Officers and soldiers preparing for the Bulgarian siege, Constantinople, 913 (MED0099)

Constantinople prepares for the Bulgarian siege, 913

In the summer of 913 Symeon I of Bulgaria brought his army beneath the walls of Constantinople. The empire was at its most fragile: Emperor Constantine VII was seven years old, power lay with a regency headed by the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos, and the succession had been marked by months of intrigue. Symeon had chosen his moment precisely.

A siege that never happened

The Bulgarian army encamped before the Theodosian walls and did not attack them. Symeon knew he had neither the fleet to close a blockade from the sea nor the engines to breach that circuit: his strength lay in the threat, not the assault. The regency negotiated, and secured his withdrawal in exchange for recognitions at once political and symbolic — the Bulgarian imperial title and the prospect of a dynastic marriage.

What the painting shows

Giuseppe Rava depicts what was happening inside the walls: officers and soldiers organising the defence, checking equipment, setting the watches along the walkways. It is the side of warfare the chronicles rarely describe, and which the Byzantine military manuals set out in detail, from the distribution of rations to the posting of sentries on the towers.

Equipment

The soldiers wear early tenth-century kit: lamellar klibanion or scale byrnie, helmet with aventail, shield and spear. The Theodosian walls, already nearly five hundred years old, would hold for another five and a half centuries.