Isaac's Empire 2.0

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Basileus Giorgios

Pururauka said:
Now you understand my plight my good man!
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I've understood it all along, which is why I try not to be too over-zealous on your wonderful thread. Nothing worse than an annoying fan pestering you constantly for updates...

Anyway, the next update will cover the 1230s and 1240s, all being well: a time of difficulty for the Empire. I'm thinking of calling the chapter "The Shock of Defeat", after the chapter on the Arab conquests in Whittow's book. There'll be lots of dynastic movement, and at some point I'm going to introduce a big new heresy that didn't appear in the original IE.
 
Utgard96

Utgard96

Basileus Giorgios said:
I've understood it all along, which is why I try not to be too over-zealous on your wonderful thread. Nothing worse than an annoying fan pestering you constantly for updates...
Click to expand...

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I rest my case.
 

Basileus Giorgios

Okay, I have the next update planned out, and it'll chronicle the beginning of the Empire's period as an unhappy satellite of the expanding Jurchen Empire. There'll also be the Empire's first genuinely powerful Grand Logothete, and a bit of a civil war.

Just need to write the bastard first!
 

Minerva233

Ah, happy to hear about an upcoming update. Times of trouble/ unhappy servitude always make for interesting reading if nothing else.
 

Basileus Giorgios

The next update is 85% finished and hopefully I'll be able to publish in the next few hours. We're covering a rather larger timespan this time round than in the past few updates, which I hope suits people.
 
Chapter Eighteen: The Search for Stability
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    • Basileus Giorgios

    Chapter Eighteen: The Search for Stability

    "...The lord Rōmanos the Emperor was an idiot and an illiterate man, neither bred in the high imperial manner, nor following Roman custom from the beginning, nor of imperial or noble descent, and therefore the more rude and authoritarian in doing most things ... for his beliefs were uncouth, obstinate, ignorant of what is good, and unwilling to adhere to what is right and proper..."

    Constantine VII, sole Emperor 945-959, For His Own Son, Rōmanos (De Administrando Imperio)    ​




    George I returned to Constantinople a triumphant victor at Christmas 1232, after spending the autumn pursuing the remnants of Šurhaci Khan’s great army as far as the Anatolikon. Once it was clear that the enemy had retreated across the Taurus, the Emperor gave thanks to God, and ordered the construction of a colossal new monastic complex at Abydos, paid for by the melted down treasure and weaponry of the Jušen royal army. God’s favour had returned, and his Regent on Earth was duly grateful.

    It must have come as a rude shock, therefore, when in the spring of the following year a new Jušen army descended the Taurus passes and spent the summer on a leisurely tour around Cappadocia, extorting money and slaves from the terrified villages. The war, it seemed, would not end so swiftly, and this came to the Emperor as a bitter blow. In the autumn of 1233, it is reported, he began to sink into a kind of madness, and his collapse was rapid, such that by Christmas the Empire was effectively in the hands of a Regency council, dominated by the ambitious new Patriarch of Constantinople Theodotos II[1]. The circumstances are murky, but by February George had retreated to his new monastery at Abydos, never to return. He left no sons, and had never designated a co-Emperor. Who would be his heir?

    The obvious precedent from history was to raise to power the retired Emperor’s twenty-year old daughter Theodora, but this was strongly opposed by Theodotos. Twenty years after her death, the shadow cast by the God-accursed Eirene still hung over Constantinople, and in a time where the Almighty had quite clearly showed himself to be distinctly unhappy with the direction of affairs in His Empire, was it really wise to tempt fate by offering him another weak and feeble woman to rule?[2] Patriarch Theodotos and his allies certainly thought not, and instead offered the throne to an elderly and undistinguished noble named Leo Zaoutzes[3] who was, nonetheless, a distant descendant of Alexios Komnenos.[4] Within a month of ascending the throne as Leo VII, however, the old man was dead. This, Theodora’s party was loud to claim, was clear evidence of divine will, and, reluctantly, the Patriarch gave way, the better to protect his eyes. Theodora would rule.

    But she could not hope to do so alone. Very soon after her mother’s death she took to husband one Isaac Palaiologos, who duly became Isaac III.[5] Despite the fact that Palaiologos was a man twenty years her senior, and a notable betrayer of her Nafpliotid family, the marriage proved a surprisingly happy one, and a measure of much-needed peace and stability descended. Theodora, urged on by her formidable mother Zoe, learned the lessons of her ancestors, and kept well out of public power, allowing the five-year peace treaty arranged with Šurhaci Khan in 1235 to be presented to the Constantinopolitan masses as entirely the work of her husband and his allies alone.[6] Instead, she devoted her energies to the important business of dynastic politics, and notably succeeded where her father had failed: three daughters and two sons were born to the happy couple. In 1238, their eldest son Constantine was associated on the throne with his father at the age of two, stamping dynastic stability upon the Palaiologoi. Meanwhile, the once powerful Nafpliotidai withered, especially following the death of their patriarch Leo in 1237. A new era, it seemed, was dawning.

