ABSTRACT
The courts featuring in this paper lay at the far end of Europe from Alfred’s Wessex. Their rulers at first sight have little in common with Alfred, and not much more to do with each other: on the one hand, the Byzantine emperors, spending most of their time in ‘the reigning city’, Constantinople; and on the other, in the steppe-like plains south of the lower Danube, the Bulgar khans, operating out of their principal towns and encampments, first Pliska and then (from the last years of the ninth century) Preslav.1 The two rulers at the centre of attention are Emperor Leo VI (886-912) and Symeon of Bulgaria (893-927). As their regnal dates imply, they were half a generation younger than Alfred, being born respectively in the mid-and the early 860s, and it will be necessary to glance at their fathers, especially at Symeon’s, Khan Boris-Michael.
