Basil II

• 1. Introduction

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  Basil II died on the 15th of December 1025, and when his soldiers found him in a corner of a church in 1260, two and a half centuries later, there was a shepherd's flute placed in his mouth. Nobody recorded who put it there or why. But the image lodges in the mind: the most powerful Roman emperor in four centuries, buried alone, without heirs, outside the walls of the city he had spent his life defending.

  His reign lasted 49 years and 11 months, the longest of any Roman emperor. He was born in 958 into the highest possible rank, a porphyrogennetos, meaning a child born to a reigning emperor. He was crowned co-emperor before he was old enough to walk into battle. And then, for a decade, warlords ruled in his name while he watched and waited and learned.

  When he finally seized control, he did it with a ruthlessness that startled his own court. He blinded armies. He stripped the great landowners of estates they had spent generations accumulating. He ate the same rations as his soldiers. He filled the imperial treasury with gold until it held the equivalent of 200,000 pounds of the metal. And he gave his own sister, a princess who had never expected to leave Constantinople, to a foreign ruler in exchange for military support, an arrangement that changed the religious history of Eastern Europe forever.

  What made a man who reportedly despised literary culture become the subject of poems comparing him to Cyrus the Great and Alexander? How did a reign launched in civil war become the high-water mark of Byzantine power? And what does it mean that the historian Michael Psellos, who was born near the end of his reign, describes him as a man who rolled his whiskers between his fingers when he was angry?

• 2. The Man Psellos Described

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  Michael Psellos wrote the description in his Chronographia, and it is precise enough to feel like a portrait sitting. Basil was shorter than average, stocky, impressive on horseback. He had light-blue eyes and strongly arched eyebrows. He wore his side whiskers long, and when he was deep in thought or angry, he rolled them between his fingers. In later life his beard was scant.

  Psellos records that Basil was not an articulate speaker. His laugh was loud and convulsed his whole frame. He had ascetic tastes and wore a dark-purple robe furnished with few of the gems that usually decorated imperial costumes, a striking contrast in a court that treated ceremonial display as a form of political argument.

  He reportedly despised literary culture and affected scorn for the learned classes of Byzantium. Yet his reign coincided with the Macedonian Renaissance, a period when classical Greek scholarship was being absorbed into Christian art and ancient Greek philosophy was studied widely. The library of the University of Constantinople grew substantially during this period. Basil did not drive this revival, but he did not suppress it either. He built churches and monasteries, which suggests a practical piety rather than genuine indifference to culture.

  The historian George Finlay, writing in the 19th century, recorded that Basil saw himself as prudent, just, and devout, while others considered him severe, rapacious, cruel, and bigoted. John Julius Norwich offered the blunter assessment: ugly, dirty, coarse, boorish, philistine, and almost pathologically mean. Norwich added that Basil was deeply un-Byzantine, caring only for the greatness of his empire. The epitaph on his tomb, which he apparently composed or approved, speaks in a soldier's voice: no one saw my spear lie idle.

• 3. Regents, Rivals, and the Wait

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  Romanos II died on the 15th of March 963, only two days after the birth of his youngest child Anna, at the age of 24. His death was widely suspected to be poisoning by hemlock, and the chroniclers Leo the Deacon and John Skylitzes both implied his wife Theophano was responsible. Basil was five years old.

  The Byzantine Senate confirmed Basil and his younger brother Constantine as emperors, with their mother as nominal regent. Real power went to the parakoimomenos Joseph Bringas. Theophano distrusted Bringas. So did the general Nikephoros Phokas, who had just returned from conquering the Emirate of Crete and raiding as far as the sack of Aleppo. Phokas was proclaimed emperor by his men and marched on Constantinople. The capital's populace supported him. Bringas fled. On the 16th of August 963, Nikephoros Phokas was crowned emperor.

  Phokas married Theophano on the 20th of September, securing his legitimacy as the guardian of Basil and Constantine. He was murdered in December 969 by Theophano and his own nephew John Tzimiskes, who exiled Theophano and became emperor John I. John married Theodora, a sister of Romanos II. Basil became effective senior emperor only when John died on the 10th of January 976.

  Throughout this period, Basil Lekapenos served as the de facto ruler. Lekapenos was an illegitimate, eunuch son of Emperor Romanos I, and thus Basil's great-uncle by blood. As president of the Byzantine Senate, he was, in Psellos' framing, a wily, gifted politician who hoped the young emperors would be his puppets. The younger Basil, watching all of this, devoted himself instead to learning the details of administrative business and military science. He would need both. John I had belatedly planned to curb the great landowners, and rumors held that Lekapenos, who had illegally acquired vast estates, had him poisoned to prevent an investigation.

