XLVI. An Unsettled State
A mid-12th century “Tuscan Cross” imperial seal.
[1]
A Man Alone
It is tempting to see the Battle of the Marcova, coming very conveniently at the beginning of a new century, as the opening of a new historical chapter. The battle has since taken on nearly mythological importance; a notable Italian historian of the 19th century very memorably referred to it as the "coronation in blood," when the rule of the young and untested emperor
Romanus was confirmed, and indeed sanctified, in the terror of battle and the ecstasy of victory. Certainly the historical importance of a battle which left a king of Germany dead upon the field cannot be wholly dispelled by even the most contrarian revisionism. Yet Marcova did not end the fighting, which was to rage on in the Alps and southern Italy for years to come.
The position of the young Romanus - he was not quite twenty three at the time of the battle - was exceedingly precarious. His father
Ptolemy had won back his birthright by his military acumen and the loyalty of a multinational band of soldiers and mercenaries which included southern Lombards, Romans, Sardo-Normans, Greeks, Hungarians, and Armenians. Many had served him for years, and their leaders were hardened veterans. They were invested enough in the success of Ptolemy's quest to rally behind his son when, in the immediate aftermath of the emperor's death, the German king descended to try and wrest away all they had conquered, but how far their loyalty to his son truly went in the absence of this external and existential threat was an open question. Moreover, the new emperor was very thoroughly an outsider to the country he now claimed to rule.
Romanus was born on the literal frontier of Christendom: in Ankyra, Anatolia, at that time a fortress-city on the frontier of the Turkish incursion. By Greek standards he was of excellent breeding, a blood relation of Macedonian, Argyroi, and Komnenid emperors and related by marriage to the present ruling dynasty of the Bryennioi.
[2] At five years old, when his father Ptolemy was sent to Italy to recruit among the Lombards, he and his mother moved to Constantinople. Romanus enjoyed the upbringing of one of the empire's elite; his mother was a noblewoman of a prominent family, his father was a famous (if foreign) general who attained high court dignity in the course of the 1080s, and through the marriage of his aunt
Maria to
John Bryennios, brother of Emperor
Nikephoros IV and Grand Domestic of the East, he was associated with the emperor as well.
All went well until the abortive rebellion of
Romanos Diogenes in 1089. While his father may not have been involved, Ptolemy was nevertheless suspect as he was a first cousin of the traitor, and he was relieved of his command and placed under house arrest in Constantinople. Thanks to the influence of John the Grand Domestic, Ptolemy would be reinstated in 1090, but sent away to a post in Calabria and Sicily while his wife and children remained hostages in the capital. Certainly they were well-treated and Romanus received an excellent education, but he could never forget that his cage, while gilded, was a cage still. Only in 1094, after a separation of five years, was Ptolemy's family permitted to rejoin him, and in the next year they followed him to Rome.
The first battle Romanus ever saw was Caserta in 1095, where the sixteen year old prince watched his father's forces shatter the Italian army. The five years that followed were the second phase of his education, taught in much less comfort than the Constantinopolitan court. Only Romanus, the eldest of Ptolemy's three sons, accompanied his father in the field, although Ptolemy never allowed him independent command. In 1097, Romanus acquired both a wife and a crown; his father arranged for him to marry
Agatha Saluciana, the sole legitimate child of the late Emperor Azus, who was not quite fourteen, and in December he was "elected" King of Italy by a throng of Ptolemy's warriors in Pavia. Of his life during his father's brief "peaceful" reign between 1098 and 1100, we know very little.
Ptolemy's death could easily have been the end of the Tusculani. Young, foreign, and untested, Romanus was not a very formidable figure on his own, and aside perhaps from the Romans themselves his support among the native population was fairly tepid. Yet the prospect of a German conquest was anathema to Ptolemy's generals and foreign soldiers, who feared being dispossessed of their hard-won lands and honors by Eberhard and his son
Conrad, elected King of Italy. Although the chroniclers of the time present Romanus as rallying his father's men to his side, taking the imperial crown for himself, and leading his forces to victory at the Marcova, the young emperor was in truth little more than a mascot, a legitimating figure for Ptolemy's followers to gather around. The true rulers, without whom Romanus would never have even been crowned, were his father's four most prominent generals:
Leo Diogenes,
Leo Artasius,
Roger Brassonis, and
Maurice the Slav. Emperor Romanus was as much a symbol as the Holy Lance he carried into that decisive battle.
