Anyway, here's what we're all here for: chapter fifteen!
Chapter Fifteen: The Calm Between Storms
"Some bad men murmured that the Empress should be cast aside and replaced with a broad-hipped wench of the tavern, but the pious Emperor, beloved of God, spat on their suggestions and sent them cringing from his glorious presence"
Xiphilinus the Lydian, Three Saintly Emperors
George I was crowned Emperor of the Romans in September 1212 with minimal fuss, but the new monarch must have been abundantly aware that he had a mountain to climb in terms of dealing with the legacy of Eirene. All around the Empire, the Empress’ men remained in positions of power: even if she had angered the Doukai, others remained more than happy to support her, notably the houses of Palaiologos and Kantakouzenos[1], to say nothing of the surviving members of the Nafpliotis clan. The thirty-four year old Italian can also hardly have been unaware of the uncomfortable precedent for Komnenids to emerge from monasteries and stir up havoc.[2] It was a difficult situation which required a delicate hand: fortunately, George I possessed this natural caution in abundance. As things turned out, Eirene’s three daughters spent less than a month in their monasteries before being recalled to Constantinople to be married. Here, George took a calculated gamble. The eldest daughter, a proud young woman by the name of Theophano, was married off to Michael Bringas, the son of David and a man who might have hoped to be Emperor. Instead, he was awarded with the office of Katepánō of Italy and membership of the imperial house. This could have been risky, and a less confident man than George would have been wary about the marriage. But the two men had served together in the revolt, and the new Emperor probably knew Michael Bringas well enough to judge he would be satisfied with his reward. It was, as things turned out, the correct decision; Bringas went on to be a loyalist despite his wife, who in the event died in childbirth four years after the marriage. Meanwhile, the middle daughter, named Eirene for her mother, was married off to Constantine Doukas, the son of the Alexios who had so dramatically fallen from favour in the old regime. Once again, it was the correct decision: Constantine and Eirene fell deeply in love, and their marriage was long, happy, and most importantly, loyal.
The final marriage would be that of the Emperor himself. George had initially considered marrying a princess of the Doukai, on account of the Empress Eirene’s alleged devilry, but was assured by the Patriarch that such impurity could not have passed on to her daughters.[3] With this assurance there could only really be one choice: and the Emperor George was married to Zoe Komnena. Within a few months, the new Empress had a child in her belly.
There were plenty of other loose ends flickering in the wind, however. Most pressing of these were Eirene’s two surviving male cousins, Joseph and Anthemios Nafpliotis.[4] Anthemios, as a eunuch, could be treated leniently, and he was confirmed in his position as Parakoimomenos by the new Emperor, but Joseph was trickier, controlling as he did the great Nafpliotis family estates. In the end, George opted to appease Joseph Nafpliotis well, trusting that there would be no popular support for a return of the family to power. Named Domestikos tēs Anatolēs, Josephwas sent eastward with his bastard son Rōmanos to try and begin the process of restoring the frontiers there. His two sons, Leo and George, were kept behind by the Emperor- wisely, as it turned out. Early in 1213, George Nafpliotis attempted to ferment an uprising in the capital, which for a day or two seemed to seriously threaten the Emperor, before it lost steam and the young nobleman was captured and tortured prior to being paraded around the hippodrome and executed.[5]It was a salutary lesson for the last remaining potential threats. The young Isaac Komnenos, safe in monastic confinement, opted to pursue a career in the clerical hierarchy that would see him eventually become Patriarch of Antioch, while in Cyprus Theodore Evagoras finally fell into line and was rewarded with the hand in marriage of George’s sister Matilda.[6]
By the middle of 1213, the internal situation seemed stable enough for the Emperor to risk leaving the capital. His destination was, of course, the East, where the achievement of Kürboğa looked ripe for demolition. Eirene’s foreign policy decision to refuse considering a peace with the Salghurids was now appropriated by the new Emperor as a useful political tool. Messages were sent to the Sultan Tuğtekin, proclaiming the reasonableness of George and his eagerness for peace: all Tuğtekin would have to do would be to vacate his father’s conquests in their entirety.
In expecting this to be the basis of a lasting peace settlement, the Emperor was clearly pushing his luck. The plan seems to have been to use Tuğtekin’s indignant refusal as a pretext to sweeping the Salghurids out of Syria and Palestine in a couple of triumphant campaigns, but the Emperor George was no great battlefield commander: indeed, his tactical arrogance in military matters stood in stark contrast to his adroit and careful management of internal diplomacy.[7] A campaign into northern Syria in autumn 1213 met with embarrassing failure, with Rōmanos “the Bastard” being forced to step in to save his Emperor’s life. Rōmanos was a eunuch who had been intended for the clergy by his father, but at the age of just twenty six he was already showing himself to have more battlefield ability than anyone in the East since his distant kinsman Jordan of Aversa. In 1214, he achieved what George had failed to do by defeating Tuğtekin in pitched battle at Apameia on the Orontes, opening up northern Syria for conquest. In 1217, after two patient years of siege, Damascus fell, and the eunuch commander entered the city in triumph. Unlike his peers, Rōmanos realised just how badly the imperial armies had suffered in the previous years of repeated defeat, and urged his Emperor to conclude peace now, to avoid John II-style overstretch. Reluctantly, George was persuaded, and in 1218, a peace settlement was finally concluded that left the majority of Palestine under Salghurid control, but guaranteed Christian access to the holy places of Jerusalem. For the rest of George’s reign, the Syrian frontier would remain peaceful, testimony to the Emperor’s diplomatic skill in the face of his military ineptitude.
