellious border region breaking away from Byzantium.

This goal shaped the new state’s central power from the beginning. Tarnovo was not just a royal residence; it was meant to be a capital like Constantinople, with a court that reflected imperial order and claimed the same authority. The political vision behind the restoration was deeply influenced by the Byzantine model, but it was not a simple copy. It was a deliberate adaptation of the imperial system, opening the Orthodox empire at home so the restored Bulgarian realm could present itself as the rightful continuation of the ancient tsars’ political world. The claim to imperial dignity was central to this plan, and the question of church leadership was part of the same idea. In a state that saw itself as a reborn Christian empire, the ruler’s authority and the church’s power were closely linked. Restoring the state meant restoring the full symbolic structure of rule.

However, the new monarchy did not start from scratch. Its first practical task was to take over the existing administration in the lands it controlled. The Byzantine provincial system was not destroyed but taken over, continued, and adapted. The Asen brothers’ first concern was not ceremonies but administration: holding fortresses, installing garrisons, and securing tax collection. In the areas under Bulgarian control, they appointed soldiers, στρατηγοί (military governors), and tax collectors, showing how military command, regional government, and revenue collection were closely connected in the early state. The new regime’s administrative language was heavily influenced by Greek, showing both the prestige of Byzantine forms and the practical continuation of offices and procedures after breaking with imperial authority. The restored kingdom was built by taking over an existing imperial system and making it serve a new ruler.

This continuity extended to local power as well. The sources do not describe a fully developed hierarchy separating court and provinces, but they show a state that depended on men who could command, govern, and collect taxes. The new order could not work without local elites who knew the land, fortresses, and community obligations. Around the brothers gathered such regional leaders, because the restoration could not have lasted on the brothers’ will alone. In this way, the boyars were not outsiders to state-building; they formed the social backbone of the new monarchy. The kingdom was created not just by the brothers’ leadership but by including local nobles into a system of command, where loyalty to the ruler, control of fortresses, and participation in tax collection supported each other.

Law and taxation were among the earliest and most urgent issues for the new state. The leaders justified their break with Byzantium not as random rebellion but as freeing themselves from an illegal ruler. If the Byzantine emperor was a usurper, then the oaths of loyalty to him were not valid; political obedience could be ended because the ruler demanding it was illegitimate. This was more than just words. It gave the restoration a legal language and helped turn armed resistance into a claim of rightful sovereignty. At the same time, taxation was clearly a core function of statehood. The new rulers kept the Byzantine tax system because the state needed it. The fight for freedom was also a fight over who had the right to collect taxes, who controlled fortress revenues, and whose law defined obligations in the land.

Seen this way, the first years of the Second Bulgarian Empire were years of rebuilding institutions under the pressure of war. The capital was being created while battles were still fought; central authority was imagined while local administration was taken over; tax order was reactivated while the old imperial legitimacy was denied. The state that emerged between 1185 and 1197 was neither a simple continuation of pre-Byzantine Bulgaria nor a brand-new creation. It was a restored monarchy shaped from Byzantine forms, Bulgarian memories, and the needs of conquest. Its system was old in structure but new in loyalty, giving the second empire its unique character from the start.

The restoration of Bulgarian rule was from the beginning more than a military revolt or a fight for the throne. At the time, it was seen as a release from slavery, a liberation granted by God. This religious framing gave the new power its first legitimacy. The proclamation in Tarnovo in 1186 was not only political but also spiritual: the brothers presented their cause as the awakening of a people whose kingdom had not disappeared but had been suppressed. That is why the early Asenids’ rhetoric was strongly tied to the idea of divine will and the belief that Bulgaria had a rightful place among Christian kingdoms. The revolt was born in a world where political and sacred rights were inseparable.

No symbol was more important in this religious politics than Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki. When the Normans sacked Thessaloniki in 1185, many saw it as a sign from heaven: a great city had fallen, imperial order was shaken, and the saint who had protected the city was believed to have withdrawn. This story spread quickly and took on new meaning in Tarnovo, where the Asenids built a church dedicated to the saint and kept an icon of him. The saint’s cult moving from Thessaloniki to the new Bulgarian capital gave the uprising a dramatic religious story: the protector of an abandoned imperial city became the guardian of the new Bulgarian center. Tarnovo was thus more than a fortress; it was becoming a holy place where the renewed kingdom could present itself under saintly protection.

This religious dimension also affected church authority. Restoring the state meant restoring the full political and spiritual dignity Bulgaria had before 1018. The Asenids’ claims in the early years pointed toward the ideal later clearly expressed: the Bulgarian ruler belonged to a line of kings whose authority had been supported by a Bulgarian church leader of equal rank. In other words, the kingdom was imagined not as a partial autonomy under Byzantine control but as a full Christian state with its own ruler and its own highest church authority. Even before this was fully organized, the idea mattered because it united throne, altar, and people in one historical claim.

