Chapter Seven: The Dragon Emperor
"And so, together, they led the Roman Empire- the barbarian, the eunuch, and the soldier."
Philotheos of Thebes, Life of Manuel, written circa 1190.
The corpse of the Emperor Alexios was barely cold when Jordan of Aversa hurriedly returned to the Imperial Palace, woke the dead Emperor’s brother Isaac and urged him to hasten to the Great Church of Hagia Sophia, there to become the third of his family to take the Imperial throne. Isaac did not delay. The elderly Patriarch, John Italos (i), was swept out of bed, and forced to perform a rapid coronation ceremony in the early hours of the morning, before a small gathering. By the morning of October 3rd 1117, Isaac II Komnenos seemed to have securely snatched the throne of the Roman Empire.
The new Emperor was fast approaching his seventieth birthday at the time of his accession to the throne, and yet, according to all who describe him, he was in magnificent physical condition, the product of years of vigorous living. Unlike his brother, who had often preferred to retreat to bookish obscurity, Isaac was a loud and domineering figure, every bit the warrior Emperor. His hair was still shaggy golden (“like a fearsome lion”, Philotheos (ii) tells us), and he stood well over six feet tall. When Basil Palaiologos had his first audience with his rival a few days after Isaac’s accession, the Emperor was so intimidating and overbearing that Palaiologos could barely speak to request his promotion to the office of Domestikos tēs Anatolēs in exchange for the abandonment of all claims to the throne. Isaac reacted violently, chasing Palaiologos out of the room armed with the battle-axe of a Varangian guardsman (iii). Isaac had suffered years of humiliation at the hands of his brother, and now he had seized the throne he was intent on revenge.
Chasing his rivals around the Palace might have amused the new Basileus, but it was not intelligent politics. Within a few weeks, Basil Palaiologos had fled to Antioch and there, declaring an alliance with the current Domestikos tēs Anatolēs Bardanes of Mopsuestia, he killed the Doux Pantherios Skleros and raised the standard of revolt. He had ample support. For the armies of the East, Isaac “the Italian” (iv) was a semi-literate barbarian, supported by the equally barbaric Jordan of Aversa and his followers. Palaiologos had little trouble in whipping up the Tagmata, and then, with the coming of spring 1118, marching them west to occupy the Anatolian plateau.
Isaac’s response was characteristically forthright: and all the more disastrous for it. Gathering detachments from the various Themata nearest to Constantinople, plus his own palace guard regiments and a motley band of Western European mercenaries, he sped east, and met the rebels in battle near the town of Amorion. The result was quick, and decisive. The army of the Emperor was routed (v), and Isaac himself barely escaped with his life. Bardanes then advanced yet further westward, and was welcomed into Nicaea by the influential local landowner, Nikēphoros Nafpliotis (vi).
Things got still worse for the beleaguered Emperor, who had fled across the Aegean to Athens, following his defeat. In July, his own son Stephen raised the standard of revolt (vii). Stephen’s motives for doing so are murky, but what seems most likely is that the Emperor’s younger son had felt snubbed by his father, who had repeatedly favoured his elder brother Manuel. Stephen immediately crossed to Epiros (viii), accompanied by a large and experienced army. It was, for the Emperor Isaac II, the lowest point of his reign.
From here, though, the rebel cause would fall apart so rapidly that it was impossible for any of the participants not to attribute affairs to divine intervention of some sort. In desperation, the Senate of Constantinople, alarmed by the prospect of dynastic change, entrusted the remaining armies of the West to Jordan of Aversa, a hitherto militarily inexperienced courtier. It was a wise decision. Jordan surprised many (not least himself) by inflicting a serious defeat on a small section of the rebel army, which prompted Bardanes to retreat from Nicaea, onto less favourable terrain (ix). There, his army demoralised, he was badly defeated by Jordan’s enthusiastic troops, and died on the battlefield. Shortly afterward, Nikephoros Nafpliotis returned to the side of the Government (x). The Emperor Isaac was able to return to Constantinople with his position considerably secured.
