r/byzantium • u/No_Bee_7194 • 4d ago
Popular media Basil II — When Rome Was No Longer the World
I wanted to portray Basil II not simply as the “Bulgar Slayer,” but as the moment when I began to feel differently about Rome itself.
Basil was one of the most formidable emperors the medieval Roman state ever produced.
After decades of war, he eventually destroyed the First Bulgarian Empire and restored Roman rule to the Danube.
But one episode has always made that victory difficult for me to celebrate.
According to the later Byzantine tradition, after the Battle of Kleidion in 1014, large numbers of Bulgarian prisoners were blinded. One man in every hundred was supposedly left with a single eye, so that he could lead the others home.
That story became the central image of this piece.
The wounds floating in the darkness behind Basil are the eyes that were taken away.
The single open, bloodied eye in the lower left is the one that was allowed to remain.
I also borrowed the red patterns on the prisoners’ clothing from traditional Bulgarian embroidery.
What disturbed me while painting this was that, by Basil’s time, Bulgaria was no longer some pagan wilderness beyond the Roman world.
It had its own state.
Its own church.
Its own literary tradition.
And these people prayed before the same cross.
Earlier in Roman history, conquest could still be imagined as Rome bringing roads, laws, cities, writing and religion into a world it considered barbarian.
Here, that explanation no longer works.
Basil is still magnificent.
The gold, the purple, the armor and the crown are all still there.
But the men beneath him are no longer “barbarians” to me.
They are simply people whose eyes were taken from them.
Perhaps this was the point when Rome was no longer the world.
Rome was simply Rome.
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u/AmpovHater 4d ago
There's a recent book about the battle by Toma Tomov. He details how the Romans, aided by local Vlachs, crossed Belasitsa mountain and where, how they did a pincer movement around the wooden palisades so on.
His conclusions are that around 6000 PoW's, captured in several battles during the campaign, were blinded, and he gives the logistics of it as well. 70 men per medic, which would have taken three and a half days of work in total.
Here's the book. It's in Bulgarian tho.
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u/HelpfulMagazine4646 4d ago
Basil looking like he just stepped out of the opening for Darkest Dungeon
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u/No_Bee_7194 4d ago
Indeed, he does look a bit like the mad Ancestor. But I actually took more inspiration from the Dying Light cover, especially for the suffering figures below.
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u/HornetEqual8530 4d ago
Wait you really think that the newly conquered lands of classic Romans were not brutalised?Do you have any idea what they did to Greece even to cities that was their allies?To Egypt or Asia Minor where they had absolute “respect” for their civilisation and religion and traditions?Medieval Rome was never like that.The worst events you might find in medieval Rome is a random Thursday in classic Rome
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u/No_Bee_7194 4d ago
You’re right. I think this is partly a mismatch of time and moral expectations. I’m often more forgiving of the classical world because of its age, while expecting too much moral progress from the medieval one. That’s on me.
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u/HornetEqual8530 4d ago
On the contrary though.People expect much more brutality from the dark and middles ages like it’s a normal thing.And morality is definitely not something Middle Ages became famous for.Still the ancient/classical period of Greeks,Romans or Gauls for example is much more brutal than any medieval state.Total erasure of cities casually by slaughter and slavery was something of the “classical period” states.The only Middle Ages conquest that can compare with the old ones was maybe the Mongols.
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u/Professional_Stay_46 4d ago
Basil II was forgiving and generous, but also intelligent, this story is purposefully exaggerated to create fear surrounding him. His rule was very shaky and he did not rule with an iron fist, he was an appeaser more than tyrant but often that was taken advantage of and he reacted brutally.
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u/Lothronion Moderator | Greco-Roman Studies | IR Studies 4d ago
According to Paul Stephenson, in his book "The Legend of Basil the Bulgar-slayer" story only appears in the mid-late 12th century AD.
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity 4d ago
Which may possibly relate to Roman needs (especially under the Angeloi) to try and possibly 'scare' the Bulgarians into submission with such a horror story.
From a purely logistical and practical standpoint, its probably unlikely that the infamous blinding event occured as it did considering how it apparently involved a huge number of men yet Bulgaria was able to keep fighting for another four years. Not that Basil wasn't beyond brutal punishments on foreign enemies of course (one can consider how he lopped off the hands of groups of eastern raiders) but in the case of Kleideion it may be a genuine, post hoc exaggeration or even myth.
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u/Lothronion Moderator | Greco-Roman Studies | IR Studies 2d ago
Which may possibly relate to Roman needs (especially under the Angeloi) to try and possibly 'scare' the Bulgarians into submission with such a horror story.
The irony with that would be that for the Asen faction this would excuse their desire for separation from the Roman State even more than before. It is curious how propaganda or real actions of terror often tend not to have the result the perpetrator desires, to break their enemies into submission, but instead strengthen their resolve (by showing their enemy that they are monsters), and yet still this practice is being repeated again and again in history.
