Romania · Where the sources disagree
How far north did the First Bulgarian Empire actually reach?
Bulgarian scholarship puts Krum in Transylvania. A Romanian historian said flatly that no Bulgarian ruler was ever master of Wallachia. The strange part is which Romanians took the Bulgarian side.
The short answer
Suzerainty over the plains is widely accepted; Transylvania is not. The evidence is thin enough that both national schools have held their ground for a century.
For most of the ninth century, the strongest state anywhere near the lower Danube was Bulgaria. Under Khan Krum, who ruled from 803 to 814, it doubled in size, destroyed an emperor's army, and — depending on whose textbook you open — either did or did not rule a large part of what is now Romania.
This holding records Bulgarian suzerainty over Wallachia, Oltenia and Transylvania from 681 to 1018. Suzerainty means overlordship without direct administration: tribute and obedience rather than officials and law courts.
The southern half of that claim is not seriously disputed. The northern half is, and Transylvania in particular. What makes this argument worth reading is not the evidence, which is thin, but the politics underneath it — which run in the exact opposite direction from what you would expect.
The case for a wide Bulgarian reach
Bulgarian scholarship has been broadly united on this since Vasil Zlatarski, and speaks of "the Bulgarian lands across the Danube" — Transdanubian Bulgaria.
- Zlatarski held that Krum took eastern Hungary and Transylvania from the Avars, whose empire the Franks had just destroyed, and so came to share a border with the Frankish state.
- Petăr Mutafchiev drew it wider still: from the river Tisza in the west to Durostorum in the east, and north as far as the Transylvanian mountains.
- A Byzantine source known as the Scriptor Incertus records Krum settling prisoners of war across the Danube. You need territory to settle people on.
- And there is salt. Transylvania has some of the largest rock salt deposits in Europe, and salt was a strategic commodity — you cannot preserve food without it. Transylvanian salt travelled down the rivers to the Danube, and whoever controlled the river controlled the trade.
The case against
Nicolae Bănescu wrote the sustained refutation in 1947, L'ancien état bulgare et les pays roumains. His conclusion is categorical enough to quote:
The whole of Byzantine history registers the Bulgarian effort in the direction of the south and the west when there was an energetic chief, such as Krum and Simeon — that is, in the direction of Byzantium. No such effort has been registered across the Danube except for the western region and that of the delta of the river, a passageway of the barbarians. Neither Krum nor Asparuh or even the great tsar Simeon have ever been masters of Wallachia and Moldavia and still less of Transylvania.
The shape of that argument is worth noticing. Bulgarian strategy is documented in detail across three centuries, and it points south, at Constantinople. A state fighting for Thrace and Macedonia is not simultaneously governing the Carpathian basin — and the sources that record the southern wars in great detail say nothing about a northern administration. Iorga made a related point about Dobruja: it was a corridor the Bulgars passed through on the way south, not a base they held facing north.
Bănescu knew he was arguing against the field. He was contesting John Bury, Konstantin Jireček, Lubor Niederle and Fyodor Uspenskiy — and several of his own countrymen.
The strange part
Here is what makes this dispute genuinely unusual.
Dimitrie Onciul, A. D. Xenopol, Constantin Giurescu, P. P. Panaitescu and Ovid Densușianu all accepted that the First Bulgarian Empire extended north of the Danube. Those are Romanian historians endorsing the Bulgarian position on a territorial question.
Lucian Boia explained why, and the explanation is the most useful thing in the whole argument.
Conceding Bulgarian domination over Romanians north of the Danube presupposes that Romanians were already there to be dominated — in the ninth century, before the Hungarians arrived. For a nineteenth-century Romanian historian fighting the claim that Romanians only turned up in the Middle Ages, that concession bought far more than the territory it gave away.
In other words: Bulgarian nationalism was not the opponent that mattered. Hungarian nationalism was, and you spend your concessions on the enemy you are not fighting.
Boia notes the timing too. The Romanian posture shifts after 1918, once Romania had actually gained Transylvania and began taking an interest in the Vlach minorities south of the Danube. Bănescu's flat refusal dates from 1947, not from 1880.
That is a case where knowing what a historian needed the answer to do explains the answer better than the evidence does — and it applies to both sides equally.
What would settle it
- Bulgarian administrative material north of the mountains: lead seals, an inscription, a fort built with the distinctive Pliska-Preslav masonry. Seals are the direct trace of an official, and their absence north of the Carpathians is currently an argument from silence that one find would end.
- Separating salt from sovereignty. That Transylvanian salt reached Bulgaria is established. That reaching it required holding the mines is an assumption, and trade does not need a governor.
- Separating the Bulgarian state from Slavic settlement. A lot of what gets offered as evidence for Bulgarian rule in Transylvania is really evidence for Slavic population. Those are different claims on different terms, and this map keeps them apart deliberately — the Slavs have a holding of their own.
What the map does
It records suzerainty rather than administration — the weaker of the two claims, and the one the evidence supports. Dobruja is recorded separately, because it was held on completely different terms and lost forty-seven years earlier. And the whole thing is marked contested, because the extent, and Transylvania above all, is exactly what two national schools have never agreed on.
Sources
- Nicolae Bănescu, L'ancien état bulgare et les pays roumains (Bucharest, 1947), 9–56 and 66.
- Vasil Zlatarski, Istoriya na bălgarskata dărzhava prez srednite vekove, vol. 1 part 1, 248.
- Petăr Mutafchiev, Bălgari i rumăni v istoriyata na dunavskite zemi, 158–159, 166.
- Scriptor Incertus, on Krum settling Byzantine captives across the Danube.
- Lucian Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, 116.
- Roumen Daskalov, "Feud over the Middle Ages: Bulgarian-Romanian Historiographical Debates".
- First Bulgarian Empire; Bulgarian lands across the Danube.