Here is the first half of my Roman Empire timeline, Isaac's Empire, running from 1059 to 1564
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Isaac I Komnenos was crowned Emperor of the Romans on September 1, 1057. He inherited a system that was close to total collapse. The empire was at its greatest territorial extent since the rise of Islam, sprawling from Italy to the Caucasus, but inside all real authority had collapsed, and corruption had flourished for over thirty years. Gradually, the armed forces, descendants of the legions of old, had fallen into disrepair, starved of funds by an ever growing court bureaucracy that feared a military revolt that would place a competent Emperor on the throne of Constantine and Justinian. However, despite all of this bureaucracy’s attempts, a military adventurer by the name of Isaac had now seized the throne. The Empire would never be the same again.
Isaac’s first act as Emperor was to pay off his fellow generals and send them away from Constantinople, he had no wish to himself be overthrown. He did not instantly start slicing down at the bureaucrats either, to do so would have been political suicide. Instead, he turned his attention to the imperial coffers, which now lay nearly empty. Immediately, he began a program of confiscating territories given as bribes by his incompetent predecessors on the throne.
However, when he turned his attention to Church possessions, he faced much more opposition. In 1058 he entered into a major dispute with Patriarch Michael Keroularios, which ended in the Emperor deposing his Patriarch and the Patriarch dying in exile. Isaac’s popularity plummeted.
On the other hand, he still held the support of the army, which any strong Emperor understood to be key, and was able to lead them to a stunning victory against the Pecheneg barbarians in 1059, returning to Constantinople in triumph. In just two years, he had reversed the Empire’s downward spiral, and begun the second stage of the spectacular Roman renaissance that dominated the middle Ages.
1060 was a quiet year for the Emperor, who kept his head down and worked quietly to keep everything running properly in the state. He began the trimming of the bureaucracy, including dismissing the chronicler Michael Psellus. Because of this, our information for Isaac’s activities for the next couple of years is very poor. We know that in 1062, his brother John was dispatched to southern Italy, where he had some success in expelling the Normans from the peninsula. However, Isaac had concentrated the larger part of the still recovering imperial army in the Caucasus and Syria because of a much larger threat, so the Normans were still able to retain part of the “boot” of Italy and use this as a launch pad to conquer Sicily.
A map of the area can be seen below. Purple shows areas returned by John Komnenos to full imperial control, red is under Norman rule, and red and grey stripes are undergoing Norman conquests.
The Emperor Alexius I was twenty eight years old at the time of his accession. He had inherited from his uncle an empire that was rich and stable in its Asian heartlands at least. To the west the situation was very different. Ever since the death of his father John in 1072, the situation in Italy had gradually become worse. The competent Norman leader Robert Guiscard had completed the subjugation of Sicily three years before, and had begun to construct a fleet to menace Imperial possessions in Italy and the western Balkans. No sooner had Alexius been crowned Emperor than word reached him from the west; the Normans had sacked Corfu, an important Imperial garrison. Initially, Alexius remained in Constantinople, waiting to see if the situation would sort itself out, but in 1077, the Normans captured Salerno and Capreno, effectively encircling the imperial lands in Italy. Now seriously alarmed, Alexius recalled the Imperial army from a minor peacekeeping expedition in Armenia and prepared to send the full force of his troops against the Normans. In 1078, the great force set out, with Alexius at its head, leading some 50,000 troops.
Unsurprisingly, the Normans collapsed before the Emperor’s onslaught. By the end of the year, they had been forced out of Apulia and Calabria, and in 1079, Alexius invaded Sicily proper. Messina fell that same year, but the resistance from the Norman garrison at Palermo was stubborn, and Alexius settled down to prepare for a winter siege.
However, the Emperor’s dreams of a quick victory in Sicily were not to be. In November, the governor of Dyracchium, Nicephorus Bryennius, declared himself Emperor, and began marching on Constantinople. Nicephorus Botaneiates, a general loyal to Alexius was able to hold the usurper at Thessalonica, but Bryennius was far from beaten. Reluctantly, the Emperor left Sicily, where the Normans immediately overcame the small garrisons he had left at Messina.
Despite this, Alexius knew that the revolt was a much more pressing concern than the Normans; Bryennius was a competent and popular general who stood a real chance of taking and holding the throne.
Alexius met Bryennius in battle at Adrianople sometime in spring 1080. The battle was an Imperial victory, but hardly a decisive one. The two armies were evenly matched, with around 30,000 soldiers each, testament to the scale and popularity of Bryennius’ revolt. Had the general not been killed accidentally, the future history of the Roman Empire could have been very different, as it was; Alexius Komnenos’ position was secured.
Meanwhile, everything the Emperor had achieved in Italy was rapidly falling apart. The Normans had captured Reggio at around the same time as the defeat of Byrennius, and had begun inching their way back into imperial lands, devastating the crops that were growing. By the end of the year, the Byzantine situation was bad. The towns were starving, and, to make matters worse, the Normans had not retreated to Sicily for the winter, but remained to devastate the countryside. On Christmas Day 1080, Taranto fell, and Bari was besieged. Alexius was desperate to return to Sicily, but was paralyzed in Constantinople by the intrigues of the aristocracy, who snarled and snapped at the Emperor. Then, in February, an offer of help arrived from a most unexpected source; the Papacy.
The Pope at the time was Gregory VII, an intelligent and strong willed man who was determined to assert himself as leader of Christendom. Already he had emerged triumphant over the Western Emperor Henry IV, but now, when he looked south he saw the Mezzogiorno in ruins after nearly a decade of swinging back and forth between Norman and imperial armies. As he was keen to restore control over Constantinople, Gregory sent ambassadors east to Alexius. While these did not lead to a full scale reunion of the churches, they did lead to a major thawing in East-West relations, and represent the first steps on the path of the reunion of the church. More importantly for Alexius though, was the physical side of the bargain, which would amount to direct Papal support for his campaigns.
Guiscard had already antagonized the Papacy with his annexation of Salerno, technically a Papal vassal. Now, Gregory seized the chance for revenge. He sent some 10,000 Italian soldiers to reinforce the Byzantines, who were led by Alexius’ loyal general Nicephorus Botaneiates. These reinforcements, coupled with the fact that Botaneiates brought Greek grain for the starving Italian locals ensured a quick victory. By midsummer the Normans had been forced from the mainland for good, Guiscard was killed while defending Reggio. After this, Sicily, which was largely Orthodox anyway, put up no resistance, by October, Nicephorus Botaneiates was in control of Palermo. The surviving Normans, around 5000 of them, were rounded up and arranged into a military unit to be deployed in Syria. The great Norman adventure in southern Italy was at an end.
But the Byzantine renaissance in Italy was just beginning. While Nicephorus Botaneiates was conquering the Normans, the Western Emperor Henry, tired of the humiliations dealt to him by the Pope, had swept down into Italy. For three years, the two bided their time, until, in 1084, the Emperor occupied Rome itself.Gregory thereupon retired into the exile of Sant' Angelo, refusing to meet Henry’s demands to crown him Emperor of the West. Meanwhile, Gregory sent desperate emissaries to Constantinople, promising Alexius the throne of the west if he could save the Pope.
For Alexius, bored of spending the past four years in the capital, this was a golden opportunity. Once again, he gathered a large army, and set off for Italy. Henry, seeing a determined and powerful opponent, and one that had far more claim to the title Roman Emperor than he did, promptly turned tail and fled. Gregory was liberated, and Alexius I became the first Roman Emperor to set foot in Rome since the eighth century.
Although he ordered his soldiers to treat the ancient monuments with respect, there was little to attract Alexius to Rome. It was by Byzantine standards, a rather small, shabby little town, another Adrianople or Caesarea, certainly nothing to compare with the true seat of the Roman Empire, Constantinople. Alexius must also have noticed the barely disguised hostility his troops received from the Roman people, for them he was not the successor of Augustus and Constantine but rather a schismatic Greek whose forebears had abandoned the eternal city in 751. Therefore he informed the Pope that he had no interest in the crown of the Western Emperor, but that perhaps some territorial concessions would be enough reward for his services. Gregory, who was by now sliding into a deep mental illness, was happy to oblige, granting Alexius control over Sardinia, Corsica, Venice and all Italy south of the Papal States. Venice was already an Imperial vassal, but Corsica, Sardinia and southern Italy were successfully integrated into the empire, so that by the time of Alexius’ death they were thriving themes.
Alexius spent the next two years in Italy, sorting out various affairs. The area was divided into six themes, these being Apulia, Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, Sicily and Sardinia.Until 1091 Corsica was part of the theme of Sardinia but was ceded to Alexius’ ally, the Republic of Genoa in return for a forty year naval alliance between Genoa and the Empire.
The Emperor returned to Constantinople in triumph in summer 1087, with yet more good news, his wife Irene gave birth to a healthy son named John, whom Alexius immediately crowned co-emperor. The Komnenid dynasty was now finally secure in power, there would not been another serious revolt in the Roman Empire for over a century.
The next three years Alexius spent at his capital, watching his son grow up. This peaceful existence came to a rude end however, in spring 1091, when a vast horde of Pecheneg barbarians broke past the Danube frontier, and began to lay waste to Thrace. Once more Alexius returned to battle. With some 10,000 Italian veterans, plus native Thracians and soldiers from Asia Minor he was able to crush the Pechenegs at Levounion. So total was Alexius’ victory that the Pechenegs are never again mentioned by any source as a menace to society, and no tribe dared invade the Balkans again until years after Alexius’ death. Their shattered remnants were sent away in disgrace to Sicily to act as military police against the remaining Norman and Saracen rebels on the island. On all fronts Alexius appeared triumphant. He celebrated his forty-fifth birthday in style in the capital with a triumphal parade featuring Normans, Pechenegs and Sicilian Saracens, among others.
The next few years would be better still. Seljuk control of the Levant had always been shaky, but between 1090 and 1095 it collapsed altogether, and the Empire became steadily more and more Mesopotamian focused, the result of a series of warring and incompetent Sultans. To the south meanwhile, the Egyptian Fatimids had stagnated since their defeat at the hands of Alp Arslan nearly thirty years previously and proved unable to recover any of their former territories. Thus three new states emerged, each squabbling for scarce resources; the Sultanate of Damascus which controlled everything from Homs in the north to Jerusalem in the south, a re-emergence of the traditional Imperial puppet of the Emirate of Aleppo, and further north-east, the Atabeg of Mosul. These three young nations were in a state of near constant warfare, aided by constant flows of money from Constantinople, Baghdad and Cairo. It was in the interests of neither Emperor, Sultan, nor Caliph for one small Islamic state to become more powerful than any of the others.
In the West though, the situation was slowly declining again. The Western Emperor Henry IV was slowly building up his strength for an assault on Genoa, the most important Byzantine ally in the Western Mediterranean. Alexius had helped Genoa rise to power at the expense of Pisa and Venice, now she was one of the greatest cities of Italy, larger and richer than Rome herself. For a while he was distracted by a civil war within his realm, but in 1098, he launched a vast army against the Genoese. The defenders were able to repel the Emperor for a while, bringing in supplies from their colony at Corsica, but if they were to hold out for any length of time, they would need a protector who was the equal of Henry himself. In Christendom that could only mean one man; Emperor Alexius Komnenos.
When he heard the news of the siege of Genoa, Alexius was instantly ready for action. His Empire faced no major challenge in any other theatre, so he felt comfortable about drawing a vast force; some 70,000 soldiers, out of Asia Minor for what would be his third Italian expedition. To this he added some 40,000 Greeks and Bulgarians, and, an exotic touch, bullied 5000 Arab horsemen from the Zirid Emir at Tunis. The great force arrived at Genoa just before Christmas 1099.
And not a moment to soon. Genoa had now been besieged for nearly a year and a half, and morale was beginning to run out. The arrival of the Emperor rallied the population so much that no sooner had the Byzantines set foot in the city than they were being showered with petals by the grateful Genoese. On January 12th 1100, they met with the Western Imperial forces at Savona, to the west of Genoa. The Battle of Savona ended in a complete Byzantine victory. The Western army, comprised mostly of German nobles and Italian peasants, was swept away by the disciplined Byzantine army, and by sunset, Henry himself had surrendered. Meeting with Alexius, he agreed to formally renounce any claim on the title “Roman Emperor” and promise never again to invade Genoa or any of the Byzantine territories in Italy. Then he was allowed to depart in peace.
Why was Alexius so generous? Perhaps he had learned the lessons of Justinian- that a war for Italy would be a costly, violent process and give an area that was far more of a hindrance than a help to the Empire. Or maybe he was reluctant to become dragged any further into the complicated tangle of Western European politics; after all, the whole reason the Roman Empire’s attention had turned eastward in the first place was because this area was so much more important than the squabbling, semi-barbarian kingdoms of the west. For the Genoese, the Battle of Savona marked the effective end of their independence. As a “guarantee of future liberty” Alexius placed a Byzantine garrison of some 5,000 men in Genoa, to hold the city and Corsica, and ensure that it would be a faithful Byzantine puppet. For the Genoese, far worse fates could certainly have befallen them, now they could make undreamed of riches as citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire. And one day, a Genoan would raise himself up the greasy pole of Byzantine civilization to seize the ultimate prize; the imperial crown.
Alexius returned in triumph to Constantinople in the spring of 1102, taking time on his way home to meet with the Pope, and visit Sicily, where the Orthodox citizens flocked to see their Emperor at Palermo. Upon his return to the capital, Alexius settled down, never to leave on campaign again. Instead, he largely dedicated his time to the education of his young son John.
The Empire remained at peace for the rest of Alexius’ reign, Byzantium’s flanks protected by the smaller Christian and Muslim kingdoms and Emirates. To the north the Georgians held off the raiders from the steppes, while in the south the four post-Seljuk emirates continued to squabble and prevent a real threat emerging to trouble the Empire. In the west meanwhile Henry VI had passed away in 1105, and his son Henry V was too busy warring against German princes and then the Poles to pay too much attention to Italy. In 1110, following a dispute with the Pope he considered marching into Italy, but was dissuaded by a Byzantine-Papal-Genoese alliance. Alexius finally passed away in 1118, his empire at peace, and feared on all fronts.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE (INCLUDING VASSALS) AND SURROUNDING STATES AT THE DEATH OF EMPEROR ALEXIUS I
Alexius’ son John, had inherited all of his father’s best traits in full, an agile mind, military genius, and superb skills of diplomacy. John had also inherited from his parents a strong sense of the spiritual, but whereas Alexius was quite happy to burn heretics at the stake, John was an altogether more peaceful character. Indeed, of all the medieval Roman Emperors, John is considered to by far the most merciful, gentle and generally Christian, reflected by the name for which he is still known to this day, “John the Beautiful”.
John was able to gain this name perhaps in part because of the state of his empire. Byzantium in the 1120’s was indisputably the greatest power of the world outside China. Not even mighty Islam had a power that could compare to John’s Roman Empire.
Only once in his life did John march to war. In 1126, he admitted a blind member of the Hungarian Royal Family to stay in Constantinople. Unfortunately, the Hungarians feared John aimed to annex their kingdom, after all, his wife Irene was daughter of King Ladislaus I, giving John at least a shaky claim on the throne of Hungary. King Stephen II also feared that this was his last chance to stop the Empire before it became simply too strong. Therefore in he invaded in 1128. Initially, the Hungarians met with success, breaching the Danube frontier and capturing several important towns including Singidunum (Belgrade), Serdica (Sofia) and Phillipopollis (Plodiv). Unfortunately for Stephen, John had not intention of letting the Hungarian get any further, for to the south, the southern Balkans were experiencing a boom unseen since before the Great Plagues of the 6th century. The Hungarians, together with a group of rebellious Serbs, were surrounded and crushed at the fortress of Haram in 1130, after nearly two years of solid campaigning. John demanded little from Stephen; certainly he had no intention of annexing Hungary. He was content with a few border fortresses and a guarantee of peace, with the humiliated King was all too happy to grant.
John then returned to Constantinople. One cannot help but wonder if his courtiers were entirely delighted at the return of their Emperor, he was, after all an extraordinary pious man, even by Byzantine standards. His unfortunate courtiers were expected to restrict their conversation to serious subjects only. The food served at the emperor's table was very frugal and those who lived lives of luxury were subject to regular lectures from the Emperor, who considered their way of life to be immoral, and against the teachings of Christ.
Nevertheless, amongst the general populace, John Komnenos was loved in a way that neither Isaac nor Alexius, great men though they had been, were. He frequently visited and spoke with the poor, dispensing charity lavishly. Between 1132 and 1134 he embarked upon a tour of Asia Minor, leaving government in the hands of his twenty year old son, Isaac. In Asia, he was able to witness the growing population boom, to be seen most spectacularly in Antioch, capital of Syria, and boasting a population of around 250,000, higher than at any time in the city’s long history. John remained in Antioch over the winter of 1133/4, and developed a deep affection for the place. In 1134, he returned to Constantinople, via Thessalonica, the Empire’s second city, which was booming just as much as Antioch, with a roughly similar population. He eventually returned to Constantinople in the autumn, which dwarfed either of them, or any other Christian city for that matter. Modern historians estimate twelfth century Constantinople’s population at anywhere between six hundred thousand and a million souls… essentially as large as a city without modern agriculture could get.
John Komnenos, in contrast to his father, lived a slow, relaxed life. In Italy, the Western Emperors Henry V and Lothair III were too busy with events in Germany to bother the Empire, and its loyal protectorates, Venice and Genoa, were both happy to profit from their privileged relationship with the Empire. The Papacy remained peaceful and stable, supported by Imperial armies in the south. The Popes Callixtus II and Honorius II both were well aware that any anti-Byzantine move on their part would not be to their best interests, and so largely gave up on persecuting the Patriarchs of Constantinople for their heretical ways.
Only in 1130 was there a minor incident in Italy. After the death of Honorius II, two rival Popes emerged, Anacletus II and Innocent II. Anacletus, a member of a powerful Roman family was the first to call for Alexius Komnenos, Isaac’s eldest son, and Catapan of Italy, for aid. Alexius, at Palermo immediately recognized Anacletus as Pope, but Innocent would not be put off. Excommunicated by Anacletus, he sailed north, hoping to gain an alliance with the Western Emperor. For Alexius, such a state of affairs could not be allowed to come about, Italy was finally beginning to recover from the long wars by the two Empires. And so, when Innocent disembarked at Genoa, he was quietly taken aside and executed. The head of the anti-Pope was sent back to Rome, and a potentially major diplomatic incident was avoided.
Back in Constantinople, far away from these disputes, John devoted his time to every Byzantine’s favourite hobby, theological dispute. Taking as his role model the famous scholar Emperor Constantine VII, John and his beloved sister Anna* began to churn out vast numbers of books. Their “Alexiad” about the lives of their father and great uncle Isaac was widely praised throughout the empire, becoming essential reading for most of the upper classes. At the same time, they wrote many other fascinating pieces, most of which, have fortunately survived to the present. John’s “On the Conquest of Bulgaria” sheds a vital light on the campaigns of Emperor Basil II in the early eleventh century, which are otherwise relatively unknown. In 1139, brother and sister began work on a complete “user’s guide” to the Roman Empire, intended for John’s son and heir apparent, Alexius. In some ways it is near identical to a similar piece by Constantine VII, but contains new advice, as the empire’s situation had changed greatly in the two centuries since Constantine’s day. There is advice on how to deal with the Papacy (in the end, the Patriarch of Rome has few friends, and any Emperor of the Romans should endeavour to keep it this way), and the Islamic sultanates along the Empire’s southern frontier (the lands of the Infidels must not be allowed to unite. Pay them rich tributes to keep them fighting each other; it will always be cheaper in the end).
In 1142, John received a message from his son Isaac, governor of Antioch, inviting the Emperor to spend the winter in the East. John, who had always been in love with the city, hastened to join Isaac. En route however, tragedy struck. In Palermo, John’s eldest son Alexius had fallen in and died. The Emperor was deeply unhappy, but not inconsolable, he was sure that Alexius had been a Christian, and now sat with the Lord in Heaven. In Antioch, he had two more sons waiting, Isaac, and the youngest of the Emperor’s eight children; Manuel.
Emperor John II spent his last Christmas in Antioch with his sons. In the spring, he and Manuel returned to Constantinople. En route, they stopped in the theme of Cilicia to go hunting, where tragedy struck. While in the wilds of Cicilia, the Emperor was accidentally infected by a poison arrow. The poison set in, and shortly afterwards he died. John's final action as emperor was to choose his youngest son Manuel Komnenos to be his successor.
Why exactly he chose Manuel to be his heir is unknown. Manuel was certainly a brave warrior, and possessed a quick, easy intelligence, but other than that there was nothing much to set him apart from his other brothers, he was younger than any of them. Nevertheless, it was Manuel Komnenos who was quickest to return to Constantinople, and it was Manuel Komnenos who, in August 1143, was crowned Emperor of the
Romans.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AT THE DEATH OF JOHN II KOMNENOS
Emperor Manuel I had barely a year in Constantinople before he was forced to return east. En route, he stopped off at Iconium, where his brother Isaac had been seized and arrested by the governor, Michael Branas. Branas was rewarded by the Emperor, but Isaac was nonetheless freed from prison and restored to the position of Governor of Syria, he was, after all, Manuel’s last surviving brother, and had much greater knowledge of the situation in the East.
During John’s reign, an ambitious young Atabeg had risen to power in Mosul, by the name of Zengi. While an attempt to unify Mosul and Aleppo in 1128 had been thwarted by the Emperor, Zengi, ever an ambitious man, remained determined to end the Byzantine monopoly on power in the Levant, and unite the Islamic statelets of the region under his rule. His ambitions had been kept in check by Isaac, but, while Isaac had been imprisoned over the past year, much had changed.
In the summer of 1144, Zengi led a powerful army into the Sultanate of Aleppo, besieging its second city, Edessa. The emir, Masul ibn-Ak Sunkur, send an emergency messenger to Constantinople, begging for aid from the Emperor, but Manuel was still in the capital at the time, enjoying celebrating a peaceful first year on the throne. Nevertheless, the young Emperor had a love of battle and war, and immediately set out to aid Aleppo. En route there was the stop at Iconium as described above, and, after gathering some 40,000 soldiers, Manuel arrived at Aleppo on Christmas Day, 1144.
He was too late. The next morning, word arrived from Edessa; Zengi occupied the city, and was marching on Aleppo itself with a large army. Immediately, Masul ibn-Ak Sunkur panicked, and secretly sent messengers to Zengi, offering terms of surrender. Manuel, who had retreated to Antioch to gather more troops, was disgusted to discover that the cowardly emir had caved in to Zengi. Moreover, he was profoundly alarmed. After ruling for less than two years, he had already allowed the balance of power in the Middle East to slide against him. Zengi had two states in the bag, and was now determined to seize a third; Damascus.
However, it was not to be. After a long fruitless summer in 1145, where he consistently failed to make any headway against the Damascenes, he was assassinated by a slave from Edessa in 1146. Manuel’s first great foe was dead, but his ghost would haunt the empire for decades to come.
For a while, it seemed as though the balance of power had been restored. Zengi’s realm was divided between his two sons, with Mosul going to Saif ad-Din Ghazi, the elder, and Aleppo to Nur-ad-Din, the younger. Isaac Komnenos, governor of Syria, could, it seemed, breathe easy. Reassured, Manuel returned to Constantinople.
The peace would not last. In 1149, supported by a force of Damascene mercenaries eager to divide the brothers, Nur-ad-Din marched on Mosul. Saif ad-Din quickly marched out to meet his brother, and the two Muslim armies met at Ar-Raqqah on the Euphrates. The outcome was a shattering victory for Nur-ad-Din. Saif fled to Constantinople, but was murdered en route by a group of bandits. Once again, one man ruled supreme in Mosul and Aleppo.
Suddenly it seemed all the east was in flames. In Armenia, the ambitious King Toros II invaded Anatolia in 1151. Why exactly he chose to attack Byzantium then is unknown, but it finally gave Manuel a chance to unleash his armies. For eight years the warlike Emperor had been denied a battle, now he would not be denied. The Armenians were smashed in two massive battles, at Theodosiopolis and Manzikert. For centuries later, Manzikert would be known as “the terrible day” for the Armenians; it marked the end of medieval Armenia. The capital at Ani was victim to a brutal sacking, and the north of the country was overrun King Demtere I of Georgia. Manuel had been deliberately brutal in his treatment of Armenia, it was intended as a powerful statement to the Mediterranean; this was what would happen if the Roman Empire was sufficiently provoked. Unfortunately for the Mediterranean, and ultimately Byzantium herself, few states learned this lesson.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND SURROUNDING STATES IN 1152AD
In 1154, a new and potentially dangerous element appeared in Manuel’s sphere of influence, the new King of Italy, Frederick I. Despite the best efforts of Manuel’s Catapan of Italy, one Michael Markopoulos, Frederick was crowned Emperor of the West by Pope Victor IV on June 18th 1155.
For Manuel this was a most alarming prospect. There had not been an Emperor of the West for almost twenty years, thanks in part to firm Byzantine support of the Popes Anacletus II and Victor IV. However, despite this, the Byzantines remained as far as the Popes were concerned schismatic heretics. Victor’s crowning of Frederick as Emperor, one feels, may have been a desperate attempt to escape from the influence of Constantinople; once a valued ally, now the dominator of Italy.
Victor died a few months after crowning Frederick Emperor, and there was now a strong feeling amongst the Cardinals that a stronger figure was needed to lead the Papacy to a glorious new era of domination. Therefore it was announced that the new Pope would be a German bishop, one who would bear the title Gregory VIII.
Gregory immediately sent ambassadors to Frederick, urging him to “restore Italy to one empire, as in the days of the past, with one Emperor, and one Pope”. Though officially an invitation for the Emperor to attack Pisa, which had sunk into piracy after being eclipsed by Byzantine Genoa, few could have failed to notice the true meaning of the Pope’s words. Manuel Komnenos in Constantinople certainly didn’t. How he got word of it is unknown, but it is certain that in 1157, he sent messages to both Gregory and Frederick, urging them to halt the slide towards war. Only Gregory bothered to respond, sending a rude letter addressed to “Emperor of the Greeks”. Manuel was incandescent with rage. Immediately, he began to gather troops. At Genoa, grain was brought in from Corsica and Sardinia, in readiness for a siege, while at Palermo, capital of Byzantine Italy, construction began on a war fleet. Demands were sent to the Zirid emir at Tunis for money and horses which the Emir quickly made available, he was after all little more than an Imperial vassal. Italy prepared herself for war.
In June 1158, Frederick set out upon his second Italian expedition. Pisa, the expedition’s official target was captured and sacked, soon to be followed by an even more glittering prize; Milan. Manuel meanwhile had arrived at Bari, with a gigantic army of almost 100,000 men. The two emperors sat either side of Rome, each waiting for the other to back down. Neither did.
The two sides finally met in battle on April 3rd 1159, just north of Rome. Fighting was extremely fierce, but eventually the Byzantines began to emerge victorious. The Pisans in Frederick’s army suddenly revolted, and surrounded a squadron of German knights, massacring them to a man. Many of Frederick’s other German subjects turned and fled before the disciplined Imperial onslaught. Zigzagging north up Italy they were caught in a pincer movement by a Genoan-Venetian army. Few made it back to Germany alive.
The Emperor Frederick meanwhile had been captured. Brought before Manuel, the Eastern Emperor at first refused to believe that the bloodied and tattered man covered in dirt was the mighty Western Emperor of the Romans (or Franks, the Byzantines never referred to a Western Emperor as “Roman” if they could help it). Manuel’s terms were harsh. Ravenna and Pisa were seceded to the Eastern Empire, and Frederick would give up the title “Emperor of the Romans”. Frederick retreated, greatly humiliated by his sudden reversal of fortune, and would never return to Italy again.
Yet, in the long run, The Holy German Empire, as it came to be known, had been saved from itself by Manuel. Nominally the victor of the battle, the Byzantine Emperor can have hardly known the far-flung consequences of his victory at the Battle of Rome, nor would he have given them a moment’s notice. For now though, he had business with the Pope.
Gregory VIII had initially tried to flee after hearing the news of the battle, but there was nowhere for him to go. In France, the French and English monarchs were engaged in a savage war, and in Spain the situation was much the same. Only one significant Catholic power remained to come to the Pope’s aid, but in 1159 the Kingdom of Hungary did not act. Manuel marched on Rome. Gregory miserably flitted from aristocrat to aristocrat, begging them to find some way to stop the Byzantines. It was not to be. On April 9th, Manuel entered Rome. On April 10th, Pope Gregory VIII was declared deposed, and on the 11th, a little known Sicilian Cardinal by the name of Jordan was proclaimed Pope Anacletus III.
Anacletus III made it clear from the start that he wished a reunion of the churches, a request Manuel was all to happy to grant, this was, after all the only reason he had placed Anacletus on the throne of St. Peter’s. When Manuel departed Rome that autumn, Pope and Emperor travelled to Constantinople together, thus Anacletus III became the first Pope to set foot in Constantinople since Constantine I in the eighth century.
He met with barely disguised hostility from the populace. Despite being as Orthodox as they were, he was seen as a traitor to the Orthodox faith for demanding supremacy over them as Patriarch of Rome. Manuel on the other hand was a conquering hero, who had re-established near full Imperial rule over Italy. And so when their beloved Emperor asked the general populace to accept Anacletus, their hostility was muted somewhat. Perhaps this Sicilian could be another step towards the total restoration of the Roman Empire?
One man, of course, disagreed, the Patriarch Luke. As head of the Orthodox Church, he surely was the head of matters of spirituality in the Roman Empire? Luke, by now seriously worried, began to spread shocking and dangerous rumours. The court of the Emperor would be moved back to Rome, the dreaded “filoque” clause would be added to the Nicene Creed, the Patriarchate of Constantinople would be reduced to a mere bishopric.
In modern times it can be hard to understand the devotion that the Byzantines had for their religion; it can only be compared to that of modern day football hooligans. A crowd of rioters suddenly surrounded Pope Anacletus’ temporary accommodation in part of the Palace. The Emperor was furious, and rode to the citizens almost alone, begging them to give the Pope a second chance, and assuring them that Constantinople would remain heart of the Roman Empire. Once again, when faced with their conquering hero, the citizens relented.
On February 1st, the Third Council of Nicaea was held. In it, a new brand of Christianity was hammered out, blending Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The Pope was head of the church, and his deputy would be the Patriarch of Constantinople, with all three other Patriarchs below them. Above all the Patriarchs was the Emperor himself; who, as equal of the Apostles, reserved the right to make of break Patriarchs. The filoque clause was removed from the Nicene Creed. A whole range of bishoprics were shuffled around, largely to compensate the Patriarch for his loss in status. Now he gained full responsibility for all Italy south of Rome herself, Sicily, and Sardinia.
The people of Constantinople rejoiced. The Roman Church was united once again. Not only had this but the Council also attended to some distinctly non-spiritual matters. Rome would once again be part of the Empire.
Manuel’s dominion was now at its greatest extent since the days of Heraclius. He ruled all of Italy south of the Po, the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, parts of Syria, and much of the Caucasus. Most other Emperors would have been happy with this vast realm, yet for Manuel it was not enough. The conqueror of Armenia and Sicily was determined to go further.
In 1162, the opportunity dawned. In Hungary, the death of King Géza II had prompted a minor struggle for power between the dead King’s son Stephen, and his brother, confusingly also named Stephen. The brother had already earlier fled to Constantinople, where he was supported by Manuel. Meanwhile, in Hungary, a tattered parish priest had turned up, claiming to be Pope Gregory VIII. Gregory urged King Stephen to break with the so recently reunited church, to follow the true Catholic faith, and the young king followed the Pope’s advice. This was, for Manuel, a final insult that he must return.
In 1163, he invaded Hungary. Stephen and Gregory attempted a counterassault, heading south towards Constantinople while Manuel was away, but they were ambushed by a force led by George Paleaologus, one of Manuel’s trusted generals. Battered, but not broken, they returned to Hungary, where the Emperor was waiting. At the battle of Siscia, once again Manuel emerged triumphant over a disorganized Western army. King Stephen fell down dead, while Pope Gregory did another of his famous vanishing acts. Manuel’s Stephen became King Stephen IV of Hungary, but not without a heavy demand from Manuel. All Hungary west of the Danube would be ceded to the Empire, it had once been Roman land, and would be restored to the Empire. Stephen tried to negotiate, but Manuel was inflexible. Finally, the new King agreed, and Manuel added another sizeable chunk to the Roman Empire.
The Emperor was now forty six years old. In a reign of twenty one years he had proved himself perhaps the greatest conqueror in all Byzantine history, surpassing Heraclius, Nicephorus Phocas, even Basil the Bulgar Slayer himself. Yet unlike these Emperors, there was no-one to check Manuel’s inexorable advance. To the east, the Seljuks had collapsed, to be replaced by a revived but still weak Abbasid Caliphate, and a more east Turkish dynasty, the Khwarezm Shah. In the south, Nur-ad-Din still proved resolutely unable to sieze Damascus and set himself up as a credible rival to the Empire. And the west had been humiliated not once, but twice before Manuel, who now had control of the Papacy, and could rest easy in this theatre.
