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Chapter Twenty Three: The Hour Long Emperor
Chapter Twenty Three: The Hour Long Emperor

“He led his men o’er the snow
He led where only heroes go
Laskaris was his noble name
Let all of Faith recall his name”

Opening lines of the Laskariad, epic poem of the later fourteenth century​

Constantine X Palaiologos, it was said, resembled his grandfather. Like George of Genoa he was of a short and stocky build, with dark eyes, gingerish hair, and a slightly squashed nose. In the autumn of 1296, it was becoming deeply clear he shared one further trait with his ancestor. Constantine, it seemed, was falling into madness.[1]

To begin with, the lapses were minor, apparently confined to the Emperor mistaking his nephew Demetrios Maleinos for the Regent the young man had been named for. As the last years of the thirteenth century slid by, however, the situation grew steadily worse. In the circumstances, it might have been expected that Constantine would be gradually eased out of the picture by the imperial family but in a singular shot of bad luck the man who everyone presumed would be Constantine’s heir, the Caesar Gregory Maleinos, passed away early in 1299. Gregory was the closest thing to a powerful unifying figure Constantinople had known since the death of the Regent Demetrios a generation previously, and his sudden removal from the picture set in motion a short, but nasty sequence of events.

Gregory left behind him two adult sons, Constantine and Demetrios, each of whom had a substantial dash of imperial blood through their mother, the Emperor’s sister Helene Palaiologina, and could thus reasonably hope to inherit power. Of the two, Constantine was by far the more impressive. A talented general who had inherited his father’s tough martial instincts in every way, Constantine Maleinos had served in the reconquering army of Michael Photopoulos in the East and then had been largely responsible for the final defeat of the Egyptian revolt in 1295. He was also, as we have seen, deeply dismayed by his father’s decision to retreat from the anger of the Basileus back in 1282, and saw the madness of his great-uncle as the perfect moment to prove that he could be his own man.

The exact motivations of the revolt of Constantine Maleinos that broke out in the summer of 1301 are lost to us. Certainly, Maleinos aimed at the purple, although whether he sought to be named Caesar as his father had been or whether he sought to depose his uncle the Emperor altogether is disputed by scholars.[2] Whatever Maleinos sought, he could be reasonably confident he would succeed: for he was a popular figure amongst the soldiery of the Eastern Tagmata and an experienced general. Launching his revolt from Egypt, he quickly gained the support of a cowed Patriarch of Jerusalem, and some sort of coronation ceremony may have taken place in the Holy City. Messengers were sent to the cities of Syria and Anatolia, as well as Constantinople itself, assuring the peoples of Maleinos’ goodwill and peaceful intentions. True to his word, when Maleinos found the gates of Emesa and Antioch closed to him, he left the cities in peace and passed them by in good order, to find a warmer welcome in Cilicia, where he intended to spend the winter.

None of this assuaged feeling in Constantinople one bit. Particularly vehement in their denunciation of the rebel were Maleinos’ brother Demetrios and his cousin Rōmanos Chryselios[3], both of whom cynically saw opposing a rebel as a way to advance the chances of themselves and their own sons to gain the purple in the absence of a direct heir of the Palaiologan dynasty.[4] Although Maleinos’ wife Margarita brought with her her own family, the Anemoi, few others amongst the nobles were willing to back the rebel cause. If he wanted to be Emperor, Constantine Maleinos would have to demonstrate his fitness for the position.

He would gain the chance to do this sooner than expected. Late in 1301, with the Cilician passes supposedly frozen shut, an army somehow scrambled through the frozen slopes led by a dashing young general named John Laskaris. Laskaris, a cousin of Maleinos’ wife Margarita, apparently sought to prove his loyalty to the Emperor and his efforts were enough to inspire the later epic poem, the Laskariad.[5] Epic poem or not, the attempt to nip Maleinos’ revolt in the bud was an utter failure for Laskaris, who saw his men melt away like the winter snows they had crossed rather than face the battle hardened Egyptian veterans. The would-be saviour of the Empire was treated with mild courtesy by Maleinos, who sent him back to Cappadocia to proclaim a continued message of goodwill. This done, the great rebel army rumbled onward onto the Anatolian plateau.

