Here is a sentence you do not expect to write about medieval Bulgaria: in the summer of 1306, a Catalan army was on the loose in the Balkans, and the Bulgarian tsar was trying to hire it. It sounds like a mix-up. It is not, and it is a useful reminder that the medieval Balkans were a far stranger, more cosmopolitan place than the tidy national histories let on.
What happened on this day
The calendar hands us a puzzle today. The record points to a Battle of Mont Hemus in 1306, but the date is slippery: the surviving structured entry places it on 6 July, and there is no English or Bulgarian encyclopaedia article about the battle at all, only a Catalan one. So rather than claim an exact anniversary we do not really have, treat today as a window onto one of the wildest summers the medieval Balkans ever saw.
The Catalan Company was a mercenary army of almogavars, hard professional soldiers left unemployed when a war in Sicily ended. In 1303 the Byzantine emperor Andronikos II hired them to fight the Turks in Anatolia, which they did with brutal success. Then, in April 1305, the Byzantines decided their expensive guests had become too dangerous and had the Company's leader, Roger de Flor, murdered at a banquet in Adrianople, using another band of mercenaries, the Alans, to do the killing.
What followed is remembered as the Catalan Revenge. The Company turned on the empire that had betrayed it and spent two years ravaging Thrace. Along the way, near the mountains the ancients called the Haemus, they caught up with the Alans who had killed their leader and destroyed them: of some nine thousand men, by one account only a few hundred walked away, and the Alan commander was killed. That clash is the Battle of Mont Hemus the calendar is nodding at.
So where is Bulgaria in all this? Right in the middle, playing a careful game. According to the record, in that same year of 1306 the Bulgarian tsar Todor Svetoslav took those rebellious Alan mercenaries into his own service and settled them in Bulgaria, and made overtures, without success, to the Catalans as well. He was no bystander to the chaos on his southern border; he was trying to turn it to his advantage. He had already spent the early 1300s prising the Black Sea fortress towns of Mesembria, Anchialos, Sozopolis and Agathopolis out of Byzantine hands, and would make peace with the empire in 1307, sealed, as these things usually were, with a marriage.
Why this matters for British expats
This is where a dry medieval date suddenly touches your holiday photos. The four fortress towns Todor Svetoslav took from Byzantium have modern names you will recognise: Mesembria is Nesebar, Anchialos is Pomorie, Sozopolis is Sozopol and Agathopolis is Ahtopol, the string of old towns along the southern Black Sea coast that British visitors wander around every summer. When you walk the walls at Nesebar or the cobbled lanes of Sozopol, you are moving through the exact chess pieces a Bulgarian tsar was pushing about seven hundred years ago.
And the fortress whose ruins sit on the plateau above Shumen belongs to the same medieval world: a Bulgaria that was not a quiet backwater but a state elbowing for position between Byzantines, Tatars and freelance armies of Catalans and Alans. That is the real correction a Catalan mercenary war offers a British expat. The country you have moved to has always been a crossroads, fought over precisely because everyone had to pass through it. Today's non-anniversary is a good day to remember that the tidy version of history usually leaves the strangest bits out.
Sources and further reading
There is no English or Bulgarian Wikipedia article on the Battle of Mont Hemus itself, only a Catalan one, which rather tells you whose history bothered to remember it. For the wider story this piece leans on the English Wikipedia entries for the Catalan Company and for the Bulgarian tsar Theodore Svetoslav, which set out the murder of Roger de Flor, the two-year rampage and Svetoslav's dealings with the mercenaries.