The province of Moesia Inferior was in trouble.
Invaders were at the gates of Varna. These were not particularly smart invaders, because the smart invaders always sailed around to the Black Sea side of the city and walked right in. At least now, Moesia Inferior need not have that much of an inferiority complex.
Rome had tried to tell these people: You’re the Bottom, I’m the Top. Did they listen? No, they took the best of Roman culture, like mineral baths and cannoli, and lived a fun life.
One day, a watchman named Radovan was on lookout duty when he saw the barbarians set up camp on the plains outside the city. Were they invading? No, not yet, so he called his friend Dinko over to ask what to do. Just keep watching them and see if they have weapons or whatever. Radovan watched the invaders put up their gaudy tents, which seemed to have been looted from other settlements, and install what looked like a very large sun deck. Dinko suggested, these may be Northern Barbarians, the kind of people on the other side of the Danube. They live in cold places, so it’s perfectly understandable that they want to come out here and lounge around in the sun.
For several days, the invaders didn’t invade. Watchmen came and went, and once again it was Radovan’s turn. As the sun climbed in the sky, he used his spyglass to observe some migrating birds. Then, his eyes landed on the barbarians’ sun deck, and he saw something he could not unsee. A warrior man with many strange tattoos lay naked on his back. Another warrior man, also naked but wearing a collar with a chain attached knelt before the first man, and put his priapus inside his mouth. “Cannibals!!” Radko clenched and looked away. He ran to the nearby gong, which had been a gift of Caesar Augustus, and banged away as though his little heart would burst. The rest of the city looked up from doing their mosaics and pressing grapes into wine. “Did you say ‘cannibals’?” “See for yourselves!” No one could bear to keep looking too long and hard at the sausage swallowing and what was surely bloody carnage and dismemberment.
Well, after the city council had been convened, they decided to defend themselves. They lined up their cannons, all three of them, on the wall facing away from the Black Sea. That was the heavy part. They aligned the cannons. They cannonized the cannoli. And they shot their creamy missiles at the cannibals.
As expected, the naked sundeck of muscled invaders did not react well to being drenched in dripping, white, creamy liquid. They screamed, and yelled that the Wrath of Khan would be directed at the city. Some invaders then got the idea to lick the running, sweet ambrosia off of the other men’s bodies. Again, watchman Radovan had to look away in despair.
The next day the city was invaded. Not much to tell about. Once the barbarians had put on their armor and saddled their mighty Asian Steppe horses, flying pastry were not serving as a deterrent, Indeed, during the next century, cannoli were banned as per Mongol rule #438: if it doesn’t have something to do with horses, we don’t need it. Anyone who wanted to enjoy the secret local tradition, well, they did it in secret. Only with the coming of the Ottomans in 1396 was it again legal to eat cannoli on main street. Say what you want to about the Turks, if it goes with coffee it’s a gift from god.
That is why, to this day, the canonical history of Varna and Veliki Tarnovo sings of the bittersweet resistance wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a cannoli.