As my last series, All My Capetians, ended with the end of the, well, Capetians, I hope y’all will join me on a strange journey back in time to the twilight of the Komnenoi dynasty of Byzantium.
I’d like to begin by introducing you, as best I can, to this vanished world, an empire of Greeks who called themselves romaioi, Romans, with one foot in the Christian West and the other in the Near East just as their city, Constantinople, straddled Europe and Asia.
The empire was ringed on all sides by barbaros peoples, infidels, nomads, and ‘false Christians’ which included such peoples as the Vlakhs (ancestors of the modern-day Romanians), the Franks or ‘Latins’ of Western Europe, as well as Byzantium’s ancient enemy, the Arabs. But by the time of the Komnenoi, the most persistent and troublesome enemy was perhaps the various Turkic-speaking nomad tribes. The Bulgars were so fierce that the Emperor Basileios II had been dubbed Boulgaroktonos, or Bulgar-slayer, for kicking mad Bulgar ass; Selcuks had carved out a kingdom for themselves in Anatolia called Rum; in 1091 a horde of Patzinaks attempted to invade Constantinople and were only stopped when the Byzantines allied with the Patzinak’s distant cousins, the Kumans. The Turkic peoples seemed to be pressing in, threatening the Byzantine way of life with their customs, Islam, and love of oil wrestling.
If you and I could travel back in time and stand before the massive kilometer-long walls of Constantinople, first we would pay an entrance fee and then await permission to enter the city’s environs. Entering through the Porta Aurea, the Golden Gate, decorated with statues of emperors and a sculpture of a chariot pulled by four elephants, we would walk down the Via Egnatia, seeing public squares filled with people in brightly colored clothing, the wealthy in silks, the poor in linen, Orthodox priests, eunuchs, children, women, a small portion of the city’s population of about 375,000. Churches stood on almost every street, displaying sacred relics and icons wrought in metal, enamel, or mosaics, which would be marveled at and even kissed by visitors. Pilgrims would mill about us, clutching in their hands encolpia (pendant crosses) as souvenirs. Almost as numerous as the churches were the bathhouses were the Byzantines went to relax and gossip.
In the markets we would find exotic fruits and spices such as pepper and cloves. Foreign visitors to Constantinople often remarked on the rivers of olive oil and wine. We’d haggle with merchants, many of them among the foreigners who called Constantinople home: the Armenians, Jews, Venetians, Genoese, Slavs, and Catholic Christians from Western Europe, as well as Muslims. Romany gypsies, known as athinagoi, also lived in Constantinople, plying their trade as bear-keepers and soothsayers; some “would have snakes wound around them, and they would tell one person that he was born under an evil star, and the other under a lucky star; and they would also prophecy about upcoming good and ill fortunes.”
Perhaps we would catch a glimpse of highborn women going to and from church, veiled from prying eyes, surrounded by servants. Byzantine women were more genteel, sophisticated, and in some ways more powerful than their Western European counterparts. They could make their own wills and have custody of their children if widowed. Women were often educated, and court ladies organized literary circles, reading, borrowing, and commissioning books. Anna Komnene remarks on the foreign women who accompanied the Crusading army to Constantinope, expressing amazement at the way they rode their horses and took part in the fighting beside their men.
This was the world into which Manuel Komnenos was born in November 1118, the youngest child of the emperor Ioannes II and his red-haired wife, Piroska, herself the daughter of King László I of Hungary. He was therefore a porphyrogenitos, an imperial prince born in the purple chamber of the royal palace that was decorated with precious porphyry marble. His father had been emperor for only a few months; Manuel’s grandfather, the emperor Alexios I, had caught a chill while attending the carnival games in the Hippodrome that February, which spread to his shoulder and killed him a few months later. Although his sister Anna Komnene schemed to seize the throne for herself and her husband, Ioannes had her and her cronies packed off to monasteries and firmly established himself on the throne.
