Samuel rebuilt a Bulgarian empire from Ohrid after the Byzantine conquest of 971, fought Basil II for thirty years, and died ten weeks after losing his army at Kleidion.
Samuel was one of the four sons of Count Nicholas, a provincial Bulgarian governor, and the brothers appear in the sources collectively as the Cometopuli — the count's sons.
They rose in 976, when the death of John Tzimiskes gave Bulgaria its opportunity: the eastern half of the empire had been annexed by Byzantium five years earlier, but the western lands around Ohrid and Prespa had never been occupied.
Samuel outlived his brothers, ruled in fact from the 980s and in title from 997, and spent thirty years fighting Basil II. He held an empire reaching from the Danube to the Adriatic and deep into Greece, and he lost it fortress by fortress.
Bulgaria had been broken in 971. Tzimiskes took the capital Preslav, deposed the tsar in a ceremony in Constantinople, and abolished the Bulgarian patriarchate — but Byzantine control reached only the east.
When Tzimiskes died in 976 and Basil II inherited a civil war, the Cometopuli took the west. Three brothers died in the fighting of the following years and Samuel was left in sole command, ruling from Ohrid with a patriarch of his own.
He took the title of tsar only in 997, after the death in captivity of Roman, the last of the old dynasty. Until then he governed as the servant of a state whose ruler was a Byzantine prisoner, which is a fair measure of how seriously the legitimacy of the old line was taken.
He is visible almost entirely through his enemies, and their portrait is of a formidable, energetic and merciless opponent rather than a character.
What can be read from his actions is a ruler who understood terrain better than anyone he fought, who preferred ambush and the mountain pass to open battle, and who kept a large territory together for three decades under continuous attack — which requires more than generalship.
The one intimate episode the sources preserve is the blinding of his own captured son-in-law's people and the family violence that surrounded his succession, and even that comes through Byzantine and later Bulgarian tradition. His death — collapsing at the sight of the blinded army — is the most famous thing about him and belongs to the same tradition rather than to any contemporary account.
In 986 Basil II invaded and besieged Sofia, and Samuel destroyed his army as it withdrew through the pass of Trajan's Gate. The emperor escaped; the humiliation was total, and it bought Bulgaria more than a decade while Basil fought his own aristocracy.
Samuel used it. At its height his empire ran from the Danube to the Adriatic coast, took Dyrrhachium, raided into the Peloponnese and held most of the southern Balkans.
From about 1000 the pressure became continuous. Basil campaigned every year, took fortresses methodically and garrisoned what he took, and there was no second Trajan's Gate — the emperor never again gave him the opportunity.
In July 1014 Samuel blocked the pass at Kleidion with a palisade and a strong force, and beat off the Byzantine assaults until a detachment under Nikephoros Xiphias crossed Mount Belasica and came down behind him.
The army was destroyed. Samuel escaped only because his son Gabriel Radomir extracted him, and thousands were taken prisoner.
He died on 6 October, ten weeks later. The tradition that he collapsed at the sight of the blinded prisoners returning comes from Skylitzes, writing about 1070, and is inseparable from the blinding story itself — which the same chronicler is the only source for. He was buried at St Achilleios on Lake Prespa, where a grave identified as his was excavated in the twentieth century.
The state survived him by four years and no more. Gabriel Radomir was murdered by his cousin within a year, Ivan Vladislav fought on and died at Dyrrhachium in 1018, and Bulgaria was annexed that year.
His archbishopric at Ohrid outlasted the empire. Basil II left it in being with reduced status rather than abolishing it, and it remained the ecclesiastical centre of the region for centuries — the most durable institution Samuel created.
In the modern Balkans he is claimed as a national figure by more than one country, and the argument over whether his state was Bulgarian or Macedonian is a live political matter rather than a historical one. The medieval sources call it Bulgaria, which is what this archive records; what it meant to the people in it is a different and much harder question.