On 29 July 1014 the Byzantine emperor Basil II broke the army of Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria in the pass of Kleidion, near today's village of Klyuch between the Belasitsa and Ograzhden mountains. The Bulgarians had walled off the valley and held it against frontal attacks until Byzantine troops found a path over the ridge and fell on them from behind. Samuel escaped, but thousands of his men were captured, and according to the sources Basil had them blinded and sent home. Samuel died soon after, and by 1018 Bulgaria was a Byzantine province.
A long war
Samuel had made himself master of a large Bulgarian state centered on Ohrid, which by the 11th century stretched across much of the Balkans. Basil II's first campaign against him ended in disaster: Mark Cartwright, in the World History Encyclopedia, describes the Byzantine army wiped out at Trajan's Gate in 986, while the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica dates Basil's first unsuccessful efforts to 981. From the late 990s Basil fought his way back year after year, retaking Greece and then Bulgarian cities such as Pliska and Skopje.1
By 1014 the war was reaching its end. To stop another Byzantine invasion, Samuel's troops built a wall across the gorge near Klyuch, in the Belasitsa mountains, according to the Bulgarian News Agency's historical calendar. Byzantine accounts call the place Kleidion.2
The wall and the ridge
Basil attacked the barrier head-on again and again without success. Then, the Bulgarian News Agency's account says, Byzantine detachments found a path to the crest of the Belasitsa, slipped through unseen and attacked the Bulgarians from behind, while Basil struck the wall from the front and broke it down. The Bulgarian army was routed. Cartwright calls it a great and decisive victory, and the 1911 Britannica an overwhelming defeat for Bulgaria. The same Bulgarian account says Samuel escaped to the fortress of Prilep with the help of his son, Gavril Radomir.3
Fifteen thousand prisoners
The aftermath is the most famous part of the story. The accounts agree on the core of it: Basil had the prisoners, put at about 15,000, blinded, leaving one man in every hundred with one eye to lead the others back to their tsar. The Bulgarian News Agency says the blinded men reached Samuel in October 1014; the 1911 Britannica says he fainted at the sight and died two days later, and Cartwright says he was said to have died of a stroke brought on by the shock. The tale comes down from the Byzantine side, and its numbers cannot be checked independently.4
Bulgaria could not hold out for long without Samuel. After some resistance led by his heirs, Basil entered Serdica, today's Sofia, in 1018, and the first Bulgarian state came under Byzantine rule. The emperor became known as Bulgaroktonos, the Bulgar-Slayer, a name the Bulgarian News Agency ties directly to his cruelty after the battle. Cartwright notes that he then governed his new subjects with some restraint, keeping taxes low and leaving the Bulgarian church its independence. Our article on the Battle of Kleidion tells the full story, and our profile of Basil II follows the emperor's whole reign.5
