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Episode 334 - State Builders from the Steppe with Eric Halsey

December 30, 2025·47 min·4 clips

How did a 20-year-old Bulgarian state become the kingmaker for exiled Byzantine emperors seeking to regain their thrones?

The episode pauses the main narrative. Before the regular installments resume, the host sets this up as the second of four interviews, this one on state-building. The guest's Bulgaria is a political body with a strange trick: it endured by becoming hard to recognize. The name stayed. The language, culture, religion, and ethnic composition did not. That is the knot the conversation keeps pulling at. Continuity, in this telling, does not mean sameness. It means adaptation, and sometimes a lot of it. A steppe empire becomes a medieval Christian state without pretending nothing happened along the way. Krum is there in the background, but Boris ends up being the sharper case. He takes power in the mid-ninth century, not long after Krum and during the Amorian period, and his reign sits right on the edge between a pagan steppe empire with a rigid ethnic class structure and something more like a multi-ethnic medieval polity. The interesting part is how unheroic Boris can look. Later memory treats him with deep reverence. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church remembers him as a saint, and Sofia's public landscape keeps him present. But in the story told here, he is also a ruler who kept losing wars. A lot. Those defeats rarely cost him much territory, though, and sometimes they even opened the door to alliances with the people who had beaten him. That is where the argument has its bite. Boris did not need battlefield glory to remake Bulgaria. Diplomacy kept defeat from becoming disaster, and conversion to Christianity changed what the state could be. The episode stays analytical, not celebratory. Its dry little punchline is that a state can survive by changing so much that the name becomes the clearest line between where it started and where it ended.

As heard by us

An interview about how Bulgaria changed to survive as a state.

Eric Hulsey frames Bulgaria as a case study in survival through adaptation, and the episode makes that argument with clarity. Krum and Boris stand at the center of a story about change winning out over stasis: language, religion, culture, and the state all move over time, and…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Bulgaria to become the argument, not just the setting.

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