Byzantine Culture

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Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer

Basil II ruled for 49 years, destroyed the Bulgarian empire, doubled Byzantine territory and left a full treasury. A portrait of the most successful Byzantine emperor and what came after him.

Basil II reigned for forty-nine years, longer than any other Roman or Byzantine emperor, and left the empire larger, richer and safer than he had found it. He died in 1025 with the Balkans pacified to the Danube, the eastern frontier pushed into Armenia and Syria, a treasury reportedly holding two hundred thousand pounds of gold, and no heir capable of holding any of it. Within fifty years of his death most of what he had won was lost. He is the strongest argument both for and against the proposition that individual emperors mattered.

The portrait that survives in the Menologion tradition — the frontispiece of his psalter in Venice shows him armoured, crowned by Christ, with defeated Bulgarians prostrate at his feet — is the image he chose for himself, and contemporaries broadly agreed with it. Michael Psellos, writing a generation later from a civilian and rather snobbish standpoint, described a man who abandoned the elegance expected of an emperor: plain dress, cropped beard, no interest in literature, permanently on campaign, and personally terrifying.

A Contested Inheritance

Basil was born about 958, the elder son of Romanos II, and was crowned as a child. When his father died in 963 he was five, and the throne was taken in succession by two great generals who married or controlled his mother: Nikephoros II Phokas, murdered in 969, and John I Tzimiskes, who died in 976. Basil was eighteen when he finally became senior emperor in his own right — not, as an older tradition has it, a child. The correction matters, because it changes the character of what followed: he came to power as an adult in a court run by others and spent the next thirteen years taking it apart.

Two great families of the Anatolian military aristocracy, the Phokades and the Skleroi, revolted in turn and then together. Bardas Skleros rebelled in 976; Bardas Phokas was sent against him, then rebelled himself in 987 and had himself proclaimed emperor. In 988 Phokas’s army stood at Chrysopolis, across the water from the capital.

Basil’s solution was the most consequential diplomatic transaction in Byzantine history. He asked Vladimir of Kiev for troops; Vladimir asked for the hand of Basil’s sister Anna, a porphyrogenita princess whom no emperor had ever given to a foreigner; Basil agreed on condition that Vladimir accept baptism. Six thousand Rus warriors arrived, Phokas died suddenly at Abydos in 989 while riding out to challenge the emperor in single combat, and the revolt collapsed. The Rus contingent stayed on to become the Varangian Guard, and the conversion of Kiev brought the whole of eastern Slavdom into the Byzantine religious world, as the Byzantine legacy in Russia describes.

The War Against the Aristocracy

Basil drew a permanent conclusion from the revolts: the great landowning families of Anatolia were the principal threat to the state. His legislation against them was the most aggressive social policy any Byzantine emperor attempted.

The novel of 996 abolished the forty-year limit after which an illegally acquired estate became secure, allowing the state to reclaim land taken from peasant communities at any distance in time. The allelengyon, imposed around 1002, made great landowners liable for the unpaid taxes of the poor households in their district. The preamble to the 996 law names families and describes, with something close to contempt, how a magnate acquires a village: a bad harvest, a loan, a forced sale.

The policy was enforced while Basil lived and repealed soon after he died. The aristocracy he had fought re-emerged in the eleventh century, absorbed the soldier-smallholdings that supplied the thematic army, and produced the Komnenian dynasty.

The Bulgarian War

The war with the Bulgarian empire of Samuel lasted, with interruptions, from 986 to 1018. It began badly: in 986 Basil, inexperienced, was ambushed and routed at Trajan’s Gate in the passes south-east of Sofia and barely escaped.

What followed was not a war of great battles but a methodical campaign of attrition — annual invasions, the systematic reduction of fortresses, the cutting of the Bulgarian state into pieces from the edges. Samuel was an able opponent who raided as far as the Peloponnese, and the contest ran for thirty years.

It was decided at the pass of Kleidion in July 1014. The best-known story in Byzantine history attaches to the aftermath: that Basil blinded fourteen thousand prisoners, leaving one man in a hundred with one eye to lead them home, and that Samuel died of shock two days after seeing them arrive. The story appears in the eleventh-century chronicler John Skylitzes, writing some decades later, and in the Bulgarian tradition after him. The numbers are certainly inflated — mass blinding of prisoners on that scale is logistically implausible — and modern historians differ on how much of the episode is true. What is not in doubt is that Samuel died shortly after the battle, that his state disintegrated over the following four years, and that Basil’s byname Boulgaroktonos, “Bulgar-slayer,” is not contemporary: it first appears in the twelfth century.

