The most distinctive, as well as the most fatal, characteristic of the Komnenian
empire was the identification of the state with the imperial family;
this was the essence of what used to be labelled the feudalism of the Komnenian
dynasty. In some ways, Manuel’s regime looks less feudal than that
of Alexios or John, despite his liking for the culture and the company of
western knighthood. As he matured, according to Choniates, ‘he ruled
more autocratically, treating his subjects not as free men but as if they were
servants who belonged to him by inheritance’.35 His reliance on eunuchs
recalls the pre-Komnenian period, as do his attempts to cut back on grants
of privilege and immunity. Yet the cut-back was mainly at the expense of
the church and the Italian maritime republics. All other indications are
that he was at least as indulgent to his extended family as his father and
grandfather had been, and that he was scrupulous in maintaining a strict
hierarchy by blood-relationship. He created one new title, that of despot¯es,
for B´ela-Alexios ofHungary, when designating him as his future son-in-law
and heir to the throne; the title lapsed at the birth of Alexios II, but it was
revived by later emperors, and it remained the most senior of the three
titles (the others were sebastokrat¯or and caesar) which were reserved for
the emperor’s immediate family, and carried semi-imperial status, allowing
their bearers to wear quasi-imperial insignia and to sit with the emperor on
ceremonial occasions.
Manuel may also have introduced certain changes to the titulature of
the wider circle of imperial relatives. In the earlier years of the dynasty, all
relatives by blood or marriage below the rank of caesar had been designated
by variants of the title sebastos (see above, p. 612). In the ceremonial lists
of Manuel’s reign, however, the imperial nephews and cousins, who stand
next to the enthroned imperial family, have no titles beyond their kinship
designation, with the sole exception of the senior imperial nephew, who
is pr¯otosebastos (‘first sebastos’) and pr¯otovestiarios, i.e. head of the imperial
household. The ranks of the sebastoi begin at the next level down and,
among them, those who are designated as the emperor’s gambroi, that is
the husbands of his female nieces and cousins, rank senior to those whose
relationship is too distant to be named. Not only are ranks carefully graded
by degree of kinship to the emperor, and within each degree according
to the seniority of the kinsman through whom the kinship is traced, but
kinship designations begin to take the place of titles.36
In addition to this continual articulation of the imperial family system,
Manuel’s reign witnessed its further extension downwards from the military
to the bureaucracy, and outwards into the sphere of foreign relations.
As the Komnenian aristocracy proliferated, more of its members came to
hold civilian office, while others married into the more illustrious civilian
families, one of which, the Kamateroi, was already connected with
the Doukai and well on the way to establishing its later ascendancy in the
church and the bureaucracy. The marriage diplomacy of Alexios I and John
II had created blood lines leading from the Komnenoi to ruling dynasties
in the lands of the Rus, the Caucasus, Hungary and Germany. Manuel
more than doubled the network with marriage alliances that related the
imperial family in Constantinople to royal and princely families in Austria,
Jerusalem, Antioch, Tuscany, Piedmont, northern France and Languedoc.
Marriage alliances were also discussed with Henry II of England (1154–89)
and William II of Sicily. This was perhaps the closest Byzantium came to
being at the centre of an international ‘family of kings’; even the sultan of
Rumwas included by virtue of his ritual adoption as the emperor’s son. That
Manuel saw a close connection between his internal and external families
is evident in the way he interfered with the church’s marriage legislation on
the forbidden degrees of kinship and punished men from undistinguished
bureaucratic families who threatened to devalue the status of Komnenian
brides by attempting to marry into noble families.
In 1180, then, the political existence of theByzantine empire was governed
by kinship and lineage to an unprecedented degree. The future of the system
consisted as never before in the cohesion of the extended imperial family.
For a century that cohesion had been managed by the emperor as head of
the family, but now that the emperor was an eleven-year-old, it depended
on a consensus of loyalty to the young Alexios II among the Komnenian
nobility. Manuel did what he could to create a framework of collective
patriotic and familial responsibility: he set up a regency council, perhaps
based on his inner circle of advisers, comprising his widow, the patriarch
and a number of relatives. The latter were presumably selected on the basis
of seniority, althoughNiketas Choniates indicates that they participated on
a basis of equality.37 At the same time, Manuel obtained guarantees from
the sultan, the prince of Antioch, the king of Jerusalem and possibly other
members of the external ‘family of kings’ that they would defend Alexios’
inheritance.
With hindsight it seems clear, and contemporaries seem to have sensed,
that these measures were doomed to failure. The Komnenian family had
been prone to factionalism from the time of Alexios I, and its solidarity
inevitablyweakened as each generation multiplied the number of household
units (oikoi) with which the imperial oikos at the heart of the kin-group
(genos) had to share the finite resources of an empire which they all still
regarded as the Komnenian family patrimony. The accessions of John II
and Manuel I had not gone unchallenged, and although Manuel saw off
his original challengers, the sebastokratores Isaac, his brother and uncle, the
latter’s place was taken by his son Andronikos, while the former’s supporters
seem to have gravitated towards Alexios Axouch, the husband of Manuel’s
niece by the emperor’s late brother Alexios.
