The sources

I. The Life of St Clement in OCS is lost but certainly existed. There are two Lives in Creek:

(a) The longer Life attributed to Archbishop Theophylakt of Ohrid (fungebntur c. 1085 - 1109), sometimes known as the Bulgarian Logend (Legenda bulgarica) and usually dated c. 1100, a learned and rhetorical work partly based on the lost Life. Most scholars accept Theophylakt's authorship but Snegarov has recently put forward some arguments for doubting this. He prefers to date it to after 1200, perhaps c. 1235 when the Patriarchate of  Turnovo was created and Ohrid saw itself losing all its glory.(a) Certain  passages of the Life may be read as a defence of Ohrid and its privileges; others bear upon the polemics between Greeks and Latins. Theophylakt was a prolific writer and many works were loosely attributed to him. But none of them are noticeably Bulgarophile, as the Life of Clement is, so the real author may be rather Archbishop Demetrios Khomatianos (fungebatur c.1235), who is known to have been a devotee of St Clement and conversant   with OCS. The value of the Life is variable, containing as it does obvious misconceptions, such as the statement that Methodios personally baptised Boris.

(b) The Short Life, generally attributed to Demetrios Khomatianos - also known as the Ohrid Legend - of little value, and if Snegarov is right, in fact a still later work. The manuscript is thirteenth or fourteenth century.

2. Two Offices of St Clement, one OCS and one Greek.  The Creek one   was composed at Ohrid probably over a considerable period (eleventh - fourteenth century). The OCS Office, of which there is only one manuscript of 1435, couples him with St Panteleimon, the patron of the monastery founded by St Clement at Ohrid, so there is a presumption that it was composed there not long after his death (916), together with the lost Life.

3. The Life of St Naum (commemorated on 23 December) in OCS shows signs of being a companion to the lost Life of Clement by the same author, a disciple of the two saints still working in the area of their ministry. There is a tradition that Bishop Marko commissioned these two Lives. The late medieval manuscript was found in the Zographou monastery on Mt Athos. There is also a Greek Life (sometimes referred to as the Macedonian Legend) of unknown date and authorship, and another still unpublished.

(a) Thus the venerated relies of St John of Rila were transferred from Ohrid to Turnovo at this time.

Boris was now within sight of his goal. It remained to train a hierarchy for a Bulgarian Slav church. All the early episcopal appointments naturally fell to Greeks; whether the changeover could be effected without further disagreement with the Byzantine authorities remained to be  seen. Boris retained Naum at Court. Clement was sent to work in Macedonia. This is not to be interpreted as a disgrace: he was sent with a new civil governor for the province, a Slav Dometa, evidently to ensure proper conditions for his work. He was given property - 'three houses in Devol' - and other privileges. Clement was probably a Macedonian by birth and preferred to devote himself to missionary and  teaching work among the Macedonian Slavs (the area was almost wholly Slav) rather than to remain attached to the Court, for him too political  and too Greek. At most Boris may have felt that it was better to keep the Greek and Slav missionaries somewhat apart and not to risk too strong a  reaction on the part of his Creek advisers until the Slav work was well established. The only potential stumbling-block was the use of the Glagolitic alphabet to which Clement loyally adhered.

Boris was a great builder. Among his earliest foundations is to be reckoned the Court Chapel at Pliska. Tradition records that he built seven cathedrals for his new bishoprics. The number seven must, as always, not be taken too literally.

