Vol. 3 No. 1 (2023)
Ethnogenesis at the Balkans II

Turkic, Roman, or Iranian? The Institution of the Six Great Boilades in Early Medieval Bulgaria

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  • Tsvetelin Stepanov
Tsvetelin Stepanov
St Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia, Bulgaria
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47074/HSCE.2023-1.02

Published 31-07-2023

Keywords

  • Bulgars, boilades, bolyars/boyars, Sassanid Iran, Byzantium, Constantine Porphyro-gennetos, kavkhan, ichirguboil

How to Cite

Stepanov, Tsvetelin. 2023. “Turkic, Roman, or Iranian? The Institution of the Six Great Boilades in Early Medieval Bulgaria”. Historical Studies on Central Europe 3 (1):26-41. https://doi.org/10.47074/HSCE.2023-1.02.

Copyright (c) 2023 Tsvetelin Stepanov

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The original, shorter, version of this paper [see below n. 26] on the so-called six great boilades known from the Bulgar(ian) early medieval past (after the 890s) as ‘bolyars’ (cf. also the late Rus’ rendering as ‘boyars’) was published in 2002 but only in Bulgarian. That is why an English version with some addenda is proposed in the hope that colleagues might comment on it, elucidating important details concerning this institution. Thus, the paper intends to identify analogies with ancient and early medieval Iranian and (East) Roman/Byzantine statehood. However, similarities may prove to be purely formal rather than of a genetic (or causal) nature and, therefore, should not lead to final conclusions, especially in the absence of further unambiguous information coming from primary sources.

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