• 4. The Generals Who Almost Won

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  Bardas Skleros and Bardas Phokas were members of the wealthy military elite of Anatolia, the same class that had produced the two regent-emperors who had ruled during Basil's childhood. Both wanted what Nikephoros II and John I had held. Both believed Basil would collapse under pressure.

  Skleros rebelled first. Basil suppressed him in 979 with the help of 12,000 Georgian troops under Tornikios and David III Kuropalates of Tao. When Phokas later rebelled in 989, Skleros was released from exile to support him, creating a combined front. When Phokas died in battle, Skleros, whom Phokas had imprisoned by that point, assumed command of the remaining rebellion. The campaign ended without a final battle; Skleros surrendered to Basil in 989. He was allowed to live, though he died blind, whether through disease or deliberate punishment for his insurrection the source does not confirm.

  Lekapenos fell between the two rebellions, in 985. He was accused of plotting with the rebels and punished with exile and the confiscation of his property.

  The advice that Psellos records Skleros giving to Basil after his defeat is one of the most striking passages in the Chronographia. Skleros told him to cut down governors who became over-proud, to give generals on campaign too few resources, to exhaust them with unjust exactions, to admit no woman to the imperial councils, to be accessible to no one, and to share intimate plans with few. Basil took this counsel to heart, and it shaped every subsequent policy toward the aristocracy.

  To defeat the rebellions in the first place, Basil had accepted help from Prince Vladimir I of Kiev, who in 988 had captured Chersonesos, the empire's main base in the Crimean Peninsula. Vladimir offered to evacuate Chersonesos and supply 6,000 soldiers. His price was marriage to Basil's younger sister Anna.

• 5. Anna, Vladimir, and Christendom's Eastern Branch

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  Anna was a porphyrogenita, born to a reigning emperor, and no Byzantine princess of that rank had ever been given to a foreign ruler. The Byzantines classified the peoples of Northern Europe, Franks and Slavs alike, as barbarians. Anna objected. The imperial annals offered no precedent.

  Vladimir, for his part, had been investigating religions. He had sent delegates to various countries. Marriage was not his primary reason for choosing Christianity. When he promised to baptize himself and convert his people, Basil finally agreed. Vladimir and Anna were married in Crimea in 989.

  The 6,000 Rus' warriors who came with the arrangement proved decisive in suppressing the rebellions of Skleros and Phokas. They were later organized into the Varangian Guard, the elite unit that would serve Byzantine emperors for generations and save Basil himself at the Battle of the Gates of Trajan.

  The longer consequences were vast. The marriage of Anna and Vladimir marked the beginning of the process by which the Grand Duchy of Moscow, many centuries later, would proclaim itself the Third Rome and claim the political and cultural heritage of Byzantium. The Christianization of Kievan Rus' pulled its successor states into the Byzantine cultural and religious tradition. Basil had traded his sister's marriage for soldiers. He had also, without quite intending it, drawn the religious map of Eastern Europe for the next millennium.

  Rosemary Sutcliff's 1976 novel Blood Feud depicts Basil from the point of view of a member of his newly created Varangian Guard, a perspective that captures how the arrangement must have appeared at ground level: a foreign mercenary unit at the heart of the most sophisticated court in the world.

• 6. The Bulgar Slayer

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  On the 29th of July 1014, at the Battle of Kleidion, Basil and his general Nikephoros Xiphias outmaneuvered the Bulgarian army defending one of its fortified mountain passes. Samuel of Bulgaria, who had extended his rule from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea, narrowly escaped capture through the valor of his son Gabriel.

  What followed is the act that gave Basil his epithet. He was said to have captured 15,000 prisoners. He had 99 of every 100 men fully blinded, leaving one one-eyed man in each cohort to lead the rest back to Samuel. A possible reason the source offers is that in Byzantine eyes the Bulgarians were rebels against imperial authority, and blinding was the standard punishment for rebels. Samuel was struck down by the sight of his returning army. He suffered a stroke and died two days later, on the 6th of October 1014.

  The road to Kleidion had been long. Basil had first attempted to besiege Sredets, the city now called Sofia, in 986, with a 30,000-strong army. He had to lift that siege and on the retreat fell into an ambush at the Battle of the Gates of Trajan, escaping only with the help of his Varangian Guard. Samuel had meanwhile raided as far as central Greece. In 996, the Byzantine general Nikephoros Ouranos defeated a Bulgarian force at the Battle of Spercheios in Thessaly.

