Bulgaria’s Tsar Samuel had extended his rule…

Bulgaria’s Tsar Samuel had extended his rule from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea, recovering most of the lands that had been Bulgarian before the invasion of Svyatoslav of Kievan Rus', during the years when Emperor Basil II had been distracted with internal rebellions and recovering the military situation on his eastern frontier.

Samuel had also conducted damaging raids into imperial territory as far as central Greece.

The tide had turned in 996, when the imperial general Nikephoros Ouranos inflicted a crushing defeat on a raiding Bulgarian army at a battle on the River Spercheios in Thessaly.

Samuel and his son Gabriel were lucky to escape capture.

Basil II, beginning in 1000, is free to focus on a war of outright conquest against Bulgaria, a war he prosecutes with grinding persistence and strategic insight.

In this year, the imperial generals Nikephoros Xiphias and Theodorokan take the old Bulgarian capital of Great Preslav and the towns of Lesser Preslav and Pliskova.