alternatehistory.com

Chapter Fourteen: The Favour of Our God
Chapter Fourteen: The Favour of Our God

"The Devil roamed at will across the lands in these years, and Christians in all corners were seduced by the vilest heresies"

Constantine X Palaiologos, Roman History​



For a few years, a sort of equilibrium now descended upon Eirene’s cowed court. The Empress was perhaps now finally comfortable in her own skin, and, with the death of her father Constantine in 1190 at the hands of a Bulgarian army, there was now no-one who could conceivably challenge her. Small mercies could now be seen, as when the disgraced general David Bringas was allowed to scurry into retreat in Venice early in 1191.[1] The Empress appeared to be content to rule quietly.

It would be unfair to Eirene to believe her to be the foolish tyrant that our sources, without exception, present her as. There was clearly, following the Bloodletting, a determined attempt to introduce a measure of stability on the empire’s foreign frontiers. In 1189, a marital alliance was proposed between Ivan of Bulgaria and the six year old Porphyrogenite princess Theophano. Negotiations broke down badly, ending with a brief war and the death of Eirene’s father, but even then, Eirene was not such a fool as to openly provoke Ivan. In the end, a lesser treaty was patched up in 1193, with one of Eirene’s relatives marrying Ivan’s younger brother.[2] In the East, meanwhile, Theodore Evagoras had apparently checkmated Kürboğa in Palestine, and in 1194 a three-year ceasefire was agreed.

It was a happy state of affairs that could not last. The destroyer of Eirene’s settlement was, perhaps inevitably, Prince Smbat of Syunik, who, late in 1196, seized the great city of Ani in a daring winter raid.[3] There, in the historic capital of the Armenian people, he named himself King of Kings, and declared a war of liberation against the Roman Empire.

In the past, Smbat had been a mere thorn in the side of various imperial generals, who could be dealt with in a single campaigning season: but no longer. In 1197, Armenia burst violently into flame, and it seemed as though the new King of Syunik was utterly unstoppable. When Nikēphoros Nafpliotis, Eirene’s cousin and Strategos of the Anatolikon marched against him, Smbat seized the opportunity to inflict upon the armies of the East a truly devastating defeat at Manzikert on Lake Van.[4] Nikēphoros himself escaped, but was badly wounded, and died during the harrowing retreat of the imperial armies into Cappadocia that autumn, shadowed all the way by Armenian raiders.

Smbat’s successes emboldened Kürboğa and Ivan, too. Evagoras had clearly expected a renewal of the treaty of 1194, and had therefore lent troops to Nafpliotis’ army. The Salghurid Sultan, though, had other ideas.[5] Peace, he declared, was impossible for as long as the infidels occupied lands once trodden by the heirs of the Prophet, and to that end he suggested the imperial evacuation of all land beyond the Taurus as the basis for a lasting peace.[6] Evagoras could do little but turn down this offer, but with insufficient men, even a capable general like he could do little but face repeated setbacks and embarrassments. In 1198, with news reaching him of defeat after defeat, the general was forced to turn tail, and flee to Cyprus.[7] He never returned to Syria.

The Empire’s enemies were triumphant: and worse still was to come. In 1196 Ivan had secured for himself a very different marital prize to young Theophano Komnena, in the form of Margit, the young daughter of King Ladislaus of Hungary. Three years, and two healthy sons, later the Tsar was emboldened to take the next logical step with his partners.

Events were dictated by affairs far to the West. In the 1180s, the old kingdom of West Francia had increasingly been drawn into the world of competing Norman and German monarchs, with the extinction of its own male royal line in 1183.[8] This had attracted plenty of opposition across the realm, with the fans being flamed, perhaps rather unwisely, by Pope Anacletus IV of Rome, a man of the line of the Counts of Toulouse, who had broken away from their Norman allegiance by 1186.[9] This had, not unnaturally, provoked much irritation from Henry “the Conqueror” and his allies, and by the early 1190s the allies of John of Florence were flourishing in the Norman court.[10]The alienation of the Norman King reached its conclusion in the autumn of 1197, when the Florentine ally Michael was placed on the vacant Episcopal throne of Paris and named the one truly Orthodox Patriarch in Christendom. Henry did this for political, not theological reasons, but the die was nonetheless cast. Never again would there be unity in Christendom: the Parisian Orthodox Church was born.

