Vasil Levski - Historical Background

Historical Background

In 1396 or 1422, the medieval Bulgarian Empire had ceased to exist, falling under full Ottoman domination. The inegalitarian Ottoman millet system had turned the Bulgarians and other Christian subjects into second-class citizens, and the religious differences had created insurmountable cultural antagonism. The empire's 19th-century economic hardships, which prompted its personification as the "sick man of Europe", meant that the Ottoman state's Christian residents suffered more than its Muslim subjects and reforms planned by the sultans faced insuperable difficulties.

Bulgarian nationalism gradually materialised during the mid-19th century with the economic upsurge of Bulgarian merchants and craftsmen, the development of Bulgarian-funded popular education, the struggle for an autonomous Bulgarian Church and political actions towards the formation of a separate Bulgarian state. The First and Second Serbian Uprisings had laid the foundation of an autonomous Serbia during the late 1810s, and Greece had been established as an independent state in 1832, in the wake of the Greek War of Independence. However, support for gaining independence through an armed struggle against the Ottomans was not universal. Revolutionary sentiment was concentrated largely among the more educated and urban sectors of the populace. There was less support for an organized revolt among the peasantry and the wealthier merchants and traders, who feared that Ottoman reprisals would jeopardize economic stability and widespread rural land ownership.