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Chapter Twenty Five: Blood and Heresy
Chapter Twenty Five: Blood and Heresy

"When he received bad news, it is said, his face would swell and redden as if he were fit to burst, and he would shout and shriek so loudly it was impossible for any to be with him. When the news from Persia reached him, the Emperor set upon the messenger with his bare hands like a savage beast."

Chronicle of John of Cilicia, writing c.1400​


If the Italian delegation in Constantinople had hoped that their attempts would at least give the resistant Emperor David Pegonites pause for thought, they would be disappointed there too: for David was determined to go further along the path of doctrinal compromise than any Emperor in centuries. Instead of allowing Samuel of Grado and the other Italian bishops to return home, he herded them into semi-captivity in the secondary imperial palace at Blakhérnai on the Golden Horn, under the care of his eldest son Alexios.[1]

The reason for the seizure of the Italian bishops soon became clear. A few months later, a delegation of seven Armenian bishops, as well as two each from Egypt and Syria arrived in the City, under the protection of the Emperor. The various foreign bishops were joined by a number of churchmen from the immediate vicinity of the capital, most importantly Patriarch Michael IV.[2] The party (numbering about forty in all) was feasted in a series of lavish dinners by the Emperor over the Christmas period, before sitting down to business in February 1316. The aim was nothing less than to heal the great schism of the Church brought about by the long gone Council of Chalcedon, to create a unified Church for a Roman Empire that now once more encompassed most of the Christians of the East.[3] David had, after all, been brought to power by the largely anti-Chalcedonian soldiers of Syria, and was determined to repay their loyalty, as well as ensuring it for the future against the revived Jušen Khanate of Iran under Jamshīd Khan.

Initial discussions, held in the Delphax wing of the Great Palace, were promising: although it would later be claimed that the Italians’ objections had been overridden by the sycophantic and supine bishops of the Aegean region, and Patriarch Michael himself: what the Easterners made of the so-called Little Council of Delphax is never really recorded. Whatever the case, after a further round of opulence and feasting, Samuel of Grado and his compatriots were sent back to Italy loaded with presents, with a view to convening a full Council of the Church the following year.

David would have to wait, however, for late in 1316 embers from the ongoing war in Bulgaria began to land in Epirus and Thessalonica.[4] A poor harvest had led to much resentment, especially when news of the decadence lavished upon the attendees of the Council of Delphax. It was angrily proclaimed across the western provinces that the Basileus was nothing more than a womanish Easterner, come to sap the hardy and orthodox taxpayers of Europe of their hard earned wealth. In truth, of course, this was hardly David’s fault: the inflation that had begun under Constantine X was now exacting a punishing toll on the rural poor that the court of Constantinople was largely shielded from. But the peasants had little interest in hearing this: and what is more, one group was spinning a very different story.

The radical Christians known as the Helots had scarcely been thought of by the governments of either Michael IX or Alexander IV, and David Pegonites’ regime likewise paid them scant attention. Like so many other ethereal heresies before them, the Helots by the 1310s appeared to be dead and done, confined to a handful of odd wandering hermits and obscure bookish monks. But the circumstances of 1316 came together perfectly in their favour. The Little Council of Delphax, it was ringingly proclaimed, was a perfect example of the corruption of the world, with the Holy Word of God being prostituted to the demands of a distant and immoral tyrant. Helotism suddenly found itself with a distinctly receptive audience, both amongstRomaic speakers and Bulgarian rebels. The seed of uprising even crossed to Italy, where the Katepánō Andronikos Xanthis found himself briefly besieged in his quarters in Syracuse by a furious mob.

As winter melted into spring, things took a still more menacing turn. The Strategos of Epirus was one Theodore Komnenodoukas, a man whose very name gave testimony to his imposing pedigree. The Komnenodoukai were the descendents of the Empress Eirene Nafpliotissa’s second daughter and namesake and her husband Constantine Doukas, a scion of the Empire’s richest and most influential family. This, according to the Komnenodoukai, gave them a far superior claim to power than the descendants of Eirene’s youngest daughter Zōē and her husband George of Genoa. The first man to adopt the surname, Alexios Komnenodoukas, had been a prominent leader of the so-called “Sebastean revolt” against Demetrios the Regent back in 1246, and his son Isaac had ever after been kept under very close watch by the Palaiologan regime.[5] Theodore was Isaac’s youngest son, and had first seen military action as a teenager in the Bulgarian revolt of 1288, where he had moderately distinguished himself. Constantine X was by this point secure enough to allow the Komnenodoukai a measure of influence at court, but upon the accession of Michael IX they were again sidelined, which continued under Alexander IV and David. Theodore Komnenodoukas was therefore a man with a distinct grievance, and it is perhaps not tremendously surprising that in Easter 1317 he entered Thessalonica without a fight, and was raised upon the shields of the soldiery as David Pegonites had been and proclaimed Emperor of the Romans, “to the great cheer of all the common people”, as one writer put it.

