Lars Brownworth - Lost to the West - The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

Eager to prove himself, Basil II found an excellent excuse for a military adventure in Bulgaria. Thanks largely to Byzantium’s distraction, Bulgaria had somehow managed to resurrect itself from its ruined state and expand at imperial expense. A remarkable man named Samuel, the youngest and most capable of the so-called Sons of the Count who had defied Tzimisces, had assumed the title of tsar—the Slavic version of Caesar—and declared a second Bulgarian empire. Conducting summer raids into northern Greece, the tsar managed to capture several key cities, damaging Byzantine prestige and inciting more of his countrymen to join him. Outraged by the temerity of this jumped-up peasant and determined to prove himself worthy of his glorious predecessors, Basil II gathered an army sixty thousand strong and headed for the magnificent Bulgarian city of Sofia.

The campaign was a disaster from the start. After several weeks of annoying the citizens of Sofia with an ineffectual siege, Basil II gave up and started the long march home. Traveling through a mountain pass called the Gates of Trajan without bothering to scout ahead, his army blundered into an ambush by the amused tsar, who had been watching for just such an opportunity. Leaving his insignia behind, the emperor managed to escape, but most of his army was cut to pieces. The twenty-eight-year-old Basil II had stumbled badly, and when he returned to Constantinople, frightened and humiliated, the damage to his prestige was immediately apparent.

To old Bardas Sclerus, watching from the safety of the caliph’s court in Baghdad, it was obvious that he had been right all along. The bumbling boy in Constantinople who happened to have the right parents didn’t deserve the throne after all, and with his incompetence now starkly revealed, surely an old warhorse like himself would be welcomed with open arms. The caliph was only too happy to provide funding for a campaign that promised to be extremely disruptive to his powerful neighbor, and so, loaded down with money, Bardas Sclerus made his third bid for the throne.

Annoyingly enough for the hopeful pretender, when he reached Asia Minor he discovered that his old rival Bardas Phocas had also rebelled. Rather than fight it out, the two decided to bury the hatchet and pool their resources, but this proved to be just a ruse, and the moment Sclerus lowered his guard Phocas had him arrested and thrown into a dungeon. With that unpleasantness behind him, Bardas Phocas gathered his cheering army and lumbered off toward Constantinople. Unfortunately for the rebels, however, Phocas lacked a navy, and when they reached the Bosporus it was to find the imperial fleet patrolling both coasts.

But nothing seemed able to dent Bardas Phocas’s optimism. He was well aware that the master of Constantinople was a mere boy of twenty-eight whose only military experience had been to get his army annihilated in an ambush. Bardas Phocas, on the other hand, had seen a lifetime of impressive victories on the field, and historians were even now writing of him that “whole armies trembled at his shout.”

In the capital, Basil II knew the deck was stacked against him. He had lost his best troops in the ill-advised Bulgarian campaign, and the emboldened Tsar Samuel was raging unchecked through the Balkans, threatening to overrun the entire peninsula. Something clearly needed to be done soon, but even if the emperor somehow managed to scrape together an army, there wasn’t anyone to lead it—certainly not a general of Phocas’s caliber. The only solution was to enlist a formidable ally, and fortunately there was one close at hand. The emperor contacted the Russian prince Vladimir and offered the hand of his sister in exchange for an alliance.

The staid imperial court was horrified. As Basil’s own grand father Constantine VII had pointed out, Byzantine princesses “born in the purple” ranked with Greek fire as state treasures never to be handed over to its enemies. Furious patricians pointed out that no Roman princess in the history of the empire had ever been given to a pagan barbarian, and certainly not to one who already had plenty of wives and several hundred concubines. Now Basil II was threatening to trample Byzantine pride under the feet of the uncivilized Slavs. But neither the outraged cries of the court nor the anguished sobs of his sister had any effect on the emperor. Marriage in the imperial family had always been more of a political than a personal matter, and when Vladimir eagerly sweetened the deal by agreeing to provide six thousand huge Norse warriors in addition to being baptized, Basil’s protesting sister was hastily bundled off to await her new husband’s pleasure. *

The arrangement may have offended popular sentiment in the capital, but Basil was quite pleased with himself when he saw the blond giants that Vladimir sent. Armed with massive double-bladed axes, and subject to the famous beserker rages, they were splendidly terrifying. The emperor was so impressed that he made them his personal bodyguards—a permanent position he called the Varangian Guard. *After slipping across the Bosporus at night with his new force, Basil launched a ferocious dawn attack on the unsuspecting rebel camp. While flamethrowers spraying Greek fire spread chaos, the emperor went crashing through the tents, slaughtering everyone he could find. Those rebels who weren’t half asleep or drunk stumbled to their feet, only to be greeted by the horrible sight of the Norse warriors lopping off the limbs of men and beasts with a hideous efficiency. In a matter of hours, the killing was over, and though Phocas himself was away with a large part of the army besieging a city, Basil II could at last claim a victory in the field.

A few months later, the newly confident emperor got a chance to face his rival directly, and to the surprise of nearly everyone involved, he turned out to be a considerably better general than the aging Bardas Phocas. Seeing his imperial dreams slipping away just when they were within his grasp was too much for the old rebel, and he roared out a challenge of single combat, charging toward the emperor and wildly swinging his sword above his head. Before he had closed half the distance, a sudden seizure gripped him and Phocas fell heavily from his saddle. The watching imperial guards leaped on the paralyzed general, chopping off his head, and at the sight of their master’s gruesome death, the rebel army disintegrated.

The great revolt was broken, but it wasn’t quite over. The moment she heard of her husband’s death, Phocas’s widow set the imprisoned Bardas Sclerus free, and the surviving rebels flocked to his standard. The old general accepted the acclamations of his troops, and for a moment it looked as if the civil war would drag on, but Sclerus was a tired, broken man, by now nearly completely blind. After a brief show of resistance, he happily accepted the emperor’s offer of a fancy title and a comfortable estate. When the two met to discuss their treaty at one of the emperor’s sumptuous villas, Basil was surprised to see that the celebrated general was a rather sad-looking, bent old man who had to be supported on either side in order to walk. After graciously pretending that the whole rebellion had been a simple misunderstanding, Basil asked his guest for advice on how to prevent dissension in the future. The answer, he was told, was to declare a virtual war on those of noble birth. “Exhaust them with unjust exactions, to keep them busy with their own affairs. Admit no woman to the imperial councils. Be accessible to no one. Share with few your most intimate plans.” *

No emperor in the long and illustrious history of the empire would ever take such advice closer to heart. The vicious civil wars had left their scars on Basil II, wiping away the carefree spirit he had shown as a youth and leaving a hard, untrusting man in its place. Surrounded by his Varangian Guard, he dedicated himself unswervingly to the service of the empire. Nothing—neither the outcries of the aristocracy nor the spears of his enemies—would be allowed to get in the way.