Tarnovo

Under Tsar Ivan Alexander, who reigned from 1331 to 1371, and his sons, Tarnovo became a city of books as well as walls. In a school of scribes he founded here, Patriarch Evtimiy reformed the spelling and language of the church books, setting the model for Church Slavonic in Serbia, Wallachia, Moldavia and Russia. With the relics of thirteen saints and some twenty thousand people living by more than fifty crafts, the city was hailed by its own writers as a new Jerusalem, Rome and Constantinople in one.

In July 1393, after a siege of about three months, the Ottomans took Tarnovo, and what was left of the empire soon fell with it. The city's memory of its tsars outlived the conquest: in 1598 and again in 1686 its people rose under leaders who claimed descent from the old royal house, and both risings were crushed within months.