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Chapter Eight: Megas Basileus
Chapter Eight: Megas Basileus

"It is our Imperial Will that the Christian peoples should be joined together in a state of perfection and Unity, for this is most pleasing to the Almighty."

Manuel Komnenos, Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans, Opening statement of the Third Council of Nicaea​


The accession to the throne of Manuel Komnenos was uncontested. Fifty-one years old at the time of his coming to power, Manuel had inherited all of his father’s qualities in full. Tall, hairy, and fearsomely intelligent, it was hardly surprising that not one ambitious commander dared to even begin to question his new Emperor. Not for generations had there been such a smooth transfer of power from an Emperor to his heir.

Manuel’s reign is often considered to mark the apogee of the Komnenid dynasty. He was certainly lucky to inherit from his father and uncle an Empire that was stable and dominant on all of its frontiers, and to have the services of the ever-energetic Parakoimomenos Basilios, his intellectual vigour undimmed despite his advancing years (i). Few, indeed, could imagine a court without the old eunuch, who, despite the misgivings of the Emperor, was confirmed in his position within a few days of the accession. There were plenty more spoils. Manuel had long been an ally of Jordan of Aversa, and the Norman was swiftly appointed to the position of Doux of Antioch, from where, in 1124, he led a daring and hugely successful raid that managed to sack Damascus.

The early years of Manuel’s reign were, by the standards of his predecessors, relaxed. A Cuman (ii) raid upon the Imperial colonies in the Chersonesos (iii) were repulsed with minimal difficulty, with the Cumans themselves being forced to acknowledge Constantinople’s suzerainty. The native princes on the frontiers, too, seemed relatively quiescent- even the ever feuding Armenian princes seemed for now tolerant to accept the sovereignty of the new Emperor. Sadly, for the Basileus, it was not a situation that could last forever.

The trouble, though, came not from the Armenian princes, but from a client monarch at the other end of the Empire. Ever since the days of Basil II, the Serbs had been relatively quiet clients of the Empire- aside from a brief flare-up into revolt in the early days of Alexios Komnenos (iv), Constantinople had been able to keep them under control. Of late, though, this had begun to change. The demands of the Imperial tax machine had seen the Serbs grouped together in 1125 under the authority of a sole ruler, given the title of Doux (v). The man chosen for this office was a hardy warrior by the name of Constantine Reljić, a half-Norman whose father had settled in the Serbian lands as an imperial peacekeeper back in the 1070s. Reljić had adopted his mother’s Serbian name, and had grown up as a loyal servant of Constantinople, attracted to the ideals of the Christian Empire in a way that many Serbs had not been. However, several perceived snubs by the new regime of Manuel Komnenos had done much to strain Reljić’s loyalty, and the depredations of the Imperial tax collectors upon his countrymen had angered the Doux. In 1128, therefore, he sought help from a new quarter- the kingdom of Hungary.

Hungary at the time was settling down from the convulsions that had characterised the long reign of King Solomon I, who had finally expired at the age of seventy three in the spring of 1126 (vi). His son and namesake was, like Reljić, a man of a mixed background, with his mother Judith of Swabia being the sister of the same Emperor Henry IV who had caused Constantinople so much trouble in Italy. Solomon II, therefore, was hardly a disinterested party in the struggles between great Empires, and was eager to strike back a blow to redeem the pride of his deceased uncle. Accordingly, with this family injustice in mind, the King of Hungary sent forth an army of several thousand men to “liberate” the Serbs. The Tagmata of the Bulgarian provinces, marching into Serbia in an attempt to quell the flames of rebellion, were put to ignominious flight, and sent scuttling back to Thessalonica in disarray. Worse was to follow. In the spring of 1129, with a belly filled by a prosperous harvest the previous autumn, the Hungaro-Serbian army descended from the mountain passes, and managed to overwhelm the importance fortress of Sardica, on the military road from Constantinople to the city of Singidunum. With Singidunum and her hinterland thus cut off, Reljić and his allies could concentrate on picking off the neighbouring towns piecemeal, which they duly did. By the end of the year, barely a town was left in Imperial hands in a line running from Rasdaria to Dyracchion (vii).

