Sviatoslav's invasion of Bulgaria

• 1. Introduction

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  Sviatoslav's invasion of Bulgaria began as one empire's clever scheme to avoid fighting its own wars. In late 966 or early 967, the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas dispatched a diplomat named Kalokyros to the court of Sviatoslav, ruler of the Kievan Rus'. The payment on offer, according to Leo the Deacon, was 1,500 pounds of gold. The task: convince the fierce Rus' prince to sweep down from the north and humble the Bulgarian Empire, which bordered Byzantium to the west. What followed was a cascade of consequences that none of the parties had anticipated. A proxy war became a conquest. An ally became an enemy. And a ceremony in Constantinople would publicly strip a tsar of his crown and dedicate his imperial regalia to God. How three empires collided across the Balkan peninsula, and how a scheme for easy diplomacy ended with Bulgaria absorbed into Byzantium, is a story of ambition badly miscalculated.

• 2. Forty Years of Peace

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  Tsar Simeon of Bulgaria died in May 927, and the political landscape of the Balkans shifted almost immediately. His son Peter I took the throne and married Maria, the granddaughter of Byzantine emperor Romanos I Lekapenos, forging a marriage alliance that ended decades of war. Bulgaria's imperial title was recognized, and Byzantium agreed to pay an annual tribute. Both sides called it a subsidy for Maria's upkeep, a polite fiction that let Byzantium avoid the appearance of paying tribute to a rival. The arrangement held for almost forty years. Peter's reign lacked the military drama of his father's but earned the description of a "golden age" for Bulgaria, with a prospering economy and a thriving urban society. Meanwhile, Byzantium turned its energy eastward. Generals John Kourkouas and Nikephoros Phokas led campaigns that won back vast territory from the Abbasid Caliphate, and the imperial army was reformed into a sharper, more offensively capable force. Byzantium also worked quietly to encircle Bulgaria. Their outpost at Cherson on the Crimean coast kept trade ties with the Pechenegs and the rising Kievan Rus'. Byzantine missionaries oversaw the Christianization of the Magyars. The Slavic princes of the western Balkans slipped back under Byzantine influence, particularly after Časlav Klonimirović broke Bulgarian control over Serbia. Provoking Pecheneg and Khazar attacks on Bulgaria was, as the Byzantines knew well, a proven method of pressure. By 965, Empress Maria was dead, and Nikephoros II decided the tribute no longer needed to be paid.

• 3. The Proxy Gambit

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  Nikephoros met a Bulgarian embassy in late 965 or early 966 and responded to their request for the customary tribute by having the envoys beaten and sent home with threats. He then marched his army to Thrace, staged a military parade, and sacked a handful of Bulgarian border forts. His anger was also partly triggered by a treaty Tsar Peter had recently signed with the Magyars, allowing them to cross Bulgaria freely and raid Byzantine territory in exchange for leaving Bulgaria alone. Nikephoros was not, however, willing to fight Bulgaria directly. His armies were committed in the East, and the mountainous, heavily forested Bulgarian terrain made a conventional campaign unappealing. Instead he reached for an older tool: hiring a foreign power to do the fighting for him. Sviatoslav was in some ways an unconventional choice for this role. The Byzantines had traditionally used the Pechenegs as their proxy against Bulgaria. But the historian A.D. Stokes noted a likely second motive: Sviatoslav had recently destroyed the Khazar khanate, and turning his attention south and away from Cherson, the Byzantine trading post in Crimea, may have suited Nikephoros well. The patrikios Kalokyros carried the offer north, and Sviatoslav accepted with enthusiasm. Tsar Peter, alarmed, sent his two sons Boris and Roman to Constantinople as hostages. The gesture did not stop what was coming.

• 4. Conquest of the Northeast

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  In August of 967 or 968, Sviatoslav led his forces across the Danube into Bulgaria. A Bulgarian army of 30,000 men met them at the Battle of Silistra and was defeated. The Bulgarian historian Vasil Zlatarski recorded that Sviatoslav then seized 80 towns in northeastern Bulgaria. Most were looted and destroyed rather than garrisoned permanently. Tsar Peter I suffered an epileptic stroke when news of the defeat reached him. The Rus' wintered at Pereyaslavets while the Bulgarians retreated into the fortress of Dorostolon. The following year, Sviatoslav pulled back temporarily to deal with a Pecheneg assault on his capital at Kiev, an attack the Primary Chronicle attributed to Bulgarian instigation, though others suspected Byzantine involvement. While Sviatoslav was away, Peter sent a new embassy to Constantinople. Liutprand of Cremona recorded that these envoys, unlike their predecessors who had been beaten, were now received with great honour. Nikephoros, emboldened, demanded steep terms: Peter was to abdicate in favour of his son Boris, and the two young Byzantine princes Basil and Constantine were to marry Bulgarian princesses. Peter entered a monastery and died there in 969. Boris II was released from Byzantine custody and recognized as tsar. For a brief moment, the scheme seemed to have worked. Sviatoslav's campaign had broken Bulgarian power, installed a compliant ruler, and cost Byzantium little beyond a payment of gold. But Sviatoslav had tasted the richness of the Balkan lands, and he was not going home.