Such a league of disparate commanders may not have carried on well once the immediate danger had passed, and thus it was probably for the best that half of this quadrumvirate, Roger and Maurice, did not survive the battle. The main beneficiary of their deaths was Leo Diogenes. Leo, the son of the disgraced Romanos Diogenes (whose rebellion had brought Ptolemy into disfavor in the east), had been crucial to Ptolemy's success in Italy, and as the new emperor's second cousin and a fellow Greek he had the trust and confidence of young Romanus. After Marcova, Leo Diogenes was effectively his commander in chief; he was granted the title of
Magnus Domesticus, a direct Latin translation of the Byzantine
Megas Domestikos, the first of a number of Byzantine court and military titles to be adapted directly into Italian usage by Romanus. Leo Diogenes allied himself with his fellow easterners Leo Artasius (an Armenian) and
Sophia Komnene, the emperor's mother, and this "Greek Party" wielded a tremendous amount of influence on the emperor. Secondary to this alliance, although still important, was the "Roman Party" represented by the
Magna Logotheta Cardinal-Bishop
Marinus of Albano, who had served as Ptolemy's ambassador to the King of Germany in 1098, and his ally
Caesarius of Sabina, who was granted the title of
curopalates. As Romans - the most fervent native supporters of Ptolemy, and now Romanus - their importance was considerable, although they lacked the personal relationship to the emperor possessed by his cousin and mother.
New Guard
From 1098, when Ptolemy completed his conquest of the Italian kingdom, the most important project of the Ptolemaei was the reordering of the military aristocracy. Loyal foreign soldiers and mercenaries had to be compensated, typically at the expense of disloyal Lombards. Ptolemy had been relatively lenient with the northern nobility, perhaps fearing that he might provoke a general uprising in favor of Conrad if he was too harsh, but his son was not the compromising type. After the Marcova sent the Conradines back over the mountains and Theophylact was driven from the south, Romanus began a thorough purge encouraged by Leo Diogenes and the “Greek Party.” The policy was driven as much by necessity as by vengeance; mercenary bands were good enough for a conquest, but settled
milites held a kingdom.
An influx of foreigners into Italy in the wake of conquest was nothing new. Alboin had brought his Lombards, Charlemagne had brought his Franks, and Hugh had brought his Provencals. Even the Tusculani, though “native” to Italy, had tended to displace Lombards and Franks in the north with Romans and southern Lombards, although their policy was not one of ethnic exclusionism. Romanus could not do the same with “Greeks” like himself; even when the Armenians were included in the count, the total “Greek” complement of Romanus’ forces certainly numbered fewer than two thousand men, and perhaps only one thousand. The beneficiaries of the Ptolemaic victory were not only Greeks and Armenians but Sardo-Normans, Italo-Hungarians (including both longtime Italian settlers in Pannonia and more recent Italian
patriciani who had fled after the civil wars of Azus), Provencals, and the old Romans and southern Lombards who had always been favored by the Tusculani emperors. Although onomastic evidence suggests most such settlement was in Lombardy, new
milites were also settled in Verona-Friuli, Tuscany, Emilia, and Benevento-Capua. It was a strange admixture, but life went on; a monastic chronicle from Chieri notes matter-of-factly that in the year 1101 the lord Alberto was replaced by a certain lord Haytone “who had the favor of the emperor;” the name is a Latinization of the Armenian
Hethoum.
There is some irony to be found in the fact that Romanus seeded Italy with more territorial lords of Frankish derivation than the Francophile Salucians ever had. In the first place, there were plenty of “Sardo-Normans,” a category including both Sardinian-born “Normans” and more recent arrivals. They were warriors of good reputation, and the death of Roger Brassonis seems to have helped dissolve any lingering sense of obligation to the Brassonids of Sardinia. The fertile plains of Lombardy were more attractive than that rocky isle, and many were enticed to settle. Less commented upon, but probably more numerous, were Provencals and other southern "Franks," veterans of the Marcova or those who flowed into the country afterwards, who saw better opportunities for prosperity and status in the reforming imperial state than in Provence.
