The word "bulgarian" used today to describe ethnic Bulgarians, originated as "Bulgars" and indicated a much wider region of Eastern Europe since the country of Bulgaria was much bigger in those days. The people of this region who were Orthodox Christians were labeled heretic by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages (After the Great East-West Schism in 1054 the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches label each other as 'heretic'). During the fourth Crusade the western knights managed to capture Constantinople, they devastated and plunderred the Byzantine Empire and on its ruins created their own Latin Empire. The new power they acquired naturally lead to their desire to invade their northern neighbour - the Bulgarian Empire. The war they initiated against the Bulgarian Empire was especially fierce, but the Bulgarians managed to devastate the attacking crusaders' armies of the fourth crusade and to launch a successful couterattack campaign. They captured and incarcerated the imposed Latin emperor Baldwin of Fladres, who remained prisoner in the capital of the Second Bulgarian empire (Veliko Tarnovo) until his death. According to some estimations the war between the Bulgarians under tsar Kaloyan and the agression of the crusaders took the lifes of more than 600 French nobels, their generals, lutenants and armies who tried to plunder the Bulgarian state. This practically was a devastation of the western European nobelry at that time. Along with throwing the Latin Emperor Baldwin of Flandres in a dungeon, Kaloyan finished his campaign by locating and destroying the army of Boniface de Monferat and killing the latter as he was the true organization force behing the Crusade. The financing force of the Crusaders, the Venetian Enrico Dandolo, who was representing the people providing the western european knights with money for their ivasion, miraculously managed to escape the battlefield before being killed. However Enrico Dandolo developed a serious inflamation of his testicles due to the long and hectic riding when running away from the Bulgarian forces and soon he died from it.
All those events brought Tsar Kaloyan the nickname "Romankiller".

The fear that the word "Bulgarian" started to evoke among western Europeans at those times resulted in the word "Bulgarian" developing a negative and almost frightening connotation. During later centuries, some Catholics came to believe that Bulgarian Orthodox Christians were depraved hedonists given to bizarre sexual practices, probably because of active discrediting efforts by the Catholic church.

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