Law

Law in medieval Bulgaria took shape across two states whose territories changed over time across the Danube region and the Balkans. The First Bulgarian Empire is conventionally dated from 681 to 1018. After a Byzantine interval from 1018 to 1185, the Second Bulgarian Empire lasted from 1185 until the Ottoman conquests of the late fourteenth century. The evidence for law differs between these periods: early rulers issued rules and Christian legal texts were adapted from Byzantine models, while a small group of later royal charters records particular grants and privileges.

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Rulers, custom and written law

In the pagan period, the ruler combined political and judicial authority and also served as high priest. The ruler’s power operated alongside that of leading noble families and, on important matters, a council of nobles and armed people. This was not a uniform legal administration across the empire’s changing lands. As the state expanded, efforts to centralise authority also brought different communities under the ruler’s officials and laws.

The tenth-century Byzantine Suda, an encyclopaedic compilation, attributes laws against theft, false accusation and other misconduct to the early ninth-century ruler Krum. It relates them through a story about the fall of the Avars. This is a later narrative about a lawgiving ruler, rather than fragments of an extant Bulgarian code. Its moralising account helps explain Krum’s later reputation, while Christian compilations and charters preserve different kinds of legal text.

Christian law and the Law for Judging the People

Christianity became the state religion in 864, bringing new religious institutions and legal traditions into the Bulgarian polity. Byzantine law provided important models. After his conversion, Boris I sought legal guidance from Pope Nicholas I; in the following decades, Christian legal writing in Slavonic developed within a wider world of Byzantine and Slavic texts.

The Law for Judging the People , also known in manuscripts as the Court Law for the People, is a short legal compilation usually dated to the late ninth or early tenth century. It drew substantially on the Byzantine Ekloge , a collection of imperial laws, and on church-law material. Its provisions combine criminal, civil, religious and military matters. The text is associated with the period of Bulgarian Christianisation, but its place of origin remains disputed: Bulgaria and Great Moravia have both been proposed, as has Lower Pannonia. The surviving manuscript tradition is preserved in Rus copies.

The Law for Judging the People directs judges to examine witnesses and assess their eligibility and testimony. Requiring testimony from people able to speak to a case gave the judge a procedure for testing an accusation. The compilation also combined secular penalties with religious penance, assigning courts and church authorities connected roles in enforcing Christian conduct.

Property, obligations and social status

The rules preserved in the Law for Judging the People address theft, arson and other offences against property. They also set out specific obligations: the owner of an enslaved thief could be held responsible for damage caused by that person, and someone borrowing a horse was accountable for returning it in good condition. A provision concerning prisoners of war allowed a captive to gain freedom through ransom. Another chapter dealt with the division of military booty.

The compilation regulates relations between spouses and grounds for divorce. Its sanctions include fasting, exile, corporal punishment, enslavement and death. Its opening provision targets pagan worship: a village permitting the rites could be assigned to the church, while participating landholders could be sold with their property and the proceeds given to the poor. The demand joins coercive punishment to the establishment of Christian religious authority.

Social standing affected the institutions through which people dealt with authority. Malamir’s inscriptions distinguish high nobles, called boilas, from bagains, another elite rank, and a wider population. Later estate charters place dependent cultivators within a landholder’s jurisdiction and reserve particular dues or services to a monastery. Such documents define whose court and collectors could act within a specific estate.

Royal charters and particular rights in the Second Empire

For the Second Bulgarian Empire, royal charters are among the few surviving secular documents. Issued by five tsars between roughly 1230 and 1380, they were written in Middle Bulgarian using the Early Cyrillic alphabet. A charter was a formal act through which a ruler granted property or confirmed particular rights and privileges. It was therefore different from a general law code: it recorded a specific grant to a person, institution or group.

After 1230, Tsar Ivan Asen II issued a charter to the Vatopedi Monastery and another permitting merchants from Ragusa, or Dubrovnik, to trade throughout Bulgarian lands. In 1342, Tsar Ivan Alexander’s chancellery confirmed the Zograf Monastery’s rights over the village of Hantak. A charter issued by Tsar Ivan Sratsimir between 1369 and 1380 allowed merchants from Braşov in Transylvania to trade freely within his realm, centred on Vidin. Such acts show how rulers could define privileges for religious institutions and foreign merchants. The charters also preserve terms for taxes, agreements and penalties, offering glimpses of legal language and practice.