Immediately, the monarchs of Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria threw their support behind the new Patriarch of Paris, with only Ladislaus of Hungary doing so with much real theological conviction. Ivan of Bulgaria, certainly, had never once complained about theological troubles in his state, although the fact “Pope” Michael was more than willing to offer a junior Patriarchate for the Bulgarians was a major boost to the Tsar’s prestige. Naturally, all of this was greeted with horror by Anacletus IV of Rome and his backers in Constantinople, with Eirene immediately putting out a strongly worded message of condemnation in the name of her husband and son. It was all to no avail. In 1199, Ivan and Ladislaus, urged on by Pope Michael, declared Holy War on Constantinople. By the end of the year, the City was under siege.

The year 1200 marked a personal low for Eirene herself. With the City besieged by heretics, and the imperial armies apparently helpless to intervene, it was small wonder that her political enemies began to openly speculate as to whether God's favour had been withdrawn from the Empire. Sinister portents followed, with the Bithynian estates of the Nafpliotis family being terrorised by a monstrous leopard, and an Attic monk being devoured by a shark.[11] And if demons could terrorise the Empire in the form of animals, why not in the form of humans? Such were the fevered whispers within the besieged city.

Wild predictions of God's misfavour may have been exaggerated, however. Early in 1201, Kürboğa set out from Damascus, apparently with the idea in mind of restoring the Caliphate to glory by seizing Baghdad. Here, though, he would meet an opponent even he could not overcome: the Saljūq Sultan Kayqubād.[12] In a brilliant series of manoeuvres near Mosul, Kayqubād succeeded in cutting the Salghurid off from his army and then capturing him, before executing him as a threat to unity in the Caliphate. Kürboğa's head, preserved in salt, was thereafter swiftly despatched to Constantinople as a token of Baghdad's friendship. Eirene's allies were soon crowing, and they had yet more reason to be pleased when the besiegers suddenly began to fall to an outbreak of illness that ended up killing Tsar Ivan himself. With their new heir a five year old boy, the Bulgarians were in no position to continue the siege of Constantinople, and upped and left: although Ivan's foremost lieutenant Samuel of Pliska was able to inflict a sharp mauling upon an over-hasty imperial army led by Alexios Doukas.

The Empress had weathered a dangerous eighteen months by the summer of 1201, but it rapidly became clear that the genie was now well and truly out of the bottle. In 1203, Italy burst into revolt, led by the still notionally independent client state of Venice. Pope Anacletus IV was forced to flee to Dyrrachium, something of an embarrassing position for the heir of St. Peter: he died in exile there in January 1204, just too soon to hear about the capture and sack of Venice by imperial troops a few weeks later. In 1206, following the unlamented death of Alexander III, it was the turn of ibn-Yusuf to raise the standard of revolt, supported by Smbat of Syunik. Once again, luck intervened; the Arab general died choking on a grape in Iconium, while Smbat finally died the following year, succeeded by his rather less warlike son Roupen II.[13] Eirene remained secure, but as the whispering campaigns against her continued, she began to grow increasingly savage, lashing out at those, such as Alexios Doukas in 1210, who presumed to advise her to moderate her behaviour: Doukas had urged a peace treaty with Kürboğa's son Tuğtekin[14], but Eirene disagreed so violently that the unfortunate Doukas was scourged and castrated before his exile to Trebizond.

The surprising thing is that Eirene's downfall took as long as it did; but when it finally did come, it came quickly. Late in 1211, Italy erupted into revolt a second time, led by the elderly exile David Bringas and a collection of younger generals and leading men of the city states, who claimed the support of the Pope and an impressive number of Italian bishops. Avoiding the might of the imperial navy, Bringas' men marched overland through Bulgaria where they recieved a warm welcome from the teenage Tsar Symeon, as well as the addition of a number of Bulgarian troops to their army. In Thrace, Alexios' Doukas heir Constantine was quick to similarly offer his own support and money, and much of the imperial army of the West rapidly deserted to the rebels. Panicking now, Eirene sent increasingly shrill messages East, imploring the support of Theodore Evagoras, but the once dashing and bold young general preferred to watch and wait from Cyprus, and he did not stir from the island.

