IT is widely accepted that the fall of Constantinople in 1204 brought to its knees an empire which was already on its way to dissolution, notably on its Balkan edges. Three peoples displayed new vigour: the Bulgars, the Serbs and the Albanians, the frontiers between their lands remaining still fluid, especially those between Bulgaria and Serbia. Each of these peoples can be observed at a different stage in its evolution towards political and cultural autonomy. Bulgaria under the Asen dynasty, which broke with the Byzantines in 1185–7, and which gained Byzantine recognition, in 1202, of its mastery over the lands from Belgrade to Sofia, represented the resurgence of an older state, though with rather different territorial boundaries; even after two centuries of submission to Byzantium, it remained the home of distinctive political and cultural traditions which asserted its role as the major power in the Balkans, and, in consequence, implied Bulgarian rights even over Constantinople.

In Serbia, Stefan Nemanja (1170–96) had recently brought together the two old power centres of Raška and Diokleia (which corresponded to Zeta, and to modern Montenegro). Zeta, it is true, retained a strong particularist tendency, and internecine strife within the family of the Nemanjids only made this worse. On the coast, Italian influences by way of Dalmatia resulted in the temporary appearance of communes, of which the best example is that of Kotor (Cattaro), which could barely withstand the attempts of the Serb princes to absorb them in their realms. In any event, Nemanja directed a push southwards from 1183 which enabled him to place pressure beyond Niš in Macedonia; at the same time he held on to his influence on the Dalmatian coast north of Dubrovnik (Ragusa), which oscillated between Byzantine and Norman Sicilian overlordship, and southwards along the coast as far as the Mati estuary, in northern Albania.