Bulgarian medieval history specialises in the glorious defeat, the heroic last stand, the empire going down with the flag up. So it is worth pausing on a day when Bulgaria simply won. On this date in 1332, near a village called Rusokastro in the hills behind what is now Burgas, the young Tsar Ivan Alexander beat a Byzantine emperor in the field and walked away with everything he wanted.
What happened on this day
The quarrel was the usual medieval Balkan tangle. Bulgaria and Byzantium had signed a secret pact against Serbia in 1328, but when Bulgaria was busy fighting the Serbs, the Byzantine emperor Andronikos III took the chance to march into Thrace and grab a string of Bulgarian towns. Ivan Alexander, barely a year into his reign, went to get them back.
He also cheated cleverly, which is half the charm of the story. His army of around 8,000 already outnumbered the Byzantine 3,000, but he opened negotiations anyway and then spun them out, stalling for time, because he was waiting on reinforcements. Three thousand cavalry slipped into his camp overnight, and the next morning, the talking suddenly over, he attacked. The battle started at six and was done in about three hours: the Bulgarian horse worked around the Byzantine line and smashed into its rear, and the emperor's men broke and fled into the fortress of Rusokastro.
Then Ivan Alexander did the genuinely shrewd thing. He surrounded the fortress with the beaten emperor inside it, and instead of storming the walls, he reopened negotiations from a position of total strength. The result was a peace on his terms: the lost Thracian towns came back to Bulgaria, and the two rulers sealed the new friendship by betrothing Ivan Alexander's son to Andronikos's daughter. A win, and then a wedding.
The date, incidentally, is why you will sometimes see this given as 18 July. Bulgaria was on the old Julian calendar in 1332, and converting that to our modern one nudges the battle forward about a week, to the 26th.
Why this matters for British expats
Here is the part that should make any Brit sit up. Ivan Alexander's reign was the golden autumn of medieval Bulgaria, a burst of art and manuscripts before the whole thing fell to the Ottomans in 1393. Its single most dazzling survival is his personal Gospel book, the Tetraevangelia of Ivan Alexander, made in 1355 and filled with 366 miniatures. And it is not in Sofia. It is in London, in the British Library, catalogued as Add MS 39627, where it has been called the finest work of art Bulgaria produced before the conquest.
So the crown jewel of the era this battle belongs to is a bus ride away for anyone visiting the UK, and fully digitised for anyone who is not. That is a rare thing: a piece of Bulgarian national heritage you can actually go and stand in front of on a wet afternoon in Euston.
Being honest about geography, Rusokastro is a long way from us, down near the Burgas coast rather than up here in the northeast, so there is no local connection to claim beyond the shared empire that Shumen also belonged to. The fortress ruins are still there, though, and make an easy detour if you are already headed to the sea.
Sources and further reading
The account of the battle draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on the battle of Rusokastro and the standard English-language histories of Ivan Alexander's reign, with the detail on his Gospel book resting on the British Library's own catalogue record for the manuscript.