Boris I of Bulgaria
Boris I made Bulgaria Christian by choosing between two churches that both wanted it, got from Constantinople an archbishop of its own that Rome would not offer, took in the exiled disciples of Cyril and Methodius and gave them the schools in which the Slavonic alphabet and liturgy were made, and came out of the monastery he had retired to in order to blind the son who had tried to undo it. He became khan in 852 over a state of Bulgar nobles ruling a Slav majority, fought Serbia, Croatia and the Franks without much result, and in 864, after a Byzantine army and fleet appeared during a famine, accepted baptism with the emperor Michael III as godfather and the name Michael. The boyars rose against the foreign god and he executed fifty-two of them with their families. What he wanted was a church that answered to him, and neither Constantinople nor Rome would give it. He wrote to Pope Nicholas I in 866 with a hundred and six questions about trousers, fasting, and whether a Christian could go on fighting, got a famous reply and Latin bishops. When Rome would not name the archbishop he asked for, sent them home in 870 and took a Greek one from the council at Constantinople, with autonomy. In 886 the pupils of Methodius, driven out of Moravia by the Germans, reached Bulgaria, and he set Clement at Ohrid and Naum at Preslav to train a Slavonic clergy. The alphabet they simplified from Cyril's is the one that carries his teacher's name, and the state was Slav in its books from then on. He abdicated in 889 to his elder son Vladimir and went into a monastery, and when Vladimir turned back to the old gods and the boyars he came out in 893, and deposed and blinded him. He called a council that made the younger son Simeon prince, moved the capital from Pliska to Preslav and the liturgy from Greek to Slavonic, and went back to his cell. He died in 907 and was a saint within a generation.
- Lived: 830 CE – 907 CE
- Nationality: Bulgarian
- Roles: khan, monarch, saint