William of Tyre described Ioannes II as a short man, swarthy, very ugly, with black hair and eyes, so dark he was known as ‘the Moor’. His subjects called him Kaloioannes, ‘Beautiful Ioannes’, because of the beauty of his character. He was a good man and a great emperor. As soon as he became emperor he promoted his childhood companion, Ioannes Axouch, a Turk who had been captured by Crusaders in 1097 and gifted to Alexios I as a slave, to the rank of megas domestikos, the commander of the Byzantine army. Axouch would serve him faithfully for decades. Ioannes took in Piroska’s blinded cousin, Álmos of Hungary, when Álmos fled to him in 1126. Álmos’ rival, King István II, was so angered when Ioannes refused to expel Álmos that he attacked the then-Byzantine city of Belgrade and tore it down to its foundation stones.
Another exciting event of Manuel’s youth was the exile of his uncle, Isaakios *sebastokrator *(this title means venerable ruler). Isaakios sebastokrator had at first been a firm supporter of his brother Ioannes, but for some reason in 1130 he conspired against him and, being caught, fled with his sons Ioannes Tzepeles and Andronikos to the court of the emir Gazi Gümüştekin Danishmend. Isaakios sebastokrator even tried to form a coalition of allies including Turks and the rulers of Jerusalem, Armenia, and Trebizond to fight Ioannes, but the whole thing fell apart and he eventually returned to court and his brother’s good graces.
Isaakios sebastokrator’s son, Ioannes Tzepeles, had spent his formative years in the emir’s Islamic court and apparently never reconciled himself to being a Byzantine princeling. Due to what Niketas Choniates calls “some trifling vexation against his uncle the emperor Ioannes”, he defected to the Turks in 1140, converted to Islam, and married a Selcuk princess. He would only be one of many black sheep in the Komnenoi family.
Manuel was the youngest of four sons, so his odds of becoming emperor seemed pretty remote. His eldest brother, the co-emperor Alexios, died suddenly of a fever in 1142. The second-eldest son, Andronikos, died while bringing his brother’s body back to Constantinople. At this point, Ioannes II took the shocking step of passing over the third son, Isaakios, in favor of the youngest, Manuel. His homie Axouch pleaded with him not to do it, but Ioannes held firm. Ioannes was killed while boar hunting, and Axouch respected his wishes and made sure Manuel was crowned emperor.
This had to have been cold water in the face to his elder brother Isaakios, but remarkably Isaakios seemed more or less cool with it. Maybe he knew something most people never realized – being a Byzantine emperor was dangerous work! If you didn’t end up dying in battle and your skull being lined with silver and used as a drinking cup by a Bulgar khan, or murdered by your gay lover who’d been living in a big happy foursome with you, your mistress, and your sister, or deposed and blinded by your own goddamn mother, you could look forward to a boring death like accidentally dying on a boar hunt. Maybe Isaakios was like, “Eh, you want the job, you can have it, bro.”
When Manuel became emperor, he found a crown and a fiancee waiting for him. His father had asked the German imperial court for a princess suitable for his son and heir, so the emperor Konrad had sent his wife’s sister, Bertha von Sulzbach, who was precisely the sort of plain, humorless, German hausfrau her name implies. Manuel was too busy partying like a rock star and left her waiting around for about three years before he finally married her. Although he eagerly hoped for sons, none were born.
The Patriarch Kosmas Attikos, who was greatly favored by Manuel’s brother Isaakios who “regarded him almost as a god”, was accused of conspiring to replace Manuel with Isaakios. Angered by this accusation, he cursed Bertha’s womb, declaring that she would never bear a son. Stephanos Kontostephanos, the *megas doux *(grand duke) and husband of Manuel’s sister Anna, nearly beat the shit out of the patriarch when he heard that. In retaliation, the patriarch foretold a “stony fate” for Kontostephanos, who was struck in the loins by a stone missile while in battle a few years later and killed. Regardless, Bertha and Manuel had two daughters, one of whom died young, the survivor being Maria Porphyrogenita.
Choniates has this to say about Manuel and Bertha: “She had the natural trait of being unbending and opinionated. Consequently, the emperor was not very attentive to her, but she shared in the honors, bodyguard, and remaining imperial splendours; in the matters of the bed, however, she was wronged. For Manuel, being young and passionate, was wholly devoted to a dissolute and voluptuous life and given over to banqueting and reveling; whatever the banquet of youth suggested and his vulgar passions prompted, he did. Indulging in sexual intercourse without restraint and copulating with many female partners, he unlawfully penetrated his own kinswoman.”
