Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 170, the conquest of Armenia.

They were inverted commas around conquest if you couldn't tell.

I know we've had quite a few interruptions to our end of the century tour, but we are

moving east across the Byzantine world of 1025. We started in Italy, passed through the Balkans,

paused a while in Constantinople, and now find ourselves on the eastern front.

We actually covered quite a lot of the issues here, back in episode 145, the eastern conquests.

There we talked about the capture of Meliting, Tarsus, Antioch, the towns that had once been the

launching paths for Jihad were all now in Roman hands.

There was a sense then that perhaps the Byzantines would attempt to reconquer their old provinces.

John's and Mesquise had marched deep into Syria, and some propaganda claimed that his eyes

were fixed on Jerusalem. But then John died and Basil II took over. The young emperor

spent 20 years being assaulted by the heirs of the great generals, a process which knocked

any enthusiasm for conquering adventures out of the Vassil Fs. Once he'd finally seen off the

eastern magnates, Basil was hardly likely to entrust any general with the glamorous task of marching

into the Holy Land. And yet Basil is remembered as a conqueror. Not only was he the Bulgar slayer,

but he also pushed the eastern boundary of Romania further into Armenia than it had ever

gone before. From the narrative you know about this process, Basil dedicated his life to breaking

the army, trying to turn it into a loyal beast that would no longer threaten his throne.

So he took it out on campaign every year to keep the men occupied and used it to flatten the harsh

edges of his realm. The Bulgarians were pushed into submission over the course of a decade's long

campaign, and once that was over Basil turned east, marching deep into the Armenian mountains to

deal with those who had supported his enemies. Yes, it all came back to the civil wars he'd fought

...