Who won the Battle of Anchialus?
At the Battle of Anchialus, also called the Battle of the Achelous, on 20 August 917, Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria destroyed a large Byzantine army led by Leo Phokas near the Black Sea coast. The Byzantine attack began well, but Simeon threw his reserves against its rear, and the retreat that followed became a rout and then a massacre. The empire suffered a total defeat, and the victory left Bulgaria, for a time, the dominant power of the Balkans.2
Writing late in the tenth century, generations after the battle, the Byzantine historian Leo the Deacon could still say that heaps of bones lay near Anchialus, where the army of the Romans had been cut down as it fled in disgrace. A powerful imperial army had marched out to crush Bulgaria once and for all. On a summer day by a small river on the Black Sea coast, it was itself destroyed.3
Simeon, the half-Greek tsar
Simeon was born in the mid-860s, a younger son of Boris I, the khan who had made Bulgaria Christian. As a young man he was sent to Constantinople, where he studied Demosthenes and Aristotle and began a monastic life. In 893 Boris deposed Simeon's elder brother Vladimir, whose excesses, Miller writes, had endangered the state, and placed Simeon on the throne.4
He ruled a state at its height. His capital, Great Preslav, was in the words of his contemporary John the Exarch a marvel to behold, and Simeon had so many Greek books translated into Slavonic that his contemporaries likened him to the Ptolemies. In 913, Leszka writes, he reached for the title of basileus, emperor, raising his standing against the ruler in Constantinople.5
The crown of 913
Simeon's first war with Byzantium, in the 890s, began over trade: two Greek merchants moved the Bulgarian market from Constantinople to Thessalonica and loaded it with duties. The emperor Leo VI called in the Magyars, who devastated Bulgaria, but Simeon struck back, beat a Greek army at Bulgarophygon near Adrianople and won a favorable peace.6
When the emperor Alexander refused to renew that peace and then died in 913, leaving the child Constantine VII on the throne, Simeon marched on Constantinople. Outside the walls the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos, head of the regency, met him and laid his own headcloth on Simeon's bowed head. Historians still argue whether this was a coronation, a recognition of his imperial title or merely a blessing; Leszka surveys several rival interpretations. A marriage between Constantine VII and a daughter of Simeon seems to have been agreed as well.7
Zoe's war
In February 914 the regency changed hands. The patriarch was pushed aside by the empress Zoe Karbonopsina, the child emperor's mother, and the deal of 913 was dead. That September Simeon took Adrianople, apparently in answer to the broken agreement, and the new regents resolved to destroy him.8
Peace on the eastern frontier allowed Constantinople to bring troops from all over the empire. Leo Phokas, domestic of the scholai, led the land army; Romanos Lekapenos, the drungarios of the fleet and a future emperor, was to sail to the Danube and ferry Pecheneg nomads across to attack Bulgaria from the north. The plan failed before the battle began: Romanos quarreled with the envoy John Bogas, Simeon had been courting the Pechenegs himself, and they never crossed.9
The armies
No Byzantine source gives the size of either army. The Arab writer al-Masudi tells of a battle in which 62,000 Byzantines met 60,000 Bulgarians, and some scholars have accepted his figures for Anchialus, but Leszka rejects them as worthless for both sides, noting that it is not even certain that al-Masudi is describing this campaign. Forces that large, he argues, do not seem to have been sent on real campaigns, and he estimates each army at roughly 15,000 to 25,000.10
The sources do name the Byzantine officers: John Grapson, commander of the excubitors; Olbianos Maroules of the hikanatoi; the magister Melias with his Armenians; Leo's brother Bardas Phokas; Romanos and Leo, sons of Argyros; and the patrician Constantine Lips, probably as an adviser to Leo. It was an army of the imperial elite.11
The battle by the Achelous
The armies met on 20 August 917 near the fortress of Anchialus on the Black Sea coast. John Skylitzes places the battle at a fortress called Achelous, which Leszka takes to be the small river Achelous that flows near Anchialus; hence the battle's two names. Simeon watched from a height overlooking the field. A letter of the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos mentions that the tsar's horse was killed, which has led some historians to think Simeon fought in person; Leszka suspects the horse fell when the Byzantines struck at his command post.12
What we know of the fighting suggests two phases. In the first, the Byzantine attack threw back the Bulgarian front line, and for a while it looked as if the empire would win the victory it had planned. Then Simeon threw his reserves against the rear of the Byzantine army. The blow caused confusion, the Byzantines began to fall back, and the main Bulgarian force, which had itself been giving way, turned and came back into the fight. Caught between the two, the imperial army dissolved into a disorderly flight.13
Why the Byzantines broke
The Byzantine historians struggled to explain the disaster, and they told two stories. Skylitzes says that Leo Phokas dismounted at a spring to wash off his sweat and refresh himself. His horse broke loose and ran riderless through the camp, the soldiers took it for a sign that their commander had fallen, and they panicked and fled. Leo the Deacon blamed politics instead: news came that Romanos Lekapenos had sailed for Constantinople to seize the throne, and Leo Phokas abandoned the line to race him there.14
Skylitzes himself could not decide which story was true and concluded that it made no difference, since the battle was shamefully lost either way. Both stories tell of commanders thinking of their own ambitions rather than the empire. Romanos was accused of leaving the land army to its fate and failing to rescue the fugitives; he escaped being blinded for it only through powerful friends at court. Within three years he had been proclaimed co-emperor, which in practice made him the ruler of the empire.15
The massacre
The flight cost the Byzantines far more than the fighting. The Byzantine sources only lament the scale of the slaughter without giving figures; one says soldiers were trampled by their own comrades, another speaks of death by the sword, by drowning and under the hooves of horses, with only a few escaping. Constantine Lips, John Grapson and other experienced officers were among the dead. Leo Phokas got away to Mesembria and sailed to Constantinople.16
William Miller, writing in the Cambridge Medieval History, summed it up in one word: Simeon annihilated the Byzantine army at Anchialus. The bones Leo the Deacon described, still visible decades later, are the most vivid testimony to how many men died there.17
After Anchialus
Simeon's men followed up the victory with a march toward Constantinople, and Leo Phokas, still trusted by the regency, met them again at Katasyrtai, on the approaches to the capital, later that year. The sources disagree about the result; Leszka concludes that the Bulgarians, raiding rather than besieging, did not reach the walls. Bulgaria, Miller writes, became for a brief period the dominant power of the Balkan peninsula, its rule stretching from the Black Sea to the Ionian Sea.18
The victory changed Simeon's ambitions. Leszka argues that it convinced him he could only win his place in the Christian world by force, and perhaps that God was on his side. Within a few years he styled himself basileus of the Romans, emperor of the Romans as well as of the Bulgarians, and in 923 his army stood before Constantinople again. He never took it.19
Simeon died in 927. His weaker son Peter married a granddaughter of Romanos Lekapenos and won recognition of his imperial title, but Bulgaria declined under Magyar, Pecheneg and Rus attacks. Less than a century after Anchialus, Basil II broke the Bulgarian army at Kleidion in 1014, and in 1018 Bulgaria lost its independence.20› Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer
For the wider story, see the greatest battles of the Byzantine Empire, the Middle Ages era page, and 20 August in history.
