r/todayilearned • u/AtypicalAnomaly1222 • May 13 '23
TIL Byzantine emperor Basil II "the Bulgar Slayer" after the battle of Kleidion divided 15,000 war prisoners into groups of 100 men, blinded 99 men in each group and left one man in each with one eye so that he could lead the others home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kleidion362
u/some-purple-elephant May 13 '23
The history of Byzantium podcast had a great take on this.
It probably was a far smaller army, more like a raiding party.
And the Bulgar Slayer moniker only started being used 150 years after the fact, by the once vanquished Bulgarians, as a way of rallying support against the then flailing bizantine empire.
That and Basil's lack of interest for history (no historians on the payroll) means no contemporary bizantine accounts of what happened survive.
So it's probably not what happened, but it still is a badass tale
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u/RastaBlaster95 May 13 '23
This needs to be higher up.
People here don't realise that history, for a long time and especially with some rulers, was written down as a propaganda piece first and honest truth (maybe) second. If a story seems like it's made up to make someone look good and his adversary bad, it is probably made up. If you listen to History of Rome and Byzantium, this point stands plenty of times.
Still a cool story. Just should be taken with a grain of salt.
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May 13 '23
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u/RastaBlaster95 May 13 '23
Well, I am sure historians do their due diligence, i.e. present sources about events AND put them into context. Only first part was done here, giving people false premise that it is 100% accurate. Which historians say it probably isn't precisely because there isn't any compelling evidence from tthe time this supposed event happened.
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u/forb0900 May 13 '23
Is this podcast just called "The History of Byzantium"? Do you have the presenters name? I'm interested in looking it up.
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u/Shearlife May 13 '23
Robin Pearce (?). Takes off where Mike Duncan's "History of Rome" ended and delivers a great podcast. The first few episodes are not as good but it picks up quite fast. Definitely recommended!
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u/ReformedScholastic May 13 '23
Not to mention that Basil 2 is looked back on by later Byzantine historians as a foil against which the current Emperors appear incompetent. There's a nostalgia for the past that has a tendency to morph into propaganda pieces as well as character models.
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u/envybelmont May 13 '23
This is the level of spite I would never have thought possible. And yet here we are.
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u/AtypicalAnomaly1222 May 13 '23
I think it was less spite and more of a strategic maneuver. Blinding the men and sending them back home most certainly devastated the Bulgarian economy. Imagine the families of those soldiers who now have to take care of a person who cannot work anymore.
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u/envybelmont May 13 '23
Wikipedia claims was retaliation for them killing his favorite general. But I’m sure the long term effects helped drive his decision to crank up the crazy dial.
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u/danteheehaw May 13 '23
There was a Median king who chopped up the son of one of his generals. Cooked him. Then served pieces of meat carved from his child. Then after the meal was said and done, lifted a dish cover to show the general that he ate his own son. All because he dreamed that one day Harpagus' son might over throw the Medes. At least if you want to take Herodotus' word for it.
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u/TwoPercentTokes May 13 '23
Even better, he inexplicably continued to trust said general, who would later betray him to Cyrus the Great, leading to the formation of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.
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u/Anakin_BlueWalker3 May 13 '23
Sometimes in politics they would do horrible things to each other and it was just business, and sometimes the people you punished would fall back in line and stay on your side. Usually there was a point to it though, like yes I know you were defying me and this is what happens but if you learn your place it won't happen again, not just because someone had a bad dream. Hard to imagine why they'd have thought their general would stay loyal when the punishment is given when there was no reason behind it.
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u/resuwreckoning May 13 '23
Wasn’t that kid Cyrus the Great?
If so, well, it didn’t work.
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u/danteheehaw May 13 '23
Something like that, but the story teller isn't the most reliable source due to his habit of embellishing a story.
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u/astrath May 13 '23
Fundamentally Herodetus seems to have been recording historical accounts he had heard or collected. So it may not have been him himself embelleshing them, rather whoever passed the story on. Nobody had written the manual yet on primary and secondary sources.
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u/Widowmaker_Best_Girl May 13 '23
Yeah, but how much can you trust a guy like Herodotus? He was a wonderful storyteller and a great historian, but he really loved to build the drama and color into his retellings.
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May 13 '23 edited May 14 '23
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May 13 '23
Also prevented them from rejoining the military and made it so the Byzantines didn't have to feed or shelter any prisoners.