  Beginning in 1000, Basil prosecuted a grinding war of conquest. His generals took Great Preslav, the former Bulgarian capital. Working from Thessalonica in 1001, he recovered Vodena, Verrhoia, and Servia. He cut communications between Samuel's Macedonian heartland and the lands south of the lower Danube. Samuel raided Adrianople; Basil intercepted him near Skopje and stormed the Bulgarian camp, recovering the plunder. Bulgaria submitted in 1018, and for the first time in 400 years the empire held its ancient Danubian frontier.

  Basil's treatment of the defeated Bulgarians was not uniformly cruel. He gave many former Bulgarian leaders court titles, provincial positions, and army commands, aiming to absorb the Bulgarian elite into Byzantine society. He accepted Bulgarian taxes in kind rather than money, recognizing that Bulgaria lacked the monetary economy of Byzantium. His successors reversed that tax policy, a decision that drove the Bulgarian discontent and rebellion that followed in the 11th century.

• 7. The Treasury and the Land Laws

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  By 1025, Basil had accumulated 14.4 million nomismata in the imperial treasury, equivalent to 200,000 pounds or 90 tonnes of gold. His annual revenue stood at 7 million nomismata. These numbers sat against a background of nearly constant warfare, which suggests that the financial achievement was a deliberate policy rather than a windfall.

  The foundation was his war on the great estates. In January 996, Basil issued a legal decree that directly targeted the immense landholdings of the Anatolian aristocracy. Owners who could prove their claim predated the Novels of Romanos were allowed to keep their estates. Those who had illegally seized land afterward would lose it; the original legal owners could reclaim it. This was not a theoretical policy. Lekapenos had already been stripped of his property in 985. The decree put a structural limit on how much the wealthy could accumulate.

  In 1002, Basil introduced the allelengyon, a tax that required the dynatoi, the wealthy landholders, to cover the tax arrears of their poorer neighbors. It was unpopular with the aristocracy. Basil did not abolish it. The emperor Romanos III abolished it in 1028, three years after Basil's death.

  In 992, Basil had also negotiated a commercial treaty with the Doge of Venice, Pietro II Orseolo. Venice's customs duties in Constantinople were reduced from 30 nomismata to 17 nomismata. In exchange, the Venetians agreed to transport Byzantine troops to southern Italy in times of war. The source notes that this arrangement also began the slow decline of the Byzantine navy, as the practice of relying on Venice for sea power meant the empire invested less in its own fleet during the 11th century.

  Basil took the children of dead army officers under his protection and paid for their shelter, food, and education. Many of those children became his soldiers and officers. One of them, Isaac Komnenos, later became emperor himself.

• 8. Epitaph and Aftermath

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  Basil died on the 15th of December 1025, preparing a military expedition to recover Sicily. The empire at that moment stretched from southern Italy to the Caucasus and from the Danube to the Levant, its greatest territorial reach since the Muslim conquests four centuries earlier. At the end of his reign, the empire held a population of approximately 12 million people.

  He had originally planned to be buried in the last sarcophagus available in the rotunda of Constantine I at the Church of the Holy Apostles. He changed his mind and asked his brother Constantine VIII to bury him instead at the Church of St. John the Theologian at the Hebdomon Palace complex, outside Constantinople's walls. The inscription on the tomb spoke in the first person: no one saw my spear lie idle.

  He left no heirs. The Macedonian dynasty passed to his brother Constantine and then to a succession of largely ineffective rulers. Yet fifty years of relative prosperity followed his death, because the treasury was full, the borders held, and the institutions Basil had built continued to function. The Battle of Manzikert in 1071 undid much of what he had achieved in Georgia, Armenia, and on the Fatimid frontier, when governors pulled their troops to Constantinople to fight a succession crisis and left the Anatolian frontier undefended against the Seljuk Empire. The Normans permanently pushed the Byzantines from southern Italy in April 1071.

  In Greece, he became a national hero. In Bulgaria, Alexander Kiossev noted in Understanding the Balkans that the hero of one nation is the villain of its neighbor, and that Basil the Murderer of Bulgarians, a central figure in the Greek pantheon, is equally central as an object of hatred in Bulgarian national memory. Ion Dragoumis, writing in 1907 at the height of the Struggle for Macedonia, urged Greeks to follow Basil's example and went further than Basil himself had gone, in a passage that speaks to how the memory of the blinding at Kleidion persisted and mutated in the centuries after his death.