• 5. A Kingdom Seized

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  In the summer of 969, Sviatoslav returned to Bulgaria at the head of a larger force that included Pecheneg and Magyar allies. During his absence, Bulgarian forces had recovered Pereyaslavets and pushed back the remaining Rus' garrisons. Sviatoslav fought his way back in, storming Preslav after forcing the Bulgarians to retreat inside it. Boris II was kept on as a nominal ruler under Sviatoslav's control. He served as a useful face of continuity, retained specifically to reduce Bulgarian resentment at the Rus' presence. Bulgarian soldiers joined Sviatoslav's army in considerable numbers, drawn partly by the promise of plunder but also by his openly anti-Byzantine aims and probably by a sense of shared Slavic identity. Sviatoslav made a deliberate effort to retain their loyalty: he prohibited looting of the countryside and the plundering of cities that surrendered without resistance. The situation Nikephoros had engineered had inverted entirely. Instead of a weakened Bulgaria on Byzantium's northern border, there was now a unified Russo-Bulgarian force poised to drive south. Nikephoros tried and failed to get the Bulgarians to turn on the Rus' again. On the 11th of December 969, he was murdered in a palace coup and replaced by John I Tzimiskes, who inherited the crisis. Tzimiskes sent envoys to negotiate. Sviatoslav's reply was a demand for an enormous sum, and a threat: if Byzantium could not pay, it should abandon its European territories entirely and retreat to Asia Minor. His co-conspirator Kalokyros, the original Byzantine envoy who had recruited him, apparently coveted the Byzantine throne for himself and had encouraged these ambitions.

• 6. The Byzantine Counterstrike

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  In early 970, the Rus' army crossed the Balkan mountain passes heading south, accompanied by Bulgarians, Pechenegs, and Magyars. Leo the Deacon recorded that when they stormed Philippopolis, now the city of Plovdiv, they impaled 20,000 of its surviving inhabitants. Tzimiskes was not yet ready to face Sviatoslav personally. He assigned the Domestic of the Schools Bardas Skleros and the eunuch stratopedarch Peter to manage the war in the Balkans. Skleros met the Rus' advance near Arcadiopolis, now called Luleburgaz, in early spring 970. His force of 10,000-12,000 men was heavily outnumbered. He used a feigned retreat to lure the Pecheneg contingent away from the main Rus' body and into a prepared ambush. The Pecheneg force was destroyed, the main Rus' army panicked and fled, and the Byzantines pressed hard. The Rus' pulled back north of the Balkan range. Tzimiskes used the breathing room to suppress the revolt of Bardas Phokas and assemble a proper invasion force. In early 971 he moved troops from Asia to Thrace, gathered siege equipment, and arranged for the Byzantine navy to transport soldiers for a landing behind enemy lines. He chose Easter week of 971 to strike. The Balkan passes had been left unguarded. A.D. Stokes suggested this was because a preliminary peace agreement after Arcadiopolis had made the Rus' complacent; others point to the Rus' being tied down suppressing Bulgarian revolts. Either way, Tzimiskes' army of 30,000-40,000 men reached Preslav without being challenged.

• 7. The Siege of Dorostolon

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  On the 13th of April 971, Byzantine forces stormed Preslav. The Rus' and Bulgarian garrison under the noble Sphangel had held out with determination, but the city fell. Boris II, his family, and the Bulgarian imperial regalia were taken. The main Rus' force under Sviatoslav had already withdrawn toward Dorostolon on the Danube. Along the way, fearing a Bulgarian uprising behind his lines, Sviatoslav executed 300 Bulgarian nobles and imprisoned many others. The Bulgarian garrisons of the forts between Preslav and Dorostolon, by contrast, surrendered peacefully to the advancing Byzantines. Outside Dorostolon, the two armies met in a pitched battle. Tzimiskes broke the Rus' resistance by ordering his heavy cataphract cavalry forward, and the Rus' retreated inside the fortress. The siege that followed lasted three months. Byzantine ships blockaded the Danube while troops ringed the fortress by land. The Rus' attempted multiple sallies; three major pitched battles were fought outside the walls, all of which ended in Byzantine victories. The final battle in late July was particularly brutal. By its end, Byzantine chroniclers reported that only 22,000 of an original Rus' force of 60,000 survived. Sviatoslav negotiated terms. His army was permitted to leave with their lives, but they had to surrender all captives and plunder. Their trading rights with Byzantium were restored in exchange for an oath never again to attack imperial territory. Sviatoslav did not live long enough to consider breaking that oath: he was killed in a Pecheneg ambush on his return journey, at the river Dnieper.

• 8. The End of Bulgarian Independence

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  Tzimiskes returned to Constantinople in triumph, and the procession he staged was deliberate in its symbolism. He entered the city through the Golden Gate behind a wagon carrying an icon of the Virgin Mary and the Bulgarian imperial regalia. Boris II and his family walked behind the emperor. At the Forum of Constantine, Boris was publicly stripped of his imperial insignia. At the church of Hagia Sophia, the Bulgarian crown was dedicated to God. Tzimiskes installed Byzantine generals along the Danube in eastern Bulgaria. Preslav was renamed Ioannopolis in the emperor's honour. Dorostolon, or possibly Pereyaslavets, was renamed Theodoropolis after St. Theodore the Stratelate, who was believed to have intervened in the final battle. The Bulgarian patriarchate was demoted to an archbishopric answerable to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Bulgarian nobles and members of the royal family were relocated to Constantinople and Asia Minor. The region around Philippopolis was resettled with Armenians. But Tzimiskes, like Nikephoros before him, cared more about the East than the Balkans. No sustained effort was made to extend Byzantine control into the north-central Balkans and Macedonia, where neither Rus' nor imperial troops had ever really operated. Local Bulgarian elites remained in charge there. When Tzimiskes died in 976, a Bulgarian resistance coalesced around the four sons of a count named Nicholas, who became known as the Cometopuli. One of them, Samuel, was crowned Tsar in 997 and launched raiding campaigns as far south as the Peloponnese. He fought Basil II across decades of war, and when Basil finally conquered Bulgaria in 1018, the Byzantines never recognized Samuel as a legitimate ruler. In their eyes, the Bulgarian state had ended at the Forum of Constantine in 971, the day a crown was laid at the feet of God.