Ancient City Mosynopolis (Μοσυνόπολις)

Mosynopolis (Greek: Μοσυνόπολις), of which only ruins now remain, was a city in the Roman province of Rhodope that until the 9th century was known as Maximianopolis (Μαξιμιανούπολις) or, to distinguish it from other cities of the same name, as Maximianopolis in Rhodope.

The city of Maximianopolis appears in written sources from the 4th century on. Its fortifications were renewed by Justinian I, and it was later a base for operations by Emperor Basil II in his wars against the Bulgarians.

In the 11th century, the city was the center of a district (bandon) in the theme of Boleron, and Anna Komnene reports in her Alexiad that there were many Manichaeans living in Mosynopolis in the late 11th/early 12th centuries. The town was captured in 1185 by the Normans, while the monk Ephrem says that the city was captured in 1190 by Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor. The Battle of Messinopolis, in which the Bulgarians defeated Boniface I, Marquess of Montferrat, took place nearby in 1207, and was speedily followed by the destruction of Mosynopolis by Tsar Kaloyan of Bulgaria.

The fate of the town thereafter is somewhat obscure: it re-appears in 1317 as part of the theme of "Boleron and Mosynopolis", and its bishopric was still active, but the historian Catherine Asdracha, in her 1972 survey of the Rhodope area in the late Middle Ages, suggests that it never recovered from Kaloyan's sack and remained in ruins, proposing that it is to be identified with the town of Mesene, which the emperor and historian John VI Kantakouzenos reported as "destroyed many years ago".