In 1168 though, the inevitable finally happened; the fall of Damascus. A triumphant Nur-ad-Din now reigned over the largest and most powerful state to border Byzantium, and he had his eyes set on the next prize-Fatimid Egypt.
The Fatimids had once been a great power, but had never recovered from their disastrous defeat at the hands of Alp Arslan over a century previously. Their Caliphate had become increasingly introverted and isolated, reduced to little more than Egypt itself. Widely detested throughout the Islamic World for its Shiite faith, Egypt could only hope that Manuel Komnenos would come to its aid when Nur-ad-Din’s nephew Saladin marched on it in 1172. But Manuel, seeming stripped of his energy, would do no such thing. He had suddenly become disinterested in military matters, preferring to spend time with his ageing wife Theophano. Manuel and Theophano were childless, and desperately sought a son to revitalize the Empire. So, when the Empress, who must have been forty at the very least, conceived and gave birth to a son, Alexander, in 1170, it was widely hailed as a miracle. The proud father spent more and more time with his baby son over the next few years, intending to shape the boy into a new great Emperor. In this he failed. In 1174, he returned east.
Nur-ad-Din was in a position of dangerous strength. He held several great cities, Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Cairo, and funds from the conquest of Egypt steeled his armies. Manuel, seeing too late that the Muslim was now a credible threat to the Empire, hurriedly marched south.
As he crossed Asia Minor, the Emperor noticed that it was becoming more and more difficult to raise armies. His troops were spread out around the world, in Italy, Hungary and Armenia. In the absence of the peasant small-holders that made up the bulk of Manuel’s army, the great landowners had snatched up their plots, and great estates had radiated out once again. Here, the ageing Emperor must finally have begun to realize the immense damage he had wrought on his Empire. Byzantium was exhausted, and close to breaking point. Manuel could no longer gather armies of 50,000 or more men. He arrived at Antioch with a contingent of some fifteen thousand soldiers, and prepared for his last campaign.
As with all of Manuel’s wars, it began with staggering success. A week before Manuel had arrived at Antioch; Nur-ad-Din had finally passed away. His Sultanate was in chaos, and the Emperor advanced rapidly south. Aleppo fell, then Tripoli, Damascus, and Acre. By the beginning of 1176, the Emperor had surrounded Jerusalem. The Holy City fell to the Byzantine force on March 12th, providing a welcome boost in morale; Jerusalem was part of the Empire for the first time since 638! Manuel settled down in the city to plan his last great conquest, Egypt. But it was not to be.
In early September, he and his small army marched out of Jerusalem, to meet Saladin, Sultan of Egypt. Seeing the veteran Byzantine force approaching, Saladin retreated to a heavily fortified pass near the town of Gaza, and proposed a truce. Manuel refused, and began the assault on September 17th, 1176.
The Byzantine vanguard was the first to encounter Saladin's troops, and made it through the pass with few casualties, as the Egyptians were not finished setting up their positions. By the time the vanguard reached the end of the pass the rear was just about to enter; this allowed the Egyptians to almost completely trap them. Panicking, the commander John Ducas ordered the vanguard to return, but they could do nothing but watch, as little by little, waves of Muslim forces overwhelmed Manuel’s veterans.
Manuel himself was in no position to help either. As the shadows lengthened, he and his bodyguard turned and fled to Jerusalem. There, embassies were sent to Saladin, promising peace and a rich tribute, which the Sultan accepted. The invincible Emperor had been defeated.
Manuel returned to Constantinople the following spring, to hold a triumph, displaying the riches of the Holy Land for all to see. But the Emperor was mentally and physically drained. He had had ambitious plans for the Christianization the Holy Lands, vast new churches in Damascus and Aleppo, bringing Armenia into the Roman Church. In all of these he failed. For three years he sat in Constantinople, doing little but bask in his people’s affection. For them, he was Megas Basileus, the greatest Emperor, who had raised Byzantium to the mightiest power in the known world. Manuel, an intensely intelligent man, knew better. On September 17th 1180, four years to the day since Gaza, he died.
On the face of it, Manuel Komnenos was a truly great Emperor. He had extended Imperial prestige to its greatest height since Justinian, and had achieved a reunion of the churches that looked set to last. He died adored by his people, with a wife, son and brother at his bedside, and a vast empire.
Yet Manuel, for all his efforts, had wrecked the empire. The treasuries, after nearly forty years of unending warfare, lay empty, his armies were impossibly stretched to maintain order in Italy, Hungary, Armenia, and Palestine. He had made few arrangements for Alexander’s regency, and fewer for the future defence of the Empire. Even his most cherished achievement, Church unity, would not last for long after his death.
In conclusion then, while Manuel Komnenos was certainly a great Emperor, he was not a good one. And it is on his head, that the blame for three decades of future chaos must be placed.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND SURROUNDING STATES IN 1180AD
The Emperor Alexander IV was crowned in early October 1180. From the start, he did inspire confidence, largely due to the fact he was a 10 year old boy. Barely a few weeks after taking the throne therefore, Alexander was shoved aside by a prominent general named Andronicus, the cousin of Alexander’s father Manuel.
Andronicus Komnenos had grand plans for the empire. Unlike his cousin, he fully understood that the outlying regions would have to be brought over fully to Imperial loyalty. His attention turned first to Italy, where Imperial rule was resented, if not entirely hated. There, in several cities, notably Florence, he set up large schools, funded by the Emperor alone. The Byzantine garrisons in the city were largely withdrawn, and Italians were promoted in the civil service. Unlike most emperors before him, Andronicus realized that for his Empire to function, conquered peoples had to be given a stake in it. Accordingly, he laid out new laws. In Syria and Palestine, Islam would be tolerated, and in the heretical church in Armenia would be suppressed, but gently, owing largely to the steady trickle of people to Uniate Christianity.
Andronicus though, was not a naturally patient or gentle man. Accordingly, in 1182, he had himself crowned co-Emperor. The army was beginning to get restive through lack of pay, and Andronicus, realist as he was, decided that they needed to be paid now and brought onside, before it was too late. He proposed a massive tax on the wealthy landowners, which would cripple them, but give the army a solid monetary base to tighten control in Manuel’s conquests, and relieve pressure on the poor. When the rich, contemptuously refused Andronicus’ taxes, the Emperor’s patience snapped. Leading a small force of the Emperor’s elite Saxon Guard, he burned the Thracian manor of one rich landowner, one Constantine Nafpliotis, as an example to the others. Nafpliotis, who was visiting a relative in Athens, returned to his estate to find it a smoking ruin.
News quickly spread, but it had the opposite effect of what Andronicus had desired. Nafpliotis now led a revolt of some of the richest and most powerful men in the Byzantine Empire. Using their immense funds, they were able to gather a large mercenary army, and marched on Constantinople, demanding the surrender of the Emperor, and the withdrawal of his hated tax.
In Constantinople, Andronicus panicked. He deployed some 30,000 soldiers from Bulgaria to confront the threat, but the seriously demoralized troops were ambushed en-route by a group of Bulgarian brigands and badly bloodied. The brigands then marched on Sardica, and sacked the place, killing the Byzantine governor, and proclaiming a Second Empire of Bulgaria. Meanwhile, the loyalists were smashed by the landowners and their mercenaries, who sent messengers ahead to Constantinople asking for just one thing, the surrender of Andronicus Komnenos.
Here, the Emperor Alexander made the first of several decisions that would cripple the Empire throughout his long reign. One night, while Andronicus slept peacefully, Alexander ordered the Saxon Guards to attack. Andronicus tried to fight back, but was by now approaching seventy years old, and was quickly overwhelmed by the tough Englishmen. A week later, the twelve year old Emperor met with the noblemen near Adrianople. He brought with him the severed head of Andronicus.
Constantine Nafpliotis was victorious, but now, with the young Emperor before him, he had a new idea. Somehow he convinced the Patriarch Basil II and Alexander’s mother Theodora that a marriage between the young Emperor and his daughter Irene would be a good idea to ensure the loyalty of the landowners. The twelve year old Emperor of the Romans and the ten year old daughter of an aristocrat were married in the autumn of 1182. A pair of children reigned over a Roman Empire that was collapsing into disaster.
In Hungary, King Ladislaus III, an intelligent plotter of a man, saw his chance. With Bulgaria in revolt, the Imperial troops west of the Danube were isolated. In a violent battle, the Byzantines were defeated by the Hungarian, who pressed his advantage, moving down into Dalmatia. By the end of 1183, Byzantium’s Balkan territories were in great trouble.
Even the Church, Manuel’s proudest achievement began to crack. The long reign of Pope Anacletus III had finally come to an end in 1181, and he was succeeded by Anacletus IV. Anacletus IV then angered the powerful King Henry I of England by demanding that he practice Uniate Christianity, rather than the pure Catholicism which remained strong to the north and west of the Christian world. Henry pointedly refused, and allied with the Catholic Emperor of Germany, Henry IV. The two Henrys then devoted their considerable power to the conquest of Uniate France. Caught in a pincer movement, the French quickly surrendered. It was what they did next that was so damaging. The two empires decided to place their frontier along the river Seine, and placed a “Patriarch of the West” in Paris, who controlled a long narrow strip of territory along the length of the river. This Patriarch was essentially a reinstated Pope, a pupil of the long dead Gregory VIII, who called himself Michael I, the first Pope of Paris. With the Parisian Papacy Catholicism burned back into life, and Christendom was once more divided.
Not that Emperor Alexander would have been remotely concerned by this. The young man had fallen totally under the spell of the two most important women in his life; he had developed a passionate hatred. In 1188, Empress Irene II, aged just sixteen, managed to persuade the Senate that her mother in law Theodora was an enemy of the state. The Senate panicked, and the Saxon Guards were sent in. For the second time in just six years, a senior member of the Imperial family met their maker on the end of an English axe.
While Byzantium descended into chaos, to the north, Bulgaria was thriving. Tsar Peter IV was a superbly talented military leader. In 1190, he crushed an attempted Imperial reconquest led by Constantine Nafpliotis, punishing the landowner with blinding, just as the great Emperor Basil II had blinded Bulgarians in the distant past. Adrianople, undefended, was sacked the next year, and in 1193, the newly built Bulgarian fleet began to harass the coastal cities of northern Anatolia. Alexander, responded by sending a small flotilla of around twenty dilapidated warships, which were duly crushed.
However, Alexander was no longer really in control of his own court. Ever since her marriage to him a decade ago, Irene Nafpliota had been steadily increasing her influence over her inept husband. As a teenager, she had ridded herself of her main rival for power, Alexander’s mother Theodora, now she turned her attention to seizing total control of the Roman Empire.
It is clear that Irene was an unusually intelligent woman, and she must have laid out her plans with real care and caution. In 1193, the same year as the fleet’s humiliation at the hands of the Bulgarians, she had fallen pregnant, delivering a son, Isaac, on Christmas Day of that year. The baby boy cemented her claims to the throne, and, with the baby just a few weeks old, she had him crowned co-Emperor. Slowly, advocating the rights of her son, Irene’s influence lengthened. Alexander II was slowly but surely pushed aside. He appeared less and less in public, with Irene and her young son taking command. By the late 1190’s he had fallen into drunkenness and despair, despite fathering three more children, all daughters; Zoe, Theophano and Anna.
Irene could now congratulate herself on being the most powerful human being in the Empire. Unfortunately, she misused her position. She began to favour a Syrian general, Abu Karim Muhammad, who was, as his name suggests, an Arab. Naturally this caused immense scandal at the courts of both Constantinople and Rome, despite the fact that it was Karim who had been able to maintain a tenuous Imperial presence in Palestine. Never mind the fact that Karim had renounced Islam and spoke perfect Greek and Latin, his race made him an object of loathing as a “Saracen infidel”. In cosmopolitan Antioch this mattered little, and even in Constantinople it could have been tolerated, but for Rome it was unacceptable. In 1202, Anacletus IV wrote a stern letter to the Empress, urging her to sack the great general. Irene prevaricated for a while, but pressure was slowly but surely building against Karim, and the general was dismissed.
For Karim, this was an outrage, which he had no intention of accepting. His armies were extremely loyal to him, Irene, having starved the army of income, commanded the loyalty of only the Saxon Guard. Upon returning to Antioch, Karim sent messengers to Al-Adil, the Sultan of Egypt, offering him Palestine and Cyprus in exchange for military support. The Sultan enthusiastically agreed, and Karim gained some 10,000 heavy cavalry to support his Byzantine native troops. His army thus gained, he returned west; to Constantinople.
The news reached Irene that the capital was being marched on near the end of 1203. The empress sent messengers to Rome, demanding money and troops from Anacletus and the Catapan of Italy, David Bringas, but the Pope had passed away, and Bringas was already fully engaged crushing a revolt in Corsica. The Empress was left powerless.
Then, suddenly it seemed as though the Lord sent her a miracle. Near Nicaea, Karim had settled down to eat at the home of a noble who had revolted with him. The general had begun to choke and splutter, before slumping down, face first in a bowl of food. He had choked on a grape. The Empress had been saved.
Or so it seemed. In fact, Karim’s death brought only the shortest term benefit to the empire. Upon hearing the news of the general’s death, Al-Adil decided to invade Palestine anyway. Jerusalem fell after just a few days, and a massacre ensued. Every Christian and Jew found within the city walls was brutally murdered. Some, in an irony, were crucified in front of the Holy Sepulcher. It was an act of sickening brutality, that, unfortunately, would be repeated all too often over the decades to come.
By 1210, Syria and Palestine were effectively lost. Antioch held out, as did a few coastal strongholds like Acre and Tripoli. But other than these, all of Manuel’s last great conquest was lost. In Constantinople, the apathetic rule of Empress Irene and her woeful husband continued. The Empire needed a saviour. In 1212, it finally got one.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND SURROUNDING STATES IN 1212AD
Italy was one of the only parts of the empire that was still thriving at the beginning of the 13th century. Ever since the establishment of Florence as an intellectual heart of the empire by Andronicus in 1181, Italy had undergone a series of dramatic changes that would eventually become known as “the Renaissance”. Thirty years later, the Italian Renaissance was in full swing. Since Irene had taken control in Constantinople, Italy had gained a large measure of autonomy, jointly ruled by the Catapan in Palermo and the Pope in Rome. Therefore it should come as no surprise that, with Constantinople sinking into ever deeper chaos, the next Emperor of the Romans should be an Italian.
Georgio Rossi was the son of a prosperous Genoan merchant, who had enlisted in the army of the Catapan of Italy, and had served with distinction in crushing the Corsican revolt. Rossi was still a young man, when he first appears in the records of Benito Conti, the famous thirteenth century Italian chronicler. According to Conti, Rossi was a gifted leader and superb public speaker. How exactly he became involved in the conspiracy is unknown, but by the end of 1211, all was not well for the Empress Irene II in Italy.
In 1210, she had been foolish enough to annoy the wife of the powerful and intelligent Catapan of Italy, David Bringas. Bringas then decided enough was enough. The Roman Empire had a long tradition of violent military regime change; it was how the Komnenids had come to power over a century before, and it was how their dynasty would fall.
Over Christmas of 1211, the powerful men of Italy met with Pope Tiberius in Rome, where the demise of the Komnenid dynasty was planned out. Bringas and Rossi would together lead the army and fleet of Italy against Constantinople, enlisting the alliance of the Bulgarian Tsar if it was possible. Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the Catapan’s son Michael would try and undermine the dynasty from within.
The plan was put into action in early spring, 1212AD. Rossi and Bringas together gathered an army of around 25,000 and marched across the Balkans. En route, an embassy arrived from Bulgaria, the Tsar would be delighted to offer them military support in exchange for 10 years of peace between Bulgaria and the Empire. The Italians were delighted to agree, and their numbers were immediately swelled by around 20,000 Bulgarian troops.
Back in Constantinople, Irene and Alexander remained defiant. But the entire Empire was against them. In Asia Minor, Theodore Laskaris, an important general based in Nicaea chose to throw his lot in with the Italian revolt. Irene, now realizing her situation was hopeless, sent out messengers to negotiate with the rebels. In August 1212, the former Empress was sent in exile to Italy. Her son Isaac was forcibly sent into a monastery in Armenia. Her three daughters would have brighter futures, married to the men of the new aristocracy. The eldest, Zoe, was engaged to Georgio Rossi, the middle daughter Theophano was betrothed to Michael Bringas, while the youngest, Anna, aged just thirteen, would eventually marry Basil Paleaologus, a close ally of Rossi.
With Irene and Isaac thus deposed of, the rebels resumed the march on Constantinople. Emperor Alexander attempted to organise the terrified populace into defence, reminding them of his great and noble ancestors who had done so much for the empire. The citizens were unimpressed. How exactly Alexander died is unknown, but it is rumoured that he was stabbed by an elderly man, a former soldier under Manuel. It is certainly a good story. On October 4th, 1212, the Senate opened the gates of Constantinople to the rebel army.
There was never any doubt as to who would take the throne. David Bringas might have organised the revolt, but he was ageing fast, and besides, he held a deep love for Italy, and missed the country which he had governed for decades. Theodore Laskaris was an impressive leader of men, and a talented general, but he was not well liked by the citizenry of Constantinople. Therefore, on October 10th, Georgio Rossi was crowned Emperor George I of the Romans, the first Italian Emperor for centuries.
The new Emperor took as his inspiration Isaac Komnenos, and like him, he was determined to put the empire back on firm ground. In the east, the thematic system had finally collapsed under the pressure from greedy landowners, but as an Italian, Rossi arguably was more aware of classical Roman history than the Romans of Constantinople themselves. He was able to see that with the empire so spread out once more what was needed was a professional standing army, with property becoming a reward, not a requirement, for service. Therefore it can be said that George’s first step towards restoring the Roman Empire was the restoration of its most famed feature; the Imperial Legionaries.
The legions had declined in the sixth and early seventh centuries for several reasons; the loss of vast swathes of territory, their unsuitability for light warfare against the Arabs, and the large cities from which they had been drawn had been replaced by primarily agricultural areas. By 1212 however, most of these factors were no longer in existence. Cities were booming, especially around the Aegean and in Sicily, so more and more tax revenues were flowing into Constantinople. In Irene’s day, these had been squandered on bribes and sweeteners, but no more.
Command for retraining the armies was entrusted to Michael Bringas, who was appointed “Praetorian Prefect” another long abandoned term. By 1214, there were twenty “legeonas” stationed around the empire. Recognizing nevertheless that warfare had evolved radically since the days of the early Emperors, these were supported by horse archers, a Turkish design beloved by the Byzantines, and the traditional heavy cataphract cavalry. George was eager to try out this formidable new force. In 1215, he marched east.
His object was beleaguered Palestine. Of Manuel’s impressive conquests, only a couple of coastal cities remained. Undeterred, George pushed south. The Egyptian army was met, and crushed near Tiberias. The jubilant Emperor pursued the Egyptians south, pausing at Nazareth to order construction of a vast new set of city walls; henceforth the birthplace of the Saviour of Mankind would be the capital of Palestine. Jerusalem, place of Jesus’ death, was deemed by George to have been tainted by the presence of the “vile false prophet” Mohammed. Perhaps this is why he made no moves against the Holy city; remaining content to let the broken Egyptians pay him massive tributes to ensure their independence. A new legion was formed of native Christians to police the province, with old thematic forces acting as border guards. This done, the Emperor returned to Constantinople.
Though George was a competent general, it was at the administrative and diplomatic side of Empire that he really excelled. His reorganisation of the army was just the start. In 1218, he began a major overhaul of the legal system, which had not been so comprehensively looked over since the time of Basil I in the ninth century. Over the next eight years, drawing on the skills of Italian, Greek, Armenian and Syrian scholars, and the law was slowly adapted to fit the greatly enlarged empire since Basil’s day. Jews and Muslims were both granted official protection under the law, though they had to pay a special tax. All non-religious limits on reaching power in the state were removed, as long as you were a Uniate Christian with a firm grasp of Greek you could rise to power, something that the Italian Emperor must have been very proud of.
However, while Byzantium boomed, the rest of the world was crumbling. A deadly new threat had arisen in the East, while in the West, the growth of great new empires threatened Byzantium’s neutrality.
The problem had begun in 1217, when the ambitious King Richard I of England had invaded the independent French principality of Toulouse. Its inhabitants, the Occitanians, had appealed to the Pope, for they were Uniate Christians, for support, but Tiberius was unwilling to act without support from the Emperor. George, for his part, was reluctant to deploy troops to Toulouse, an area which he doubtless considered semi-barbarian and worthless strategically. On the other had, the Occitanians were Uniate, and they controlled all of Mediterranean France. To allow them to fall would give the powerful King of England access to the Mediterranean, where he could threaten Byzantine shipping, and the provinces of Corsica and Sardinia. Therefore, after much dithering, George eventually agreed to send two legions to reinforce the Occitanians in the summer of 1218.
The expedition was a mixed success. Though the Occitanians were able to defeat Richard, it was not a conclusive, crushing victory, and there was much confusion between the Greek and Italian speaking legionaries and the feudal French Occitanians. On the other hand, it ensured the survival of Uniate Christianity not only in Toulouse, but also in Christian Spain, where, six years previously, the Christians had recaptured the great city of Cordoba.
In the east, the danger to Byzantium was much more pressing. In 1220, the Khwarezmian Shah had suddenly and dramatically been crushed, by a race so savage that George feared “Attila himself has risen from Hell to destroy the Romans”. This new great warrior was not Attila the Hun, but a man named Genghis Khan, who had, in just fourteen years, established a gigantic empire that stretched from Persia to Korea. George had no wish to antagonize such a great warlord, and hurriedly sent Genghis fine gifts of gold, silk and furs. The Khan appreciated the gesture, and send ambassadors back to Constantinople, where a peace was agreed to between the Mongols and Byzantines.
But it was not a peace that could last long. The Mongol warriors returned from Constantinople open mouthed with awe, here was a city whose beauty and size only the Chinese could match. More worryingly for the Byzantines, they were richer than the Chinese by far. Slowly but surely, tales began to build up in Genghis’ court, of the extraordinary wealth of the Roman Empire of the East. While Genghis was alive, he would not hear of attacks on his ally in the west. But in 1227, the greatest conqueror since Alexander passed away. Inevitably, the great hordes began to turn west. Across the largest empire Earth had ever seen, gigantic armies began to amass. The Mongols were marching on Constantinople.
Genghis Khan was succeeded by his third, and favourite, son Ögedei Khan in 1229. Ögedei realized that to maintain control over his father’s huge empire, further conquests were needed. For a while, he considered attack Baghdad, but then had a better idea. Baghdad might be large and rich, but there was another city, even further west, that was still larger and richer: Constantinople.
Soon after his accession, therefore, Ögedei sent an army west. There can be little doubt that this army was vast in size, numbering perhaps as many as 200,000 soldiers. Frantic embassies from Emperor George I were dismissed, the Khan would not be dissuaded. In the spring of 1230, the great expedition set out.
There was originally some debate amongst the Mongols as to which route to take, but it the end Ögedei, a manknown for his ability to sway doubters in any debate in which he was involved, persuaded his generals and advisers to march south, through the Caucasus. The Mongol horsemen thundered west. By now seriously alarmed, back in Constantinople, George sent word to the King of Georgia, under King George IV. The Emperor’s namesake and close friend immediately prepared for war. A significant Georgian force set out to meet the Mongols, at the soon to be infamous battlefield of Gandza.
There, on September 14th, the Georgian army was annihilated. Their troops, largely heavy infantry, had drawn up on a plain on what had begun as a warm morning. By midday however, with heat searing down on their thick armour, the Georgians began to wilt. The Mongols begin the assault. Led by Ögedei’s talented young nephew Batu Khan, the disciplined and terrifying Mongol horse archers began to loose volley after volley of death at the Georgians. An attempt by the Georgian’s own horse archers to drive their enemies off ended in disaster; the Mongols were true steppe warriors, not a motley group of mercenaries. Growing desperate now, George IV himself led his crack heavy cavalry at a charge straight into the Mongolian lines. Despite inflicting some casualties, the King was captured by the hardened Mongol troops. Only then did the Mongols close for the kill. More and more arrows hummed into the Georgian ranks. Soldiers began to break and run, only to be ridden down and butchered by the terrifying eastern warriors. By evening, the defeat was complete. The entire military might of the Kingdom of Georgia had been wiped out in the space of a few hours.
The King was brought before the Khan on hands and knees. Ögedei commented that the Georgian ruler had fought well and nobly on the battlefield, and it would be a terrible shame for such a brave warrior to be ransomed home like a coward. With these words, the last King of Georgia was executed.
News of the defeat carried fast to Tbilisi, the capital. Soon, the Mongolians were at the gates. Ögedei offered the inhabitants a simple choice, abandon their city, or lose their lives. The terrified, demoralised citizens chose the latter option, and the Mongols rode in. Within a few days, Tbilisi had been demolished, its gold and jewels looted, its houses burned.
The capital of Georgia was indeed a rich prize, but for the ever hungry Ögedei, it was but a mere appetizer compared to his ultimate title, the capital of the Roman Empire. Ignoring the freezing conditions of winter in the Caucasus, the Mongolians swept westward. Trebizond and Sinop both cowered before the oncoming storm, but were ignored. There could be no more distractions now, Constantinople must fall.
By December, Ögedei had arrived at the Hellespont. He urgently needed to cross the narrow stretch of water, and so descended on the cities of the area, Pergamum, Smyrna, and Nicaea, demanding ship builders. All winter, the coasts of Anatolia rang to the sound of the Great Khan’s engineers, building a vast fleet of ships to transport thousands upon thousands of horsemen across the Hellespont.
In Constantinople, George I had received the news of the Mongol advance with horror. But where other emperors might have panicked, the Italian stood firm. The great land walls of the capital were restored, and legions were recalled from across the Balkans to defend the Queen of Cities. But it was in the Golden Horn that the Emperor made his most important preparations. If the Great Khan wanted a war by sea, then the Emperor of the Romans would deliver him one.
Back at Abydos, Ögedei’s base on the Hellespont, preparations were nearly complete. In an astonishingly short space of time, a vast armada of boats had been raised. Ögedei decided to make an impression on the watching Romans. The boats were to be lashed together to make a bridge, which the Mongol horsemen would walk over. The Khan had already heard tales of Xerxes doing this nearly two millennia before, a great king from the east descending on the Greeks. Perhaps he did not bother to hear what happened to the Persian in the end. Either way, by Easter, his bridge was complete. A magnificent bridge of boats, strapped together, spanned the mile across the Hellespont. The Great Khan was the first to cross, urinating on the far side, the first Mongol to enter Europe. Then he returned. The crossing would be made the next morning.
He did not notice the small ship that desperately fled north up the Marmara to Constantinople. Exactly how the message was re-laid in time is unknown. But that evening, on the 16th April 1231, the trap was ready.
The next morning, the great Mongolian army began to cross. The horses were nervous at the rather unsteady bridge, so progress was slow, as their riders comforted and encouraged their steeds. Suddenly, ships began to appear on either side of the bridge. The Khan, expecting this, ordered warships to engage the Romans, which they did. The unfortunate sailors, drafted from as far away as China, could have had little idea what would happen next.
From a Roman warship, a dazzling orange flame began to appear. A viscous, boiling hot liquid was pumped out of nozzles at the front of the warships, engulfing the terrified Mongols. Many threw themselves into the sea, only to be boiled alive by the flames, which burned even on the surface of the water. In a short time, the Mongol defenders had been overcome. The Romans closed on the bridge.
Terror began to break out as the first blasts of Greek fire impacted upon the soldiers crossing. The horses, desperate to escape this horrific death, began to stampede. Coupled with the burning boats, the bridge began to break up. More and more Mongols and their horses leapt into the sea, trying to swim to safety, but the Romans were relentless. More and more Greek fire was pumped out, annihilating the survivors. Missiles flew, sinking the warriors, while small boats of locals scurried around the great galleys, impaling Mongol survivors. The defeat of the Great Khan was total and humiliating.
Ögedei had remained on the far shore, watching all this. As soon as the bridge had begun to collapse, he had ordered all men to retreat. Desperately, the Khan fled across Anatolia, but as his horsemen entered a ravine in the Taurus, they were finally cornered. Trapped and exhausted in enemy territory, the Mongols were massacred to a man. Once again the Roman Empire had emerged triumphant against the odds.
Yet the Mongol menace was far from over. The Battle of Abydos might well have been a disaster for the steppe warriors, but their greatest general, Ögedei’s nephew Batu Khan, had survived. He, and around two thousand others, had already successfully crossed the Hellespont when the Romans attacked. Desperately, the Mongolian fled north, defeating a small Roman force that had been sent to intercept him. Legend has it he and his warriors personally swam across the Danube, either way, by the end of 1231, Batu and the “two thousand” had arrived back at the Mongol capital, Karakorum.
Batu immediately asserted his authority. Yes, there had been a defeat in the west, but it was on Asia that the stability of the young empire depended. Accordingly, Batu made no further moves on the Romans, diverting his forces to completing the conquest of China.
Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the populace was stunned. Never before had such a great force invaded, caused such panic, and then retreated again so suddenly. Some ascribed it to the Virgin Mary, but for the more practical minded it was clear that there was only one true saviour, the Emperor George.
Seldom before had a Roman Emperor experienced such unbridled love from his subjects, but in truth, by the end of 1232, George was fading fast. To this day, the disease that afflicted him is unknown, but it is presumed to have been cancer. More worryingly for the empire, he had no son to succeed him, only a daughter, Theodora. Young Theodora had inherited all of her grandmother Irene’s dominating personality in full, and her father realised the danger of allowing her too much political power in the state. Therefore, he betrothed her to one Isaac Bringas, the grandson of George’s by now long dead ally David Bringas, and a talented young general. This done, the Emperor formally retired from the throne, crowning Isaac Bringas Emperor of the Romans. He died around the age of fifty in 1234 back home in Genoa, with his beloved wife Zoe Komnena at his side. Fortunately for the Romans, their saviour from the West had left the Empire in capable hands. For the first time since Justinian and Theodora, an Emperor and Empress would share equal power over the Empire; and the results would be no less spectacular.
EUROPE IN 1232
RELIGIOUS DIVISIONS IN 13th CENTURY EUROPE
Emperor Isaac II was thirty two years old when he inherited the throne of the Roman Empire. Despite his youth, he was widely liked and trusted by the Senate and Church, due to his relaxed, yet confident ways. In Rome, Pope Michael I, himself newly crowned declared a golden age of glory over the Empire. Isaac II’s reign would certainly be one to be remembered.
The Emperor came to the throne just months after the violent Mongol raid of Ögedei Khan, and therefore he sent embassies to the new Khan, Ögedei’s nephew Batu. However, all was not well at the court of the Great Khan. Though Batu had directed the conquest of Song China, adding new riches to the Mongol Empire, and thus erasing the shame of the Battle of Abydos, he was never personally popular among the Mongols themselves. They were virtually sure that he was not, as he claimed, a direct blood descendant of the great Genghis, as his grandmother, had given birth to his father just weeks after Genghis released her from captivity. A short, bitter struggle for power in Karakorum followed. Batu was executed, and his cousin Güyük was elected Great Khan. But others still clamored for Güyük’s throne, and so the new Khan was happy to sign a peace treaty with the Romans.
Despite the peace, Isaac and Theodora both remained wary of the Mongols. Therefore, in 1236, they sent embassies to Kiev, the empire’s closest and most powerful ally. The two states agreed to mutually aid each other in the event of a Mongolian attack. Gradually, Roman and Russian civilization was beginning to draw together. A heavily pregnant Empress Theodora even visited Kiev personally over Christmas of 1240, where she went into labour, and delivered Isaac the last of their three children, a son, Constantine. This boy was hailed by the Metropolitan of Kiev as an honorary Russian, due to the fact that his baptism took place in the main cathedral of Kiev.
In the empire proper, business was booming. The growth of cities continued at a rate unseen for over a millennium. Constantinople’s population now stood at over one and a half million, fed by vast imports of grain from Anatolia and the Russian steppes. Within these large cities, something very new was happening however. For the first time in its history, the Roman Empire was developing a middle class.
The new middle classes were a mixed group. Made up of scholars, doctors, lawyers and merchants, they were rapidly spreading across the empire. More worryingly for the Imperial system, they were finding ways to exert their voice in the state. The ancient blue-blooded families of the Constantinopolitan Senate were slowly losing ground, as more and more middle income citizens flooded in. Gradually, the middle class began to demand a change in government. No longer could the Empire exist as a divine monarchy. Peacefully, though insistently, the middle classes began to campaign for a system not seen in its rawest form since before Christ Himself, a Demokratia.
At first, Isaac and Theodora were unsure how to cope with these demands. Both were extremely popular with the people, and had no wish to alienate them. On the other hand, anything that gave the mob more power surely reduced the power of the Basileus, Equal of the Apostles as he was. Nevertheless, the rulers decided to listen to the people’s demands. After all, did Jesus himself not say all were equal before the eyes of God?
