1294, Pt.2
Demētrios Koútroúlēs was a well-trained and experienced logistics officer who had served in the van of various regional armies for the better part of two decades, rising to the command of a Kentarkhia. Interestingly, he was the highest-ranking officer in Theódoros’ army to have seen actual combat, having been thrust into combat during the Siege of Berat when the camp was overrun by Albanian mercenaries. As such, his barging into the command tent and pleading for Theódoros to walk back his proclamation due to their poor situation was just a little bit disconcerting.
The new basileus had retired to his tent to begin ‘processing’ a cask of wine that had been seized from the cellars of Naples’ governor. He had been at this for about an hour before Koútroúlēs burst into the tent and began begging him to reconsider. Theódoros, by now thoroughly besotted, plays along in hopes that Koútroúlēs will exhaust himself and go away. Koútroúlēs then gives an explanation of how his declaration of revolt while they were in a fringe border territory would give the loyalists time to prepare while they trekked over the mountains to reach strategic points. The fact that they were in Mōrea made it doubly so, as their two options were to either sit outside of Monemvasia, hoping that the garrison would fall before an army arrived from Thrákē, or launch an insane and overreaching march across all of Éllas to somehow take Kōnstantînoúpoli before they all starved. But that later option was so outlandish that he couldn’t take it seriously, right? Right?
Koútroúlēs hurriedly launched into an explanation of how that would be insane because said path would take them through several heavily-defended fortresses, across multiple hostile states and through the home camp of the Western Army, all without the supplies necessary to keep the army fed even for six months, which would be how long it would take, even if all the fortresses in their path threw open their gates. But by that point Theódoros was thoroughly drunk and just wanted the irritating man to go away, and so ordered him to begin preparations for the march. He then passed out, and when he woke up the next morning with no memory of the night before. Upon seeing the army preparing to decamp, he assumed he had issued orders while he was sober and went about his normal routine.
Koútroúlēs, meanwhile, was in his tent mulling over his options. With his superior seemingly set on a suicide course, he knew he had to do something to save his own skin when the other shoe inevitably dropped. As such, he drafted two letters, one to Guy of Athens and one to Kantakoúzenós. The former gave a detailed plan of the route that Koútroúlēs believed they would be taking, and the latter was a frantic explanation of how he wanted no part of this conflict, was actively working against the rebellion and how if Kantakoúzenós just stayed in place this whole thing should collapse by itself.
News of the revolt spread quickly both north and south, likely due to the fact that many of Theódoros’s soldiers were mercenaries who wouldn’t know what ‘operational security’ meant if it bludgeoned them in the back of the head with a four-by-four. Kantakoúzenós received word of the rising on 30 March, only five days after it began, which was extremely unusual for the time period. The cause of this was Koútroúlēs’ message, which did exactly the opposite of what it was meant to and sent Kantakoúzenós into a right panic. The governor sent the fastest ship in his employ to the capital to summon aid while simultaneously beginning extreme preparations for a siege. He recalled the few troops left south of Myzithras and began destroying bridges and narrow roads to slow down the attack which he believed would be inevitable.
Said fast ship reached Kōnstantînoúpoli on 5 April, whence Andrónikos absolutely hit the roof, spending the better part of the day raging across Vlakhérnai in a rather petulant manner (Yeōrgios Pakhymérēs, the court chronicler, records that amongst other things the basileus hurled a hunting dog off of the third-story stairwell of the Palace and smashed two chairs into the wall) before finally calming down enough to start dictating policy. That is not to say, however, that he was really calm, as evidenced by his orders to have Kantakoúzenós demanicled* and the various shouted threats of what he would do to his Mégas Doméstikos, Iōannēs Sénnakhereim, if Theódoros’ rebellion was not put down posthaste. Sénnakhereim, supposedly staring anxiously down at the broken body of the dog, hurriedly agreed.
Theódoros was in command of one of the three field armies within Rhōmaíōn, leaving Andrónikos and Sénnakhereim with two options in terms of forces to face the revolt. The Doméstikos tōn Dysē, Mikhaēl Ylavãs, was last reported as being camped at Skopía with eight allagia of Cuman and Turkish mercenaries and six allagia of native infantry, and given his force and location he was the natural choice to march against Theódoros. A messenger was dispatched with orders on 6 April.
