Krum

Krum ruled Bulgaria for around eleven years, destroyed a Byzantine army with its emperor in it, and had the emperor's skull made into a drinking cup. He came to the throne about 803, probably from the Bulgar aristocracy of Pannonia, at a moment when the Avar khaganate had just been broken by Charlemagne; Krum took its eastern lands, which roughly doubled his territory and put Bulgaria on a frontier with the Frankish empire. He is the first Bulgarian ruler known to have issued written law, and the fragments preserved in a Byzantine lexicon are severe and even-handed: false accusers punished as the accused would have been, thieves' legs broken, beggars supported and the vineyards uprooted. In 811 the emperor Nikephoros I invaded, took and burned the capital Pliska, and was caught in a mountain pass on the way home; the Byzantine army was annihilated and Nikephoros killed, the first emperor to die in battle against a foreign enemy since 378. Krum had the skull lined with silver and drank from it at feasts, which is recorded by the Byzantines themselves. He then took Adrianople and deported its population, and was preparing to besiege Constantinople when he died suddenly in April 814. His son Omurtag made a thirty-year peace. The Bulgars at this point were still pagan and Turkic-speaking; the conversion to Christianity and the adoption of Slavic came two generations later under Boris I and Simeon. Krum's law code is the earliest evidence of a Bulgarian state acting through written rules rather than custom. The skull cup was a steppe practice with a specific meaning - taking the strength of a defeated enemy - rather than simple barbarity, and Byzantine writers knew that and reported it as horror anyway.

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