Progress towards a true democracy in the empire was initially very slow, partly due to Isaac and Theodora’s extreme caution. However, in 1246, one event suddenly jerked the democratic movement back into life. From the East, a terrible plague arrived.
How exactly the Black Death swept down on the Roman Empire is unknown, though it is virtually certain that Mongols were involved. The most likely theory is in 1244, the Mongols, supported by Chinese auxiliaries, were engaged in putting down a revolt in Georgia. During a protracted siege of the town of Batumi, the disease erupted amongst the Mongol army. The ingenious Mongol leader catapulted the infected corpses over the city walls to infect the inhabitants. The Georgian rebels fled west, bringing the plague by ship into Constantinople and the Balkans, whence it spread, with frightening speed.
The plague arrived at the capital around March. By the end of the year, it had spread as far north as Frankfurt and Paris, and as far west as Portugal. From its original Georgian genesis point, the Black Death, as it came to be known, rampaged southward to Baghdad and Cairo, and back eastwards into the Mongol Empire. Half the world was united in death and suffering.
Though the Plague in Constantinople lasted less than a year, in that time almost half of the capital’s population was removed over one long, nightmarish summer. Conditions were warm and wet, perfect for the fleas, which leapt from one corpse to the next. As far as the bacterium involved, Yersinia pestis, was concerned, Constantinople was the perfect home. Though this was now the bacterium’s third visit to the capital, Roman medicine proved as inefficient as ever. By July, the Empress Theodora was stricken, followed quickly by her daughter Helena, the Imperial couple’s eldest child.
One man remained safe though. Isaac Bringas, Emperor of the Romans, would later put his survival down to the grace of the Virgin, thought it is more likely to have been from his own insistence on personal hygiene that was unparalleled amongst contemporary European monarchs. By October, when the plague finally began to die back (though it would continue to ravage more distant areas such as England and Spain into the next year), Isaac could ponder the immense task of reconstruction.
The problems he faced were formidable. Between a quarter and a third of the population of the Empire had been erased, among them many generals, senators and bishops, not to mention his beloved wife and daughter. According to later legend, the Emperor had a dream in which the Virgin ordered him to tend to the sick and needy, as Christ before him had done. Isaac, an exceptionally pious man, did just that. Leaving the government in the hands of his six year old son Constantine (though more practically, Patriarch Alexander of Constantinople), Isaac began to tour the empire, following the example of John II before him. Iconium, Caesarea, Antioch and Bethlehem were all visited in a breakneck three month tour of the east. Next, the emperor boarded ship for Sicily, visiting Cyprus and Crete en route. He dared not venture into the Italian heartland, where the fires of the plague still flickered, but his presence at Palermo and Bari was greatly appreciated by the general populace. Finally, at the end of 1247, he returned home, via Dyracchium and Thessalonica.
Not only did Isaac’s tour of the empire further increase his immense popularity, it also gave the Emperor serious food for thought. All around his realm he had met his average citizens, law abiding, intelligent men and women who felt passionately about the state of affairs in their particular theme, and wished to have a more direct stake in the empire. After all, they argued, yes, the Emperor was the Equal of the Apostles. But in the eyes of the Lord, all men are born equal. Why should the chance for advancement to the very highest position of state be denied to the lowly born?
One of the most passionate men speaking out in favour of this theory was Patriarch Alexander, newly promoted by the Emperor to be Pope. Alexander, whose grandparents had been farmers in Sparta, a peaceful backwater of the empire, felt strongly about the issue of the small man rising himself up to power and recognition through piety, strength, and a good deal of hard work. Over the next few years, he engaged in major discussions with his close friend the Emperor, by aiding him with several minor theological matters, such as Isaac’s second marriage to an Athenian, Katherine.
Finally, in 1252, the Emperor rolled out sweeping new legislation. Every themata would henceforth be ruled in tandem, by a military commander, the commander of the theme’s legion who would be responsible for defence of the theme and organising the contribution to the army, and an elected magistrate from the general populace, to monitor internal affairs within the theme, such as taxation and trade. This magistrate could serve for a period of up to three years before re-election, after which he was eligible to stand as a Senator in Palermo, Thessalonica, Iconium or Bethlehem, which Isaac designated as “dioceses”. Finally, the citizen could aim for the ultimate honour, as a member of the Constantinopolitan Senate, holding such ferocious powers as voting on taxes, how many soldiers to deploy in event of war, organisation of the grain supply in Constantinople, and generally ultimate authority in the empire unless directly overruled by the Emperor himself. Every Christian male citizen over the age of 16 gained the right to vote, and women too could earn the right, provided they were they sufficiently pious and intelligent.
For the ancient aristocracy, it was a bitter blow, but they were too divided and shattered by the plague to do much to oppose it. They retained hereditary seats on the Senate, and in practise their greater funds meant that they were far more able to run an election campaign than the common man, though after a while, this advantage began to count for less and less.
Nevertheless, despite these seismic changes, in many ways, life continued as normal. The legions still nervously watched the Mongol frontier, to the north the Germans rampaged around the Baltic, seeking converts to heretical Catholicism, while fur and caviar swept down the Dnieper from Russia to Byzantium. This was the world into which the boy Emperor Constantine X emerged. Constantine grew up in an empire enjoying a golden age. Fluent in Latin, Greek, and Arabic, Constantine was clearly destined to be another scholar emperor, like his illustrious namesake, the 10th century Constantine VIII. And when his father Isaac breathed his last, aged around seventy, on September 19th, 1269, Constantine was ready.
Already, his world was changing. In 1258, the Mongol army had sacked Baghdad. Once Constantinople’s only true rival outside China, the great city had been left a snuffed out shell. The golden age of Islam had been obliterated in a few days. The Muslim chronicler Abdullah Wassaf perfectly captures the mood of terror and destruction in the city of the Caliph.
"They swept through the city like hungry falcons attacking a flight of doves, or like raging wolves attacking sheep, with loose reins and shameless faces, murdering and spreading terror...beds and cushions made of gold and encrusted with jewels were cut to pieces with knives and torn to shreds. Those hiding behind the veils of the great Harem were dragged...through the streets and alleys, each of them becoming a plaything...as the population died at the hands of the invaders."
The sack of Baghdad worried the Romans, not because they regretted the loss of life- they did not- but more the scale of the damage. Few could imagine such a catastrophe overturning a major Roman city like Antioch or Bethlehem, let alone Constantinople herself. In the face of the gathering Mongol storm, the Romans cast their memories back to the dark days prior to the Battle of Abydos, when a Mongolian army had easily swept past their defenses and rampaged through Anatolia. And that was just a raid. Imagine what a full scale invasion could do!
At Karakorum, the Great Khan Hulagu, and his successor Abaqa had similar emotions. In 1259, nervous Roman ambassadors had arrived at Karakorum seeking an extension of the peace, which Hulagu was happy to grant, but Aqaba was less inclined to be peaceful. In 1265, the by now elderly Isaac had tried to offer the Khan the hand of his illegitimate daughter Maria in marriage, but Abaqa turned down the proposal.Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was a nominal Christian, Abaqa wanted control over the greatest and oldest state in the Christian world. By the time Constantine X came to the throne in 1269, the situation was rapidly spiraling out of control. Once again, the Mongols were marching on the Roman Empire. This time, they would not be repelled so easily.
ROMAN THEMATA AND DIOCESES AFTER THE REFORMS OF 1252AD
The Emperor Constantine X was not, to put it mildly, warrior material. Yet, over his reign, he exerted every possible effort to save the empire from a foe whose tenacity, violence, and tactical brilliance had not been seen since the days of the Caliphate at its height.
Constantine was, above all, a realist. He knew he was not a great warrior, and that, if push came to shove, faced with a full blown Mongolian invasion, with all the limitless resources that entailed, the empire would be unlikely to be able to pull off a decisive victory. And victory at all was distinctly unlikely.
So the Emperor decided on a bold idea. Embassies were sent to Egypt, Bulgaria, Galicia and Kiev, all (save Kiev), traditionally rivals and enemies of the empire. The Sultan of Egypt, admittedly, owed the Empire his throne, due to assistance in crushing a Mamluk revolt years before, while Bulgaria and the Russians could be expected to show support, for they were all Uniate Christians. The fact that Pope Gregory IX helpfully suggested the possibility of a Slavic Patriarch in exchange for assistance also helped. Nevertheless, in medieval times, such a diverse group of allies was unusual, and it gave the nervous Romans a much needed confidence boost.
To the east, the Great Khan Kublai was gathering an army so large, peasants said, that it took a week to pass. The exact size of the Great Khan’s army is still unknown, but it is estimated to have numbered around half a million. Upon reaching the northern tip of the Caspian, Kublai divided his forces. The general Mengu-Timur led half the army into Russia, while his rival and subordinate Nogai took the other half southwards. Their plan was simple, crush the Roman allies, then move in on the empire itself. It would be a brutally successful one.
The first engagement took place in April 1273, when Mengu-Timur met with a Kievan army under the command of the Grand Prince Lev I. The Russian army was formidable, made up of a hardy mixture of wild Viking heavy infantry, native Slavic regular troops, and heavy missile cavalry, descended from the Pechenegs, who had invaded Alexius’ Byzantium nearly two centuries before.
But the Mongols were even more formidably armed. Fifty years of rule over the Chinese had taught them some lessons in the art of warfare. It is speculated that this evolution in the Mongol war machine may have been prompted by their interaction with the Roman Empire, a state that had over a millennium copied the armies of its enemies and conquered peoples. Either way, the army commanded by Mengu-Timur was a formidable, and multi-ethnic, fighting force.
The two armies met at Belgorod, to the east of Kiev. Initially, Timur attempted to repeat the tactics that had won the Mongols their empire; wheeling horse archers breaking up an enemy army. Yet the Russians stood firm. Lev deployed his own horse archers, surprising the Mongolian cavalry, and driving them back. Seeking to press their advantage, the Russian cavalry charged forward towards a group of lightly armed Chinese auxiliaries, and were met by two entirely new, and entirely ferocious weapons.
From the Chinese ranks a hail of missiles suddenly blasted forward. The Russians were probably the first Europeans to encounter that deadly Chinese military invention; the repeating crossbow.
Compared to any other missile, the repeating crossbow was unmatched. Its most terrifying ability was to discharge missiles at rates of up to about two per second, against a target as far as 75 metres away. As the first bolts landed, pandemonium was instantly created in the Russian ranks. Horses dropped, dead or wounded, and the others fled in terror from this awful weapon. Yet, once out of range, the Russians imagined themselves to be safe. They had no idea about the next and even more deadly weapon in the Mongol arsenal.
Slowly, the Chinese began to approach the stationary Russian lines. From out of their ranks, men appeared, wheeling long, hollow steel tubes. Curiously, the Russians observed the frantic activity around the tubes, as the enemy loaded small lead balls into them. They can have had no idea of what would happen next.
Thunder rang out over the steppes. All across the Russian front line, men were buckling, lumps of lead smashing their skulls or ribs. Desperately, Lev’s discipline now finally broke. The Russians charged towards the Chinese lines, Viking warriors lifting their mighty battleaxes against the hapless Chinese. Yet, as they approached, the ground below them suddenly exploded. The ever ingenious Chinese armies had planted landmines in front of their lines. The Russian army was utterly broken. As they fled in any direction they could, the Mongol horsemen swept down from all sides, massacring the fleeing enemy. The defeat of Kiev was utter and humiliating. Mengu-Timur marched on Kiev, ignoring the pleas of Russian ambassadors to turn back. The city was stormed, and razed, its fine churches smashed, its wooden houses burned. Women were raped, men murdered. The greatest city of Russia was left a smoking ruin. As soon as the news reached Galicia, the craven state surrendered rather than risk facing the Mongol terror. On the western front, only the Bulgarians remained loyal to Constantine. And in the east, the situation was very little better.
Nogai had advanced south from the remnants of Baghdad in December 1272, and by March, after a dangerous and gruelling trip through the deserts, finally arrived, already bloodied, at Jerusalem. Here, he was confronted by full armed might of the Ayyubid Sultan Al Adil III. Being a Mongol, Nogai took it upon himself to demolish this army. Though, as far as we can tell, his armies did not include any frightening Chinese gunpowder weapons, but dispatched the Sultan with the same contemptuous ease as their fellows to the north.
The way into Egypt was now open. Ignoring the Holy City, the Mongols turned their attention to a far more glittering prize, Cairo; the greatest city of Islam. Like Baghdad and Kiev and countless others, Cairo was destroyed. On its ruins his established his own city, which the Romans would later called Hunnopolis. This done, the “Huns” settled down in the land of the Pharaohs. Spies were sent north into Byzantium. Apparently, the northern branch of the expedition had been a total success. Mengu-Timur was at the Danube, and the terrified Bulgarians were desperately trying to block his entrance into their lands.
News travelled slowly in the medieval world, and in all likelihood, by time the news reached Nogai, Mengu-Timur was already ravaging Bulgaria. The Bulgars, realising it was impossible to defeat the Mongols in pitched battle retreated into the mountains, emerging periodically to launch brief, savage attacks against the enemy. As a strategy it was not entirely useless, and the Mongolians were forced to take heavy precautions to avoid being ambushed and massacred by their tenacious foes, greatly slowing their advance southwards. Meanwhile, more and more Bulgarian soldiers and citizens had slowly been trickling southward into the Roman Empire. By early autumn, Thessalonica was thronged with immigrants, desperately seeking safe passage and a new life on the Greek Isles, protected by the fearsome Imperial navy.
Mengu-Timur had initially planned to push straight on to Constantinople, but upon hearing about the situation in Thessalonica, decided to divert his attention there. The second city of the empire was also extremely rich and prestigious; destroying it would deliver a heavy blow to Roman morale. Descending from the hills, the Mongols saw the crammed city below them. Without any warning they struck.
Desperately, the ragtag band of two legions, Thessalonian citizens, and Bulgarian warriors tried to stem the Mongols. True, the fearsome invaders suffered heavy casualties as they threw themselves at the great city’s ramparts. But in the end, the outcome was inevitable. By the end of October, the Imperial navy had arrived, in an attempt to rescue the citizenry. Women and children were evacuated to Crete and Mytilene en masse, while men survived as best they could. Early in November, 1273AD, Thessalonica fell to the Mongols. Its legionary defenders were crucified in a brutal parody of Jesus himself, the other citizens were sewn into sacks and dropped into the sea. Churches were torn down and ransacked for their gold and jewels, and abandoned homes were eagerly combed for treasure. A few weeks after the fakk, one of the largest cities of Europe no longer existed.
Mengu-Timur now sent word to Nogai; to move north and harass Roman positions in Palestine and Anatolia, while he moved on the ultimate prize, Constantinople herself. Never in her history had the Roman Empire appeared more defenceless. Her allies crushed, her second city demolished, her armies scattered, Constantinople alone now stood as the empire’s last hope. History stood on a razor blade.
The Mongols moved swiftly eastwards from Thessalonica. By Christmas Day, 1273, Constantinople was besieged. In Egypt, Nogai had used his long rest well, to commandeer and enhance the Ayyubid navy. With skilled Egyptian sailors at his command, Nogai’s fleet stood a far better chance against the Imperial Navy than Ögedei’s did before him. As the Mongol sailed northward, his ships met and defeated a Roman fleet off Cyprus, buoying their courage. More worryingly, they also captured several Greek fireships.
On land, the Mongol army was also having notable successes. Damascus fell and was ransacked, though not to the same level as Thessalonica or Cairo. Pressing northward into Syria, they met what seemed to be their last obstacle, six Roman legions commanded by the general Michael Photopoulos, an experienced warrior, and close friend of Emperor Constantine X. By contrast, the Mongol army was effectively leaderless. Yet on the flat Syrian plains, they held every advantage. The legions retreated into the Taurus, apparently leaving Antioch open to the Mongols. At Antioch, there was no need for the warriors to besiege the city; instead, the citizens delivered the barbarians a vast ransom of gold, jewels and horses.
Now almost choking on gold, the Mongols marched into the Taurus, intending to crush the Romans once and for all. But Michael Photopoulos was cleverer than that. The highlands of eastern Anatolia had proved fatal to Mongolian armies before, so they would again. Surrounded by a particularly harsh winter, the Mongols divided their forces through the narrow mountain passes. This was exactly the opportunity the Romans had been waiting for. One by one, Mongolian divisions were picked off. By the time the horsemen had descended onto the relatively flat coasts in the spring of 1274, barely half of them remained. Sacking Attalia in anger, they pressed onwards. Off Smyrna (which was also devastated), they met with the Mongol-Egyptian navy, which had spent a pleasant winter plundering Crete and harassing the Imperial navy. Their confidence restored, the Mongols pressed onwards, to the Queen of Cities. Evidently influenced by both Russians and Arabs, Mongolian records call the city Miklagard, and its people the Rum. But the city was Constantinople, Queen of Cities, and its people were Romans, the oldest and proudest race of Europe. And here the great Mongol empire would be shattered beyond repair.
The siege continued throughout 1274. By early autumn, Mengu-Timur was growing impatient, and decided to storm the city. He had gunpowder and catapults at his command, there could be no more delays. Nogai privately agreed. It was decided the final assault would take place on October 15th. The Mongols planned every intricate detail. The ships would force the Imperial Navy into a confrontation, and defeat it, before attacking the Sea Walls, while the main Mongol army would batter at the defences of the city with its artillery.
The Emperor Constantine, whose spies were everywhere, was no doubt aware of this, and prepared his city accordingly. Legionary stood shoulder to shoulder with beggar, every male citizen over the age of 16 apart from priests were conscripted to defend the walls. Below them, women stood with buckets of water, Greek fire, and arrows, ready to rush them up to help their husbands and sons.
The Mongol assault began promptly, and was chronicled “live” by a priest, Basil of Sparta, who watched the siege unfold, and wrote down what was happening before his very eyes. As soon as the sun rose, the fleet moved towards the Golden Horn, where Roman ships stood, pretending to be unprepared, as the great chain across the horn was lifted. Silently, the Egyptians sailed forward, sinking several vessels. Then, suddenly, magnificently, the Imperial navy sprang into live. A squadron of fireships descended from the Black Sea into the Mongols rear, trapping them in the Golden Horn. Meanwhile, the main bulk of the navy engaged the enemy head on. Mongol and Egyptian died a fiery death together, as their wooden ships were engulfed by the blaze. A few Roman vessels were overwhelmed by the Mongol’s own captured fireships, but it would not alter the course of the battle. In a few short hours, the enemy fleet had been wiped out.
Unfortunately, at the land walls, the situation was far bleaker. Basil, hurrying westward through Constantinople, travelling along the city’s great thoroughfare, the Mese, could hear the sounds of the giant fortifications being pulverised by the fearsome Chinese artillery. The skies turned back, and heavy rain began to fall. It seemed to the priest as though the world was ending in this titanic clash of civilisations. As Basil reached the land walls, a great cry of dismay rang out amongst the Romans, the enemy were through the walls! A great breach had been opened up in the land walls.
Basil could hear the thundering of hooves, as Mongol horsemen poured towards the gaping hole. Led by Mengu-Timur himself, they descended on the great crowds of women at the base of the walls, massacring them. In desperation, the women attempted the stab the Mongols with arrows, but to no avail. Men tried to throw themselves from the battlements to save their wives and daughters, but were killed in the process. Triumphantly, the Mongols began to spread through Constantinople, looting and burning as they went.
This was exactly as the Emperor Constantine had hoped. Together with a single legion, he had remained in Constantinople’s great forum. Quickly, he sent orders out, to attack the enemy within the city. Man, woman and child all pelted the Mongols with bricks and plaster as they marched through the narrow streets. Then, as they emerged onto the Mese, the legions were waiting. The Mongols were destroyed. Attempting to flee, they were met by the cold steel of Michael Photopoulos’ legions, arrived at the nick of time almost miraculously. Both Mengu-Timur and Nogai were killed as they fled in terror. Few, if any Mongols survived alive.
Throughout the great empire, the shockwaves radiated outward. The western invasion had been destroyed. In Karakorum, the Great Khan Kublai broke down and wept. Never again would one man hold such stupefying resources alone. Kublai died a broken man a few years later, and the Mongol empire split into three squabbling successor states, none of which would survive for long. The world’s largest empire had died at the hands of the world’s oldest.
To the victors, the spoils of war. Constantine’s alliance had been shattered at the hands of Mengu-Timur and Nogai, now he would restore broken nations to its former glory. Briskly, the legions occupied Bulgaria and Egypt, and Roman settlers swarmed north to Kiev, there to found a new and still more beautiful capital of Russia. At a stroke, Constantine X had restored his empire almost to the size of Justinian’s, but avoided the troubles of Manuel. The Bulgarians and Egyptians, broken by the Mongols, welcomed the legions as liberators, and quickly settled down as subjects of the Emperor.
Nevertheless, the Mongols had inflicted appalling damage. Soon after they had been crushed, Constantine X rode out to Thessalonica. Seeing the second city of the empire reduced to a broken ruin, he was deeply angered, and resolved to start Thessalonica all over again. For the next decade, almost a quarter of Imperial revenues were channelled into rebuilding. Syrians, Egyptians, Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians; all were brought in to settle what would rapidly become by far the most cosmopolitan city of the Empire. Churches and mosques rubbed shoulders freely, while in the forums, Isaac II’s democracy rumbled onwards, as the great Senate of Thessalonica recovered as Christians from across the empire engaged in passionate debate on issues as diverse as the nature of Christ, to the taxation of olive farmers.
Constantine X, like George I before him, was hailed as the architect of peace. But unlike George, Constantine was not a natural showman, and preferred the peace of the Imperial palace. Almost alone of Roman Emperors, he never married, preferring instead the company of his trusted general Michael Photopoulos, prompting dark rumours of a homosexual relationship. However, Constantine did not waste his time. In Constantinople, he planned and executed the construction of two magnificent new churches, while encouraging innovation and new designs. The University exploded into life, when, in 1286, Constantine decided that study would be funded by the state, and available to all Uniate Christian men.
The Emperor himself showed something of a flair for science too. For centuries, the Romans had known of steam power and clockwork; it was used to power several devices in the Imperial palace. It seems that it was under Constantine X that they finally realised its true potential. Slowly, tentatively, experiments began, first on a steam powered crane, then, in Italy in 1302, a self driven cart. Of course, in the early years, this technology was primitive, dirty and extremely dangerous. Steam cranes were used in the construction of a new basilica in Naples in 1305, but exploded, causing the dome of the church to collapse, killing dozens of builders. Even so, the first tentative steps towards industrialisation certainly took place in Constantine’s reign.
The Romans were also benefitted by a group of extremely useful slaves. As the Mongols had been cut down as they fled, one group of them, the Chinese gunners, had been spared and captured. Brought before the Emperor, he ordered them to put their creative flair in the arts of death to use. 1284 sees the first recorded use of a cannon in a Roman army (on an expedition into Mesopotamia), and the repeating crossbow was quickly adopted as a standard missile weapon. By 1300 Roman rule, aided by Mongol devastation and Chinese firepower, once again had spread across three continents. In Persia, the Mongol Il-Khanate continued to threaten the legions, defeating them in pitched battle in 1292, and ensuring a shaky peace, but elsewhere, there were few constraints on Roman rule. A revolt in Egypt in 1296 was swiftly and ruthlessly put down; the Egyptians had to learn that no more would the Roman state tolerate their independence. Either they could become good Roman citizens, or remain slaves. There were no more revolts.
In Bulgaria, by contrast, there were far fewer rebellions. The Tsar remained in effective control, as Duke of Paristrion, and the thriving Bulgarian communities in the Aegean encouraged a sense of unity with the once hated Romans. In 1290, the Constantine engineered the election of a Bulgarian Pope, Samuel I, who held the position with dignity and competence for twelve years. It was under Pope Samuel I that plans for a Slavic Patriarchate were further advanced, to sit in newly rebuilt Kiev.
The first Patriarch of Kiev, Boris I, was crowned by a high powered Roman delegation on Christmas Day 1305, led by the Emperor Constantine X, and Patriarch David of Constantinople. Constantine, that “honorary Russian” was especially welcomed amongst the citizens. Kiev was where he had been born, and, in a rather fitting twist of fate, it would be at Kiev where he would catch pneumonia. Returning to Constantinople in summer, he initially showed some small signs of recovery, but they did not last long. On July 12th, 1306AD, Emperor Constantine X died.
Modern historians are divided on Constantine. On the one hand he was a ditherer, obsessed with the vastly expensive reconstruction of Thessalonica, and painfully shy. On the other, he had showed remarkable courage against the Mongols, and had presided over the empire’s great comeback to a true world superpower.
Either way, Constantine X died alone, with no child or brother to succeed him. Both of his sisters were already dead, and with him so too died the line of Italian Emperors that stretched back to George I. It would be fifty years before another great dynasty would sit upon the throne of Augustus, and in that time, the Roman Empire would be haunted by the return of its oldest and most deadly enemy; civil war.
Constantine X was sixty six years old when he died, ancient for a man in medieval times. Even so, he was young compared to his successor. Constantine had willed that supreme power by entrusted to general Michael Photopoulos, who was enthroned as Emperor Michael VII in late summer, 1306. When Photopoulos had defeated the Mongols thirty two years earlier he had been an experienced veteran general, when he was crowned, he was seventy eight years old.
Michael VII was low born; he had reached the throne purely through his own talents. As a young man, he had taken a passionate part in first elections in his home town of Smyrna, being elected to magistracy. By the time of his fortieth birthday he held a military rank normally awarded only to aristocrats, and, as we have seen, by time he was fifty he was the Emperor Constantine’s closest ally. Due to this, he was a great admirer of Isaac II, and that Emperor’s Demokratia. It was this that was to run him into trouble.
Less than sixty years after its inception, Isaac’s democracy was already falling into the hands of the rich and powerful, for they possessed the resources to bribe elections on a monstrous scale. True, each man had an equal vote, but only the very rich could stand for election, for they were expected to finance their entire campaign themselves. Beyond a local level, only the wealthy could expect to be voted in.
For the old emperor, this idea was repellent. In 1310, he made a series of passionate speeches to the Senate, arguing that they should do more to include the lower classes. For the senators, a conservative group of aristocrats and nouveau-riche merchants, such an idea verged on the scandalous. While, in principle, many of them agreed with the Emperor, in practise they were reluctant to enforce such a measure. Michael VII, it was decided, was a danger to democracy in the Roman Empire. He would have to be removed.
On March 14th, 1311, the Emperor arrived at the Senate to deliver his plans for reformation. Three senators took the old man aside, telling them they needed to speak to him urgently. What exactly happened in that darkened corridor of the Senate House is unknown to this day, what is known is that, for the first time since the days of Nero, the Senate had belligerently intervened to topple an Emperor. Michael VII never did deliver his speech. His body was thrown into a coffin, and a funeral was arranged with almost indecent speed. A week later, the Senate was crowning one of its own, a haughty aristocrat by the name of Alexander.
Alexander V was, to put it mildly, a disaster. Perhaps the only good thing that can be said about his reign was that it was short. In 1313, he ordered that the much loved Pope Tiberius II be brutally removed from office, for Alexander believed, ludicrously, that Tiberius had designs on his throne. For the next year, the throne of Saint Peter remained empty while the Emperor did everything he could to obstruct a new Pope being elected.
Meanwhile, Alexander’s foreign policy was equally ridiculous. In 1312, he personally led an ill prepared and totally useless invasion of Hungary that was met by a stinging defeat. The Emperor, it was said, was forced to pretend to be a woman to escape the Hungarians, who made short work of the poorly led legions.
In 1314, Alexander set out on campaign once again, this time for the East and the Il-Khanate. He seems to have dreamed of emulating his great namesake, and conquering lands all the way to the far Indus. In this he was to prove himself pitifully disillusioned. In two major battles, the Mongols shattered the Roman armies. Alexander, once again, survived, and fled. But the legions now decided enough was enough. The leader of the soldiers, the Strategos David marched into the Emperor’s tent, and stabbed the Basileus as he lay sleeping. Seizing the dying man’s crown and sceptre, he emerged out into the army, proclaiming himself Emperor of the Romans. The delighted troops, thoroughly sick of Alexander, raised David up upon their shields and marched on Constantinople. For a while, the Senate dithered, but eventually the view that David was, like them, an aristocrat, prevailed, and the Emperor marched in triumph into the city, there to be crowned Emperor David I.
Immediately, David set about righting the wrongs of his predecessor. Peace treaties were hurriedly drawn up with Hungary and Persia, and Papal elections were finally held, resulting in the coronation of Pope John XXI. For a while, it seemed as though order had been restored.
The problem was Emperor David tried to move too far, too fast. Recognizing that the Senate had now become a real danger to the power of the Imperial family, he tried to reverse democracy, through a series of short measures. Terms of office were restricted to one year, and anyone found of corruption during their election campaign would be brutally blinded. The Senate, justifiably wary, began to strike back against the Emperor, culminating in 1322, when David was denied access to the Senate house for a week, forcing him to apologise, and restore some of the Senator’s rights. By now, he was also becoming increasingly unpopular with the mob, due to his high taxation policies to support the army. Under David, the legions expanded massively, so by 1325, there were almost fifty of them stationed around the empire. As military expenditure increased, so too did inflation. However, the death blow to the reign of this Emperor came in 1327, with the election of one of the most remarkable Popes in history; Samuel II.
From a poor Italian family, Samuel had risen to become Bishop of Venice in 1319, a position he served at with distinction for eight years. Samuel was noted for his incredible piety and intelligence, he had been just twenty nine years old when he became Bishop. However, he also displayed many not so Christian characteristics. He was a deeply calculating man, and, from the start it was obvious to many that he had his eye on the Papacy. As Pope Victor VI descended into alcoholism and apathy, the young Bishop began to mount a series of increasingly vicious attacks at the frail Pope. Too late, Victor finally awoke to the danger he was in. All across Italy and beyond, the clergy were rising up against him. The Emperor David responded to the Pope’s desperate appeals for aid as he always did; by sending in the troops.
But the Emperor’s typical heavy handedness did nothing to help the unfortunate Victor. In 1327, he died inexplicably; foul play was suspected. There was no doubt as to who would be his successor. On April 19th, the Bishop of Venice was proclaimed Pope Samuel II of Rome.
David now hastily sought to make amends with the dynamic young Pope, but too late. Samuel had the support of the Catapan of Italy, John Kotsiopoulos, who delivered a pointed warning to the Emperor; interference in Italy would not be tolerated. At the same time, the Pope sent out feelers to the increasingly restive Senate of Constantinople. Would it be possible, he wondered, for the Senate to again depose a Roman Emperor? Gradually, Senators began to receive private letters from the Pope. Secret meetings were held in the great mansions throughout the capital. Outwardly though, the treacherous senators revealed nothing. The Emperor was perfectly unaware of the plot.
In 1328, David set out on campaign. His target was the Mongol Il-Khanate of Persia, which had become the Empire’s most serious rival for power in the near east. Already the Il-Khans had expelled the Romans from Mesopotamia, now; they cast their hungry eyes towards Syria. The Il-Khanate may only have been a small chunk of the great Mongol realm that had invaded Constantine’s empire, but it was a dangerous foe nonetheless.
If nothing else, the Emperor retained the support of the grossly enlarged Imperial army. In April, he crossed the Euphrates, into Persian land. A counteroffensive was easily swatted off by David, and he set off down the great river for Baghdad.
In Constantinople, tensions now reached fever pitch. Pope Samuel seized his opportunity. Leaving a trusted cardinal to take care of affairs in Rome, he made a dash for the capital. By midsummer, the Pope had arrived, and the plots were planned in ever more intricate detail. The Emperor David would have to go. In replacement, the Senate proposed one George of Athens, an elderly, yet dependable bureaucrat. For Samuel, George seemed the perfect choice of Emperor, competent enough to keep the empire running, yet weak willed enough to be utterly dominated by the predatory Pope. By early autumn, all had been agreed. A small, elite group of senators rode east.
In Mesopotamia, the Emperor was having huge success. He had captured and sacked Mosul and Malatya, and was preparing to re-cross the Euphrates, loaded down with plunder. True, he had failed to sack Baghdad, but he had more than enough loot to finance another expedition the next year…
It all seemed as if it were going too well. It was. Early in October, with the Romans about to re-cross the Euphrates, scouts reported a huge Persian army approaching from the east. The Emperor’s advisers urged him to retreat back into his own lands to replenish his supplies, and fight a defensive campaign, but David, seized by a sudden surge of ambition, decided to defeat the Persians in battle on their own lands.
Our sources for the battle that ensued are pitifully thin, but we do know it was a disastrous defeat for the Romans. It was now the Mongols than were weighed down with plunder; though from their own cities. It is also known that the victory was decisive enough to stabilise Mongol rule in Persia, and allow the Il-Khanate to survive for much longer than it perhaps would have done otherwise.
Somehow, David survived the battle, and he fled eastwards, with the battered and broken legions following. He spent Christmas reflecting upon the ruin of the expedition in Antioch, before setting off westward for Constantinople.
Time finally caught up with the Emperor in February, somewhere near Tarsus. Exactly why the assassins took so long to reach Cilicia is nowhere explained, but either way, their mission was complete. Surprising the Emperor while he was using the lavatory, they stabbed him through the heart, killing him instantly.
