Keratsa Petritsa

Keratsa Petritsa (Bulgarian: Кераца Петрица; fl. ) was a Bulgarian noblewoman (bolyarka), sister of tsar Michael Shishman of Bulgaria. Her eldest son Ivan Alexander rose to the Bulgarian throne after vicissitudes of politics.

Keratsa descended, via a lateral line, from Ivan Asen II. She was the sister of Michael III Shishman Asen and Belaur, children of despotēs Shishman of Vidin by an unnamed daughter of sebastokrator Peter and Anna (Theodora). She was also a distant cousin of tsar Theodore Svetoslav and tsar George II Terter. She was Catholic.

Since the middle of the 13th century, the area of Vidin had been effectively autonomous under ineffective Bulgarian overlordship, and was ruled successively by Yakov Svetoslav (died 1276), Shishman (died between 1308 and 1313), and then the future Michael Asen III. Shishman and his son received the high courtly title of despotēs from their cousin Theodore Svetoslav and, on the childless death of young George Terter II in 1323, the brother of Keratsa Petritsa was elected emperor of Bulgaria by the nobility.

Keratsa Petritsa converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy at some point, and retired to a convent under the monastic name Theophana (Теофана). Her memory is honored in the Bulgarian Orthodox Synodic (Синодик):

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