Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

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.

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.