Once again, senators had removed an Emperor from power. But in doing so, they had removed the last obstacle to power for a man infinitely more cunning and dangerous than any of them. Pope Samuel II now reigned supreme over the Roman Empire.
The coronation of the Emperor George II was greeted in Constantinople by joyous celebrations. George himself, an elderly intellectual, had long despised David and his meddling with Demokratia, and was quick to restore the old systems. Nevertheless, some adjustments had to be made. Having taken the throne, George had no wish to be replaced as quickly and brutally as David had been. Therefore, the limits on magistracies were kept at a single year, and looking back into democratic history, the Emperor decided to revive “ostracisms”, that is, the elected exile of politicians. With the fickleness of the Roman citizens, the threat of ostracism was a deadly one for any politician.
One example of a high flyer swiftly brought down was Michael Karras, a prominent military leader, who had heroically defended the Euphrates frontier against a full scale Persian assault in the summer of 1329. The Khan of Persia, hearing the Emperor David was dead, pressed forward his advantage, rumbling forwards to the frontier, his banners displaying a single word “Antioch”, a clear statement of his intent. Karras, together with just two scratch raised legions, had ambushed the Persians as they crossed the great river, and inflicted a punishing defeat on them. The bridge across the Euphrates had been pulverised by Roman cannons, leaving the Persians on the left bank helpless before the legions, who swiftly cut them apart. Karras returned to Antioch hero of the city, and he was duly elected Demarchos (mayor) of Antioch the next year.
Yet Karras’ reign as mayor was brought to a swift and humiliating end. Sometime in the autumn of 1330, the daughter of a prominent aristocrat claimed that Karras had raped her. The mayor’s popularity soon plummeted, and, when the time for elections and ostracisms came around in 1331, it was he who was expelled from Antioch. He settled in a small village to the south of the city, but was, according to local legend, stabbed to death by an elderly Persian woman, whose son he had killed. The skies had not, for Karras, proved the limit.
Back in Constantinople, the Emperor George enjoyed huge popularity with the urban poor for his genuine compassion for their plight, and interest in their lives. He would frequently meet with them, listening to problems, and attempting, wherever possible, to help out wherever he could. At the beginning of 1331, he began construction on a great new church of Saint Paul, the first of Constantinople’s cathedrals to be build outside the city walls.
Yet, popular and efficient as George II was, it should not be forgotten that he was merely the puppet of an altogether greater man, Pope Samuel II. Now in his early forties, the Pope had everything he had ever dreamed of; absolute authority over both the spiritual and practical aspects of the Roman Empire. Many of George’s most prominent achievements have Samuel’s fingerprints all over, the massive cathedral for one. (Samuel always claimed a close affinity with Saint Paul) So, when the Emperor passed away peacefully in his early seventies at the end of 1331, it is no surprise that he left it to the Pope to nominate his heir.
One man though, stood against this. Andronicus Xanthis, a general based on the Danube frontier. As far as such a thing existed in the 1330’s, Xanthis was Pope Samuel’s intellectual and political equal. He was certainly the one whom the Pope considered his greatest rival for power.
Xanthis was a decisive man. Pope Samuel’s legates in Constantinople had already approved a new emperor who was duly acclaimed by the Senate a few days after George’s death; Basil of Adrianople, another elderly bureaucrat. For Xanthis, this would not do.
He arrived at Constantinople a few weeks after the coronation of the Emperor Basil III, and immediately demanded to speak with the Senate. In an electrifying speech, he denounced the Pope’s total control over the affairs of the empire, accusing the Senate of betraying the Empire for the favour of a devious and manipulative Pope.
What exactly the Senators thought of Xanthis’ comments is nowhere mentioned, but their response is easy to see. His speech was a miserable failure. Stripped of his command, he was sent away in disgrace to try and make a living in some remote corner of the empire. Pope Samuel, who heard the news over Christmas 1331, could congratulate himself on a job well done.
However, the Senate and clergy had badly misjudged the situation. Xanthis had many allies in high places, and it so happened that one of them was the husband of the emperor’s beloved daughter Maria. This husband then marched into the emperor’s personal chambers and delivered an ultimatum, either Basil retire to a monastery, or he and Maria would leave Constantinople, never to return. The confused old emperor quickly gave in, and on December 29th announced to the Senate he would retire from the throne. It was now Xanthis who was on top in the bitter feud.
Now in total control of Constantinople, the husband of Basil’s daughter, one Constantine, declared himself Emperor. On the face of it, he appeared a perfect candidate. Related by marriage to the previous emperor, handsome, pious and intelligent, and with no less than five potential heirs in his sons, Constantine XI would ordinarily have been considered a good, if not great emperor. But these were not ordinary times.
Pope Samuel quickly realised that the victorious duo of Xanthis and Constantine XI would have to be toppled, and quickly. Already, Constantine was making moves towards stifling the regular messages between the clergy in the empire that kept the Pope aware of events on the Bosphorus, potentially endangering the vast web of that Samuel sat in the centre of. The Pope would have to act quickly.
Probes were sent out to Constantine’s second son, John, governor of Apulia. Of all the Emperor’s sons, it was John who got along most poorly with his father. The only child of a brief marriage to an Athenian woman, John had always been rather resented by his father for his good looks and intelligence. Tensions between father and son had finally reached boiling point in 1325, when the seventeen year old John had seduced and married the very woman Constantine (a notorious womaniser) had been sniffing around, forcing Constantine to settle for the rather plain Maria. Despite the fact that this had brought Constantine his throne, the relationship with John remained icy, hence the fact his son was governor of a poor and unimportant theme.
Over 1332, John and Samuel grew ever closer. The Emperor’s son was charmed utterly by the Pope, declaring him to be a “new Peter”, a title Samuel was hardly shy to accept. Dark rumours began to circle, apparently John had pimped his wife to the Pope, and Samuel had gone so far as to baptize all of John’s illegitimate children. Soon, all Italy was abuzz with tales of scandal.
Yet Constantine XI paid them little heed. Aged fifty two, he was already sliding into alcoholism and despair. In the autumn of 1332, his eldest and favourite son Michael had been killed while leading an expedition against the Hungarians. A few months later, he was followed to the grave by another brother, Alexius. Under the circumstances, one can hardly blame Constantine for what happened next.
Early in 1333, Italy suddenly and dramatically rose in revolt. The Emperor was confronted by an ugly sight, his own son marching against him with seven legions. Hurriedly he sent for Andronicus Xanthis. Xanthis rolled in from Iconium two months later, with nine of his own legions, plus auxiliary troops from the Persians, who had every desire to see the Romans bogged down in a civil war.
There could be no delay. John stormed northwards through Italy, and descended back down through Dalmatia, crushing two imperial legions as he went. By autumn, he ruled everything east of Thessalonica. Xanthis, zigzagging across the Balkans had attempted to corner him, but to no avail. However, finally a confrontation was forced, near Adrianople.
The outcome was a victory for the rebels, but a bloody one. Each side lost upwards of 10,000 men, and the fields around Adrianople, it is said, were stained red with blood for months. Both men backed down to lick their wounds. However, Xanthis knew he could not delay the attack much further. Even as he tried to gather more legions his time was running out; to the west his foe Pope Samuel had used church funds to raise new legions, while in Constantinople Constantine XI was sliding ever closer to suicide.
In January of 1334, John attacked again, buoyed by fresh troops from Italy. Xanthis’ army was shattered. The general fled for his life. Dodging John’s assassins, he finally arrived in Persia, where he was given a hero’s welcome by the Khan. Even so, this could not disguise the fact that he had suffered a major defeat.
Constantine, seeing all hope was lost, committed suicide, leaving the way open for his son. John’s two surviving brothers, Romanus and Manuel wisely retreated at the news of his approach, and joined Andronicus Xanthis in Persia. On March 18th, 1334, John III was crowned Emperor of the Romans in Constantinople the fourth in as many years, and Pope Samuel could once again smile. For now, he was victorious.
EUROPE IN 1334AD
Unfortunately for the Pope, John III proved a woefully incompetent Emperor. Despite being militarily talented, within a just a couple of months, power had corrupted him. Sitting up in Baghdad and sniffing the air, Xanthis realised that all was not yet lost. Accordingly, he advised the Khan to strike soon. The Great Khan Chupan, an active ruler, quickly set his state into action. In late autumn, 1334, a huge Persian army rolled into Roman Syria.
The news that the Persians were loose in Syria was met with outright panic in Constantinople, but one man remained calm, the Emperor himself. John decided to lead the legions into battle himself, for surely with God at his back, he, the equal of the apostles, would be invincible?
Marching east, he spent Christmas at Iconium, where Philip Diakos, Strategos of Cilicia, met with him. The news from Syria was bleak. Several cities had been sacked, and worse, two legions had defected to the Persians, who were led by John’s old enemy, Andronicus Xanthis. The Emperor was furious, and rather randomly had Diakos blinded, for leaving his post in Cilicia, thus depriving himself of one of his greatest generals. Sweeping down through the Taurus, the peasants fled at his approach, for there were stories of legionaries burning to death innocent farmers, raping their daughters, and enslaving their sons. It was hardly difficult, therefore, for Xanthis and his ally John’s brother Romanus to pose as restorers of liberty.
However, their hopes for a quick victory were soon shattered. What followed was a gruelling eighteen months of civil war that tore apart much of what had been achieved over the past decades. At the beginning of 1335, the rebels sacked Antioch, a city that was steadfastly loyal to the Emperor. The Patriarch, Christopher Fotilas wailed that the Uniate Church was being torn apart by her own children, and he was not wrong. In Italy, the Catapan had declared in favour of the rebels, forcing Pope Samuel to flee to Corsica. Help, however, was at hand. An Aragonese force swept westward, defeating the Romans, and occupying Corsica and Sardinia, where the Pope set up temporary residence. Meanwhile, the Italians opened up a second front against John in the Balkans. Another famous city was looted, this time Nikopolis on the Gulf of Actium.
Adding to the woes of the average Roman citizen was the catastrophic failure of the harvests in 1335. Though Egypt managed to produce grain, Thrace and Anatolia, torn apart by warring armies, did not. The grim shade of starvation began to stalk the lands. In starving, besieged cities throughout the Empire, citizens huddled around small campfires made of the bodies of the dead.
Terrible deeds followed. An attempted amphibious landing on Crete by the rebels was defeated by Imperial troops; local citizens leapt upon the rebels and burned them alive. In Cyprus, the opposite happened, when an attempted Imperial coup was defeated, the culprits were crucified upside down.
Even the Holy City herself was not immune from bloodletting. In September 1335, John III arrived outside the gates. After a brief siege, Jerusalem capitulated, but not before much of her beautiful architecture had been pulverised by Imperial cannons, including both the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock. The Patriarch, an ally of Xanthis, was tortured, blinded, and had his arms and legs cut off before finally being executed. Jerusalem’s citizens were butchered.
The two armies, loyalist and rebel, remained evenly matched throughout 1335. In early July, they met near Caesarea, where the outcome was a thrilling victory for Xanthis and his legions supported by the Persians. But a few weeks later, Romanus’ section of the rebel army suffered a major humiliation while trying to force its way into Egypt, abandoning Jerusalem, and allowing John to commit the awful sack described above. It was not until March of the following year that the rebels were able to tempt Imperial forces into a decisive engagement.
The battle took place just to the east of Damascus, on a flat, scrubby plain. The two armies were both monstrously large, perhaps commanding as many as two hundred thousand soldiers each. Right from the start however, Xanthis had the advantage. His Persian reinforcements were swift horse archers, devastating descendants of the Mongols of the previous century (for Persia saw no problem in simultaneously portraying itself the heir of Cyrus, Mohammad, and Genghis Khan, as well as a bewildering variety of other military leaders). The legions began to wilt under the sun, and finally a squadron of elite Imperial cataphracts darted on in pursuit of the Persians. It was a fatal mistake. Xanthis had constructed a series of deep trenches in front of his own positions, into which the hapless horsemen fell. The hammer of his army now butchered, John could do little to stop his enemy closing in for the kill.
Slowly, the rebels picked their way around the trenches, but upon reaching the flat plains, they began to sprint. John’s legionaries surged forward, crunching into the rebel forces. For a while, it seemed as they would have some headway. But then, with the sound of thundering hooves, the rebel horsemen descended. Cataphract mingled with Mongol warrior as the rebel cavalry smashed into the Imperial right flank, causing them to break and run. The rebel army now pivoted inward, trapping the Imperial legions. The Emperor’s loyalists finally broke, and lay down their weapons, or worse, turned in on their general. John’s Saxon Guards desperately tried to resist, but to no avail. The Emperor of the Romans was cut down in a short violent struggle. The Battle of Damascus had been lost.
Yet Xanthis’ celebrations would not last long. His young protégé Romanus summoned the great general to his tent. Xanthis, not realising anything was amiss, hurried to his ally, only to be seized by a group of Persian warriors, then blinded and packed off to a monastery deep in the Palestinian desert. With this simple, malicious act, did Romanus establish himself as sole victor of the civil war.
For the Roman citizens, torn apart by eighteen hellish months, the Emperor Romanus IV must have seemed like deliverance from heaven itself. To broken and bleeding Roman Asia, he applied a soothing balm of tax cuts and Persian gold. Scratch raised legions were disbanded; Pope Samuel (nominally Romanus’ bitter foe) was recalled the Rome. Only in the West did the embers of civil war still burn; the Aragonese still occupied Corsica and Sardinia, and the Catapan of Italy and Pope remained at each others throats. Nevertheless, if nothing else, Romanus IV did establish some semblance of order throughout the wider empire.
The rest of 1336 passed without event. Romanus smoothly had the Catapan sacked, appointing as his successor his sole surviving brother, Andronicus, who also gained the title of Caesar. In Constantinople, Romanus worked tirelessly with the monks and senators to restore peace and order. His young age, ruthless intelligence, and desire for peace caused the citizenry to refer to him as a “new Augustus”, a title Romanus enthusiastically adopted. The harvests of 1336 and ’37 were collected peacefully.
The year 1338 is the best remembered of Romanus’ reign. The Aragonese were beginning to grow restless in Corsica and Sardinia; worse, a heretical monk by the name of Charles Abarca was spreading a quite vile view of the Church in the Aragonese homeland. In it, it rejected both the Pope of the Catholics and the Patriarchs and Emperors of the Uniate Christians, emphasising the divinity of the individual.
Abarca had originally been a passionate Uniate priest, but had become disillusioned with what he saw as division in the “united” church, chiefly the wars between the Spanish Uniate states in the early 14th century. Pope Samuel’s meddling and domineering personality had further alienated the priest, until, in 1334, he had finally broken with the Uniate Church, and began preaching his own message.
This had been eagerly seized upon by King Carlos of Aragon, who had had a major falling out with Samuel the previous year over the Pope’s cold shouldering of Aragon for Constantinople. Now there were whisperings that Abarca’s “Protestantism” could become officially favoured throughout the kingdom’s lands, including Imperial territory! Such a threat to the empire could not, and would not, be tolerated.
In the early spring of 1338, the task force set out from Sicily, led by the Caesar Andronicus, Catapan of Italy. Within two months, the Aragonese occupiers were swept from Sardinia, but Corsica proved a more difficult proposition. Nevertheless, it was far too close to Roman Italy to be left alone. Quietly, Andronicus contacted the King of Navarre, prior to now, a rather insignificant principality, inviting him to invade Aragon, with Papal blessing. The King enthusiastically took up the offer, and stormed south into Aragon in mid autumn. The Aragonese hurriedly summoned their soldiers back from Corsica, but these were caught in a violent storm south of Toulouse. The kingdom swiftly fell to a mixture of Roman gold, inclement weather, Papal indifference and major aggression from Navarre. From being a small principality, Navarre had abruptly become a Mediterranean heavyweight.
Sweetest for all for Andronicus, Romanus and Samuel was the news that reached Italy over Christmas, and Constantinople in early New Year 1339. The vile heretic Charles Abarca was dead, burned at the stake before the King of the United Kingdom of Navarre and Aragon. Now, surely his heresy would wither and die?
Back at Constantinople, Romanus’ popularity soared to new heights, when, in 1339, his wife Irene delivered him a healthy son, whom the Emperor named Isaac after previous great emperors. For many, it seemed as though the golden age of the Roman Empire could continue. Pope Samuel certainly did, while no longer in total control of the empire, he had found in Romanus an acceptable enough companion, especially given Romanus’ distaste for meddling in Church affairs. The Pope finally appeared content to abandon the political meddling that had caused so much damage, and absorb himself in theological matters. Peace reigned all across the empire. Romanus IV, that young, brilliant emperor, had restored all that had been lost to the Romans.
Then, in midsummer 1340, he died.
For a while, it seemed as though the calm of Romanus’ all too short reign would continue. His brother Andronicus smoothly arrived in Constantinople to be crowned Emperor, naming as his heir his nephew Isaac, Romanus’ baby son. All was calm.
Love had always been a perilous thing for Romans; it had brought down Antony and Cleopatra, and, more recently, the Empress Theophano. Once again, one of the purest of human emotions would bring misery and doom to Roman citizens. The Emperor Andronicus II fell in love with his sister in law, Irene, and asked her to marry him, a proposition that the Empress accepted.
The uneasy peace over Italy suddenly exploded. For Pope Samuel, the Imperial love affair was a sham. Storming out of his semi-retirement he delivered a violent sermon, describing the Imperial family as "vile and incestuous". The ever pious average Romans reacted with similar revulsion, although perhaps with a little more pragmatism. Of all the Patriarchs, only Marcus of Jerusalem; sat shivering amongst the shattered remains of the Holy Sepulchre failed to protest loudly against the marriage.
Unfortunately, the more the empire protested, the more determined the couple became. As a precedent, they gave Antony and Cleopatra, an ill chosen inspiration for the successors of the Second Augustus. Finally, the citizenry of Constantinople opted to show their anger in the only way they knew would hammer the message home; in a brutal riot.
The riots of summer 1341 continued, on and off, for the best part of three months. At the end of them, Constantinople had been torn apart. The Hagia Sophia had been set on fire, and thousands upon thousands of homes had been destroyed. Finally, Andronicus began to realise that he could not go against the wills of the populace. In autumn, Irene was packed off to Cyzicus on the Marmara, an extremely rich and pleasant area, but a humiliating exile nonetheless.
She did not stay there long. Fleeing east dressed as a male merchant, she soon arrived in her home city of Tripoli in Syria. There she met with Alexander Lekkas, a childhood friend and close ally of her dead husband Romanus. It had been Lekkas who had advised Romanus to kill Xanthis, his bitter rival for power as a great general in the empire. With Xanthis now long dead, Lekkas stood supreme as foremost military mind in the Roman Empire. However, unlike Xanthis he lacked the ability to navigate the political as well as the military battlefield. He was therefore completely defenceless when confronted by the flattery and bribes of the period’s greatest man; Pope Samuel II.
Samuel once again deployed what had always been his strongest card, Church money. Using it, Alexander was able to scratch raise two legions, ostensibly for an expedition against the Persians, who had understandably expected territorial concessions for the assistance they had given to Romanus IV in seizing power. As these had failed to materialise, the Persians were understandably growing restive.
Leading four legions, Alexander (and unbeknownst to Andronicus; Irene) marched northward, passing Antioch, obscured by a thick black smog as steam cranes rebuilt the city. But there, instead of turning east for the Euphrates, Alexander marched west. Seriously alarmed now, Andronicus demanded that the general halt, only to be met with contemptuous refusal. A message from Rome arrived; in an almost unbelievable show of hypocrisy, Pope Samuel condemned the Emperor for abandoning his true love in times of crisis. Would Christ do this? Of course not!
Now, suddenly, the awful truth dawned on Andronicus. The last of Constantine XI’s five sons to survive, he must have known that it was all in vain. God himself must be working against their line! Sure enough, the armies he had ordered had failed to materialise, evidently thinking the very same thing. Andronicus, according to the chroniclers, broke down, and wept bitter tears. Seizing his three year old nephew Isaac, he grabbed the boy by the hand, and fled the Imperial palace. Concerned courtiers fled after the Emperor, to find him desperately embracing the child on the Theodosian walls. The last speech of Emperor Andronicus II is worth quoting in full; it is still remembered and echoed today in many modern tragedies.
"Here, my line dies. Two of my brothers and my father reigned before me; I am the last to rule the Roman Empire. I have seen dreams of power and glory humbled before me as God took my beloved brothers away from me, one by one, and He in His infinite wisdom has now seen fit to remove me from the throne of His most noble Empire of the Romans. A thousand blessings be upon you, Little Caesar, the last man of our family to survive me. Long live Isaac! Long Live the City! Long Live the Roman Empire!"
And with these last, anguished words, the Emperor threw himself from the battlements, before the gaze of his terrified nephew and the Senators of Constantinople. With him, all hopes for any peaceful resistance of Pope Samuel’s power over the Empire died. He had reigned for less than two years.
Alexander V entered Constantinople as a victor by default. Little Isaac was of course overjoyed to be reunited with his mother, but neither of them had much cause to be celebrating. Alexander had originally proposed marriage to Irene, but Pope Samuel, sinking lower than ever before, had a better idea. The Pope’s illegitimate daughter Maria, aged just fourteen, was shamelessly pimped to the victorious general. Irene, once again, found herself heading into bitter exile, the only consolation being that this time she and her son could remain together. She took the little boy, and fled to Theodosia in the Crimea, a historic place of flight for deposed rulers, and there she died eight years later, sadly reflecting on her shattered dreams of peace and happiness.
For a moment, we shall divert our attention away from the Romans though, to the far north. The Holy German Emperor Heinrich IV was a young and dynamic ruler, seeking to expand his realm. He did not need look far. Just beyond his western frontier there lay the Kingdom of Norway, a staunchly Uniate State surrounded by Catholic enemies. In 1344, he launched a brutal war of annexation, smashing the Norwegian armies, and occupying the country. Heinrich can have had no idea about the chain of events he had just set in motion.
Johan Igesund was, prior to the German attacks, an admiral. He was haunted by tales passed down the generations of a great green land to the west, an eternal frontier of trees. With his young family killed in the German occupation, Johan decided there was nothing left to lose. Gathering together a ragbag group of sailors, priests and even a couple of prostitutes, he set sail in spring, 1345.
The voyage was a difficult one, and we need not dwell on the details. Nevertheless, it was one blessed by luck in the end. In early autumn, he and his men sighted the green land. Landing on it, they established a settlement, which they named Jensby, in honour of Jens Birst; a cousin of Igesund’s who had been killed by the Germans. At the time, the Norse did not know the true extent of what they had discovered. The continent of North Johannia* stretched out before them.
Jensby thrived almost from the start. By a fortunate coincidence, the Norse had landed in an area far south of Norway itself, which, although boasting harsh enough winters, had nothing that they hadn't seen before. In May 1346, Jensby's first child was born, named Erik Jensby, after his new home town. Despite the fact that the colony was thriving, Igesund left a few weeks after the child's birth. He was a man on a mission.
The mission in question was a return to Norway, suffering badly after two years of German rule. Landing in Bergen in autumn, he found his compatriots sullen and crushed. German Catholicism was rapidly spreading throughout the land, as Uniate icons and relics were smashed and burned by their so called co-religionists. Resentment against the Germans was high, especially with the horros of the Parisian Inquisition now creeping into Norway.
Johan Igesund brought a ray of fresh light into the country. Speaking to sailors, farmers, priests, blacksmiths, soldiers; every aspect of Norwegian life, Johan convinced many hundreds to come and make a new life in the great new land Christ had shown him. Gradually, the trickle became a flood. Despite winter storms in the Atlantic, Igesund returned to Jensby around a year after he left, with an additional three hundred colonists, as well as horses, cattle and pigs.
He found the town very different from the one he had left. Three more children had been born now, and construction was underway on a humble little wooden church, built from the trees of Johannia itself. More importantly, it seemed as though the residents of Jensby were not alone in this new land. Over the winter, contact had been made with tribes of native people. These natives had enthusiastically helped the Norse, and several Norsemen had even taken native wives! Igesund was unimpressed by these developments initially, after all the natives were heathens. But, after being greeted by a native chief and presented with several sumptuous gifts, he quickly changed his tune. Perhaps the Norse could, after all, peacefully become masters of this grand new world.... Those first colonists in the 1340's cannot have known it, but they were unwittingly the pioneers of a global revolution, beginning a new era that would shake the world. The medieval period was over. The age of colonialism was about to begin.
*Obviously in this timeline, the continent would not be known as "America". The term New World is still in use though.
The Romans were not particularly impressed by such developments. They were pleased that the Uniate Church had found new lands to the west, but having no access to the Atlantic, there was no way for them to join in any colonisation efforts themselves. Besides, in the 1340’s, the Empire was effectively paralysed.
Alexander V was not a bad Emperor; he was simply not a good one. Though he was an amiable man, who was extremely fond of his young wife Maria, and maintained order in the empire for his six year reign, the simple fact is that he was utterly dominated by the altogether stronger personality of Pope Samuel II. And the Empire suffered.
By 1342, Samuel was not the man he had once been. Now in his fifties, he was already looking, according to chroniclers, aged before his time. A decade and a half of intrigue and scandal had not helped the man, and he was by now exhibiting the first signs of the madness that would eventually overcome him. When asked by the Bishop of Caesarea what should be done about conversion in Johannia, Samuel responded by going on a long winded, and utterly pointless discussion of the state of Uniate Christianity in Britain, speculating that the newly independent Celts to the west might adopt Unity (in the event, they remained Catholic).
Despite these occasional slips, Samuel remained firmly in control. In 1344, it was he, not Alexander, who ordered the legions raze Milan, the dominator of a group of Northern Italian city states that had been considering conversion to Catholicism. An altogether more positive aspect of his Papacy began to emerge in Italy about this time though as well…
The Italian renaissance was by now over, not because Italians had stopped developing, but simply because they had returned to typical Roman standards of education. Armed with this knowledge, Italian inventors began to experiment with ever more inventive devices. In 1347, one Giovanni Contadino visited Rome bearing news of a spectacular new machine which greatly impressed Pope Samuel. Contadino had invented the first printing press.
At first, few understood the truly revolutionary aspects of the steam powered printing machine. Pope Samuel declared the machine a gift from God, buying it, and setting Contadino up in a great palace in the Vatican, there to tinker with machinery for the rest of his life. The printing press meanwhile was put into good use. Copies of the Bible were churned out at an incredible rate to cater for the middle class families. “Rejoice!” declared the Pope, “For the Word of God can now be heard in every home!” Of course, families would still be expected to come to church every Sunday, and to pay proper respect to Pope and Emperor, but that was hardly the point. Shiny, mass produced books, written in both Greek and Latin were spreading all across the empire, to cater for all inhabitants. By around 1350, the canny Pope had even carved out a distinctly non-spiritual niche exporting these Bibles to Uniate Iberia, for a hefty profit of course. All across Italy, snouts were in the trough.
In Constantinople, Emperor Alexander had watched these events with passing interest, probably before returning to a game of polo, or a long theological discussion with his close friend, the Patriarch Michael IX. Few shed any tears when, in 1348, the Emperor passed away from a severe case of pneumonia caught while hunting, indeed, many must barely have realised he was emperor. Despite the boom in writing in the fourteenth century, Alexander V is barely mentioned, except in passing. This dull, colourless man, therefore, remains dull and colourless to this day.
There were few surprises when the throne passed smoothly to his equally boring cousin, David. The Emperor David II, however, lacked his cousin’s peaceable nature. In 1349, he ordered huge tax increases across the empire, in order to construct a vast mausoleum for himself in his home town of Nazareth. In Rome, Pope Samuel looked on with concern, suspicious of this puppet Emperor who pulled all his own strings. There was a minor revolt against the Emperor in the autumn1350, when the Kephale (elected civilian governor) of Nicomedia rose up against David’s rapacious taxes. The revolt was crushed with astonishing brutality. The Kephale was blinded, and both his sons were castrated. Nicomedia was bloodily sacked by a group of Persian mercenary soldiers. Pope Samuel, worried that the Emperor might seriously damage his own prestige, chose to act. In early 1351, a group of mercenaries entered Constantinople; and, seizing David, executed him.
For the citizens, nothing notable had happened; it was what the Pope did next that was so profoundly shocking. In summer 1351, rather than choose a new ruler, Samuel did the unthinkable, he seized the crown for himself.
Outrage exploded. The other five Patriarchs vocally spoke against him, but Samuel would have none of it. Making himself comfortable as both Emperor of the Romans and Vicar of Christ, he coldly ordered the murder of the Patriarchs. Though the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Kiev survived, those of Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople were not so lucky. Captured and dragged back to Constantinople, the Pope-Emperor ordered their execution.
The three Patriarchs were together bound to a beacon, and set alight. As the smoke from the screaming men licked up into the warm autumn sky over Constantinople, the citizens would have finally realised the stark, brutal new order. Henceforth, the Church and the State would be united, just as the Church itself had been. Pope Samuel would reign supreme; any speech against him was speaking against God himself. All across the empire, a new order was arising.
And the infinitely cunning Pope used every tool at his disposal to ensure his power. Printed Bibles began to feature surprising new sections, talking about the divinity of Samuel himself. The Pope, sinking into deliriousness, came up with an odd new theory, if Pope and Emperor were both equal of the Apostles, and he was both, then surely he was superior to an apostle? Perhaps indeed, he was equal to Christ himself? Profound heresy of course; but with the Uniate Church so effectively decapitated, there was no resistance. When the Bishop of Nazareth protested, he was bricked up in the city walls.
Samuel’s reach was far, yet not infinite. In Iberia for example, the first moves towards the breakup of the Uniate Church were taking place. In 1352, King James of Castile married the young Queen Catherine of Leon, uniting the two kingdoms for the first time. Shortly after this, the King appealed to the Pope-Emperor for what seemed a reasonable enough demand, a Patriarch of Toledo, to serve Iberian Uniates. But Samuel contemptuously refused. Calling the Spanish “barbarian scum” he excommunicated James from the Uniate Church, believing the King wanted to seize the Papal throne for himself.
Most monarchs would have simply shook their head in unhappiness at how low the great man had sunk, but King James, hammer of Florida, was not that kind of man. In 1353, he expelled his Uniate Bishops, styling himself as Head of the Church of the Spaniards. This Spanish church was essentially Uniate in theology, but with one key and shocking heretical difference- Mohammad was accepted as a Prophet, albeit one whose teachings had been distorted by the early Caliphs. Shocking as such a theory undoubtedly was, it would have struck the pragmatic, and possibly atheist King as a sensible solution, making his religion more acceptable to the Muslim masses, who converted en masse. To ensure the loyalty of his own subjects, for whom a strong anti-Muslim sentiment still existed, he emphasised Christ’s teachings on brotherhood and love, and, more practically, cheerfully executed a couple of dissident bishops pour encourager les autres.
The Uniate Church thus disunited, Pope Samuel began to be attacked from all sides. The Pope, rather than backing down as any sane man would have done, simply repeated his claims of divinity. Now though, disturbing reports were coming in from Crimea. An army of Russians and Romans was being raised against him, and was marching south. The Bulgarians, heartily sick of Samuel’s tyranny and insanity, gladly gave them passage across the Danube. At the head of the expedition there marched a gifted young teenage boy, Isaac, son of Romanus of Syria. Despite being just seventeen years old, Isaac proved himself a uniquely talented general and orator. In midsummer 1356, he swept aside a force of Samuel’s loyalist legionaries, and marched straight for Constantinople.
Once outside the city walls, he suddenly, unexpectedly offered peace. Writing to the Pope addressing him as “my beloved Holy Father, equal of Christ”, he asked to be invited into the city to discuss peace, together with only the smallest bodyguard. Eagerly, desperate to cling to power, and flattered by the young man’s attention, the Pope agreed. The two men met in Hagia Sophia, its fifteen year restoration since the riots of 1341 finally complete. There, under the golden mosaics, one of the foulest murders in history was carried out.
Isaac acted coldly, and decisively. Marching up to the Pope-Emperor, he heavily punched him in the stomach, causing the old man to double up in pain. One of Isaac’s Syrian bodyguards then plunged a dagger into Samuel’s shoulder. Samuel collapsed on the floor, bleating for mercy. Here though, a bloodlust descended on the men. Even the Pope-Emperor’s own bodyguard suddenly turned on him. Samuel’s great golden and purple robes were torn off and ripped apart, while the soldiers took it in turns to stab him in the arms and legs. His toes were cut off one by one, then his fingers. All the while, Isaac stood above the screaming figure, kicking and spitting. Samuel’s left eye was put out, and his ears were cut off. Blood flowed freely across the great church. Finally, the mutilated remains of what had been the greatest man in history were carried out into the forum. There, surrounded by the unforgiving gaze of the citizens of Constantinople, Pope Samuel II, last of the great Popes of Rome, was slowly and brutally hacked to death by Isaac’s bodyguards. When, at last, the shrieks of agony subsided, the young man stepped in to deliver the coup de grace. Raising a large axe, he decapitated Samuel. Thus, finally, after twenty nine years of violence, did Pope Samuel II meet a fittingly gruesome demise.
