iii

Streams of Gold,
Rivers of Blood
Anthony
Kaldellis
The Rise and Fall of
Byzantium, 955 a.d. to
the First Crusade

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CO NTENTS

Maps  xiii
Genealogies  xxi
Preface  xxvii
Acknowledgments  xxxiii
A Note on Transliteration  xxxv

Introduction: The Byzantine Empire

in the Tenth Century  1
Romanía  1
Imperial governance  4
The army and war  9
“Landed aristocracy”? “Anatolian
magnates”?  13

Part I Conquest and Consolidation

1 “Avengers of Rome”: The First Phase
of Conquest in the East (955–​963)  21
The cast of the conquest: The final years
of Konstantinos VII (d. 959)  21
Turning the tide in the southeast  24
Southern Italy  29
A smooth succession: Romanos II  32
The conquest of Crete  34
viii   ix

The conquest of Cilicia (phase I)  38

The rise of Phokas  40
2 “The White Death of the Saracens”:
Nikephoros II Phokas (963–​969)  43
The new regime  43
Failure in Sicily  45
The conquest of Cilicia (phase II)
and Cyprus  46
The annexation of Taron  50
Declining popularity  51
Tension with Bulgaria  54
Tension in Italy with the German
empire  57
Military victory, political failure: The final
years  61
3 “A Mind Full of Cares, Brave in Danger”:
Ioannes I Tzimiskes (969–​976)  65
The new regime  65
The defeat of the Rus’ and Bulgaria  68
Eastern incursions: Toward a new balance
of power  74
An otherwise obscure reign  79
4 “From Spectator to Contestant”: Basil II
(976–​1025), Part I  81
The new regime  81
The first rebellion of Bardas Skleros  83
The foreign policy of Lakapenos and Phokas,
979–​985  87
The fall of Lakapenos and the rebellion of Phokas
and Skleros  94
5 “Guarding the Children of New Rome”:
Basil II (976–​1025), Part II  103
From status quo to peace in the east,
990–​1001  103
The war against Bulgaria, 991–​1003  112
The emperor and the “aristocracy”  115
6 “No One Ever Saw My Spear at Rest”: Basil II
(976–​1025), Part III  120

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The missing decade and conquest of Bulgaria,

1004–​1018  120
Monitoring Aleppo, 1000–​1025  127
The war with Abkhazia-​Kartli and the last
rebellion, 1021–​1022  131
The apogee of Byzantine Italy  134
The end of an era  138
General Considerations: the Age
of Conquest  142

P art II New Enemies and the Return

of Politics
7 “Intrigues of the Women’s Quarters”: From
Macedonians to Paphlagonians  155
Konstantinos VIII (1025–​1028)  155
Romanos III Argyros (1028–​1034):
The same insecurity  158
The debacle at Aleppo and the capture
of Edessa  160
Diplomacy and dynastic instability  163
Michael IV (1034–​1041): Family rule  165
Frontier integrity  168
The conquest, and loss, of Sicily  171
The Bulgarian revolt  173
The dramatic fall of Michael V
(1041–​1042)  175
8 “No Less Laws than Arms”: Konstantinos IX
Monomachos (1042–​1055), Part I  179
Enter the Normans  181
1043: Trial by fire  184
Domestic initiatives (phase I)  187
The annexation of Ani  191
The Pecheneg invasions and the Revolt
of Tornikios  192
9 “Squaring the Circle”: Konstantinos IX
Monomachos (1042–​1055), Part II  196
The Seljuk invasions and the Pecheneg
wars  196

Contents    ix
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Domestic initiatives (phase II)  201

Italy on the brink and the Schism
of 1054  203
Coping with new challenges  208

10 “With Sword Drawn”: It All Comes to

a Head, 1055–​1059  214
Theodora (1055–​1056)  214
Michael VI (1056–​1057)  216
Isaakios I Komnenos (1057–​1059): Fiscal
reforms and the fall of Keroularios  219
Barbarians of the east and west  222
General Considerations: the Return of
Multipolarity 224

