The Patriarchate of Tarnovo

The institutional ancestry of the Patriarchate of Tarnovo reached back through the ecclesiastical arrangements imposed after the fall of the First Bulgarian Empire. In 971 Emperor John Tzimiskes had deposed Patriarch Damian at Drastar, an act intended to abolish the independent Bulgarian patriarchate together with the Bulgarian imperial order. After the final Byzantine conquest of Bulgaria in 1018, Basil II did not restore that patriarchate. Instead, he organized an autonomous archbishopric whose residence was at Ohrid and whose official titles continued to associate it with Bulgaria, all Bulgaria, and Justiniana Prima. The new arrangement preserved much of the territorial body of the former Bulgarian Church while reducing its head from patriarch to archbishop and placing the institution within the political order of the Byzantine Empire.

The archbishopric of Ohrid possessed a substantial degree of ecclesiastical autonomy. It was not treated as an ordinary metropolitan province of Constantinople: the emperor selected or confirmed its archbishop, but the archbishop was consecrated by his own bishops. Basil II’s privileges declared that the archbishop should govern the Bulgarian bishoprics and the cities formerly subject to Tsars Peter and Samuel. The archdiocese contained more than thirty sees, including Ohrid, Kastoria, Moglena, Bitola, Strumitsa, Velbazhd, Triaditsa, Nish, Branichevo, Belgrade, Skopje, Prizren, Lipljan, Drastar, Vidin, and other dioceses stretching across much of the former Bulgarian realm. This continuity preserved a specifically Bulgarian ecclesiastical geography, but its center lay at Ohrid, while the Bulgarian lands north of the Balkan Mountains remained politically and hierarchically integrated into the Byzantine world.

The uprising begun by Theodore-Peter and Ivan Asen I in 1186 therefore required an ecclesiastical as well as a political reconstitution. Tarnovo, the capital of the revived state, had previously been only a bishopric under Ohrid. Since the rebellion had not liberated Macedonia and Ohrid remained under Byzantine rule, the Asen brothers refused to leave their new kingdom spiritually dependent upon an archbishop residing outside it. They withdrew the territories under their control from Ohrid’s jurisdiction, raised the bishop of Tarnovo to the rank of archbishop of Bulgaria, and placed Basil, a close supporter of the dynasty, at the head of the restored church. The act was unilateral and violated the canonical order recognized by the Byzantine Church, but it supplied the new state with the ecclesiastical head considered indispensable to legitimate monarchy.

Basil’s installation revealed both the determination and the canonical vulnerability of the new regime. He was elevated with support from the Vidin hierarchy and two other bishops, but a Greek bishop of Vidin summoned to perform the installation refused, fled, and, after being recaptured, was executed. Basil nevertheless assumed his office in about 1187 and crowned a Bulgarian ruler in a solemn church ceremony—either Theodore-Peter, who had already been acclaimed tsar, or Ivan Asen I, who soon became the senior ruler. Tarnovo thus possessed an archbishop, a cathedral establishment, and a coronation rite linking the ruler to God through the Church. Yet the archbishop remained unrecognized by Constantinople, and the revived hierarchy rested on political possession and Bulgarian historical tradition rather than on generally accepted canonical recognition.

Kalojan transformed this problem into an international negotiation. Between 1200 and 1207 he corresponded with Pope Innocent III, presenting the restoration of Bulgarian imperial and patriarchal dignity as a right inherited from Simeon, Peter, and Samuel. He offered to recognize papal supremacy if Rome would grant him an imperial crown and recognize the head of the Bulgarian Church as patriarch. At the same time, he used the possibility of submission to Rome to pressure Byzantium, claiming that Emperor Alexios III and the patriarch of Constantinople had offered to crown him and provide him with a patriarch because an empire could not stand without one. His policy reflected the Byzantine conception of a balance between imperial and priestly authority, even though he sought its confirmation from whichever universal power would accept Bulgarian claims.

The settlement reached on 7 November 1204, after the crusaders had conquered Constantinople, granted less than Kalojan had requested. A papal cardinal crowned him king, not emperor or tsar, and consecrated the archbishop of Tarnovo as primate, not patriarch. Rome recognized the Bulgarian Church’s internal autonomy, but that autonomy existed under papal supremacy and did not make its head a patriarch equal to the great Orthodox sees. Innocent’s representatives explained that king and primate were approximately equivalent to the titles Kalojan desired. Kalojan understood the distinction but ignored it in his own political and ecclesiastical usage: he continued to call himself tsar and treated the Tarnovo primate as patriarch. The union therefore gave the Bulgarian Church external recognition and freedom from Ohrid, but it neither bestowed an imperial title upon the ruler nor created a canonically recognized Orthodox patriarchate.