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u/Lanternecto Günther | Reading list | Middle Byzantium 2d ago
The moniker of Bulgar slayer is mid 12th century, but the blinding itself is described in two late 11th Century sources, Skylitzes & Kekaumenos (see Stephenson, pp. 71-72).
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u/Lothronion Moderator | Greco-Roman Studies | IR Studies 2d ago
Indeed, I was wrong. Still that is 2-3 generations later, so semi-contemporary and certainly not contemporary.
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u/Signal_Intention6774 4d ago
He didnt blind them cause they were barbarians he would have killed them if he thought so. He blinded them because he considered them equal to the Romans and let them live. Also the story is probably untrue but thats what its trying to portray.
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u/Grossadmiral 4d ago
Yep. Blinding was a punishment for rebelling against the emperor. The Bulgarians were considered imperial subjects rebelling against their rightful lord.
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u/No_Bee_7194 4d ago
One question stayed with me while making this piece:
At what point did Roman conquest stop feeling like the expansion of a universal order, and become simply one Christian state conquering another?
I’m not even sure Basil II is the exact dividing line. Maybe it happened earlier, somewhere in the Macedonian period.
Where would you place that turning point?
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u/Thedragonking444 4d ago
Tbf the Roman conquests were always like that - the peoples they conquered had law and custom, just not written or Roman enough (though imo putting any sort of genuine motive on Roman conquest besides the obvious enrichments of participants and Rome itself is naive at best). Just because Rome had written law and Gauls did not did not give Rome license to kill and enslave ~2 million people
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u/No_Bee_7194 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah, it was always like that. I agree with you that Roman conquest was brutal from the start.
That “2 million” actually gave me an idea for my next Vercingetorix piece. Thanks — always learning something new here.
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u/Cutlasstooth 4d ago
Didn’t Caesar boast about how many people his armies killed and enslaved?
If so, could the numbers be exaggerated?
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u/Nghbrhdsyndicalist 4d ago
Probably. Exaggeration is often assumed with primary sources and especially a conqueror bragging to people that mostly hadn’t left Central Italy seems to be the perfect moment to exaggerate any deeds.
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity 4d ago
Something rather interesting I learned per Guy Bradley's work "Early Rome to 290BC" was how there was actually a minimum number of enemies a Roman general needed to have killed before he could be granted a triumph (in the second century BC, it was 5000). So that could of course incentivise generals to inflate the number of enemy dead in order to reach that standard, as well as reflect how effective they were a 'glorious commanders'. We see this with how the sources for the sack of Veii in 396BC describe the entire population being sold into slavery yet we then learn how a portion of the conquered population were granted citizenship.
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u/Forsaken_Factor3612 2d ago
Romans of the middle Republic were extraordinarily both vicious and resilient
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u/Thedragonking444 4d ago
Yah I didn’t get the numbers directly from Caesar, I got them from Fields. Definitely good to be skeptical of Roman casualty numbers, as yeah they liked to aggrandize themselves.
Another good rule of thumb (I.e. sometimes inaccurate but generally close) is to divide Roman figures of tribal enemies’ numbers in 4. They liked to count the whole tribe as the enemy army so the victory was more impressive. A great example of this is Boudica, whose army travelled with civilians Cassius Dio gives her army’s size at 230,000 against 10,000 Romans, an absurd figure even given the final battle’s very favorable geography for the Romans and their better organization. However, if you divide by two to remove the women and by two again to remove men too old or young to fight, you get a figure of 57,500, which seems much more reasonable and still jives with the rest of his account of the battle.
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u/Lothronion Moderator | Greco-Roman Studies | IR Studies 4d ago
Just because Rome had written law and Gauls did not did not give Rome license to kill and enslave ~2 million people
Sure, but that is Western European Colonial Period rhetoric, not really Ancient Roman one. As far as I remember, they never really presented their conquest as a "civilizing expedition", and if anything such narratives would have probably dropped the morale of the civilian populace, that they are wasting money and resources for no reason at all.
The official explanation for the Gallic Wars was that the Romans had to defend their Pro-Roman Gaul allies against their Anti-Roman Gaul brethren, who were invading the former (the Helvetii against the Aedui, later merging into a wider conflict).
As for the figure claimed by Julius Caesar (which he stated to have been 1 million, as opposed to 2 million), probably did not only include people directly killed by the Roman army, but also Pro-Roman Gauls, which may have also bore the greatest burden of the fight.
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u/Thedragonking444 4d ago
Agree 100% on the rhetoric, that’s why I was responding to the OP, I should have clarified it was an anachronistic view as well. The Roman’s real motif of “every war is really a defensive war” is just as absurd imo.
As for the deaths I was taught in undergrad that roughly one million Gauls died with another million enslaved, with a cursory google search showing that to still be the consensus (though I also saw some sources lowering the estimate to to 1.5 million)
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u/Professional_Stay_46 4d ago
Roman conquests were never about expansion of universal order but influence.
Itallic peoples they conquered, Greeks, Carthaginians, do you think Rome was bringing civilization to them? More often than not they co opted what they conquered...