(b) A Bishop of Ohrid signed the acts of the Council of Constantinople of 879-80. (c) Probably a Byzantine foundation of c. 879-80

Among these can be identified, with variable certainty: the basilica on an island in Lake Prespa one of the churches at Ohrid,(b) and one at Nesebur (Mesembria); the church at Vodocha (near Strumitsa), which would seem therefore to be the cathedral of the see of Bregalnitsa (dateable to c. 886-9); and the church at Cherven, south of Ruse on the Danube. Bulgarian were now, in greater or less degree, such Greek sees as Belgrade or Morava,(c) Dorostol (Drustur), Serdica (modern Sofia), whose church of the Holy Wisdom still survives, Philippopolis (Plovdiv) and Develt (a short way south of Burgas). The seven bishops from Bulgaria who attended the Council of 879-80 in Constantinople therefore represented the majority, if not the totality, of the episcopacy. Boris's most important monastic foundation was St Panteleimon (Patlejna), on a steep hillside on the opposite bank of the River Ticha from the new royal residence at Preslav. A fragmentary inscription in Latin from Preslav, which appears to relate to the dedication of a church, is the only witness left to the activities of the Papal mission of the 860s in the sphere of architecture.

The remains of Pliska give rise to many difficulties of interpretation. The small basilica within the palace area can in all probability be ascribed to Boris's reign. The date of the huge basilica outside - some 320 by 96 feet, of which half is a vast atrium - is still in dispute. Early excavation reports of Bulgarian savants, followed by several later scholars, too readily assumed that all the monuments belonged to the first creative period of Bulgarian culture in the ninth-tenth centuries. But it has become increasingly clear that old sites destroyed and abandoned in the invasion period were later reoccupied by squatters, eventually to become in some cases important new settlements. Nearby Madara is a case in point. Originally an Imperial fortress watching the steppes (fifth-sixth centuries), it became a Bulgarian centre in the eighth-ninth centuries, and not merely a fortress but one of the main cult centres, as the famous cliff sculpture - the 'Madam rider' - and the remains of a pagan shrine side by side with Christian edifices bear witness. An inscription on the rock-face which mentions Khan Omurtag and the goddess Tangri suggests that in the first half of the ninth century Madara was the religious and Pliska the political capital. The layout and mere size of Pliska leave little room for doubt that it too was originally a Roman military camp with outer vallum and inner stone defences. The drainage and heating systems in the palace area are likewise typically Roman. The place was reoccupied by the Bulgars in the seventh-eighth centuries. Understandably the new inhabitants often used old materials to hand: several stone blocks with Latin inscriptions can be seen in the palace walls. The plan, size and construction of the great basilica are strongly against its being a new foundation of Boris. A basilica of this type would normally be dated not later than the sixth century and this is surely its true age. How far Boris restored it to use is problematical. Within the palace complex itself, the Court Chapel stands not far from what is believed to be a pagan shrine. Somewhat later a small basilica was buit to the west of the palace, this time overlying a pagan religious edifice. This basilica is of the dimensions which we should expect for the time and place, in contrast to the great basilica standing isolated some distance away.

By 889 Boris was sufficiently satisfied that Christianity was well and truly established in his realm to take the decision to abdicate and retire to the monastery of his own foundation at Preslav. This proved too sanguine. His eldest son Vladimir aligned himself with that faction in the Bulgarian ruling class which still embraced the lost cause of rejecting everything Greek. Though Vladimir was nominally a Christian there may still have been some diehard anti-Christians among his supporters. He entered into relations with Arnulf of Bavaria who encouraged his anti-Greek policy. Though the crisis was essentially political the Greek hierarchy was inevitably involved. Vladimir imprisoned Archbishop Stephen and allowed other persecutions. Boris still commanded enough authority to come out of his retirement in 893 and depose his son. It was now a question of proving the political ability of Symeon, his younger son, whose devotion to Greek Christian culture was beyond all doubt.

The year 893 marks the coming of age of the Bulgarian Slav church. At a council summoned by Boris in the autumn of that year he installed Symeon as the new ruler and decreed the official adoption of the Slav language in the church. The capital was now formally transferred from Pliska (near the modern village of Pliskov-Aboba) to Preslav, a bette strategic point and less linked with Bulgaria's pagan past. Boris then again withdrew to the contemplative life. He died on 2 May 907.

