The Crusade Against “Schismatic” Bulgaria (1238) and Its Antecedents

The association between Bulgaria and the crusading movement is not particularly strong. Although many crusading expeditions crossed its territory, either when it was an independent polity or when it was subjected to Byzantine or Ottoman domination, it was never a recruiting ground for crusaders or the target of a crusade except for the period in which it confronted the Latin Empire of Constantinople, following its establishment during the Fourth Crusade. Although the Bulgarian tsar Kalojan (1197–1207) received the royal crown in exchange for the obedience of the Bulgarian Church to Rome, his aggressive politics and his military success against the Latin Empire forced Henry of Flanders to ask Pope Innocent III for military and financial assistance, presenting the Bulgarian ruler and his successor, Boril (1207–1218), as heretics and schismatics, consorting with the Greeks to the detriment of Christianity. In the last years of Boril’s reign this hostility subsided and the two polities entered a period of good relations until, in 1235, Boril’s successor Ivan Asen II (1218–1241) obtained the autocephaly of the Bulgarian Church from the patriarch of Nicaea, thus ending Bulgarian obedience to Rome. This caused a resurgence of the aggressive anti-Bulgarian rhetoric that had characterized the first years of the confrontation between Bulgaria and the Latins, and this time Pope Gregory IX organized a proper crusade against the “schismatic” Ivan Asen, asking King Béla IV of Hungary to invade Bulgaria and granting him all the crusading privileges. In the end, this expedition was never carried out; nonetheless, it is a useful case-study for a better understanding of the relations between the Holy See and the polities of Eastern Europe, as well as for the general phenomenon of crusading against Christians.