Part 87: Romanos the Mad
Part LXVII: Romanos the Mad
The Persecutions of Romanos began in earnest in 1237, as the Emperor set about putting the Church in order as he saw it. Unlike his predecessors Romanos saw no reason that the Central Church authority in Greece should be subservient to the heretics of Italy and Syria, that is to say the Thessalonikans. He did not recognize that council’s authority, and indeed wanted to reverse all of its actions at the first opportunity. But it was clear by now that the wider Christian world would not support these policies. Indeed, with the Cathari rising in Franki, and the entrenchment of Italian-educated, and therefore Thessalonikan, clerics across the West there was a very real chance that if Romanos called a full Ecumenical Coouncil it could go even further against his own Chalcedonian views.
He therefore was going to have to lay the groundwork for a full Imperial reversal, and from there use his influence as Roman Emperor to reverse it in the wider Christian world. To give a look ahead, Romanos’s efforts in this area will not only fail, but backfire spectacularly. So hated will he be in future generations that the church policies he supported would be completely discredited. And thus, this serves as the last time that we will be seeing the Chalcedonians in power.
Heresy trials were instituted in Italy first, and were primarily aimed at the wealthy and prosperous church officials. In normal times the Exarch almost certainly would have strongly objected to such moves, but the young Julius was only fifteen following the death of his father earlier in the year, and when the Emperor’s men told him to do something he obeyed.
Seven cardinals were convicted during 1237 alone, and significant wealth and property was seized from their churches, all of which was either sold or sent back to Constantinople to pay for the Emperor’s increasing military expenditures.
Not content with his prior expansions of the Imperial army Romanos III was determined to add another fifty thousand men to the military, as well as build a number of new fortresses in northern Italy and on the Danube. This even as revenues continued to decline. Taxes were thus raised, and the once abandoned practice of tax farming reintroduced, but with Romanos’s beloved officer corps now doing the reaping. Corruption as you might expect was rampant, but the Emperor would hear not a word against his men, and instead punished anyone who reported wrongdoing.
One of the positions opened up was the head of the Excubatores, the Emperor’s bodyguard, and into this position was placed an officer named Constantine, a Taxidia in his mid-forties, and who had a son, also named Constantine, who I’ll be referring to for this part as Constantine the Younger who was elevated to high rank within the Emperor’s guard. Both Constantines were from Germanni, but were noted to be fluent in Greek, a rare trait among the German Taxiia, as well as Latin, their preferred language in Imperial service. Constantine the Younger, was a popular, charismatic, and talented officer. All traits that would serve him well during his short time wearing the Imperial purple.
The elder Constantine seems to have been something of a check on Romanos’s darker instincts, and is claimed by the records to have talked the Emperor down from some new mad scheme. The fact that these records were all written either during his son’s reign, or during the reign of Julius II and his son, who was married to the younger Constantine’s daughter, probably cautions against some of the wilder tales. Romanos probably didn’t propose to seize one tenth of all persons inside the Empire and sell them into slavery.
But there is an unfortunate nugget of truth in it, as in 1239 Romanos unveiled a project based on the labor requirements in the West. No longer would Imperial subjects just be required to pay their taxes in cash or kind, no now they would also be paying additional amounts in forced labor. As infrastructure spending declined in the midst of Romanos’s tax shortfalls and ballooning army the Emperor decided to simply force his subjects to work on maintaining of roads, aqueducts, irrigation systems, and whatever else happened to need oversight.
This declaration was met with immediate, and massive backlash. Across the Empire riots broke out as citizens refused to be treated like slaves by the central administration, and in Egypt the Exarchs tried to refuse to even implement it. Romanos responded by dispatching soldiers to put down the revolts, and he had the Exarch’s families, who were required to live in Constantinople during the terms, charged with treason, declared them guilty, and had them burned alive.
This move was utterly shocking to both the populace of the capital, and even many of Romanos’s own inner circle, with the younger Constantine noted as refusing to watch the flames be lit, but also being careful to not let the Emperor see him do so. It was here, in 1239 that Romanos probably could have been stopped had the will been there, had there been anyone in the Empire who could challenge the authority of the Emperor. But there wasn’t.
