Kubrat throws off Avar rule: Old Great Bulgaria

The patriarch Nikephoros, writing around 780–790, reports — in a passage with no parallel in Theophanes — that Koubratos, nephew of Organas and lord of the Onogundurs, rose against the khagan of the Avars, insulted the men he had from the khagan and drove them out of his land; he then sent envoys to Heraclius and made a peace that both kept for the rest of their lives, and the emperor sent him gifts and the rank of patrician. Nikephoros gives no year: the nearest datable events in his narrative belong to 634 and 640, hence the interval. He also tells of an unnamed “lord of the Huns” who came to Constantinople with his nobles, was baptised and made a patrician — often thought to be Organas — and the Egyptian bishop John of Nikiu describes a Hunnic prince brought up at Heraclius’s court who backed the empress Martina and her sons after 641. His translators rendered this prince’s name as Kubratos, but the Ethiopic text has Qetradês, so the identification is disputed.

Theophanes, whose fuller account of the Bulgars goes back to a lost source shared with Nikephoros, places “old Great Bulgaria” between the Sea of Azov and the river Kouphis, usually taken for the Kuban, and calls Kubrat lord of Bulgaria and of the Kotragoi. He died “in the time of Constantine of the West”, that is under Constans II (641–668) — probably, as the archaeologist A. V. Komar suggests, around 660–665 — after enjoining his five sons to stay together. They divided nonetheless: the Khazars made the eldest, Batbayan, their tributary, Kotrag crossed the Don, Asparuh led his horde across the Dnieper and the Dniester towards the Danube, and two others went to Avar Pannonia and to the Pentapolis near Ravenna. Kubrat is usually identified with Kurt of the Dulo clan, to whom the Bulgarian Princes’ List gives sixty years of rule.

Historians debate whether all these reports concern one man. Some separate the rebel against the Avars from Kubrat of Great Bulgaria or link the revolt with Kuver, a Bulgar leader in the Avar khaganate, and Cyril Mango noted that there is no evidence of Avar authority reaching the Sea of Azov in the 630s. Others follow Joachim Werner in seeing Kubrat’s grave in the Pereshchepina treasure in the Dnieper region, which would make his realm far larger.