Bulgaria | Page 7

Balkan Mountains:
There were also certain other Goths, who are called Minores, an
immense people, with their bishop and primate Vulfila, who is said,
moreover, to have taught them letters; and they are at this day dwelling
in Moesia, in the district called Nicopolitana[1] at the foot of Mount
Haemus, a numerous race, but poor and unwarlike, abounding only in
cattle of divers kinds, and rich in pastures and forest timber, having
little wheat, though the earth is fertile in producing other crops. They
do not appear to have any vineyards: those who want wine buy it of
their neighbours; but most of them drink only milk.
[1] Around the modern town of Tirnova.
A contemporary of the saintly Ulfilas (who surely should be accepted
as the first national hero of the Bulgarians) states that Ulfilas had
originally lived on the other side of the Danube and had been driven by
persecution to settle in Bulgaria. This contemporary, Auxentius,
records:

And when, through the envy and mighty working of the enemy, there
was kindled a persecution of the Christians by an irreligious and
sacrilegious Judge of the Goths, who spread tyrannous affright through
the barbarian land, it came to pass that Satan, who desired to do evil,
unwillingly did good; that those whom he sought to make deserters
became confessors of the faith; that the persecutor was conquered, and
his victims wore the wreath of victory. Then, after the glorious
martyrdom of many servants and handmaids of Christ, as the
persecution still raged vehemently, after seven years of his episcopate
were expired, the blessed Ulfilas being driven from "Varbaricum" with
a great multitude of confessors, was honourably received on the soil of
Roumania by the Emperor Constantius of blessed memory. Thus as
God by the hand of Moses delivered His people from the violence of
Pharaoh and the Egyptians, and made them pass through the Red Sea,
and ordained that they should serve Him [on Mount Sinai], even so by
means of Ulfilas did God deliver the confessors of His only-begotten
Son from the "Varbarian" land, and cause them to cross over the
Danube, and serve Him upon the mountains [of Haemus] like his saints
of old.
Ulfilas civilised as well as Christianised the Goths of Bulgaria, and was
responsible for the earliest Gothic alphabet--the Moeso-Gothic. He
translated most of the Scriptures into Gothic, leaving out of his
translation only such war stories as "the Book of Kings," judging that
these would be too exciting for his Gothic flock and would incite them
to war.
[Illustration: A SHÔP WOMAN OF THE DISTRICT OF SOFIA]
After a century of peace war broke out again between the Goths and the
Roman Empire--which may now be called rather the Greek Empire--in
A.D. 369. The course of the war was at first favourable to the Emperor
Valens. All the independent Goths were driven back behind the Danube
boundary, but were allowed to live there in peace. The Roman orator
Themistius, in congratulating the Emperor Valens, put on record the
extent of his achievement and of his magnanimity:
But now, along almost all the frontiers of the Empire, peace reigns, and

all the preparation for war is perfect; for the Emperor knows that they
most truly work for peace who thoroughly prepare for war. The
Danube-shore teems with fortresses, the fortresses with soldiers, the
soldiers with arms, the arms both beautiful and terrible. Luxury is
banished from the legions, but there is an abundance of all necessary
stores, so that there is now no need for the soldier to eke out his
deficient rations by raids on the peaceful villagers. There was a time
when the legions were terrible to the provincials, and afraid of the
barbarians. Now all that is changed: they despise the barbarians and
fear the complaint of one plundered husbandman more than an
innumerable multitude of Goths.
To conclude, then, as I began. We celebrate this victory by numbering
not our slaughtered foes but our living and tamed antagonists. If we
regret to hear of the entire destruction even of any kind of animal, if we
mourn that elephants should be disappearing from the province of
Africa, lions from Thessaly, and hippopotami from the marshes of the
Nile, how much rather, when a whole nation of men, barbarians it is
true, but still men, lies prostrate at our feet, confessing that it is entirely
at our mercy, ought we not instead of extirpating, to preserve it, and
make it our own by showing it compassion?
Valens restored Bulgaria to the position of a wholly Roman province,
even the Gothic Minores being driven across the Danube. But there was
now to come another racial element into the making of Bulgaria--the
Huns.
I can still recall the resentment and indignation of the Bulgarian
officers in