    The second half of the 1230s was genuinely a time of peace and prosperity, but increasingly for Isaac III’s government, problems were becoming apparent. The Empire’s fabulously wealthy Syrian provinces remained under tight Jušen control, with the Eastern frontier effectively reduced to the point it had been at the height of Arab expansion half a millennium previously. Italy was dangerously restive, with its cities perceiving the events of 1233 as an Anatolian coup against an Italian Emperor: a situation only exacerbated in 1242 with the death of the regime’s last important Italian in Patriarch Theodotos.[7] By this point, however, the real hammer blow had already fallen. In 1241, the Empress had died in childbirth, with the baby boy only living a few days. Isaac bore the loss relatively stoically and certainly avoided any sort of mental collapse, but his hold on the throne became increasingly queried, especially following the renewal of Jušen raids in 1243. It was probably fortunate for Isaac III that he died when he did, in the spring of 1245 at the head of an army headed East to face the Empire’s new perennial foe. He was remembered as a decent man who struggled manfully in a difficult situation: but not as the hero the Empire needed.

    That hero was waiting in the wings, but to trace the extraordinary story of the man who is known to history simply as “the Uncle”, we must backtrack thirty years.

    In 1211, with the regime of Eirene Nafpliotissa falling apart in all directions, unmarried daughters rapidly became the most valuable commodity of any nobleman who had been too closely associated with the Empress. One such noble was John Palaiologos, who had initially fought against Eirene and her allies but had quickly come to an agreement with them in the 1180s.[8] In 1211, seeing which way the cards were likely to fall, John changed his allegiance once again, urging his son Isaac to join the Italian rebels, while simultaneously promising his daughter Zoe to one of the rebels’ Bulgarian allies. This was enough to earn John and his family amnesty under George I, but a nasty spanner was thrown in the works when the young Zoe, a headstrong fourteen year old, spurned her Bulgarian match to marry a common soldier named Demetrios Simeopoulos, one of her escort, before the eyes of an obliging (and Bulgarian hating) Thracian priest. Thus ordained before the eyes of God, the marriage could hardly be set aside, especially a Government such as that of George I, which explicitly aimed for piety in all things. John Palaiologos, so we are told, had raged himself to an early death in 1216, while Zoe and Demetrios settled down to enjoy a life of happy, although childless, obscurity in Adrianople.

    With the accession of Zoe’s brother to the purple in 1234, the couple’s quiet existence was rapidly transformed. Zoe was quickly moved up the court hierarchy, being named Augusta by her “beloved sister” Theodora in 1239, while her husband found himself as captain of the Varangian guard.[9] After Theodora’s death, Zoe replaced her as the main Empress for acts of ceremonial, and seems to have acted as a mother figure to her nieces and nephews. Remarkably, this couple now stood just a hair’s breadth from power, and with Isaac’s death, they moved quickly to seize it. Demetrios seized the young Emperor Constantine X and fled with him to Hagia Sophia, emerging some hours later with papers apparently signed by Isaac III and confirmed by Constantine naming him sole Regent.

    Uproar immediately broke out amongst the aristocracy, who were horrified at the idea of the young imperial Porphyrogenitoi being brought up by a pair of up jumped commoners. Serious trouble began to brew very rapidly, and within a few weeks, one Constantine Nafpliotis, backed by a variety of important nobles, had issued from Sebastea a list of demands “for the good of the God-blessed Emperor”, top of which was the removal and trial of the Regent Demetrios, “a most common and illiterate fellow”.[10] Demetrios, not unreasonably fearing the consequences of deposition, refused to budge, and demanded Nafpliotis and his allies stand down and return to court peacefully. There was no reply.

    Despite his military background, Demetrios Simeopoulos was not a man popular with the troops: in the Western Tagmata, he was disliked as a man who had deserted them to abscond with a noble girl, while in the East he was disliked merely as a Westerner.[11] Even when faced with a revolt that threatened to put a determinedly Eastern regime back in control of the capital, then, the Western Tagmata sat on their hands, their generals busying themselves with a suddenly crucial little war in Serbia and ignoring summons from Constantinople. The Regent would have to look elsewhere for support.

