Koubrat’s death

The sons, however, did not fulfil the behest of their wise father. After Koubrat’s death, like the majority of all multitribal state formations at that time, ‘Great Bulgaria’ disintegrated under the impacts of the Khazars coming from the east. Part of the Proto-Bulgarians set out to the north and formed there, at the place where the Kama River disgorges its waters into the Volga, the so-called Volga Bulgaria. Another part of them, led by Koubrat’s son Asparouh, withdrew to the estuary of the Danube and started from there frequent incursions into the Byzantine lands to the south of the big river.

The Establishment of the Bulgarian State

In the year 680 the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IV Pogonatus launched a massive attack, by land and sea simultaneously, against the Proto-Bulgarians and the Union of seven Slav tribes in Moesia. Asparouh, however, defeated his army and moved southwards as far as the Balkan Range. There he built his fortified camp of Pliska (not far from today’s town of Shoumen) and concluded an agreement with the chiefs of the seven Slav tribes for waging a joint struggle against the common enemy – the Byzantine Empire. This was not an agreement difficult to conclude, for Proto-Bulgarians and Slavs had known each other for quite a long time. They had been neighbours at the time of‘Great Bulgaria’ and some of them had entered both the Hunnish Tribal Union and the Avar Khaganate. In order to check a further penetration of Proto-Bulgarians southwards, the Byzantine Emperor signed a peace treaty with Asparouh in the beginning of 681, recognizing officially the birth of the Bulgarian, or more precisely, of the Slav-Bulgarian state.

The new state of Byzantine

The new state spread between the Danube, the Black Sea, the Balkan Range and the Timok River to the west. It gradually enlarged its territory and came to occupy some time later the center of the Balkan Peninsula. The land was beautiful and fertile, but very unquiet, for it was the crossroads of important routes linking the north with the south, Europe with Asia. In times of peace riches flowed in via the ‘Old Road’, which was also called ‘Apia Trajana’, ‘The Military Road’, ‘The Diagonal Road’; intensive trade and cultural exchange was carried out which contributed to the country’s rapid progress. The periods of peace, however, were shorter than those of war. Unlike the newly- created West-European states, which had emerged and developed upon the ruins of the Roman Empire and which were later reached by the barbarian waves after the latter had broken their crests, Bulgaria had had the impertinence to emerge in the very heart of the well-preserved Eastern Roman Empire and had to pay dearly for her impertinence. The powerful Empire looked down on the uninvited newcomers and spared no effort in its attempts to throw them back to the other side of the Danube or to assimilate them in the way it had done before with numerous other barbarian tribes. This forced the Bulgarians to wage exhausting life-and-death wars in the course of centuries for their free national existence.