Meanwhile, Guy had received Koútroúlēs’ message on 28 March. Understandably, he was more than miffed by Theódoros conquering his territories, but he was also very much a pragmatist. If he were to help the self-proclaimed basileus become the actual basileus, then he could most likely inveigh upon him to cede some rather fringe territories that might give him a fighting chance against the Sicilians and their vassals. As such, he sent a messenger to Theódoros two days later, offering support for his bid for the throne and hinting that he had the name of a traitor in his camp.
This messenger reached the rebel army while it was camped on the southern side of the Hexamilion, waiting for a group of local workmen to clear out a section of the wall large enough to pass through. Upon receiving the Athenian courier, Theódoros agreed to Guy’s offer, then retired to his tent and began going through various suspects for a traitor. He had a relatively minor commander named Mikhaēl Strategópoúlos, and had him dragged out of his tent in the dead of night and hacked to death in the mess during breakfast the next morning. Strategópoúlos had always been suspected of embezzling and this was given as the reason for the admittedly unusually brutal execution, but in fact it was intended to scare the mole into flight. Koútroúlēs, though now sweating bullets, keeps his head down and after a few hours of intense surveillance the army moves on through the now-demolished wall.
On 5 April, the rebels and the Athenians link up at Thēvai, with Guy leading an army of 500 horse (mixed knights and unarmored) and 2,000 horse from the Attican baronies, with the intention of leaking up with troops from the western baronies. Although the atmosphere within the camp is tense, to say the least, the now-united army keeps shambling along towards mainland Rhōmaíōn, spending the next month slowly advancing along the southern coast of Kōpaïda and gathering troops (mostly coerced militiamen) from the local populace.
Ylavãs’ army reached the border with Thessalia on 13 May, and immediately crossed across into the state without bothering to consult the court at Lárissa. While they were technically a vassal state of Rhōmaíōn and thus any Rhōman army could enter the country at-will without permission, it absolutely incensed Despotēs Kōnstantȋnōs and his regent, Anna Kantakoúzena, as well as most of the Thessalian nobility. However, they were powerless to do anything because the entirety of the Thessalian army was camped outside of the port of Yalaxidéi, preparing of a naval invasion of Epiros, and could not be easily transferred.
While the officials were powerless, not everyone was. Andrónikos Tarkhaneiōtes, the younger brother of the war hero Mikhaēl Tarkhaneiōtes, had fled to Thessalia in 1289 after trying and failing to overthrow the basileus. He had never stopped dreaming of being an independent ruler, and he seized upon this mass anger to further his own position.
He slipped out of Lárissa on 15 May, riding east to the Rhōman port of Dēmētrias, which was one of the few cities garrisoned by equal parts mercenary and native. Tarkhaneiōtes convinced most of the garrison to join him, promising riches to the mercenaries and glory to the Rhōmans. After that he turned and raced down the coast, gathering up volunteers from the various veteran settlements along the Pagasitikós. He reached the port of Auláka, on the Malian Gulf opposite Thermopylae, on 25 May with a force of 4,000 foot and 500 cavalry. Of course, he knew that he couldn’t fight Ylavãs on an equal footing with a force that small, and as such was planning to let Ylavãs and Theódoros bleed each other and then finish off whoever survived and claim the glory for defeating the whole force. (At the time, he was unaware that Guy had sided with Theódoros).
Ylavãs, on the other hand, was moving much more slowly than he was expecting. The Thessalians along the marching road were uniformly hostile, and the local magistrates had taken to tearing up or burying the roads to spite them. On one occasion, a group of mercenaries hired by the local pronoiar stalled the army’s advance for two days in the pass of Thaumokós before the fortress finally fell and the locals were massacred. Resistance decreased sharply after that, and on 31 May the army staggered out of the hills into the plains west of Rodítsa.
Also by 31 May, the combined rebel-Athenian emerged onto the Rodítsan Plain. By now they numbered 3,000 horse and 8,000 foot, outnumbering Ylavãs’ army by a goodly margin. However, they were very much a divided force who would gladly fight each other at the first provocation. Both armies’ scouts made contact in the early days of June, and as the summer opened the two forces, with Tarkhaneiōtes waiting in the wings, marched towards the first battle of the Theódoran Civil War at the small ford town of Kómma.