The heart was now out of the rebellion, and the Emperor and his allies did not hesitate to press home their advantage. Stephen Komnenos was starved out of the Haemic peninsula (xi), and forced back to Italy, pursued by his brother and a large army. Manuel duly defeated Stephen near the city of Italian Troy (xii), and subjected his brother to a brutal blinding. Meanwhile, Isaac and Jordan pushed Basil Palaiologos out the other way, to the Eastern front, where he too was defeated and blinded near Melitene. An opportunistic invasion by the Atabeg of Harran, attempting to take advantage of the chaos, was briskly smashed, and Isaac II returned to Constantinople, his position secured.
He would never return to the battlefield again, and, indeed, soon began to find his age finally catching up with him. Restricted to his bed for most of the day, and living on a diet of specially softened food to compensate for the loss of most of his teeth, the old Emperor must have cut a rather feeble figure. This enforced confinement, though, was probably distinctly beneficial for the Empire as a whole. It is an irony that circumstances had forced Alexios Komnenos, a born administrator, to become a soldier- and it is even more of one that differing circumstances forced his brother, a born soldier, to enact a serious programme of administrative reforms.
To credit these reforms to Isaac is a stretch, as they had largely been dreamt up by the Parakoimomenos Basilios. Nonetheless, the Emperor was able to throw his weight and remaining energy fully behind the eunuch’s ideas, to force them through with a fearsome degree of efficiency. Basilios’ main concern was the taxation system which had, for close to a century now, been struggling to cope with the changing nature of life in the Empire. A system based on fleecing rural peasants to defend a beleaguered state had worked well enough in the dark days of the eighth and ninth centuries, but now, with the Empire unquestionably more powerful than any of its neighbours, and urban life booming, things had begun to look distinctly different (xiii).
Furthermore, the civil war, plus the expensive wars of the reign of Alexios had left the coffers in a parlous state. The Anatolian peasantry was increasingly turning to banditry; with the exactions of the Imperial tax collectors becoming too much to bear it was hardly surprising that they had enthusiastically supported the revolt of Basil Palaiologos and his allies. As more peasants evaded tax, takings fell, forcing the administration to tighten the squeeze still further on those remaining taxpayers. The situation was plainly untenable and Basilios, with the civil war now out of the way, was determined to scrap it.
Tax would, for the first time in centuries, become the responsibility of cities, not the wider Themata. Inspectors of the Parakoimomenos moved out into the countryside, assigning, in many cases, the exact territories to cities that they had held in the sixth and seventh centuries. Only monastic land remained inviolate, but even that was to be taxed to a degree, a decree imposed upon a Church by Basilios’ ally, Patriarch Italos, who died shortly afterward. Most significantly, for local communities, was the ruling that tax would be collected by local people, with a rotating programme of tax gathering shared by the major landowners, who would be assessed regularly for corruption by one another. It was far from a perfect system, and corruption remained rampant. Nonetheless, for the first time, the return of urban life to the provinces of the Empire was properly acknowledged. The slowly rising urban classes would now begin to acquire an important new stake in society, as allies of the Imperial Government against potential corruption by the tax-gathering magnates- or, alternatively, as allies of the magnates to collude in fleecing the others. It was a significant step- the power of an educated urban group, the so called “Mesoi”(xiv)would henceforth become an increasingly crucial element in governing the Roman Empire. Most importantly, by focusing the state’s finance-gathering apparatus upon the towns, the burden could be lifted somewhat from the fields. The life of the peasant remained a gruelling one, but no longer would it be crushing. These reforms, coupled by a limited debasement of the Nomisma to eighteen carats (xv), were enough for the Empire to financially turn the corner. By 1122, it was rumoured that Isaac had amassed a veritable dragon’s hoard of treasure (xvi).
