Episode 315 - Questions XV

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Hello everyone and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 315 Questions 15

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Okay, so in today's episode we're going to look at your questions about Andronicus II's spectacularly underwhelming reign.

I began to write answers to each question that you sent, but I felt I was just reiterating the whole podcast narrative, which will be very dull for those binge listening, though I do appreciate it's been a few weeks for those listening live.

So, rather than go through the first few questions individually, let me give one long answer to clarify a few things about events in Andronicus' lifetime.

Hopefully, this will get us to the crux of the matter, which I think listener LC sums up succinctly by asking: why was Andronicus so useless?

Andronicus II Palaeologos became emperor in 1282, and for the first ten years of his reign, things seemed to be going reasonably well.

Andronicus was adept at pacifying the church, who was still in tumult from his father Michael's policies of church union, and on various fronts in Europe, the empire's position became more secure.

Though we see a big red flag in Andronicus' decisions to debase his coinage and disband his navy, he was clearly responding to a massive budget deficit, and for a decade he got away with it.

It was around 1291 that the Emperor became aware that Turkic raiding into Western Anatolia was a serious problem, and so he spent time there rebuilding forts and reorganizing defences.

His absence encouraged agitation in Serbia and Epirus, which he could do little about,

and it was in the mid-1290s that things started to turn sour.

Andronicus gave his nephew, Alexius Philanthropinos, overall command in Anatolia,

but he did so well that he was proclaimed emperor and had to be blinded.

Meanwhile, the absent fleet encouraged the Venetians to attack Constantinople by burning the Genoese colony at Galata.

The Empire was clearly stretched to breaking point by having to deal with so many enemies at once, so Andronicus took relatively desperate measures, marrying his infant daughter off to appease the Serbians and settling thousands of Alans on Roman territory in order to provide fresh recruits for the army.

It was in Andronicus' twentieth year on the throne, though, that multiple Turkic tribes broke through the frontier, defeated his armies, and spread out to occupy the land.

Though Turkic pressure had been building for several decades, I don't think the government anticipated this level of collapse or the speed of it.

So let's just pause there so that we can all agree on the state of play.

Although Andronicus's 20 years on the throne had not been successful, it was only at this point that it became clear how disastrous the situation was.

Many listeners asked why no one overthrew Andronicus if he was such a poor emperor, but we should remember that it was the emperor's father who had brought the Romans back to Constantinople, and despite his divisive religious policies, many people felt they owed everything to the Palaeologos family, from the wealthy who'd returned to their ancestral homes, to the working families who'd improved their situation dramatically by the return of Roman government to its capital.

Michael had ruled for a long time, and now so too had his son.

And Andronicus was a pious figure, who'd married well and had lots of legitimate sons and grandsons, who was good at mollifying public anger, and still the situation in Europe was reasonably good.

So it's asking a lot, after decades of one family being in power, to just overthrow them when things

get tough.

As we discussed in the narrative, Andronicus was clearly not a good military leader, and it was a real mess that his best general had

turned against him and, you know,

made Andronicus reluctant to empower another potential usurper.

But that's the sort of downside that happens all the time in Roman history.

It's only in the next decade where things become catastrophic.

The Alans

proved

to be poor soldiers, or at least poorly motivated,

and their replacements, the Grand Catalan Company, were even worse.

Why did no one overthrow Andronicus now, while the Catalans roamed around the empire enslaving and destroying?

In part because the European army was under the command of the Emperor's son and was swiftly mauled by the Catalans, so there was essentially no army left to march on Constantinople and install their own candidate.

And think about it, if they had been able to,

the people would have expected this usurper to prove that he had divine support by going out and driving the Catalans off, which no one wanted to do.

We should also remember that at its peak, the Nicene Empire had fielded armies about 6,000 strong,

And

with Anatolia now in chaos, it's doubtful that the state could muster half that many.

So

even had you found 2,000 or 3,000 men brave enough to face the Catalans, they would have been outnumbered, which was suicidal, given the Catalans were an extremely experienced army.