At this point, David Pegonites considered fleeing to Antioch. Komnenodoukas was extremely wealthy and well-connected, and moreover, he appeared to command an impressive degree of loyalty from his troops and the peasantry of the Haemic peninsula, who accompanied his progress towards Constantinople as an ever-flowing tide, kept supplied by the wealth of the pretender’s family. Philippi and Mosynopolis surrendered without a fight to the rebel army, and soon they were at Adrianople, which similarly yielded. When at the city, Komnenodoukas heard that the Emperor had indeed abandoned Constantinople for the East, and hurriedly hastened to claim the throne, encouraged by a letter of welcome from the frightened Patriarch Michael IV.

It was a tragic mistake. Somewhere near the town of Arkadiopolis, the ragged popular army of Theodore Komnenodoukas was ambushed by a small force of professional troops of the Tagmata, led by David’s eldest son Alexios, just twenty two years old but already proving himself to be a capable and beloved general. Komnenodoukas’ army probably outnumbered the young Pegonites five to one, but Alexios led hardened warriors out of Bulgaria, while the rebel force was made up of irregular levies, mercenaries, and armed peasants.[6]The battle of Arkadiopolis was wrapped up in under two hours, with rebel force swiftly breaking under the hammer of Alexios Pegonites’ armoured horsemen. Komnenodoukas himself valiantly attempted to rally his force, but was experienced enough to know that his levies stood little chance against experienced professional troops. He fled the scene of the battle, hoping to escape Rhōmanía altogether and claim sanctuary from the King of Hungary, but was betrayed by a Bulgarian boyar en-route. He entered the Golden Gate of Constantinople in January 1318, not as a conquering Emperor, but as a headless corpse.

By this point, the disturbances of the Helots had largely died down, but the promised Church Council remained for the Emperor David as distant a prospect as ever, as, indeed, did hopes of peace. Encouraged by news of revolt, Jamshīd Khan had in 1318 began to menace the Eastern provinces, forcing the Emperor to send his son and several thousand crack troops away from Bulgaria to the East: he did not dare to leave the capital himself for fear of confirming his enemies’ taunts of his oriental leanings. Heartache struck that same year, with the death of the Empress Sophia Chryselie, the link that bound David to his ambitious family in the form of his brothers. David began to sink into paranoia, rarely seen without heavy guard. The Chryseloi brothers were seized soon after Sophia’s death, and expressly forbidden to leave the City without David’s say-so. More and more the hopes of the regime focused themselves on the dashing and heroic Alexios Pegonites, who had all of his father’s vision with none of the heavy handedness. But Alexios himself died barely a year after his mother, badly wounded after winning a triumphant victory over the Bulgars. He left behind him an infant son and daughter, but they were quickly also taken into custody by the Emperor, who hoped to use them as hostages against their mother’s family, the powerful Melissenoi.

Alexios’ death might have been a tragedy, but he did not die entirely in vain, for the campaigning season of 1319 had seen the collapse of most serious resistance in Bulgaria. David’s second son Damianos was married to the heiress of the greatest of the Bulgarian generals, and, though fighting continued into 1320, the war was effectively over. At the end of the year, the Emperor made a great show of abolishing the special tax that had been levied over the past eight years to finance the war, to great popular acclaim. After a rocky few years, it seemed that the imperial government might have a chance to get back on the front foot.

In the event, it would prove to only be a brief respite. In 1322, Jamshīd Khan passed away, and was succeeded without question by his heir, Ghazan I. This in itself was a remarkable testimony to the success of Jamshīd in stabilising the Irano-Jušen state, for Ghazan had a number of brothers and cousins who signally failed to challenge his accession. Nonetheless, the new Khan (or perhaps better, Shāhanshāh, for the Jušen were now quickly being subsumed into the broader Iranian state) had to prove himself his father’s equal quickly, and so he began to make aggressive noises towards Constantinople. These were principally over the by-now longstanding issues of the Jušen refugees in Rhōmanía taken in by Michael X when Jamshīd had first risen to power, and kept as a diplomatic levering point ever since. The negotiations that followed were shortlived and ill tempered, and late in the year, the Khan led an army around the fertile valleys of the Upper Euphrates, extorting gold as he went.[7] An attempt by a young local Strategos, Adrianos Lekkas, to ambush him as he retreated was avoided entirely, leaving the Roman troops red-faced and the Khan jubilant, his prestige secured without a drop of Iranian blood spilled.