Part III Collapse

11 “The Agony of a Virulent Poison”: The Road
to Mantzikert, 1059–​1071  231
Konstantinos X Doukas (1059–​1067):
Domestic mispriorities  231
Frayed frontiers: Seljuks and Oghuz  233
The end of Byzantine Italy  236
Eudokia and the succession: Romanos IV
Diogenes (1068–​1071)  238
Chasing Turks  241
Mantzikert  246
Civil war  248
12 “Squeezed by the Pangs of Death”: The Empire
on the Verge, 1071–​1081  252
Michael VII Doukas (1071–​1078):
The new regime  252
The state of the provinces  254
A Norman statelet in Asia Minor  256
Breakdown  261
Nikephoros III Botaneiates (1078–​1081)  266
General Considerations: Imperial Collapse  271

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Epilogue: A Byzantine History of the First

Crusade 280
Crusading in broader perspective  282
The making of a surrogate Byzantine
army  287
Restoring the Roman east  295

Guide to the Ten Most Important Narrative

Sources  303
Notes  305
Glossary  349
Bibliography  351
Index of Persons and Places  377

Contents    xi
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PREFACE

T he Byzantines were not a warlike people. They did not typically

raise their children to fight with weapons, as happened in many societ-
ies around them. Their strategy was famously cautious and defensive. They
preferred to pay their enemies either to go away or to fight among themselves.
Likewise, the court at the heart of their empire sought to buy allegiance with
honors, fancy titles, bales of silk, and streams of gold. Politics was the cun-
ning art of providing just the right incentives to win over supporters and
keep them loyal. Money, silk, and titles were the empire’s preferred instru-
ments of governance and foreign policy, over swords and armies. And the
Byzantine state and bureaucracy could generate a larger cash flow than any
other Christian realm at the time. Even in 1080, with half its territory lost
to the Turks, “fountains and streams of gold gushed forth” from the court of
a new emperor desperate to establish his position.1
That desperation stemmed from the dark side of Byzantine politics: the
emperor was always vulnerable to the ambitions of domestic rivals, who
resorted to murderous plots and civil war. If gold failed to make an emperor
popular, or if he was perceived as weak, the “hands of sons were stained with
the blood of fathers, and brother would strike down brother.”2 Sitting on
the throne in Constantinople was a dangerous and precarious business—​but
it was business-​as-​usual. Our period, however, was exceptional in two other
ways. It began with a burst of violence aimed at the empire’s neighbors, as
Byzantine armies went on the offensive and conquered more land and peo-
ple than had ever been subjected to the Roman yoke since the conquests
of Justinian in the sixth century. A  new generation of aggressive soldiers,
trained to fight from youth, slaughtered, sacked, and conquered until the
xxviii   xxix

empire no longer faced credible rivals. When Tzimiskes cut down the five
thousand survivors of a battle, in 963, the blood ran down into the fields,
and the site was renamed “the Mountain of Blood.” One emperor came to be
known as “the White Death of the Saracens,” another as “the Bulgar Slayer.”
The tide would turn during the eleventh century. Three new enemies—​
the Normans, Pechenegs, and Seljuk Turks—​would fall upon the empire
and strip it of many of its conquests. It was now the turn of the Byzantines
to suffer horribly, as “rivers of blood flowed through” their provinces.3 The
present book recounts this sudden rise and fall of an empire on the cusp of
the millennium, an empire torn by its own contradictions and threatened
by the powers that would fashion a new world. It tells the story of how the
streams of gold were drowned by the blood of politics and war.
The years between 955, when the general Nikephoros Phokas was placed
in command of the army and launched a strategy of aggressive conquest, and
1081, when the general Alexios Komnenos seized the throne amidst impe-
rial collapse and political chaos, were a pivotal period in Byzantine history.
During this time, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests,
first in the southeast against the Arabs, then in Bulgaria, and finally also
in Georgia and Armenia. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the
most powerful state in its geostrategic environment and seemed to have no
credible rivals. It was also expanding economically, demographically, and,
in time, intellectually too. Yet imperial hegemony came to a crashing end
in the third quarter of the eleventh century, when political disunity, fiscal
mismanagement, and defeat by the Seljuks in the east and the Normans in
the west forced Byzantium to fight for its very survival. It gradually had to
settle for being one power among many, and just over a century later it was
conquered and dismembered by the crusaders. Byzantium fell behind the
curve of history and would never catch up to its peers, especially in the west.
Such dramatic fluctuations had not been typical of its past history. How did
this happen? What strategies, policies, and personalities shaped the rapid
rise and even more rapid collapse of Byzantine power in less than 150 years?
This story, which fascinates those interested in Byzantine history because
of its dramatic qualities, has to be told anew. It seems to have fallen off the
radar of historians. The last to reconstruct the events of this period in detail,
by using the primary sources, was Gustave Schlumberger, over a century
ago (1890–​1905). Yet he did not cover the eleventh-​century collapse, reach-
ing only as far as 1056, the end of the Macedonian dynasty. Schlumberger’s
work, moreover, which is outdated in many respects and tended toward a
Romantic narrative style, has not been translated into English. After him, we
have mostly general surveys, many of which are good, but they tend to look