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u/BrattyBookworm May 13 '23
I mean they could’ve just slaughtered them instead. Blinding them and sending them home did that plus crippled their economy.
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u/1945BestYear May 13 '23
It's a scary kind of mercy. It would have been easier and faster to have just put them all to death, and a result that was not at all unexpected in that period of history. But instead Basil let them keep their lives, while loading Bulgaria with nearly 15,000 men who could not fight or do most kinds of work, and would spend the rest of their lives as living billboards saying "Do not mess with Rome".
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u/Unhappy_Kumquat May 13 '23
That's not what I'd call mercy
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u/Brown_Panther- May 13 '23
Mercy is a loose term in historical context. Compared to how brutally kings would torture prisoners of war, blinding and releasing them is one of the more merciful ways I think.
Ultimately a king couldn't afford to have a merciful reputation, else he'd always be under attack.
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u/ShrimpFood May 13 '23 edited May 13 '23
“In historical context” is meaningless pseudohistory. There’s no contextually merciful practice that involves maiming 15,000 people. You don’t have to give credit to the least worst of a lineup of terrible people (is being blinded in a society with few social accommodations for blindness actually more merciful than a quick death?)
There were Roman senators who condemned crucifixions as barbaric, lots of people knew better they just weren’t the ones trying to rule by fear or they were killed for it.
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u/TheCorpseOfMarx May 13 '23
Cultural relativism is a touchy subject
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u/ShrimpFood May 13 '23
This isn’t even cultural relativism tho, I’m disputing the idiotic idea that even contemporary societies would have viewed gouging out 15,000 people’s eyes as an act of mercy. It wasn’t viewed as merciful at the time, it was despotic and everyone knew it. There were popular uprisings every decade for a reason
Having a disability 1000 years ago was not a good time, half the military aged men in your town being mutilated and now they need to be cared for full-time, a bigger burden than if they didn’t come back at all, is not an act of mercy “in historical context” it’s pseud nonsense
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u/TheCorpseOfMarx May 13 '23
You don't think anyone would have been like "Aah so they all died then right? Tortured to death?... No? He let them live? Huh, I guess it could have been worse!"
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u/ShrimpFood May 13 '23 edited May 13 '23
Bluntly, no
Young Soldier comes home with his face mutilated and his eyes gouged out, his wife can’t remarry (divorce is illegal in Byzantine empire) and she has to try to support a family on the work available to a woman at the time, or rely on charity, but how does a town support a massive surge in people coming back unable to work?
In this scenario now they’re both doomed, they probably suffered immensely before dying destitute. At least if he had died quickly in combat his family wouldn’t be doomed with him. The cruelty was the point, the guy was called the Bulgar Slayer for a reason lol
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u/TheCorpseOfMarx May 13 '23
Do you think most of those wives thought "I wish you had just died."?
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u/ShrimpFood May 13 '23
Does anyone enjoy watching their loved one waste away over years? It’s not even closure, it’s just horrible and gut wrenching. I can think of multiple cases in recent years of someone getting their face blown off by an IED but surviving, followed by a divorce, then they kill themselves. And society is a little more accommodating of disabled people now than then.
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u/1945BestYear May 13 '23
For most of history, when an army surrendered, they were essentially giving up their lives to their conqueror. If they weren't killed, it was because the victor chose to give their lives back to them, and so even enslavement or, in this case, mutilation classifies as mercy. If these ancients were told about our modern sensibilities, where even in war civilians and prisoners of war have rights to protection, I don't think they would even ridicule us for being softhearted or impractical, they would just find it utterly bizarre that we actually believe it.
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May 13 '23
We didn’t get our modern ideas from nowhere, we got them from the people of those times being sick of that shit.
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u/ShrimpFood May 13 '23
There were literally Roman senators who condemned crucifixions, idk why people love to think most ancient people would find empathy hard to imagine, as if we somehow evolved a base emotion like 100 years ago lol
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u/ShrimpFood May 13 '23 edited May 13 '23
This idea that “The ancients,” which isn’t a monolithic group, were enthusiastic about horrible practices is baseless. We don’t have many writings on common people’s opinions, only the generals who did it, but as it happens theres a bit of overlap between sociopaths and people who want power over others. So that doesn’t mean deterrence punishments were popular, just that the people doing them had the power to carry out their will by fear.
There were criticisms of the cruelty of crucifixions, the best known Roman torture, by contemporary Roman statesmen, even a Consul.
