Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria - Rise of Serbia and The Ottoman Threat

Rise of Serbia and The Ottoman Threat

See also: Serbian Empire, Rise of the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgarian-Ottoman Wars

During the same period, the Serbian king took advantage of the Byzantine civil war to take possession of what is now Macedonia, and of most of Albania and northern Greece. In 1345 he began to call himself "Emperor of Serbs and Greeks", and in 1346 he was crowned as such by the newly created Patriarch of Serbia. These actions, which the Byzantines received with indignation, appear to have been supported by Bulgaria, as the Patriarch of Bulgaria Simeon had participated in both the creation of a Serbian patriarchate and the imperial coronation of Stefan Uroš IV Dušan.

By the second half of the 1340s, little remained of Ivan Alexander's initial successes. John VI Kantakouzenos' Turkish allies pillaged parts of Bulgarian Thrace in 1346, 1347, 1349, 1352 and 1354, to which were added the ravages of the Black Death. The Bulgarians' attempts to repel the invaders met with repeated failure, and Ivan Alexander's third son and co-emperor, Ivan Asen IV, was killed in battle against the Turks in 1349, as was his older brother Michael Asen IV in 1355 or a little earlier.

By 1351 the Byzantine civil war was over, and John VI Kantakouzenos had realized the threat posed by the Ottomans to the Balkan Peninsula. He appealed to the rulers of Serbia and Bulgaria for a united effort against the Turks and asked Ivan Alexander for money to construct warships, but his appeals fell on deaf ears as his neighbours distrusted his intentions. A new attempt for cooperation between Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire followed in 1355, after John VI Kantakouzenos had been forced to abdicate and John V Palaiologos had been established as supreme emperor. To cement the treaty, Ivan Alexander's daughter Keraca Marija was married off to the future Byzantine Emperor Andronikos IV Palaiologos, but the alliance failed to produce concrete results.