So why did no one in Constantinople overthrow the emperor?

Again, those in the palace had every reason to stick with their man.

Not only did they owe their position to his favour, but many of them

came through family connections which had now been in place for decades.

Andronicus had also kept his top advisors loyal by promoting men from humble backgrounds rather than relying on his relatives.

people like Theodore Metocites were never going to turn on Andronicus unless he turned on them.

As for the people of New Rome, we can only speculate.

We don't have sources to tell us enough about what urban life was like at this time.

There was unrest.

The Vasilevs had to hold public meetings to justify his policies and regularly appeared in religious processions to demonstrate his piety.

But beyond the loyalty we can assume people held for Andronicus, it's also possible that the riots which unseated earlier emperors were fueled by a different time, a different place, a more secure culture.

You know, if you live in a thriving city and are a member of a guild, let's say, you may feel you have enough social infrastructure to support you if you're caught fighting with imperial bodyguards in the street.

You know, if everyone you work with is grabbing clubs and setting off to smash the palace, then it's easier to get involved and ignore the potential downsides of such a decision.

I suspect that Constantinople felt like a much more insecure place in the 13th century than it had done before.

Remember that large parts of the city were still burnt out husks from the Fourth Crusade, given over to farming or filled with refugees in makeshift shelters.

The government was far less wealthy than it had been, and so most people were too.

Life for many still revolved around relationships with the state or with the Genoese, so I suspect there was a lot more to lose, which created a different atmosphere from earlier febrile periods.

Between 1310 and 1320, our sources become meagre, but we can assume that pretty much everyone was traumatized from the Catalan experience and the loss of Anatolia, so there was no stomach for civil war.

It took until 1321 for someone to finally step up, and that was of course the Emperor's grandson, Andronicus the third.

As you can imagine, his generation, who'd been frightened children when the Catalans were roaming the land, now wanted to stand tall as men and fight for their people.

And still it took seven years to get the job done, since the few thousand men that made up the army in Europe would never have been able to force the Theodosian walls.

So I hope that recap helps answer some of your questions

about how Andronicus was able to remain in power for so long and what people's feelings were towards him.

There were several rebellions by Anatolian troops who were angry about the military situation, but we're talking about a few hundred men, never enough to get anywhere near the capital.

Some listeners asked about a sort of psychological explanation for the emperor's poor performance.

Did growing up in the palace make him less responsive to the provinces?

Did the Palaeologan origins in Europe make them care less about Asia?

I don't think so.

Andronicus just wasn't a warlike person.

Plenty of emperors haven't been.

It's just sad that that's what the Empire needed at this time.

He did try everything he could to save Anatolia.

It's just each attempt was botched or poorly conceived.

Paying over the odds to the Catalans was a desperate measure, a serious attempt to save Anatolia from collapse.

It just wasn't wise, and it turned out as badly as it could have.

Let's get into your specific questions.

Listener A asks, why is there such a big contrast in the finances of the Empire before and after recapturing Constantinople?

Was it the expenses of fighting more enemies and rebuilding the capital?

Or were there other economic forces at work?

I think we can assume that Michael spent a lot of money after retaking the capital.

He had an army and a fleet, he had a city to rebuild and re-beautify, and he spent a lot on foreign diplomacy, as we saw with Church Union and the Sicilian Vespers.

He was debasing his coinage during his reign, so he knew he was running out of money.

And so Andronicus abandoned the navy to try and stop the bleeding.

Unfortunately, Turkic raids then picked up, causing economic hardship in the most prosperous region of the empire.

By the time Anatolia was gone, the Roman state would have lost half its revenue.

Listener M.O.

asks, how wealthy was the Roman state at this stage?

Is there a comparison point with earlier centuries which could enlighten us?

As ever, reliable figures are hard to come by, but historian Warren Treadgold has made estimates which are very useful, even if we can't assume they are accurate.