This kinswoman was his own niece, Theodora Vatatzaina, the daughter of Manuel’s sister Eudokia and her husband Theodoros Vatatzes. Choniates describes Theodora as arching “her eyebrow in conceited disdain” and in every way acting the empress that she was not.
Manuel’s favorite relative at court was his cousin Andronikos Komnenos, son of the disgraced rogue Isaakios *sebastokrator *and brother of the turncoat Ioannes Tzepeles. It’s worth noting that in a court where Manuel partied so hard that he had sex with just about anyone who couldn’t run away fast enough, up to and including his own blood niece, that Andronikos could keep up with and even surpass him in debauchery. Choniates, who was hardly a fan of him, says that Andronikos “excelled most men in bodily strength and his physique was worthy of empire.”
Other fixtures at court included Manuel’s brother Andronikos’ children, Ioannes protosebastos, Alexios, Maria, Eudokia, and Theodora. Theodora married Heinrich II of Austria, who had the remarkable nickname of Jasomirgott (“By God!”). Eudokia was shacked up with her cousin Andronikos. Alexios will be important later. Of these nieces and nephews, the eldest, Ioannes protosebastos, was undoubtably Manuel’s favorite of his siblings’ children that he was (probably) not fucking. He gave his nephew the title of protosebastos (first venerable one) after Ioannes lost an eye in a tournament in Pelagonia and adored him like a son.
Relations could be tense amongst these imperial cousins and nephews. A quarrel broke out in 1145 when Ioannes Axouch, Manuel’s brother Isaakios, and Andronikos debated the military prowess of Manuel versus his father Ioannes. Axouch and Isaakios overly praised Ioannes, to which Andronikos took offense. He taunted Isaakios, who drew his sword and tried to decapitate Andronikos, the blow being blocked by the timely intervention of Manuel and their cousin Ioannes Doukas.
Andronikos was a snake from a nest of snakes. Upset by the honors Manuel gave to Ioannes protosebastos, he tried scheming with the king of Jerusalem and the sultan of Konya. He even promised the king of Hungary two towns under his command if he would help Andronikos seize the throne. Despite this, Manuel seemed unconcerned with his scheming cousin. He barely even noticed when Andronikos bungled an assassination attempt on him during a nightime hunting trip in Pelagonia. It wasn’t until Andronikos threatened to murder Ioannes protosebastos that Manuel began paying attention.
Andronikos was laying in bed with his lover Eudokia, Ioannes protosebastos’s sister, when she confided in him that some of her male relatives were coming that night to kill him. She tried to convince him to dress in drag and sneak out disguised as one of her maids, but Andronikos was afraid of being caught and suffering an inglorious death ‘while being dragged by the hair’ before the emperor in women’s undergarments. Instead, he drew his sword and charged outside, so startling his would-be assailants that he made good his escape.
Manuel had him tracked down, and Andronikos was captured and thrown in prison, where he remained from 1155 to 1158. During this time period, King Baldwin III of Jerusalem requested an imperial bride from Constantinople, and accordingly Theodora Komnene, one of the many daughters of Manuel’s brother Isaakios, was dispatched. Theodora and Baldwin married, but he died a few years later in 1162, leaving her a childless teenage widow.
Meanwhile, Andronikos discovered a secret passageway in his cell and slipped out. He took the time to visit his wife and have sex with her one last time, thereby conceiving their son Ioannes, before escaping. Oh, Andronikos.
SOURCES:
Choniates, Niketas. O city of Byzantium, 1984.
Ciggaar, Krijna. Western travellers to Constantinople: the West and Byzantium, 962-1204: cultural and political relations, 1996.
Kinnamos, Ioannes. *Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus *(Columbia University Press), 1976
Magdalino, Paul. The empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143-1180, 2002.
Rautman, Marcus. Daily life in the Byzantine Empire, 2006.
Soulis, George. “The Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire and the Balkans in the Late Middle Ages”, Dumberton Oaks Papers, vol. 15 (1961).
