Simeon I of Bulgaria
Simeon I was educated at Constantinople to be a monk, was made prince of Bulgaria by his father's council in 893 when his brother was blinded, fought Byzantium for thirty years to be its emperor, took the title of tsar and a patriarch of his own, and presided over the golden age in which the Slavonic books were written; he died a month before an attack on the capital he had besieged four times, and his son made peace. He was born about 864, the year of his father Boris's baptism, and spent ten years at the Magnaura school in the capital, where the Byzantines called him half-Greek for his Demosthenes. The first war came in 894 over a trading concession moved from Constantinople to Thessalonica. He beat the Byzantines, the Byzantines brought the Magyars down on him, he brought the Pechenegs down on the Magyars, who moved to Pannonia for good, and at Bulgarophygon in 896 the imperial army was destroyed and the empire paid tribute. The second came when the regents of the child Constantine VII stopped paying in 913. He camped outside the walls, was received by the patriarch Nicholas and given a crown of some kind in a ceremony both sides described differently, and got a promise that his daughter would marry the boy emperor, which the boy's mother then broke. After that it was war until he died. At Anchialus on the Black Sea in August 917 he destroyed the largest army Byzantium had raised in a century. He took Adrianople twice, marched to the walls of Constantinople in 921, 922 and 923, sacked Serbia, burned the Thracian countryside, and had himself proclaimed emperor of the Bulgarians and Romans, which the admiral Romanos Lekapenos, who had taken the throne in the meantime, met him outside the walls in 924 to argue about. He had no fleet and the walls held. His court at Preslav, with its golden church, was where Clement's and Naum's pupils produced the first literature in a Slavonic language, and he had chronicles and sermons translated for himself. He died suddenly in May 927 while preparing another siege, and Peter, his son, married Lekapenos's granddaughter and kept the title in a treaty that autumn.
- Lived: 864 CE – 927 CE
- Nationality: Bulgarian
- Roles: tsar, monarch