The work of St Clement in Macedonia continued to be based on the tradition of his masters. Born about 840, he became a pupil of Methodios in his Olympian monastery, and remained one of his closest collaborators. Perhaps Methodios brought him from the Slav province which he governed. It is permissible to suppose that he received the name Clement when accompanying Cyril and Methodios on their mission to Khazaria, at the time of the invention of St Clement's relics at Kherson. One of the Office hymns compares him to Timothy, the closest companion of St Paul. Clement transplanted the Glagolitic alphabet to Macedonia. According to the Life some 3,500 pupils passed through his hands in seven years; these gradually extended the area of missionary and pastoral labours. Clement's work remained essentially educational, earning for him, as for his revered masters, the title of 'teacher'. As little knowledge of Greek could be expected in the remoter parts of Macedonia he wrote for his flock many homilies in Slav; also hymns ane prayers. Clement was therefore, if traditional ascriptions are correct the first prolific author of original compositions in Church Slavonic; to him must go a share in the glory of its development as a written language extending beyond close translation of Greek sacred texts. The area of Clement's ministry can only be defined approximately. His first'centre is given as Devol, south-west of Lake Ohrid which lay in the region then known as Kutmichevitsa, commonly taker to be roughly the triangle Saloniki-Skopje-Valona. The highway from Durazzo to Saloniki and on to the Imperial City - the Via Egnatia - skirted the lake, at that time frequently called Lake Devol.

Symeon elevated Clement to a bishopric soon after his accession in 893. He thus became the first Slav bishop of the Bulgarian church, a matter of great pride to later Bulgarian writers. The precise location of his see remains enigmatic. Its name only appears in an ambiguous adjectival form in the Slav texts, suggesting a place Velika, which agrees with some but not all Greek transcriptions. Velika occurs nowadays several times in the toponymy of the upper Vardar valley and it would seem that the local Slavs so named the river itself (the 'Great River'). The see is surely to be sought on one of the main lines of communication of Macedonia, plausibly on the River Vardar itself. As Tunicki pointed out, Theophylakt's Life implies that the new see was not too far distant from Ohrid, which Clement continued to visit frequently, but that the diocese did not include, or at least was not identical with, the region of his educational labours. A conceivable identification is therefort modern Veles on the Vardar. This would have been a strategic centre suitable for Clement's talents in organising the Slav Bulgarian church against Greek encroachments from Saloniki. Boris had appreciated this fact in creating the see of Bregalnitsa, not far east of Veles. Velika is obviously in Macedonia. The view still occasionally advanced that it is not to be sought in the Balkans but represents an inaccurate reminiscence of Great Moravia or its alleged capital Velegrad (Velihrad) may be dismissed. That Clement was promoted bishop by Methodios himself rests on a passage in the unreliable Short Life and finds no confirmation elsewhere. Indeed it agrees neither with what we know of Methodios's later years nor with the established fact that Symeon made Clement a bishop; he would not have ignored an earlier Methodian consecration.

Clement died on 27 July 916 and was buried in his own monastic foundation of St Panteleimon at Ohrid. A fresco in the church of the Holy Wisdom at Ohrid shows him standing next to St Cyril. The work belongs to Archbishop Lee's improvements in the middle of the eleventh century and can lay no claim to being a likeness. It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Clement was the builder of the original church of the Holy Virgin (Bogoroditsa) at Ohrid, now known as St Clement's. This church probably enshrined his relics for a time. The extant inscription recording Clement's death is however not contemporary. Clement's St Panteleimon can scarcely be other than the church now revealed under the Imaret Mosque. Theophylakt's Life notes that he founded two churches at Ohrid 'much smaller than the cathedral'. The inspiration of these 'round' churches - frequently of trefoil (triconchal) plan - in the Ohrid region and elsewhere in the Balkrans is to be found in the numerous fourth-sixth century Byzantine baptisteries and martyria.