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  xxix

at events from a greater distance than one would sometimes like and tend
to recycle the view pushed by an early twentieth-​century school of thought
according to which the history of Byzantium in this era was driven by a par-
ticular socioeconomic transformation. That view, however, is highly doubt-
ful. For these reasons, we need a new narrative history of Byzantium in this
era. We now have more sources than were available to Schlumberger, we
know more about their limitations, and we are hopefully free of many of the
preconceptions that shaped past scholarship. Yet past conjectures with little
support in the evidence have also become hardened facts or common wisdom.
They need to be tested against the evidence. The problem is that much spe-
cialized research is now taking place against the background of an implied
master narrative of this period that is recycled with minor variations from
one survey to the next. This narrative frames and limits research into more
particular areas, and often predetermines the scope of their methodology.
Here, then, is what Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood hopes to accomplish.
It offers a narrative reconstruction of the political and military history of
the empire and points to a new understanding of the socioeconomic changes
that took place in this period. The narrative focuses mostly on the decisions
made by the court and their implementation on the frontier. As these deci-
sions were not made in a vacuum, the narrative also tries to expose their
structural constraints. On the domestic front, we are dealing not so much
with “policies” as with attempts to reward supporters and protect each
regime against potential rivals. Emperors in Byzantium were never safe; they
needed to reaffirm their legitimacy constantly, and this governed imperial
decisions on all levels.
This is also an “international” history in the sense that it tries to explain
who the people were with whom the Romans of Byzantium were interact-
ing, and what constraints operated along each stretch of the frontier. Though
there are notable exceptions (especially Mark Whittow for this period), many
of our surveys are excessively Byzantinocentric; they point the spotlight at
Byzantium and do not illuminate what was going on around it. Enemies
along the frontier are named, but little is said about them or the dynamics
that were driving their relationship with Byzantium. After many years of
heavy reading in Byzantine history, I found that I was still unable to explain
to myself who the Hamdanids were or what Davitʿ of Tao was trying to
accomplish. We should no longer write history that way. This book, there-
fore, takes a different approach: as each area becomes central to the narrative,
I  introduce the internal dynamics and goals of the Hamdanids, Fatimids,
Normans, or Seljuks. As I am not at all committed to Byzantine imperial
projects, I have tried to avoid a pro-​Byzantine bias.

