Early Settlement
Many Germans passed through Bulgaria during the eastern Crusades, as Bulgaria lies on the direct land route from Western and Central Europe to the Levant and the Holy Land. They were usually met with hostility as they were negatively disposed to the Orthodox population of the Byzantine Empire (which ruled Bulgaria at the time of the First and Second Crusades) and the Second Bulgarian Empire. Crusaders led by the Frankish noble Renier of Trit established the short-lived Duchy of Philippopolis around what is today Plovdiv, but in 1205 the Latins were routed by Kaloyan of Bulgaria in the Battle of Adrianople, their emperor Baldwin IX of Flanders was captured by the Bulgarians and died in Tarnovo. Kaloyan's daughter Maria was betrothed to the second Latin Emperor, Henry of Flanders, who she is thought to have poisoned.
Groups of Saxon ore miners (called саси, sasi in Bulgarian) are known to have settled in the ore-rich regions of Southeastern Europe. In the 13th-14th century, Germans from the Upper Harz and Westphalia settled in and around Chiprovtsi in modern northwestern Bulgaria (then part of the Second Bulgarian Empire) to extract ore in the western Balkan Mountains, receiving royal privileges from Bulgarian tsar Ivan Shishman. According to some theories, these miners established Roman Catholicism in this part of the Balkans before most of them left following the Ottoman invasion, the rest being completely Bulgarianized (by marrying Bulgarian women) and merging with the local population by the mid-15th century. Along with spreading Roman Catholicism, the Saxons also enriched the local vocabulary with Germanic words and introduced a number of mining techniques and metal-working instruments to Bulgaria.
Germans are also thought to have mined ore in the Osogovo and Belasica mountains (between Bulgaria and the Republic of Macedonia), as well as around Samokov in Rila and various parts of the Rhodope Mountains and around Etropole, but were assimilated without establishing Catholicism there.
After their expulsions from Hungary (1376) and Bavaria (1470), Germanic-speaking Ashkenazi Jews settled in the Bulgarian lands. For their history, see History of the Jews in Bulgaria.
Read more about this topic: Germans In Bulgaria
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)