The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (42 page)

while all the other high dignitaries of East and West remained standing. He made no difficulties: the sooner the marriage were to take place, the sooner he could be off to Bulgaria where he belonged. Of his three nieces the eldest, Eudocia, was badly disfigured by smallpox and destined to spend her life in the cloister while the youngest, Theodora, is said to have been almost as
unpleasing in
appearance; she too - as we shall see - never married. The middle sister, the Princess Zoe, was however a good-looking and eminently nubile girl of twenty-three, in every respect suitable for the match. The archbishop was delighted with her, and had no doubt that his imperial master would be equally enthusiastic; while Zoe herself seems to have displayed none of the reluctance that had characterized the departure of her aunt Anna to Kiev a dozen years before. In January 1002, accompanied by Arnulf and his suite and a retinue appropriate to a
porph
yrogenita
and an Empress, she set sail for her new home.

Alas, it was not to be. When her ship reached Bari, she found tragic news awaiting her. Her betrothed, stricken by a sudden fever, had died on 24 January at the castle of Paterno near Rome, aged twenty-two. Poor Zoe: by his death she had lost far more than a husband - far more, even, than the imperial crown of the West. If she and Otto had had a son, he might in due course have inherited not only the Western Empire but - in the absence of any other male heir — the Eastern as well, uniting the two for the first time and ruling over a territory extending from the borders of France to those of Persia; and the whole subsequent history of the world might have been changed. Now those dreams had vanished. Sadly she bade farewell to the archbishop and re-embarked on the same vessel by which she had come. .

We may indeed grieve for Zoe; we need not, on the other hand, grieve for her too much. The Western Empire might have slipped from her grasp; but the Eastern remained her inheritance and, as we shall see in the next chapter, for more than twenty years after the death of her father she was to enjoy all the power - and all the marriages - that she could have wished.

The spirits of the young princess can hardly have been much lifted when, in the spring of 1004, there was celebrated in Constantinople another dynastic marriage with all the pomp and panoply that she might have expected for her own. The bride on this occasion was a distant relative of the two Emperors, a certain Maria Argyra; the groom was
Giovanni, the son of the Doge of Venice Pietro Orseolo, whom his rather had recently raised to share the ducal throne. The ceremony took place in the imperial chapel and was performed by the Patriarch himself, the two Emperors Basil and Constantine both being present to crown the bridal pair in the Eastern fashion. When the festivities were over, a magnificent palace was put at their disposal in which they stayed for several months. Autumn was already far advanced - as was Maria's pregnancy - by the time they returned to Venice.

But if Zoe envied the couple their happiness, she did not do so for long. In 1006, after a series of disastrous harvests, north Italy and Dalmatia were stricken by famine; and in the wake of famine, as so often in the Middle Ages, came plague - carrying off, among many thousands of humbler victims, Giovanni Orseolo, his wife and their baby son. The death of the young Dogaressa was recorded, with ill-concealed satisfaction, by St Peter Damian; vindictive as always, however, he ascribes it to a rather different cause:

Such was the luxury of her habits that she scorned even to wash herself in common water, obliging her servants instead to collect the dew that fell from the heavens for her to bathe in. Nor did she deign to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up in small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth. Her rooms, too, were so heavy with incense and various perfumes that it is nauseating for me to speak of them, nor would my readers readily believe it. But this woman's vanity was hateful to Almighty God; and so, unmistakably, did He take His revenge. For He raised over her the sword of His divine justice, so that her whole body did putrefy and all her limbs began to wither, filling her bedchamber with an unbearable odour such that no one - not a handmaiden, nor even a slave - could withstand this dreadful attack on the nostrils; except for one serving-girl who, with the help of aromatic concoctions, conscientiously remained to do her bidding. And even she could only approach her mistress hurriedly, and then immediately withdraw. So, after a slow decline and agonizing torments, to the joyful relief of her friends she breathed her last.

