Family Life

Family life in medieval Bulgaria took shape across changing territories along the Danube and through the Balkans. The First Bulgarian Empire lasted from 681 to 1018; after Byzantine rule between 1018 and 1185, the Second Bulgarian Empire lasted until the Ottoman conquests of the late fourteenth century. Household relationships were affected by Christian law, rural community obligations, differences in landholding, and the demands of work. The evidence is especially clear about legal rules and ruling dynasties, and less detailed about everyday relationships within ordinary families.

On this page5 sections

Households and community in the First Empire

Most people lived in farming settlements, where food production and animal care required work within and between households. Excavated houses combined cooking installations and storage with space for small-scale production. Landholders and local authorities also placed claims on the produce and labour of those living in a village.

Most peasants were personally free and lived under the central administration. From the tenth century, however, the number of peasants personally dependent on nobles or church estates increased. A family’s circumstances could therefore be shaped not only by kinship and local community ties but also by the authority that controlled the land on which its members lived or worked.

Marriage and legal rules

Christianity became the state religion in 864, and a written legal tradition developed in the period that followed. The Zakon Sudnyi Liudem, or “Court Law for the People,” was written in Old Church Slavonic in the late ninth or early tenth century and drew heavily on Byzantine law. Its place of origin is disputed: it is often associated with Bulgaria, but scholars have also proposed Great Moravia or Lower Pannonia. Its surviving text is therefore useful evidence for legal ideas in the Slavic Christian world, but its connection to Bulgarian practice is not certain.

Boris’s questions to Pope Nicholas I in 866 show marriage becoming a practical issue of Christian conversion. The pope explained betrothal, a ring, a documented property gift and a church blessing as elements of Roman practice. He also said that people unable to afford elaborate ceremonies could still marry: consent was essential. This was guidance sent to Bulgaria in response to the ruler’s questions.

Christian teaching also changed the definition of kinship. Nicholas explained that baptism established a spiritual relationship between a sponsor and the baptised person and could restrict marriage between connected families. He permitted remarriage after a spouse’s death. These answers show religious authority entering decisions about whom a person could marry and how a household could be formed again after bereavement.

Land, inheritance, and dependence

Second Empire charters define household rights within particular estates. Dependent cultivators could hold fields across generations, but a grant might prohibit selling land outside the estate’s community or reserve judicial dues to a monastery. The named groups paritsi and otrotsi appear within these relationships of dependency, whose practical terms were set out by the landholder’s privileges.

Legal texts also recognized forms of unfree status. The Zakon Sudnyi Liudem includes a provision making the owner of an enslaved person responsible for damage caused by that person’s theft, and another concerning the release of a prisoner of war through ransom. These rules distinguish the legal position of enslaved people and captives from that of dependent peasants.

Work in rural and urban settings

Rural households cultivated cereals, tended animals and processed food for storage and use. Fields, herds and domestic tools connected different jobs: an ox needed feeding before it could work, and grain needed gathering and processing before it supplied meals. Lords’ dues and demands for service drew on the same household resources.

Towns brought together different kinds of work. Crafts included weaving, shoemaking, leatherworking, carpentry, and metalworking, while urban centres also handled the processing of agricultural produce. In the Second Empire, towns had separate neighbourhoods associated with groups such as nobles, craftspeople, and merchants.

Dynastic marriage and widowhood

For ruling families, marriage could serve diplomacy as well as create kinship. In 927, the marriage of First Empire ruler Peter I to Irene Lekapene reinforced a peace agreement with Byzantium. In the Second Empire, Ivan Asen II’s marriage to Anna Maria, daughter of the Hungarian king, was associated with the return of Belgrade and Braničevo as her dowry.

In the fourteenth century, Ivan Alexander separated from his first wife, Theodora of Wallachia, and married Sarah-Theodora. The first marriage’s son Ivan Sratsimir ruled at Vidin, while Ivan Shishman, a son of the second marriage, succeeded at Tarnovo. Family relationships interacted with territorial appointments and local interests in the later division of royal power.

Evidence about widowhood is likewise clearest among the elite. After the death of her husband, Emperor Constantine Tikh, Maria Palaiologina married Ivaylo, who became emperor during a period of revolt and civil conflict. Under the Second Empire, a minor ruler could also be governed by a regency that included his mother, the patriarch, and senior members of the dynasty.