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

By strengthening the empire’s land laws, Basil II forced the nobility to return—without compensation—any land they had taken since the reign of Romanus Lecapenus. He also decreed that if a peasant couldn’t pay his taxes, his rich neighbors would have to come up with the money for him. Predictably, the nobility howled with outrage, but Basil II ignored them. His entire life had been spent in the shadows of overpowerful aristocrats; their grasping ambitions had troubled the Macedonian dynasty for long enough. Now that he was firmly in control, he meant to see that they would never have the opportunity to do so again.

By the spring of 991, the emperor was finally secure enough to begin the great endeavor of his life. He hadn’t forgotten the humiliations of the Gates of Trajan, or how Samuel had laughed at Byzantine arms, and the time had come to tame the Bulgarian wolf. He moved with an agonizing slowness—there was no point in risking another ambush. Every route was checked and double-checked, and close tabs were kept on possible escape routes.

Tsar Samuel watched it all with some amusement from the safety of the mountains. He had no reason to fear a man he had so effortlessly beaten years before, and if the emperor’s army was large, he could take comfort from the fact that it would soon be gone. The empire was a large place, with enemies on every side. All he had to do was stay out of the way and before long a crisis on some far-flung frontier was sure to force the Byzantines to leave. The tsar had seen invaders like this emperor before—one moment all flash and thunder, and the next moment gone.

Sure enough, less than a year after Basil had entered Bulgarian territory, a breathless message reached him that the Fatimids were besieging Aleppo and threatening Antioch. Those cities—and all of northern Syria—were on the brink of surrender, but there seemed little hope of reaching them in time since the journey would take the better part of three months. Basil II had so far only moved with glacial slowness, but he had spent his life surprising people and with the help of eighty thousand mules (one for each soldier, another for each man’s equipment) he made the trip in an extraordinary sixteen days. Terrified by the Byzantine army that had seemed to materialize out of thin air, the Fatimid army fled, and Basil II marched triumphantly down the coast, conquering the city of Tripoli for good measure.

When the emperor returned home, it was to find that Tsar Samuel had taken advantage of his absence to overrun Bosnia and Dalmatia, even raiding as far south as the Peloponnese. With virtually any other ruler on the Byzantine throne, Samuel’s strategy of hiding in the hills until the danger had passed would have worked brilliantly. Against Basil II, however, the tactic only prolonged Bulgarian suffering. True enough, Basil had none of the panache or brilliance of his two predecessors, but he was far more dangerous than either of them. Other men campaigned from the middle of the spring to the end of the summer, but on returning to face the tsar, Basil II stayed in the field year-round, equally impervious to the freezing snow and the blazing sun. With his grinding, methodical nature, he never lost patience or resolve. Year after year, Bulgarian cities were sacked and their crops burned as the emperor relentlessly hunted Tsar Samuel. Finally, after nearly twenty years of defeats and devastating invasions, the Bulgarian army took a last stand. On the morning of July 29, 1014, the two armies clashed in a valley at the foot of the Belasica Mountains, and the result was a crushing Byzantine victory.

Samuel escaped to a nearby fortress, proclaiming that he would carry on the fight, but Basil was in no mood to let that happen. He had fifteen hundred prisoners blinded—sparing one eye in every hundred men so that they could lead their sightless companions back to the tsar. Mutilation had always been the preferred Byzantine treatment of its dangerous enemies, but never on such a scale, and from it Basil earned the nickname that is still celebrated in the street names of modern Greece. Down through the centuries the emperor would thereafter be known by the sobriquet Boulgaroktonos —the “Bulgar Slayer.”

The ragged horde shuffled its way to the city of Prespa in modern-day Macedonia, where Samuel was staying. The horrible sight was even more devastating than Basil intended. Their very presence was a constant reminder of Samuel’s humiliation, and their care was an added burden that the ravaged state couldn’t afford. When they appeared before their tsar, the terrible sight was too much for the broken Samuel to bear. He turned his face to the wall and expired in shame two days later. The second Bulgarian empire struggled on for another four years without its founder, but the handwriting was on the wall, and in 1018 Basil II entered the Bulgarian capital and received its complete surrender.

For the first time since the Slavs had invaded the empire four centuries before, the entire Balkan Peninsula was under imperial control. Basil II had spent more than half his life in its conquest, capping a remarkable resurgence of Byzantine power brought about by the extraordinary Macedonian dynasty. The empire had almost doubled in size, emerging as the strongest power in the Mediterranean, and its new territories would not be easily relinquished. Unlike his predecessors, Basil II understood that quick gains seldom lasted unless they were properly consolidated and governed. Under previous emperors, conquered peoples had been made perfectly aware that they were second-class citizens, but now Bulgarian nobles were given Byzantine wives and imperial titles, and taxes were helpfully relaxed in regions that had been devastated by war. Such examples of good governance certainly reduced tensions and strengthened ties to Constantinople, but above all it was the emperor’s refusal to indulge in unnecessary risks that contributed the most to maintaining peace. When the Fatimid caliph ordered all churches in his territory destroyed in 1012, Basil refused to take the bait—although he could certainly have extended Byzantine power into Palestine and even Egypt. Instead, he responded with an economic blow, banning all trade with the Fatimids until they saw the error of their ways. Only when they allied with Armenia to attack the empire did he come sweeping down to sack a few cities and panic the caliph. When it came to war, Basil was always willing but never eager to fight.

In one area only did the great emperor disastrously fail. Absorbed by the cares of state, he never produced an heir, but though this would prove to be calamitous for the empire, it didn’t appear so in his lifetime. By 1025, in the steady hands of its all-powerful emperor, the Byzantine eagle was triumphant on virtually every frontier. Its enemies were scattered and broken before it, and only in Sicily did the Muslim foe continue to resist. Hoping to correct that final oversight, the seventy-year-old emperor gathered a vast army and sent it under the care of a eunuch to await his arrival in Calabria. Basil II, however, never arrived. After a sixty-four-year reign—longer than any other monarch in Roman history—he died, fittingly enough, while planning the campaign.

Constantine the Great had set up twelve massive sarcophagi around his own magnificent tomb in the Church of the Holy Apostles, and the bodies of the greatest Byzantine emperors were traditionally laid to rest inside them. In 1025, there was one last unused sarcophagus, and by all rights Basil should have been buried there; but according to his own wishes, the body was taken to a church in Hebdomon just outside the city walls. Though there were few emperors who better deserved to be buried alongside the giants of the past, his final resting place was somehow fitting. He had always remained aloof from his citizens, never allowing himself to become distracted from the all-important task of running the empire. He had bent foreign rulers to his will, humbled his enemies, and provided a shield for the poor against the clutches of the aristocracy. Yet for all that, he was oddly distant, inspiring admiration in his subjects, but never love. His mind had always been uniquely un-Byzantine, cast more in the mold of his Spartan ancestors than the murky theological speculations of his peers. As the old rebel had advised him so many years ago, no woman or man was ever offered a share in his burdens. Through all the trials of his reign, he remained splendid but remote—surely the loneliest figure ever to sit on the Byzantine throne.