One of the key successes of Romanus' reign was the recovery of the imperial army from its Salucian-Crescentian nadir. At this time, however, the process of reform - rebuilding, really, as there was not much left of it after Caserta - was only just beginning. The 12th century "Ptolemaic army" as it is usually understood, with its Byzantine-styled guard units,
milites aulae, and
contarati, was nowhere to be seen in the opening years of the century. The exception was that oldest of Tusculan corps, the
Milites Ungarorum, which received a new lease on life. The Hungarian Guard had a checkered past in the service of the Tusculani; they had betrayed Theodorus in favor of Alric, and had declined in relevance by the reign of Benedict to the point where Ptolemy (who was old enough to remember their betrayal) appears to have actually disbanded them and merged the remnants into the Hungarian mercenaries under Leo Diogenes. Those mercenaries had proved vital, however, and after Ptolemy’s death Leo decided that the reconstitution of the
Milites Ungarorum would be a useful means to retain them in a privileged capacity. Notably, however, in keeping with Byzantine classicisms the Ptolemaic-era guardsmen were occasionally referred to as
Turc[h]ae and the unit as the
Milites Turcorum. This has been the source of much confusion among historians over the centuries, some of whom attempted to explain the name by erroneously claiming that Ptolemy brought a force of mercenary [Oghuz] Turks with him from Anatolia.
[3]
The Rhaetian War
The Battle of the Marcova had badly shaken Conradine power. Although King Conrad had already received the German crown during his father's lifetime, he was not particularly popular. Eberhard had only just held the realm together in the wake of earlier setbacks in the Italian campaign; the Saxon and Franconian nobility had to be dragged into the enterprise reluctantly, and the Bavarian duke
Rudolph was able to refuse the summons entirely thanks to the support of King
Michael the Valorous of Hungary. The absence of the Bavarians was a fateful one, for Rudolph's warriors could have easily turned the tide at the Marcova. Particularly after the recent defeat, the German nobility was not particularly enthused about casting yet more blood and treasure into the Italian pit, yet Conrad insisted upon the recognition of his title as King of Italy and left little doubt that his policy as monarch would be to pursue his father's ambition.
Neither Conrad nor Romanus were well-prepared for a new war, but peace seemed impossible. Although the actual German forces had retreated beyond the Alps after Marcova, the submission of some northern lords to Romanus turned out to be ephemeral. The emperor’s detour to the south to deal with Theophylact in 1101 provided Conrad with an opportunity to shore up his position in parts of Ivrea and Bergamo where there were Lombard aristocrats who were not reconciled to the new order. Conrad would not relinquish this foothold, nor would he renounce the crown of Italy, which he had received by election and claimed on the basis of his inheritance from his late mother
Emilia Saluciana (d.1098), the sister of Azus. The result was years of intermittent conflict in which Conrad and Romanus struggled for control of the mountain marches. To contemporaries, it was simply a continuation of the war that had started at Caserta, but modern historians tend to differentiate between the late 11th century
civil war, involving rival Crescentian, Ptolemaic, and Conradine parties fighting across northern Italy, and the subsequent “Rhaetian War” between Romanus and Conrad which was largely confined to the Alpine region.
The title suggests a grander conflict than it actually was. Its story, which receives the most detail in the Burgundian Chronicle and the late 12th century
Vita of the Blessed Gerard of Disertina, is one of raids, ambuscades, and personal politics, with relatively minor lords in the mountains shifting their allegiances and at times raiding one another with the Conradine or Tusculani cause as a pretext. The contest was usually a seasonal affair, ending with the coming of winter and not resuming until the thaw of the snow in the mountain passes. Its limited nature had to do with the logistical difficulties posed by the terrain, but it was also true that neither belligerent was fully committed to the struggle. With other powerful neighbors to consider and wary of provoking his German subjects into rebellion, Conrad could not spare his whole strength, and had to rely chiefly on Burgundian and Swabian levies which had already been depleted by the Battle of the Marcova. Meanwhile, in the opening years of the war Romanus was fighting with a jury-rigged army while still trying to assert control of his own newly-acquired domain and keeping an eye out on hostile neighbors to the south.
The Rival Emperors
Since the days of Charlemagne, the relationship between the Latin and Greek emperors had certainly had its rocky moments. Despite intermarrying with various Byzantine dynasties, even the Tusculani occasionally warred with their eastern counterparts. Typically, however, their conflicts were resolved quickly, either by battle or negotiation, and resulted in fairly minor changes in the border; the Tusculani had occasionally controlled Salerno and Lucania as far as the Gulf of Taranto, but Apulia and Calabria proper had never been seriously threatened by Italian conquest. There was not always peace on the southern border, but it was not a frontier between permanently hostile states.
