Talk:Ivailo of Bulgaria
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This article is outdated and does not correspond to the modern historian views. The fact is that Ivailo was called a "swineherd" by the byzantines who started hating him after a succesfull series of battles against the Byzantine empire in which Ivailo was known not to keep any alive prisoners. In no other source was he called a peasant or a swineheard. Historians started asking themselves long time ago, is it actually possible for a "swineheard" to defeat the perfect war machine of the so called Tartars - namely the Mongols, who were unobstructedly ravaging through Europe at the time, and be so easily crowned as car. Having byzantine sources that call enemy rulers with insulting names is not an isolated case. Modern historians do not accept the possibility of a peasant becoming a monarch in such a short time. Unfortunately Bulgarian sources are not abundant and though his personality seems to be shrouded in mystery the modern view is that it is highly possible that Ivailo was a boyar or other aristocracy member, who was actually educated in millitary tactics and had the social support to become a monarch.
Ivailo was also most likely a vegetarian if not a Bogomil, which explains a lot of the mystery surrounding his behaviour and persona.
The legent of the "peasant tsar" was gladly embraced by the communists, because in him they were seeing the social emblem of the ruling working class. I guess another good example of using Ivailo`s personality for imposing ideas.
[edit] Transliteration
I replaced Ivaylo with Ivailo. The correct (and adopted by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) Latin rendering should be Ivajlo, but I am aware it is not popular and will be replaced immediately by the next person who reads the article. It would also pose difficulty in reading the name by an English-speaker. In Slavic Latin alphabet, the letter Y renders the sound between I and Ǎ, called in Russian yery, ы, like in RYBA (Polish, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian). This letter should not be used to denote consonant I (Bulgarian and Russian"i kratko", Й), which should be rendered with J (at least in initial position). 85.11.148.52 08:46, 15 September 2006 (UTC)