[thread=93323]Discussion thread[/thread]
Isaac I Komnenos was crowned Emperor of the Romans on September 1, 1057. He inherited a system that was close to total collapse. The empire was at its greatest territorial extent since the rise of Islam, sprawling from Italy to the Caucasus, but inside all real authority had collapsed, and corruption had flourished for over thirty years. Gradually, the armed forces, descendants of the legions of old, had fallen into disrepair, starved of funds by an ever growing court bureaucracy that feared a military revolt that would place a competent Emperor on the throne of Constantine and Justinian. However, despite all of this bureaucracy’s attempts, a military adventurer by the name of Isaac had now seized the throne. The Empire would never be the same again.
Isaac’s first act as Emperor was to pay off his fellow generals and send them away from Constantinople, he had no wish to himself be overthrown. He did not instantly start slicing down at the bureaucrats either, to do so would have been political suicide. Instead, he turned his attention to the imperial coffers, which now lay nearly empty. Immediately, he began a program of confiscating territories given as bribes by his incompetent predecessors on the throne.
However, when he turned his attention to Church possessions, he faced much more opposition. In 1058 he entered into a major dispute with Patriarch Michael Keroularios, which ended in the Emperor deposing his Patriarch and the Patriarch dying in exile. Isaac’s popularity plummeted.
On the other hand, he still held the support of the army, which any strong Emperor understood to be key, and was able to lead them to a stunning victory against the Pecheneg barbarians in 1059, returning to Constantinople in triumph. In just two years, he had reversed the Empire’s downward spiral, and begun the second stage of the spectacular Roman renaissance that dominated the middle Ages.
1060 was a quiet year for the Emperor, who kept his head down and worked quietly to keep everything running properly in the state. He began the trimming of the bureaucracy, including dismissing the chronicler Michael Psellus. Because of this, our information for Isaac’s activities for the next couple of years is very poor. We know that in 1062, his brother John was dispatched to southern Italy, where he had some success in expelling the Normans from the peninsula. However, Isaac had concentrated the larger part of the still recovering imperial army in the Caucasus and Syria because of a much larger threat, so the Normans were still able to retain part of the “boot” of Italy and use this as a launch pad to conquer Sicily.
A map of the area can be seen below. Purple shows areas returned by John Komnenos to full imperial control, red is under Norman rule, and red and grey stripes are undergoing Norman conquests.
The Emperor Alexius I was twenty eight years old at the time of his accession. He had inherited from his uncle an empire that was rich and stable in its Asian heartlands at least. To the west the situation was very different. Ever since the death of his father John in 1072, the situation in Italy had gradually become worse. The competent Norman leader Robert Guiscard had completed the subjugation of Sicily three years before, and had begun to construct a fleet to menace Imperial possessions in Italy and the western Balkans. No sooner had Alexius been crowned Emperor than word reached him from the west; the Normans had sacked Corfu, an important Imperial garrison. Initially, Alexius remained in Constantinople, waiting to see if the situation would sort itself out, but in 1077, the Normans captured Salerno and Capreno, effectively encircling the imperial lands in Italy. Now seriously alarmed, Alexius recalled the Imperial army from a minor peacekeeping expedition in Armenia and prepared to send the full force of his troops against the Normans. In 1078, the great force set out, with Alexius at its head, leading some 50,000 troops.
Unsurprisingly, the Normans collapsed before the Emperor’s onslaught. By the end of the year, they had been forced out of Apulia and Calabria, and in 1079, Alexius invaded Sicily proper. Messina fell that same year, but the resistance from the Norman garrison at Palermo was stubborn, and Alexius settled down to prepare for a winter siege.
However, the Emperor’s dreams of a quick victory in Sicily were not to be. In November, the governor of Dyracchium, Nicephorus Bryennius, declared himself Emperor, and began marching on Constantinople. Nicephorus Botaneiates, a general loyal to Alexius was able to hold the usurper at Thessalonica, but Bryennius was far from beaten. Reluctantly, the Emperor left Sicily, where the Normans immediately overcame the small garrisons he had left at Messina.
Despite this, Alexius knew that the revolt was a much more pressing concern than the Normans; Bryennius was a competent and popular general who stood a real chance of taking and holding the throne.
Alexius met Bryennius in battle at Adrianople sometime in spring 1080. The battle was an Imperial victory, but hardly a decisive one. The two armies were evenly matched, with around 30,000 soldiers each, testament to the scale and popularity of Bryennius’ revolt. Had the general not been killed accidentally, the future history of the Roman Empire could have been very different, as it was; Alexius Komnenos’ position was secured.
Meanwhile, everything the Emperor had achieved in Italy was rapidly falling apart. The Normans had captured Reggio at around the same time as the defeat of Byrennius, and had begun inching their way back into imperial lands, devastating the crops that were growing. By the end of the year, the Byzantine situation was bad. The towns were starving, and, to make matters worse, the Normans had not retreated to Sicily for the winter, but remained to devastate the countryside. On Christmas Day 1080, Taranto fell, and Bari was besieged. Alexius was desperate to return to Sicily, but was paralyzed in Constantinople by the intrigues of the aristocracy, who snarled and snapped at the Emperor. Then, in February, an offer of help arrived from a most unexpected source; the Papacy.
The Pope at the time was Gregory VII, an intelligent and strong willed man who was determined to assert himself as leader of Christendom. Already he had emerged triumphant over the Western Emperor Henry IV, but now, when he looked south he saw the Mezzogiorno in ruins after nearly a decade of swinging back and forth between Norman and imperial armies. As he was keen to restore control over Constantinople, Gregory sent ambassadors east to Alexius. While these did not lead to a full scale reunion of the churches, they did lead to a major thawing in East-West relations, and represent the first steps on the path of the reunion of the church. More importantly for Alexius though, was the physical side of the bargain, which would amount to direct Papal support for his campaigns.
Guiscard had already antagonized the Papacy with his annexation of Salerno, technically a Papal vassal. Now, Gregory seized the chance for revenge. He sent some 10,000 Italian soldiers to reinforce the Byzantines, who were led by Alexius’ loyal general Nicephorus Botaneiates. These reinforcements, coupled with the fact that Botaneiates brought Greek grain for the starving Italian locals ensured a quick victory. By midsummer the Normans had been forced from the mainland for good, Guiscard was killed while defending Reggio. After this, Sicily, which was largely Orthodox anyway, put up no resistance, by October, Nicephorus Botaneiates was in control of Palermo. The surviving Normans, around 5000 of them, were rounded up and arranged into a military unit to be deployed in Syria. The great Norman adventure in southern Italy was at an end.
But the Byzantine renaissance in Italy was just beginning. While Nicephorus Botaneiates was conquering the Normans, the Western Emperor Henry, tired of the humiliations dealt to him by the Pope, had swept down into Italy. For three years, the two bided their time, until, in 1084, the Emperor occupied Rome itself.Gregory thereupon retired into the exile of Sant' Angelo, refusing to meet Henry’s demands to crown him Emperor of the West. Meanwhile, Gregory sent desperate emissaries to Constantinople, promising Alexius the throne of the west if he could save the Pope.
For Alexius, bored of spending the past four years in the capital, this was a golden opportunity. Once again, he gathered a large army, and set off for Italy. Henry, seeing a determined and powerful opponent, and one that had far more claim to the title Roman Emperor than he did, promptly turned tail and fled. Gregory was liberated, and Alexius I became the first Roman Emperor to set foot in Rome since the eighth century.
Although he ordered his soldiers to treat the ancient monuments with respect, there was little to attract Alexius to Rome. It was by Byzantine standards, a rather small, shabby little town, another Adrianople or Caesarea, certainly nothing to compare with the true seat of the Roman Empire, Constantinople. Alexius must also have noticed the barely disguised hostility his troops received from the Roman people, for them he was not the successor of Augustus and Constantine but rather a schismatic Greek whose forebears had abandoned the eternal city in 751. Therefore he informed the Pope that he had no interest in the crown of the Western Emperor, but that perhaps some territorial concessions would be enough reward for his services. Gregory, who was by now sliding into a deep mental illness, was happy to oblige, granting Alexius control over Sardinia, Corsica, Venice and all Italy south of the Papal States. Venice was already an Imperial vassal, but Corsica, Sardinia and southern Italy were successfully integrated into the empire, so that by the time of Alexius’ death they were thriving themes.
Alexius spent the next two years in Italy, sorting out various affairs. The area was divided into six themes, these being Apulia, Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, Sicily and Sardinia.Until 1091 Corsica was part of the theme of Sardinia but was ceded to Alexius’ ally, the Republic of Genoa in return for a forty year naval alliance between Genoa and the Empire.
The Emperor returned to Constantinople in triumph in summer 1087, with yet more good news, his wife Irene gave birth to a healthy son named John, whom Alexius immediately crowned co-emperor. The Komnenid dynasty was now finally secure in power, there would not been another serious revolt in the Roman Empire for over a century.
The next three years Alexius spent at his capital, watching his son grow up. This peaceful existence came to a rude end however, in spring 1091, when a vast horde of Pecheneg barbarians broke past the Danube frontier, and began to lay waste to Thrace. Once more Alexius returned to battle. With some 10,000 Italian veterans, plus native Thracians and soldiers from Asia Minor he was able to crush the Pechenegs at Levounion. So total was Alexius’ victory that the Pechenegs are never again mentioned by any source as a menace to society, and no tribe dared invade the Balkans again until years after Alexius’ death. Their shattered remnants were sent away in disgrace to Sicily to act as military police against the remaining Norman and Saracen rebels on the island. On all fronts Alexius appeared triumphant. He celebrated his forty-fifth birthday in style in the capital with a triumphal parade featuring Normans, Pechenegs and Sicilian Saracens, among others.
The next few years would be better still. Seljuk control of the Levant had always been shaky, but between 1090 and 1095 it collapsed altogether, and the Empire became steadily more and more Mesopotamian focused, the result of a series of warring and incompetent Sultans. To the south meanwhile, the Egyptian Fatimids had stagnated since their defeat at the hands of Alp Arslan nearly thirty years previously and proved unable to recover any of their former territories. Thus three new states emerged, each squabbling for scarce resources; the Sultanate of Damascus which controlled everything from Homs in the north to Jerusalem in the south, a re-emergence of the traditional Imperial puppet of the Emirate of Aleppo, and further north-east, the Atabeg of Mosul. These three young nations were in a state of near constant warfare, aided by constant flows of money from Constantinople, Baghdad and Cairo. It was in the interests of neither Emperor, Sultan, nor Caliph for one small Islamic state to become more powerful than any of the others.
In the West though, the situation was slowly declining again. The Western Emperor Henry IV was slowly building up his strength for an assault on Genoa, the most important Byzantine ally in the Western Mediterranean. Alexius had helped Genoa rise to power at the expense of Pisa and Venice, now she was one of the greatest cities of Italy, larger and richer than Rome herself. For a while he was distracted by a civil war within his realm, but in 1098, he launched a vast army against the Genoese. The defenders were able to repel the Emperor for a while, bringing in supplies from their colony at Corsica, but if they were to hold out for any length of time, they would need a protector who was the equal of Henry himself. In Christendom that could only mean one man; Emperor Alexius Komnenos.
When he heard the news of the siege of Genoa, Alexius was instantly ready for action. His Empire faced no major challenge in any other theatre, so he felt comfortable about drawing a vast force; some 70,000 soldiers, out of Asia Minor for what would be his third Italian expedition. To this he added some 40,000 Greeks and Bulgarians, and, an exotic touch, bullied 5000 Arab horsemen from the Zirid Emir at Tunis. The great force arrived at Genoa just before Christmas 1099.
And not a moment to soon. Genoa had now been besieged for nearly a year and a half, and morale was beginning to run out. The arrival of the Emperor rallied the population so much that no sooner had the Byzantines set foot in the city than they were being showered with petals by the grateful Genoese. On January 12th 1100, they met with the Western Imperial forces at Savona, to the west of Genoa. The Battle of Savona ended in a complete Byzantine victory. The Western army, comprised mostly of German nobles and Italian peasants, was swept away by the disciplined Byzantine army, and by sunset, Henry himself had surrendered. Meeting with Alexius, he agreed to formally renounce any claim on the title “Roman Emperor” and promise never again to invade Genoa or any of the Byzantine territories in Italy. Then he was allowed to depart in peace.
Why was Alexius so generous? Perhaps he had learned the lessons of Justinian- that a war for Italy would be a costly, violent process and give an area that was far more of a hindrance than a help to the Empire. Or maybe he was reluctant to become dragged any further into the complicated tangle of Western European politics; after all, the whole reason the Roman Empire’s attention had turned eastward in the first place was because this area was so much more important than the squabbling, semi-barbarian kingdoms of the west. For the Genoese, the Battle of Savona marked the effective end of their independence. As a “guarantee of future liberty” Alexius placed a Byzantine garrison of some 5,000 men in Genoa, to hold the city and Corsica, and ensure that it would be a faithful Byzantine puppet. For the Genoese, far worse fates could certainly have befallen them, now they could make undreamed of riches as citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire. And one day, a Genoan would raise himself up the greasy pole of Byzantine civilization to seize the ultimate prize; the imperial crown.
Alexius returned in triumph to Constantinople in the spring of 1102, taking time on his way home to meet with the Pope, and visit Sicily, where the Orthodox citizens flocked to see their Emperor at Palermo. Upon his return to the capital, Alexius settled down, never to leave on campaign again. Instead, he largely dedicated his time to the education of his young son John.
The Empire remained at peace for the rest of Alexius’ reign, Byzantium’s flanks protected by the smaller Christian and Muslim kingdoms and Emirates. To the north the Georgians held off the raiders from the steppes, while in the south the four post-Seljuk emirates continued to squabble and prevent a real threat emerging to trouble the Empire. In the west meanwhile Henry VI had passed away in 1105, and his son Henry V was too busy warring against German princes and then the Poles to pay too much attention to Italy. In 1110, following a dispute with the Pope he considered marching into Italy, but was dissuaded by a Byzantine-Papal-Genoese alliance. Alexius finally passed away in 1118, his empire at peace, and feared on all fronts.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE (INCLUDING VASSALS) AND SURROUNDING STATES AT THE DEATH OF EMPEROR ALEXIUS I
Alexius’ son John, had inherited all of his father’s best traits in full, an agile mind, military genius, and superb skills of diplomacy. John had also inherited from his parents a strong sense of the spiritual, but whereas Alexius was quite happy to burn heretics at the stake, John was an altogether more peaceful character. Indeed, of all the medieval Roman Emperors, John is considered to by far the most merciful, gentle and generally Christian, reflected by the name for which he is still known to this day, “John the Beautiful”.
John was able to gain this name perhaps in part because of the state of his empire. Byzantium in the 1120’s was indisputably the greatest power of the world outside China. Not even mighty Islam had a power that could compare to John’s Roman Empire.
Only once in his life did John march to war. In 1126, he admitted a blind member of the Hungarian Royal Family to stay in Constantinople. Unfortunately, the Hungarians feared John aimed to annex their kingdom, after all, his wife Irene was daughter of King Ladislaus I, giving John at least a shaky claim on the throne of Hungary. King Stephen II also feared that this was his last chance to stop the Empire before it became simply too strong. Therefore in he invaded in 1128. Initially, the Hungarians met with success, breaching the Danube frontier and capturing several important towns including Singidunum (Belgrade), Serdica (Sofia) and Phillipopollis (Plodiv). Unfortunately for Stephen, John had not intention of letting the Hungarian get any further, for to the south, the southern Balkans were experiencing a boom unseen since before the Great Plagues of the 6th century. The Hungarians, together with a group of rebellious Serbs, were surrounded and crushed at the fortress of Haram in 1130, after nearly two years of solid campaigning. John demanded little from Stephen; certainly he had no intention of annexing Hungary. He was content with a few border fortresses and a guarantee of peace, with the humiliated King was all too happy to grant.
John then returned to Constantinople. One cannot help but wonder if his courtiers were entirely delighted at the return of their Emperor, he was, after all an extraordinary pious man, even by Byzantine standards. His unfortunate courtiers were expected to restrict their conversation to serious subjects only. The food served at the emperor's table was very frugal and those who lived lives of luxury were subject to regular lectures from the Emperor, who considered their way of life to be immoral, and against the teachings of Christ.
Nevertheless, amongst the general populace, John Komnenos was loved in a way that neither Isaac nor Alexius, great men though they had been, were. He frequently visited and spoke with the poor, dispensing charity lavishly. Between 1132 and 1134 he embarked upon a tour of Asia Minor, leaving government in the hands of his twenty year old son, Isaac. In Asia, he was able to witness the growing population boom, to be seen most spectacularly in Antioch, capital of Syria, and boasting a population of around 250,000, higher than at any time in the city’s long history. John remained in Antioch over the winter of 1133/4, and developed a deep affection for the place. In 1134, he returned to Constantinople, via Thessalonica, the Empire’s second city, which was booming just as much as Antioch, with a roughly similar population. He eventually returned to Constantinople in the autumn, which dwarfed either of them, or any other Christian city for that matter. Modern historians estimate twelfth century Constantinople’s population at anywhere between six hundred thousand and a million souls… essentially as large as a city without modern agriculture could get.
John Komnenos, in contrast to his father, lived a slow, relaxed life. In Italy, the Western Emperors Henry V and Lothair III were too busy with events in Germany to bother the Empire, and its loyal protectorates, Venice and Genoa, were both happy to profit from their privileged relationship with the Empire. The Papacy remained peaceful and stable, supported by Imperial armies in the south. The Popes Callixtus II and Honorius II both were well aware that any anti-Byzantine move on their part would not be to their best interests, and so largely gave up on persecuting the Patriarchs of Constantinople for their heretical ways.
Only in 1130 was there a minor incident in Italy. After the death of Honorius II, two rival Popes emerged, Anacletus II and Innocent II. Anacletus, a member of a powerful Roman family was the first to call for Alexius Komnenos, Isaac’s eldest son, and Catapan of Italy, for aid. Alexius, at Palermo immediately recognized Anacletus as Pope, but Innocent would not be put off. Excommunicated by Anacletus, he sailed north, hoping to gain an alliance with the Western Emperor. For Alexius, such a state of affairs could not be allowed to come about, Italy was finally beginning to recover from the long wars by the two Empires. And so, when Innocent disembarked at Genoa, he was quietly taken aside and executed. The head of the anti-Pope was sent back to Rome, and a potentially major diplomatic incident was avoided.
Back in Constantinople, far away from these disputes, John devoted his time to every Byzantine’s favourite hobby, theological dispute. Taking as his role model the famous scholar Emperor Constantine VII, John and his beloved sister Anna* began to churn out vast numbers of books. Their “Alexiad” about the lives of their father and great uncle Isaac was widely praised throughout the empire, becoming essential reading for most of the upper classes. At the same time, they wrote many other fascinating pieces, most of which, have fortunately survived to the present. John’s “On the Conquest of Bulgaria” sheds a vital light on the campaigns of Emperor Basil II in the early eleventh century, which are otherwise relatively unknown. In 1139, brother and sister began work on a complete “user’s guide” to the Roman Empire, intended for John’s son and heir apparent, Alexius. In some ways it is near identical to a similar piece by Constantine VII, but contains new advice, as the empire’s situation had changed greatly in the two centuries since Constantine’s day. There is advice on how to deal with the Papacy (in the end, the Patriarch of Rome has few friends, and any Emperor of the Romans should endeavour to keep it this way), and the Islamic sultanates along the Empire’s southern frontier (the lands of the Infidels must not be allowed to unite. Pay them rich tributes to keep them fighting each other; it will always be cheaper in the end).
In 1142, John received a message from his son Isaac, governor of Antioch, inviting the Emperor to spend the winter in the East. John, who had always been in love with the city, hastened to join Isaac. En route however, tragedy struck. In Palermo, John’s eldest son Alexius had fallen in and died. The Emperor was deeply unhappy, but not inconsolable, he was sure that Alexius had been a Christian, and now sat with the Lord in Heaven. In Antioch, he had two more sons waiting, Isaac, and the youngest of the Emperor’s eight children; Manuel.
Emperor John II spent his last Christmas in Antioch with his sons. In the spring, he and Manuel returned to Constantinople. En route, they stopped in the theme of Cilicia to go hunting, where tragedy struck. While in the wilds of Cicilia, the Emperor was accidentally infected by a poison arrow. The poison set in, and shortly afterwards he died. John's final action as emperor was to choose his youngest son Manuel Komnenos to be his successor.
Why exactly he chose Manuel to be his heir is unknown. Manuel was certainly a brave warrior, and possessed a quick, easy intelligence, but other than that there was nothing much to set him apart from his other brothers, he was younger than any of them. Nevertheless, it was Manuel Komnenos who was quickest to return to Constantinople, and it was Manuel Komnenos who, in August 1143, was crowned Emperor of the
Romans.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AT THE DEATH OF JOHN II KOMNENOS
Emperor Manuel I had barely a year in Constantinople before he was forced to return east. En route, he stopped off at Iconium, where his brother Isaac had been seized and arrested by the governor, Michael Branas. Branas was rewarded by the Emperor, but Isaac was nonetheless freed from prison and restored to the position of Governor of Syria, he was, after all, Manuel’s last surviving brother, and had much greater knowledge of the situation in the East.
During John’s reign, an ambitious young Atabeg had risen to power in Mosul, by the name of Zengi. While an attempt to unify Mosul and Aleppo in 1128 had been thwarted by the Emperor, Zengi, ever an ambitious man, remained determined to end the Byzantine monopoly on power in the Levant, and unite the Islamic statelets of the region under his rule. His ambitions had been kept in check by Isaac, but, while Isaac had been imprisoned over the past year, much had changed.
In the summer of 1144, Zengi led a powerful army into the Sultanate of Aleppo, besieging its second city, Edessa. The emir, Masul ibn-Ak Sunkur, send an emergency messenger to Constantinople, begging for aid from the Emperor, but Manuel was still in the capital at the time, enjoying celebrating a peaceful first year on the throne. Nevertheless, the young Emperor had a love of battle and war, and immediately set out to aid Aleppo. En route there was the stop at Iconium as described above, and, after gathering some 40,000 soldiers, Manuel arrived at Aleppo on Christmas Day, 1144.
He was too late. The next morning, word arrived from Edessa; Zengi occupied the city, and was marching on Aleppo itself with a large army. Immediately, Masul ibn-Ak Sunkur panicked, and secretly sent messengers to Zengi, offering terms of surrender. Manuel, who had retreated to Antioch to gather more troops, was disgusted to discover that the cowardly emir had caved in to Zengi. Moreover, he was profoundly alarmed. After ruling for less than two years, he had already allowed the balance of power in the Middle East to slide against him. Zengi had two states in the bag, and was now determined to seize a third; Damascus.
However, it was not to be. After a long fruitless summer in 1145, where he consistently failed to make any headway against the Damascenes, he was assassinated by a slave from Edessa in 1146. Manuel’s first great foe was dead, but his ghost would haunt the empire for decades to come.
For a while, it seemed as though the balance of power had been restored. Zengi’s realm was divided between his two sons, with Mosul going to Saif ad-Din Ghazi, the elder, and Aleppo to Nur-ad-Din, the younger. Isaac Komnenos, governor of Syria, could, it seemed, breathe easy. Reassured, Manuel returned to Constantinople.
The peace would not last. In 1149, supported by a force of Damascene mercenaries eager to divide the brothers, Nur-ad-Din marched on Mosul. Saif ad-Din quickly marched out to meet his brother, and the two Muslim armies met at Ar-Raqqah on the Euphrates. The outcome was a shattering victory for Nur-ad-Din. Saif fled to Constantinople, but was murdered en route by a group of bandits. Once again, one man ruled supreme in Mosul and Aleppo.
Suddenly it seemed all the east was in flames. In Armenia, the ambitious King Toros II invaded Anatolia in 1151. Why exactly he chose to attack Byzantium then is unknown, but it finally gave Manuel a chance to unleash his armies. For eight years the warlike Emperor had been denied a battle, now he would not be denied. The Armenians were smashed in two massive battles, at Theodosiopolis and Manzikert. For centuries later, Manzikert would be known as “the terrible day” for the Armenians; it marked the end of medieval Armenia. The capital at Ani was victim to a brutal sacking, and the north of the country was overrun King Demtere I of Georgia. Manuel had been deliberately brutal in his treatment of Armenia, it was intended as a powerful statement to the Mediterranean; this was what would happen if the Roman Empire was sufficiently provoked. Unfortunately for the Mediterranean, and ultimately Byzantium herself, few states learned this lesson.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND SURROUNDING STATES IN 1152AD
In 1154, a new and potentially dangerous element appeared in Manuel’s sphere of influence, the new King of Italy, Frederick I. Despite the best efforts of Manuel’s Catapan of Italy, one Michael Markopoulos, Frederick was crowned Emperor of the West by Pope Victor IV on June 18th 1155.
For Manuel this was a most alarming prospect. There had not been an Emperor of the West for almost twenty years, thanks in part to firm Byzantine support of the Popes Anacletus II and Victor IV. However, despite this, the Byzantines remained as far as the Popes were concerned schismatic heretics. Victor’s crowning of Frederick as Emperor, one feels, may have been a desperate attempt to escape from the influence of Constantinople; once a valued ally, now the dominator of Italy.
Victor died a few months after crowning Frederick Emperor, and there was now a strong feeling amongst the Cardinals that a stronger figure was needed to lead the Papacy to a glorious new era of domination. Therefore it was announced that the new Pope would be a German bishop, one who would bear the title Gregory VIII.
Gregory immediately sent ambassadors to Frederick, urging him to “restore Italy to one empire, as in the days of the past, with one Emperor, and one Pope”. Though officially an invitation for the Emperor to attack Pisa, which had sunk into piracy after being eclipsed by Byzantine Genoa, few could have failed to notice the true meaning of the Pope’s words. Manuel Komnenos in Constantinople certainly didn’t. How he got word of it is unknown, but it is certain that in 1157, he sent messages to both Gregory and Frederick, urging them to halt the slide towards war. Only Gregory bothered to respond, sending a rude letter addressed to “Emperor of the Greeks”. Manuel was incandescent with rage. Immediately, he began to gather troops. At Genoa, grain was brought in from Corsica and Sardinia, in readiness for a siege, while at Palermo, capital of Byzantine Italy, construction began on a war fleet. Demands were sent to the Zirid emir at Tunis for money and horses which the Emir quickly made available, he was after all little more than an Imperial vassal. Italy prepared herself for war.
In June 1158, Frederick set out upon his second Italian expedition. Pisa, the expedition’s official target was captured and sacked, soon to be followed by an even more glittering prize; Milan. Manuel meanwhile had arrived at Bari, with a gigantic army of almost 100,000 men. The two emperors sat either side of Rome, each waiting for the other to back down. Neither did.
The two sides finally met in battle on April 3rd 1159, just north of Rome. Fighting was extremely fierce, but eventually the Byzantines began to emerge victorious. The Pisans in Frederick’s army suddenly revolted, and surrounded a squadron of German knights, massacring them to a man. Many of Frederick’s other German subjects turned and fled before the disciplined Imperial onslaught. Zigzagging north up Italy they were caught in a pincer movement by a Genoan-Venetian army. Few made it back to Germany alive.
The Emperor Frederick meanwhile had been captured. Brought before Manuel, the Eastern Emperor at first refused to believe that the bloodied and tattered man covered in dirt was the mighty Western Emperor of the Romans (or Franks, the Byzantines never referred to a Western Emperor as “Roman” if they could help it). Manuel’s terms were harsh. Ravenna and Pisa were seceded to the Eastern Empire, and Frederick would give up the title “Emperor of the Romans”. Frederick retreated, greatly humiliated by his sudden reversal of fortune, and would never return to Italy again.
Yet, in the long run, The Holy German Empire, as it came to be known, had been saved from itself by Manuel. Nominally the victor of the battle, the Byzantine Emperor can have hardly known the far-flung consequences of his victory at the Battle of Rome, nor would he have given them a moment’s notice. For now though, he had business with the Pope.
Gregory VIII had initially tried to flee after hearing the news of the battle, but there was nowhere for him to go. In France, the French and English monarchs were engaged in a savage war, and in Spain the situation was much the same. Only one significant Catholic power remained to come to the Pope’s aid, but in 1159 the Kingdom of Hungary did not act. Manuel marched on Rome. Gregory miserably flitted from aristocrat to aristocrat, begging them to find some way to stop the Byzantines. It was not to be. On April 9th, Manuel entered Rome. On April 10th, Pope Gregory VIII was declared deposed, and on the 11th, a little known Sicilian Cardinal by the name of Jordan was proclaimed Pope Anacletus III.
Anacletus III made it clear from the start that he wished a reunion of the churches, a request Manuel was all to happy to grant, this was, after all the only reason he had placed Anacletus on the throne of St. Peter’s. When Manuel departed Rome that autumn, Pope and Emperor travelled to Constantinople together, thus Anacletus III became the first Pope to set foot in Constantinople since Constantine I in the eighth century.
He met with barely disguised hostility from the populace. Despite being as Orthodox as they were, he was seen as a traitor to the Orthodox faith for demanding supremacy over them as Patriarch of Rome. Manuel on the other hand was a conquering hero, who had re-established near full Imperial rule over Italy. And so when their beloved Emperor asked the general populace to accept Anacletus, their hostility was muted somewhat. Perhaps this Sicilian could be another step towards the total restoration of the Roman Empire?
One man, of course, disagreed, the Patriarch Luke. As head of the Orthodox Church, he surely was the head of matters of spirituality in the Roman Empire? Luke, by now seriously worried, began to spread shocking and dangerous rumours. The court of the Emperor would be moved back to Rome, the dreaded “filoque” clause would be added to the Nicene Creed, the Patriarchate of Constantinople would be reduced to a mere bishopric.
In modern times it can be hard to understand the devotion that the Byzantines had for their religion; it can only be compared to that of modern day football hooligans. A crowd of rioters suddenly surrounded Pope Anacletus’ temporary accommodation in part of the Palace. The Emperor was furious, and rode to the citizens almost alone, begging them to give the Pope a second chance, and assuring them that Constantinople would remain heart of the Roman Empire. Once again, when faced with their conquering hero, the citizens relented.
On February 1st, the Third Council of Nicaea was held. In it, a new brand of Christianity was hammered out, blending Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The Pope was head of the church, and his deputy would be the Patriarch of Constantinople, with all three other Patriarchs below them. Above all the Patriarchs was the Emperor himself; who, as equal of the Apostles, reserved the right to make of break Patriarchs. The filoque clause was removed from the Nicene Creed. A whole range of bishoprics were shuffled around, largely to compensate the Patriarch for his loss in status. Now he gained full responsibility for all Italy south of Rome herself, Sicily, and Sardinia.
The people of Constantinople rejoiced. The Roman Church was united once again. Not only had this but the Council also attended to some distinctly non-spiritual matters. Rome would once again be part of the Empire.
Manuel’s dominion was now at its greatest extent since the days of Heraclius. He ruled all of Italy south of the Po, the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, parts of Syria, and much of the Caucasus. Most other Emperors would have been happy with this vast realm, yet for Manuel it was not enough. The conqueror of Armenia and Sicily was determined to go further.
In 1162, the opportunity dawned. In Hungary, the death of King Géza II had prompted a minor struggle for power between the dead King’s son Stephen, and his brother, confusingly also named Stephen. The brother had already earlier fled to Constantinople, where he was supported by Manuel. Meanwhile, in Hungary, a tattered parish priest had turned up, claiming to be Pope Gregory VIII. Gregory urged King Stephen to break with the so recently reunited church, to follow the true Catholic faith, and the young king followed the Pope’s advice. This was, for Manuel, a final insult that he must return.
In 1163, he invaded Hungary. Stephen and Gregory attempted a counterassault, heading south towards Constantinople while Manuel was away, but they were ambushed by a force led by George Paleaologus, one of Manuel’s trusted generals. Battered, but not broken, they returned to Hungary, where the Emperor was waiting. At the battle of Siscia, once again Manuel emerged triumphant over a disorganized Western army. King Stephen fell down dead, while Pope Gregory did another of his famous vanishing acts. Manuel’s Stephen became King Stephen IV of Hungary, but not without a heavy demand from Manuel. All Hungary west of the Danube would be ceded to the Empire, it had once been Roman land, and would be restored to the Empire. Stephen tried to negotiate, but Manuel was inflexible. Finally, the new King agreed, and Manuel added another sizeable chunk to the Roman Empire.
The Emperor was now forty six years old. In a reign of twenty one years he had proved himself perhaps the greatest conqueror in all Byzantine history, surpassing Heraclius, Nicephorus Phocas, even Basil the Bulgar Slayer himself. Yet unlike these Emperors, there was no-one to check Manuel’s inexorable advance. To the east, the Seljuks had collapsed, to be replaced by a revived but still weak Abbasid Caliphate, and a more east Turkish dynasty, the Khwarezm Shah. In the south, Nur-ad-Din still proved resolutely unable to sieze Damascus and set himself up as a credible rival to the Empire. And the west had been humiliated not once, but twice before Manuel, who now had control of the Papacy, and could rest easy in this theatre.