For a man with a military reputation like Manuel Komnenos, this was an intolerable state of affairs, and one which he had no intention of letting rest. The concerns of Jordan of Aversa to keep a large force in the East were overridden, and the Emperor set out from Constantinople in summer 1130 at the head of a very large army- contemporary sources talk of a million men, an obviously absurd figure that nonetheless gives a chilling indication of Manuel’s purpose of intent (viii). When battle was eventually joined, at Haram in Serbia itself, the large army of the Emperor initially seemed cumbersome, and in the course of an epic two-week slog Reljić was able to win several tactical victories. Numbers, though, eventually told. Faced with Manuel’s stern resolve, Solomon of Hungary blinked, and gave orders for his warriors to retreat. Reljić was left friendless, and he was duly dragged back to Constantinople and blinded as part of the concluding ceremony of Manuel’s triumph in the Hippodrome. With him went the vast majority of the Serbian aristocracy. A nation had, effectively been decapitated, and while Serbian resentment would continue to fester, never again would it be able to reach as serious a pitch as in the great revolt of Constantine Reljić.

The example provided by newly subdued Serbia was an intriguing one for Manuel, and it was not long before the Emperor began to contemplate applying the lessons of the Serbian revolt to the seemingly intractable problem of the Armenians who had, shortly after the Serbian campaign, caused a series of major riots in Cilicia linked to Turcoman attacks on the undefended region (ix). The Armenian problem, though, was one of a different order of magnitude to that of the Serbs; for not only did the Armenians exist in various client principalities on the imperial flanks, they also made up substantial parts of the population of the eastern provinces and a large proportion of the Tagmata of Anatolia. Any attempt to decapitate them, therefore, would have to be attempted with extreme care. Still, the idea intrigued Manuel. Early in 1134, he seems to have tried to put some of the ideas into practise, travelling to Antioch and there arranging a dramatic show trial of the Prince of Syunik (x), Roupen, which ended with his arrest and detention on Cyprus and his replacement upon the throne by his one year old son, Smbat. The experiment did not end well- violent riots broke out in Antioch and several Chalcedonian monasteries were burned to the ground before Jordan of Aversa could hurriedly restore order. Manuel was forced to beat a retreat on this occasion- but the idea continued to float around the chanceries of the capital.

By the end of the decade, the Emperor was beginning to fade, and more and more power was passing into the hands of his son and co-Emperor John, a dynamic and ambitious man now in his early thirties. John’s great passion was for theology, and for the future of his Church. The thought that everywhere around him the faithless were dooming themselves to Hell through their own errors was a source of great distress to the young Emperor, and he made repeated and forceful efforts to bring various groups to the light of the Church. In 1141, the Jews of Constantinople suffered the indignity of a series of patronising lectures by John, coupled with blatant bribes at conversion. Three years later, it was the turn of the Armenians who, according to a waspish comment by Jordan of Aversa (xi), were treated to the spectacle of John Komnenos trailing round the Armenian churches of Syria in tears, begging their priests to convert. Both Jews and Armenians, though, remained defiant, and Jordan and his fellow Eastern commanders firmly encouraged John to stay well away. Instead, John’s gaze turned ever further to the West.

Ever since the Battle of Savona, the Patriarch of Rome, the so called “Pope”, had been in a state of subordination to the whims of the Imperial Katepánō, an office occupied in the 1140s by one Constantine Nafpliotis, the son of the Bithynian aristocrat Nikēphoros who had been instrumental in the great revolt against Isaac II. Constantine was a young and not particularly able man who had been raised to his position by Manuel, and, following his arrival in Italy, had promptly done much to irritate Constantinople’s allies in the peninsula, to the extent that, in 1147 the peoples of Rome rose up against their pro-Imperial Pope Anacletus II, replacing him with the ominously named Gregory VIII. Worse still, Gregory immediately began to make appeals to the new German Emperor, Frederick (xii), seeking his support in shaking off the influence of the schismatic “Greeks”. Frederick, young and inexperienced, could not resist the opportunity to play the hero, and duly descended into Italy at the head of a small army. A promising start for Gregory and the Germans quickly turned sour, though. The elderly Emperor Manuel, upon hearing the disturbances, insisted on crossing to Italy personally to deal with a situation that was manifestly out of the control of Constantine Nafpliotis. Confronted with the implacable resolve of this seemingly invincible Emperor, Frederick quickly retreated, and the expedition was over as soon as it had begun. Not for centuries would a German Emperor again attempt a direct attack upon the Roman Empire (xiii).