The religious world where this restoration happened was already marked by deep tensions. Long before 1185, Bulgarian society had known both strict monastic life and the appeal of heretical teachings like Bogomilism, which arose as responses to oppression, poverty, and spiritual unease. The revival of Bulgarian statehood did not erase this background; it grew out of it. Monasteries and hermitages remained important as places where memory, prayer, and social identity were kept alive, while the rise of Tarnovo as a political center gave these institutions new importance. The early Asenid regime had every reason to promote saintly patronage and church prestige because in a society used to seeing spiritual authority as a rival to imperial power, the church could either stabilize the new order or reveal its weaknesses.

Written culture was also tied to this recovery of political memory. The most important texts for understanding the spirit of the time are not new royal chronicles but older writings that kept alive the idea of Bulgarian kingship as an enduring and almost prophetic truth. The Bulgarian apocryphal tradition, which imagined a future ruler who would unite Bulgarian and Greek lands, preserved the memory of a kingdom that had not died in the minds of its people. These texts did more than keep nostalgia alive; they provided a language to understand the 1186 restoration. They connected past and future through stories that treated kingship, land, and Christian destiny as one continuous story. In this way, the new state was born not only from war and alliances but also from memory, prophecy, and written tradition.

The first decade of the Second Bulgarian Empire belongs as much to spiritual rebuilding as to political revolt. Between 1185 and 1197, the Asenids worked to root their authority in holy symbols, the cult of a major martyr, the idea of divine freedom, and the revived memory of an old imperial tradition. Their rule had not yet produced the full church and cultural institutions later associated with Tarnovo as a patriarchal and cultural capital, but the foundations were already being laid. The new kingdom began by claiming not only land and taxes but also the right to stand before God and people as the rightful continuation of Bulgarian Christian statehood.

The economy in which the Second Bulgarian Empire was founded was one of uncertainty, movement, and quick changes. The uprising of Asen and Peter did not start in a long-established city but in Tarnovo, a place that had played little role in Bulgarian politics before. Its sudden rise as the center of resistance is telling: the new kingdom was born not from an old administrative capital but from a fortified location with a strong strategic position. In the early years, power depended less on established institutions and more on holding a defensible hilltop, controlling the mountain passes, and keeping open routes for people, supplies, and news. The wars with Byzantium made this even more urgent because the conflict was fought not only on battlefields but also along roads, mountain passes, and spaces between towns.

Farming remained the hidden foundation of all this activity. Although sources from 1185–1197 don’t give detailed accounts of harvests, rents, or village duties, the very survival of the uprising and the brothers’ repeated campaigns show that the countryside continued to support political action. A military movement that began in spring 1186 and survived many imperial campaigns could not have lived on fighting alone; it needed food, animals for transport, and a rural population able to support soldiers. So, from the start, restoring the kingdom meant reactivating farming resources in lands north of the Balkan Mountains and around Tarnovo. The story makes clear that the struggle did not happen in an economic vacuum: controlling the countryside and the routes connecting it to fortresses was essential for political survival.

Towns mattered mainly as points of control rather than independent commercial centers. Tarnovo’s rise from obscurity went hand in hand with turning older fortresses into strong points in a defensive system. Isaac II’s army could move through open country, but mountain passes and approaches to the interior were blocked by fortified places that had to be forced, bypassed, or neutralized. The strength of the new Bulgarian regime lay in its ability to turn these places into barriers. This is why the early restored state’s economy must be understood through the idea of movement: whoever controlled the passes and towns controlled access to markets, taxes, and supplies. The big lesson of these years was that the geography of trade and the geography of war were inseparable.

The early Asenid state was still too new and under attack for its economy to be fixed in detailed documents. The first decade does not show a mature tax system in surviving records; instead, it shows a sovereignty in the making, which had to establish political control before it could organize taxes, dues, and property rights. Still, the language of restoration carried economic meaning. Declaring the revival of the Bulgarian kingdom meant claiming the authority to receive obedience, command resources, and free the country from imperial burdens. In this sense, founding the state already meant rearranging landholding and obligations: loyalties were shifting, the old imperial claim to revenue was challenged, and a new royal center was asserting control over people, routes, and settlements. Although charters from the first decade are missing, the restoration itself tells us what they would have done: define the ruler’s right to command, protect, and collect taxes in a world where political freedom and economic control were newly connected.

The foreign policy of the new Bulgarian movement began in a region already shaken by crisis. When Theodore and Asen appeared before Isaac II Angelos at Kypsela in autumn 1185, they did not come as open rebels but as petitioners asking for a small mountain district in the Haemus as a military grant. Their rejection and the insult to Asen by the emperor’s uncle turned this request into a break with Byzantium. But this event only makes sense in the wider Balkan context: Byzantium was struggling with Norman attacks from the west and Serbian and Hungarian advances in the central Balkans. Imperial authority in the provinces was weak enough that local strongmen, frontier lords, and ambitious communities tested its limits. The Bulgarian uprising began not in isolation but in a region where the old order was visibly failing, and where neighboring powers treated the imperial frontier as negotiable.

