Titans of History

Still a young man, Basil—who had demanded Phakos’ severed head as a trophy—had shown himself to be a brave and ruthless combatant, not afraid to lead his armies into battle. Nonetheless, government of the empire remained largely in the hands of his uncle, the eunuch Basil Lekanpenos, the grand chamberlain of the imperial palace, so Basil accused him of secretly sympathizing with the rebel cause, and exiled him from Byzantium in 985. Distrustful of the established elite, Basil preferred to offer patronage and protection to small farmers in return for providing military service and regular taxes. He systematically toppled any other potential rivals, confiscating their lands and money to help fund his relentless military campaigns.

In 995, angered by Arab incursions into Byzantine territory, he gathered 40,000 men and attacked Syria—securing it for the Empire for the next 75 years. In the process, he sacked Tripoli and nearly reached Palestine and Jerusalem. His mortal enemy, however, was the equally ambitious and self-styled Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria, who had used the distractions of the Byzantine civil wars to extend his own empire from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, swallowing up swathes of Byzantine territory. Basil’s early forays against the Bulgarians, such as the siege of Sofia in 986, had been costly and unsuccessful, leading to the disastrous ambush at the Gates of Trajan, in which thousands of his soldiers were lost and he barely escaped alive. From 1001, however, having eradicated his domestic enemies, Basil began to eat back into the territory conquered by Samuel, soon regaining Macedonia. Success was steady rather than spectacular until a massive victory at the Battle of Kleidon, on July 29, 1014, Basil’s forces taking Samuel’s capital.

As a brutal denouement to the campaign, Basil lined up the defeated prisoners and had them blinded. In a macabre gesture, he left one eye for every hundred men so that the hapless troops could find their way back to their homes. A reported 15,000 shuffled away in pathetic columns, wounded, blinded and utterly terrorized. According to the 11th-century historian John Skylitzes, the tsar fainted after seeing his soldiers return and died of a stroke. In this single horrifying moment, Basil earned his epithet Bulgar Slayer.

HASSAN AL-SABBAH AND THE ASSASSINS

1056–1124

No man ever escaped when the Sheikh of the Mountain desired his death

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Marco Polo

“The Old Man of the Mountain,” Hassan al-Sabbah, was arguably the forerunner of modern jihadist terrorism, a medieval Osama bin Laden (though unlike him, a Shiite), but he was also a figure of learning and mystique, a charismatic military and religious leader who achieved power for his sect far beyond its resources. His fiefdom of Alamut, high in the Elburz Mountains of northern Iran, was the base of the mysterious but deadly sect known as the Assassins. Marco Polo, who visited the area on his way back from China, told of a beautiful garden in which a powerful sheikh trained fanatical killers to become his loyal followers with hashish-fueled promises of paradise. These same men would then do all that the Old Man asked—even kill themselves, if that was what he desired.

Hassan al-Sabbah was born in the Persian city of Qom, becoming an admired scholar of Shia Islam. While still a youth, his family moved to the town of Rayy, and it was there that he resolved to devote his life to the Shia Ismaili sect.

Hassan carved an early career at the court of the Seljuq Turks, a Sunni dynasty whose empire controlled much of Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine between the 11th and 14th centuries. In the service of the Seljuq sultan, Hassan rose to become a senior adviser but ended up causing offense and was banished, an insult he never forgot.

Hassan roamed around the Middle East until he arrived in Egypt in about 1078. Cairo was then the capital of the Fatimid empire whose caliphs were Shia Ismailis. He remained there for some three years, continuing his studies and establishing himself as a religious leader of the Nizariya faction. But when he and his faction lost out in a political struggle and were driven out of Cairo, he led his sect on a new path. He and his followers established or fortified a series of remote strongholds across the Middle East, from Lebanon to Iraq, and from Syria to Iran. He returned to his native Iran, taking over Alamut castle in the Elburz Mountains. It would remain his aerie and capital until his death.