Axouch’s ‘conspiracy’ in 1167 was quickly disposed of, but Andronikos
was a constant worry to Manuel from 1154, almost as troublesome during
his long spells in prison, from which he escaped twice, in 1159 and 1164, and
in exile among the empire’s eastern neighbours (1167–80), as he was during
his brief period of liberty. After his return and rehabilitation in Manuel’s
final year, he was understandably sent – like his father before him – into
comfortable internal exile on the Black Sea coast. But this exclusion from
Constantinople played into Andronikos’ hands, by giving him a provincial
power base where he could recruit supporters, and by casting him as an
impartial outsider to the selfish intrigues which divided the regency council
of Alexios II, to the gross neglect of the boy’s upbringing and the public
interest.
According to Niketas Choniates, there were those who lusted after the
widowed empress and sought to seduce her, those who lusted after money
and appropriated public funds to meet their growing expenses and those
who lusted after imperial power.38 Elsewhere he describes them in somewhat
different terms: ‘Some of his noble guardians winged their way repeatedly
like bees to the provinces and stored up money like honey, others like goats
hankered after the tender shoots of empire which they continually longed
to crop, while others grew fat like pigs on filthy lucre’.39 The emphasis on
money-making is interesting, particularly the implied distinction between
the misappropriation of tax revenue from the provinces, and the sordid
enrichment from the profits of trade, and possibly of prostitution, in Constantinople.
It shows that the search for funds to maintain an aristocratic
lifestyle was a constant motivating factor in political loyalty.
His enforced isolation thus put Andronikos in an ideal position, which
he exploited masterfully, to pose as champion of Alexios II’s best interests,
which the boy’s guardians were patently neglecting, and to win the sympathies
of the many noble figures in Constantinople: these includedManuel’s
daughter Maria, who resented the dominance which one of the regency
council,Manuel’s nephewthe pr¯otosebastos Alexios, acquired over the young
emperor by forming an amorous liaison with the dowager empress. After
the tension between Maria and the pr¯otosebastos broke out in armed conflict,
Andronikos’ intervention became inevitable. If Andronikos, once in
power, had kept his election promises and formed a genuinely inclusive
regency government for Alexios II, he might have held the Komnenian
nobility together. His programme of administrative reform, admirable in
itself, could have won him support even among his peers if he had treated
them fairly and generously. But by instituting a reign of terror against all
potential rivals for the regency, including the emperor’s sister and mother,
he provoked a serious revolt in Asia Minor; then, by going on to eliminate
Alexios II and settle the succession on his own son John, he removed the
only focus of consensus among the Komnenian kin-group, and committed
himself to dependence on a faction bound to him by self-interest.
The terror continued, and those who could escaped by fleeing abroad, to
the courts of rulers who had had ties or treaties withManuel and Alexios II.
Thus the sultan, the prince and patriarch of Antioch, the king of Jerusalem,
the pope, FrederickBarbarossa, the marquis ofMontferrat, the king ofHungary
and, above all, the king of Sicilywere approached by refugees imploring
their intervention. It was at the insistence of Manuel’s great-nephew, the
pinkern¯es Alexios Komnenos, that William II of Sicily sent the invasion
force which took Dyrrachium and Thessaloniki in 1185. The stated aim of
the expedition was to replace Andronikos with a young man claiming to
be Alexios II: pseudo-Alexioi were the inconvenient but inevitable consequence
– for later emperors, too – of the fact that Andronikos had sunk
Alexios’ body in the Bosporus. The Sicilian invasion thus not only recalled
the past invasions of Robert Guiscard, Bohemond and Roger II; it also set
a precedent for the diversion of the Fourth Crusade, both by the damage
and humiliation it caused, and in the way it involved the external ‘family
of kings’ in the politics of the Komnenian family.
Andronikos would probably have succeeded eventually in repelling the
Sicilian invasion, as he succeeded in quelling every organised conspiracy
against him, but the very diligence of his agents in hunting down potential
conspirators led, quite unpredictably, to the spontaneous uprising which
toppled him.Whenhis chief agentwent to arrest a suspect who had given no
cause for suspicion, the suspect slew the agent in desperation, and then did
the only thing he could do in order to avoid immediate execution: he rushed
for asylum to the church of St Sophia. A crowd gathered, Andronikos –
evidently feeling secure – was out of town and, St Sophia being also the
imperial coronation church, one thing led to another. So Isaac II Angelos
became emperor because he was in the right place at the right time, and
this had a decisive effect on the course of his reign. His propagandists
claimed, and he firmly believed, that his accession was providential, that
he was the Angel of the Lord sent by heaven to end the tyranny, so that his
whole reign was ordained, blessed and protected byGod.He considered his
power irreproachable and untouchable, and he exercised it with a mixture
of grandiosity and complacency quite inappropriate to his situation.