No serious resistance was met in Asia Minor. Unlike any would be Jušen conqueror, Constantine Maleinos made sure to thoroughly de-fang the remaining troops of the Tagmata in their Cappadocian barracks, and also to charm the previously resistant Dynatoi marcher-lords who now began to gravitate to the man they smelled as a winner. By Christmas 1302, Maleinos had advanced no further than the historic city of Claudiopolis[6], but unlike the rebel army defeated there two and a half centuries previously, Maleinos’ host showed no signs of defeat. Both of the general’s daughters had been promised to eligible Anatolian bachelors, and there were even signs of rapprochement with the court at Constantinople, with a few brave figures sending out exploratory feelers to conciliate, notably Nikēphoros Synadenos, the former ambassador to the Jušen who had now found himself a flourishing career as the Emperor’s favourite orator-philosopher.[7]

Though 1302 had seen Maleinos make gains, however, he had won few backers over to his side wholeheartedly, with many noble families, along with city trading guilds, monasteries, and bishops preferring to hedge their bets and avoid offending either side in the conflict. The effect this had was poisonous. Political society in Anatolia (which is of course to say only the richest fragment at the top of the pyramid) found itself badly split, and with division, violence followed. Despite Maleinos’ promises of conciliation and peace, Anatolia began to go up in smoke barely a generation after the Jušen raids had ended- and this time, no barbarian army was needed.

In spring 1303, Maleinos’ large army (contemporary sources present it as being hundreds of thousands strong, an obviously absurd figure that nonetheless suggests that Maleinos’ force was extraordinarily large) brushed aside a final defence of Constantinople by his cousin Rōmanos Chryselios and crossed the straits to make camp in the same spot ĀkǔttǎKhan had done twenty years previously. The time to decide was suddenly at hand. Some like Demetrios Maleinos favoured standing and fighting, and trusting in the walls of Constantinople to keep out his brother the rebel: but a more substantial party, led by Nikēphoros Synadenos and Patriarch Sergius IV, favoured peace. Early in the morning of the fifth of May 1303, the gates of the City swung open, and Maleinos, accompanied only by a handpicked guard of a few thousand soldiers, marched through. The “war party” seized the Emperor, and barricaded themselves inside Hagia Eirene[8] whilst the triumphant rebel proceeded to the Hippodrome, where, inside the Imperial box, he was crowned Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans as Constantine XI Maleinos.

Crowds soon gathered around the Hippodrome, as the urban mob poured into the great arena to see their new monarch. The air was quickly thick with shouts and acclamations: but the Constantine the crowd called for was not called Maleinos. Instead, the demands were for their “good Emperor”, their “father”, the “saviour of Romans”. Fearing the situation was becoming ugly, the Patriarch commanded that the mob return to their homes, and promised no harm would come to Constantine Palaiologos: but the peoples refused to be cowed. Led by a ragged monk, Andronikos of the Chora, the chants of “Father” became ever louder.

At this point, a sane man would have sent in the troops, or fled, but Maleinos had spent the past two years of his life chasing the throne, and would not be cowed by a rabble of peasants. In a rare slip of the mask of benevolence he had worn ever since leaving Egypt, he ordered his troops to cut down the mob as Belisarius had done nearly a millennium previously[9], but the small size of his escort told against him. In any case, the rabble had swords of their own. For, just outside the main entrance to the arena stood Maleinos’ former mentor the old general Michael Photopoulos mounted (so we are told) on a magnificent stallion fully armoured in bronze scale.[10] Alongside him were the Emperor’s own bodyguards, both the feeble but impressive Varangoi and the considerably more formidable Scythian Guard, a new regiment levied out of Christian Jušen deserters by Constantine X. Alone, Photopoulos would have stood little chance of overturning even Maleinos’ small force: but he had on his side the fury of the largest city of Christendom. That fury swarmed across the Hippodrome, tearing apart Maleinos’ veterans in a display of furious bloodlust before storming the imperial box. There, the “One Hour Emperor” and his backers were seized but not, on Photopoulos’ orders, harmed. Instead, they were brought before the general, unmoved from his horse, for the Emperor to decide their fate.