That dynamic would change completely in the 12th century as the division between empires took on a new and deeply personal aspect. Modern historians tend to prefer discussing material and social causes of conflicts, and very rightfully so, as they are usually more edifying (if perhaps less gripping as literature) than the ascription of everything to the quirks and foibles of personalities. Yet it is impossible to understand Italo-Roman policy under Romanus without appreciating the complete and unabiding contempt, and indeed hatred, with which the emperor in Lucca regarded the emperor in Constantinople, Nikephoros V Bryennios.
Romanus had always adored his uncle John Bryennios, the dashing (if not extraordinarily gifted) commander of the armies of Anatolia and the brother of Emperor Nikephoros IV "Hippeus." John had done well by his in-laws: As mentioned, John’s influence had secured Ptolemy’s pardon for his suspected involvement in the Diogenes plot, John had seen to the care and education of Romanus, his mother, and his siblings while Ptolemy was away in Italy, and John’s influence was probably behind the emperor’s eventual decision to release Ptolemy’s family and allow them to join him in Calabria. John had been Romanus' protector and patron in Constantinople, and during his teenage years - when his actual father was far away - Romanus seems to have had regarded his uncle as nearly a foster father. John, however, was bitterly resented by his nephew
Kaisar Nikephoros, the emperor's son. The prince perceived his uncle to be a rival for his father's crown even after Nikephoros was officially raised to co-sovereignty, and as Ptolemy was his uncle’s close friend and brother-in-law as well as a capable general, the younger Nikephoros perceived him as both an enemy and a very serious threat. Prince Nikephoros intrigued against them both of them constantly and was the great villain in the mind of the teenage Romanus; he was the man who had turned the emperor against Romanus' family and kept him from his father.
In 1099, Nikephoros IV died, having spent his reign valiantly fighting to save the empire from being overrun in the most serious crisis it had faced since the initial Arab conquests. His son succeeded him, and immediately began cleaning house. John was stripped of his command, and soon accused of collaboration with the families of Diogenes and Alpherikos which had abandoned imperial service to conquer Italy and no doubt plotted against the true empire even now. John was forced into a monastery. When a rebellion broke out against Nikephoros later that year, the rebels saw John as the natural alternative to Nikephoros and liberated him from captivity. To what extent John was an active planner of this rebellion is unclear, but once freed he put aside any reluctance he may have had and sided openly against his nephew. Nikephoros, however, was the victor of the struggle, and in 1100 John was captured and blinded. He died not long thereafter. Romanus, upon hearing the news, was rendered actually speechless with grief and rage. He had reason enough already to dislike Nikephoros, but he never forgave him for the act of brutality he had committed upon Romanus' beloved uncle (whether or not it was justified by rebellion). From that time on, Egidius writes, "[Romanus] ceased to dignify the lord of the Greeks with the title of emperor."
Egidius meant that quite literally. In 1100 there was nothing the newly-crowned Romanus could do to avenge his uncle militarily, but from the start of his reign he waged a rhetorical war against Nikephoros. His predecessors had generally respected the titular norm, dating back to the Carolingian era, by which the eastern emperors accepted the western use of the title of
imperator/
basileus but reserved for themselves that of
Imperator Romanorum/Basileus Rhomaion. While "Roman/of the Romans" pops up fairly regularly in Italo-Roman documents and imperial charters, the Tusculani and Salucian emperors generally eschewed its use in dealing with the east, and their coins usually admitted only the title
Imperator Augustus. In contrast, the very earliest extant coins of Romanus title him as IMP.AUG.ROM (
Imperator Augustus Romanorum). Even this was apparently too subtle for Romanus, who soon aggrandized that title into
Imperator Augustus Omnium Romanorum ("August Emperor of All the Romans"), yielding the secular tetragrammaton IAOR or ORIA (Latin word order is rather loose) which was to make its appearance on Ptolemaic coins, seals, and secular artwork.
