Don’t be to hard on that guy, hitler ordered him not to retreat under the pain of dishonour
The Eternal Empire: Emperor Maurice dies before being overthrown
- Thread starter wcv215
- Start date
That would be cool
it would be hilarious
Also, I would like to ask about something: did the Roman Empire took the guise of still being a republic untill Diocletian ?
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Just read this entire TL in the space of four days. I love it! Can't wait to see how Manuel IV will do... a sheltered, unworldly young man presiding over a vast empire recently devastated by plague?
Heroes have been made from unlikelier men.
Heroes have been made from unlikelier men.
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To a certain extent. The Principate kept the outward form of the Republic at least until the reign of Septimius Severus going into the early 3rd century after which it began evolving toward a more obviously autocratic government form. Before then the Emperor was formally only princeps - "first citizen", basically a Father of the Republic type figure, or a first-among-equals. Diocletian changed the entire system by introducing the Tetrarchy and formally dividing the Empire's territories between two ruling emperors and two junior emperors. Kind of like First Intermediate Period Egypt, if both northern and southern pharaohs had had a co-regent, except on a vastly grander scale.
So kinda sorta. It’s more accurate to say that Diocletian dropped the last remnants of the princeps rather than saying he did away with the guise of the Republic entirely. The shift away from that had been a long time coming, going back to at least Domitian, and his early shift in the direction of being more autocratic is a big part of his damnation. Septimius Severus is, as usual, also to blame as he held the army foremost and scorned all other men. After the Crisis of the Third Century started more aspects of the principate were discarded, until Diocletian just got rid of the illusion of the “First Citizen” and became Dominus officially. Even then though Aurelian had started using the term more openly (after it was introduced by Domitian) as deus et dominus.
I have a feeling Romanos the Mad put a few cracks in the facade though.
States rarely stay the same after all. Romans adapt out of necessity and the era they are at.
actually no, i think the facade of princep was already gone, as now they are crowned by the patriarchI have a feeling Romanos the Mad put a few cracks in the facade though.
Part 104: So Little Time
Part CIV: So Little Time
To say that Manuel set about his new duties with a will would be an understatement. He sent out commands across the Empire, bringing Senators back to Constantinople, and offering land grants to the survivors of the Plague. Family farms, which had survived, ballooned in size, going from roughly 30 acres to nearly 100 acres per family. Aiding him in this process was just how many of the wealthy landowners had died. Across the Empire entire families had been wiped out by plague, leaving tenants without landlords. Manuel stepped into this void, taking over vacant estates himself and having the land broken up and distributed to the surviving tenants.
Those landowners who survived did so at a somewhat lower level of wealth, as their intake of crops for sale had diminished drastically and they were forced to accept less rent from tenants to avoid having them simply petition the Emperor for a land grant. That isn’t to say that the landowner was actually poorer overall than they had been before the plague, and the opposite was often the case. Wealth overall was consolidated in the wealthiest survivors, who found themselves inheriting more wealth than ever before.
This then led to another problem, inflation. Inflation has been a massive problem for the Empire in the past, but during the early years of Manuel IV’s reign it grew to an astounding degree. This should not be terribly surprising, as the amount of gold per person had effectively doubled over the past few years, and prices increased to match. Wage laborers were increasingly priced out of staples as their increased wages could not keep up. They moved to cities as fear of plague diminished and were often shipped back out to the provinces as new farmers. Or into the army.
Manuel dealt with the problem of inflation by raising taxes to wartime levels, while cutting spending. The result was an economic downturn as prices did not immediately decrease, and riots broke out in Constantinople throughout 1348 and 1349, with one in 1349 being barely contained by the Imperial army. Finally in 1350 he relented and reduced taxes, but kept the active reforming energy going elsewhere.
Manuel was a proponent of manufacturing, and he began an incredibly ambitious expansion of that craft. One major contribution which would have massive ramifications into the present day was his 1351 law banning the use of slaves in what today we would call an industrial environment. At the time this was an odd law, but one which wasn’t much commented, as slaves had died in vast numbers, and now numbers were barely sufficient to work large personal estates and do the duties related to record-keeping and personal service of the upper class. The law will of course be rolled back and eventually revoked in the coming centuries, but the basic principle will remain an important point for advocates of Imperial citizens to focus on restoring, until finally Emperor Ahmad II did so in 1847, as industrialization truly began to take off in Italy. As such it might be the single most important contribution Manuel IV made in his entire life. Other than ensuring his son was well educated and had the army’s loyalty of course.
That said, ultimately Manuel’s attempts to increase manufacturing was in general a dismal failure. He didn’t have the efficient machines which will drive later industry, nor the sort of control afforded to Ahmad during the Renaissance Wars. There were successes. Silk production around Constantinople began to recover to levels not seen since the workshops had been destroyed in 1248, and armorers in Greece and Italy innovated new ways to produce armor to replace the large number of workers now lost.