This series of events seems to have driven Romanos deeper into his monstrous conduct. Before this incident the number of people Romanos ordered executed by burning at the stake was somewhere under one hundred, more or less reasonable for an Emperor of his time who had reigned for nearly twenty years. In the next five years that number will climb to nearly ten thousand.
The exarchs were dragged back to the capital by their own men in chains, the authority of the Emperor on full display, and were also burned alive. Their replacements were picked by the Emperor for loyalty, and immediately went about putting the Imperial order into effect. Shortly thereafter a conspiracy against the Emperor was uncovered among a number of Greek officers among Romanos’s guard. They and their families were charged with treason, and soon were executed in Romanos’s new favorite punishment.
Thus did the final six years of Romanos the Mad’s reign begin. I will not recount all that happened, as any number of documenti have been published on the topic, as well as various cycli set in the period. Heresy and treason trials became commonplace once again, and property confiscations were the new normal. Between 1240 and 1245 thousands were charged with a litany of crimes and either executed or exiled for those who “only” were charged with lesser heresies.
And all of it was conducted under the careful eye of Romanos and the Chalcedonian clergy which he supported. As time went on this clergy were grouped in with the worst of Romanos’s excesses, though to be fair to them the evidence we have does indicated that they often opposed the overly harsh sentences and argued for mercy rather than callous destruction. Julian himself wrote despairingly to a Thessalonikan colleague who carefully kept his head down that, “we have doomed ourselves by tying our fortunes to this cruelty. I beg when you have won and are writing of us, do remember that we were dragged along by the cart which we had attached ourselves to. But being so attached we find we cannot now remove ourselves.”
As Julian’s memory was damned as soon as Julius II had him executed this plea was not heeded.
Which does lead us to the year 1245, when the exarchs of Africa and Ravenna quietly sent word to Julius II, now a fully grown man and the most powerful man in the Western Empire that if he declared himself against Constantinople then they would back him, and accept the personal consequences if they did so.
Julius took their correspondence and began to consider, but events overtook him.
It started in Hispani, where Roman control had been loose ever since Manuel had reconquered the peninsula. The lords of the peninsula outside the exarchate declared that they no longer recognized the authority of Constantinople. They then raised their soldiers and waited for the inevitable attack to try and put their rebellion down. It never came.
Instead the Exarch, who was not married and had no children, threw his lot in with the rebels, and soon brought their soldiers in to help him put down the Imperial troops still loyal to Romanos.
The Hispani rebellion it turned out was the first leak in a dam that was about to collapse. Without waiting for word from Julius the exarch of Africa declared himself separated from the authority of Constantinople, but declared that he would serve the exarch of Italy if Julius would declared himself Imperator of the West.
Syria was next, where the imprisoned son of the old exarch was freed by his father’s supporters, and put into position as a figurehead leader of local Syrian troops who declared themselves out from under Constantinople’s control. A short civil war followed, and Imperial troops were thrown back behind the Taurus Mountains. On their victory the man was hailed as Basileus, but he commented that he was quite tired of that title, and would style himself as a simple Rex, king of Syria. That would not be all however, as local Egyptians threw out their Imperial garrison as 1245 drew to a close, and without an exarch separate from Constantinople they declared themselves subjects of the new kingdom setting itself up in Syria.
He was joined by the exarch of Armenia, who committed suicide shortly thereafter to prevent himself hearing about the fates of his wife and two daughters who were in Romanos’s custody. His younger brother then took power in Armenia, this was Michael Guaramoi.
Julius II finally made his own decision near the end of 1245 as well, he accepted the pledges from both North Africa and Ravenna, and in a ceremony on Christmas Day, December 25 1245 he had Julian III seized, deposed, and set to be tried. The Chalcedonian cardinals were expelled and those Thessalonikans inside the city of Rome were called to a hurried session, and elected Pope Paul VI, who promptly produced a gold circlet that had been secured from somewhere in the city, and crowned Julius Caesari to be Emperor of the West.
The lines were drawn, and the entire Empire outside the Balkans and Anatolia were now in full revolt. And this revolt was unlike those in the past. They sought not to take the central throne for themselves, but simply to be rid of it entirely. Twenty years of Romanos III was quite enough.
