Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium.

Episode 156.

The Half Blind.

Leading the Blind.

You can imagine how long I've been sitting on that title.

Today we're going to talk about Basil, the Bulgar Slayer, and the end of the Bulgarian war.

But before we get there, we need to put this conflict fully into context.

The sheer length of this war is something that it would be easy to lose sight of, given

our lack of sources.

If you look at Justinian's time in power, our information was so plentiful that each

decade of his reign has its own flavor.

His rise to power under Justin, the optimism of the conquests, the post-plague depression.

By contrast we know so little about Basil's era that we have no idea what he was thinking

most of the time.

We don't know what people thought back home.

We have no clue what Samuel and the Bulgarians were feeling.

It would be easy then, as many historians of the previous century did, to cast the

war as one long mission of revenge for Basil.

In 986 he was ambushed and humiliated at Trajan's Gate.

In 1018 he finally conquered Bulgaria.

Given Celos' characterization of the Emperor, as stern and angry, it's tempting to see

Basil teeth-gritted, determined to make crushing Bulgaria his life's mission.

...