Basil II

Basil II was emperor of the Byzantine Empire from 976 to 1025, the longest reign of any Roman or Byzantine emperor. After surviving two great aristocratic rebellions, he spent decades at war, conquered the Bulgarian state after a struggle of almost thirty years, and extended imperial rule into the Caucasus. When he died, the empire was at its greatest extent since the Arab conquests of the seventh century, and its treasury was full. Later generations knew him as Boulgaroktonos, the "Bulgar-slayer".

Basil was born in 958, the elder son of the emperor Romanos II and his wife Theophano, and so a member of the Macedonian dynasty. Because he was born to a reigning emperor, he was called porphyrogennetos, "born in the purple". He was crowned co-emperor as a small child, but when his father died in 963 he and his younger brother Constantine were too young to rule. Power passed first to the general Nikephoros II Phokas, who married Theophano, and then, after Nikephoros was murdered in 969, to another general, John I Tzimiskes. Both ruled as senior emperors while the boys remained nominal co-rulers. They were successful soldiers, recovering Crete, Cyprus and Antioch and destroying the eastern Bulgarian state.

When John died in 976, Basil, now about eighteen, became senior emperor, but real authority lay with his great-uncle Basil Lekapenos, a eunuch who held the office of parakoimomenos, chief chamberlain. In 985 the emperor had him dismissed and exiled, and from then on ruled in person.

Basil's first years were dominated by rebellion. The wealthy military families of Asia Minor saw no reason why a young prince with no military record should rule over them. In 976 the general Bardas Skleros rose in revolt and controlled much of Anatolia for three years, until he was defeated in 979 by Bardas Phokas, nephew of the former emperor, fighting for the government with Georgian help. In 987 Phokas himself rebelled, and the two rebels briefly joined forces. Phokas's army advanced to the Asian shore opposite Constantinople, modern Istanbul.

Basil found help in the north. Vladimir, prince of Kievan Rus', sent about 6,000 warriors in return for the hand of Basil's sister Anna, a remarkable concession, since Byzantine princesses born in the purple were not normally married to foreign rulers. Vladimir accepted baptism, and his conversion brought Christianity in its Orthodox form to the Rus', with lasting consequences for the religious and cultural history of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. With the help of these troops, Basil defeated the rebels at Chrysopolis in 988 and at Abydos in 989, where Phokas died suddenly, perhaps of a stroke. Skleros submitted soon afterwards. The Rus' soldiers became the core of the Varangian Guard, the emperors' elite bodyguard for the next two centuries.

The revolts left Basil distrustful of the great landowning families. In 996 he issued a law restricting the ability of these "powerful" families to acquire the land of peasant communities, and allowing the state to reclaim property taken illegally, even generations earlier. He later made the rich responsible for the unpaid taxes of their poorer neighbours.

Basil's longest war was against Bulgaria, which had revived in the west of the Balkans under the four brothers known as the Kometopouloi, of whom Samuel became sole ruler. In 986 Basil besieged Serdica, modern Sofia, without success, and on his retreat his army was ambushed in the pass known as the Gates of Trajan and badly defeated. Samuel then expanded his power across much of the Balkans, raiding Greece as far as the Peloponnese.

From around 1000 Basil returned to the war with greater determination, campaigning year after year and capturing fortresses one by one. He took Pliska and Preslav in the east, Vidin on the Danube after an eight-month siege, and Skopje, today in North Macedonia. The decisive blow came on 29 July 1014 at Kleidion, in the mountains near the Strymon river, where Byzantine troops outflanked the Bulgarian army holding a fortified pass. According to the chronicler John Skylitzes, writing later in the century, Basil had about 15,000 prisoners blinded, leaving one man in every hundred with one eye to lead the others home, and Samuel died of shock when he saw them. Historians accept that a mass blinding took place but consider the numbers likely to be exaggerated. The Bulgarian state fought on for four more years until, in 1018, the last members of its ruling family surrendered and Basil entered the capital, Ohrid. Bulgaria was annexed and organised into Byzantine provinces, while the Bulgarian church kept a degree of autonomy under an archbishop at Ohrid. Basil celebrated by visiting Athens, where he gave thanks in the Parthenon, then a church of the Virgin.

The epithet "Bulgar-slayer" is not recorded in his lifetime and appears in the sources only around 1200, when Byzantium again faced a Bulgarian revolt. In modern times his reputation became bound up with rival Greek and Bulgarian nationalisms, and he remains a contested figure in the history of Bulgaria.

Basil also defended the empire's eastern frontier against the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt. In 995, when a Fatimid army besieged Aleppo, a Byzantine protectorate, he marched across Asia Minor with a small force in about sixteen days, an exceptional feat, and the besiegers withdrew. After further campaigning, a ten-year truce was agreed in 1000 and renewed afterwards.

In the Caucasus, Basil acquired the lands of the Georgian prince David of Tao after David's death in 1000, under an earlier agreement. In 1021 and 1022 he campaigned against King George I of Georgia, who had claimed this inheritance, and forced him to give up territory. The Armenian king of Vaspurakan ceded his kingdom to the empire in exchange for estates in Anatolia, and the king of Ani agreed to leave his realm to Byzantium on his death, extending imperial influence deep into Armenia.

Basil never married and had no children, an unusual choice for an emperor that left the succession to his brother Constantine, who had shown little interest in government. The historian Michael Psellos, born a few years before Basil's death, describes him as a stern, short-spoken ruler who despised luxury and literature, lived like a soldier and trusted few advisers. He was careful with money, and Psellos claims that by the end of the reign the treasury held 200,000 pounds of gold, though the figure cannot be checked.

Basil was preparing an expedition to recover Sicily from its Muslim rulers when he died on 15 December 1025, aged about sixty-seven. At his own request he was buried not among earlier emperors in the Church of the Holy Apostles but in the church of Saint John the Theologian at the Hebdomon, outside the city walls, where soldiers paraded. His successors lacked his ability, and within fifty years much of what he had won in the East was lost after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. He is nevertheless regarded as one of the most effective rulers in Byzantine history.