Confined since the definitive loss of Sicily to the Saracens in the last years of the ninth century to the southern provinces of Calabria, imperial forces began the reconquest of Sicily and southern Italy from Saracen and Lombard masters during the last years of the reign of the Emperor Basil II. By the 1020s southern Italy was firmly administered under an imperial military governor, a katepano, and the recovery of western Sicily was under way. Basil’s death in 1025 slowed the process, however, which eventually ground to a halt in the 1030s. In southern Italy pressure from the German emperors was fended off through an alliance with the papacy, but new enemies soon appeared on the scene in the shape of the Normans, first appearing in c. 1016 in Gaeta as pilgrims en route for the Holy Land, shortly thereafter employed as mercenary troops in large numbers by both Lombards and Byzantines. Drawn by the pay and by the possibility of rich pickings through warfare, their numbers rapidly swelled, and by the 1030s some had succeeded well enough to gain local lordships and titles and establish a permanent territorial foothold. The most successful was Robert Guiscard of the Hauteville family: by 1059 he had defeated and driven out Byzantine troops from Apulia and Calabria, and had defeated and captured the Pope, Leo IX, and had been awarded the title of Duke of Apulia and Calabria.
From this base Robert planned the conquest of the Byzantine Balkans, and to this end he launched in 1081 a major assault on the imperial fortress of Dyrrhachion, modern Durazzo or Durres in Albania. The city fell and the new Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who had rushed to relieve the city, was heavily defeated and himself almost captured. A well-planned counteroffensive was then begun, and by 1085 the Norman threat had been defeated. But the establishment of the Normans in southern Italy ended any Byzantine efforts to recover Sicily (which itself soon fell under Norman control) or southern Italy. Bari, the last imperial fortress in the region, fell in 1071. Guiscard’s son Bohemund continued his father’s anti-imperial policy and was a key participant in the First Crusade, obtaining the city of Antioch, contrary to an agreement made with Alexios in 1098. His capture by Turkish troops in 1100 was followed by his release after payment of a ransom in 1103, when he continued to oppose Byzantine troops until his return to Italy in 1104. He launched a new expedition against Dyrrhachion in 1107 (having first called for a new crusade, against Byzantium on account ofthe emperor’s supposed betrayal of the Crusaders), but was surrounded and forced to surrender. He became a vassal of the emperor, who awarded him the duchy of Antioch (he died, probably in Italy, in 1109 or 1111). While this did not end Byzantine-Norman conflict, which was strenuously pursued by the Norman King of Sicily, Roger, during the middle years of the twelfth century, there was no further successful Norman invasion.
In the Balkans the peace which followed the wars between the empire and the Bulgar Tsar Symeon in the early 920s lasted throughout the reign of his successor, Peter I (927-967). The Bulgar demand for the annual Byzantine ‘tribute’ in 965 soured this relationship and encouraged the Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas (963-969) to call in the Rus’ under their ruler Svyatoslav against the Bulgars’ northern frontier. Svyatoslav was too successful, however. He destroyed the Bulgar resistance and occupied the northern part of the territory. Ejected after a fiercely-contested campaign by the Emperor John I Tzimiskes in 971, Svyatoslav was killed on the return journey to Kiev. But Byzantine troops now occupied eastern Bulgaria up to the Danube. When Tzimiskes died in 976 a rebellion of the sons of a local leader, based around Prespa and Ohrid, challenged Byzantine control. The real leader was one of the sons, named Samuel, who became Tsar and launched a series of attacks on Byzantine troops, forcing the empire to relinquish much of the territory it had nominally controlled.
The war which followed lasted over 20 years and resulted, eventually, in the utter defeat of the Bulgars and the conquest of the whole territory excluding Croatia in the north-west, which remained independent, although subject to imperial tribute and to pressure in the west from the nascent power of Venice, still nominally a Byzantine territory but entirely independent in practice. The newly-conquered territories were organised into three major provinces, or themata, along the standard pattern: in the west, the thema of Sirmium (Belgrade) included the tributary Serb lands (which had moved in and out of the imperial political orbit over the preceding centuries); in the centre and south the thema of Bulgaria covered modern Macedonia; and in the east and along the Danube delta the thema of Paristrion was established in the provinces formerly known as Moesia and Scythia, including the Dobrudja. Bulgaria remained an important imperial territory until the 1180s.
The Croatian districts, together with the territory occupied by the Slovenes to the north and west, had been largely under Frankish political influence since the destruction by Charlemagne of the Avar Khaganate in the 790s, although Byzantine control over much of the Dalmatian coastal region meant that imperial cultural influence was also significant. Frankish influence was reduced by local rebellions from the 870s, and by the 920s a local prince, Tomislav, in alliance with the Byzantine emperor, was ruling over an expanded and powerful Croat confederacy. After his death this collapsed, however, and independent Croatian princes survived by a shifting pattern of alliances with their surrounding neighbours. During Basil II’s war with Samuel, the Byzantines relied on Venice to assert imperial influence, and although Croatia became a Byzantine vassal in 1019, Venetian interest in the wealthy Dalmatian trading cities had been aroused. Although rejecting Byzantine overlordship after 1025, Croatia again became an imperial ally when the Normans posed a threat. Croatia also had to confront the Hungarian kingdom to the north, which in the 1080s was able to impose itself as the dominant power in the region. Thereafter Croatia, with Slavonia, remained effectively
Approximate limit of Norman kingdom c. 1156 Byzantine border (approximate) c. 1025 Approximate limits of Bulgarian control c. 900 Approximate limits of Bulgarian rule c. 996
Pliska Under Samuel’s control for most of the period, c. 986-1014
Loannina Under Samuel’s control at height of his power c. 996, subsequently reverting to Byzantine dominion
Map H. l Byzantine Italy and the Balkans c. 960-1180.
Part of the kingdom of Hungary until the Ottoman conquest in the early sixteenth century.
World History
