I am from a bit to the north, Romania more specifically, and I have a genuine question, the one from the title, why are the first and second Bulgarian Empires so underrated in common knowledge?
I was just watching a Jimmy Carr show, and a joke came up “there is a Make Bulgaria Great Again movement in Bulgaria, my question is, when was Bulgaria ever great?”, I fully understood the joke with the current situation, but I couldn’t laugh at the joke because the fact I knew about the first and second Bulgarian Empires made me break immersion. But also got me thinking, “yes, there are a lot of people who don’t even know the Bulgarian Empires existed let alone their influence”.
Jimmy Carr is also a very educated person yet he didn’t know about the Bulgarian Empires and this seems a common theme in Western Europe.
Naturally, I googled this before posting, and many answers were like “oh, Bulgarian nationalism!”, well, I’m not Bulgarian and even if I were “Bulgarian nationalism” is not an argument. It’s like saying, oh, you wonder why people don’t know about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? Polish nationalism!
But here on CK3 forums a lot of people know about the Bulgarian Empires (sometimes the 2nd was called by contemporaries the Bulgarian-Vlach Empire
) to which, well, the Bulgarian Empire doesn’t even have a de jure territory even though it could easily have all the lands encompassing Bulgaria, the Dniester river and the Tisza river as de jure lands. And has no personal flavor whatsoever while other empires do.
I am not saying the Bulgarian Empire is on the same level as the Mongol or British Empires but it was certainly not ignorable content in mainstream histography. It just eludes me why it’s so not know by generally educated people about Europe.
I remember “back in the days”, meaning the 90s the Byzantine Empire was seen as “just 1000 years of decline not worth talking about”, while I loved that period. In times, options have changed, sure, it’s not as popular as Western Rome and it will never be because it gave birth to the western civilisation, but people talking about the Byzantine Empire aren’t talking about “that 1000 years decline empire” anymore.
Maybe the Bulgarian Empire will go though a similar stage, but even in CK3 I see it rarely talked about despite having little to no flavor, not even de jure land (that they passed the 100 years mark for!).
I was just watching a Jimmy Carr show, and a joke came up “there is a Make Bulgaria Great Again movement in Bulgaria, my question is, when was Bulgaria ever great?”, I fully understood the joke with the current situation, but I couldn’t laugh at the joke because the fact I knew about the first and second Bulgarian Empires made me break immersion. But also got me thinking, “yes, there are a lot of people who don’t even know the Bulgarian Empires existed let alone their influence”.
Jimmy Carr is also a very educated person yet he didn’t know about the Bulgarian Empires and this seems a common theme in Western Europe.
Naturally, I googled this before posting, and many answers were like “oh, Bulgarian nationalism!”, well, I’m not Bulgarian and even if I were “Bulgarian nationalism” is not an argument. It’s like saying, oh, you wonder why people don’t know about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? Polish nationalism!
But here on CK3 forums a lot of people know about the Bulgarian Empires (sometimes the 2nd was called by contemporaries the Bulgarian-Vlach Empire
) to which, well, the Bulgarian Empire doesn’t even have a de jure territory even though it could easily have all the lands encompassing Bulgaria, the Dniester river and the Tisza river as de jure lands. And has no personal flavor whatsoever while other empires do.I am not saying the Bulgarian Empire is on the same level as the Mongol or British Empires but it was certainly not ignorable content in mainstream histography. It just eludes me why it’s so not know by generally educated people about Europe.
I remember “back in the days”, meaning the 90s the Byzantine Empire was seen as “just 1000 years of decline not worth talking about”, while I loved that period. In times, options have changed, sure, it’s not as popular as Western Rome and it will never be because it gave birth to the western civilisation, but people talking about the Byzantine Empire aren’t talking about “that 1000 years decline empire” anymore.
Maybe the Bulgarian Empire will go though a similar stage, but even in CK3 I see it rarely talked about despite having little to no flavor, not even de jure land (that they passed the 100 years mark for!).
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