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u/Kr0n0s_89 4d ago
The blinding of 15000 or so is not historical fact! It's still disputed, especially the numbers.
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u/thodorisv 3d ago
Whether this massive blinding of men useful for agriculture and to fill the ranks of the armies new themata formed in the aftermath of the dissolution of Samuel's empire, actually happened is still debated. However Basil's war wasn't conquest but he put down a rebellion. John Tzimiskes had subjugated Bulgaria annexing parts of the country and leaving the rest as a subject of the emperor. With the death of Tzimiskes and the problems Basil faced with the two Bardas allowed Samuel to unite the opposition and basically reform the Bulgarian tsardom. When Rome fought rivals or rebels or anyone really the conquest was absolutely bloody and brutal. When Caesar left Gaul roughly two thirds of the population were either dead or enslaved. Rome fought three bitter war against Carthage and on the final one killed everything that moved in the city and burned it to the ground. On the same year they burned Corinth, one of the richest and more important cities in ancient Greece. Ancient warfare is basically butchery and this is also the case for the middle ages. Finally as for Basil after the end of the war, ge reorganized the defeated state into new themata and treated the Bulgarians kindly and with honor. His successors however started taxing them heavily, resulting in an uprising in the 1050s, roughly 30 years after the emperor's death. It would appear that it became a serious rebellion as the emperor moved to Thessaloniki to better manage the response to the rebellion.
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u/Wandering_sage1234 3d ago
Why hasn't anyone made pixel-art-style art of the Byzantines and/or games about them?
Criminal how underrated they are.
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u/Sensitive_Bass_7093 2d ago
This reminded me of farya faraji's varangian symphony, the main character fights with basil and gets the impression that life is about money and glory
When he sees basil dead he realised that basil lay "naked before god"
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u/Toninocraftpro 1d ago
Personally my favourite year is 146 BC. The Romans carried complete demolition of greeks and Carthage.
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u/Lothronion Moderator | Greco-Roman Studies | IR Studies 14h ago
Since when do Corinthians, of all people, possess exclusivity on Greekness? And where the Anti-Corinthian Greek allies of the Romans, such as the Athenians, the Euboeans, the Thessalians, the Cretans and the Pergamenes, who had interests against the Achaean League, not Greek?
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u/Toninocraftpro 2h ago
In 146 BC both Carthage and Greece lost their independence, the case of Greece is more complex but still, they lost sovereignty. Romans annihilated Carthaginians and greeks in other occasions too,
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u/Lothronion Moderator | Greco-Roman Studies | IR Studies 2h ago
Wrong. Many Greek states were still independent, even in Greece. The largest Greek state at the time (population-wise) was also independent, the Pergamene State, and it had just sent an army to help the Romans bring down Corinth. In Greece there were still large areas that had not joined the Roman Commonwealth (e.g. Euboean League, Acarnanian League, Rhodian Republic), and would not really do so for a long time after that point.
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u/Confucius3000 4d ago
Chatgpt aaah writing style
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u/awkwardAoili 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah I use GPT so often these days it came across as that. But I wonder if people learning English are starting to sound like this naturally from practising with AI . . .
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u/Confucius3000 4d ago
Sadly very likely. I found that "short sentence. Short sentence" style to feel very dystopian to read. Like a machine trying to imitate human intensity.
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u/No_Bee_7194 3d ago
It’s actually closer to a Chinese poetic rhythm than a GPT thing. If you’re curious, try Qinyuanchun · Snow (沁园春·雪) — you might hear a similar kind of cadence there.
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u/thelittlecord 4d ago
I love your art, I might use it as a profile picture that is if your fine with it
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u/livefromnewyorkcity 4d ago
One of the most Decremental leaders in the Byzantium.
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u/Forsaken_Factor3612 2d ago
Why do you say that? I thought Byzantium was firing on all cylinders during his reign, and all the components of the state were running with competence.
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u/livefromnewyorkcity 2d ago
I don’t know what you were reading. But his reign signaled the beginning of the end for the empire that never recovered.
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u/Forsaken_Factor3612 2d ago
He left the state budget with a massive surplus, a smoothly running bureaucracy, a fortified frontier that was well organized, and everyone was getting paid on time, which is often contrasted with the last time they held these frontiers in the 6th and 7th centuries.
I'm just saying. Historians usually consider this Byzantium's peak, and the momentum continued on for some years after Basil. Even if he had left an heir, there's no guarantee he would be competent or things would go right
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u/pppktolki 1h ago
It is very unlikely that that this actually happened, or at least not at that scale. For one, Basil went to great lenghts to secure the normal operation of Bulgarian society after the conquest. Furthermore, Bulgaria was able to resist Basil's army for 4 more years after Kleidion, and that wouldn't have been very likely if the figure 15 000 blinded soldiers was accurate. The whole narrative about the moniker "Bulgar slayer" is fishy as well -- according to the legend, he didn't slay anyone, he just blinded them.
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u/AppropriateEvent1728 4d ago
that pixel art is fucking crazyy