In 1168 though, the inevitable finally happened; the fall of Damascus. A triumphant Nur-ad-Din now reigned over the largest and most powerful state to border Byzantium, and he had his eyes set on the next prize-Fatimid Egypt.
The Fatimids had once been a great power, but had never recovered from their disastrous defeat at the hands of Alp Arslan over a century previously. Their Caliphate had become increasingly introverted and isolated, reduced to little more than Egypt itself. Widely detested throughout the Islamic World for its Shiite faith, Egypt could only hope that Manuel Komnenos would come to its aid when Nur-ad-Din’s nephew Saladin marched on it in 1172. But Manuel, seeming stripped of his energy, would do no such thing. He had suddenly become disinterested in military matters, preferring to spend time with his ageing wife Theophano. Manuel and Theophano were childless, and desperately sought a son to revitalize the Empire. So, when the Empress, who must have been forty at the very least, conceived and gave birth to a son, Alexander, in 1170, it was widely hailed as a miracle. The proud father spent more and more time with his baby son over the next few years, intending to shape the boy into a new great Emperor. In this he failed. In 1174, he returned east.
Nur-ad-Din was in a position of dangerous strength. He held several great cities, Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Cairo, and funds from the conquest of Egypt steeled his armies. Manuel, seeing too late that the Muslim was now a credible threat to the Empire, hurriedly marched south.
As he crossed Asia Minor, the Emperor noticed that it was becoming more and more difficult to raise armies. His troops were spread out around the world, in Italy, Hungary and Armenia. In the absence of the peasant small-holders that made up the bulk of Manuel’s army, the great landowners had snatched up their plots, and great estates had radiated out once again. Here, the ageing Emperor must finally have begun to realize the immense damage he had wrought on his Empire. Byzantium was exhausted, and close to breaking point. Manuel could no longer gather armies of 50,000 or more men. He arrived at Antioch with a contingent of some fifteen thousand soldiers, and prepared for his last campaign.
As with all of Manuel’s wars, it began with staggering success. A week before Manuel had arrived at Antioch; Nur-ad-Din had finally passed away. His Sultanate was in chaos, and the Emperor advanced rapidly south. Aleppo fell, then Tripoli, Damascus, and Acre. By the beginning of 1176, the Emperor had surrounded Jerusalem. The Holy City fell to the Byzantine force on March 12th, providing a welcome boost in morale; Jerusalem was part of the Empire for the first time since 638! Manuel settled down in the city to plan his last great conquest, Egypt. But it was not to be.
In early September, he and his small army marched out of Jerusalem, to meet Saladin, Sultan of Egypt. Seeing the veteran Byzantine force approaching, Saladin retreated to a heavily fortified pass near the town of Gaza, and proposed a truce. Manuel refused, and began the assault on September 17th, 1176.
The Byzantine vanguard was the first to encounter Saladin's troops, and made it through the pass with few casualties, as the Egyptians were not finished setting up their positions. By the time the vanguard reached the end of the pass the rear was just about to enter; this allowed the Egyptians to almost completely trap them. Panicking, the commander John Ducas ordered the vanguard to return, but they could do nothing but watch, as little by little, waves of Muslim forces overwhelmed Manuel’s veterans.
Manuel himself was in no position to help either. As the shadows lengthened, he and his bodyguard turned and fled to Jerusalem. There, embassies were sent to Saladin, promising peace and a rich tribute, which the Sultan accepted. The invincible Emperor had been defeated.
Manuel returned to Constantinople the following spring, to hold a triumph, displaying the riches of the Holy Land for all to see. But the Emperor was mentally and physically drained. He had had ambitious plans for the Christianization the Holy Lands, vast new churches in Damascus and Aleppo, bringing Armenia into the Roman Church. In all of these he failed. For three years he sat in Constantinople, doing little but bask in his people’s affection. For them, he was Megas Basileus, the greatest Emperor, who had raised Byzantium to the mightiest power in the known world. Manuel, an intensely intelligent man, knew better. On September 17th 1180, four years to the day since Gaza, he died.
On the face of it, Manuel Komnenos was a truly great Emperor. He had extended Imperial prestige to its greatest height since Justinian, and had achieved a reunion of the churches that looked set to last. He died adored by his people, with a wife, son and brother at his bedside, and a vast empire.
Yet Manuel, for all his efforts, had wrecked the empire. The treasuries, after nearly forty years of unending warfare, lay empty, his armies were impossibly stretched to maintain order in Italy, Hungary, Armenia, and Palestine. He had made few arrangements for Alexander’s regency, and fewer for the future defence of the Empire. Even his most cherished achievement, Church unity, would not last for long after his death.
In conclusion then, while Manuel Komnenos was certainly a great Emperor, he was not a good one. And it is on his head, that the blame for three decades of future chaos must be placed.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND SURROUNDING STATES IN 1180AD
The Emperor Alexander IV was crowned in early October 1180. From the start, he did inspire confidence, largely due to the fact he was a 10 year old boy. Barely a few weeks after taking the throne therefore, Alexander was shoved aside by a prominent general named Andronicus, the cousin of Alexander’s father Manuel.
Andronicus Komnenos had grand plans for the empire. Unlike his cousin, he fully understood that the outlying regions would have to be brought over fully to Imperial loyalty. His attention turned first to Italy, where Imperial rule was resented, if not entirely hated. There, in several cities, notably Florence, he set up large schools, funded by the Emperor alone. The Byzantine garrisons in the city were largely withdrawn, and Italians were promoted in the civil service. Unlike most emperors before him, Andronicus realized that for his Empire to function, conquered peoples had to be given a stake in it. Accordingly, he laid out new laws. In Syria and Palestine, Islam would be tolerated, and in the heretical church in Armenia would be suppressed, but gently, owing largely to the steady trickle of people to Uniate Christianity.
Andronicus though, was not a naturally patient or gentle man. Accordingly, in 1182, he had himself crowned co-Emperor. The army was beginning to get restive through lack of pay, and Andronicus, realist as he was, decided that they needed to be paid now and brought onside, before it was too late. He proposed a massive tax on the wealthy landowners, which would cripple them, but give the army a solid monetary base to tighten control in Manuel’s conquests, and relieve pressure on the poor. When the rich, contemptuously refused Andronicus’ taxes, the Emperor’s patience snapped. Leading a small force of the Emperor’s elite Saxon Guard, he burned the Thracian manor of one rich landowner, one Constantine Nafpliotis, as an example to the others. Nafpliotis, who was visiting a relative in Athens, returned to his estate to find it a smoking ruin.
News quickly spread, but it had the opposite effect of what Andronicus had desired. Nafpliotis now led a revolt of some of the richest and most powerful men in the Byzantine Empire. Using their immense funds, they were able to gather a large mercenary army, and marched on Constantinople, demanding the surrender of the Emperor, and the withdrawal of his hated tax.
In Constantinople, Andronicus panicked. He deployed some 30,000 soldiers from Bulgaria to confront the threat, but the seriously demoralized troops were ambushed en-route by a group of Bulgarian brigands and badly bloodied. The brigands then marched on Sardica, and sacked the place, killing the Byzantine governor, and proclaiming a Second Empire of Bulgaria. Meanwhile, the loyalists were smashed by the landowners and their mercenaries, who sent messengers ahead to Constantinople asking for just one thing, the surrender of Andronicus Komnenos.
Here, the Emperor Alexander made the first of several decisions that would cripple the Empire throughout his long reign. One night, while Andronicus slept peacefully, Alexander ordered the Saxon Guards to attack. Andronicus tried to fight back, but was by now approaching seventy years old, and was quickly overwhelmed by the tough Englishmen. A week later, the twelve year old Emperor met with the noblemen near Adrianople. He brought with him the severed head of Andronicus.
Constantine Nafpliotis was victorious, but now, with the young Emperor before him, he had a new idea. Somehow he convinced the Patriarch Basil II and Alexander’s mother Theodora that a marriage between the young Emperor and his daughter Irene would be a good idea to ensure the loyalty of the landowners. The twelve year old Emperor of the Romans and the ten year old daughter of an aristocrat were married in the autumn of 1182. A pair of children reigned over a Roman Empire that was collapsing into disaster.
In Hungary, King Ladislaus III, an intelligent plotter of a man, saw his chance. With Bulgaria in revolt, the Imperial troops west of the Danube were isolated. In a violent battle, the Byzantines were defeated by the Hungarian, who pressed his advantage, moving down into Dalmatia. By the end of 1183, Byzantium’s Balkan territories were in great trouble.
Even the Church, Manuel’s proudest achievement began to crack. The long reign of Pope Anacletus III had finally come to an end in 1181, and he was succeeded by Anacletus IV. Anacletus IV then angered the powerful King Henry I of England by demanding that he practice Uniate Christianity, rather than the pure Catholicism which remained strong to the north and west of the Christian world. Henry pointedly refused, and allied with the Catholic Emperor of Germany, Henry IV. The two Henrys then devoted their considerable power to the conquest of Uniate France. Caught in a pincer movement, the French quickly surrendered. It was what they did next that was so damaging. The two empires decided to place their frontier along the river Seine, and placed a “Patriarch of the West” in Paris, who controlled a long narrow strip of territory along the length of the river. This Patriarch was essentially a reinstated Pope, a pupil of the long dead Gregory VIII, who called himself Michael I, the first Pope of Paris. With the Parisian Papacy Catholicism burned back into life, and Christendom was once more divided.
Not that Emperor Alexander would have been remotely concerned by this. The young man had fallen totally under the spell of the two most important women in his life; he had developed a passionate hatred. In 1188, Empress Irene II, aged just sixteen, managed to persuade the Senate that her mother in law Theodora was an enemy of the state. The Senate panicked, and the Saxon Guards were sent in. For the second time in just six years, a senior member of the Imperial family met their maker on the end of an English axe.
While Byzantium descended into chaos, to the north, Bulgaria was thriving. Tsar Peter IV was a superbly talented military leader. In 1190, he crushed an attempted Imperial reconquest led by Constantine Nafpliotis, punishing the landowner with blinding, just as the great Emperor Basil II had blinded Bulgarians in the distant past. Adrianople, undefended, was sacked the next year, and in 1193, the newly built Bulgarian fleet began to harass the coastal cities of northern Anatolia. Alexander, responded by sending a small flotilla of around twenty dilapidated warships, which were duly crushed.
However, Alexander was no longer really in control of his own court. Ever since her marriage to him a decade ago, Irene Nafpliota had been steadily increasing her influence over her inept husband. As a teenager, she had ridded herself of her main rival for power, Alexander’s mother Theodora, now she turned her attention to seizing total control of the Roman Empire.
It is clear that Irene was an unusually intelligent woman, and she must have laid out her plans with real care and caution. In 1193, the same year as the fleet’s humiliation at the hands of the Bulgarians, she had fallen pregnant, delivering a son, Isaac, on Christmas Day of that year. The baby boy cemented her claims to the throne, and, with the baby just a few weeks old, she had him crowned co-Emperor. Slowly, advocating the rights of her son, Irene’s influence lengthened. Alexander II was slowly but surely pushed aside. He appeared less and less in public, with Irene and her young son taking command. By the late 1190’s he had fallen into drunkenness and despair, despite fathering three more children, all daughters; Zoe, Theophano and Anna.
Irene could now congratulate herself on being the most powerful human being in the Empire. Unfortunately, she misused her position. She began to favour a Syrian general, Abu Karim Muhammad, who was, as his name suggests, an Arab. Naturally this caused immense scandal at the courts of both Constantinople and Rome, despite the fact that it was Karim who had been able to maintain a tenuous Imperial presence in Palestine. Never mind the fact that Karim had renounced Islam and spoke perfect Greek and Latin, his race made him an object of loathing as a “Saracen infidel”. In cosmopolitan Antioch this mattered little, and even in Constantinople it could have been tolerated, but for Rome it was unacceptable. In 1202, Anacletus IV wrote a stern letter to the Empress, urging her to sack the great general. Irene prevaricated for a while, but pressure was slowly but surely building against Karim, and the general was dismissed.
For Karim, this was an outrage, which he had no intention of accepting. His armies were extremely loyal to him, Irene, having starved the army of income, commanded the loyalty of only the Saxon Guard. Upon returning to Antioch, Karim sent messengers to Al-Adil, the Sultan of Egypt, offering him Palestine and Cyprus in exchange for military support. The Sultan enthusiastically agreed, and Karim gained some 10,000 heavy cavalry to support his Byzantine native troops. His army thus gained, he returned west; to Constantinople.
The news reached Irene that the capital was being marched on near the end of 1203. The empress sent messengers to Rome, demanding money and troops from Anacletus and the Catapan of Italy, David Bringas, but the Pope had passed away, and Bringas was already fully engaged crushing a revolt in Corsica. The Empress was left powerless.
Then, suddenly it seemed as though the Lord sent her a miracle. Near Nicaea, Karim had settled down to eat at the home of a noble who had revolted with him. The general had begun to choke and splutter, before slumping down, face first in a bowl of food. He had choked on a grape. The Empress had been saved.
Or so it seemed. In fact, Karim’s death brought only the shortest term benefit to the empire. Upon hearing the news of the general’s death, Al-Adil decided to invade Palestine anyway. Jerusalem fell after just a few days, and a massacre ensued. Every Christian and Jew found within the city walls was brutally murdered. Some, in an irony, were crucified in front of the Holy Sepulcher. It was an act of sickening brutality, that, unfortunately, would be repeated all too often over the decades to come.
By 1210, Syria and Palestine were effectively lost. Antioch held out, as did a few coastal strongholds like Acre and Tripoli. But other than these, all of Manuel’s last great conquest was lost. In Constantinople, the apathetic rule of Empress Irene and her woeful husband continued. The Empire needed a saviour. In 1212, it finally got one.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND SURROUNDING STATES IN 1212AD
Italy was one of the only parts of the empire that was still thriving at the beginning of the 13th century. Ever since the establishment of Florence as an intellectual heart of the empire by Andronicus in 1181, Italy had undergone a series of dramatic changes that would eventually become known as “the Renaissance”. Thirty years later, the Italian Renaissance was in full swing. Since Irene had taken control in Constantinople, Italy had gained a large measure of autonomy, jointly ruled by the Catapan in Palermo and the Pope in Rome. Therefore it should come as no surprise that, with Constantinople sinking into ever deeper chaos, the next Emperor of the Romans should be an Italian.
Georgio Rossi was the son of a prosperous Genoan merchant, who had enlisted in the army of the Catapan of Italy, and had served with distinction in crushing the Corsican revolt. Rossi was still a young man, when he first appears in the records of Benito Conti, the famous thirteenth century Italian chronicler. According to Conti, Rossi was a gifted leader and superb public speaker. How exactly he became involved in the conspiracy is unknown, but by the end of 1211, all was not well for the Empress Irene II in Italy.
In 1210, she had been foolish enough to annoy the wife of the powerful and intelligent Catapan of Italy, David Bringas. Bringas then decided enough was enough. The Roman Empire had a long tradition of violent military regime change; it was how the Komnenids had come to power over a century before, and it was how their dynasty would fall.
Over Christmas of 1211, the powerful men of Italy met with Pope Tiberius in Rome, where the demise of the Komnenid dynasty was planned out. Bringas and Rossi would together lead the army and fleet of Italy against Constantinople, enlisting the alliance of the Bulgarian Tsar if it was possible. Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the Catapan’s son Michael would try and undermine the dynasty from within.
The plan was put into action in early spring, 1212AD. Rossi and Bringas together gathered an army of around 25,000 and marched across the Balkans. En route, an embassy arrived from Bulgaria, the Tsar would be delighted to offer them military support in exchange for 10 years of peace between Bulgaria and the Empire. The Italians were delighted to agree, and their numbers were immediately swelled by around 20,000 Bulgarian troops.
Back in Constantinople, Irene and Alexander remained defiant. But the entire Empire was against them. In Asia Minor, Theodore Laskaris, an important general based in Nicaea chose to throw his lot in with the Italian revolt. Irene, now realizing her situation was hopeless, sent out messengers to negotiate with the rebels. In August 1212, the former Empress was sent in exile to Italy. Her son Isaac was forcibly sent into a monastery in Armenia. Her three daughters would have brighter futures, married to the men of the new aristocracy. The eldest, Zoe, was engaged to Georgio Rossi, the middle daughter Theophano was betrothed to Michael Bringas, while the youngest, Anna, aged just thirteen, would eventually marry Basil Paleaologus, a close ally of Rossi.
With Irene and Isaac thus deposed of, the rebels resumed the march on Constantinople. Emperor Alexander attempted to organise the terrified populace into defence, reminding them of his great and noble ancestors who had done so much for the empire. The citizens were unimpressed. How exactly Alexander died is unknown, but it is rumoured that he was stabbed by an elderly man, a former soldier under Manuel. It is certainly a good story. On October 4th, 1212, the Senate opened the gates of Constantinople to the rebel army.
There was never any doubt as to who would take the throne. David Bringas might have organised the revolt, but he was ageing fast, and besides, he held a deep love for Italy, and missed the country which he had governed for decades. Theodore Laskaris was an impressive leader of men, and a talented general, but he was not well liked by the citizenry of Constantinople. Therefore, on October 10th, Georgio Rossi was crowned Emperor George I of the Romans, the first Italian Emperor for centuries.
The new Emperor took as his inspiration Isaac Komnenos, and like him, he was determined to put the empire back on firm ground. In the east, the thematic system had finally collapsed under the pressure from greedy landowners, but as an Italian, Rossi arguably was more aware of classical Roman history than the Romans of Constantinople themselves. He was able to see that with the empire so spread out once more what was needed was a professional standing army, with property becoming a reward, not a requirement, for service. Therefore it can be said that George’s first step towards restoring the Roman Empire was the restoration of its most famed feature; the Imperial Legionaries.
The legions had declined in the sixth and early seventh centuries for several reasons; the loss of vast swathes of territory, their unsuitability for light warfare against the Arabs, and the large cities from which they had been drawn had been replaced by primarily agricultural areas. By 1212 however, most of these factors were no longer in existence. Cities were booming, especially around the Aegean and in Sicily, so more and more tax revenues were flowing into Constantinople. In Irene’s day, these had been squandered on bribes and sweeteners, but no more.
Command for retraining the armies was entrusted to Michael Bringas, who was appointed “Praetorian Prefect” another long abandoned term. By 1214, there were twenty “legeonas” stationed around the empire. Recognizing nevertheless that warfare had evolved radically since the days of the early Emperors, these were supported by horse archers, a Turkish design beloved by the Byzantines, and the traditional heavy cataphract cavalry. George was eager to try out this formidable new force. In 1215, he marched east.
His object was beleaguered Palestine. Of Manuel’s impressive conquests, only a couple of coastal cities remained. Undeterred, George pushed south. The Egyptian army was met, and crushed near Tiberias. The jubilant Emperor pursued the Egyptians south, pausing at Nazareth to order construction of a vast new set of city walls; henceforth the birthplace of the Saviour of Mankind would be the capital of Palestine. Jerusalem, place of Jesus’ death, was deemed by George to have been tainted by the presence of the “vile false prophet” Mohammed. Perhaps this is why he made no moves against the Holy city; remaining content to let the broken Egyptians pay him massive tributes to ensure their independence. A new legion was formed of native Christians to police the province, with old thematic forces acting as border guards. This done, the Emperor returned to Constantinople.
Though George was a competent general, it was at the administrative and diplomatic side of Empire that he really excelled. His reorganisation of the army was just the start. In 1218, he began a major overhaul of the legal system, which had not been so comprehensively looked over since the time of Basil I in the ninth century. Over the next eight years, drawing on the skills of Italian, Greek, Armenian and Syrian scholars, and the law was slowly adapted to fit the greatly enlarged empire since Basil’s day. Jews and Muslims were both granted official protection under the law, though they had to pay a special tax. All non-religious limits on reaching power in the state were removed, as long as you were a Uniate Christian with a firm grasp of Greek you could rise to power, something that the Italian Emperor must have been very proud of.
However, while Byzantium boomed, the rest of the world was crumbling. A deadly new threat had arisen in the East, while in the West, the growth of great new empires threatened Byzantium’s neutrality.
The problem had begun in 1217, when the ambitious King Richard I of England had invaded the independent French principality of Toulouse. Its inhabitants, the Occitanians, had appealed to the Pope, for they were Uniate Christians, for support, but Tiberius was unwilling to act without support from the Emperor. George, for his part, was reluctant to deploy troops to Toulouse, an area which he doubtless considered semi-barbarian and worthless strategically. On the other had, the Occitanians were Uniate, and they controlled all of Mediterranean France. To allow them to fall would give the powerful King of England access to the Mediterranean, where he could threaten Byzantine shipping, and the provinces of Corsica and Sardinia. Therefore, after much dithering, George eventually agreed to send two legions to reinforce the Occitanians in the summer of 1218.
The expedition was a mixed success. Though the Occitanians were able to defeat Richard, it was not a conclusive, crushing victory, and there was much confusion between the Greek and Italian speaking legionaries and the feudal French Occitanians. On the other hand, it ensured the survival of Uniate Christianity not only in Toulouse, but also in Christian Spain, where, six years previously, the Christians had recaptured the great city of Cordoba.
In the east, the danger to Byzantium was much more pressing. In 1220, the Khwarezmian Shah had suddenly and dramatically been crushed, by a race so savage that George feared “Attila himself has risen from Hell to destroy the Romans”. This new great warrior was not Attila the Hun, but a man named Genghis Khan, who had, in just fourteen years, established a gigantic empire that stretched from Persia to Korea. George had no wish to antagonize such a great warlord, and hurriedly sent Genghis fine gifts of gold, silk and furs. The Khan appreciated the gesture, and send ambassadors back to Constantinople, where a peace was agreed to between the Mongols and Byzantines.
But it was not a peace that could last long. The Mongol warriors returned from Constantinople open mouthed with awe, here was a city whose beauty and size only the Chinese could match. More worryingly for the Byzantines, they were richer than the Chinese by far. Slowly but surely, tales began to build up in Genghis’ court, of the extraordinary wealth of the Roman Empire of the East. While Genghis was alive, he would not hear of attacks on his ally in the west. But in 1227, the greatest conqueror since Alexander passed away. Inevitably, the great hordes began to turn west. Across the largest empire Earth had ever seen, gigantic armies began to amass. The Mongols were marching on Constantinople.
Genghis Khan was succeeded by his third, and favourite, son Ögedei Khan in 1229. Ögedei realized that to maintain control over his father’s huge empire, further conquests were needed. For a while, he considered attack Baghdad, but then had a better idea. Baghdad might be large and rich, but there was another city, even further west, that was still larger and richer: Constantinople.
Soon after his accession, therefore, Ögedei sent an army west. There can be little doubt that this army was vast in size, numbering perhaps as many as 200,000 soldiers. Frantic embassies from Emperor George I were dismissed, the Khan would not be dissuaded. In the spring of 1230, the great expedition set out.
There was originally some debate amongst the Mongols as to which route to take, but it the end Ögedei, a manknown for his ability to sway doubters in any debate in which he was involved, persuaded his generals and advisers to march south, through the Caucasus. The Mongol horsemen thundered west. By now seriously alarmed, back in Constantinople, George sent word to the King of Georgia, under King George IV. The Emperor’s namesake and close friend immediately prepared for war. A significant Georgian force set out to meet the Mongols, at the soon to be infamous battlefield of Gandza.
There, on September 14th, the Georgian army was annihilated. Their troops, largely heavy infantry, had drawn up on a plain on what had begun as a warm morning. By midday however, with heat searing down on their thick armour, the Georgians began to wilt. The Mongols begin the assault. Led by Ögedei’s talented young nephew Batu Khan, the disciplined and terrifying Mongol horse archers began to loose volley after volley of death at the Georgians. An attempt by the Georgian’s own horse archers to drive their enemies off ended in disaster; the Mongols were true steppe warriors, not a motley group of mercenaries. Growing desperate now, George IV himself led his crack heavy cavalry at a charge straight into the Mongolian lines. Despite inflicting some casualties, the King was captured by the hardened Mongol troops. Only then did the Mongols close for the kill. More and more arrows hummed into the Georgian ranks. Soldiers began to break and run, only to be ridden down and butchered by the terrifying eastern warriors. By evening, the defeat was complete. The entire military might of the Kingdom of Georgia had been wiped out in the space of a few hours.
The King was brought before the Khan on hands and knees. Ögedei commented that the Georgian ruler had fought well and nobly on the battlefield, and it would be a terrible shame for such a brave warrior to be ransomed home like a coward. With these words, the last King of Georgia was executed.
News of the defeat carried fast to Tbilisi, the capital. Soon, the Mongolians were at the gates. Ögedei offered the inhabitants a simple choice, abandon their city, or lose their lives. The terrified, demoralised citizens chose the latter option, and the Mongols rode in. Within a few days, Tbilisi had been demolished, its gold and jewels looted, its houses burned.
The capital of Georgia was indeed a rich prize, but for the ever hungry Ögedei, it was but a mere appetizer compared to his ultimate title, the capital of the Roman Empire. Ignoring the freezing conditions of winter in the Caucasus, the Mongolians swept westward. Trebizond and Sinop both cowered before the oncoming storm, but were ignored. There could be no more distractions now, Constantinople must fall.
By December, Ögedei had arrived at the Hellespont. He urgently needed to cross the narrow stretch of water, and so descended on the cities of the area, Pergamum, Smyrna, and Nicaea, demanding ship builders. All winter, the coasts of Anatolia rang to the sound of the Great Khan’s engineers, building a vast fleet of ships to transport thousands upon thousands of horsemen across the Hellespont.
In Constantinople, George I had received the news of the Mongol advance with horror. But where other emperors might have panicked, the Italian stood firm. The great land walls of the capital were restored, and legions were recalled from across the Balkans to defend the Queen of Cities. But it was in the Golden Horn that the Emperor made his most important preparations. If the Great Khan wanted a war by sea, then the Emperor of the Romans would deliver him one.
Back at Abydos, Ögedei’s base on the Hellespont, preparations were nearly complete. In an astonishingly short space of time, a vast armada of boats had been raised. Ögedei decided to make an impression on the watching Romans. The boats were to be lashed together to make a bridge, which the Mongol horsemen would walk over. The Khan had already heard tales of Xerxes doing this nearly two millennia before, a great king from the east descending on the Greeks. Perhaps he did not bother to hear what happened to the Persian in the end. Either way, by Easter, his bridge was complete. A magnificent bridge of boats, strapped together, spanned the mile across the Hellespont. The Great Khan was the first to cross, urinating on the far side, the first Mongol to enter Europe. Then he returned. The crossing would be made the next morning.
He did not notice the small ship that desperately fled north up the Marmara to Constantinople. Exactly how the message was re-laid in time is unknown. But that evening, on the 16th April 1231, the trap was ready.
The next morning, the great Mongolian army began to cross. The horses were nervous at the rather unsteady bridge, so progress was slow, as their riders comforted and encouraged their steeds. Suddenly, ships began to appear on either side of the bridge. The Khan, expecting this, ordered warships to engage the Romans, which they did. The unfortunate sailors, drafted from as far away as China, could have had little idea what would happen next.
From a Roman warship, a dazzling orange flame began to appear. A viscous, boiling hot liquid was pumped out of nozzles at the front of the warships, engulfing the terrified Mongols. Many threw themselves into the sea, only to be boiled alive by the flames, which burned even on the surface of the water. In a short time, the Mongol defenders had been overcome. The Romans closed on the bridge.
Terror began to break out as the first blasts of Greek fire impacted upon the soldiers crossing. The horses, desperate to escape this horrific death, began to stampede. Coupled with the burning boats, the bridge began to break up. More and more Mongols and their horses leapt into the sea, trying to swim to safety, but the Romans were relentless. More and more Greek fire was pumped out, annihilating the survivors. Missiles flew, sinking the warriors, while small boats of locals scurried around the great galleys, impaling Mongol survivors. The defeat of the Great Khan was total and humiliating.
Ögedei had remained on the far shore, watching all this. As soon as the bridge had begun to collapse, he had ordered all men to retreat. Desperately, the Khan fled across Anatolia, but as his horsemen entered a ravine in the Taurus, they were finally cornered. Trapped and exhausted in enemy territory, the Mongols were massacred to a man. Once again the Roman Empire had emerged triumphant against the odds.
Yet the Mongol menace was far from over. The Battle of Abydos might well have been a disaster for the steppe warriors, but their greatest general, Ögedei’s nephew Batu Khan, had survived. He, and around two thousand others, had already successfully crossed the Hellespont when the Romans attacked. Desperately, the Mongolian fled north, defeating a small Roman force that had been sent to intercept him. Legend has it he and his warriors personally swam across the Danube, either way, by the end of 1231, Batu and the “two thousand” had arrived back at the Mongol capital, Karakorum.
Batu immediately asserted his authority. Yes, there had been a defeat in the west, but it was on Asia that the stability of the young empire depended. Accordingly, Batu made no further moves on the Romans, diverting his forces to completing the conquest of China.
Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the populace was stunned. Never before had such a great force invaded, caused such panic, and then retreated again so suddenly. Some ascribed it to the Virgin Mary, but for the more practical minded it was clear that there was only one true saviour, the Emperor George.
Seldom before had a Roman Emperor experienced such unbridled love from his subjects, but in truth, by the end of 1232, George was fading fast. To this day, the disease that afflicted him is unknown, but it is presumed to have been cancer. More worryingly for the empire, he had no son to succeed him, only a daughter, Theodora. Young Theodora had inherited all of her grandmother Irene’s dominating personality in full, and her father realised the danger of allowing her too much political power in the state. Therefore, he betrothed her to one Isaac Bringas, the grandson of George’s by now long dead ally David Bringas, and a talented young general. This done, the Emperor formally retired from the throne, crowning Isaac Bringas Emperor of the Romans. He died around the age of fifty in 1234 back home in Genoa, with his beloved wife Zoe Komnena at his side. Fortunately for the Romans, their saviour from the West had left the Empire in capable hands. For the first time since Justinian and Theodora, an Emperor and Empress would share equal power over the Empire; and the results would be no less spectacular.
EUROPE IN 1232
RELIGIOUS DIVISIONS IN 13th CENTURY EUROPE
Emperor Isaac II was thirty two years old when he inherited the throne of the Roman Empire. Despite his youth, he was widely liked and trusted by the Senate and Church, due to his relaxed, yet confident ways. In Rome, Pope Michael I, himself newly crowned declared a golden age of glory over the Empire. Isaac II’s reign would certainly be one to be remembered.
The Emperor came to the throne just months after the violent Mongol raid of Ögedei Khan, and therefore he sent embassies to the new Khan, Ögedei’s nephew Batu. However, all was not well at the court of the Great Khan. Though Batu had directed the conquest of Song China, adding new riches to the Mongol Empire, and thus erasing the shame of the Battle of Abydos, he was never personally popular among the Mongols themselves. They were virtually sure that he was not, as he claimed, a direct blood descendant of the great Genghis, as his grandmother, had given birth to his father just weeks after Genghis released her from captivity. A short, bitter struggle for power in Karakorum followed. Batu was executed, and his cousin Güyük was elected Great Khan. But others still clamored for Güyük’s throne, and so the new Khan was happy to sign a peace treaty with the Romans.
Despite the peace, Isaac and Theodora both remained wary of the Mongols. Therefore, in 1236, they sent embassies to Kiev, the empire’s closest and most powerful ally. The two states agreed to mutually aid each other in the event of a Mongolian attack. Gradually, Roman and Russian civilization was beginning to draw together. A heavily pregnant Empress Theodora even visited Kiev personally over Christmas of 1240, where she went into labour, and delivered Isaac the last of their three children, a son, Constantine. This boy was hailed by the Metropolitan of Kiev as an honorary Russian, due to the fact that his baptism took place in the main cathedral of Kiev.
In the empire proper, business was booming. The growth of cities continued at a rate unseen for over a millennium. Constantinople’s population now stood at over one and a half million, fed by vast imports of grain from Anatolia and the Russian steppes. Within these large cities, something very new was happening however. For the first time in its history, the Roman Empire was developing a middle class.
The new middle classes were a mixed group. Made up of scholars, doctors, lawyers and merchants, they were rapidly spreading across the empire. More worryingly for the Imperial system, they were finding ways to exert their voice in the state. The ancient blue-blooded families of the Constantinopolitan Senate were slowly losing ground, as more and more middle income citizens flooded in. Gradually, the middle class began to demand a change in government. No longer could the Empire exist as a divine monarchy. Peacefully, though insistently, the middle classes began to campaign for a system not seen in its rawest form since before Christ Himself, a Demokratia.
At first, Isaac and Theodora were unsure how to cope with these demands. Both were extremely popular with the people, and had no wish to alienate them. On the other hand, anything that gave the mob more power surely reduced the power of the Basileus, Equal of the Apostles as he was. Nevertheless, the rulers decided to listen to the people’s demands. After all, did Jesus himself not say all were equal before the eyes of God?
Progress towards a true democracy in the empire was initially very slow, partly due to Isaac and Theodora’s extreme caution. However, in 1246, one event suddenly jerked the democratic movement back into life. From the East, a terrible plague arrived.