In other areas however Manuel’s efforts were an expensive failure, in particular his efforts to expand ignifera production crashed, and saw little effect in the Roman state itself, where the secretive nature of powder production, and competition from liquid fire artisans, sabotaged the project. Worse, in 1351 Frankish smiths turned out their first working canna, and soon the art was spreading across Europe, ending the century of Roman monopoly.
What all these projects, both successful and failed, had in common was that they were expensive, and significantly delayed recovery in other areas, in particular those related to the army. Army recruitment was still down, and army pay lagged behind inflation to a particularly alarming degree. Soldiers had died in vast numbers to Plague, and now Manuel simply did not replace them. He needed the cash for other purposes. The result can probably be imagined, revolt.
In 1353 the Moesian army, which had not seen a donative at all during the reign of Katerina’s children, and now was going on two full decades without a pay raise went into revolt, aiming to overthrow Manuel and replace him with a distant cousin of the family, whom they hoped would be more cooperative. These soldiers marched into Thrace, and laid siege to Adrianople. For six months the city held out while Manuel tried to rally reinforcements from the East, and also to negotiate with the rebels. Ultimately, he managed to get a pledge of support from the Eastern army and marched them across Anatolia as news of Adrianople’s fall arrived. The city’s fall proved to be a major blow to the rebellion however, as sickness inside the city from the siege spread to the Moesians, sending many of them to their deaths long before the Emperor’s army could arrive. When the battle was finally fought Manuel’s forces crushed the rebels, and he was left with an even smaller army. A donative was however paid out, and pay increased somewhat, and more importantly vacant land was set aside for soldiers to use to supplement their income.
The Moesian army, restored by Katarina was effectively disbanded as a field force, being left as something closer to a garrison while Manuel set about rebuilding a proper field army in Thrace itself. Once again, this was expensive, and the Roman state ran up large debts from 1353 until 1355, when the project was largely abandoned. For the next two years the Senate managed to stymie Manuel’s quest for more funds, which they accurately believed would be largely wasted on the latest idea the enthusiastic, but rather ineffective Manuel had.
With Manuel sidelined some of his projects actually began to succeed, for independent reasons. The most important of these was silk manufacturing. Long a major part of Imperial production silk had grown in value over the previous years as the increased wealth of the great men of the Empire saw the amount of silk being consumed by their households increase. As production now increased the price fell significantly, relative to inflation at least. As wages began to rise silk was even sometimes purchased by the upper middle class, in fairly small amounts at this point. As the 1350s drew to a close and the Arab-Turkish War finally came to an end the Eastern trade routes were opened once again as well, in particular those which went south to India. And of course, the old trade across Africa to Malia saw even more external demand. However, in 1359 Frankish agents successfully managed to duplicate the feat of Justinian I in smuggling silkworms out of southern Italy, all the way to the Rhine where Frankish production soon began.
Back in the Empire however Manuel was thoroughly deflated. His grand projects had failed, his great schemes came to nothing, and if we’re being honest he was something of a laughingstock among the powerful. He would not go down in history as another great Emperor, nor even a particularly good one. He instead withdrew from public life, leaving his wife to handle many of the public responsibilities of his role. He still issued orders and directives, but these weren’t the grand and ambitious projects of his youth, instead being simple administrative decisions. And looking at his later years, he actually did a decent job. He’d always been smart, well-educated, and well-intentioned, and this shone through as he undertook smaller projects, including significant rework performed on the churches of Consantinople, which was well-organized and finished both on-time and on-budget. By 1360 he had gotten the Senate to let go of its reigns, and he returned to the project of rebuilding the Thacian field army.
While Manuel undertook the background organizational work it was his son, John, who was out working in his father’s name. John was not super interested in organization or any kind of paperwork, but he was an active hunter, rider, and enthusiastic soldier. He was popular with the men for joining them in drinking, gambling, marching, and training. As well as for getting them out of trouble for occasional indiscretions. In 1361 this army faced its first test as a Russi raiding party penetrated the Taurican defenses and raided down into Thrace. In a short battle some three hundred Roman cavalry nominally led by John routed a smaller force of about 200 Russi, capturing sixty of them, as well as all their plunder. It was a minor affair, but did serve to give John his first awards as a soldier. Another revolt, this time in Nort Africa, broke out in 1363 and the Thracian army was dispatched for the first time to put it down, succeeding over a series of battles until capturing the leadership in 1365.
By now Manuel’s health had taken a downturn, as he seems to have come down with consumption sometime during the winter of 1364. To try and recover he departed Constantinople for Italy the next summer, never to return. His wife followed him, but she died along with their two youngest children in October 1365, their ship being sunk by a storm off the coast of Sicily. John’s return to Constantinople therefore was subdued, and he took up the position as regent reluctantly, being uncomfortable with the public duties, and ultimately handed them off to his, now only surviving, younger brother Leo. John retained the power, and would perform Senatorial duties, as well as continue building his father’s field army, but the religious and civic duties went to the younger brother.
