The Byzantine Legacy in the Balkans

The Balkans are where Byzantium is least visible as ruins and most present as inheritance. There is no Hagia Sophia in Sofia or Belgrade, but the alphabet on the street signs, the shape of the churches, the structure of the liturgy, the legal vocabulary and the very titles of the medieval rulers all came from Constantinople.

The relationship was never simple admiration. Bulgaria and Serbia each fought the empire repeatedly, each produced rulers who wanted to take Constantinople and rule it, and each built a state on the Byzantine model with the explicit aim of replacing the Byzantine one. Cultural dependence and political hostility ran together for six hundred years.

Conversion as the Founding Act

The decisive moments are datable. Bulgaria accepted baptism from Constantinople under Boris I in 864; Serbia was Christianised in stages through the ninth century and definitively under Byzantine influence; the Rus followed in 988.

Each conversion carried a package: a hierarchy, a liturgy, a body of canon law, a script, a stock of translated texts, a style of church building, a court ceremonial and a political theology. The article on Byzantine diplomacy sets out why the empire invested so heavily in missionary work, and Cyril, Methodius and the Cyrillic alphabet describes the linguistic side.

Boris’s negotiation is the instructive case. He shopped between Rome and Constantinople for two years, seeking the best terms — specifically an autonomous church with its own archbishop — and took the Byzantine offer because it conceded more. The Balkan states adopted Byzantine Christianity by choice and on negotiated terms, not by conquest.

The Slavonic Literary Culture

The most consequential Byzantine export was not a doctrine but a technology: a script and a literary language.

Cyril and Methodius created Glagolitic and translated the liturgy into Slavonic in the 860s. After their Moravian mission failed, their disciples were expelled and welcomed in Bulgaria, where Clement and Naum established schools at Preslav and Ohrid. The Cyrillic alphabet was developed there, and Bulgaria became a literary culture in its own language within a generation.

Under Tsar Simeon (893–927) — who had been educated in Constantinople — Preslav produced a large body of translations from Greek: theology, chronicles, saints’ lives, encyclopaedic compilations. This corpus was then transmitted onward to Serbia and to Kievan Rus, which is why Slavonic Orthodoxy shares a common textual inheritance.

The point is worth stating plainly: Byzantium permitted, and actively supported, the translation of its liturgy and literature into a vernacular language. The Latin church of the same period did not, and the divergence in the religious cultures of eastern and western Europe follows substantially from that single difference.

The Imperial Idea

Byzantine political theology was exported along with everything else, and the Balkan rulers took it seriously.

Simeon of Bulgaria adopted the title tsar — from caesar — and had a Bulgarian patriarchate proclaimed, aiming explicitly at the imperial title in Constantinople. His campaigns are described in the Byzantine–Bulgarian wars.

Stefan Dušan of Serbia was crowned “emperor of the Serbs and Greeks” at Skopje in 1346, having first elevated the Serbian archbishopric to a patriarchate so that there would be someone of appropriate rank to crown him. He issued a law code, the Zakonik, drawn substantially from Byzantine law, and reorganised his court on the Byzantine model with Byzantine titles.

Ivan Asen II of Bulgaria in the thirteenth century used the style “emperor of the Bulgarians and Greeks.”

The pattern is consistent. There was one model of legitimate universal Christian rule, it was Byzantine, and the way to claim it was to reproduce it — the same logic that later produced the Third Rome in Moscow.

Art and Architecture

Balkan church architecture is Byzantine architecture with local modifications: the cross-in-square plan, brick and stone masonry, domes on drums, three apses. Serbian building developed distinctive regional schools — the Raška school of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries combining Byzantine plans with Romanesque stone detail, then the Vardar and Morava schools of the fourteenth and fifteenth.

The painting is more than derivative. The fresco cycles of the Serbian royal foundations — Studenica, Mileševa, Sopoćani, Gračanica, Dečani — are among the finest surviving Byzantine-tradition work anywhere, and Sopoćani in particular, with its monumental figures of the 1260s, has been ranked by more than one historian above anything surviving from Constantinople in the same decades.

Greek painters worked in Serbia and Macedonia; local painters trained in the Greek manner; and the painters Michael Astrapas and Eutychios signed work across the region around 1300. The stylistic development is treated in Byzantine frescoes.

Law and Church Order

Byzantine law reached the Balkans in Slavonic translation. The Nomokanon of Saint Sava, compiled around 1219 for the newly autocephalous Serbian church, translated Byzantine canon and civil law together and became the foundation of Serbian legal culture; it was later transmitted to Russia. The tradition is described in Orthodox canon law.

Church organisation followed the Byzantine pattern of autocephalous national churches in communion with Constantinople — a model that allowed each Balkan state its own hierarchy while preserving doctrinal unity, and that has proved durable enough to structure Orthodox Christianity to the present, with all its attendant jurisdictional quarrels.

