It’s not a household
name but perhaps it should be (along with Arausio, Manzikert and so
on).
The Battle of Kleidion
was the climax of a decades long struggle between not only the
Eastern Roman Empire and the Bulgars, but a personal war between
Emperor Basil II and Tsar Samuel of the Bulgarian Empire.
Unfortunately, Fawlty
Towers’ success means that Basil tends to be seen as a silly name,
but Basil II was perhaps the single most capable emperor the Eastern
Empire ever produced, up there with Alexius and John Comnenus (and,
of the Western, Aurelian and Trajan).
After a prolonged
period of being emperor in name only*, he finally took the reins in
his late teens. His first campaign, some years later, against the
Bulgars ended in disaster and almost cost Basil his life at the hands
of Samuel. After this events drove him to focus his attention
elsewhere before, as a more mature and capable man, returning to the
Bulgars.
Although, at this
period of history, the Byzantines had been enjoying success against
the Saracens in the east, in the west, the Bulgars, under Samuel, had
been building themselves into quite the powerhouse.
Basil II, the last of
three great warlike emperors in a row, put a stop to this. Contrary
to the stereotype (often but not always deserved) of a Byzantine
emperor being a remote, palace-dwelling creature, he led from the
front, and usually lived there too. The devotion of his army was
ferocious, partly because he adopted the orphans of men who fell in
battle and with whom he shared a father-son relationship, and he
created the elite Varangian Guard (think Praetorian Guard, but
composed of loyal Scandinavians rather than treacherous Romans).
Led by their great
emperor, the Eastern Roman Empire started taking the Bulgars to task,
and the pivotal moment of the war was reached at Kleidion. The
Bulgars were defending a pass in significant numbers (hard to be
precise, unfortunately), and initially repulsed the Byzantine
assault. When Basil II sent men around to take the Bulgars from the
rear, the battle was won, and Samuel himself almost captured. The
Bulgar army dissolved into a rout, so it was not merely victory, but
a crushing victory.
A huge number of men
were killed in the rout, and 10,000 were captured. And its because of
those 10,000 that Kleidion is best known. Basil, hereafter known as
the Bulgar-Slayer, had them divided into groups of 100. Of those, one
man was blinded in one eye, and the other 99 blinded in both eyes.
The one-eyed man then acted as shepherd for his 99 companions, and
the 10,000 were sent back to Samuel.
The Tsar, by this time
old, ill, and suffering not only knocks on the battlefield but
politically, reportedly saw the ruined remnants of his army and
experienced a fatal heart attack.
The victory ultimately
led to the Eastern Empire’s borders extending all the way to the
Danube, for the first time in centuries. But it’s not the
territorial advantage or the battle itself that made the battle live
on, but the cruel fate meted out to the thousands of prisoners.
It also cemented Basil
II’s reputation as a brutally successful man, whose uncompromising
ruthlessness made the Eastern Empire stronger than it had been for
hundreds of years.
Thaddeus
*I may well write another piece on this, as it’s a rather interesting period.
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