Basil’s dominions were half as extensive again as those of Constantine VII.
Constantine seems to have had little appetite for direct territorial expansion,
preferring like his father to emphasise his pre-eminent role as the wise
guarantor of order and justice. Basil, by contrast, appears to have presented
conquest as his prime aim, without any palpable regard for the question of
who would succeed to leadership over the newly amassed territories after
the deaths of himself and his younger brother, Constantine VIII (1025–8).
But he had managed to maintain the army’s loyalty by becoming its general
and personally directing its affairs, a stance which had much in common
with Nikephoros II Phokas’.
Basil was contending with the prestige which individual commanders
and great military affinities still enjoyed. They were bracketed with other,
less politically involved, families whose wealth and influence was liable to
occlude imperial authority locally and thus lower the proceeds fromtaxation
at the disposal of central government. Basil, like his grandfather and the
soldier-emperors of the eighth century, presented the provision of justice
and security of property for the lowliest of his subjects as an essential duty
of the ruler (see above, pp. 275–7, 489). Just after his spectacular campaign
to rebuff Fatimid attempts at seizing Aleppo while Thessaloniki’s outskirts
lay exposed to Bulgarian raiders, Basil issued an important novella on land
law. This in effect abolished the statute of limitations for restitution of
property acquired by ‘the powerful’ from ‘the poor’, save only for that
property covered by legal documents for 934 or earlier; the legal process
was, more or less, to be skewed in favour of claims by members of peasant
fiscal communities against ‘the powerful’ who had ‘wrongfully deprived
and despoiled’ them.96
Basil was avowedly trying to preserve tax units of property-owning
country-dwellers of limited or slender means who had been the subject
of imperial legislation earlier in the tenth century and who were described
as vital for the empire’s well-being (see above, p. 492).His rhetoric of equity
was the more strident for his need to rally the war effort against the Bulgarians
in hostilities that gave every sign of being protracted and very burdensome
for tax-payers. The novella of 996 alluded to those who had used their
senior positions in the establishment to amass properties and who through
their wealth and influence put undue pressure on those small proprietors
not yet swallowed up by their estates. One such had risen from humble
beginnings to the dignity of pr¯otovestiarios, only to be abruptly divested
by the emperor, who ‘made him one of the villagers once more’; another
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