Romanus found genealogical justification for his quarrel as well, noting that while he was a direct descendant of Basil the Macedonian, the Bryennioi possessed no Macedonian blood at all. In subsequent years, no doubt with the emperor's patronage, Italian scribes dutifully translated and annotated a spurious genealogy of Basil I, produced during his reign in the 9th century, which denied Basil’s humble origins as a Macedonian peasant and claimed him to be a descendant of Constantine the Great and the Arsacid kings of Armenia. That fabricated claim was further ornamented by the tenuous (but accurate) Carolingian descent through Gisela of Ivrea, Emperor Alberic's wife, as well as the old Tusculani family legend that the clan was descended directly from the Roman
gens Julia, which was further extrapolated into a claim of kinship with Julius Caesar. That largely fictionalized array of esteemed ancestors, which Egidius repeats uncritically, appealed to the emperor's pride but also his ambition. Although necessity dictated for the time being that his efforts focus on Italy, his rhetoric demonstrated a conviction that he was not only the rightful emperor of the west, but of the east as well.
Second Front
Nikephoros did not have quite the same visceral hatred of Romanus - at least not yet - but he recognized him as a grave danger, and was angered by the treason of
Marinus IV, the Duke of Naples, who had provided Ptolemy with ships and defected to the western emperor. At the same time,
Theophylact Crescentius, the former Duke of Benevento and Capua who Romanus had driven from the empire in 1101 and had taken refuge in Byzantine Italy, was offering his services in exchange for regaining his duchy. In 1103, as Romanus skirmished with the Germans and rebels in the Alps, a Greco-Lombard force under Theophylact and
katepano Nicholas Synadenos attacked Naples.
Romanus and Leo Diogenes came personally to the south, and once again the Ptolemaic cavalry forces proved their worth. The mounted column reached Naples far sooner than the Greeks had expected, while much of the force was spread out ravaging the Neapolitan country, and the Greco-Lombards fled without giving battle. The Greeks retreated to Salerno, and the Italians ravaged the countryside around that city and then drove into Lucania, raiding as far as Taranto. Inspired by the feeble resistance of the Catepanate, Romanus decided to return to the northwest and invest Salerno, but was forced to abandon the siege because of his lack of preparation, his lack of a naval force, and news that a Swabian army had broken into the Lombard plain.
As it turned out, the “Swabian army” was merely a raid in force, and while the country around Milan was devastated it posed no existential threat. The maneuvers of 1103 illustrated, however, the difficulty of fighting both the Germans and Byzantines simultaneously on opposite sides of the empire. Romanus had demonstrated that he would not fold easily, but he faced powerful opponents who had the resources to fight a long and gruelling conflict.
Footnotes
[1] The Tuscan cross, also known as a “grille cross,” “gridiron cross,” “portcullis cross,” or “Saint Laurence cross,” is properly blazoned a “cross triple parted,” although its exact design varied in the Middle Ages. The symbol first appears in an Italian context during the 11th century but did not become a popular symbol associated with the Italian imperial house until the Ptolemaic era. The name “Tuscan cross” is the result of an abbreviation or error, originating in an English confusion of “Tuscan” with “Tusculan.” Two popular theories for its origin exist: One, that it represents the iron window grilles from which the Abbey of Cryptoferrata, the traditional “hometown” sanctuary of the Tusculani family, got its name; or two, that it represents the gridiron of the 3rd century martyrdom of Saint Laurence, who was an early patron saint of the Tusculani as far back as Alberic and considered a special protector of the dynasty. It has also been suggested that the triple cross is intended to be a symbol of the Trinity. This particular Tuscan cross seal is augmented by decorative roundels and the addition of the emperor’s abbreviated title of IAOR/ORIA.
[2] Specifically, he was the great-great-great-grandson of Constantine VII the Macedonian through his great-great-grandmother Agatha Porphyrogenita; the great-grandnephew of Romanos III Argyros through his grandmother Helena Argyre; the grandnephew of the emperor Isaac Komnenos through his mother Sophia Komnene; and a marital relation of the presently ruling Bryennios dynasty through the marriage of his aunt Maria Alpherike to the Grand Domestic John Bryennios, brother of Nikephoros IV.
[3] Oghuz, Ghuzz, Uzes, and Turkmen are all names referring to the same “branch” of the Turkic cultural-linguistic family to which the Seljuks belonged, as opposed to other Turkic peoples like the Pechenegs, Khazars, and Cumans.
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