the ‘outside’ other 63
Th e Uighur khagan’s reputation grew signifi cantly especially aft er
760s. On the occasion of his marriage to a Chinese princess (788
A.D.), he sent a special charter to the Chinese emperor that read the
following:
Earlier we regarded us brothers (sic!); and now the son-in-low [on your]
daughter’s [side] is your half-son. If the Western Huns [Tibetans] trou-
ble you, master, then your son asks for permission to stand against them
with an army.^184Bulgaria also aims at such fi lial-and-fraternal links with the Byzantine
Empire, but it happens as late as the time when the Bulgars were con-
verted to Christianity in mid-860s. Until then, the formal barrier of
diff erent religions was in place and it prevented such recognition from
the Byzantine side. Th ere is, of course, an exception dated to 705 A.D.
and related to the names of the Bulgar khan Tervel and the Byzantine
emperor Justinian II (685–695; 705–711). However, it was not worth
very much from the self-identifying point of view and the comparison
between the Bulgars and the Byzantines, at least by the ninth cen-
tury. Th is becomes obvious from the available evidence and the Bulgar
stone inscriptions especially. Of course, they oft en put the stress on the
diff erences and the distinctions rather than on similarities as it is typi-
cal of the pre-modern man. Th ere was ground for similarities although
within a limited framework since aft er the early decades of the ninth
century the Bulgars conquered territories until then populated with
subjects of the Byzantine emperor. Th erefore, the old boundaries
became ‘history’, but the imaginary ones, such as own/our land—for-
eign/their land probably survived for a long period. To a great extent
it was due to the fact that the geographic boundaries in this very case
existed in a special ‘synchrony’ with the ethno-cultural de-limit-ations,
the psycho-emotional settings, prejudices and clichés that were deeply
embedded in the early medieval Bulgar society regarding Byzantium
as the total Other.
Summing up, the notions about the Other and the attitude towards
him were focused not only on the morality, but on the symbolic and
hierarchic level as well.
(^184) Bichurin 1950, 327.