The Everyday Life of Bulgarians from the 13th Century

The wealth of information contained in the documents of the Ohrid Archdiocese collected in the collection Ponemata diaphora (“Miscellaneous Works”) makes them a valuable source for the medieval history of the Balkan-Asia Minor region in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. A large part of them reveal different aspects of the relationship between the Archdiocese and its mostly ethnically Bulgarian congregation. For this reason, these documents will be published, translated and commented in volume XIII of the series Greek sources for Bulgarian history, which is being prepared for printing. The texts included in the Ponemata diaphora can be grouped according to their content into four distinct categories: a) decisions on ecclesiastical cases, b) decisions on property and inheritance disputes, c) decisions on cases related to marriage law and d) decisions on manslaughter cases. We will present them in this order here as well, keeping the numbering of the documents introduced by the publisher of Ponemata diaphora, Prof. Günther Prinzing. The brief content of the described legal cases represents an unadulterated picture of the everyday life of Bulgarians from the 13th century.