We are told that Andronicus had raised a million hyperpyra in 1321.

That number is slightly lower than it could be because of Pronoia land, where the local landowners kept the tax in exchange for supplying troops to the army.

So let's just say a bit over a million gold coins a year.

in a good year, obviously.

That would compare to eleven point eight million under Basil II at the height of Byzantine power, or just over six million under Theophilus in the ninth century, as the long recovery began.

The most impoverished the Byzantine state had been, by these estimates, was under Constantine V,

so around 775 AD, when annual revenues would have been just under 4 million.

Those numbers have been adjusted for the debased hyperpira that Andronicus was using.

So, back in 775, the Empire controlled Anatolia up to Cilicia, but very little Balkan territory.

It did retain the islands of Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily, as well as those of the Aegean, but even at that stage, when they were being battered by Arab raids most summers, the Emperor still collected about four times the revenue which Andronicus could claim from his territories six centuries later.

Listener A.S.

asks whether the hiring of the Catalans was influenced by the success of the First Crusade in driving the Turks from Western Anatolia.

Certainly, there was a long history of hiring Latin knights to fight the Turks, but their record was decidedly mixed.

They were often successful, but rarely loyal, and so it proved in this case.

Andronicus was not doing anything out of the ordinary when it came to hiring Roger de Flore, but he didn't seem to anticipate what should have been a very real possibility.

Listener T.O.

asks, apart from Genoa, did Andronicus have any other Western allies?

Not in the sense of a state committed to defending Roman territory, no.

But the Byzantines maintained diplomatic contact with all the major European courts, hence the success of the Sicilian Vespers and the various marriages that were organized, like Andronicus's first marriage to a Hungarian princess, and then his second to Yolanda of Monferrat,

and then later Andronicus III's marriage to Anna of Savoy.

Listener T.O.

also asks whether it would have been better to sell Rhodes to the Knights Hospitala, as the Latins suggested they did,

instead of the island being captured by the Knights a few years later.

Presumably the Romans felt they had a chance of fending the Crusaders off, hence the fighting went on for a while.

I think selling a piece of Romania to a foreign government would have been completely unacceptable, for reasons which should be obvious.

But

maybe they could have rented the main infrastructure of the island to the hospitallers the same way they leased Chios and Phokia to the Genoese.

Listener R.M.

asks whether decreasing loyalty to a Constantinople-centered Byzantine Empire was a primary factor in its decline.

As in, had the sack of New Rome made people less likely to cooperate with the government.

This is is definitely a factor, yes.

We saw in the period of exile that people quickly adapted to the new decentralized world they found themselves in.

Various generals and nobles were willing to switch sides to benefit themselves, sometimes at an alarming rate.

So when John Vitatsis retook a lot of Balkan territory, he couldn't just re-impose the old tax rolls.

The populations of the Balkans had enjoyed 60 years of much looser regulations, and so imperial tax demands had to be slowly reintroduced, with many towns and nobles enjoying exemptions or special privileges to keep them on side.

I think all of this could have been slowly whittled away with time, though.

Ultimately, it was the

Mongol arrival on the Anatolian plateau, which was the big shock to the system, that pushed the Romans into decline.

Because the Turkic tribes taking western Anatolia meant the Romans lost their most prosperous

and

probably most loyal place.

And

that was sort of the direct cause of decline.

Yes, Andronicus was running out of money, but the state was relatively stable.

And

it's possible that over time,

the...

citizens of the empire would have gotten used to paying taxes to Constantinople again and directing their political energies towards the bosphorus.

So it certainly was a factor, whether it's the primary factor, I don't know.

Listener A says, I read somewhere that the Palaeologi actually managed to gain land in Italy by inheriting Montferrat.

Did this impact the Empire in any meaningful way?

As I mentioned earlier, Andronicus' second marriage was to Yolanda of Montferrat, who he married in part to put an end to her claim to Thessaloniki, which was still kicking around from Boniface's time in the city.