Kalojan’s subsequent war against the Latin Empire did not by itself terminate the ecclesiastical agreement with Rome. The formal connection survived into the reign of Boril, even while Bulgarian religious practice remained deeply Orthodox. The council held at Tarnovo on 11 February 1211 against the Bogomils employed the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, one of the characteristic doctrinal texts of the Eastern Church. Under Ivan Asen II the Roman union increasingly appeared unnecessary and politically incongruous, particularly because it placed Bulgaria in the same formal religious sphere as the Latin Empire. When the tsar moved to restore full communion with the Orthodox East, Primate Basil opposed the abandonment of the union, left Tarnovo in protest, and retired to Mount Athos. His departure, followed by his death there, removed the principal institutional defender of the Roman connection.

Ivan Asen II’s ecclesiastical policy was inseparable from the expansion of Bulgaria after his victory over Theodore Komnenos at Klokotnitsa on 9 March 1230. His conquests included Serres, Prilep, Ohrid, Philippopolis, Demotika, Adrianople, and extensive areas of Macedonia, Thrace, and Albania. In the newly acquired territories he installed Bulgarian metropolitans and bishops, filling vacancies and in some places displacing Greek incumbents. Yet the archbishopric of Ohrid was not simply abolished or absorbed into Tarnovo. It continued its autonomous existence even after Ohrid came under Bulgarian rule. Demetrios Chomatianos remained its formidable archbishop until about 1234; after his death a Bulgarian, Ioannikios, was probably enthroned there, and he was succeeded by Sergios before the death of Ivan Asen II. The result was a Bulgarian political realm containing both the patriarchal ambitions of Tarnovo and the older autonomous tradition of Ohrid.

The tsar’s efforts to extend Tarnovo’s authority also encountered clear canonical limits. After taking the Chalcidic peninsula, Ivan Asen II proclaimed his protection over Mount Athos, confirmed earlier monastic charters, and made generous gifts, especially to Zographou, which had become a major Bulgarian monastic house. He attempted to place Athos under the hierarch of Tarnovo, but the monasteries resisted subordination to an urban bishop and the tsar did not enforce the claim. He also tried to subordinate the metropolitan of Thessaloniki to Tarnovo and appointed a loyal cleric to that see. The clergy of Thessaloniki and Epirus, together with the Athonite monks, protested. These disputes encouraged the weakened Epirote Church to recognize the Nicaean patriarch as ecumenical, while Ivan Asen refrained from jeopardizing his larger objective—Nicaean recognition of the Bulgarian patriarchate—by pressing secondary claims over the Epirote hierarchy.

Negotiations with Nicaea developed after John of Brienne assumed power in Latin Constantinople in 1231. Ivan Asen II turned to Patriarch Germanos II, the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople residing in Nicaea, and linked ecclesiastical reconciliation to an alliance with Emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes against the Latin Empire. Germanos responded through Christopher, metropolitan of Ancyra, whose letter set out the Nicaean position. The principal dispute concerned consecration: Nicaea demanded that the new archbishop of Tarnovo receive ordination from the ecumenical patriarch. The obstacle was overcome in 1234. Following Basil’s death, Joachim was elected to the Tarnovo throne, travelled to Nicaea, and received his episcopal dignity from Germanos II. This restored canonical and hierarchical communion between the Bulgarian Church and the Orthodox East before the higher patriarchal title itself was conferred.

The decisive settlement was completed in the spring of 1235. Ivan Asen II, accompanied by his wife and his daughter Helen, met John III Vatatzes at Kallipolis, where the rulers finalized their political cooperation. They then crossed to Lampsakos on the Asian shore. Germanos II celebrated the marriage of the young Helen to Theodore Laskaris, the Nicaean heir, and an imperial and synodal decree granted autonomy to the hierarch of Tarnovo and authorized him to bear the title of patriarch. The assent of the eastern patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem gave the act broader Orthodox authority. Joachim was thus recognized as the first canonically acknowledged patriarch of the restored Bulgarian Empire and returned to Tarnovo as the head of an autocephalous Orthodox Church.

Recognition rested on reciprocal concessions. Ivan Asen II and the Bulgarian hierarchy acknowledged Germanos II as the ecumenical patriarch and accepted Nicaean ecclesiastical jurisdiction in eastern Thrace. Nicaea in return recognized the Church of Tarnovo as autocephalous and its head as patriarch. The Athonite monks, relieved of Tarnovo’s attempted jurisdiction, supported the new Bulgarian status. The political treaty recognized Bulgarian possession of the territories northwest of the lower Maritsa, while Nicaea soon demonstrated its authority south and east of the agreed ecclesiastical frontier by appointing a new metropolitan of Thessaloniki. For Ivan Asen, patriarchal recognition strengthened his position among the Greek as well as Bulgarian inhabitants of his enlarged state. It was also the price and reward of alliance: Bulgarian and Nicaean armies immediately began joint operations against the Latin Empire, ravaged eastern Thrace, and advanced to the walls of Constantinople.

