the ‘inside’ other 121
period Byzantium for many reasons, including religious, lacked any
missionary enthusiasm.^140
It is highly dubious whether Kuber was eventually baptized while
still in “Old Bulgaria”, i.e. before getting the trust of the Avar khagan
who gave him the right to rule as his own people a part of the khagan-
ate’s inhabitants, mainly former Byzantine captives (taken during the
Avar campaigns in the Balkans in the first decades of the seventh cen-
tury), i.e. Christians and their kin. Perhaps Kuber has won the sympa-
thies of his subordinates with his knowledge (if not with his personal
belief?) of the Christian faith so that he was able to persuade them to
split with the Avars, to fight several times with them and, finally, to
settle down within the borders of the Byzantine Empire, in the lands of
nowadays Macedonia. The fact that he was allowed to rule those lands
can support the idea that Kuber was baptized before leaving Qubrat’s
Bulgaria.^141
More serious opposition in this respect existed among the Bulgars
against the Christians of Bulgar noble origin, and especially after 813
A.D. ‘Kanasybigi’ Omurtag (814–831) and his youngest son Malamir
(831–836) became most notorious with their attitude to Enravota, the
eldest son of Omurtag and heir to the throne. Omurtag denied him the
right to inherit the throne as Enravota refused to renounce his Chris-
tian faith, and after getting the throne in 831 A.D. his brother Malamir
had him beheaded because of his stubbornness.^142 Probably Enravota
was the first martyr of the Christian faith among the noble elite of the
Danube Bulgaria.^143 The intrusion of Christianity at the court threat-
ened to alter the Bulgar ‘nature’, as a consequence of the penetration
of the Christian (= Byzantine) otherness; that is why there were perse-
cutions and martyrs though most of them were among former subjects
(^140) More details see in, Vachkova 2004, 147 and n. 160.
(^141) Atanasov 1999, 33–34, who in fact follows Venedikov 1995, 90. Also see,
Stepanov 2003, 92–93. 142
Mitropolit Simeon 1931, 256–259. For the persecutions of Christians in Bul-
garia, especially in the reigning years of Omurtag and Malamir, details see in, Zlatarski
1970, 376–426.
(^143) See Follieri and Dujchev 1963, 104. Browning 1988, 33, stresses on the fact that
among the martyrs, killed after the Krum’s death, there were two men with Slavonic
names, namely Khotomiros and Loubomiros, and two more men one of them bear-
ing most probably a Bulgar name and the other—a name with possible Bulgar origin,
namely Koupergos and Aspher. But whether or not they were Bulgar aristocrats, it is
still an open question. Nikolova 1995, 191, quite reasonably asks, why this evidence of
archbishop Theophylaktos “does not find support in other sources”.