The ultimate reason for Bringas' triumph, though, was the religious feeling of the mob of Constantinople. BY 1212, there was a simple feeling that Eirene had lost divine favour, and if the Empire stuck with a woman sponsored by Satan it would be doomed; for the Byzantines, who saw themselves at the apex of a society of God's chosen people, this simply could not be allowed to happen.[15] Bringas brought with him impressive religious support that was probably far more important than his large army. After just a couple of weeks of siege, the gates of the City were opened, and Bringas' men captured Constantinople. The fate of Eirene has been mentioned above: swiftly executed and thrown into the sea. Her children were rounded up and each sent into monastic confinement. The old regime was now at an end.

It would not be David Bringas who succeeded Eirene, however: the Empire would have to wait another century for its first Emperor David. Instead, the prize went to a hitherto distinctly secondary young general named George of Genoa, who had caught the attention of the soldiery during a particularly daring assault on a section of the city wall prior to the opening of the gates. It was George of Genoa who was raised upon the soldiers' shields in the traditional Roman manner, and it was George of Genoa who was crowned, a few weeks later, as Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans and God's representative on Earth.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, brute force was not so useless in the quest to obtain the favour of God as Bringas and his assembled prelates might have hoped.



[1] Brought down in a coup amongst the Eastern armies in 1185, Bringas has been a prisoner in Constantinople ever since.

[2] Maria Nafpliotissa, the second daughter of Eirene’s cousin Leo. Not to be confused with Leo’s mother Maria.

[3] The largest city of the Caucasus, Ani was a former Armenian capital with a population possibly exceeding one hundred thousand. This rich prize was captured by the armies of Constantine IX in the 1040s. It sits on OTL's modern Turkish/Armenian frontier.

[4]TTL’s “Battle of Manzikert” (the earlier battle fought at the site in 1065 is largely forgotten, see Chapter Two) is a far bloodier affair than OTL’s, with thousands of men dead on the battlefield.

[5] To be fair to Evagoras, Kürboğa’s emissaries had been strongly hinting a renewal of peace was on the cards, prior to the news of Smbat’s dramatic successes reaching the Nile.

[6]Much of Syria fell to Kürboğa in 1186, but important strongholds including Antioch, Edessa and Emesa, and all of Cilicia, remain in the hands of Constantinople.

[7] The island is at least defensible, owing to Kürboğa’s lack of a serious fleet.

[8] As mentioned above, Henry “the Conqueror” of England is the grandson of the last West Frankish king, and Frederick Ii of Germany is his great grandson.

[9] Anacletus (1181-1203) is the uncle of the energetic and able Count Hugh of Toulouse (1182-1219).

[10] John himself, the great opponent of the compromises of the Third Council of Nicaea, died in Henry’s court in 1194.

[11] Leopards continued to exist in north western Anatolia until at least the 1970s IOTL. Great white sharks still inhabit the Mediterranean basin.

[12] Great nephew of the Sultan Maḥmūd (1132-1167) mentioned in chapter nine.

[13] Smbat had been placed on the throne of Syunik as a one year old baby in 1134 by Manuel Komnenos (see chapter eight). Seven decades on, he has established himself as the greatest survivor of Near Eastern power politics, and more than doubled his territory, at the expense of both Romans and Turks. Roupen II, named for his grandfather, inherits a formidable little kingdom.

[14] A savage civil war had consumed the Salghurid realm between 1201 and 1208, as various sons of Kürboğa jostled for position. The quiet and reserved Tuğtekin eventually prevailed through his natural caution and intelligence.

[15] I use “Byzantine” here as I have done above, to refer solely to the inhabitants of Constantinople. Citizens of the ERE in general did see themselves as God's chosen people, latter day Israelites.
Top