The settlement of 1018 was unusually generous. Bulgaria was annexed but allowed to pay its taxes in kind rather than coin; the Bulgarian archbishopric of Ohrid was preserved as an autocephalous church; the surviving Bulgarian nobility was given Byzantine titles and absorbed. For the first time since the sixth century the empire’s European frontier stood on the Danube. The longer story is told in the Byzantine–Bulgarian wars.

The Other Frontiers

While the Bulgarian war ran, Basil also:

  • Marched to Syria in 995 in a forced winter ride from Anatolia, relieving Aleppo and checking the Fatimids
  • Annexed most of Armenia and Georgia by treaty and inheritance, extending the frontier to Lake Van and beyond
  • Restored Byzantine authority in southern Italy and was preparing an expedition to recover Sicily when he died
  • Kept Venice as a naval auxiliary through the grant of trading privileges in 992 — a limited version of the concession that would be far more damaging when Alexios I repeated it on a larger scale ninety years later

The Man

Basil never married and left no children, which is the central fact of the reign’s aftermath. Psellos says he lived like a soldier, ate what his men ate, and reduced the ceremonial of the court to a minimum. He also says — and the detail rings true — that the emperor distrusted eloquence and preferred officials who spoke plainly.

His burial choice was pointed. Rather than the imperial mausoleum at the Church of the Holy Apostles, he was buried at the Hebdomon outside the walls, at the parade ground of the army, under an epitaph he composed himself. A later Latin visitor recorded its opening: no other emperor, it claimed, had rested from labour as little as he had.

What Went Wrong Afterwards

The throne passed to Basil’s brother Constantine VIII, an elderly pleasure-seeker, then through Constantine’s daughters Zoe and Theodora and a sequence of husbands and adoptees. Between 1025 and 1081 the empire had thirteen rulers.

The specific failures were:

  1. The military settlement was reversed. The allelengyon was repealed, the estates grew, and the soldier-farmers disappeared.
  2. The treasury was spent. Basil’s reserve funded fifty years of court expenditure and mercenary hire, and the gold coinage began to be debased in the 1040s.
  3. The Armenian buffer was dismantled. The annexed Armenian principalities were disarmed and their princes pensioned into Anatolia at exactly the moment the Seljuk Turks arrived on the other side of them.

The consequence was Manzikert in 1071, forty-six years after Basil’s death, and the loss of the Anatolian heartland. Whether Basil is responsible for leaving a system that depended on him personally, or his successors for dismantling it, is one of the standing arguments of the period.

The Sources

Basil’s reign is oddly documented for so consequential a period. There is no contemporary narrative history.

John Skylitzes, writing perhaps sixty years later, supplies the main chronicle account, including the story of the blinded prisoners. He is drawing on earlier material now lost and is not always reliable on numbers or motive.

Michael Psellos opens his Chronographia with Basil and is the source of the personal portrait — the plain dress, the cropped beard, the contempt for ceremony, the distrust of eloquence. Psellos was born in 1018, so he never met him, and he is writing to contrast a soldier-emperor with the civilian court he himself served.

Yahya of Antioch, an Arabic-writing Christian chronicler, is independent of the Byzantine tradition and valuable precisely for that, particularly on the eastern campaigns and the Fatimid relationship.

The legislation — Basil’s novels, especially the law of 996 against the dynatoi — is the best evidence, because it is the emperor’s own voice on the question he cared most about, and its preamble is unusually direct about how magnates absorbed peasant land.

The Menologion frontispiece, the miniature in the Venice psalter showing Basil armoured and crowned by Christ with Bulgarians prostrate at his feet, is the image he commissioned of himself and should be read as a political document.

The Argument About the Reign

Historians divide over whether Basil’s success was structural or personal, and the question matters because the empire came apart within fifty years of his death.

The personal reading holds that Basil ran a system that only he could operate: a relentless emperor, permanently on campaign, personally supervising a hostile aristocracy and a treasury he refused to spend. Remove him and the machinery had no operator, which is exactly what happened.

The structural reading holds that the settlement was sound — a restored frontier, a solvent treasury, a legislated check on the magnates — and that the eleventh-century collapse was caused by his successors’ specific decisions: repealing the allelengyon, spending the reserve, disarming the Armenian principalities and running down the army.

There is a third, harsher view: that Basil bequeathed a state with no succession plan, no trained heir and no institutional restraint on his successors, and that a ruler who leaves nothing behind him but a full treasury and an unmarried brother has not, in the end, governed well.

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