It was said that when news reached Constantinople, the Emperor David beat the messenger boy carrying it to within an inch of his life.[8] Certainly, there was fury and incredulity in the Palace. It seemed clear to the Basileus that the obvious cause for the problem was inadequate training and quality of troops on the Eastern frontier, and he therefore attempted to seek more sources of income to fund a greatly increased army. Perhaps chastened by the experience of 1317, the commons were left alone: instead, an attempt was made to extort wealth from the Dynatoi. Predictably, this went down extremely badly, leading to a deeply embarrassing incident when the Emperor was actually refused entry to the Senate House by a number of supremely grand aristocrats.[9]

A stronger Emperor than David Pegonites might well have been able to stare down the Dynatoi, but the fact was that David did not have the support of any part of civilian society within the Empire, be it Senate (as represented by the Dynatoi), Church or the common people. Only the growing power of the mercantile families still backed David’s regime, and that was more down to the desire for stability than any particular desire to keep a particular monarch in power.[10] The army alone remained reasonably loyal, thanks to David’s own background and the glorious memory of his son Alexios, and it was to the army that the Emperor David now turned. Large numbers of troops were garrisoned in and around Constantinople, ostensibly to protect against the attacks of further Bulgarian rebels. To hear the sources tell it, the Empire was fast becoming a great armed camp.

Italy, as ever, remained semi-detached. There, the decrees of the paranoid Emperor could be largely ignored, or at least given minimal attention. So it was that upon the death of Pope Victor VI, after a long but feeble pontificate of twenty five years, in 1327 the urgings by Constantinople to appoint the loyalist Bishop of Bari as his successor fell upon deaf ears. There could be only one realistic candidate for the post, it seemed: and Samuel of Grado duly became Pope Samuel II that summer.

What happened next is confusing, for our sources are contradictory.[11] It seems that David opted to travel to Italy himself, to impose his own choice of Patriarch of Rome at the head of a large army, leaving his sons and co-Emperors Damianos and Rōmanos in Constantinople. He certainly progressed as far as Rhaidestos, but there he mysteriously fell ill and died. It was an ignominious end, for David was a man of talent and vision who could have made a fine Emperor in easier circumstances. As it was, the state was left in the hands of his sons. Damianos, the elder, was twenty four but unmarried and supposedly half mad, while Rōmanos, the younger, was a boy of thirteen. These, however, were minor details to the jubilant aristocracy, who considered themselves ridded of an oriental despot. Comparisons duly followed of David with the Persian kings of old who had threatened classical Greece, but who had been defeated by the pluck and guile of brave patriotic men. What the dead Emperor’s sons made of all this is nowhere recorded.

The news was also greeted with satisfaction in Rome, and, it was muttered, with less surprise than should have been the case. Two days after the message arrived of the death of David Pegonites, Pope Samuel set sail for Constantinople, and the destiny of a generation.

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[1] The Palace of Blachernae IOTL became the main imperial residence under the Komnenoi, a change that never happens ITTL, where it remains a secondary residence, generally inhabited by important figures outside the main imperial family. Until the revolt of Constantine, the palace was the main base of the Maleinos family.

[2] Not to be confused with his predecessor but one Michael III the Weaver, who died in the reign of Alexander IV.

[3] Held in 451, the Council of Chalcedon aimed to steer a middle way between the positions of the so-called Nestorians, who emphasised the division and equality of Christ’s human and divine aspects, and the Monophysites, who emphasised the subordination of the human to the divine. The council failed to bring around Monophysite hardliners, who by the later sixth century were creating a separate church hierarchy in Syria and Egypt.

[4] It is worth noting that the Italian bishops certainly put in at several Epirote ports that same autumn.

[5] For the Sebastean revolt, see Chapter Eighteen. Briefly, it was an abortive uprising of nobles upon the death of Isaac III Palaiologos, seeking to gain control over Isaac’s young sons Constantine and George and was put down with Jurchen support.

[6] The main western Tagmatic armies are fully engaged in subduing the Bulgarian revolt in 1317, leaving Komnenodoukas with only the militia troops of the still not entirely defunct Themata, as well as an array of mercenaries and peasant levies.

[7] In doing so, Ghazan bypassed the more heavily fortified area around Edessa and Samosata under the Duke of Antioch and instead struck at the more lightly defended “Armenian Themes” to the north.

[8] Admittedly, the sources are fairly hostile to the “heretic” David.

[9] Notably Gregory Maleinos, grandson and namesake of Constantine X’s powerful brother-in-law.

[10] For the rise of the merchants, see Chapter Nineteen.

[11] They’re torn between a desire to condemn the heretic David, and the demon Samuel, in short.
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