Almost as soon as the Venetian wedding was over, Basil had returned to Bulgaria, where he was devoting all his energies to the eradication of Tsar Samuel and his Empire. By dint of almost continuous campaigning between 1000 and 1004, he had regained virtually all the eastern half of the Balkan peninsula, from Thessalonica to the Iron Gates of the Danube; Samuel, who had always trusted to what might today be called guerrilla tactics, now found himself struggling against an enemy who
could move through rough country as quickly as he could himself, who -
never gave him an opportunity for ambush or surprise attack and who seemed alike impervious to heat and cold, wind and weather. Throughout the next decade the Emperor continued to advance, though our sources - such as they are - give us infuriatingly litde detail. We know, for example, that in 1005 Samuel was betrayed by his father-in-law John Chryselius, his daughter Miroslava and her husband Ashot the Taronite, who handed over Dyrrachium to Basil in return for money and tides; and that in 1009 the Tsar suffered a crippling defeat at a village called Creta, near Thessalonica. But that is about all. It is only in 1014 that the mists clear away sufficiently to allow us a glimpse of a battle which, though it by no means marked the end of the war, certainly put its eventual outcome beyond reasonable doubt.

It was fought in the narrow defile of Cimbalongus, or Clidion, leading from Serrae (Seres) into the valley of the Upper Struma. Fifteen years before, Samuel would probably have prepared an ambush; but by this dme any such plan, as he knew all too well, was doomed to failure. Instead, he decided to occupy it with his own troops, blocking Basil's way forward and obliging him to undertake a long and dangerous detour. Thus, when the Emperor arrived with his army, he found the entry to the defile closed by row after row of wooden palisades. He was still wondering how to proceed when one of his generals, the
strategos
of Philippopolis Nicephorus Xiphias, suggested leading a detachment secredy up the wooded hillside, along the ridge and down again to attack the Bulgars in the rear. At first Basil was sceptical - the plan smacked of risk and daring, two qualities he always mistrusted - but finally, seeing no other way out of the difficulty, he reluctantly agreed.

So Xiphias stole out of the imperial camp with a small body of carefully chosen men, made his way through the forest and eventually emerged at the further end of the defile, behind Samuel's army; and on 29 July he attacked, while the Emperor simultaneously launched a determined assault on the palisades. The Bulgars, taken entirely by surprise and unable to defend both extremities of the pass at once, panicked and fled. Many were cut down as they ran, many more were captured — some 14,000 to 15,000, if our sources are to be believed.
1
The Tsar himself would have been among them but for the heroism of his son, who somehow remounted him and brought him back to the

1
Cecaumenus, writing some sixty years after the event, gives a figure of
14,000;
Cedrenus
1
5,
000.

fortress of Prilapon (the modern Prilep). The two of them were especially lucky, for Basil was in vengeful mood: it was now that he meted out the punishment for which - more than for any of his conquests, or any of his legislation - he is chiefly remembered, and which is described by Gibbon at the head of this chapter.

It was the beginning of October before the dreadful procession shuffled into the Tsar's castle at Prespa. Samuel was already a sick man, broken by the misfortunes of his nation and the failure of his hopes; and at the sight of his once-splendid army in its pitiful state he collapsed in a fit of apoplexy. A draught of cold water revived him for a few moments; but he soon lapsed into a coma and died two days later. Most of those who mourned his death knew full well that they were also mourning that of his Empire; and yet, with all the courage of their despair, the Bulgars still fought on - first under his son Gabriel Radomir and then, after the latter's murder in 1016, under his murderer (who was also his cousin), John Vladislav. Only when John in his turn was killed while besieging Dyrrachium in February 1018 did they surrender. Soon afterwards Basil made his formal entry into their capital, Ochrid. He was met at the gates of the city by John's widow, Maria, and as many of their family as she had been able to gather: three sons
1
and six daughters, together with two daughters of Gabriel Radomir and five of his sons, one of whom had been blinded. There was even a bastard son of Samuel's. Basil received them with friendliness and courtesy and took all eighteen under his protection.

He had been twenty-eight years old when he first took up arms against the Bulgar Empire; he was now sixty. Its annihilation had taken him most of his active life, but now at last the task was triumphantly accomplished. For the first time since the arrival of the Slavs the entire Balkan peninsula was under Byzantine control. All that he had to do now was to show himself in as many cities - as possible, to receive homage, to exact oaths of fealty and to establish himself in the minds of the populations as their overlord. From Ochrid he passed on with his royal proteges to Prespa, where one of the bravest of the Bulgar generals, Ivatsia, was blinded when he refused to submit; thence to Castoria, where two daughters of Tsar Samuel were brought before him and, suddenly catching sight of the Tsaritsa Maria, were with difficulty

1
Their eldest son Prusian and two more of his brothers had escaped to the mountains, where they were resolved to continue the struggle; but it was not long before they too gave themselves up.

prevented from tearing her limb from limb; thence to Thermopylae, where he gazed upon the bleached bones of the 'thousands of Bulgar soldiers slaughtered' by Nicephorus Uranus twenty-three years before and - with still greater interest - upon the mighty fortifications built by another of his commanders, Roupen the Armenian, to protect the pass against further assault; thence finally to Athens itself, where he climbed up to the Acropolis to attend a service of thanksgiving in the Church of the Theotokos, the Mother of God - originally dedicated to a very different goddess, and known to us as the Parthenon.

