The Book Of Ancient Bastards (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
( A.D. 958–1025) Basil was ugly, dirty, coarse, boorish, totally philistine and almost pathologically mean. He was, in short, profoundly un-Byzantine. . . . He cared only for the greatness and prosperity of his Empire. No wonder that in his hands it reached its apogee.”—John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Apogee The Byzantine Empire, that Greek-speaking successor state of Rome that flourished in the eastern Mediterranean for hundreds of years after the end of Roman power in the west, saw more than its share of imperial bastards, rulers capable of great works and great cruelty, frequently all at the same time. Without question the most remarkable of these was a great military leader who sold his sister to a foreign ruler in exchange for military support, and blinded fifteen thousand captive enemy soldiers all at once, in order to break the resistance of a previously implacable foe. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Basil II, who ruled the empire from the time he was two until his death sixty-five years later.
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