Basil I rose from a Macedonian peasant family through the imperial stables, murdered his patron Michael III in 867, and founded the dynasty that ruled Byzantium for 189 years.
Basil was born to a peasant family in the theme of Macedonia in Thrace, of Armenian descent, and came to Constantinople with nothing.
He rose through a talent for horses and physical strength into the imperial stables, attracted the attention of the emperor Michael III, and became his chamberlain, his favourite and finally his co-emperor.
He got there by murder: the Caesar Bardas in 866, and Michael himself in September 867. The dynasty he founded lasted until 1056 and produced the empire's medieval peak, which is why the histories written under it worked so hard on the story of how it began.
The details of his origins are obscured by later dynastic propaganda, which supplied him with a descent from the Armenian Arsacid kings and prophetic dreams to match. What survives underneath is a peasant family, possibly one deported to Thrace, and a young man who walked to the capital looking for work.
He entered the service of a relative of the emperor, was noticed for breaking a horse nobody else could manage and for defeating a Bulgarian champion in a wrestling match, and was taken into Michael III's household.
The rise was fast and complete: chamberlain, then married to the emperor's mistress Eudokia Ingerina at Michael's arrangement, then co-emperor in 866 after he had removed the Caesar Bardas — the emperor's uncle and the man actually running the government.
Everything written about him was written by or for his descendants, and it is worth being blunt about what that means: the sources are a dynastic charter, not a biography.
They give him vigour, judgement, personal courage and a talent for administration, and the record of the reign does support competence. They also give him a providential rise, prophetic signs and a predecessor so degenerate that killing him was a public service — which is the part that should be set aside.
What can be read through it is a man of enormous physical ability and political nerve who was entirely unsentimental about the people who had helped him. He killed Bardas, who had made his career possible, and Michael, who had made him emperor. His last years were dominated by grief for a dead son and by suspicion of the living one, whom he imprisoned for three years.
The legal work is the achievement that lasted. He began a systematic revision and translation of Justinian's law into Greek, issued the Procheiron and the Epanagoge, and set in motion the recodification his son completed as the Basilika — the legal foundation of the middle Byzantine state.
Militarily the record is mixed but positive: ground recovered in southern Italy, Bari taken in 876, the fleet rebuilt and Cyprus briefly recovered, and campaigns against the Paulicians of Tephrike that destroyed them as a power.
In the church he deposed the patriarch Photios, restored him later, and managed relations with Rome with more care than his predecessors — a policy of not provoking the papacy that lasted until his son fell out with it.
The dynasty is the legacy. Nine emperors and 189 years, including Constantine VII, Nikephoros II and John I as regents by marriage, and Basil II — under whom the empire reached its greatest medieval extent.
The historiographical legacy is more troubling and this archive has to keep pointing at it. The Macedonian historians blackened Michael III to justify the murder, and the version they produced held for a thousand years; the archive's article on Michael III exists partly to say so.
His own end has a symmetry the chroniclers enjoyed: killed by a hunting accident involving a stag, in some accounts after his belt caught on its antlers, and dying convinced his surviving son was plotting against him. Leo VI succeeded without difficulty.