Basil II reigned for forty-nine years, the longest in Byzantine history, annexed Bulgaria after a thirty-year war, and left the empire at its greatest extent since Justinian and its treasury full.
Basil II came to the throne in name as a child in 960 and in fact in 976, and ruled until 1025 — forty-nine years, the longest reign in the empire's history.
He spent the first thirteen of them fighting for survival against the great Anatolian military families who had made and unmade the previous three emperors, and most of the remaining thirty-six on campaign, principally against Bulgaria.
What he left was an empire stretching from the Danube to the Euphrates, a full treasury, a broken aristocracy — and no heir, because he never married. Within half a century of his death the position had been lost.
He was born in 958 to Romanos II and the empress Theophano, and was crowned co-emperor as a small child. His father died when he was five, and his mother married Nikephoros Phokas, who ruled as senior emperor until he was murdered.
John Tzimiskes then ruled for seven years while Basil and his brother Constantine remained co-emperors in name. It is a remarkable fact of his childhood that two successive soldier-emperors took the senior throne over him and neither had him killed.
He took power in his own right in 976 at eighteen, under the tutelage of the chamberlain Basil Lekapenos, and spent the next decade discovering that the throne and the power were different things.
Psellos, writing a generation later, gives the fullest portrait, and it is of a man who deliberately made himself into an instrument. Short, unimpressive on horseback, brusque in speech, indifferent to ceremony, dress and the pleasures the court existed to provide.
He lived in camp for most of forty years, ate with the soldiers, kept no mistress that anyone recorded and never married — an extraordinary omission for an emperor with a dynasty to continue, and one contemporaries could not explain either.
The early humiliations explain a good deal: the defeat at Trajan's Gate in 986, the two great rebellions that nearly took his throne, and the discovery that his own chief minister was governing without him. What emerged was a suspicious, tireless, methodical ruler who trusted procedure over people and never again risked a battle he had not arranged.
Bardas Skleros rebelled in 976 and Bardas Phokas — nephew of Nikephoros II — in 987, and between them they nearly ended the Macedonian dynasty. At one point Phokas held all of Anatolia and was proclaimed emperor.
Basil survived by an alliance that changed European history. He asked Vladimir of Kiev for troops, and got six thousand Rus' warriors in exchange for the hand of his sister Anna — a porphyrogenita, born in the purple, whose marriage to a foreign ruler was against every Byzantine precedent.
The price included Vladimir's conversion, and the Christianisation of the Rus' followed. The six thousand Rus' became the Varangian Guard, and Basil destroyed Phokas at Abydos in 989 with their help. He then spent years dismantling the families that had rebelled.
Samuel of Bulgaria had rebuilt a Bulgarian state in the west while Basil was fighting for his throne, and in 986 he destroyed Basil's army at Trajan's Gate. It was the emperor's only serious defeat and it determined how he fought afterwards.
From about 1000 he campaigned in Bulgaria nearly every year: taking fortresses, garrisoning them, refusing battle unless it was on his terms, and coming back the following spring. It was a strategy of exhaustion, and it took fourteen years.
At Kleidion in July 1014 the Bulgarian army was destroyed by a flank march over Mount Belasica, and Samuel died in October. The war nonetheless ran until 1018, when the Bulgarian nobility submitted and the empire's frontier returned to the Danube for the first time in three and a half centuries.
His domestic policy was a war on the great landowners, whom he blamed for the rebellions and for swallowing the soldier-farmers the army was recruited from. The allelengyon of 1002 made the powerful liable for the unpaid taxes of the poor in their districts, which was as unpopular with them as it sounds.
He was careful with money in a way no previous emperor of the century had been, and he died with a reserve reported in the region of two hundred thousand pounds of gold — a figure that says more about the state's capacity than any narrative could.
He founded nothing, built little, patronised no literature to speak of, and issued no great law code. The empire he handed on was a going concern rather than a monument, which was evidently how he wanted it.