Preface    xxix
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The narrative was also written out of a direct and critical engagement
with the primary sources, including literary texts, documentary records,
inscriptions, coins, and seals. Modern surveys of this period often rely on pre-
vious reconstructions, and they in turn on their predecessors. This sometimes
makes it hard to find what primary source ultimately buttresses specific
claims. Here, by contrast, the sources will be cited directly, so that readers
know the basis for any assertion and can follow the trail. By returning to the
sources and starting anew there, this history clears away a number of fictions
and misunderstandings that have entered the record. Like most Byzantinists
today, I make extensive use of both western and eastern sources. The “foreign”
ones are sometimes better for Byzantine history than the Byzantine ones,
but they must all be used critically and skeptically. There is too much gos-
sip, political bias, and rhetorical invention in them. Some Byzantine sources
reflect specific authorial projects as well as the influence of subsequent events
and the pull of classical models of writing. There is less factual history in
them than one might assume, and some of them are too focused on the capital
and Roman politics rather than on foreign lands, or even the frontier. I will
not survey the main sources here (a guide to the main ones appears at the end
of the book). No mere summary can do justice to the problems and tempta-
tions that they pose to scholars, so I have written a separate study outlining
the many ways in which these literary texts are both more and less than an
accurate recounting of facts.4 One device that they use, and that still tempts
modern historians, is to psychologize the actions of individuals or groups.
This definitely makes histories more exciting, but resisting it, as I have done
here, hopefully makes them more sober, fair, and accurate. Unlike most of our
sources, I try not to take sides, glorify, or condemn.
By following all the sources in detail and in tandem, I saw clearly for
the first time patterns of imperial behavior that shaped both domestic
and foreign policy. I also came to surprising conclusions, sometimes the
opposite of what I expected to find. This was especially the case regard-
ing the imperial collapse of the eleventh century. For example, I  was
forced, against a Psellos-​induced bias, to rehabilitate the military leader-
ship of Konstantinos IX Monomachos. I also came to a completely differ-
ent understanding of the behavior of the patriarch Michael Keroularios
during the fateful summer of 1054. But more importantly, beyond the
actions of specific individuals, I came to question a particular model of
socioeconomic transformation that some historians sought to impose on
this period. According to this model, the imperial “state” ruled by the
Macedonian dynasty was challenged by the landowning “magnates” of
Asia Minor, who were powerful “families” that were eating up peasant

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lands and angling to run the empire in a way that benefited their own
class. As far as I can tell, this picture is fictitious. It leads to tendentious
interpretations of events and individuals that serve a modern agenda, spe-
cifically to show how and when Byzantium became “feudalized.” When
we view those events and individuals against the narrative patterns of
Byzantine imperial history, a different picture emerges, one of emperors
systemically vulnerable to potential enemies and rivals, including most
prominently their own courtiers and generals. In sum, political-​military
history will here point to a different understanding of the socioeconomic
history of this period. This is elaborated in the Introduction and the
General Considerations that conclude the three parts of the book.
This book does not focus on general cultural, literary, intellectual, artistic,
religious, or economic developments that took place during this period, to
which a narrative approach is not ideally suited, but it does include material
from those categories. Trade, painting icons, and sending embassies were
always occurring in the background, but do not need to be mentioned in
banal instances (which are the majority). Major changes in trade policy (espe-
cially with the Italian cities) occurred only after the period covered here. And
although I am fascinated with the rise (or return) of the scientific study of the
climate and of environmental history, which will contribute new insights in
the coming decades, it is unclear how its conclusions can interface with the
history of events, as at some point they must. Recent efforts to write narrative
history from a climatological angle seem to be reductive and fail to explain
Byzantine expansion in an age of supposed regional collapse.
During our period, Byzantium flipped its geographical presence. In
955, it controlled most of Asia Minor, southern Greece, and the corridor
from Greece to Thessalonike and Constantinople. By 1081, it was an almost
entirely Balkan state, having in effect exchanged most of Asia Minor for
Bulgaria, holding both only briefly (1018–​1071). The gravest domestic
threat to the emperors at the beginning of our period was the armies of Asia
Minor and their officers, such as Phokas, whereas toward the end the greatest
threat came from the armies and officers of Macedonia, such as Bryennios. In
this sense, little changed in the underlying structural dynamics of imperial
power, only their geographical orientation. Thus this history will focus on
the assets and vulnerabilities of imperial authority, on how emperors sought
to win support and stave off enemies, first, in a phase of rapid imperial expan-
sion; then during a phase of consolidation and equilibrium; and finally dur-
ing a sudden defeat and rapid decline.
As with the title of the book, the chapter titles have also been borrowed
from expressions in contemporary sources that seemed strikingly relevant.5

Preface    xxxi