In war Basil II - called
Bulgaroctonu
s,
the Bulgar-Slayer - had been merciless and brutal; with the coming of peace he proved moderate and understanding. The Bulgars were no longer his enemies; they were his subjects, and as such they deserved every consideration. Taxes were kept deliberately low, and payable not in gold as elsewhere in the Empire but in kind. The Patriarchate of Ochrid was downgraded to the status of an archbishopric, but not subordinated to the see of Constantinople: the Bulgarian Church thus continued to be autocephalous in every respect save one: the appointment of the archbishop was kept by the Emperor in his own hands. Most of the conquered territory was divided into two main Themes, Bulgaria and Paristrium, the latter being essentially the old Danubian province to the north. Certain areas in the west, however - notably Croatia, Dioclea, Rascia and Bosnia - continued to be ruled by their own native princes under imperial suzerainty. As for the Bulgars themselves, the vast majority welcomed the peace and caused no trouble (except on two later occasions when they very understandably protested against corrupt imperial governors); the aristocracy, for their part, were integrated into the Byzantine social and official hierarchy, several of them being given high office. Thus Prusian, the eldest son of John Vladislav, received the rank of
magister
and subsequently became
strategos
of the important Brucellarian Theme, covering roughly the area between Nicaea and Ancyra. His brother Aaron was later to be
catapan
(military governor) of Vaspurakan and, as we shall see, brother-in-law of the Emperor Isaac Comnenus.

And so the Bulgarian problem was settled; but the Emperor's work was not yet done. The eastern
c
uropalates,
King Bagrat of Abasgia, had died in 1014, whereupon his son George had immediately renounced the agreement of fourteen years before, invading and occupying Tao and Phasiane. Basil had sent a fleet to the far end of the Black Sea in an attempt to contain the damage, but now was his first chance of dealing effectively and conclusively with the rebel prince. In 1021 he set out on his third and last Asian expedition; in the following year George surrendered, leaving his three-year-old son in the Emperor's hands as a hostage for his good behaviour.
1
At this point Basil could easily have turned back; instead, he seized the opportunity to improve his position along his ever-troublesome eastern frontier. By astute diplomacy and without any threat or even suggestion of military aggression, he annexed the region of Vaspurakan; equally peacefully, he persuaded John Smbat, the Armenian King of Ani, to bequeath his kingdom to the Empire on his death. By the time he returned to the capital in 1023 he had established no less than eight new Themes - running in a huge arc from that of Antioch in the far south and then north-eastward with those of Teluch, 'the Euphrates Cities' (later to be known as the Theme of Edessa), Melitene, Taron, Vaspurakan, Iberia and Theodosiopolis. He himself now reigned supreme from the Adriatic to Azerbaijan.

He was just sixty-five: a good age by medieval standards. Almost half his life had been spent on campaign. Most other men of his years and achievements would have been only too ready to lay down their swords and live out the rest of their days in peace and tranquillity. But Basil was not like other men: his energies were undiminished, and the reports that he found awaiting him at Constantinople immediately suggested a new channel into which they might be directed. These reports came from the imperial
catapan
in south Italy, Basil Boioannes. The political situation in that region had been gready complicated since 1017 by the arrival of large numbers of young Norman adventurers and freebooters, who had entered the peninsula in search of fame and fortune and had willingly allied themselves with the local Lombard separatists in the latter's efforts to free all Apulia and Calabria from Byzantine rule. For a year they had had considerable success; but in October 1019, at Cannae on the River Ofanto — where in 216
bc
the Carthaginians under Hannibal had destroyed the army of Republican Rome — Boioannes had won a similar (if smaller) victory over a mixed force of Lombards and Normans. Three years later he had blocked a huge military expedition led by the Western Emperor