It wasn’t quite that simple of course. Other than Spain, where Imperial forces had been easily beaten, Imperial troops remained in several camps, and over the next year multiple major battles will be fought as the rebelling lands fight to establish independence for the first time in over a thousand years. Had he lived it is almost certain that Romanos would have crushed them all given a chance, and given his military skill it seems likely he would have succeeded. But we will get to that in just a moment.
First, there was an incident which, at the time, seemed barely noticeable, but which was to have enormous consequences in a very short time. In 1244 the last Cuman khagan had shown up at the Tyras River begging to be protected behind the Roman defenses. His army, such as it was, had been crushed once again by some new steppe tribe in the east. And now that tribe wanted his head. His request was granted, but a short time later representatives of this tribe arrived, saying that they came from the Universal Ruler. The men were dutifully sent to Constantinople, where they appeared before Romanos and demanded that the Cuman khagan be handed over to them, and threatened annihilation if they were refused.
Romanos laughed in their faces, and informed them in no uncertain terms what he thought of their barbarian king, his kingdom, and all his men. The messengers grew angry, and repeated their threats. Romanos grew angry as well, and ordered that the most insolent have their tongues cut out, and then had all but one of the messengers burned at the stake to send a pointed message to the last, who was beaten, had his nose slit, and then was dumped naked on the steppe to die or find his own way home.
Romanos however would never learn the consequences of what he had done, because the massive revolt across the Empire had finally prompted action among the men he trusted most, the two Constantines. The elder was the ringleader, and organized the conspiracy, while the younger was sent to Constantinople to lay the groundwork for what would come after. In the Chalcedon palace a squad of men were gathered whom the elder Constantine knew were sympathetic to him, and they agreed to assassinate the made Emperor.
Constantine’s squad moved quick and decisively. He was one of the last men the Emperor still trusted with entry into the Imperial palace without requiring an extensive search. This time it would be Romanos’s undoing. Constantine had a number of daggers concealed on his person, and he met the other conspirators in a small, out of the way room and distributed them. As Romanos held court, ordering executions and confiscations Constantine approached, ostensibly report of a conspiracy against the Emperor.
Romanos was always eager to hear of such things, and bade Constantine give him the information. Constantine came closer, and informed the Emperor that it was one of his closest confidants. Then, he drew his dagger and lunged. Romanos was always quick, and even in his now advanced age he managed to throw himself from the throne, only being grazed on the side by the dagger. He rose and drew his sword, but other conspirators rushed on him, even as the guard moved to stop them. A dozen blows were landed, and the Romanos the Mad was dead.
The entire room was in shock, the guards furious, but before they could exact vengeance upon the conspirators the appointed time came, and a dozen fully armored Taxidia who were loyal to Constantine were in the room, ready to put down any resistance to the coup.
Constantine denounced Romanos to the court, dubbing him the mad emperor. He then proclaimed Nikephorus, the Emperor’s nephew, imprisoned these many years, as the new ruler of the Romans.
Romanos III was 55 years old, and had been Emperor for 23 years. Romanos, as I think I’ve made clear, was the worst Emperor in Roman history. His administration was a colossal failure, his choice of bureaucrats fatally weakened the Roman state, he reignited religious persecution in an era where that was largely in the past, he showed cruelty and sadism at times a wiser Emperor would have shown clemency. And all of that we could maybe, maybe overlook. He did after all destroy the Cumans, and drive the Turks back across their border in a war that seemed all but lost. He still wouldn’t be remembered fondly, but tyrannical Emperors have had their most brutal actions overlooked before.
But, Romanos didn’t stop there. No, he provoked the wrath of the Great Khan of the East, the self-proclaimed universal ruler. The man who ruled an empire stretching from the Samhan islands to the Eastern border of Turkic Persia in the south, and deep into the steppe in the north, learned of the cruel and vicious treatment of his envoys. We don’t know exactly how. Perhaps the messenger left to die made it back. Maybe a traveling merchant heard the stories and told the Khan for what he knew would be a large reward.
However it happened, the most powerful man in the world had been insulted, belittled, and his men had been murdered. He would not stand for this treatment by some ruler on the far side of the continent. No, this would not stand even a little.
But that will have to wait. Next time we will be once again turning our attention to the wider world as we catch up on just what’s happened in the past fifty years in Europe and beyond to lay the groundwork for the Siege of 1248.
