Balkan provinces of the Byzantine Empire

Once they had settled in the Balkan provinces of the Byzantine Empire, the Slavs entered into direct contact with its highly developed material and spiritual culture, which accelerated their social and economic development. The Slavs, on their part, who had not passed through the stage of slavery, contributed to the ‘rejuvenation’ of the Empire and to doing away with the last vestiges of slave relations in it. The policy of assimilation adopted by the Byzantine Emperors with regard to the immigrants influenced the regions where the Slavs were not the predominant power (Central and Southern Greece, Asia Minor), but in Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia the Slavs were the masters of the situation. Too weak to oppose on their own the powerful pressure of Byzantium, the Slav tribes began to unite into tribal unions (the beginning of a state) and courageously to defend their independence. In their struggle against the Byzantine Empire during the last decades of the 7th century, they suddenly acquired a peerless ally in the Proto-Bulgarians.

Ethnicity of Proto-Bulgarians

The Proto-Bulgarians ethnically belonged to the Turkic tribes which inhabited the steppes of Central Asia. Their origin and name have to this day not been positively established. It is known that early in our era they had settled in the northern part of the foot of the Caucasus. Those lands had been populated from time immemorial by the Sabiri and Alani. It is probable that the Alani gave the Proto-Bulgarians their name, for in the language of that tribe ‘bulgaron’ meant ‘people living at the foot of the mountain’.

At the end of the 4th and the first half of the 5th cen-tury A. D. the Proto-Bulgarians became members of the motley conglomerate of peoples called ‘Hunnish tribal union’ and took part in the horror-sowing Hunnish raids in Central and Western Europe. After the Union dis-integrated, part of the Proto-Bulgarians settled in Italy, others went back to their former places – along the northern Black Sea coast. For several decades they formed part of the powerful Avar Khaganate and numerous Proto-Bulgarian contingents again went as far as Pannonia and, after the internecine wars within the Khaganate during the middle of the 7th century, part of them went to settle in Italy, and another part, a more numerous one, led by Kouber, penetrated deep into the Balkan Peninsula and settled in the Bitola Plain in Macedonia.

Proto-Bulgarians

The Proto-Bulgarians who had remained in their former settlements fell for a short time under the domination of Turkic tribes which had come from the east, but after a persistent and bloody struggle, they managed to free themselves and by the year 630 they had formed a powerful multi-tribal union known under the name of ‘Great Bulgaria’. Legend has it that the leader of Great Bulgaria, Khan Koubrat, gathered his five sons at his death-bed and made them take turns in breaking a bunch of tightly bound resilient twigs. After none of them succeeded in doing so, he undid the bunch and without any effort started breaking the twigs, with his fingers of an old man, one after the other. In this way he bequeathed to them his advice – never to quarrel or fight with each other, in order to be unbreakable, like the tightly bound bunch of twigs.