Other important people did not share Isaac II’s belief. His miraculous
elevation was not enough to convince Isaac Komnenos inCyprus, Peter and
Asen in Bulgaria, Theodore Mangaphas in Philadelphia or Basil Chotzas
at Tarsia, near Nikomedeia, that they owed loyalty to Constantinople, or
to prevent two young men from raising rebellions by pretending to be
Alexios II. Among his own close family, it did not make up for his lack of
seniority, or his military incompetence; he was challenged by his uncle John
and his nephew Constantine Angelos. The Komnenian nobility as a whole
were not impressed, because many of them had equally good, if not better,
dynastic claims in terms of the hierarchy of kinship which had operated
under Manuel: Isaac was descended from Alexios I’s youngest daughter,
but others could trace their descent through the male line, and some could
count John II among their ancestors. For several of them, Isaac’s success was
only an incentive to follow it and turn up at St Sophia in the hope of being
acclaimed. The first to try this was Alexios Branas, the general who had
halted the Sicilian invasion. Having failed in this first attempt, he waited
until he was put in command of the army sent to quell the Vlach revolt.
What made his rebellion so dangerous was the fact that he combined good
Komnenian lineage with military expertise and strong family connections
among the military aristocracy of Adrianople. Isaac was saved only by the
loyalty of the people of Constantinople and a bold sortie by Conrad of
Montferrat.
During ten years in power, Isaac II faced at least seventeen revolts, a
number exceeded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries only by the twentyone
plots that are recorded for the thirty-nine-year reign of Alexios I. Isaac
undoubtedly saw something providential in the fact of his survival, but
repeated opposition took its toll on the effectiveness of his rule, making
it virtually impossible for him to delegate important military commands
to highly competent noble commanders. This was probably decisive for
the outcome of the rebellion of Peter and Asen. Lack of support among
the Komnenian nobility may have prompted what was seen to be Isaac’s
excessive favouritism to his grand logothete, his non-Komnenian maternal
uncle Theodore Kastamonites, and to the latter’s successor, Constantine
Mesopotamites. It certainly drove the members of five leading Komnenian
families, the Palaiologos, Branas, Kantakouzenos, Raoul and Petraliphas, to
mount the coup in 1195 which replaced Isaac with his elder brother Alexios
III Angelos.
Sibling rivalry had, as we have seen, threatened to destroy the Komnenian
system in the past, but it had been kept under control, and its
eruption into successful usurpation sealed the fate of the system in its
twelfth-century phase. Niketas Choniates saw the overthrow of brother by
brother as the supreme manifestation of the moral depravity for which the
fall of Constantinople was just retribution.40 From the deposition of Isaac
II proceeded the escape of his son Alexios to the west just when the Fourth
Crusade needed an excuse for a detour via Constantinople. In their comeback,
the internal and external dimensions of the system fatally converged.
Choniates, perhaps looking back to Andronikos and even to his father, saw
a pattern:
If anything was the supreme cause that the Roman power collapsed to its knees and
suffered the seizure of lands and cities, and, finally, itself underwent annihilation,
this was the members of the Komnenoi who revolted and usurped power. For,
dwelling among the nations which were unfriendly to the Romans, they were the
bane of their country, even though when they stayed at home they were ineffectual,
useless and incompetent in anything they tried to undertake.41
This retribution apart, however, Alexios III faced relatively little opposition
from the Komnenoi. In 1200–1 there were provincial revolts led by his
cousinsMichael Angelos andManuel Kamytzes, and a one-day occupation
of the Great Palace in Constantinople by a son of Alexios Axouch, John
Komnenos the Fat. But otherwise, Alexios enjoyed fairly good support in
the bureaucracy and the church through his connection by marriage with
the Kamateros family, and the consortium of Komnenian families which
brought him to power appear to have been satisfied with his laissez-faire
regime, and with his adoption of the name Komnenos in preference to
Angelos. All five families flourished after 1204; four were to be prominent
after 1261 in the restored empire of the Palaiologoi, and the Palaiologoi
gained a head start in their future ascendancy from the marriage which
Alexios III arranged between his daughter Irene and Alexios Palaiologos.
The marriage of another daughter, Anna, to Theodore I Laskaris (1205–
21) laid the dynastic basis for the empire of Nicaea, the most successful
of the three main Greek successor states after 1204. Cousins of Isaac II
and Alexios III established the western state which enjoyed brief glory as
the empire of Thessaloniki and then survived in north-western Greece as
the despotate of Epiros. The empire of Trebizond, which lasted until 1461,
was ruled by a dynasty calling themselves the Grand Komnenoi, who were
descended from Andronikos I.
Under the successors of Manuel I the Komnenian system, centred on
Constantinople, was programmed for self-destruction. Relocated to the
provinces after 1204 through the leading families of the last twelfth-century
regimes, it ensured the survival of the Byzantine empire for another two
and a half centuries, while losing none of its divisive potential.
World History
