Who won the Battle of Kleidion?
The Byzantine Empire won the Battle of Kleidion on 29 July 1014. Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria had blocked a mountain pass in the Belasica range against the emperor Basil II; when a Byzantine column under Nikephoros Xiphias came down behind the defenses, the Bulgarian army broke. The chronicles say Basil blinded some 15,000 prisoners, leaving one man in every hundred a single eye to lead the rest home, and that Samuel died of the shock. Within four years Bulgaria was annexed.1
In the autumn of 1014 a strange procession came down the roads toward Ohrid: long files of men holding on to one another, each hundred led by a single comrade who still had one eye. They were what remained of Tsar Samuel's army, sent home blinded by the emperor who had beaten them at Kleidion. When Samuel went out to meet them and understood what he saw, the chronicles say, he fell senseless to the ground and died two days later.2
Two rival empires
For three centuries Byzantium and Bulgaria fought for the Balkans. Under Simeon I, early in the 10th century, Bulgaria became for a time the dominant power of the Balkan peninsula and its ruler styled himself tsar of the Bulgarians and Greeks; in 917 he destroyed a Byzantine army at Anchialus. But after Simeon the state was torn by rivalries and religious dissent and menaced by Serbs, Pechenegs and Magyars; the Rus took its capital, and in 971 the emperor John Tzimiskes took Great Preslav. Samuel later moved the capital west, finally to Ohrid.3› Battle of Anchialus, 917
Samuel and Basil
From Ohrid Tsar Samuel revived the Bulgarian kingdom, centering it on Macedonia. Facing him was Basil II, emperor from 976, who first had to win his own throne against two rebel generals and secured it only in 989, with the help of Vladimir of Kyiv and the Varangians who later formed his famous guard.4
Basil shunned fine living and cared little for literature; in many ways, Mark Cartwright writes, he lived the life of an austere monk. He never married and spent most of his time on or near the frontiers. He was dour, distrustful and pitiless, and he knew how to wait.5
Their war began badly for Basil. In August 986 his army, some 60,000 strong by Mark Cartwright's count, failed ignominiously before the walls of Serdica, today's Sofia. On its way home Samuel's men caught it in the mountain pass of Trajan's Gate and destroyed it; its colors were lost and the emperor barely escaped to Constantinople. He would wait 28 years for his revenge. From then until 1014 the two fought on and off, interrupted when Basil had to turn east to protect Antioch and Aleppo.6
A war of attrition
Basil learned from the defeat. He campaigned in winter as well as summer and took Samuel's lands piece by piece: Greece back by 997, Pliska in 1000, Skopje in 1004, Dyrrachion around 1005. The historian J. J. Norwich, quoted by Mark Cartwright, describes a commander who never undertook an operation until he was certain of victory and forbade any soldier to break ranks in battle.7
Samuel could no longer meet the imperial army in the open field. Instead he fortified the mountain passes leading into Upper Macedonia with ramparts and garrisons, hoping to force the Byzantines into sieges far from their supplies while his light troops and the mountain Slavs cut their lines. For several years, George Finlay wrote, a bloody and indecisive war wore down the kingdom of Ohrid without affecting the power of the empire.8
The pass of Kleidion
In 1014 Basil judged everything ready for a final effort. Marching up the valley of the Strymon, he found the pass of Kleidion, the Key, in the Belasica mountains strongly fortified, with Samuel himself at the head of the Bulgarian army. The emperor found the pass too strong to force and settled down before it.9
The march over the mountain
Basil then sent Nikephoros Xiphias, the governor of Philippopolis, with a strong detachment on a long circuit round a mountain to the south, to come down behind the Bulgarian position. On 29 July Xiphias fell on the enemy's rear while Basil attacked the front. Despite all Samuel's efforts, the Bulgarians gave way on every side. Only the stand of his son Gabriel Radomir saved the tsar from capture and let him reach Prilep.10
The blinding
The Byzantine chroniclers say Basil took about 15,000 prisoners. He had them blinded, leaving a single eye to one man in every hundred so that each group could be led back to its tsar. When the column approached Ohrid, Samuel went out to meet it. Seeing the full extent of the disaster, he collapsed and died two days later.11
Historians handle the story with care. George Finlay already warned in the 1850s that the numbers reported by the Byzantine historians need not be taken literally, and noted that blinding was a cruelty practiced in many parts of Europe for centuries; Richard the Lionheart, he pointed out, sent fifteen French knights home blind, led by one whose right eye had been spared. Paul Stephenson argues that far fewer men can have been blinded, since the Bulgarians still put large armies in the field against Basil afterward.12
The end of Bulgaria
Kleidion did not end the war at once. Soon after the battle a Byzantine force under Theophylaktos Botaniates, governor of Thessalonica, was trapped and destroyed in the defiles on the road to Strumitsa, and Basil had to withdraw. He learned of Samuel's death at Mosynopolis on 24 October 1014. Samuel's son Gabriel Radomir carried on the resistance, and the cruelty at Kleidion, Finlay judged, stiffened it.13
The campaign of 1015 opened with the revolt of Vodena, which threw out its imperial garrison and had to be besieged again. At Moglena, Xiphias and Constantine Diogenes turned a river, dug a mine under the wall, propped it on timbers and burned the props until the wall collapsed; the town was stormed and its men of fighting age were deported to Vaspurakan in Armenia. Bulgarian resistance, led by Samuel's heirs, took four more years to end.14
But the heart had gone out of the Bulgarian state. In 1018 Basil entered Ohrid, Samuel's capital, where the tsar's widow and family submitted, and Bulgaria lost its independence; he celebrated his triumph later, in Athens and in Constantinople. Bulgaria would remain under Byzantium until 1185. The new subjects were treated more generously than their army had been: Basil kept taxes low, allowed payment in kind and left the Bulgarian church its own archbishop at Ohrid. His campaigns carried imperial rule as far as Georgia, Armenia and Mesopotamia, but after his death in 1025 his successors squandered the inheritance within a generation or two.15
The making of the Bulgar-Slayer
Basil II is remembered as Boulgaroktonos, the Bulgar-Slayer, and Kleidion is the reason usually given. Yet Paul Stephenson has shown that his contemporaries did not call him that: they knew him as Basil the Porphyrogennetos, or simply as Basil the younger. The epithet took hold in the 12th century, when the Komnenian and Angelos emperors cultivated a military ethos, and above all after the Bulgarian rising of Peter and Asen in 1185.16
The legend returned in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the Greek national movement embraced Byzantium as part of Greek history and Greeks and Slavs competed for Macedonia, and Basil's victory over the Bulgarians became a central episode of that story. Even his famous portrait in a psalter, showing defeated enemies prostrate at his feet, cannot be tied to the Bulgarian war, Stephenson argues.17
For the wider story, see the greatest battles of the Byzantine Empire and the greatest commanders of the Byzantine Empire.