On Clement's elevation to a bishopric, with power to ordain the priests whom he had trained for the Slav church, Naum took over his educational work in Macedonia. He had remained in the capital during the years 886-93, engaged perhaps more in learned work in the circle of Boris's son Symeon than in evangelisation. Little has been handed down of his activities and no extant writings are ascribed to him. He founded a monastery at Devol and another on Lake Prespa. He retired into monastic life in 900 and died on 23 December 910. The monastery of  St Naum, at the south end of Lake Ohrid, was dedicated to him and his relics were transferred there at an early date. It became a notable centre of spiritual healing - and remained such for a millenium until within living memory.

Invaluable though the contribution of the Macedonians was, from 893 Preslav became not merely the civil capital but also the main centre of Bulgarian culture. Yet Symeon was not the man of vision that his father had been. Born about the time of Boris's baptism, he was educated in Constantinople and knew Byzantine strength and weakness from the inside. Indeed he was sometimes sarcastically called the 'half-Greek': ability to speak Creek, not blood, made one a Greek. Such was the influx of things Greek into Bulgaria from 864 that he must have gone to the City (c. 878) already proficient in the language. He attended the academy in the Magnaura Palace. Liutprand of Cremona confirms that Symeon studied Aristotle and other classical authors, therefore profane learning. But his father appears to have destined this younger son for an ecclesiastical career, that is, as a future Archbishop or Patriarch of Bulgaria. In Constantinople Symeon underwent the novitiate. His subsequent career does not suggest that he had a vocation for the Church; his association with the Patlejna monastery at Preslav, where he probably lived until he was called to the throne, suggests rather a patron of letters and the other arts.

Though Boris's court at Pliska was already on the way to adopting Byzantine manners, from 893 Symeon completed this Byzantinisation on an even greater scale at Preslav, now laid out as a great new walled city. The place had been of some importance since the early ninth century when Omurtag made a military camp there but the fine buildings all date from after 893 -churches, monasteries, hospitals. Recent investigation has shown that this Bulgarian town was, unlike Pliska, on a new site. The palace with its associated church thus raises no problems.  It is not absolutely certain whether we can identify the edifice known as the 'Round Church' with the 'Golden Church' mentioned in Old Bulgarian texts as a splendid foundation of Symeon's. As with the great basilica at Pliska, the plan of the Round Church suggests a Byzantine building of not later than Justinian's reign. Would Symeon have ordered the erection of such an archaic structure, recalling the church of SS Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinopie or San Vitale at Ravenna? It is however a fact that no single early Slav church in the Balkans was built in the contemporary style of the Imperial capital until after the Byzantine reconquest begun in the 970s. Resources evidently did not as a rule stretch to summoning master-craftsmen from the capital. Local craftsmen therefore copied what was still to be seen, more or less in ruins, about them - that is, churches built before about 500. Armenian, Cappadocian, perhaps Georgian and other monks, to be found in many parts of the Balkans, may have contributed to the adoption of 'provincial' styles. While this is an adequate explanation of this widespread tendency to archaism in the Slav Balkans, we might have expected differently of the Constantinople-educated Symeon.

(a) According to a note in an OCS translation of St Athanasius's Sennonr ogainst the   Arianr made by the monk Theodore (Todor Doksov--see p. 300), preserved however   only in a very late Russian copy.

New edifices were so often raised on the ruins of old, more or less mechanically following the original ground-plan that we can not accept the whole design of the Round Church as certainly the work of Symeon - new in 906/7.(a) Whatever may be the truth about the foundations, the decoration of the church was certainly due to him, in particular the marble facings and ceramic tiles. Such tiles were very unusual in contemporary Byzantine   architecture. Together with the carved figures of animals and some other decorative features, they suggest a specifically Bulgar taste connected the art of the steppes and thence with Persia and Central Asia.? The graffiti, mainly on the walls of the narthex, are of the greates importance. Their wording and a few legible dates allow no room for doubt that they were made between 893 and 927. One of these inscriptions is part of a text recording, in all probability, Boris's installation of his son Symeon as ruler in 893. But they are naturally not incontrovertible evidence of the date of the walls themselves, whether made or old or fresh plaster - a point on which the experts are still in disagreement. The atrium at the west end is likely to have been an addition to Symeon's. A large atrium is characteristic of many early Christian churches and for the same reason of churches built many centuries late in newly Christianised lands. It was in the atrium that the unbaptised and those undergoing penance or excommunicate, not admitted to the church proper, and the catechumens, not permitted to be present throughout the whole liturgy,(b) could participate at a distance in the mysteries of the faith. Structures recently brought to light to the south of the church may also prove to be monastic buildings associated with it. The style of the Patlejna monastery (St Panteleimon), about a mile to the east beyond the river, is more typically Byzantine.

