Tsar

, the first Bulgarian tsar and the first to bear the title. Painting by Alphonse Mucha, 1923.|alt= Alphonse Mucha's The Slav Epic cycle No.4: Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria (1923) as Serbian tsar. Painting by Paja Jovanović, 1900. . Drawing by Vasily Vereshchagin, 1896. Tsar, also spelled czar, tzar or csar ( ), is a Slavic title derived from the Latin word caesar. It was intended to mean "emperor" in the European medieval sense of the term—a ruler with the same rank as a Roman emperor, holding it by the approval of another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official—but was usually considered by Western Europeans to be equivalent to "king". Tsar and its variants were the official titles in the First Bulgarian Empire (681–1018), the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1396), the Kingdom of Bulgaria (1908–1946), the Serbian Empire (1346–1371), and the Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721). The first monarch to adopt the title of tsar was Simeon I of Bulgaria. Simeon II, the last tsar of Bulgaria, is the last person (and only living person as of 2026) to have held this title.

, the first Bulgarian tsar and the first to bear the title. Painting by Alphonse Mucha, 1923.|alt= Alphonse Mucha's The Slav Epic cycle No.4: Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria (1923) as Serbian tsar. Painting by Paja Jovanović, 1900. . Drawing by Vasily Vereshchagin, 1896. Tsar, also spelled czar, tzar or csar ( ), is a Slavic title derived from the Latin word caesar. It was intended to mean "emperor" in the European medieval sense of the term—a ruler with the same rank as a Roman emperor, holding it by the approval of another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official—but was usually considered by Western Europeans to be equivalent to "king". Tsar and its variants were the official titles in the First Bulgarian Empire (681–1018), the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1396), the Kingdom of Bulgaria (1908–1946), the Serbian Empire (1346–1371), and the Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721). The first monarch to adopt the title of tsar was Simeon I of Bulgaria. Simeon II, the last tsar of Bulgaria, is the last person (and only living person as of 2026) to have held this title.

Etymology

The title tsar is derived from the Latin title caesar, used for the Roman emperors. It entered the Slavic languages through the Gothic term kaisar and was used as an equivalent of the Greek term basileus, which referred to Byzantine emperors and the kings of the Bible. The spelling "czar" is first recorded in Sigismund von Herberstein's Notes on Muscovite Affairs (1549), transliterated using German phonology. English and French changed the spelling from to in the 19th century to better reflect the pronunciation.

Bulgaria

's epitaph uses the title tsar (outlined): "Here lies Mostich who was ichirgu-boil during the reigns of Tsar Simeon and Tsar Peter. At the age of eighty he forsook the rank of ichirgu boila and all of his possessions and became a monk. And so ended his life." (Museum of Preslav) is the only living person to have borne the title of "tsar" (as Simeon II of Bulgaria). In 705, Emperor Justinian II named Tervel of Bulgaria "caesar" ( ), the first foreigner to receive this title, but his descendants continued to use the Bulgar title "Kanasubigi". The sainted Boris I is sometimes retrospectively referred to as tsar, because at his time Bulgaria was converted to Christianity. However, the title "tsar" (and its Byzantine Greek equivalent basileus) was actually adopted and used for the first time by his son Simeon I, following a makeshift imperial coronation performed by the Patriarch of Constantinople in 913. After an attempt by the Byzantine Empire to revoke this major diplomatic concession and a decade of intensive warfare, the imperial title of the Bulgarian ruler was recognized by the Byzantine government in 924 and again at the formal conclusion of peace in 927. Since in Byzantine political theory there was place for only two emperors, Eastern and Western (as in the Late Roman Empire), the Bulgarian ruler was crowned basileus as "a spiritual son" of the Byzantine basileus. It has been hypothesized that Simeon's title was also recognized by a papal mission to Bulgaria in or shortly after 925, as a concession in exchange for a settlement in the Bulgarian-Croatian conflict or a possible attempt to return Bulgaria to union with Rome. Thus, in the later diplomatic correspondence conducted in 1199–1204 between the Bulgarian ruler Kaloyan and Pope Innocent III, Kaloyan—whose self-assumed Latin title was "Imperator Bulgarorum et Blachorum"—claims that the imperial crowns of Simeon I, his son Peter I, and Samuel were somehow derived from the papacy. The pope, however, only speaks of reges (kings) of Bulgaria in his replies, and eventually grants only that lesser title to Kaloyan, who nevertheless proceeds to thank the pope for the "imperial title" conferred upon him. After Bulgaria's liberation from the Ottomans in 1878, its new monarchs were at first autonomous prince (knyaz). With the declaration of full independence, Ferdinand I of Bulgaria adopted the traditional title "tsar" in 1908 and it was used until the abolition of the monarchy in 1946. However, these titles were not generally perceived as equivalents of "emperor" any longer. In the Bulgarian ,as in the Greek vernacular, the meaning of the title had shifted (although Paisius' Slavonic-Bulgarian History (1760–1762) had still distinguished between the two concepts).

Serbia

of Serbia The title of tsar (Serbian car) was used officially by two monarchs, the previous monarchical title being that of king (kralj). In 1345, Stefan Dušan began to style himself "Emperor of Serbs and Greeks" (the Greek renderings read "basileus and autokrator of Serbs and Romans"), and was crowned as such in Skopje on Easter (April 16) 1346 by the newly elevated Serbian patriarch, alongside the Bulgarian patriarch and archbishop of Ohrid. On the same occasion, he had his wife Helena of Bulgaria crowned as empress and his son associated in power as king. When Dušan died in 1355¹, his son Stefan Uroš V became the next emperor. The new emperor's uncle Simeon Uroš (Siniša) contested the succession and claimed the same titles as a dynast in Thessaly. After his death around 1370, he was succeeded in his claims by his son John Uroš, who retired to a monastery in about 1373.

Metaphorical uses

Like many lofty titles, such as mogul, tsar or czar has been used in English as a metaphor for positions of high authority since 1866 (referring to U.S. President Andrew Johnson), with a connotation of dictatorial powers and style, fitting since "autocrat" was an official title of the Russian emperor (informally referred to as 'the tsar'). Similarly, Speaker of the House Thomas Brackett Reed was called "Czar Reed" for his dictatorial control of the House of Representatives in the 1880s and 1890s. In the United States and in the United Kingdom, the title "czar" is a colloquial term for certain high-level civil servants, such as the "drug czar" for the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (not to be confused with a drug baron), "terrorism czar" for a presidential advisor on terrorism policy, "cybersecurity czar" for the highest-ranking Department of Homeland Security official on computer security and information security policy, and "war czar" to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More specifically, a czar in the US government typically refers to a sub-cabinet-level advisor within the executive branch. One of the earliest known usages of the term was for Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was named commissioner of baseball, with broad powers to clean up the sport after it had been sullied by the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

Citations

External links

EtymOnline

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1376339153 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.