Bulgars

Horse-riding tribes speaking an Oghuric Turkic language, the Bulgars emerged on the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas in late antiquity. In the seventh century they formed a short-lived union north of the Black Sea, then split: one group founded a state on the lower Danube that became medieval Bulgaria, another settled on the middle Volga. Modern Bulgarians, and the Volga Tatars, Chuvash and Bashkirs, all count them among their ancestors.

Where the Bulgars came from is unclear. Their homeland has been sought in Kazakhstan and the North Caucasus steppes, and some scholars see them as an offshoot of the Huns or as absorbing Hunnic remnants, a question still argued over. The name is usually derived from a Turkic root meaning "to mix" or "to stir up", read either as "the mixed ones" or as "the disturbers". On their way west they took in Iranian, Uralic and Hunnic groups.

The first clear record dates to 480, when the emperor Zeno used them against the Goths of Thrace. Over the next half-century Byzantine chroniclers describe repeated raids across the Danube, including a victory over a Roman army of 15,000 in 499, and writers such as Jordanes and Procopius often lumped them together with the Huns. From the mid-sixth century the related Kutrigurs and Utigurs dominate the sources, until the Pannonian Avars and the Western Turks overwhelmed them.

As Turkic power waned, the Bulgars reappear around 635 under Kubrat, who had been baptised in Constantinople in 619 and rebelled against the Avars. His union, called Old Great Bulgaria, proved loose. After his death, placed between 650 and 663, the Khazars defeated the Bulgars in 668, and according to Byzantine tradition Kubrat's sons led their followers in different directions. One branch stayed in the Pontic steppe under Khazar rule.

Around 681 Asparukh led his people across the Danube into the lands of today's north-eastern Bulgaria, founding the First Bulgarian Empire. There the Bulgars became a ruling elite over Slavic tribes and Greek- and Romance-speaking locals. Khan Tervel helped Byzantium against the Arab siege of Constantinople in 717–718, Krum doubled the realm, and under Boris I Bulgaria accepted Christianity in 865. Bulgar speech, still in use alongside Slavic in the ninth century, largely gave way to it after the conversion, and the state reached its height under Simeon I before the Byzantine Empire conquered it in 1018. Another group moved to the middle Volga and founded Volga Bulgaria, which adopted Islam in 922, repelled the Mongols in 1223 and fell to them in 1237.

The Bulgars were semi-nomadic herders who soon took up crafts and, in the Balkans, settled villages. Danubian inscriptions name a ruler titled khan or kanasubigi, a second official called the kavhan, and nobles called boilas, the origin of the word boyar. They honoured the sky god Tangra, held horses sacred, and practised both cremation and burial.

Most scholars hold that at least the Bulgar elite spoke an Oghuric Turkic language, a branch whose only living member is Chuvash; whether Chuvash descends from Volga Bulgar or is a sister language is debated. Since the 1990s some Bulgarian scholars have argued for an Iranian origin instead, a view others reject. The Bulgar legacy is also contested in modern national movements: Volga Tatars, Bashkirs and Chuvash are each described as descending from the Volga Bulgars, and in 2010 a Tatar activist lost a case at the European Court of Human Rights over renaming the Tatars as Bulgars. Bulgarians, for their part, count Asparukh's followers among their ancestors, alongside the Slavs.

Our maps label a Bulgar territory in 600, 700, 800 and 900. The outlines are approximate; Volga Bulgaria has a separate page, and modern Bulgaria takes its name from the Bulgars.