trimmed with gold. Two archangels hover above him. Gabriel, on the left, gives him a lance, while Michael,
on the right, transmits to him the crown offered by Christ. The emperor grasps a sword in one hand, while
in his other hand he holds a staff that touches the neck of one of the semi-prone figures beneath his feet. On
either side of the emperor are busts of saints.
A WIDE EMBRACE AND ITS TENSIONS
The artist who painted this image of Basil at the start of a Psalter had reason to
substitute him for the usual portrait of King David, the presumed author of the
psalms. Like the biblical slayer of Goliath, Basil also was a giant-slayer—in this case
via wars of expansion. To be sure, he was following in the footsteps of earlier tenth-
century soldier-emperors. Crete, lost to the Muslims in the ninth century, was retaken
by Romanus II in 961; Nicephorus II reconquered Cyprus in 965 and Antioch in 969.
But Basil conquered Bulgaria (in 1018), which, as we have seen (above pp. 82–83),
had created a rival empire right on Byzantium’s northern flank. Basil put the whole of
the Balkans under Byzantine rule and divided its territory into themes. No wonder he
was nicknamed the “Bulgar Slayer.”
At the same time, moreover, Basil was busy setting up protectorates against the
Muslims on his eastern front; at the end of his life he was preparing an expedition to
Sicily. By 1025 the Byzantine army was rarely used to protect the empire’s interior; it
was mobilized to move outward, both east- and westward.
No longer was the Byzantine Empire the tight fist centered on Anatolia that it had
been in the dark days of the eighth century. On the contrary, it was an open hand:
sprawling, multi-ethnic, and multilingual. To the east it embraced Armenians, Syrians,
and Arabs; to the north it included Slavs and Bulgarians (by now themselves Slavic
speaking) as well as Pechenegs, a Turkic group that had served as allies of Bulgaria;
to the west, in the Byzantine toe of Italy, it included Lombards, Italians, and Greeks.
There must have been Muslims right in the middle of Constantinople: a mosque
there, built in the eighth century, was restored and reopened in the eleventh century.
Soldiers from the region of Kiev formed the backbone of Basil’s “Varangian Guard,”
his elite troops. By the mid-eleventh century, Byzantine mercenaries included
“Franks” (mainly from Normandy), Arabs, and Bulgarians as well. In spite of
ingrained prejudices, Byzantine princesses had occasionally been married to
foreigners before the tenth century, but in Basil’s reign this happened to a sister of the
emperor himself.