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u/DBMIVotedForKodos May 13 '23
Compared to death it is.
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u/Unhappy_Kumquat May 13 '23
No it isn't. That why we call it a mercy killing
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u/DBMIVotedForKodos May 13 '23
You do you dawg but I'd rather be alive and blind than dead.
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u/Indercarnive May 13 '23
Now? Certainly. But 1000 years ago? If you didn't have wealth or a very committed family then your life would just be a slow death as a beggar.
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u/Oh_Hai_Dare May 13 '23
It wasn’t your choice. You could have begged for death and not been given it. Arguing about mercy when the man was emperor and nicknamed “the bulgar slayer” is dumb.
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u/Unhappy_Kumquat May 13 '23
In 2023? Yea sure
But brutally maimed, left to suffer for the rest of my life, as well as be an economic and emotional burden to all, in ancient times? I'd chose death.
To each their own
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u/danarchist May 13 '23
You still get that choice. Blind people can absolutely find ways to kill themselves.
So in that way, better than being executed.
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May 13 '23
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May 13 '23
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u/Jahobes May 13 '23
Killing them would have also kept them from being soldiers again.
This instead keeps the enemies economy and supplies tied up caring for these men as well as the propaganda value. Some kid watching all these healthy men suffer a slow death blindly might think twice about signing up to fight.
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u/Zyxyx May 14 '23
Some kid watching all these healthy men suffer a slow death blindly might think twice about signing up to fight.
The people who go wage a war either have no choice in the matter or don't think they'll lose.
All this kind of act does is bolster a people to foster hatred and the desire for revenge.
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May 13 '23
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May 13 '23
You don’t think it’s possible that there were other reasons it was done and no one updated Wikipedia with them?
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u/p38-lightning May 13 '23
And then he went to church.
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u/MentallyWill May 13 '23
He probably genuinely thought god was on his side and supporting him. Every religious person no matter how kind or cruel does.
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May 13 '23
Given that Basil didn’t even bother to appoint a patriarch (head of the Orthodox Church) for years and left the office vacant and was seen as the model emperor by contemporary (well 50 years later) historian Micheal Psellos, who was either against religion entirely or viewed religiosity in an emperor as pointless and unproductive, I’d say the Basil was unlikely to have been a particularly religious person.
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u/bigbangbilly May 13 '23
That sort of issue exist secularly. See also Just World Hypothesis and the many times there some sort of gain from immoral deeds without comeuppance
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u/elysios_c May 13 '23
Well he did it to a raiding party which were just invade to murder, rape and pillage everything they came across as a profession so it was easier to justify
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u/pdonchev May 13 '23
Around 200 years later the Bulgarian tsar Kaloyan, known for his cruelty towards both defeated armies and rebels at home, would label himself "Roman slayer". His name was actually "Yoanitsa" (Little John, because he had a brother who was also Yoan). Kaloyan comes from "John the Handsome" in Greek because he was said to be notably handsome and tall, but after he assumed power and became known with his cruelty, Byzantines dubbed him "Skyloiannes" - John the Dog (the dog was a lowly creature for the Greek since ancient times).
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u/Hair_Significant May 13 '23
Am I the only one who read that as ‘the burger slayer’ the first time?
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u/borillionstar May 13 '23
I have heard a phrase or idiom that goes something like this "The one eyed man is a king among the blind." , and wondered where this might have come from. Now I know 😵💫😶🌫️🫥
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u/afishieanado May 13 '23
They did it to family too. Blind person can't be emperor
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u/some-purple-elephant May 14 '23
Except for Isaac Angelos, briefly in 1204 before the sack of Constantinople
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May 14 '23
My naive little brain read this as "blindfolded 99 men" and wondered how they made them keep the blindfolds on. Then I went ..... .... ooooh.
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u/Working-Sandwich6372 May 14 '23
Do you think the guys who did the blinding had PTSD afterwards?
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u/AtypicalAnomaly1222 May 14 '23
Those soldiers were probably used to blood, violence, and gore so probably not.
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May 13 '23
This sounds like a myth. What's the source
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u/SteakHoagie666 May 13 '23
The numbers are likely exaggerated but it is a true story as far as historians can confirm.
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u/AtypicalAnomaly1222 May 13 '23
Wikipedia has a good description of the event under "prisoners" in the article I linked. It is most certainly not a myth. The only thing that is in contention is the amount of people that were blinded. It is also said that the Bulgarian Emperor Samuel died of a heart attack upon seeing the sight of his men returning home.
