ABSTRACT
Immortalized by his sobriquet 'the Bulgarslayer', the Byzantine emperor Basil II (976-1025) is most famous for his long military campaigns against Bulgaria. In contrast, the emperor's policy towards the empire's eastern neighbours was more usually characterized by peaceful diplomacy than by warfare.1 Yet, while the eastern frontier remained a low military prior ity for most of Basil's reign, it was not a region that could be safely neglected. In the decades immediately preceding Basil's reign, Byzantine armies had taken advantage of the waning powers of the Abbasid caliphate and extended Byzantine territorial boundaries into Cilicia, northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia. The result was a radical rede finition of a Byzantine east which for the previous three centuries had been limited to the Anatolian plateau. None-the-less, when Basil II came to the throne in 976, few of the territorial gains of this rapid expansion had been fully consolidated.2 In this chapter I want to ask how Byzantine authority in the newly conquered eastern territories was consolidated during Basil's reign. Given the geographical size of the region in question and the chronological length of the reign, I shall discuss only one dimen sion of the eastern frontier experience. Rather than analysing the empire's dealings with neighbouring states or the military administration of the frontier itself,3 I shall focus on relationships between Constantinople and
1 A detailed analysis of the empire's dealings with its eastern neighbours, both Muslim and Christian, during Basil's reign is offered by J.H. Forsyth, 'The Chronicle of Yahya ibn Sa'id alAntaki' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Ann Arbor, MI, 1977), chaps. 7-9. See J.-Cl. Cheynet's chapter in this volume (Chapter 4) for Basil's greater military attention to the west rather than the east.