John the Exarch gives a lyrical description of the glories of this Bulgarian capital. Bulgaria reached under Symeon a never to be recaptured peak of wealth and power. Symeon was the first but far from the last Slav ruler to imagine himself on the throne of the Emperor - the only true emperor appointed by God - in Constantinople.

(b) The catechumens (or learners) are dismissed by the deacon at the end of th Liturgy of the Word (Synaxis) and before the commencement of the Eucharist proper. (c) A frontier marker of 904, only some 20 kilometres north of Saloniki, has bee found with the inscription

From the time of his accession war with the Empire became the normal state of affairs and warlike operations tended almost uniformly to Bulgaria's advantage. His southern frontier soon reached within striking distance of Saloniki.(c) For the political unification of all the Balkan Slavs under Bulgaria was the obvious first step in his ambition to attain Imperial power. After the extraction of favourable peace term in 897 and again in 913 (following a dangerous attack on the City itself when the Byzantine authorities refused to pay the yearly blackmail for Symeon's quiescence), success seemed within his grasp. The Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos, Regent for Constantine VII, whose legitimacy and therefore claim to Imperial status was debatable even in many Byzantine eyes, acceded to the betrothal of Symeon's daughter to the young Emperor. Symeon might not rule in person but he would at least exped to dominate his son-in-law. But the Empress Zoe soon imposed her veto on the proposal. Though Symeon won another imposing victory in 991 Romanos Lecapenos put new heart into Byzantine resistance, made himself co-emperor and married his own daughter Helen to Constantine (919-20).(a) The negotiations of 913 had brought Symeon the style of Emperor and Autocrat of the Bulgars, recognised at a coronation ceremony performed by the Patriarch of Constantinople.

By 920 his hopes of accession to the Imperial throne were slipping away. Further campaigns, which did not spare Christian churches and monasteries, gave him control of most of the Balkans and brought him to the gates of Constantinople in 922 and again in 924.  The Emperor continued to recognise him as basileus - in Slav, tsar - and therefore as a brother but nothing more.

(a) A side-effect of the running sore of the Bulgarian menace was thus the strengthening of Imperial autocracy in the person of a succession of soldier emperors, from Romane to John Tzimiskes, nipping in the bud the possibility of a greater political role for the  Patriarchate, which Nicholas had momentarily achieved. (b) As many as five are quoted - John, Leontij, Dimitrij, Sergij, Grigorij - but the list  is unsubstantiated in reliable sources. It is quite probable that the first patriarch did not assume office until 926, a mere year before Symeon's death.

The status of the head of the Bulgarian church thus remained equivocal. Symeon needed a Patriarch to match his assumed Imperial status, in due Byzantine form. It is probable that he made a unilateral declaration to this effect in 917 or 919, but Constantinople could not be expected to recognise this elevation, nor indeed that of succeeding patriarchs during the remainder of Symeon's reign.(b) After 924 he ever styled himself Emperor of the Bulgars and Greeks, as the realisation of his ambition receded. Symeon died suddenly on 27 May 927. Recognition of the Bulgarian Patriarchate was only conceded by Constantinople in the general settlement on the accession of Peter when he also received the title of basileus (927), or at the time of his marriage to a granddaughter of Lecapenor Maria, which took place shortly after (not later than 932). He was recognised as a 'son' in Byzantine diplomatic hierarchy.

Thus Byzantine pride was saved. Peter, still a minor, came under the Imperial wing (the reverse of the situation attempted by Symeon) and...

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