For Manuel, this might have been the end of the matter- he was a very old man, he had seen off all of his enemies, and he could now return to his capital to live out his last days in peace. Those around him, though, were determined not to let the matter rest. The Parakoimomenos in particular, though now in his ninth decade, immediately grasped that here was an opportunity to force forward the Imperial interest- and he was joined in this by John Komnenos. Together, the two of them encouraged Manuel to demand a general synod of the Church, to ensure that such division never took place again. And so, in the spring of 1150, presided over by the half-dead Manuel Komnenos, the Eighth Ecumenical Council began- the third such gathering to be held in the town of Nicaea (xiv).

To call the gathering of bishops "ecumenical" might have been stretching things, in fairness. Together with the reinstated Pope Anacletus II, some thirty Italian bishops travelled to Nicaea, but the rest of the West was woefully under-represented. Six bishops came from Iberia, three from Hungary, and one each from France, England, and the Rus princes. The Germans, predictably, sent no bishops at all. At a conference so thoroughly dominated by the bishops of Anatolia and the Aegean, therefore, it was scarcely surprising that the westerners were cowed and bribed into submission- indeed, the one English Bishop, Fulk of Lichfield, never bothered to return to his cold and sodden see, and settled himself on sunny Samos for the next twenty years. The schism of 1054 was declared null and void, and the contentious filioque clause (xv) was stripped from the Latin version of the original Creed of Nicaea. Objections from the Eastern side, led by the Patriarch of Constantinople Luke, were brushed aside- indeed, Luke himself lost his eyes six months after the council. What emerged, after much hard work, was an almost total victory for Constantinople. The Chalcedonian Church, it seemed, was restored in perfect unity- as a powerful and indivisible “Uniate Church”.

There were objections, of course, but their scale was small, and it was quickly noted by various bishops that straightforward denial of the Third Council of Nicaea met with disaster. The blinding of Patriarch Luke, in particular, was a fearful sign. On the converse, the advantages to acquiescence were clear. Anacletus was rewarded with the restoration of Sicily to the control of Rome, and the confirmation of Rome’s status as the leading Patriarchate. Further afield, there was more tension- but for now, even the Germans held their tongues. Manuel’s government was triumphant.

The Emperor himself had thoroughly secured his greatness- even in his last years he was becoming known as Megas Basileus. Small wonder that, following his death early in 1152 his life was subjected to the attentions of dozens of biographers, of whom Philotheos of Thebes is but the most familiar to us. Small wonder, too, with such a legacy, that his successors would live under an increasingly lengthening shadow of the greatest Emperor of the House of Komnenos.
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i. Basilios is around sixty years old when Manuel comes to power.
ii. Steppe peoples, originally from the frontiers of China, who had pushed west in the eleventh century.
iii. The southern part of what we call the Crimea.
iv. See chapter three.
v. Previously, a number of princes had competed for power.
vi. IOTL, Solomon was overthrown in the 1070s as a child king. Here, he enjoys a long and successful reign.
vii. Sardica = Sofia. Singidunum = Belgrade. Dyracchion = Durrës. Rasdaria is a fort on the Danube, located east of modern day Vidin.
viii. Probably Manuel was leading about 30-40,000 troops. A standard Imperial army in this period would probably have been made up of about 8-10,000.
ix. Linked to the withdrawal of the armies to fight in Serbia.
x. One of the last notionally independent Armenian principalities, occupying what is now the modern nation state of Armenia but what was then at the easternmost edge of the Armenian cultural sphere.
xi. Perhaps not to be trusted, as we shall see.
xii. Not Frederick Barbarossa, needless to say, he has been butterflied.
xiii. See, many things of IE 1.0 will return.
xiv. The second council of Nicaea took place in 787, under Eirene.
xv. “And the son”- in reference to where the Holy Spirit comes from. In the original Greek version of the Creed, it proceeds solely from the Father.
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