How exactly the Black Death swept down on the Roman Empire is unknown, though it is virtually certain that Mongols were involved. The most likely theory is in 1244, the Mongols, supported by Chinese auxiliaries, were engaged in putting down a revolt in Georgia. During a protracted siege of the town of Batumi, the disease erupted amongst the Mongol army. The ingenious Mongol leader catapulted the infected corpses over the city walls to infect the inhabitants. The Georgian rebels fled west, bringing the plague by ship into Constantinople and the Balkans, whence it spread, with frightening speed.
The plague arrived at the capital around March. By the end of the year, it had spread as far north as Frankfurt and Paris, and as far west as Portugal. From its original Georgian genesis point, the Black Death, as it came to be known, rampaged southward to Baghdad and Cairo, and back eastwards into the Mongol Empire. Half the world was united in death and suffering.
Though the Plague in Constantinople lasted less than a year, in that time almost half of the capital’s population was removed over one long, nightmarish summer. Conditions were warm and wet, perfect for the fleas, which leapt from one corpse to the next. As far as the bacterium involved, Yersinia pestis, was concerned, Constantinople was the perfect home. Though this was now the bacterium’s third visit to the capital, Roman medicine proved as inefficient as ever. By July, the Empress Theodora was stricken, followed quickly by her daughter Helena, the Imperial couple’s eldest child.
One man remained safe though. Isaac Bringas, Emperor of the Romans, would later put his survival down to the grace of the Virgin, thought it is more likely to have been from his own insistence on personal hygiene that was unparalleled amongst contemporary European monarchs. By October, when the plague finally began to die back (though it would continue to ravage more distant areas such as England and Spain into the next year), Isaac could ponder the immense task of reconstruction.
The problems he faced were formidable. Between a quarter and a third of the population of the Empire had been erased, among them many generals, senators and bishops, not to mention his beloved wife and daughter. According to later legend, the Emperor had a dream in which the Virgin ordered him to tend to the sick and needy, as Christ before him had done. Isaac, an exceptionally pious man, did just that. Leaving the government in the hands of his six year old son Constantine (though more practically, Patriarch Alexander of Constantinople), Isaac began to tour the empire, following the example of John II before him. Iconium, Caesarea, Antioch and Bethlehem were all visited in a breakneck three month tour of the east. Next, the emperor boarded ship for Sicily, visiting Cyprus and Crete en route. He dared not venture into the Italian heartland, where the fires of the plague still flickered, but his presence at Palermo and Bari was greatly appreciated by the general populace. Finally, at the end of 1247, he returned home, via Dyracchium and Thessalonica.
Not only did Isaac’s tour of the empire further increase his immense popularity, it also gave the Emperor serious food for thought. All around his realm he had met his average citizens, law abiding, intelligent men and women who felt passionately about the state of affairs in their particular theme, and wished to have a more direct stake in the empire. After all, they argued, yes, the Emperor was the Equal of the Apostles. But in the eyes of the Lord, all men are born equal. Why should the chance for advancement to the very highest position of state be denied to the lowly born?
One of the most passionate men speaking out in favour of this theory was Patriarch Alexander, newly promoted by the Emperor to be Pope. Alexander, whose grandparents had been farmers in Sparta, a peaceful backwater of the empire, felt strongly about the issue of the small man rising himself up to power and recognition through piety, strength, and a good deal of hard work. Over the next few years, he engaged in major discussions with his close friend the Emperor, by aiding him with several minor theological matters, such as Isaac’s second marriage to an Athenian, Katherine.
Finally, in 1252, the Emperor rolled out sweeping new legislation. Every themata would henceforth be ruled in tandem, by a military commander, the commander of the theme’s legion who would be responsible for defence of the theme and organising the contribution to the army, and an elected magistrate from the general populace, to monitor internal affairs within the theme, such as taxation and trade. This magistrate could serve for a period of up to three years before re-election, after which he was eligible to stand as a Senator in Palermo, Thessalonica, Iconium or Bethlehem, which Isaac designated as “dioceses”. Finally, the citizen could aim for the ultimate honour, as a member of the Constantinopolitan Senate, holding such ferocious powers as voting on taxes, how many soldiers to deploy in event of war, organisation of the grain supply in Constantinople, and generally ultimate authority in the empire unless directly overruled by the Emperor himself. Every Christian male citizen over the age of 16 gained the right to vote, and women too could earn the right, provided they were they sufficiently pious and intelligent.
For the ancient aristocracy, it was a bitter blow, but they were too divided and shattered by the plague to do much to oppose it. They retained hereditary seats on the Senate, and in practise their greater funds meant that they were far more able to run an election campaign than the common man, though after a while, this advantage began to count for less and less.
Nevertheless, despite these seismic changes, in many ways, life continued as normal. The legions still nervously watched the Mongol frontier, to the north the Germans rampaged around the Baltic, seeking converts to heretical Catholicism, while fur and caviar swept down the Dnieper from Russia to Byzantium. This was the world into which the boy Emperor Constantine X emerged. Constantine grew up in an empire enjoying a golden age. Fluent in Latin, Greek, and Arabic, Constantine was clearly destined to be another scholar emperor, like his illustrious namesake, the 10th century Constantine VIII. And when his father Isaac breathed his last, aged around seventy, on September 19th, 1269, Constantine was ready.
Already, his world was changing. In 1258, the Mongol army had sacked Baghdad. Once Constantinople’s only true rival outside China, the great city had been left a snuffed out shell. The golden age of Islam had been obliterated in a few days. The Muslim chronicler Abdullah Wassaf perfectly captures the mood of terror and destruction in the city of the Caliph.
"They swept through the city like hungry falcons attacking a flight of doves, or like raging wolves attacking sheep, with loose reins and shameless faces, murdering and spreading terror...beds and cushions made of gold and encrusted with jewels were cut to pieces with knives and torn to shreds. Those hiding behind the veils of the great Harem were dragged...through the streets and alleys, each of them becoming a plaything...as the population died at the hands of the invaders."
The sack of Baghdad worried the Romans, not because they regretted the loss of life- they did not- but more the scale of the damage. Few could imagine such a catastrophe overturning a major Roman city like Antioch or Bethlehem, let alone Constantinople herself. In the face of the gathering Mongol storm, the Romans cast their memories back to the dark days prior to the Battle of Abydos, when a Mongolian army had easily swept past their defenses and rampaged through Anatolia. And that was just a raid. Imagine what a full scale invasion could do!
At Karakorum, the Great Khan Hulagu, and his successor Abaqa had similar emotions. In 1259, nervous Roman ambassadors had arrived at Karakorum seeking an extension of the peace, which Hulagu was happy to grant, but Aqaba was less inclined to be peaceful. In 1265, the by now elderly Isaac had tried to offer the Khan the hand of his illegitimate daughter Maria in marriage, but Abaqa turned down the proposal.Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was a nominal Christian, Abaqa wanted control over the greatest and oldest state in the Christian world. By the time Constantine X came to the throne in 1269, the situation was rapidly spiraling out of control. Once again, the Mongols were marching on the Roman Empire. This time, they would not be repelled so easily.
ROMAN THEMATA AND DIOCESES AFTER THE REFORMS OF 1252AD
The Emperor Constantine X was not, to put it mildly, warrior material. Yet, over his reign, he exerted every possible effort to save the empire from a foe whose tenacity, violence, and tactical brilliance had not been seen since the days of the Caliphate at its height.
Constantine was, above all, a realist. He knew he was not a great warrior, and that, if push came to shove, faced with a full blown Mongolian invasion, with all the limitless resources that entailed, the empire would be unlikely to be able to pull off a decisive victory. And victory at all was distinctly unlikely.
So the Emperor decided on a bold idea. Embassies were sent to Egypt, Bulgaria, Galicia and Kiev, all (save Kiev), traditionally rivals and enemies of the empire. The Sultan of Egypt, admittedly, owed the Empire his throne, due to assistance in crushing a Mamluk revolt years before, while Bulgaria and the Russians could be expected to show support, for they were all Uniate Christians. The fact that Pope Gregory IX helpfully suggested the possibility of a Slavic Patriarch in exchange for assistance also helped. Nevertheless, in medieval times, such a diverse group of allies was unusual, and it gave the nervous Romans a much needed confidence boost.
To the east, the Great Khan Kublai was gathering an army so large, peasants said, that it took a week to pass. The exact size of the Great Khan’s army is still unknown, but it is estimated to have numbered around half a million. Upon reaching the northern tip of the Caspian, Kublai divided his forces. The general Mengu-Timur led half the army into Russia, while his rival and subordinate Nogai took the other half southwards. Their plan was simple, crush the Roman allies, then move in on the empire itself. It would be a brutally successful one.
The first engagement took place in April 1273, when Mengu-Timur met with a Kievan army under the command of the Grand Prince Lev I. The Russian army was formidable, made up of a hardy mixture of wild Viking heavy infantry, native Slavic regular troops, and heavy missile cavalry, descended from the Pechenegs, who had invaded Alexius’ Byzantium nearly two centuries before.
But the Mongols were even more formidably armed. Fifty years of rule over the Chinese had taught them some lessons in the art of warfare. It is speculated that this evolution in the Mongol war machine may have been prompted by their interaction with the Roman Empire, a state that had over a millennium copied the armies of its enemies and conquered peoples. Either way, the army commanded by Mengu-Timur was a formidable, and multi-ethnic, fighting force.
The two armies met at Belgorod, to the east of Kiev. Initially, Timur attempted to repeat the tactics that had won the Mongols their empire; wheeling horse archers breaking up an enemy army. Yet the Russians stood firm. Lev deployed his own horse archers, surprising the Mongolian cavalry, and driving them back. Seeking to press their advantage, the Russian cavalry charged forward towards a group of lightly armed Chinese auxiliaries, and were met by two entirely new, and entirely ferocious weapons.
From the Chinese ranks a hail of missiles suddenly blasted forward. The Russians were probably the first Europeans to encounter that deadly Chinese military invention; the repeating crossbow.
Compared to any other missile, the repeating crossbow was unmatched. Its most terrifying ability was to discharge missiles at rates of up to about two per second, against a target as far as 75 metres away. As the first bolts landed, pandemonium was instantly created in the Russian ranks. Horses dropped, dead or wounded, and the others fled in terror from this awful weapon. Yet, once out of range, the Russians imagined themselves to be safe. They had no idea about the next and even more deadly weapon in the Mongol arsenal.
Slowly, the Chinese began to approach the stationary Russian lines. From out of their ranks, men appeared, wheeling long, hollow steel tubes. Curiously, the Russians observed the frantic activity around the tubes, as the enemy loaded small lead balls into them. They can have had no idea of what would happen next.
Thunder rang out over the steppes. All across the Russian front line, men were buckling, lumps of lead smashing their skulls or ribs. Desperately, Lev’s discipline now finally broke. The Russians charged towards the Chinese lines, Viking warriors lifting their mighty battleaxes against the hapless Chinese. Yet, as they approached, the ground below them suddenly exploded. The ever ingenious Chinese armies had planted landmines in front of their lines. The Russian army was utterly broken. As they fled in any direction they could, the Mongol horsemen swept down from all sides, massacring the fleeing enemy. The defeat of Kiev was utter and humiliating. Mengu-Timur marched on Kiev, ignoring the pleas of Russian ambassadors to turn back. The city was stormed, and razed, its fine churches smashed, its wooden houses burned. Women were raped, men murdered. The greatest city of Russia was left a smoking ruin. As soon as the news reached Galicia, the craven state surrendered rather than risk facing the Mongol terror. On the western front, only the Bulgarians remained loyal to Constantine. And in the east, the situation was very little better.
Nogai had advanced south from the remnants of Baghdad in December 1272, and by March, after a dangerous and gruelling trip through the deserts, finally arrived, already bloodied, at Jerusalem. Here, he was confronted by full armed might of the Ayyubid Sultan Al Adil III. Being a Mongol, Nogai took it upon himself to demolish this army. Though, as far as we can tell, his armies did not include any frightening Chinese gunpowder weapons, but dispatched the Sultan with the same contemptuous ease as their fellows to the north.
The way into Egypt was now open. Ignoring the Holy City, the Mongols turned their attention to a far more glittering prize, Cairo; the greatest city of Islam. Like Baghdad and Kiev and countless others, Cairo was destroyed. On its ruins his established his own city, which the Romans would later called Hunnopolis. This done, the “Huns” settled down in the land of the Pharaohs. Spies were sent north into Byzantium. Apparently, the northern branch of the expedition had been a total success. Mengu-Timur was at the Danube, and the terrified Bulgarians were desperately trying to block his entrance into their lands.
News travelled slowly in the medieval world, and in all likelihood, by time the news reached Nogai, Mengu-Timur was already ravaging Bulgaria. The Bulgars, realising it was impossible to defeat the Mongols in pitched battle retreated into the mountains, emerging periodically to launch brief, savage attacks against the enemy. As a strategy it was not entirely useless, and the Mongolians were forced to take heavy precautions to avoid being ambushed and massacred by their tenacious foes, greatly slowing their advance southwards. Meanwhile, more and more Bulgarian soldiers and citizens had slowly been trickling southward into the Roman Empire. By early autumn, Thessalonica was thronged with immigrants, desperately seeking safe passage and a new life on the Greek Isles, protected by the fearsome Imperial navy.
Mengu-Timur had initially planned to push straight on to Constantinople, but upon hearing about the situation in Thessalonica, decided to divert his attention there. The second city of the empire was also extremely rich and prestigious; destroying it would deliver a heavy blow to Roman morale. Descending from the hills, the Mongols saw the crammed city below them. Without any warning they struck.
Desperately, the ragtag band of two legions, Thessalonian citizens, and Bulgarian warriors tried to stem the Mongols. True, the fearsome invaders suffered heavy casualties as they threw themselves at the great city’s ramparts. But in the end, the outcome was inevitable. By the end of October, the Imperial navy had arrived, in an attempt to rescue the citizenry. Women and children were evacuated to Crete and Mytilene en masse, while men survived as best they could. Early in November, 1273AD, Thessalonica fell to the Mongols. Its legionary defenders were crucified in a brutal parody of Jesus himself, the other citizens were sewn into sacks and dropped into the sea. Churches were torn down and ransacked for their gold and jewels, and abandoned homes were eagerly combed for treasure. A few weeks after the fakk, one of the largest cities of Europe no longer existed.
Mengu-Timur now sent word to Nogai; to move north and harass Roman positions in Palestine and Anatolia, while he moved on the ultimate prize, Constantinople herself. Never in her history had the Roman Empire appeared more defenceless. Her allies crushed, her second city demolished, her armies scattered, Constantinople alone now stood as the empire’s last hope. History stood on a razor blade.
The Mongols moved swiftly eastwards from Thessalonica. By Christmas Day, 1273, Constantinople was besieged. In Egypt, Nogai had used his long rest well, to commandeer and enhance the Ayyubid navy. With skilled Egyptian sailors at his command, Nogai’s fleet stood a far better chance against the Imperial Navy than Ögedei’s did before him. As the Mongol sailed northward, his ships met and defeated a Roman fleet off Cyprus, buoying their courage. More worryingly, they also captured several Greek fireships.
On land, the Mongol army was also having notable successes. Damascus fell and was ransacked, though not to the same level as Thessalonica or Cairo. Pressing northward into Syria, they met what seemed to be their last obstacle, six Roman legions commanded by the general Michael Photopoulos, an experienced warrior, and close friend of Emperor Constantine X. By contrast, the Mongol army was effectively leaderless. Yet on the flat Syrian plains, they held every advantage. The legions retreated into the Taurus, apparently leaving Antioch open to the Mongols. At Antioch, there was no need for the warriors to besiege the city; instead, the citizens delivered the barbarians a vast ransom of gold, jewels and horses.
Now almost choking on gold, the Mongols marched into the Taurus, intending to crush the Romans once and for all. But Michael Photopoulos was cleverer than that. The highlands of eastern Anatolia had proved fatal to Mongolian armies before, so they would again. Surrounded by a particularly harsh winter, the Mongols divided their forces through the narrow mountain passes. This was exactly the opportunity the Romans had been waiting for. One by one, Mongolian divisions were picked off. By the time the horsemen had descended onto the relatively flat coasts in the spring of 1274, barely half of them remained. Sacking Attalia in anger, they pressed onwards. Off Smyrna (which was also devastated), they met with the Mongol-Egyptian navy, which had spent a pleasant winter plundering Crete and harassing the Imperial navy. Their confidence restored, the Mongols pressed onwards, to the Queen of Cities. Evidently influenced by both Russians and Arabs, Mongolian records call the city Miklagard, and its people the Rum. But the city was Constantinople, Queen of Cities, and its people were Romans, the oldest and proudest race of Europe. And here the great Mongol empire would be shattered beyond repair.
The siege continued throughout 1274. By early autumn, Mengu-Timur was growing impatient, and decided to storm the city. He had gunpowder and catapults at his command, there could be no more delays. Nogai privately agreed. It was decided the final assault would take place on October 15th. The Mongols planned every intricate detail. The ships would force the Imperial Navy into a confrontation, and defeat it, before attacking the Sea Walls, while the main Mongol army would batter at the defences of the city with its artillery.
The Emperor Constantine, whose spies were everywhere, was no doubt aware of this, and prepared his city accordingly. Legionary stood shoulder to shoulder with beggar, every male citizen over the age of 16 apart from priests were conscripted to defend the walls. Below them, women stood with buckets of water, Greek fire, and arrows, ready to rush them up to help their husbands and sons.
The Mongol assault began promptly, and was chronicled “live” by a priest, Basil of Sparta, who watched the siege unfold, and wrote down what was happening before his very eyes. As soon as the sun rose, the fleet moved towards the Golden Horn, where Roman ships stood, pretending to be unprepared, as the great chain across the horn was lifted. Silently, the Egyptians sailed forward, sinking several vessels. Then, suddenly, magnificently, the Imperial navy sprang into live. A squadron of fireships descended from the Black Sea into the Mongols rear, trapping them in the Golden Horn. Meanwhile, the main bulk of the navy engaged the enemy head on. Mongol and Egyptian died a fiery death together, as their wooden ships were engulfed by the blaze. A few Roman vessels were overwhelmed by the Mongol’s own captured fireships, but it would not alter the course of the battle. In a few short hours, the enemy fleet had been wiped out.
Unfortunately, at the land walls, the situation was far bleaker. Basil, hurrying westward through Constantinople, travelling along the city’s great thoroughfare, the Mese, could hear the sounds of the giant fortifications being pulverised by the fearsome Chinese artillery. The skies turned back, and heavy rain began to fall. It seemed to the priest as though the world was ending in this titanic clash of civilisations. As Basil reached the land walls, a great cry of dismay rang out amongst the Romans, the enemy were through the walls! A great breach had been opened up in the land walls.
Basil could hear the thundering of hooves, as Mongol horsemen poured towards the gaping hole. Led by Mengu-Timur himself, they descended on the great crowds of women at the base of the walls, massacring them. In desperation, the women attempted the stab the Mongols with arrows, but to no avail. Men tried to throw themselves from the battlements to save their wives and daughters, but were killed in the process. Triumphantly, the Mongols began to spread through Constantinople, looting and burning as they went.
This was exactly as the Emperor Constantine had hoped. Together with a single legion, he had remained in Constantinople’s great forum. Quickly, he sent orders out, to attack the enemy within the city. Man, woman and child all pelted the Mongols with bricks and plaster as they marched through the narrow streets. Then, as they emerged onto the Mese, the legions were waiting. The Mongols were destroyed. Attempting to flee, they were met by the cold steel of Michael Photopoulos’ legions, arrived at the nick of time almost miraculously. Both Mengu-Timur and Nogai were killed as they fled in terror. Few, if any Mongols survived alive.
Throughout the great empire, the shockwaves radiated outward. The western invasion had been destroyed. In Karakorum, the Great Khan Kublai broke down and wept. Never again would one man hold such stupefying resources alone. Kublai died a broken man a few years later, and the Mongol empire split into three squabbling successor states, none of which would survive for long. The world’s largest empire had died at the hands of the world’s oldest.
To the victors, the spoils of war. Constantine’s alliance had been shattered at the hands of Mengu-Timur and Nogai, now he would restore broken nations to its former glory. Briskly, the legions occupied Bulgaria and Egypt, and Roman settlers swarmed north to Kiev, there to found a new and still more beautiful capital of Russia. At a stroke, Constantine X had restored his empire almost to the size of Justinian’s, but avoided the troubles of Manuel. The Bulgarians and Egyptians, broken by the Mongols, welcomed the legions as liberators, and quickly settled down as subjects of the Emperor.
Nevertheless, the Mongols had inflicted appalling damage. Soon after they had been crushed, Constantine X rode out to Thessalonica. Seeing the second city of the empire reduced to a broken ruin, he was deeply angered, and resolved to start Thessalonica all over again. For the next decade, almost a quarter of Imperial revenues were channelled into rebuilding. Syrians, Egyptians, Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians; all were brought in to settle what would rapidly become by far the most cosmopolitan city of the Empire. Churches and mosques rubbed shoulders freely, while in the forums, Isaac II’s democracy rumbled onwards, as the great Senate of Thessalonica recovered as Christians from across the empire engaged in passionate debate on issues as diverse as the nature of Christ, to the taxation of olive farmers.
Constantine X, like George I before him, was hailed as the architect of peace. But unlike George, Constantine was not a natural showman, and preferred the peace of the Imperial palace. Almost alone of Roman Emperors, he never married, preferring instead the company of his trusted general Michael Photopoulos, prompting dark rumours of a homosexual relationship. However, Constantine did not waste his time. In Constantinople, he planned and executed the construction of two magnificent new churches, while encouraging innovation and new designs. The University exploded into life, when, in 1286, Constantine decided that study would be funded by the state, and available to all Uniate Christian men.
The Emperor himself showed something of a flair for science too. For centuries, the Romans had known of steam power and clockwork; it was used to power several devices in the Imperial palace. It seems that it was under Constantine X that they finally realised its true potential. Slowly, tentatively, experiments began, first on a steam powered crane, then, in Italy in 1302, a self driven cart. Of course, in the early years, this technology was primitive, dirty and extremely dangerous. Steam cranes were used in the construction of a new basilica in Naples in 1305, but exploded, causing the dome of the church to collapse, killing dozens of builders. Even so, the first tentative steps towards industrialisation certainly took place in Constantine’s reign.
The Romans were also benefitted by a group of extremely useful slaves. As the Mongols had been cut down as they fled, one group of them, the Chinese gunners, had been spared and captured. Brought before the Emperor, he ordered them to put their creative flair in the arts of death to use. 1284 sees the first recorded use of a cannon in a Roman army (on an expedition into Mesopotamia), and the repeating crossbow was quickly adopted as a standard missile weapon. By 1300 Roman rule, aided by Mongol devastation and Chinese firepower, once again had spread across three continents. In Persia, the Mongol Il-Khanate continued to threaten the legions, defeating them in pitched battle in 1292, and ensuring a shaky peace, but elsewhere, there were few constraints on Roman rule. A revolt in Egypt in 1296 was swiftly and ruthlessly put down; the Egyptians had to learn that no more would the Roman state tolerate their independence. Either they could become good Roman citizens, or remain slaves. There were no more revolts.
In Bulgaria, by contrast, there were far fewer rebellions. The Tsar remained in effective control, as Duke of Paristrion, and the thriving Bulgarian communities in the Aegean encouraged a sense of unity with the once hated Romans. In 1290, the Constantine engineered the election of a Bulgarian Pope, Samuel I, who held the position with dignity and competence for twelve years. It was under Pope Samuel I that plans for a Slavic Patriarchate were further advanced, to sit in newly rebuilt Kiev.
The first Patriarch of Kiev, Boris I, was crowned by a high powered Roman delegation on Christmas Day 1305, led by the Emperor Constantine X, and Patriarch David of Constantinople. Constantine, that “honorary Russian” was especially welcomed amongst the citizens. Kiev was where he had been born, and, in a rather fitting twist of fate, it would be at Kiev where he would catch pneumonia. Returning to Constantinople in summer, he initially showed some small signs of recovery, but they did not last long. On July 12th, 1306AD, Emperor Constantine X died.
Modern historians are divided on Constantine. On the one hand he was a ditherer, obsessed with the vastly expensive reconstruction of Thessalonica, and painfully shy. On the other, he had showed remarkable courage against the Mongols, and had presided over the empire’s great comeback to a true world superpower.
Either way, Constantine X died alone, with no child or brother to succeed him. Both of his sisters were already dead, and with him so too died the line of Italian Emperors that stretched back to George I. It would be fifty years before another great dynasty would sit upon the throne of Augustus, and in that time, the Roman Empire would be haunted by the return of its oldest and most deadly enemy; civil war.
Constantine X was sixty six years old when he died, ancient for a man in medieval times. Even so, he was young compared to his successor. Constantine had willed that supreme power by entrusted to general Michael Photopoulos, who was enthroned as Emperor Michael VII in late summer, 1306. When Photopoulos had defeated the Mongols thirty two years earlier he had been an experienced veteran general, when he was crowned, he was seventy eight years old.
Michael VII was low born; he had reached the throne purely through his own talents. As a young man, he had taken a passionate part in first elections in his home town of Smyrna, being elected to magistracy. By the time of his fortieth birthday he held a military rank normally awarded only to aristocrats, and, as we have seen, by time he was fifty he was the Emperor Constantine’s closest ally. Due to this, he was a great admirer of Isaac II, and that Emperor’s Demokratia. It was this that was to run him into trouble.
Less than sixty years after its inception, Isaac’s democracy was already falling into the hands of the rich and powerful, for they possessed the resources to bribe elections on a monstrous scale. True, each man had an equal vote, but only the very rich could stand for election, for they were expected to finance their entire campaign themselves. Beyond a local level, only the wealthy could expect to be voted in.
For the old emperor, this idea was repellent. In 1310, he made a series of passionate speeches to the Senate, arguing that they should do more to include the lower classes. For the senators, a conservative group of aristocrats and nouveau-riche merchants, such an idea verged on the scandalous. While, in principle, many of them agreed with the Emperor, in practise they were reluctant to enforce such a measure. Michael VII, it was decided, was a danger to democracy in the Roman Empire. He would have to be removed.
On March 14th, 1311, the Emperor arrived at the Senate to deliver his plans for reformation. Three senators took the old man aside, telling them they needed to speak to him urgently. What exactly happened in that darkened corridor of the Senate House is unknown to this day, what is known is that, for the first time since the days of Nero, the Senate had belligerently intervened to topple an Emperor. Michael VII never did deliver his speech. His body was thrown into a coffin, and a funeral was arranged with almost indecent speed. A week later, the Senate was crowning one of its own, a haughty aristocrat by the name of Alexander.
Alexander V was, to put it mildly, a disaster. Perhaps the only good thing that can be said about his reign was that it was short. In 1313, he ordered that the much loved Pope Tiberius II be brutally removed from office, for Alexander believed, ludicrously, that Tiberius had designs on his throne. For the next year, the throne of Saint Peter remained empty while the Emperor did everything he could to obstruct a new Pope being elected.
Meanwhile, Alexander’s foreign policy was equally ridiculous. In 1312, he personally led an ill prepared and totally useless invasion of Hungary that was met by a stinging defeat. The Emperor, it was said, was forced to pretend to be a woman to escape the Hungarians, who made short work of the poorly led legions.
In 1314, Alexander set out on campaign once again, this time for the East and the Il-Khanate. He seems to have dreamed of emulating his great namesake, and conquering lands all the way to the far Indus. In this he was to prove himself pitifully disillusioned. In two major battles, the Mongols shattered the Roman armies. Alexander, once again, survived, and fled. But the legions now decided enough was enough. The leader of the soldiers, the Strategos David marched into the Emperor’s tent, and stabbed the Basileus as he lay sleeping. Seizing the dying man’s crown and sceptre, he emerged out into the army, proclaiming himself Emperor of the Romans. The delighted troops, thoroughly sick of Alexander, raised David up upon their shields and marched on Constantinople. For a while, the Senate dithered, but eventually the view that David was, like them, an aristocrat, prevailed, and the Emperor marched in triumph into the city, there to be crowned Emperor David I.
Immediately, David set about righting the wrongs of his predecessor. Peace treaties were hurriedly drawn up with Hungary and Persia, and Papal elections were finally held, resulting in the coronation of Pope John XXI. For a while, it seemed as though order had been restored.
The problem was Emperor David tried to move too far, too fast. Recognizing that the Senate had now become a real danger to the power of the Imperial family, he tried to reverse democracy, through a series of short measures. Terms of office were restricted to one year, and anyone found of corruption during their election campaign would be brutally blinded. The Senate, justifiably wary, began to strike back against the Emperor, culminating in 1322, when David was denied access to the Senate house for a week, forcing him to apologise, and restore some of the Senator’s rights. By now, he was also becoming increasingly unpopular with the mob, due to his high taxation policies to support the army. Under David, the legions expanded massively, so by 1325, there were almost fifty of them stationed around the empire. As military expenditure increased, so too did inflation. However, the death blow to the reign of this Emperor came in 1327, with the election of one of the most remarkable Popes in history; Samuel II.
From a poor Italian family, Samuel had risen to become Bishop of Venice in 1319, a position he served at with distinction for eight years. Samuel was noted for his incredible piety and intelligence, he had been just twenty nine years old when he became Bishop. However, he also displayed many not so Christian characteristics. He was a deeply calculating man, and, from the start it was obvious to many that he had his eye on the Papacy. As Pope Victor VI descended into alcoholism and apathy, the young Bishop began to mount a series of increasingly vicious attacks at the frail Pope. Too late, Victor finally awoke to the danger he was in. All across Italy and beyond, the clergy were rising up against him. The Emperor David responded to the Pope’s desperate appeals for aid as he always did; by sending in the troops.
But the Emperor’s typical heavy handedness did nothing to help the unfortunate Victor. In 1327, he died inexplicably; foul play was suspected. There was no doubt as to who would be his successor. On April 19th, the Bishop of Venice was proclaimed Pope Samuel II of Rome.
David now hastily sought to make amends with the dynamic young Pope, but too late. Samuel had the support of the Catapan of Italy, John Kotsiopoulos, who delivered a pointed warning to the Emperor; interference in Italy would not be tolerated. At the same time, the Pope sent out feelers to the increasingly restive Senate of Constantinople. Would it be possible, he wondered, for the Senate to again depose a Roman Emperor? Gradually, Senators began to receive private letters from the Pope. Secret meetings were held in the great mansions throughout the capital. Outwardly though, the treacherous senators revealed nothing. The Emperor was perfectly unaware of the plot.
In 1328, David set out on campaign. His target was the Mongol Il-Khanate of Persia, which had become the Empire’s most serious rival for power in the near east. Already the Il-Khans had expelled the Romans from Mesopotamia, now; they cast their hungry eyes towards Syria. The Il-Khanate may only have been a small chunk of the great Mongol realm that had invaded Constantine’s empire, but it was a dangerous foe nonetheless.
If nothing else, the Emperor retained the support of the grossly enlarged Imperial army. In April, he crossed the Euphrates, into Persian land. A counteroffensive was easily swatted off by David, and he set off down the great river for Baghdad.
In Constantinople, tensions now reached fever pitch. Pope Samuel seized his opportunity. Leaving a trusted cardinal to take care of affairs in Rome, he made a dash for the capital. By midsummer, the Pope had arrived, and the plots were planned in ever more intricate detail. The Emperor David would have to go. In replacement, the Senate proposed one George of Athens, an elderly, yet dependable bureaucrat. For Samuel, George seemed the perfect choice of Emperor, competent enough to keep the empire running, yet weak willed enough to be utterly dominated by the predatory Pope. By early autumn, all had been agreed. A small, elite group of senators rode east.
In Mesopotamia, the Emperor was having huge success. He had captured and sacked Mosul and Malatya, and was preparing to re-cross the Euphrates, loaded down with plunder. True, he had failed to sack Baghdad, but he had more than enough loot to finance another expedition the next year…
It all seemed as if it were going too well. It was. Early in October, with the Romans about to re-cross the Euphrates, scouts reported a huge Persian army approaching from the east. The Emperor’s advisers urged him to retreat back into his own lands to replenish his supplies, and fight a defensive campaign, but David, seized by a sudden surge of ambition, decided to defeat the Persians in battle on their own lands.
Our sources for the battle that ensued are pitifully thin, but we do know it was a disastrous defeat for the Romans. It was now the Mongols than were weighed down with plunder; though from their own cities. It is also known that the victory was decisive enough to stabilise Mongol rule in Persia, and allow the Il-Khanate to survive for much longer than it perhaps would have done otherwise.
Somehow, David survived the battle, and he fled eastwards, with the battered and broken legions following. He spent Christmas reflecting upon the ruin of the expedition in Antioch, before setting off westward for Constantinople.
Time finally caught up with the Emperor in February, somewhere near Tarsus. Exactly why the assassins took so long to reach Cilicia is nowhere explained, but either way, their mission was complete. Surprising the Emperor while he was using the lavatory, they stabbed him through the heart, killing him instantly.