Following the defeat of 1213, George had retreated into Cappadocia to lick his wounds. While there, he was able to patch up a permanent peace treaty with Roupen II of Syunik, effectively granting the Armenian monarch control over all of the lands taken by his father in the past few decades. For his part, Roupen agreed to a peace treaty and sent his ten year old son Ashot to Constantinople for the boy’s “education”.[8] It was a deal that suited both Emperor and Armenian: after half a century of hostility, the Caucasus could now finally look forward to the fruits of peace, and indeed in the years after the treaty the region enjoyed an unprecedented period of commercial and artistic flowering.
The 1210s were, then, a relatively successful decade for the Empire, especially after the troubles of the previous years. For George I himself, though, they were tragic. Shortly after he had set out for the East his young wife Zoe Komnena had delivered him a healthy daughter, Theodora. The Basileus did not see the child at all until his return to the capital early in 1215, but the father-daughter relationship was strong according to all accounts. It was a good thing it was: because George and Zoe would have no other living children. Between 1215 and 1221 the Empress fell pregnant no less than five times, but all five children were either stillborn or died young. This was not merely a personal tragedy: without a male heir, the succession lay open to doubt.[9] By the time of Theodora’s tenth birthday, it was clear to all that Zoe would not bear another child, and attempts were apparently made to persuade the Empress to retreat into monastic obscurity and clear the way for a more fertile successor, but this Zoe angrily refused: not for nothing was she the daughter of Eirene Nafpliotissa. Indeed, the Emperor himself showed a distinct lack of interest in other women after his marriage, a restraint for which he would be praised by religious figures in the future. And so much devolved upon the young Theodora, a princess educated by one of the finest minds of the day, the Patriarch Nicholas V[10] and brought up by her mother to remember every drop of her imperial bloodline. If George could not have a male heir, he could at least make sure his daughter would be a capable player of the dangerous Constantinopolitan political game.
The rules of that game were, the Emperor resolved, in need of a serious update. Since the early tenth century, the Empire had been governed by the Basiliká, an update led by Leo VI of Justinian’s great compendium of Roman law.[11] But just as times had changed in the 350 years between Justinian and Leo, so had they in the three centuries between Leo and George. An update was badly needed, particularly with regard to dealing with the Empire’s greatly expanded territories in both East and West. Work seems to have begun on this in 1218, and it was completed in 1221, the year Zoe’s last child died. The Basiliká of George would serve as his heir just as much as Theodora would, enshrining as it did the Emperor’s legacy to the future. For the first time in centuries, the Code was printed in languages other than Romaic too: editions survive of the text in Latin and Armenian, and it was at least partially translated into Arabic too. George’s legal revisions speak of a new and revived Empire: outward looking, self confident, and at peace with itself.
It was, all in all, just as well. No-one in Constantinople could possibly have known it: but the Empire of the Romans was about to enter into a death struggle with a truly implacable and terrifying foe. Perhaps on the eastern frontier they might have had the first indication of what was to come, marked by the crowds of terrified refugees streaming out of the Saljūq lands. For Iran was burning.
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[1] The Kantakouzenoi enjoyed a period of spectacular ascendancy IOTL following the Fourth Crusade, but they, like the Palaiologoi, had been players since the eleventh century.
[2] See the antics of Theodora the Younger in chapter thirteen.
[3] Doctrinal making-it-up-as-you-go. The Devil’s influence is held to have entered Eirene as she lived, and it was not an inherent thing.
[4] Originally there were five Nafpliotis brothers, sons of Leo Nafpliotis and Maria Kantakouzene. Of these, Nikēphoros died in 1197 following his defeat at Smbat’s hands, Leo the Younger died naturally in 1211, and Christopher was killed by the rebels in January 1212, when he attempted to put down rebellion in Sicily.
[6] Evagoras is some thirty years older than the unfortunate Matilda. The marriage only lasts five years before the death of the Grand Duke of Cyprus, allowing Matilda to bring up their son George Evagoras (named for his uncle the Emperor) practically as an independent monarch.
[7] This mismatch is not uncommon: it’s very rare to get a leader who’s brilliant both on the battlefield and in the political arena.
[8] This happened quite commonly. In the event, Ashot remains in Constantinople for a decade, and becomes known as one of the city’s biggest playboys.
[9] Succession issues have been covered in IE before. The Romans never developed a formalised system of succession, although from Augustus onward the idea that a member of the Emperor’s bloodline had a degree of priority was circulating. Leo VI went to extraordinary lengths in the early tenth century to secure a male heir, although by contrast his great-grandsons Basil II and Constantine VIII barely bothered.
[10] Nicholas V (1209-1229) was a monk from Bithynia who had risen to prominence thanks to his links to the Nafpliotidai: he was often rumoured to be a bastard son of Eirene’s cousin Nikēphoros. He had been raised to the Patriarch by Eirene, but was never particularly close to her, and quite happily turned on the Empress to back the new regime in 1212. His intercession was instrumental in saving the lives of the other members of the Nafpliotis house, however.
[11] Leo’s code essentially stripped out the elements of Justinianic law that had become surplus by his day, as well as removing unnecessary duplications and updating definitions to suit better tenth century realities.