ily from the
Saracens.

Basil's reign marks the highest point of the power of the Eastern empire
since Justinian I. Part of the credit is due to his predecessors Nicephorus
and Tzimisces, but the greater part belongs to him. He dedicated himself
unsparingly to the laborious duties of ruling, and he had to reckon
throughout with the ill-will of a rich and powerful section of his
subjects. He was hard and cruel, without any refinement or interest in
culture. In a contemporary psalter (preserved in the library of St Mark at
Venice) there is a portrait of him, with a grey beard, crowned and robed in
imperial costume.

AUTHORITIES.--Leo Diaconus (ed. Bonn, 1828); Psellus, _History_ (ed.
Sathas, London, 1899); George Cedrenus (_Chronicle_, transcribed from the
work of John Scylitzes, vol. ii., ed. Bonn, 1839); Zonaras, bk. xvii. (ed.
Bonn, vol. iii., 1897); Cecaumenus, _Strategikon_ (ed. Vasilievski and
Jernstedt, St Petersburg, 1896); Yahy[=a] of Antioch (contemporary Asiatic
chronicle), extracts with Russian translation by Rosen (St Petersburg,
1883); Al Mekin (Elmacinus), _Historia Saracenica_, (ed. with Latin
translation by Erpenius, Leiden, 1625); "Laws (_Novellae_) of Basil" (ed.
Zachariae von Lingenthal, in _Jus Graeco-Romanum_, vol. iii., 1853);
Finlay, _Hist. of Greece_; Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_; G. Schlumberger,
_L'Epopee byzantine_, part i. and part ii. (Paris, 1896, 1900).

(J. B. B.)

BASIL (Russ. VASILY), the name of four grand-dukes of Moscow and tsars of
Muscovy.

BASIL I. DMITREVICH (1371-1425), son of Dmitri (Demetrius) Donskoi, whom he
succeeded in 1389, married Sophia, the daughter of Vitovt, grand-duke of
Lithuania. In his reign the grand-duchy of Muscovy became practically
hereditary, and asserted its supremacy over all the surrounding
principalities. Nevertheless Basil received his _yarluik_, or investiture,
from the Golden Horde and was compelled to pay tribute to the grand khan,
Tokhtamuish. He annexed the principality of Suzdal to Moscovy, together
with Murom, Kozelsk Peremyshl, and other places; reduced the grand-duchy of
Rostov to a state of vassalage; and acquired territory from the republic of
Great Novgorod by treaty. In his reign occurred the invasion of Timur
(1395), who ruined the Volgan regions, but did not penetrate so far as
Moscow. Indeed Timur's raid was of service to the Russian prince as it all
but wiped out the Golden Horde, which for the next twelve years was in a
state of an