The first lasting foreign alliance of the restored Bulgarian leaders was with the Cumans beyond the Danube. After Isaac II’s first intervention was stopped and the brothers retreated north of the river, they returned with a large allied force from the steppe. This was a crucial step because it gave the revolt mobility, shock power, and strategic depth. The Cumans were not just helpers; they made it possible to move from a local uprising to a sustained war. Their involvement also shows the brothers’ political vision: restoring Bulgarian power was not to be limited to the Balkans but built by using every anti-Byzantine resource north of the Danube. The alliance with the Cumans helped the Bulgarians take the war into Thrace, where they could attack imperial lands directly instead of waiting behind mountain passes for another Byzantine expedition.

Against Byzantium, the conflict unfolded in a series of growing campaigns that steadily shifted the balance of power. Isaac II’s first march in 1186 went through the Balkan passes to the heart of the revolt but failed to crush it. He then withdrew without restoring firm control, and the brothers resumed their operations. Their forces appeared in several places in Thrace, avoiding major battles and striking where the imperial army was weak or absent. Bulgarian detachments raided near Lardea, succeeded near Beroe, and devastated areas around Philippopolis. Isaac, frustrated, tried to take the fight north of the Balkan range. His big expedition in 1188 failed before Lovech; even if a settlement was reached, it did not undo the fact that the emperor could not restore the old order. By then, the Bulgarian leaders no longer thought in terms of local autonomy. Their goal was to reunite Moesia and Bulgaria under one rule. By the early 1190s, foreign observers described them as controlling much of the land around the Danube, plus parts of Thrace and Macedonia. What began as a revolt had become a revived state with its own ruler and archbishop, no longer needing outside approval.

The most important diplomatic moment outside Byzantium came in 1189, when Frederick I Barbarossa’s army reached the Bulgarian border during the Third Crusade. The brothers tried to turn this powerful force into an ally. Their envoys at Niš offered help against Isaac II and asked for a major political deal: after defeating Byzantium, the imperial crown in Constantinople would be given to the elder brother. This was an ambitious proposal, showing how far Bulgarian diplomacy had moved beyond mere survival. The brothers were not asking for a small frontier concession; they wanted to use the crusade to change the balance of power in the Balkans. Barbarossa’s polite response raised hopes briefly, but he chose to make peace with Byzantium and continued eastward instead of starting a Balkan war. This failure was a serious setback. It left Bulgaria without a powerful ally and forced the brothers to rely on their own armies, their Cuman horsemen, and Byzantium’s continuing weakness. Still, the episode showed that the restored Bulgarian rulers could already speak the language of great-power politics.

By 1195 and 1196, the foreign side of the struggle became even clearer. Ivan Asen’s victory near Serres showed that the renewed Bulgarian kingdom was not just defending a northern stronghold but could launch attacks deep into Macedonia. At the same time, the change of emperors in Constantinople after Andronikos I’s fall did not bring peace. Instead, it increased Bulgarian distrust of Byzantine authority. Alexios III Angelos, like his predecessor, was seen by Bulgarians as another usurper, which mattered because the Asenid claim to rule rested on the idea that such rulers had no right to obedience. Ivan Asen’s murder by Ivanko in 1196, apparently linked to Byzantine plots, showed that imperial interference had shifted from open war to secret destabilization. When Peter was killed in 1197, the restoration passed to Kaloyan. The first phase of the revived empire ended with a state that had survived pressure from its great neighbor, secured steppe alliances, sought crusader support, and emerged from two decades of Balkan turmoil as a power able to negotiate, raid, and claim equal standing with the rulers around it.

In 1185, two brothers, Theodore and Asen, asked the Byzantine emperor for land and a position but were refused and insulted. This led them to start a revolt to restore the Bulgarian kingdom, which had been lost in 1018. They made Tarnovo their capital and claimed the support of Saint Demetrius, symbolizing that God favored their cause. By 1186, they were leading a strong rebellion that spread quickly in the Balkans.

The Byzantine emperor Isaac II tried to stop them with several military campaigns but failed. The brothers gained allies, especially the Cumans, skilled horsemen from the north, which helped them fight effectively. In 1190, Isaac II suffered a major defeat near Tarnovo, showing the Bulgarians were now a real power. By the early 1190s, the restored Bulgarian state controlled large parts of the Balkans and had its own ruler and church leader.

The brothers ruled using a mix of old Byzantine systems and Bulgarian traditions. Tarnovo became a real capital with forts, administration, and tax collection. The new kingdom claimed not just land but also the right to rule as a Christian empire with its own church, linking political power and religion closely.

The war was fought mainly in the mountains using fast raids and strong defenses. The Bulgarians used their knowledge of the terrain and their Cuman allies to outmaneuver the Byzantines, who struggled to hold territory. The conflict lasted many years and showed that Bulgaria was no longer just a rebellious province but a restored kingdom.

The Bulgarians also tried to make alliances beyond Byzantium. In 1189, they asked the leader of the Third Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa, for help against Byzantium, hoping to gain more power. Although this failed, it showed their growing diplomatic skill. By the late 1190s, despite internal troubles and assassinations, Bulgaria had become a recognized state able to defend itself and act as a strong player in Balkan politics.