Within Bulgaria, the patriarch stood at the summit of a territorial hierarchy composed of metropolitans, bishops, clergy, and monastic communities. Metropolitans supervised groups of suffragan bishoprics, while bishops ordained local clergy, administered diocesan institutions, and exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction through church courts. These courts enforced canon law and clerical discipline, while major questions of doctrine or public religious order could be brought before councils such as Boril’s anti-Bogomil assembly of 1211. The patriarch and his synod provided the highest domestic ecclesiastical authority, although diocesan boundaries were repeatedly affected by conquest, diplomacy, and local political autonomy. The rapid replacement or appointment of bishops after 1230 shows how the hierarchy served both pastoral government and the political integration of newly acquired territory.

The economic foundations of the Church lay in episcopal and monastic estates, donations, and rights confirmed by rulers’ charters. Ivan Asen II’s protection of Athonite houses, his confirmation of their earlier privileges, and his generosity to Zographou illustrate the close relationship between royal patronage and ecclesiastical property. In the fourteenth century Ivan Alexander became an especially generous founder and benefactor of churches and monasteries. Such houses were not only landed religious institutions but centers of worship, education, manuscript production, and literary culture. Elementary learning was commonly associated with town churches and monasteries, while some monastic schools taught advanced grammar, Scripture, theology, and Greek. At Tarnovo itself the patriarchal residence and cathedral stood within the fortified complex of Tsarevets beside the royal palace, visibly expressing the cooperation—but also the institutional distinction—between tsardom and patriarchate.

Recognition in 1235 did not eliminate competition with Constantinople over the meaning and limits of Bulgarian autocephaly. The patriarch of Tarnovo governed the Bulgarian Church independently, yet Constantinople continued to claim ecumenical primacy and sometimes represented politically detached Bulgarian dioceses as ultimately dependent upon it. In 1312 Emperor Andronikos II placed Mount Athos directly under the patriarch of Constantinople, whose authority thereafter extended to the appointment of the Protos of the Holy Mountain. A revised Constantinopolitan list of bishoprics likewise continued to include sees in Bulgaria and Serbia among those theoretically dependent upon the ecumenical patriarch. Such claims did not abolish Tarnovo’s working self-government, but they preserved a hierarchical conception in which Constantinople remained the universal center of Orthodoxy.

The patriarchal throne founded with Joachim continued through the political turbulence of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Theodosius II was patriarch of Tarnovo and all Bulgaria in 1352 and again in 1356, during the reign of Ivan Alexander. Relations with Constantinople became particularly contentious around 1361–1362, when Patriarch Kallistos I and his synod responded to a report brought by monks from Tarnovo. Kallistos accused the Bulgarian patriarch of failing to commemorate the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, asserted that Tarnovo did not possess the same rank as the four ancient patriarchates, criticized Bulgarian baptismal practice, and objected that the Bulgarians were not using holy chrism prepared by the Great Church of Hagia Sophia. The dispute showed that Constantinople recognized Tarnovo as an Orthodox sister church while denying it complete equality of honor with the ancient eastern patriarchates.

Political fragmentation steadily narrowed Tarnovo’s effective jurisdiction. At the end of 1369 or beginning of 1370, the metropolitan of Vidin was invited to participate in the Holy Synod of Constantinople. In 1371 the Constantinopolitan patriarchate intervened in the affairs of Tarnovo and Vidin by entrusting the administration of Triaditsa, or Sofia, to the metropolitan of Vidin. In July 1381, at the request of Tsar Ivan Stratsimir, the Constantinopolitan synod selected the hieromonk Cassian as metropolitan of Vidin, ending any remaining ecclesiastical subordination of the Vidin realm to Tarnovo. Against this background the last great Tarnovo patriarch, Euthymius, strengthened the authority of his office in the fields of doctrine, liturgy, and letters. He demanded that Slavonic translations be corrected through rigorous comparison with Greek originals, required newly copied manuscripts to receive patriarchal approval, restricted copying to properly trained scribes, and, with the support of Tsar Ivan Shishman, acted against corrupt texts and heretical teachers such as Piron and the monk Theodosius Fudul.

The institutional history of the patriarchate ended with the destruction of the political order that had sustained it. An Ottoman army captured Tarnovo on 17 July 1393, and Ivan Shishman was subsequently taken prisoner at Nikopolis and executed two years later. Bulgaria ceased to be merely a dependent state and became an Ottoman province, while Tarnovo could no longer function as the capital of an independent tsardom or the seat of an autocephalous patriarch supported by that tsardom. The patriarchate’s lasting significance lay in the ecclesiastical unity it had given the Second Bulgarian Empire, in its defense of Bulgarian autonomy within the Orthodox commonwealth, and in the monastic, educational, and literary culture brought to its highest expression under Euthymius.