Ironically,

after many fruitful years of marriage, she decamped to Thessaloniki and lived away from her husband for 14 years before she died.

The succession was going to pass through the sons that Andronicus had sired with his first wife, meaning the three sons he had with Yolanda were left out in the cold.

She spent much of her time promoting their careers, which included getting her second son, Theodorus, to become the Marquis of Monferrat in 1306,

the first East Roman prince to hold a Western lordship.

But he held it for himself and for his family.

There was no kickback to the Empire from Italian tax revenue.

On the contrary, he came to Constantinople on a couple of occasions looking for money.

When he visited, the Romans who met him commented that he was a pure Latin in his outlook, religion, dress, haircut, and every other habit.

He actually wrote a treatise arguing that the Roman Empire should adopt a more Latin style of kingship, which, understandably, was ignored.

Listener C.

H.

asks about the term Palaeologan Renaissance, which you may have heard mentioned elsewhere.

This flourishing of the arts was sponsored by Michael VIII after retaking Constantinople.

He was very interested in public displays of Roman greatness, both for their artistic merit and their propaganda value.

This included mosaics, statues, and the refounding of centres of learning.

There was an urge from the educated elites to gather classical texts and preserve them

after so much had been lost during the sack of the city.

The work of Palaeologan scholars, including women, was responsible for the copying of the very texts which would fuel the literal renaissance a century later.

These scholars also wrote new and interesting texts on politics, astronomy, and mathematics, and there was a movement to translate more Latin works into Greek to better understand the neighbours who now dominated the international scene.

As Antony Cordelles points out, though, the term Renaissance is not accurate in this case, since the Byzantines had never lost touch with the ancient sources of their language and culture.

Listener CH asks why scholarship seemed to flourish at this time rather than, say, under the Macedonians.

I think this particular period of productivity was a combination of the sponsorship of Michael, the weakness of Andronicus, who didn't want to make enemies through censorship, and the excitement of rebuilding the libraries of Constantinople.

It's also worth saying that artistic techniques were developing in the West as well as the East, so that the works of Palaeologan mosaicists are of a much higher quality to those from the Macedonian era, as visitors to the Agia Sophia can see.

As for literature, this tends to flourish in Byzantium through imperial sponsorship, either directly or through sponsoring university chairs, rather than being

an end in itself to times of peace or economic vitality.

So, for example, Basil II's refusal to open his purse for court poets meant that little new literature survived from his time.

And survival is another factor, obviously.

Works do get produced which are then lost.

So sometimes we know more about a particular period simply because of the way it was preserved.

Related to this, listener M.O.

asks if people wrote about the disasters they were living through and compared them to the glory days of the past, which, yes, they definitely did.

Theodore Metocites is the most eloquent on the humbled state of Romania.

But listener MO also asks whether the population in general were aware of past golden ages, not necessarily going back to Justinian or Constantine, but, say, the Macedonian period.

Now it's obviously very difficult to reconstruct what ordinary people thought about the past.

I would assume that the vast majority had no memory of a time before Manzikert and the Crusades.

I mean, that was 250 years earlier.

And there's not much physical evidence of that time in the capital, you know, the odd church, but you know, how many people are asking, oh, when was that church built and who built it?

You know, the walls and the Hagiosophia and the Hippodrome were evidently ancient, you know, relics from a time when Roman power was far greater than anything within reach.

And when we do get a glimpse of an ordinary person's perspective in the writing of those who visited the capital, for example, all the references made

are contemporary.

As in, the Goths featured on the column of Theodosius I are identified as Latins by local tour guides.

And the statue of Justinian holding his hand out to the east

is said to be Justinian warding away the Turks.

You know, there's no memory of the Persians.

So I I very much doubt that people

reminisced about the the days of Basil II um

basically.

I think that would have been uh long gone.

Listener L C asks what was different between the depositions of Alexius II and John the Fourth compared to the Macedonian depositions?

In other words, why did Andronicus I kill Manuel's son, and why did Michael VIII blind young John Lascaris?

