The Bulgar-Slayer: The Battle That Killed a Tsar Without Touching Him

In the summer of 1014, Byzantine Emperor Basil II was at the age of fifty-six and had ruled the Byzantine Empire for the last thirty-eight years. But he had not yet fought the battle that would brand him "Bulgar-Slayer".

1. Three centuries of war

To understand what happened in the pass at Kleidion, you have to look back more than three centuries.

The Bulgars crossed the Danube and entered Byzantine territory for the first time under Khan Asparuh in 680. The first formal admission that the empire could not push them out was the treaty that Constantine IV signed with them a year later, recognizing their settlement in former Byzantine provinces. That was the starting point for Constantinople and the Bulgar khanate — later tsardom — to fight, intermarry, trade, and engage in a constant struggle to subdue and convert one another for over three hundred years.

Decades of brutal and dramatic wars followed. In 811, the Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros I was ambushed by Khan Krum in a mountain pass not unlike Kleidion, and after being killed, his skull was turned into a silver-lined drinking cup. In 864, Khan Boris accepted baptism from Constantinople and took the emperor's own name, becoming Boris-Michael. The conversion did not bring an end to the wars. Instead, it turned them into a longer argument about who was the true heir of Christian Rome in the East.

That argument reached its peak under Tsar Symeon the Great (893–927), who marched on Constantinople, demanded the title Emperor of the Bulgarians and Romans, and forced the Patriarch to crown him. Under Symeon, Bulgaria expanded from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. But soon after his death the empire fractured, and in 971 the Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes annexed its eastern half. It seemed the Bulgarian state was finished.

It was not. In the western highlands, four brothers known as the Cometopuli, who were sons of a provincial governor, gathered the resistance. The youngest, Samuel, would outlive his brothers, rebuild the kingdom and resume the fight against the old enemy.

2. The long duel

The two leaders, Samuel and Basil II, were almost the same age, and would spend their lives at war.

The Byzantine Emperor suffered a catastrophic defeat at their first major encounter in 986. Basil's army was trapped and slaughtered in the pass of Trajan's Gate, while returning from a failed siege of Sofia. Had it not been for the help of his Armenian guards, Basil himself would not have escaped. He was twenty-eight, and he would never forget it.

He pursued Samuel for the next three decades, with a methodical hatred unusual even for that age. Almost every summer he campaigned in the Balkans. He conquered fortresses one by one and constantly cultivated turncoats inside the Bulgarian elite. He had not forgotten Trajan's Gate; he ground his enemy down. By 1014, he had managed to shrink Samuel's territory to the strongholds of Macedonia. Basil was in his fifties, Samuel in his sixties, and their long duel was reaching its end.

3. Kleidion

By the summer of 1014, Samuel had been on the defensive for years. Basil's annual campaigns had eaten at his territory fortress by fortress, and the old tsar — he was now in his sixties, and the war had aged him — chose to make his stand where the geography would do the work his army could no longer do alone. The pass through Mount Belasitsa, in what is now the border region between Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and Greece, was narrow, wooded, and easily fortified. The Byzantines called it Kleidion, the Key. The name was apt: whoever held the pass held the route between Macedonia and the Strymon valley, and from the Strymon valley the road to Constantinople. Samuel built timber walls across the gorge, garrisoned them heavily, and waited.

The strategy was sound. A frontal assault on a fortified pass was suicide, and Basil knew it. The Byzantine column ground to a halt against the wooden walls and took losses. For several days the emperor probed and waited. He had been campaigning in the Balkans for nearly thirty years; he was not in a hurry. He was preparing for a longer siege when one of his generals, Nikephoros Xiphias, came to him with a proposal: there was a path over the mountain. A detachment could climb it, descend behind the Bulgarian camp, and attack from the rear.

Basil agreed. On July 29, while the Byzantine main force resumed its assault on the walls, Xiphias appeared on the slopes above the Bulgarian camp and came down through the trees. The Bulgarians, caught between the gorge and the mountain, broke. Samuel himself nearly fell into Byzantine hands. His son, Gabriel Radomir, fought his way to him, pulled him onto a horse, and rode out of the disaster toward the fortress of Prilep. Behind them, the army of the Cometopuli ceased to exist as a fighting force.

Then came the part that made the legend.

Samuel was at Prilep when the procession arrived. The chroniclers say he watched his army return as a river of darkness — men chained together in groups of one hundred, every man blind, except for one in each hundred, left with a single eye to lead the rest home. They say he collapsed where he stood, and that he died two days later, on October 6, 1014. He was sixty-six. The cause of death is given variously as stroke, heart failure, or simply grief. Whatever it was, his war had ended forty miles from the field where it was lost. The man who had spent forty years rebuilding a kingdom from a corner of the Macedonian highlands died staring at the result of a single afternoon.

4. What followed

The Bulgarian state did not survive him long. Samuel's son Gabriel Radomir succeeded him and tried to negotiate, but he was murdered within a year by his cousin John Vladislav, who continued the war. John Vladislav was killed in 1018 while besieging the coastal fortress of Dyrrachium, and with his death the resistance collapsed. Basil entered Ohrid in triumph that summer. The widowed queen Maria, the patriarch David, and the surviving Bulgarian nobility came out to meet him. He accepted their submission, dissolved the Bulgarian state, and went home. He had spent thirty-two years on this single campaign. He was now in his sixties himself.

For the first time since Heraclius, four centuries earlier, Constantinople ruled the entire Balkan peninsula. Three new themes — Bulgaria, Sirmium, Paristrion — extended imperial administration to the Danube. Basil's terms for the conquered were unusually mild. The Archbishopric of Ohrid kept its autonomy. Bulgarian taxes continued to be paid in kind, in grain and livestock, rather than in coin. He understood, as his successors did not, that a conquered people punished too harshly will rebel. He left behind, also, an empire larger than any of his predecessors had ruled in three centuries, a treasury full enough to fund his successors' incompetence for a generation, and an army that would not be matched again until it was lost at Manzikert in 1071. Within a generation of his death, in 1040, Bulgaria was rising again under Peter Delyan. In 1185 the brothers Asen would restore an independent Bulgarian state. The memory of Kleidion did not fade. For the Bulgarians, 1014 became what 1453 would later become for the Greeks — a wound that named generations.

5. The man and the name

Basil II remains a strange figure even by Byzantine standards. He never married. He fathered no heir. He dressed plainly, ate among his soldiers on campaign, and according to Psellos, who preserved his portrait a generation later, he could be charming but rarely chose to be. He died in 1025, eleven years after Kleidion, while planning a campaign to recover Sicily from the Arabs. He was sixty-seven. He had been emperor for forty-nine years, longer than any other Byzantine ruler before or since.

On his death, he asked to be buried not in the imperial mausoleum at the Holy Apostles, but in a small church in the suburbs of Constantinople, near the Hebdomon. His tomb inscription, written in his own voice, complained that he had never rested: from the day God chose him, he had passed his life in army tents, watching over the Romans. It was the closest he came to a self-portrait.

The famous epithet — Boulgaroktonos, Bulgar-Slayer — was rarely used in his lifetime. It came into wider circulation only in the twelfth century, and the historian Paul Stephenson has argued that much of the Bulgar-Slayer legend, including the most extreme details of the blinding, took shape long after Basil's death. The legend grew over his grave; the man himself made no effort to wear the name. He had won his war. He went home to die quietly. What he could not silence was the procession on the road to Prilep — a column of blind men in chains, walking forever — that the Bulgarians have never quite stopped seeing.