The dragon himself, though, was not long for the world. Now nearly seventy-five years old, Isaac II Komnenos was by some way the oldest Emperor Constantinople had seen in centuries. In the summer of 1121, to no-one’s surprise, he had associated his son Manuel on the throne with him, and, to make doubly sure of the security of the succession, Manuel soon raised his own son, John (xvii), to the rank of Caesar. Isaac spent much of the day asleep, delegating much of the business of Government to Manuel and the ever energetic Parakoimomenos. The rest of the time he spent in deep theological discussion with the newly appointed Patriarch, Antigonos, a former battlefield chaplain. Isaac, in his prime, had never been a particularly spiritual man. But now, with death approaching, his interest in what lay beyond reached feverish levels. Jordan of Aversa reports on several occasions being forced to physically restrain the elderly Emperor from begging for mercy on the streets of Constantinople in the spring of 1122, and there was a general feeling around court that the end was nigh.
Death, though, would be a while in coming, and Isaac II would suffer badly, losing his sight and control of his bowels before it finally came. Constantinopolitans might have wondered, privately, if this was divine retribution for his aggression and radicalism, but few would have dared utter those thoughts aloud. For the House of Komnenos’ grip on power was now as firm as that of any dynasty had been. When, at length, Isaac finally passed away in late August, there was no doubt as to who would succeed him. Manuel Komnenos was crowned barely an hour after his father’s death- and with his accession began the reign of the most powerful and capable Emperor Constantinople had seen in living memory.
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i. An OTL heretic who died in the 1080s. ITTL, he's raised to the throne by Michael VII Psellos as a young man. Italos enjoys a long and successful time in the Patriarchal chair, holding the office until his death in 1120.
ii. Philotheos of Thebes, that is, an hagiographer/biographer of the late 12th century. His "Life of Manuel" is one of the most important literary texts of the contemporary ERE of TTL.
iii. By the end of the 1110s, the English influence upon the Varangians is fading, and they're starting to encompass all sorts of Northern Europeans. Particularly drawn to Constantinople are the Poles, seeking service with a fellow enemy of the Germans.
iv. As we'll see, coming from Italy can make it difficult for an Emperor to enforce his will over the Eastern armies, with their strong Armenian contingents.
v. Unsurprising, really. The troops of the so called "Roman Themes" of western and central Anatolia are now little more than a local police force- it's hardly surprising they're cut to ribbons by the professional Tagmatic armies.
vi. A name that might be familiar to readers of IE v1.
vii. You might think this is a stretch- but revolts of sons against fathers are not unknown in Byzantine history, although the main examples are admittedly from the post-1204 successor states.
viii. Modern Albania, roughly.
ix. Hitherto something of a bookworm, Jordan has spent years reading up on the military exploits of various commanders. This, coupled with good old fashioned luck, allows him to pull off something quite unexpected- and it's all go from here.
x. It's an indication of how bad the situation is still perceived to be in Constantinople that Nafpliotis is able to keep his eyes.
xi. Haemic peninsula = the Balkans, a Turkish word that obviously wouldn't be used ITTL.
xii. Modern Troia in Apulia. Though reputedly founded by an ancient Greek hero, the town we're talking about is a Byzantine fortress settlement established late in the reign of Basil II.
xiii. I've discussed this briefly before, but basically, what had since the seventh century been a very rural society is finally beginning to return to something more resembling the network of towns and cities of Late Antiquity.
xvi. This is a Byzantine term that literally means "the middle", though we should be cautious to label these people as a true "middle class" as we'd understand it. Nonetheless, they're not a million miles off... IOTL, it's mostly used for when discussing social changes in the successor states, but here, I'm using it to describe a class than IOTL I suspect was somewhat stymied by the turbulence of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.
xv. Originally established at 24 carats by Constantine the Great, the Solidus-Nomisma had been devalued to around 20 by Constantine IX, something that may well have further spurred economic growth. This second, minor devaluation, will be the last for some centuries, though it brings Basilios a degree of short-term unpopularity.
xvi. These are pretty radical changes, I know, and I wasn't sure how to structure them. In the end, I justified them by reasoning that, for a state like Byzantium, about the only thing that could encourage radical restructuring would be the urge to acquire more taxes. Restructuring had taken place in the past several times, after all, and I think in this scenario, it would happen sooner or later in some form.
xvii. The grandson of Alexios Komnenos too, through his daughter Styliane.