    His eventual response was a masterstroke of diplomacy. In exchange for vague promises of giving up the long-insignificant Armenian exile Smbat, Demetrios gained a new and valuable ally: the most talented of the ailing Šurhaci Khan’s nephews, Wúqǐmǎi.[12]In 1246, a Jušen army once again crossed the Taurus to destroy a Roman one, but this time, it did so with the support of Constantinople. Never a gifted general, Constantine Nafpliotis was surrounded and cut down while attempting to retreat to Ankyra, before being sent back to Šurhaci as a slave. With him went several high-flying young aristocrats, exactly the sort of men who would have provided the most dangerous opposition to Demetrios’ regime. Wúqǐmǎi, for his part, made a return to the straits where fourteen years previously George’s warships had rained fire and death down upon the Jušen host. This time, though, the Jušen warlord was feted as a hero by George’s grandchildren, garlanded with flowers and gold, and even baptised by Demetrios’ personal priest, the same man who had wedded them a generation before.[13] A new peace treaty was put together, this time grandly touted as “Peace without End”.[14] Peace and prosperity were what Demetrios the Uncle promised the Roman people: and only time would tell if those promises could truly be realised.

    ____________________________________
    [1] OTL’s Theodotus II reigned in the 1150s. This Theodotus, born in 1168, was originally Bishop of Ravenna and a supporter of the coup against Eirene, before being elevated to the Patriarchate in 1231 (after a two year vacancy) by George.

    [2] Especially as, it should be remembered, Theodora is Eirene’s granddaughter and bears a strong resemblance to her Nafpliotid kin.

    [3] The Zaoutzes family were important under Basil I and Leo VI before falling from favour and largely disappearing from the OTL historical record.

    [4] Leo is Alexios’ great-great-grandson through the line of his daughter Anna and her husband Basil Palaiologos (see chapter seven) and their granddaughter Euphemia, who married into the largely impoverished Zaoutzes clan following the collapse of marriage negotiations with the King of Hungary (see chapter ten).

    [5] Something of an irony, given the shared Palaiologan roots of Isaac III and his short-reigned predecessor.

    [6] Šurhaci is at this point busily engaged in attempting to conquer the Arabs of the Persian Gulf.

    [7] This isn’t altogether unreasonable on the part of the Italians, with the exact circumstances of George’s apparent mental collapse being so hazy to everyone ITTL.

    [8] See chapter twelve.

    [9] By the middle of the thirteenth century, the old name is retained, but not a lot else: like the Excubitores before them, the Varangoi have become merely a group of particularly well paid and favoured nobles.

    [10] The phrase I’ve taken from a particularly bitter reference from Constantine VII to his overbearing father-in-law Romanos I.

    [11] As we’ve seen, there’s long been a strong rivalry between the armies of east and west.

    [12] Smbat, now nineteen, originally was the cause of hostilities between the Romans and Jurchens back in 1229 as a baby with a claim to the Armenian throne. It of course helps that his major supporters have always been Nafpliotids, and Smbat is married to Constantine Nafpliotis’ sister Danielis.

    [13] Wúqǐmǎi seems to have taken his baptism seriously, worshipping Christ alongside the traditional Jušen sky-goddess Abka Hehe, although perhaps not seriously enough for his shocked Roman godparents.

    [14] The deal is something of a rotten one for the Empire, involving the formal surrender of much of the occupied East. Demetrios, though, is a not a man with much sympathy for Anatolia and its magnates.
     
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    • Utgard96

    Utgard96

    Just so you know, BG, I'm still reading this, it's just gotten far too intelligently written for me to be able to nitpick in my usual style. Brilliant work, this.
     

    Magnum

    Basileus Giorgios said:
    [14] The deal is something of a rotten one for the Empire, involving the formal surrender of much of the occupied East. Demetrios, though, is a not a man with much sympathy for Anatolia and its magnates.
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    Wouldn't this be something of a problem for Demetrios' popularity with just about everyone ?
     

    Basileus Giorgios

    037771 said:
    I like that you're keeping with your mission statement at the start with this update. All these nomadic incursions really does bring it across that running a Medieval empire was actually a very hard thing to do. The chaos of this period's politics came across well here.
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    Glad you appreciated this part! I want this century to be a particularly difficult and grim one for the Empire. Indeed, it's something of a nadir for the state: by 1250, pretty much all of the gains of the Macedonian dynasty have been reversed. Italy, of course, makes up for that to some degree, but Italy's still more independent than not, with only Sicily and the south being under especially tight imperial control.

    Ares96 said:
    Just so you know, BG, I'm still reading this, it's just gotten far too intelligently written for me to be able to nitpick in my usual style. Brilliant work, this.
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    Well, thanks! :)

    Magnum said:
    Wouldn't this be something of a problem for Demetrios' popularity with just about everyone ?
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    Not necessarily, no. Demetrios is very much a creature of Constantinople, and to the urban mob and the court functionaries, he can spin the negotiations as a neat way of getting rid of violent rebels and knocking the heretical eastern dynasts (after all, they are forced by necessity to deal with Armenians and even worse, Muslims, within the Empire) a peg or two in favour of the City.

    Anyhow, more comments? :)
     
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