The long debate about the number of Kan Asparuh`s Bulgarians who arrived in the 7th century has proved unproductive for lack of data. Nevertheless, based on comparisons and premises, we can admit that the population of the Bulgarian state could hardly have exceeded 1.5—1.8 million inhabitants. The majority of them must have migrated together with Kan Asparuh as the ethnonym “Bulgarians” has been preserved, the state and its structure were established and also because the long and lasting Bulgarian spiritual influence was a fact. Time would have erased any marginal presence.
“Before my eyes is the leader of the Bulgarians cut down by your [of King Theodoric] hand, which defends freedom. … This is the nation, which, before you, had everything it wanted, a nation in which the leader won titles by buying his nobility with the blood of the enemy, glorifying its kin on the battlefield. Because, in their land, it is believed without any doubt that the more blood stains a man`s armament, the nobler he is; they are a nation, which, before the battle against you, had never met an adversary who could withstand them. ”
The merging of the ethnic components of the Bulgarians, Slavs and Thracians and the mixed, mostly urban, population of Late Antiquity in the then Roman provinces of Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia, became a historical fact in the first two to three centuries after Kan Asparuh`s arrival.
At the beginning of this process, Byzantine authors distinguished clearly between Bulgarians and Slavs, but the efforts of the Bulgarian rulers to involve the settling tribes into the affairs of the state later deleted the differentiation. The dynasty of Krum (803 991) adhered to the same orientation of including Slavonic aristocracy in the (ruling elite. The most important fact is, of course, the Christianization and the subsequent levelling of moral and religious norms.
Following the Christianization
The amalgamation of the Slavs into the Bulgarian society in the period following the Christianization was a conscious act with ideological, religious and state hood legislative motives. It was founded on the introduction of the Old Bulgarian language as the official, religious and correspondence language in the second half of the 9th century. There was no tension in the evolving national consciousness of the Bulgarian Christians as the dominance of the Bulgarians was regarded as natural, and their ethnic tolerance facilitated the undisturbed adoption of the heritage of both Bulgarians and Slavs.
Until the appearance of the Bulgarians in the region of Middle Volga, many unnamed tribes, known only from archaeological data, and nomads from the disintegrated Turkic Khaganate lived there. Moving towards Middle Volga, the then Itil River, the Bulgarians encountered local Ugrian Finnish ethnic groups together with many others. The Savirs, whose material culture was not very different from the Bulgarian, were among them. Ptolemy mentioned them (2nd century).
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