Ivan Asen II
Ivan Asen II took the Bulgarian throne back from a usurper with a Russian army in 1218, and in twenty-three years made the second empire the largest state in the Balkans, beat the Greek claimant to Constantinople at Klokotnitsa and let him go, got a patriarch by treaty and lost the papacy by it, and left an inscription in Tarnovo that lists his conquests from Adrianople to Durazzo and says the Latins held only the cities of the coast by his leave. He was born about 1190, the son of Asen, who with his brother Peter had led the rising of 1185 that ended two centuries of Byzantine rule; the brothers were both murdered by boyars, and the cousin who succeeded them was killed in 1207. The boy was taken to the Russian principalities for safety while a usurper reigned. He came back in 1218 with Russian and Cuman mercenaries, besieged Tarnovo for seven years by one account, took it, and had the usurper blinded. He married a Hungarian princess for the northwest and a Greek one for the south, and when Theodore of Epirus, who had taken Thessalonica and crowned himself emperor, attacked him in March 1230, he met him at Klokotnitsa with the treaty Theodore had broken nailed to a spear, destroyed his army, took him prisoner and released the ordinary soldiers to go home, which the chroniclers thought remarkable. The empire of Thessalonica became his client and Macedonia, Albania and Thrace his provinces. He then broke with Rome, to which his predecessors had submitted for a crown, and in 1235 at Lampsakos the Greek emperor of Nicaea and the patriarch recognised a Bulgarian patriarch at Tarnovo in return for an alliance and a marriage. The pope preached a crusade against him and Hungary did not go. He coined money with his own face, built Tarnovo's churches, and gave the merchants of Ragusa free passage. The Mongols came through in 1241, the year he died, and his children were minors. The empire paid them tribute and never again held what the inscription on the column in the Forty Martyrs church says he held.
- Lived: 1190 CE – 1241 CE
- Nationality: Bulgarian
- Roles: tsar, monarch