In truth, however, Constantine X was scarcely able to stand when his nephew was brought before him, let alone administer justice. Maleinos and his allies were thrown into hastily constructed cells within the imperial Palace while Photopoulos, perhaps the only man who could, dealt with the furious Tagmata by means of lavish payments. Justice, when it eventually came, was administered by yet another young man named for the long-dead Regent, this time Demetrios Chryselios, eldest son of the Rōmanos defeated in battle. Eager to prove himself as a stern but just man, the young Chryselios ordered that the rebels have their eyes put out and be confined to a life of monastic contemplation to save their souls, with Patriarch Sergius alone spared, to be tried, along with the Patriarch of Jerusalem, by a court of jurors summoned from the other three Patriarchates. The blindings, however, were administered so brutally that Constantine Maleinos died on the spot along with numerous others: only the septuagenarian Nikēphoros Synadenos lived any length of time after the revolt was put down. In his monastery, Synadenos would craft works that did little but function as a single long wail at his predicament.

For two years, the revolt of Constantine Maleinos had torn apart the Empire of the Romans, and the division sowed by the rebels would fester for a political generation. “Which Constantine did you fight for?” became a common refrain in markets, inns and barracks across the East, and blood continued to be spilled in a thousand petty brawls. Even amongst scholars, the division ran deep: was Maleinos a visionary hero who could have saved the Empire from its fate, or a selfish warlord who doomed it to the Antichrist?

For the next two years, the Chryseloi, despite the defeat and disgrace of Rōmanos, held sway, led by the four brothers Demetrios, Isaac, John and Andreas. The One Hour Emperor’s brother, despite his upstanding loyalty, was forced to keep a very low profile before his triumphant cousins, and never again would the House of Maleinos come so close to the purple. In the midst of it all sat the lost and lonely figure of Constantine X Palaiologos, who stubbornly refused the entreaties of his great nephews to consider the succession.

In December 1305, a minor scandal broke out at court, in which it was alleged that one of the Chryselios brothers, Isaac, had been flirting with pagan ideas.[11] Scurrilous or not, the rumour was enough to put the family thoroughly out of the good graces of their uncle the Emperor at just the wrong moment: for in February 1306, Constantine X died. For seventy years the Empire had been ruled by the house of Palaiologos, most of them in Constantine’s own reign. Dating from his crowning alongside his by-now barely remembered father Isaac III back in 1238, Constantine had ruled almost sixty eight years: the longest reigning Basileus in history.

More broadly, the age of the noble families was drawing to a close. Though it cannot have been apparent at the time, it would be the seventeenth century before a noble dynasty was again securely established on the throne. The age of the smaller men, the Mesoi,was now dawning, and an era ushered in by Isaac I Komnenos was slowly coming to an end. But for now, things would go on much as they ever had, as a new Emperor was crowned, a man many hoped would return the Empire to its apparent glories of just ten years before.

Their hopes would be dashed. Peace in Rhomania was already manifestly dying in the last years of Constantine X and with him gone, it was well and truly dead. Ahead lay fifty bitter years of anarchy.


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[1] See Chapter Eighteen.

[2] A lively pro-Maleinos and anti-Maleinos tradition sprung up especially in the 1330s, as writers debated whether the rebel could have saved the Empire, or doomed it to instability.

[3] The son of another of Constantine Palaiologos’ sisters.

[4] Though Constantine’s brother George fathered a daughter named Eirene, she is now a spinster fast approaching forty years old.

[5] The work focuses much on Laskaris as a figure of religious nobility and features many ahistorical and poetic elements: here, Maleinos is the leader of a Jurchen warband in league with Ākǔttǎ Khan, and Laskaris, despite his valiant failure, is able to sow the seeds for the salvation of the Empire.

[6] See Chapter Two.

[7] For Synadenos’ background, see Chapter Twenty. The callings of the philosopher and orator are not, of course, seen as mutually exclusive in Byzantine eyes.

[8] The second large, Justinianic church of Constantinople, known as “little St. Sophia”.

[9] Belisarius led the troops that crushed the Nika revolt on behalf of Justinian in January 532.

[10] To be precise, armoured in the style of a Klibanophoros- or, to be a little less precise, a cataphract.

[11] A grossly unfair charge: Isaac was a highly learned man studying Stoic philosophy.
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