The Baptism of Boris and the Conversion of Bulgaria

In 864, a Frankish annalist records, King Louis the German marched to meet the khagan of the Bulgars, who had promised that he wished to become a Christian (Annals of St Bertin, year 864, p. 72). When the baptism came, it came from Constantinople. A Byzantine court history compiled in the next century tells that the sister of Boris had become a Christian as a captive in the imperial city and pressed the faith on him after her return, that a famine made him call on the God of the Christians, and that he was baptized by a bishop sent from the capital and named Michael after the emperor (Theophanes Continuatus 4.13–14, pp. 162–163). It adds, as something people tell, that a monk and painter named Methodius painted the Last Judgment for him, and that the sight led him to be baptized at dead of night (Theophanes Continuatus 4.15, pp. 163–164).

Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, wrote to the convert as to a spiritual son. His letter recites the creed, describes the seven general councils one by one, likens what Michael had done to the deeds of Constantine the Great, and continues with counsels for a Christian ruler (Photius, Letter to Michael of Bulgaria 1, 4–25).

The annalist reports that the Bulgar nobles, angered by the baptism, raised the people to kill their king. He went out against them with forty-eight men, seven clerics with burning candles appeared before him, and the rebels fell to the ground in terror; he put fifty-two of the nobles to death and let the rest go unharmed (Annals of St Bertin, year 866, pp. 85–86). Boris’s own account survives in the reply of Pope Nicholas I, who repeats it to him: the leaders were put to the sword with all their children. To have killed children who had no part in the plot, the pope answers, was a sin, and the captured parents should have been spared as well; Boris is to do penance (Nicholas I, Responses to the Bulgars 17).

Boris then looked west. He asked Louis the German for a bishop and priests, and sent his son and many nobles to Rome with gifts, questions about the faith and a request for clergy (Annals of St Bertin, year 866, pp. 85–86). Nicholas answered in 106 chapters. Several deal with what Greeks had told the Bulgars: that they must not bathe on Wednesdays and Fridays, must stand in church with their hands held to the breast, must not take communion without a belt. Boris had told him that Greeks, Armenians and others were teaching different things in his country (Nicholas I, Responses to the Bulgars 6, 54–55, 106). Those who refused Christianity and kept to their idols, the pope wrote, were to be reasoned with and shunned, but not forced to believe (Nicholas I, Responses to the Bulgars 41). Asked whether the Bulgars might have a patriarch, he offered a bishop consecrated at Rome and in time an archbishop (Nicholas I, Responses to the Bulgars 72–73).

Photius protested to the eastern patriarchs that men from the West had fallen on a people Christian for less than two years (Photius, Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs 3–4), and Bulgaria became part of his quarrel with Rome. By 878 it was Rome that complained. In April of that year Pope John VIII wrote to Boris that he grieved to see him deceived, urged him not to follow the Greeks and asked him to return to Saint Peter (John VIII, Letters, 66 (16 April 878), pp. 58–59). He told the Greek bishops and clergy in Bulgaria, whom he called invaders, to leave within thirty days or lose their office (John VIII, Letters, 71 (April 878), p. 66).