After 1241, the year of the earliest recorded Tatar invasion of Bulgaria, the Second Bulgarian Empire maintained constant political contact with the Tatars. In this early period (13th and 14th century), "Tatar" was not an ethnonym but a general term for the armies of Genghis Khan’s successors. The First Tatar settlements in Bulgaria may be dated to the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century when military units persecuted in the wake of dynastic feuds in the Golden Horde defected to Bulgarian rulers (Pavlov, 1997).