rule and established the Second Bulgarian Empire. Its ruler, no longer harking back to
the khans, took the title tsar, Slavic for “emperor.” He wanted his state to rival the
Byzantines in other ways as well. In the early thirteenth century, for example, when
crusaders had taken Constantinople and Byzantine power was at a low ebb, Tsar
Ivan Asen II (r.1218–1241) expanded his hegemony over neighboring regions.
Making a bid for enhanced prestige, he seized the relics of the popular Byzantine
saint Paraskeve and brought them to his capital city. She became the patron saint of
Bulgaria, where she was known as Saint Petka: “The great Tsar Ivan Asen,” wrote
Petka’s admiring biographer, “heard about the miracles of the saint and strongly
desired to transport the body of the saint to his land.... He wanted neither silver nor
precious stones, but set off with diligence and carried the saintly body to his glorious
[imperial city of] Tarnov.”^10 It was a great triumph. But the Mongol invasions hit
Bulgaria hard, and soon its neighbors were gnawing away at its borders. Meanwhile,
its nobles—the boyars—began to carve out independent regional enclaves for
themselves. Nevertheless, by the early fourteenth century agreements with the
Byzantines and Mongols brought territories both north and south back under
Bulgarian control.
In Poland, as one author put it, “as soon as the pagans [the Mongols] entered this
land, and did much in it that was worthy of lament, and after the celebrated Duke
[Henry II] was killed, this land was dominated by knights, each of whom seized
whatever pleased him from the duke’s inheritances.”^11 The author was abbot of a
monastery in Silesia, which in his day—the mid-thirteenth century—was ruled by a
branch of the Piast ducal dynasty, as were other Polish territories. He looked back
with nostalgia to the days of Henry II, when one Piast duke ruled over all. In fact, a
centralized Poland was gradually reconstructed, not least by Casimir III the Great
(r.1333–1370), but this time it looked eastward to Rus’ and Lithuania rather than
westward to Silesia and Bohemia.
It made sense to veer in Lithuania’s direction: there Duke Gediminas
(r.c.1315/1316–1341), while he himself had not formally converted, favored
Christian missionaries and encouraged merchants from Germany and Rus’ to settle in
his duchy and build churches representing both Roman and Byzantine forms of
worship. Declaring war against the Teutonic Knights, he took Riga and pressed yet
farther eastward and southward. By the time of his death, Lithuania was the major
player in Eastern Europe. Gediminas’s heirs (known as the Jagiellon dynasty)
expanded still further into Rus’.
On the other, western edge of East Central Europe, Bohemia, too, became a
