Bulgaria is a country with an ancient history dating back to prehistoric times, the Thracian, Greek and Roman worlds of antiquity, and the powerful medieval Old Great Bulgaria founded in 632 CE and Bulgarian Empire founded in 681 CE. Thracians inhabited what is now Bulgaria in antiquity. Geographically and climatically, Bulgaria is noted for its diversity, with the landscape ranging from the Alpine snow-capped peaks in Rila, Pirin and the Balkan Mountains to the mild and sunny weather of the Black Sea coast, from the typically continental Danubian Plain (ancient Moesia) in the north to the strong Mediterranean influence in the valleys of Macedonia and the lowlands in the southernmost parts of Thrace. In 341 BC it was destroyed by the Macedonian state. In 188 BC the Romans invaded Thrace and the wars with them continued to 45 CE, when Thrace became a Roman province.
The Bulgar language spoken by the ancestors of modern-day Bulgarians is believed by some to have been a Pamirian language before being replaced by Turkic. After the Bulgars migrated to the Balkans in 7th century, Bulgars were assimilated by the local Slavs and adopted their South Slavic language, from which modern Bulgarian developed. Bolgar (also Bolgar), also Proto-Bulgarian is the language of the Bulgars, now extinct, whose classification is unclear. The language became extinct in Danubian Bulgaria in the 9th century as the Bulgar nobility became gradually Slavicized through intermarriages with the Slavic majority there. The language remained, however, in use by the population of Volga Bulgaria until the 13th or the 14th century when it adopted a number of words and constructions from the Kypchak language.
United under Kubrat (Kurt, known to Arabs as Shahriar) of the Dulo clan, the Bulgars joined forces with the Onogur Avars and broke loose from the Turkic khanate in the 630s. They formed an independent state, often called by Byzantine sources ‘the Old Great Bulgaria’, between the lower course of the Danube to the west, the Black and the Azov Seas to the south, the Kuban River to the east, and the Donets River to the north. The capital of the state was Phanagoria, on the Taman peninsula (Tmutarakan). Another Bulgar tribe, led by Kubrat’s second son Kotrag, migrated to the confluence of the Volga and Kama Rivers in what is now the Russian Federation (Volga Bulgaria). The present-day republics of Tatarstan and Chuvashia are considered to be the descendants of Volga Bulgaria in terms of territory and people, though only Chuvash is thought to be similar to old Bolgar language. A third Bulgar tribe, led by the youngest son Asparukh, moved westward, occupying today’s southern Bessarabia. After a successful war with Byzantium in AD 680, Asparukh's khanate conquered Moesia and Dobrudja and was recognised as an independent state under the subsequent treaty signed with the Byzantine Empire in AD 681. The same yeare is usually regarded as the yeare of the establishment of present-day Bulgaria. A fourth group of Bulgars, under Kouber, settled in western Macedonia and eastern Albania where it formed a khanate, which joined Slavs to attack the Byzantine Empire. The fifth and smallest group, Alcek ( 'Altsek' and 'Altzek'), led by Emnetzur, settled in Italy, northeast of Naples.
Under Boris I the Bulgarians became Christians, and the Ecumenical Patriarch agreed to allow an autonomous Bulgarian Archbishop at Pliska. Missionaries from Constantinople, Cyril and Methodius, devised the Glagolitic alphabet, which was adopted in the Bulgarian Empire around 886. The alphabet and the Old Bulgarian language gave rise to a rich literary and cultural activity centered around the Preslav and Ohrid Literary Schools, established by order of Boris I in 886. In the beginning of 10th century AD, a new alphabet - the Cyrillic alphabet.
Scythian Gold entered China from Central Asia between the 8th and the 7th centuries, and Chinese jade carvers began to make imitations of the designs of the steppes. A chronicle describes Slavic groups departing to Greece around the Gelonus area in 907. The Geloni were anciently Greeks. Its location at the northern edge of Ukraine's steppe would have allowed strategic control of the north-south trade route.
By the late 9th and the beginning of the 10th century, Bulgaria extended to Epirus and Thessaly in the south, Bosnia in the west and controlled the whole of present-day Romania and eastern Hungary to the north. A Serbian state came into existence as a dependency of the Bulgarian Empire. The Byzantines ruled Bulgaria from 1018 to 1185, subordinating the independent Bulgarian Orthodox Church to the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople but otherwise interfering little in Bulgarian local affairs. There were rebellions against Byzantine rule in 1040-41, the 1070s and the 1080s, but these failed. By the late 12th century the Byzantines were in decline after a series of wars with the Hungarians and the Serbs. In 1185 Peter and Asen, leading nobles of supposed and contested Bulgarian, Cuman, Vlach or mixed origin, led a revolt against Byzantine rule and Peter declared himself Tsar Peter II (Theodore Peter).
Bulgaria occupied the territory between the Black Sea, the Danube and Stara Planina, including a part of eastern Macedonia and the valley of the Morava. It also exercised control over Wallachia and Moldova. Tsar Kaloyan (1197-1207) entered a union with the Papacy, thereby securing the recognition of his title of "Rex" although he desired to be recognized as "Emperor" or "Tsar". He waged wars on the Byzantine Empire and (after 1204) on the Knights of the Fourth Crusade, conquering large parts of Thrace, the Rhodopes, as well as the whole of Macedonia.
Under Ivan Asen II (1218-1241), Bulgaria once again became a regional power, occupying Belgrade and Albania. In an inscription from Turnovo in 1230 he entitled himself "In Christ the Lord faithful Tsar and autocrat of the Bulgarians, son of the old Asen". The Bulgarian Orthodox Patriarchate was restored in 1235 with approval of all eastern Patriarchates, thus putting an end to the union with the Papacy. Ivan Asen II had a reputation as a wise and humane ruler, and opened relations with the Catholic west, especially Venice and Genoa, to reduce the influence of the Byzantines over his country. The original four Catholic patriarchs of the east, and the original four Eastern Orthodox patriarchs, sat in Constantinople (now called Istanbul for secular purposes, but still called Constantinople in this ecclesiastical context), Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The Patriarch of Antioch moved to Damascus in the 13th century, during the reign of the Egyptian Mamelukes, conquerors of Syria.