Invitations to Nrdics etc to rule.

[BalkanTourist]

Not nitpicking by any account, but BT, I think Bulgaria never gave the Slavs a religion or an alphabet... Byzantium did both. The Byzantine monks Cyrillos and Methodios created the Alphabet and spread Orthodoxy in Bulgaria and the rest of the Balkans, while other missionaries (and, most importantly, official arrangements and state deals - as in the case of the Rus) dealt with the rest of the Slavs.

Or was it just a figure of speach - the Bulgarians being the first Slavs to aquire alphabet and orthodoxy by the Byzantines? ~;

Byzantium was the eastern part of the Roman Empire. That's a well known fact. People often make the mistake of thinking that Byzantine equals Greek. As in any empire there wasn't a single people that inhabited it, but many - armenians, greeks, syrians, slavs etc. One of them was the governor of Solun (Thesalonika) which in the 9th century was swarming with slavs. The Slavs started raiding the Balkans in the 4th and 5th century and later settled permanently. They reached Pelopones and even Crete. They were not united and easily accepted Byzantine rule. Many melted away withint the locals. Later when Bulgaria was created, the Bulgarian khans tried to attract those slavs to join the new state as there were seven slavic tribes already within the union with the Bulgars.
The governor of Solun, Leo, sent two of his sons to get good education in the Magnaura Academy in Constantinope. They were getting ready to join the clergy. There they acquired many neccessary skills and much knowledge that would help them not only with church matter but also in diplomacy. Cyril was sent by the Emperor to many missions which are described in his literary work. He had to establish diplomatic relations with tribes and spread the word of God. In these times religion was a major diplomatic weapon.
By the ninth century the diferences between Rome and Constantinople were quite big. The two great cities and their spiritual leaders - the Pope and the Patriarch were competing for the acquisition of new souls for their respective churches. Accepting Christianity from either would put the recepient in the respective sphere of influence. The Pope already had most of Western Europe and had turned his attention to the Western Slavs who were just to the east of the HRE. The newly created state of Moravia ( to answer a question from above - no Moravia was formed as a state in the 9th century, Bulgaria in 681.) was of special interest of both the Latin priests and the orthodox ones.
In that time the only three languages that one could worship in were Greek, Latin and Hebrew. To worship in another tongue was a sin. Proving the religion is just modified politics, the Patriarch and the Orthodox council decided to approve the worship in slavic, if the Moravian Kniaz agreed to accept the Orthodoxy. He even promised him his own alphabet. So a great scholar and a diplomat was summoned to get the job done - Cyril. His brother Methodius was helping him. Who else could have done it?! There was no better man for the job. He was highly educated, experienced and SPOKE the language. The alphabet created was based on the Greek one but also considered the diferences in phonetics that the slavs had. Just look at nowadays Western Slavs who use the Latin alphabet especially in Polish where they have some words that are unreadable for the foreign eye. Unfortunately the German/Latin/Catholics prevailed and Moravia was lost for the cause. Cyril and Methodius were persecuted by the German clergy and even tried for herecy. They never made it to Bulgaria, but their students - Climent, Naum, Angelariy and Gorazd did (they were also Slavs). The Bulgarian Khan was playing the diplomatic game at the time. He knew that in order for his country to be internationally respected and recognized, and internally united, there had to be a single monoteistic well recognized religion. Emissaries of the Arabs came offering Islam. He rejected it, because at the time although the Arabs were a force to be considered and had besieged Costantinople twice, the majority of the countries were converting to Christianity. Khan Boris was even offered the Judeism from the Khazars who had accepted it earlier. The big fate defining question was -Catholicizm or Orthodoxy. The Pope had offered an archbishop, clergy to convert the populace, recognition for the Bulgarian ruler as a King, but the King was a vassal to the Pope and the church was not autonomous but was controled from Rome. After some bargaining and because they already lost Moravia and were feeling pressured at the prospects of having a Catholic faction right at their door step, the Byzantines stroke a deal. They would give the Bulgarian church full independence with their own Patriarch, the liturgy would be in Bulgarian (which turned to be universal Church-Slavonic for the Orthodox Slavs even until the time of Peter I of Russia in the 18th century) and the priests would be Bulgarian. But most importanly they offered an alphabet. After the conversion there was a tremendous revival in all aspects of life. Many scholars appeared, many books were writen in the late 9th and the 10th centuries in Bulgaria. That coincided with the rule of King Simeon the Great who ironically defeated the Byzantines and besieged Constantinople. Naturally Bulgaria was the torch bearer for all the Slavs. And when the Kievan Rus was ready to accept Christianity, many Bulgarian priests went there with books written in Slavic and it was they who spread the Cyrilic alphabet to Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Serbs. If it wasn't for the pupils of Constantine-Cyril and his brother Methodius and for the receptiveness of Kniaz Boris, that alphabet would have been dead, and so would be Bulgaria.