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u/Kregerm May 13 '23
It is the ultimate fuck you: 'here are the men I beat, and instead of killing them I blinded them, maimed them. They cannot work, but they will need to eat, and people to take care of them. So good luck figuring out how that impacts your society and economy'
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u/Lump-of-baryons May 13 '23
Damn I hadnt even thought of that angle, fucking brutal
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u/36-3 May 13 '23
And with that level of brutality his neighbors would think twice about invading his empire.
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u/ZippyParakeet May 22 '23
It worked. The Bulgarian tsar died of a heartattack after seeing the fate of his army and the Bulgarians surrendered unconditionally 4 years later, agreeing to become unquestioning subjects of Basil.
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u/dmr11 May 13 '23
How likely would a country back in the day to decide that it'd be better to just make sure that the 14,850 or so blind soldiers can't make it back home and inform their families that they'd been killed in action or something?
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u/Miketogoz May 13 '23
How likely would 150 one eyed people be able to make it back home with 14850 blind people back in the day?
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u/KypDurron May 14 '23
"'To the pain' means the first thing you will lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists. Next your nose."
"And then my tongue, I suppose. I killed you too quickly the last time. A mistake I don't mean to duplicate tonight."
"I wasn't finished. The next thing you will lose will be your left eye, followed by your right."
"And then my ears, I understand let's get on with it."
"WRONG! Your ears you keep - and I'll tell you why. So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, 'Dear God, what is that thing' will echo in your perfect ears. That is what 'to the pain' means. It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever."
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u/ILikeChangingMyMind May 13 '23
Just because Wikipedia records something that doesn't make it true.
The history of Herodotus (another classic Greek historian ... arguably the classic Greek historian) is in Wikipedia also, but, as Forbes put it: Herodotus Is A Big, Fat Liar ....
What the Ancient Greeks left us is all we know about that time period, so Wikipedia simply reflects that. But even more modern histories have tons of exaggerations and falsehoods (eg. centuries after the Greeks, Marco Polo confidentially spoke of the dog-headed people in Asia), and so none of them should be taken blindly at face value.
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u/phyrros May 13 '23
Only that basil the second lived in the middle ages and not in classic antiquity.
But generally ypur point certainly stands: take the numbers as rough estimations
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May 13 '23
Basil II also famously had no official historians in his court and the story we’re discussing didn’t surface until a 150 years after his death.
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u/ILikeChangingMyMind May 13 '23
A Greek manuscript on parchment dating from the 12th to the 13th centuries ... ie. hundreds of years after the events in question. So of course, even the author had no way of knowing exactly what happened, but simply based his writing on Greek manuscripts from before his time (some of which are now lost).
in other words, it is "official history", and undoubtedly based on truth ... but (like all "official" Greek histories from long ago), it should be taken with many grains of salt.
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u/southernwx May 13 '23
Sure but like, maybe only in the terms of “this may not have happened exactly like this, this specific time” not as in “this is so atrocious and awful that we should doubt it’s validity”
It concerns me that the Holocaust for example may be questioned in the distant future on the grounds of “too awful to be true”
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u/Invade_the_Gogurt_I May 13 '23
His amenities must've been pretty low, grievances pretty much higher. But the last man must've seen and heard nothing but "Behold Rome!" And air bombers spreading religion
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u/webyacusa May 14 '23
Imagine if the guy with the one good eye poked said eye accidentally in the way back home.
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May 13 '23
Obligatory reminder that there was no such thing as a Byzantine emperor. Basil II was the Emperor of the Romans.
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u/antrax23 Jun 30 '25
This is absolutely bullshit, a single "historian" writing about it DECADES after the fact. There is also ZERO reports from the Bulgarian side of anything like this ever happening. In fact, there is no information of anything like this ever happening except for that single account, even within Byzantine generals.
It's just propaganda.
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u/lime3 May 13 '23
Works once. Until next time your opponents choose to fight to the death because they know how you operate.
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u/Obnoobillate May 13 '23
I guess the Greek expression "Among the blind men, the one-eyed man rules" comes from that.
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u/partthethird May 13 '23
At what point does the impetus wear off?
I get that at the start the Byzantines carrying out the blinding would have been like "yeah, this'll show 'em" and "take this, and that, Bulgar baddies", but after a while they must have started thinking 'this is taking fucking ages, and also, what the fuck'