Instead of simply ruling on behalf of those children and letting them grow up, as Le Capinos, Phocas, and Zimisches did back in the 10th century.

The question of the Macedonian emperors was actually put to Antony Caldellis in either episode 282 or 83.

He said that the people of Constantinople had an attachment to the women and children of the Macedonian dynasty and violently demonstrated on their behalf on several occasions.

And so the three outsider emperors felt it was politically beneficial to rule alongside them and possibly

necessary for their survival at times.

That was also an era when no one expected Nicephorus Phokus, for example, to have to move all of his distant relatives into the court system at certain ranks,

whereas in the Komnenian period, that often was the case.

So Nicephorus could keep Basil II and his brother Constantine in the palace and still maintain a sort of manageable imperial household and promote men in the court system however he felt.

In the Komnenian period, it was more complicated since your relational proximity to the emperor often dictated your position in the hierarchy.

So if you rule on behalf of a young distant relative of yours, you have to create a kind of contested, congested, complex court hierarchy, and almost inevitably you'll generate a factional struggle for power between different branches of the family tree.

So that's probably the reason why Andronicus in brutal fashion and Michael in sneaky fashion tried to cut ties with the true heir and move their own family to centre stage.

It's just different considerations for different eras.

Final question for today.

Listener A notes that the last century seemed to fly by compared to the Comnenian period.

Would you say a relative lack of sources is related to weaker periods of Roman history, like the third or the 7th centuries.

Several listeners commented on the speed at which we were able to cover Michael and Andronicus' reigns.

In part, this was because of my decision to cover both Church Union and the Fall of Anatolia as single episodes, because I felt it would be more confusing to follow their progress year by year, and that we might lose the sense of what they meant.

But, as we also discussed earlier, about ten years of Andronicus' reign is lost as one historian ends his work and another begins.

Ultimately, the podcast is dictated by the sources, so the period we've just covered took about as many episodes as did the long reign of Basil II.

And interestingly, Basil's reign is also marked by a decade where we know very little about what was going on.

Which is interesting because Basil's reign is obviously not a weak period in Roman history, so that doesn't seem to explain why there's a lack of sources then.

The two periods you mentioned, the crisis of the third century and then the seventh century where the Arabs overrun the eastern provinces, are exceptional in Roman history.

Both involved the state collapsing in dramatic and sudden fashion, so it's no surprise that historians of the day struggled to reconstruct what had happened.

Though it may be useful to understand that most historians wrote with a purpose in mind, usually to justify the controversial decisions of a reigning dynasty, or to explain a period of history in a way that would make sense to the elites who read it.

Antony Cordellis argues that no one stepped forward to cover the Arab conquests in detail, in part because it was hard to offer an explanation that would please the reader.

Why God had allowed the Arabs to destroy the Christian Empire was a question which remained unanswered, and the explanation that most lent on that it was punishment for sin was slightly unconvincing given God had just allowed Heraclius to win an extraordinary victory over the Persians.

So in a sense, what generates history are periods of elite controversy rather than geopolitical change.

Iconoclasm led to two lengthy histories being written which attempt attempt to present those who supported icons as Christian martyrs who suffered for their faith, while the controversial elevation of Basil I

from stablemaster to emperor's best friend to sole emperor led the government to commission a string of works offering somewhat implausible explanations for his rise to power.

Since it's only the elites who read the histories, it's elite power grabs that tend to lead to written explanations trying to justify what happened.

So, Anna Komnini and her husband both wrote rival accounts of Alexius Komninos' usurpation.

Remember, she married the son of the man that Alexius defeated.

This trend is set to continue in our next period of narrative, where John Cantacusinos, the chief supporter of Alexius III, will write a history of his own part in the wars yet to come.

That's it for today.

Thank you so much to all of you who sent in questions.

Next time,

we will answer more

on slightly different topics, moving further away from Andronicus to wider issues, and that will be it for 2024.

See you next time.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

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