This bears an eerie resemblance to the later organization of the Imperator phase of Imperial history, but this is ultimately just coincidence. In Italy, Manuel was not inactive, often traveling up and down the peninsula to encourage the expansion of work, and resettlement of fallow land, as well as adjudicating disputes between tenants and landlords regarding increased rent, or even demands for wage increases by workers hurt by inflation. He was widely thought to be fair-minded in these decisions, and the economy of the Empire continued to recover. He would ultimately die in 1369, as his consumption never really improved, and he took a turn for the worse as the weather turned colder that year.
Rushed home to Campania he would see Leo one last time on Christmas day, but then would die that night.
Manuel IV was 44 years old, and had been Emperor for 21 years. I know I’ve said this a lot recently, but Manuel is hard to judge. On the one-hand, he is often held up as an example of a bad Emperor due to his first decade in power. He ran up large deficits chasing grandiose ideas, which did not come to fruition. He flitted between those ideas rapidly, so that he didn’t give any of them the resources needed. And those resources often didn’t even exist under the shrunken Imperial budget. He faced a major revolt and barely put it down due to wasting money on failed projects when he knew the army was growing mutinous.
But the other side of the coin is that Manuel ultimately grew up. His last decade in power was far more successful as his youthful exuberance gave way to more reasonable ideas, and responsible organization. And, it should also be noted he had been an extremely sheltered child, to the point that his parents seemed to have almost forgotten about him. Or at least would have liked to. If Katarina had taken Manuel into the field with her, or kept him in Constantinople even maybe he would have been able to take his proven ability and really make his mark on Imperial history.
As it was however he didn’t, and Manuel ultimately was something of a failure. I do think he was at least reasonably good, and in many ways was extremely far-seeing, perhaps a bit too much. One thing that is undeniable however is that he stood between two giants of history. The larger-than-life Katarina, who appeared more successful than she really was. And John V, who we will be covering next time.
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Like I said, the facade was long gone by then. The Thalassans were much closer to the Dominate than to the Principate in form, as their government was extremely autocratic. Even then though, it wasn't so much "your lord and god" as with Diocletian so much as, "I deserve this power because I'm the viceregent of God on Earth." Which was how the Byzantine Emperors OTL liked to present themselves, even if the reality was different. Since the Thalassans were a lot more powerful than the OTL Byzantines though they could more readily enforce that image. The Caesari by contrast are a lot closer to OTL, even if they have a more solid position than OTL Emperors did due to the greater precedence around succession.I have a feeling Romanos the Mad put a few cracks in the facade though.
So Manuel IV didn't quite live up to everybody's hopes... but he didn't do bad, all things considered!
Another great update. Did notice numerous 1251, 1253 etc where it should probably be 1353 (unless Manuel was a Time Lord 😉).
All hail John V!
Another great update. Did notice numerous 1251, 1253 etc where it should probably be 1353 (unless Manuel was a Time Lord 😉).
All hail John V!
I assume that, considering how he’s overshadowed by Emperors like Diocletian and Romanos the Mad in terms of how people view them as the epitome of bad emperors, that the best equivalent for how Caligula is viewed ITTL would be how say Maximinus Thrax or Didius Julianus are viewed IOTL in terms of being seen as a terrible Emperor…..…. by the history buffs who have actually heard of him? And speaking of which, what Emperors would you say would be comparable to Maximinus Thrax or Didius Julianus in the “viewed as a terrible emperor but only history buffs really know of them” sense?
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Caligula gets extra points for being really early, especially since Christianity, particularly early Christianity is more focused on ITTL (or at least the state-approved narrative about it). Septimius Severus would be a good example. Most of the Thalassans after Manuel II are largely forgotten, as are most of those between his uncle and Leo IV. There are some exceptions of course.
For reasons we'll get into most Emperors between the end of the Caesari and Ahmad II, who was mentioned in this chapter are usually kinda lumped together as pretty bad and/or useless, but also not worth remembering.
Edit: Although the Christianity point above is kinda balanced in Caligula’s favor (also Tiberius’s ironically enough) is that they aren’t associated with persecution of Christians, so they get let off easier than the otherwise significantly more competent and successful Diocletian.
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An Arabic, Islamic looking given name for a Roman Emperor looks, at best, really weird.
And in that note, I am interested in what Ahmed I was like as an Emperor.
Superstitious? 🤣Dammit. I don't know why I keep typing 12 instead of 13.
I will point out that there had only been a handful of Arab / Semitic emperors, and they all had good Roman names. Phillip the Arab and members of the Severan dynasty. Elagabalus l, who seems to be an exception, isn't. That was (a mangled version of) his high-priestly title. His actual name was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
I doubt the Church would baptize anyone with a visibly miscreant name like 'Ahmed'.....