Qualla: Battle of Kleidion

Battle of Kleidion: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kandi, Public domain. The valley between Belasitsa and Ograzhden is not wide. A river runs through it; oak forest climbs the lower slopes; on summer evenings the air smells of pine resin and stone. In late July of 1014, the Bulgarian tsar Samuel had blocked it with a wooden palisade and put fifteen to twenty thousand men behind it. He knew the Byzantine emperor would come because the Byzantine emperor had come every summer for almost forty years. What he did not know was the path his men had not noticed up the back of the mountain, and the cold logic of a man who had decided this would be the last campaign of a very long war.

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Image: Kandi | Public domain

Battle of Kleidion: Forty years of summers

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kandi, CC BY-SA 3.0. Samuel was the youngest of four brothers, the comitopuli, sons of a Bulgarian provincial governor who had built a new capital and a new state in the western Bulgarian highlands while the eastern half of the old First Bulgarian Empire was being absorbed by Constantinople. He was a...

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Image: Kandi | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Kleidion: The palisade

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit from the Middle Ages, unknown, Public domain. Samuel chose Kleidion because he had to. His nobility was wavering; in 1005 even the governor of the major Adriatic port of Dyrrhachium had simply opened his gates to Basil. To force a battle on his own terms, Samuel funnelled the Byzantines into the narrow valley of the Struma R...

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Image: from the Middle Ages, unknown | Public domain

Battle of Kleidion: Xiphias's path

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) and NordNordWest, CC BY-SA 3.0. Basil ordered his general Nikephoros Xiphias, governor of Philippopolis, to take a force up and over the high shoulder of Belasitsa by a steep mountain track that the Bulgarians had not adequately watched. While Basil resumed his attacks on the palisade from the front, Xiphias's ...

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Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) and NordNordWest | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Kleidion: The hundred and the one

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J. B. Bury, Public domain. Skylitzes, the Byzantine chronicler, reports that Basil took fifteen thousand Bulgarian prisoners; another source says fourteen thousand; the Bulgarian translation of the Manasses Chronicle puts the number at eight thousand. Modern historians, including the Bulgarian scholar Vasi...

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Image: J. B. Bury | Public domain

Battle of Kleidion: What Kleidion meant

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Мико, CC BY 4.0. The name Bulgar-Slayer — Boulgaroktonos in Greek — was applied to Basil only later. He himself does not seem to have used it. But the act of Kleidion entered the history of two peoples in different ways. For the Byzantines, it was the moment the long war turned. Within four years...

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Image: Мико | CC BY 4.0