Under the Ottomans

The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not end the Byzantine inheritance; it froze and in some ways extended it.

Under the millet system the Orthodox population of the empire — Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, Albanian and Arab — was administered as a single religious community under the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who acquired civil authority over his flock that no Byzantine patriarch had ever held. Byzantine canon law governed marriage, inheritance and community affairs for four centuries.

The consequence was a Hellenisation of Balkan Orthodoxy, resented by the Slavic and Romanian churches, and the abolition of the autocephalous Bulgarian and Serbian churches in the eighteenth century. The national revivals of the nineteenth century took the form, in each case, of re-establishing an independent church before establishing an independent state. The wider relationship is discussed in Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire.

The Balkans Today

What survives is not antiquarian. The alphabet, the church calendar, the architectural vocabulary of any new Orthodox church, the shape of the liturgy, the naming customs, the icon corner in the house, the boiled wheat at a memorial service — all of it is Byzantine.

So, less happily, is the political inheritance. The idea that a nation requires its own patriarchate, that religious and national identity are the same thing, and that the historic rights of a medieval kingdom constitute a present claim — these are Byzantine ideas, transmitted with the rest, and they have been used in the Balkans in ways Constantinople would have recognised and probably regretted.

Boris’s Hundred and Six Questions

The document that best captures what conversion actually meant on the ground is the list of questions Khan Boris sent to Pope Nicholas I in 866, and the pope’s replies.

Boris asks about matters of doctrine, but most of the list concerns practice — a ruler working out which of his people’s customs must change and which may stay:

• May Bulgarians continue to wear trousers, or must they adopt other dress?
• What is to be done about the horse-tail battle standard?
• May they eat animals killed by a eunuch, or birds taken without bleeding?
• Is it permitted to work on Sundays and feast days?
• May a man have two wives? What is to be done about those who already do?
• May they take communion without a belt?
• What penance is due for killing a kinsman, and what for a man who kills in battle?
• Should a criminal who takes sanctuary in a church be handed over?
• May they consult auguries and omens before a battle?
• What should be done with those who refuse baptism?

Nicholas’s replies are patient, practical and frequently permissive on custom — the trousers may stay — while firm on doctrine and morals.

The exchange is the best surviving document of a society being asked to change its habits wholesale, and it shows conversion as a negotiated process rather than a switch being thrown. Boris eventually took the Byzantine offer, having used the Roman one to raise the price.

The Serbian Churches

The Serbian royal foundations are the outstanding artistic product of the Byzantine legacy in the Balkans, and they deserve to be named.

Studenica (c. 1190), founded by Stefan Nemanja, the dynasty’s founder, who retired there as a monk and then to Athos. Marble-faced, with frescoes of 1208–1209.

Mileševa (c. 1235), which holds the “White Angel” at the empty tomb — probably the most reproduced image in Serbian art.

Sopoćani (c. 1265), whose Dormition of the Virgin on the west wall is a composition of some fifteen metres with monumental figures, and which several historians have ranked with anything surviving from Constantinople in the same decades.

Gračanica (1321) and Dečani (1327–1335) in Kosovo, the latter with the largest surviving fresco programme in the Byzantine world — over a thousand individual compositions.

Studenica, Sopoćani, Dečani and the Peć Patriarchate are UNESCO listed; the Kosovo monuments have been on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2006.

These were built by Serbian rulers, often with Greek painters, in a Byzantine idiom, as statements of a Serbian kingdom’s standing. That combination — imported form, local ambition — is the Balkan pattern throughout.

Hilandar

One institution ties the whole transmission together and is worth a paragraph of its own.

Hilandar, on Mount Athos, was granted to the Serbs in 1198 by the emperor Alexios III for Stefan Nemanja and his son Rastko — the latter better known as Saint Sava, who became the first archbishop of an autocephalous Serbian church in 1219 and compiled the Serbian Nomokanon from Byzantine canon and civil law.

Bulgaria had Zograf; the Rus had Panteleimon; the Georgians had Iviron. Each Orthodox people acquired a house on the Holy Mountain, and each house became a conduit: monks travelled, manuscripts were copied and carried home, liturgical practice was standardised, and the hesychast revival of the fourteenth century spread through exactly this network.

Athos is the reason Balkan and Russian Orthodoxy stayed in step with Constantinople for centuries after the political links had gone, and it is why the hesychast settlement of 1351 reached Moscow and Tarnovo as quickly as it did.

• The Byzantine–Bulgarian Wars — six centuries of the relationship
• Cyril, Methodius and the Cyrillic Alphabet — the script and the liturgy
• The Byzantine Legacy in Romania — the Danubian principalities
• Byzantine Frescoes — the Serbian and Macedonian cycles
• Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire — the millet system
• Byzantine Legacy in Russia — the other branch of the inheritance
• Orthodox Canon Law — the legal transmission