Once again, senators had removed an Emperor from power. But in doing so, they had removed the last obstacle to power for a man infinitely more cunning and dangerous than any of them. Pope Samuel II now reigned supreme over the Roman Empire.
The coronation of the Emperor George II was greeted in Constantinople by joyous celebrations. George himself, an elderly intellectual, had long despised David and his meddling with Demokratia, and was quick to restore the old systems. Nevertheless, some adjustments had to be made. Having taken the throne, George had no wish to be replaced as quickly and brutally as David had been. Therefore, the limits on magistracies were kept at a single year, and looking back into democratic history, the Emperor decided to revive “ostracisms”, that is, the elected exile of politicians. With the fickleness of the Roman citizens, the threat of ostracism was a deadly one for any politician.
One example of a high flyer swiftly brought down was Michael Karras, a prominent military leader, who had heroically defended the Euphrates frontier against a full scale Persian assault in the summer of 1329. The Khan of Persia, hearing the Emperor David was dead, pressed forward his advantage, rumbling forwards to the frontier, his banners displaying a single word “Antioch”, a clear statement of his intent. Karras, together with just two scratch raised legions, had ambushed the Persians as they crossed the great river, and inflicted a punishing defeat on them. The bridge across the Euphrates had been pulverised by Roman cannons, leaving the Persians on the left bank helpless before the legions, who swiftly cut them apart. Karras returned to Antioch hero of the city, and he was duly elected Demarchos (mayor) of Antioch the next year.
Yet Karras’ reign as mayor was brought to a swift and humiliating end. Sometime in the autumn of 1330, the daughter of a prominent aristocrat claimed that Karras had raped her. The mayor’s popularity soon plummeted, and, when the time for elections and ostracisms came around in 1331, it was he who was expelled from Antioch. He settled in a small village to the south of the city, but was, according to local legend, stabbed to death by an elderly Persian woman, whose son he had killed. The skies had not, for Karras, proved the limit.
Back in Constantinople, the Emperor George enjoyed huge popularity with the urban poor for his genuine compassion for their plight, and interest in their lives. He would frequently meet with them, listening to problems, and attempting, wherever possible, to help out wherever he could. At the beginning of 1331, he began construction on a great new church of Saint Paul, the first of Constantinople’s cathedrals to be build outside the city walls.
Yet, popular and efficient as George II was, it should not be forgotten that he was merely the puppet of an altogether greater man, Pope Samuel II. Now in his early forties, the Pope had everything he had ever dreamed of; absolute authority over both the spiritual and practical aspects of the Roman Empire. Many of George’s most prominent achievements have Samuel’s fingerprints all over, the massive cathedral for one. (Samuel always claimed a close affinity with Saint Paul) So, when the Emperor passed away peacefully in his early seventies at the end of 1331, it is no surprise that he left it to the Pope to nominate his heir.
One man though, stood against this. Andronicus Xanthis, a general based on the Danube frontier. As far as such a thing existed in the 1330’s, Xanthis was Pope Samuel’s intellectual and political equal. He was certainly the one whom the Pope considered his greatest rival for power.
Xanthis was a decisive man. Pope Samuel’s legates in Constantinople had already approved a new emperor who was duly acclaimed by the Senate a few days after George’s death; Basil of Adrianople, another elderly bureaucrat. For Xanthis, this would not do.
He arrived at Constantinople a few weeks after the coronation of the Emperor Basil III, and immediately demanded to speak with the Senate. In an electrifying speech, he denounced the Pope’s total control over the affairs of the empire, accusing the Senate of betraying the Empire for the favour of a devious and manipulative Pope.
What exactly the Senators thought of Xanthis’ comments is nowhere mentioned, but their response is easy to see. His speech was a miserable failure. Stripped of his command, he was sent away in disgrace to try and make a living in some remote corner of the empire. Pope Samuel, who heard the news over Christmas 1331, could congratulate himself on a job well done.
However, the Senate and clergy had badly misjudged the situation. Xanthis had many allies in high places, and it so happened that one of them was the husband of the emperor’s beloved daughter Maria. This husband then marched into the emperor’s personal chambers and delivered an ultimatum, either Basil retire to a monastery, or he and Maria would leave Constantinople, never to return. The confused old emperor quickly gave in, and on December 29th announced to the Senate he would retire from the throne. It was now Xanthis who was on top in the bitter feud.
Now in total control of Constantinople, the husband of Basil’s daughter, one Constantine, declared himself Emperor. On the face of it, he appeared a perfect candidate. Related by marriage to the previous emperor, handsome, pious and intelligent, and with no less than five potential heirs in his sons, Constantine XI would ordinarily have been considered a good, if not great emperor. But these were not ordinary times.
Pope Samuel quickly realised that the victorious duo of Xanthis and Constantine XI would have to be toppled, and quickly. Already, Constantine was making moves towards stifling the regular messages between the clergy in the empire that kept the Pope aware of events on the Bosphorus, potentially endangering the vast web of that Samuel sat in the centre of. The Pope would have to act quickly.
Probes were sent out to Constantine’s second son, John, governor of Apulia. Of all the Emperor’s sons, it was John who got along most poorly with his father. The only child of a brief marriage to an Athenian woman, John had always been rather resented by his father for his good looks and intelligence. Tensions between father and son had finally reached boiling point in 1325, when the seventeen year old John had seduced and married the very woman Constantine (a notorious womaniser) had been sniffing around, forcing Constantine to settle for the rather plain Maria. Despite the fact that this had brought Constantine his throne, the relationship with John remained icy, hence the fact his son was governor of a poor and unimportant theme.
Over 1332, John and Samuel grew ever closer. The Emperor’s son was charmed utterly by the Pope, declaring him to be a “new Peter”, a title Samuel was hardly shy to accept. Dark rumours began to circle, apparently John had pimped his wife to the Pope, and Samuel had gone so far as to baptize all of John’s illegitimate children. Soon, all Italy was abuzz with tales of scandal.
Yet Constantine XI paid them little heed. Aged fifty two, he was already sliding into alcoholism and despair. In the autumn of 1332, his eldest and favourite son Michael had been killed while leading an expedition against the Hungarians. A few months later, he was followed to the grave by another brother, Alexius. Under the circumstances, one can hardly blame Constantine for what happened next.
Early in 1333, Italy suddenly and dramatically rose in revolt. The Emperor was confronted by an ugly sight, his own son marching against him with seven legions. Hurriedly he sent for Andronicus Xanthis. Xanthis rolled in from Iconium two months later, with nine of his own legions, plus auxiliary troops from the Persians, who had every desire to see the Romans bogged down in a civil war.
There could be no delay. John stormed northwards through Italy, and descended back down through Dalmatia, crushing two imperial legions as he went. By autumn, he ruled everything east of Thessalonica. Xanthis, zigzagging across the Balkans had attempted to corner him, but to no avail. However, finally a confrontation was forced, near Adrianople.
The outcome was a victory for the rebels, but a bloody one. Each side lost upwards of 10,000 men, and the fields around Adrianople, it is said, were stained red with blood for months. Both men backed down to lick their wounds. However, Xanthis knew he could not delay the attack much further. Even as he tried to gather more legions his time was running out; to the west his foe Pope Samuel had used church funds to raise new legions, while in Constantinople Constantine XI was sliding ever closer to suicide.
In January of 1334, John attacked again, buoyed by fresh troops from Italy. Xanthis’ army was shattered. The general fled for his life. Dodging John’s assassins, he finally arrived in Persia, where he was given a hero’s welcome by the Khan. Even so, this could not disguise the fact that he had suffered a major defeat.
Constantine, seeing all hope was lost, committed suicide, leaving the way open for his son. John’s two surviving brothers, Romanus and Manuel wisely retreated at the news of his approach, and joined Andronicus Xanthis in Persia. On March 18th, 1334, John III was crowned Emperor of the Romans in Constantinople the fourth in as many years, and Pope Samuel could once again smile. For now, he was victorious.
EUROPE IN 1334AD
Unfortunately for the Pope, John III proved a woefully incompetent Emperor. Despite being militarily talented, within a just a couple of months, power had corrupted him. Sitting up in Baghdad and sniffing the air, Xanthis realised that all was not yet lost. Accordingly, he advised the Khan to strike soon. The Great Khan Chupan, an active ruler, quickly set his state into action. In late autumn, 1334, a huge Persian army rolled into Roman Syria.
The news that the Persians were loose in Syria was met with outright panic in Constantinople, but one man remained calm, the Emperor himself. John decided to lead the legions into battle himself, for surely with God at his back, he, the equal of the apostles, would be invincible?
Marching east, he spent Christmas at Iconium, where Philip Diakos, Strategos of Cilicia, met with him. The news from Syria was bleak. Several cities had been sacked, and worse, two legions had defected to the Persians, who were led by John’s old enemy, Andronicus Xanthis. The Emperor was furious, and rather randomly had Diakos blinded, for leaving his post in Cilicia, thus depriving himself of one of his greatest generals. Sweeping down through the Taurus, the peasants fled at his approach, for there were stories of legionaries burning to death innocent farmers, raping their daughters, and enslaving their sons. It was hardly difficult, therefore, for Xanthis and his ally John’s brother Romanus to pose as restorers of liberty.
However, their hopes for a quick victory were soon shattered. What followed was a gruelling eighteen months of civil war that tore apart much of what had been achieved over the past decades. At the beginning of 1335, the rebels sacked Antioch, a city that was steadfastly loyal to the Emperor. The Patriarch, Christopher Fotilas wailed that the Uniate Church was being torn apart by her own children, and he was not wrong. In Italy, the Catapan had declared in favour of the rebels, forcing Pope Samuel to flee to Corsica. Help, however, was at hand. An Aragonese force swept westward, defeating the Romans, and occupying Corsica and Sardinia, where the Pope set up temporary residence. Meanwhile, the Italians opened up a second front against John in the Balkans. Another famous city was looted, this time Nikopolis on the Gulf of Actium.
Adding to the woes of the average Roman citizen was the catastrophic failure of the harvests in 1335. Though Egypt managed to produce grain, Thrace and Anatolia, torn apart by warring armies, did not. The grim shade of starvation began to stalk the lands. In starving, besieged cities throughout the Empire, citizens huddled around small campfires made of the bodies of the dead.
Terrible deeds followed. An attempted amphibious landing on Crete by the rebels was defeated by Imperial troops; local citizens leapt upon the rebels and burned them alive. In Cyprus, the opposite happened, when an attempted Imperial coup was defeated, the culprits were crucified upside down.
Even the Holy City herself was not immune from bloodletting. In September 1335, John III arrived outside the gates. After a brief siege, Jerusalem capitulated, but not before much of her beautiful architecture had been pulverised by Imperial cannons, including both the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock. The Patriarch, an ally of Xanthis, was tortured, blinded, and had his arms and legs cut off before finally being executed. Jerusalem’s citizens were butchered.
The two armies, loyalist and rebel, remained evenly matched throughout 1335. In early July, they met near Caesarea, where the outcome was a thrilling victory for Xanthis and his legions supported by the Persians. But a few weeks later, Romanus’ section of the rebel army suffered a major humiliation while trying to force its way into Egypt, abandoning Jerusalem, and allowing John to commit the awful sack described above. It was not until March of the following year that the rebels were able to tempt Imperial forces into a decisive engagement.
The battle took place just to the east of Damascus, on a flat, scrubby plain. The two armies were both monstrously large, perhaps commanding as many as two hundred thousand soldiers each. Right from the start however, Xanthis had the advantage. His Persian reinforcements were swift horse archers, devastating descendants of the Mongols of the previous century (for Persia saw no problem in simultaneously portraying itself the heir of Cyrus, Mohammad, and Genghis Khan, as well as a bewildering variety of other military leaders). The legions began to wilt under the sun, and finally a squadron of elite Imperial cataphracts darted on in pursuit of the Persians. It was a fatal mistake. Xanthis had constructed a series of deep trenches in front of his own positions, into which the hapless horsemen fell. The hammer of his army now butchered, John could do little to stop his enemy closing in for the kill.
Slowly, the rebels picked their way around the trenches, but upon reaching the flat plains, they began to sprint. John’s legionaries surged forward, crunching into the rebel forces. For a while, it seemed as they would have some headway. But then, with the sound of thundering hooves, the rebel horsemen descended. Cataphract mingled with Mongol warrior as the rebel cavalry smashed into the Imperial right flank, causing them to break and run. The rebel army now pivoted inward, trapping the Imperial legions. The Emperor’s loyalists finally broke, and lay down their weapons, or worse, turned in on their general. John’s Saxon Guards desperately tried to resist, but to no avail. The Emperor of the Romans was cut down in a short violent struggle. The Battle of Damascus had been lost.
Yet Xanthis’ celebrations would not last long. His young protégé Romanus summoned the great general to his tent. Xanthis, not realising anything was amiss, hurried to his ally, only to be seized by a group of Persian warriors, then blinded and packed off to a monastery deep in the Palestinian desert. With this simple, malicious act, did Romanus establish himself as sole victor of the civil war.
For the Roman citizens, torn apart by eighteen hellish months, the Emperor Romanus IV must have seemed like deliverance from heaven itself. To broken and bleeding Roman Asia, he applied a soothing balm of tax cuts and Persian gold. Scratch raised legions were disbanded; Pope Samuel (nominally Romanus’ bitter foe) was recalled the Rome. Only in the West did the embers of civil war still burn; the Aragonese still occupied Corsica and Sardinia, and the Catapan of Italy and Pope remained at each others throats. Nevertheless, if nothing else, Romanus IV did establish some semblance of order throughout the wider empire.
The rest of 1336 passed without event. Romanus smoothly had the Catapan sacked, appointing as his successor his sole surviving brother, Andronicus, who also gained the title of Caesar. In Constantinople, Romanus worked tirelessly with the monks and senators to restore peace and order. His young age, ruthless intelligence, and desire for peace caused the citizenry to refer to him as a “new Augustus”, a title Romanus enthusiastically adopted. The harvests of 1336 and ’37 were collected peacefully.
The year 1338 is the best remembered of Romanus’ reign. The Aragonese were beginning to grow restless in Corsica and Sardinia; worse, a heretical monk by the name of Charles Abarca was spreading a quite vile view of the Church in the Aragonese homeland. In it, it rejected both the Pope of the Catholics and the Patriarchs and Emperors of the Uniate Christians, emphasising the divinity of the individual.
Abarca had originally been a passionate Uniate priest, but had become disillusioned with what he saw as division in the “united” church, chiefly the wars between the Spanish Uniate states in the early 14th century. Pope Samuel’s meddling and domineering personality had further alienated the priest, until, in 1334, he had finally broken with the Uniate Church, and began preaching his own message.
This had been eagerly seized upon by King Carlos of Aragon, who had had a major falling out with Samuel the previous year over the Pope’s cold shouldering of Aragon for Constantinople. Now there were whisperings that Abarca’s “Protestantism” could become officially favoured throughout the kingdom’s lands, including Imperial territory! Such a threat to the empire could not, and would not, be tolerated.
In the early spring of 1338, the task force set out from Sicily, led by the Caesar Andronicus, Catapan of Italy. Within two months, the Aragonese occupiers were swept from Sardinia, but Corsica proved a more difficult proposition. Nevertheless, it was far too close to Roman Italy to be left alone. Quietly, Andronicus contacted the King of Navarre, prior to now, a rather insignificant principality, inviting him to invade Aragon, with Papal blessing. The King enthusiastically took up the offer, and stormed south into Aragon in mid autumn. The Aragonese hurriedly summoned their soldiers back from Corsica, but these were caught in a violent storm south of Toulouse. The kingdom swiftly fell to a mixture of Roman gold, inclement weather, Papal indifference and major aggression from Navarre. From being a small principality, Navarre had abruptly become a Mediterranean heavyweight.
Sweetest for all for Andronicus, Romanus and Samuel was the news that reached Italy over Christmas, and Constantinople in early New Year 1339. The vile heretic Charles Abarca was dead, burned at the stake before the King of the United Kingdom of Navarre and Aragon. Now, surely his heresy would wither and die?
Back at Constantinople, Romanus’ popularity soared to new heights, when, in 1339, his wife Irene delivered him a healthy son, whom the Emperor named Isaac after previous great emperors. For many, it seemed as though the golden age of the Roman Empire could continue. Pope Samuel certainly did, while no longer in total control of the empire, he had found in Romanus an acceptable enough companion, especially given Romanus’ distaste for meddling in Church affairs. The Pope finally appeared content to abandon the political meddling that had caused so much damage, and absorb himself in theological matters. Peace reigned all across the empire. Romanus IV, that young, brilliant emperor, had restored all that had been lost to the Romans.
Then, in midsummer 1340, he died.
For a while, it seemed as though the calm of Romanus’ all too short reign would continue. His brother Andronicus smoothly arrived in Constantinople to be crowned Emperor, naming as his heir his nephew Isaac, Romanus’ baby son. All was calm.
Love had always been a perilous thing for Romans; it had brought down Antony and Cleopatra, and, more recently, the Empress Theophano. Once again, one of the purest of human emotions would bring misery and doom to Roman citizens. The Emperor Andronicus II fell in love with his sister in law, Irene, and asked her to marry him, a proposition that the Empress accepted.
The uneasy peace over Italy suddenly exploded. For Pope Samuel, the Imperial love affair was a sham. Storming out of his semi-retirement he delivered a violent sermon, describing the Imperial family as "vile and incestuous". The ever pious average Romans reacted with similar revulsion, although perhaps with a little more pragmatism. Of all the Patriarchs, only Marcus of Jerusalem; sat shivering amongst the shattered remains of the Holy Sepulchre failed to protest loudly against the marriage.
Unfortunately, the more the empire protested, the more determined the couple became. As a precedent, they gave Antony and Cleopatra, an ill chosen inspiration for the successors of the Second Augustus. Finally, the citizenry of Constantinople opted to show their anger in the only way they knew would hammer the message home; in a brutal riot.
The riots of summer 1341 continued, on and off, for the best part of three months. At the end of them, Constantinople had been torn apart. The Hagia Sophia had been set on fire, and thousands upon thousands of homes had been destroyed. Finally, Andronicus began to realise that he could not go against the wills of the populace. In autumn, Irene was packed off to Cyzicus on the Marmara, an extremely rich and pleasant area, but a humiliating exile nonetheless.
She did not stay there long. Fleeing east dressed as a male merchant, she soon arrived in her home city of Tripoli in Syria. There she met with Alexander Lekkas, a childhood friend and close ally of her dead husband Romanus. It had been Lekkas who had advised Romanus to kill Xanthis, his bitter rival for power as a great general in the empire. With Xanthis now long dead, Lekkas stood supreme as foremost military mind in the Roman Empire. However, unlike Xanthis he lacked the ability to navigate the political as well as the military battlefield. He was therefore completely defenceless when confronted by the flattery and bribes of the period’s greatest man; Pope Samuel II.
Samuel once again deployed what had always been his strongest card, Church money. Using it, Alexander was able to scratch raise two legions, ostensibly for an expedition against the Persians, who had understandably expected territorial concessions for the assistance they had given to Romanus IV in seizing power. As these had failed to materialise, the Persians were understandably growing restive.
Leading four legions, Alexander (and unbeknownst to Andronicus; Irene) marched northward, passing Antioch, obscured by a thick black smog as steam cranes rebuilt the city. But there, instead of turning east for the Euphrates, Alexander marched west. Seriously alarmed now, Andronicus demanded that the general halt, only to be met with contemptuous refusal. A message from Rome arrived; in an almost unbelievable show of hypocrisy, Pope Samuel condemned the Emperor for abandoning his true love in times of crisis. Would Christ do this? Of course not!
Now, suddenly, the awful truth dawned on Andronicus. The last of Constantine XI’s five sons to survive, he must have known that it was all in vain. God himself must be working against their line! Sure enough, the armies he had ordered had failed to materialise, evidently thinking the very same thing. Andronicus, according to the chroniclers, broke down, and wept bitter tears. Seizing his three year old nephew Isaac, he grabbed the boy by the hand, and fled the Imperial palace. Concerned courtiers fled after the Emperor, to find him desperately embracing the child on the Theodosian walls. The last speech of Emperor Andronicus II is worth quoting in full; it is still remembered and echoed today in many modern tragedies.
"Here, my line dies. Two of my brothers and my father reigned before me; I am the last to rule the Roman Empire. I have seen dreams of power and glory humbled before me as God took my beloved brothers away from me, one by one, and He in His infinite wisdom has now seen fit to remove me from the throne of His most noble Empire of the Romans. A thousand blessings be upon you, Little Caesar, the last man of our family to survive me. Long live Isaac! Long Live the City! Long Live the Roman Empire!"
And with these last, anguished words, the Emperor threw himself from the battlements, before the gaze of his terrified nephew and the Senators of Constantinople. With him, all hopes for any peaceful resistance of Pope Samuel’s power over the Empire died. He had reigned for less than two years.
Alexander V entered Constantinople as a victor by default. Little Isaac was of course overjoyed to be reunited with his mother, but neither of them had much cause to be celebrating. Alexander had originally proposed marriage to Irene, but Pope Samuel, sinking lower than ever before, had a better idea. The Pope’s illegitimate daughter Maria, aged just fourteen, was shamelessly pimped to the victorious general. Irene, once again, found herself heading into bitter exile, the only consolation being that this time she and her son could remain together. She took the little boy, and fled to Theodosia in the Crimea, a historic place of flight for deposed rulers, and there she died eight years later, sadly reflecting on her shattered dreams of peace and happiness.
For a moment, we shall divert our attention away from the Romans though, to the far north. The Holy German Emperor Heinrich IV was a young and dynamic ruler, seeking to expand his realm. He did not need look far. Just beyond his western frontier there lay the Kingdom of Norway, a staunchly Uniate State surrounded by Catholic enemies. In 1344, he launched a brutal war of annexation, smashing the Norwegian armies, and occupying the country. Heinrich can have had no idea about the chain of events he had just set in motion.
Johan Igesund was, prior to the German attacks, an admiral. He was haunted by tales passed down the generations of a great green land to the west, an eternal frontier of trees. With his young family killed in the German occupation, Johan decided there was nothing left to lose. Gathering together a ragbag group of sailors, priests and even a couple of prostitutes, he set sail in spring, 1345.
The voyage was a difficult one, and we need not dwell on the details. Nevertheless, it was one blessed by luck in the end. In early autumn, he and his men sighted the green land. Landing on it, they established a settlement, which they named Jensby, in honour of Jens Birst; a cousin of Igesund’s who had been killed by the Germans. At the time, the Norse did not know the true extent of what they had discovered. The continent of North Johannia* stretched out before them.
Jensby thrived almost from the start. By a fortunate coincidence, the Norse had landed in an area far south of Norway itself, which, although boasting harsh enough winters, had nothing that they hadn't seen before. In May 1346, Jensby's first child was born, named Erik Jensby, after his new home town. Despite the fact that the colony was thriving, Igesund left a few weeks after the child's birth. He was a man on a mission.
The mission in question was a return to Norway, suffering badly after two years of German rule. Landing in Bergen in autumn, he found his compatriots sullen and crushed. German Catholicism was rapidly spreading throughout the land, as Uniate icons and relics were smashed and burned by their so called co-religionists. Resentment against the Germans was high, especially with the horros of the Parisian Inquisition now creeping into Norway.
Johan Igesund brought a ray of fresh light into the country. Speaking to sailors, farmers, priests, blacksmiths, soldiers; every aspect of Norwegian life, Johan convinced many hundreds to come and make a new life in the great new land Christ had shown him. Gradually, the trickle became a flood. Despite winter storms in the Atlantic, Igesund returned to Jensby around a year after he left, with an additional three hundred colonists, as well as horses, cattle and pigs.
He found the town very different from the one he had left. Three more children had been born now, and construction was underway on a humble little wooden church, built from the trees of Johannia itself. More importantly, it seemed as though the residents of Jensby were not alone in this new land. Over the winter, contact had been made with tribes of native people. These natives had enthusiastically helped the Norse, and several Norsemen had even taken native wives! Igesund was unimpressed by these developments initially, after all the natives were heathens. But, after being greeted by a native chief and presented with several sumptuous gifts, he quickly changed his tune. Perhaps the Norse could, after all, peacefully become masters of this grand new world.... Those first colonists in the 1340's cannot have known it, but they were unwittingly the pioneers of a global revolution, beginning a new era that would shake the world. The medieval period was over. The age of colonialism was about to begin.
*Obviously in this timeline, the continent would not be known as "America". The term New World is still in use though.
The Romans were not particularly impressed by such developments. They were pleased that the Uniate Church had found new lands to the west, but having no access to the Atlantic, there was no way for them to join in any colonisation efforts themselves. Besides, in the 1340’s, the Empire was effectively paralysed.
Alexander V was not a bad Emperor; he was simply not a good one. Though he was an amiable man, who was extremely fond of his young wife Maria, and maintained order in the empire for his six year reign, the simple fact is that he was utterly dominated by the altogether stronger personality of Pope Samuel II. And the Empire suffered.
By 1342, Samuel was not the man he had once been. Now in his fifties, he was already looking, according to chroniclers, aged before his time. A decade and a half of intrigue and scandal had not helped the man, and he was by now exhibiting the first signs of the madness that would eventually overcome him. When asked by the Bishop of Caesarea what should be done about conversion in Johannia, Samuel responded by going on a long winded, and utterly pointless discussion of the state of Uniate Christianity in Britain, speculating that the newly independent Celts to the west might adopt Unity (in the event, they remained Catholic).
Despite these occasional slips, Samuel remained firmly in control. In 1344, it was he, not Alexander, who ordered the legions raze Milan, the dominator of a group of Northern Italian city states that had been considering conversion to Catholicism. An altogether more positive aspect of his Papacy began to emerge in Italy about this time though as well…
The Italian renaissance was by now over, not because Italians had stopped developing, but simply because they had returned to typical Roman standards of education. Armed with this knowledge, Italian inventors began to experiment with ever more inventive devices. In 1347, one Giovanni Contadino visited Rome bearing news of a spectacular new machine which greatly impressed Pope Samuel. Contadino had invented the first printing press.
At first, few understood the truly revolutionary aspects of the steam powered printing machine. Pope Samuel declared the machine a gift from God, buying it, and setting Contadino up in a great palace in the Vatican, there to tinker with machinery for the rest of his life. The printing press meanwhile was put into good use. Copies of the Bible were churned out at an incredible rate to cater for the middle class families. “Rejoice!” declared the Pope, “For the Word of God can now be heard in every home!” Of course, families would still be expected to come to church every Sunday, and to pay proper respect to Pope and Emperor, but that was hardly the point. Shiny, mass produced books, written in both Greek and Latin were spreading all across the empire, to cater for all inhabitants. By around 1350, the canny Pope had even carved out a distinctly non-spiritual niche exporting these Bibles to Uniate Iberia, for a hefty profit of course. All across Italy, snouts were in the trough.
In Constantinople, Emperor Alexander had watched these events with passing interest, probably before returning to a game of polo, or a long theological discussion with his close friend, the Patriarch Michael IX. Few shed any tears when, in 1348, the Emperor passed away from a severe case of pneumonia caught while hunting, indeed, many must barely have realised he was emperor. Despite the boom in writing in the fourteenth century, Alexander V is barely mentioned, except in passing. This dull, colourless man, therefore, remains dull and colourless to this day.
There were few surprises when the throne passed smoothly to his equally boring cousin, David. The Emperor David II, however, lacked his cousin’s peaceable nature. In 1349, he ordered huge tax increases across the empire, in order to construct a vast mausoleum for himself in his home town of Nazareth. In Rome, Pope Samuel looked on with concern, suspicious of this puppet Emperor who pulled all his own strings. There was a minor revolt against the Emperor in the autumn1350, when the Kephale (elected civilian governor) of Nicomedia rose up against David’s rapacious taxes. The revolt was crushed with astonishing brutality. The Kephale was blinded, and both his sons were castrated. Nicomedia was bloodily sacked by a group of Persian mercenary soldiers. Pope Samuel, worried that the Emperor might seriously damage his own prestige, chose to act. In early 1351, a group of mercenaries entered Constantinople; and, seizing David, executed him.
For the citizens, nothing notable had happened; it was what the Pope did next that was so profoundly shocking. In summer 1351, rather than choose a new ruler, Samuel did the unthinkable, he seized the crown for himself.
Outrage exploded. The other five Patriarchs vocally spoke against him, but Samuel would have none of it. Making himself comfortable as both Emperor of the Romans and Vicar of Christ, he coldly ordered the murder of the Patriarchs. Though the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Kiev survived, those of Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople were not so lucky. Captured and dragged back to Constantinople, the Pope-Emperor ordered their execution.
The three Patriarchs were together bound to a beacon, and set alight. As the smoke from the screaming men licked up into the warm autumn sky over Constantinople, the citizens would have finally realised the stark, brutal new order. Henceforth, the Church and the State would be united, just as the Church itself had been. Pope Samuel would reign supreme; any speech against him was speaking against God himself. All across the empire, a new order was arising.
And the infinitely cunning Pope used every tool at his disposal to ensure his power. Printed Bibles began to feature surprising new sections, talking about the divinity of Samuel himself. The Pope, sinking into deliriousness, came up with an odd new theory, if Pope and Emperor were both equal of the Apostles, and he was both, then surely he was superior to an apostle? Perhaps indeed, he was equal to Christ himself? Profound heresy of course; but with the Uniate Church so effectively decapitated, there was no resistance. When the Bishop of Nazareth protested, he was bricked up in the city walls.
Samuel’s reach was far, yet not infinite. In Iberia for example, the first moves towards the breakup of the Uniate Church were taking place. In 1352, King James of Castile married the young Queen Catherine of Leon, uniting the two kingdoms for the first time. Shortly after this, the King appealed to the Pope-Emperor for what seemed a reasonable enough demand, a Patriarch of Toledo, to serve Iberian Uniates. But Samuel contemptuously refused. Calling the Spanish “barbarian scum” he excommunicated James from the Uniate Church, believing the King wanted to seize the Papal throne for himself.
Most monarchs would have simply shook their head in unhappiness at how low the great man had sunk, but King James, hammer of Florida, was not that kind of man. In 1353, he expelled his Uniate Bishops, styling himself as Head of the Church of the Spaniards. This Spanish church was essentially Uniate in theology, but with one key and shocking heretical difference- Mohammad was accepted as a Prophet, albeit one whose teachings had been distorted by the early Caliphs. Shocking as such a theory undoubtedly was, it would have struck the pragmatic, and possibly atheist King as a sensible solution, making his religion more acceptable to the Muslim masses, who converted en masse. To ensure the loyalty of his own subjects, for whom a strong anti-Muslim sentiment still existed, he emphasised Christ’s teachings on brotherhood and love, and, more practically, cheerfully executed a couple of dissident bishops pour encourager les autres.
The Uniate Church thus disunited, Pope Samuel began to be attacked from all sides. The Pope, rather than backing down as any sane man would have done, simply repeated his claims of divinity. Now though, disturbing reports were coming in from Crimea. An army of Russians and Romans was being raised against him, and was marching south. The Bulgarians, heartily sick of Samuel’s tyranny and insanity, gladly gave them passage across the Danube. At the head of the expedition there marched a gifted young teenage boy, Isaac, son of Romanus of Syria. Despite being just seventeen years old, Isaac proved himself a uniquely talented general and orator. In midsummer 1356, he swept aside a force of Samuel’s loyalist legionaries, and marched straight for Constantinople.
Once outside the city walls, he suddenly, unexpectedly offered peace. Writing to the Pope addressing him as “my beloved Holy Father, equal of Christ”, he asked to be invited into the city to discuss peace, together with only the smallest bodyguard. Eagerly, desperate to cling to power, and flattered by the young man’s attention, the Pope agreed. The two men met in Hagia Sophia, its fifteen year restoration since the riots of 1341 finally complete. There, under the golden mosaics, one of the foulest murders in history was carried out.
Isaac acted coldly, and decisively. Marching up to the Pope-Emperor, he heavily punched him in the stomach, causing the old man to double up in pain. One of Isaac’s Syrian bodyguards then plunged a dagger into Samuel’s shoulder. Samuel collapsed on the floor, bleating for mercy. Here though, a bloodlust descended on the men. Even the Pope-Emperor’s own bodyguard suddenly turned on him. Samuel’s great golden and purple robes were torn off and ripped apart, while the soldiers took it in turns to stab him in the arms and legs. His toes were cut off one by one, then his fingers. All the while, Isaac stood above the screaming figure, kicking and spitting. Samuel’s left eye was put out, and his ears were cut off. Blood flowed freely across the great church. Finally, the mutilated remains of what had been the greatest man in history were carried out into the forum. There, surrounded by the unforgiving gaze of the citizens of Constantinople, Pope Samuel II, last of the great Popes of Rome, was slowly and brutally hacked to death by Isaac’s bodyguards. When, at last, the shrieks of agony subsided, the young man stepped in to deliver the coup de grace. Raising a large axe, he decapitated Samuel. Thus, finally, after twenty nine years of violence, did Pope Samuel II meet a fittingly gruesome demise.
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