Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
There is not a lot of information historically written about the battle of Moglena, which is a shame, because from what I could glean, it was certainly interesting.
Basil II, Byzantine emperor, had been hard at work, mobilizing his war machine to take down Bulgaria. The infamous Battle of Kleidion and the purported blinding of numerous Bulgarian soldiers now behind him, he retreated for a while, but again mobilized when word came to him that Tsar Samuil had died (possibly from stroke or heart failure brought on by the shock of seeing so many of his soldiers blinded) and that his son Gavril Radomir had taken charge of rebuffing the Byzantine Roman advances. Basil wanted to move quickly. Gavril’s support base was not strong, and he wanted to take advantage of this. He further fomented dissent in Bulgaria by appearing to support Gavrils’ nefarious cousin Ivan to the throne and even promising him he would support his assent to the throne if he killed Gavril and his wife and children, but that takes me away from the original point of the story.
Basil move in on Bitola, passing many Bulgarian towns, but leaving them be, forbidding rape and pillage. Bitola, Gavril’s capitol from which he had recently fled, however, he razed, biblically, “leaving not one stone upon another”.
Then he turned his attention to Voden which was always rebelling, quashing any hopes of rebellion and exiling the inhabitants. Finally, he turned to Moglena which his generals had been besieging without success. There is little to tell us why they had so little success and I have had to guess. In The Bone Goddess, they have resorted to siege towers which became stuck in the mud. Historically, Basil rolled up his sleeves and took control of the siege himself and to the astonishment of his generals, ordered the flow of the surrounding river the Moglenitsa to be diverted. The river ran around the outer walls of Moglena, serving effectively as a moat. It is hard telling how long such an operation might have taken. I would be very curious to know if the current river shows nay evidence today of this diversion of its flow. Searches of Google satellite images tell me little and it is difficult to ascertain accurately the position of the original town and fortress. It is now known as Almopia, Greece. The coordinates don’t appear to be anywhere near the river, but a lot can change in a thousand years.
After Basil had his engineers divert the river, he brought in the sappers. Sappers were low level grunts, low on the totem pole in the military, but like most low-level workers, very important. It was their job to tunnel beneath the walls. Doing so was a dangerous operation and often had to be done under the cover of night or behind screens so those on the fortress walls could not see what was being done, though I imagine after they saw the river being diverted, they certainly had to have their suspicions.
The river had been perhaps the one thing that made the inhabitants feel most secure. In the days since the operation had begun, that had all changed. Even a steady spring rain did not deter the sappers. They slogged on in the mud. Bourtzes’ sappers had diverted the river to such an extent, that tunneling work could begin, concealed with cleverly disguised wattle screens. The entire operation was supported by wooden beams. The besieged could only watch from the parapets. Basil had sent constant patrols around the parameters, night and day to ensure that the sappers’ efforts were not hampered. Most castles had a sally port with which the besieged sent out men to impede efforts to tunnel under the walls. In addition, Basil kept Moglena busy with varying levels of assault from the helepoloi, which he had caused to be set around the city at assorted intervals. They returned the assault with similar missiles from within. Basil’s men were outside the range of the catapults within Moglena, but not so the sappers, who had to make the journey of five hundred paces or so to the entrance of their tunnel. A well-placed missile caught one man before he could make his subterranean descent. Even from where Ulf stood with Bourtzes on the bank, he could see the man’s head smashed into a pulpy mess of blood and brain and mud.
Often, those who were besieged, would put a bowl of water on the ground near the suspected operations and if tunneling was being done under their city or fortress, the rippling of water in the bowl would give it away. In this case, Basil had another trick up his sleeves, as if undermining (the origin for this term in modern lingo, but the way comes from this practice) wasn’t enough to weaken Moglena’s walls.
I describe the next step in The Bone Goddess:
It was important that the mine be as dry as possible for the next stage of operation. The earth was carried away on wagons under cover of night so it would not be apparent to the defenders what was going on. This had to be done without even the benefit of torches. Wagons of dry brush and stinking, bloated hog carcasses were pulled up to the entrance of the mines and pulled deep within its recesses. The hogs had been slaughtered days before when it was thought the mines were ready for their addition, Bourtzes told Ulf.
The result pretty much ensured the destruction of walls, though surprisingly, this did not always ensure the surrender of the remaining holdouts behind their crumbling walls:
In the warm humid air, the hogs had had a chance to putrefy. Added to these were bushel baskets of rags greased with cooking fats and oils. These would be taken into the very bowels of the mine directly to where the tunnel burrowed under the castle walls. The hog fat and greasy rags would catch fire quickly. The conflagration would bring down the support beams of the mines, the only thing that continued to hold up the walls of the fortress. By the time the sun had reached its zenith, the walls had begun to show definite signs of sinking.
In the case of Moglena, Basil was successful. Moglena was completely destroyed and Gavril Radomir could only watch the destruction of yet another of his fortresses from a neighboring city. By the autumn of that same year, he would have no more stake in the operations of Bulgarian independence. Ivan Vladislav would kill him one fine autumn afternoon while he was out boar hunting. Ivan himself would only hold out three more years before Bulgaria utterly and inexorably fell to Basil II, the “Bulgar Slayer”