Episode 311 - The Next Generation

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Hello.

Hello, and welcome to Autocrat.

I am Vince, one of the co-hosts.

And I'm Cassie, the other co-host.

So, what is Autocrat?

Well, we are a podcast that is going to be going through the entire journey of Roman civilization, essentially.

That sounds nice.

So, Roman civilization, what does that mean?

Well, we are going to be going from Greek mythology, the kingdom of Alba Longa.

What is that?

Alba Longa?

Yeah.

It's basically the state that came before the Roman Kingdom.

Oh, cool, cool.

Cool.

And then the Roman Kingdom.

Yes, the Roman Kingdom, the Republic, then going through, you know, Empire, what we call Byzantium but shouldn't.

We'll get to that, listeners, all the way to Constantine XI and beyond.

So if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, feel free to come and join us.

We can be found on places such as Spotify, YouTube under the handle at Autocrat Podcast, on our website at www.autocratpodcast.worldpress.com or on TikTok where we upload a few shorts.

We hope to see you there.

Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 311, The Next Generation

Last time, we paused our narrative in the year 1310 as the dust settled on 30 years of chaos and disaster for the Roman Empire.

Anatolia was all but gone, the Catalans had moved on to Athens, leaving a trail of destruction behind them, and the Aegean was now an Italian sea.

The Byzantines were left with a European empire, a few islands, and half a dozen cities clinging on in Asia.

The next decade is a bit of a blank spot in our sources.

It falls just as one historian's work ends and another begins, neither of whose work has been translated into English, much to my chagrin.

After the trauma of the past few years, though, it would be no surprise to discover that the government were keeping a low profile, trying to stabilise the currency, settle refugees from Anatolia, and reorganise their defences.

For reasons which will soon become obvious, I'm going to refer to our Emperor as the Emperor, or Vasilevs, to day and not use his name.

If things were quiet at Constantinople, they were noisy down in Epirus.

I'm not going to attempt to recount the ever shifting alliances between the members of the Dukas family and their Latin neighbours, but I will tell you that by the end of the decade the Dukas family had been eliminated from Greece for good.

John Dukas, the ruler of Thessaly, that's that's the east of Greece, died in 1318 without an heir.

This was a dangerous time for instability, since the Catalans had begun seizing fortresses in the south.

The Roman nobles of Thessaly were divided over whether to ask Constantinople for help or not.

In the end, they split the difference.

Those in the north did, and imperial troops from Thessaloniki moved in, while those in the centre maintained their independence.

Epirus, as in western Greece, went a similar way.

The ruler there, Thomas Dukas, was murdered in 1318 by members of the Orsini family, who had been ruling the islands of Cephalonia and Zakynthos since the Fourth Crusade.

The Orsini moved in and took over southern Epirus.

Interestingly though, unlike any other Latin power in the region, the Orsini went native, at least publicly, converting to Orthodoxy and marrying into the Byzantine establishment in order to legitimise their rule.

Northern Epirus, with its capital at Joanina, decided to cut out the middleman and asked to be reincorporated into the Empire.

This was celebrated with great fanfare at Constantinople.

The Emperor had actually expanded his realm, taking back most of northern Greece.

But in practice, both regions were immediately granted a string of favours in order to sweeten the deal, including exemptions from certain kinds of taxation and conscription.

Though the benefits to the empire were slight, the Romans could content themselves with the fact that they were now the only native-run polity in the region, if you don't count distant Trebizond.

As the decade wore on, the Emperor slowly increased the efficiency of his tax collection.

He was keen to re-establish a small fleet and an army capable of at least defending Nicaea and the other cities of Bithynia.

In order to raise the necessary funds, his officials increasingly sold offices and employed ruthless tax collectors.

Resentment was beginning to build.

As you know, the Emperor's son had long ago been crowned as Michael IX,

but after a string of embarrassing defeats to the the Catalans and their allies, Michael had been removed from command of the army and had taken up residence at Thessaloniki.

His sons were there with him, Andronicus, who had also been crowned, so Andronicus III, and his younger brother Manuel.

Andronicus was a bit of a worry for the family.

He was an extravagant youth, a womanizer and a gambler.

He was a good soldier and ambitious, but was very different from his more serious father and grandfather.

This reputation was crystallized in a tragic incident in thirteen twenty.

Andronicus was at the home of a noble woman, who was not his wife, at night,

and had told his bodyguards to be on the lookout for a rival lover.

When a man approached the home asking for Andronicus, the soldiers ended up killing him.

It turned out not to be a fellow Lithario, but Manuel, Andronicus' younger brother.

This was a terrible shock for everyone, especially Michael, the boy's father, who died later that year from an illness.

The emperor was particularly appalled, and rumours swirled that with his son and heir dead, he was going to disinherit young Andronicus and turn to his second son Constantine and his family.

Tensions were high the following spring as Andronicus returned to the capital to face judgment.

In the end, the Vasilevs did not alter his succession plans, but he was concerned by his grandson, who attracted all kinds of seditious rumours.

No surprise, then.

In April 1321, Andronicus slipped out of Constantinople, rode quickly for Adrianople, and went into open rebellion.

He was acclaimed as the Vasilevs by the army there and began to reorganise the affairs of Thrace.

He had all the tax collectors arrested and began distributing the money to his followers.

He announced that all the major towns of Thrace would be granted tax exemptions like those enjoyed by Thessaloniki and Joannina and he reassigned the grants of pro noa so that his aristocratic supporters gained at the expense of those who sided with his grandfather.

This gained the young man a great following in Thrace, and his enthusiastic army marched straight for Constantinople.

The Emperor had little desire to fight his own grandchild, and so came to terms.

A power-sharing agreement was suggested.

Young Andronicus would rule Thrace, while the senior Vasilevs would maintain control over the rest of the realm.

It was quite a Latin solution, solution, granting the young man his own appanage to govern.

The following spring, though, the senior emperor broke the agreement.

He sent troops out of the city to attack his grandson's positions, while his other son Constantine, over at Thessaloniki, raised a force to try and catch the young upstart in a pinsa.

Andronicus was in a difficult position.

In order to pay his army, he would need to raise taxes, but given he just promised everyone a low-tax thrace, that would be an awkward conversation.

Fortunately, his closest ally, John Cantacusinos, agreed to bankroll the army from his personal fortune.

Momentum was with the young man.

The people of Thessaloniki turned on the emperor's son Constantine and declared for the younger man.

Andronicus was able to imprison his uncle and again turn his army towards New Rome.

Outmanoeuvered once more the senior Vasilevs came to terms.

This time they would be co-emperors.

The younger man would reside at Didymotichon in Thrace and be paid a generous salary from the treasury.

He would also have a joint say on policy decisions.

Surprisingly, this agreement would work fairly well for the next five years.

Let's take a pause and digest what's just happened.

This is one of those rare civil wars where almost no fighting took place.

There was little appetite for palaeologos on palaeologos violence, and interestingly, the damage done by blinding John Lascaris seems to have sunk in.

When Andronicus imprisoned his uncle Constantine, he didn't harm him, simply forcing him into the monastic life.

Historian Mark Bartusis argues that the civil war was essentially a referendum on the reign of the aged Andronicus.

The senior emperor had been on the throne for forty pretty miserable years.

Andronicus the third presented himself as the change candidate, young and vibrant, and willing to fight for the empire in a way that his grandfather rarely had.

He was promising to campaign personally in Anatolia.

Clearly many people wanted a fresh start and were willing to support his cause.

He also represented a new generation, not just in age, but in circumstance.

The loss of Anatolia meant that the towns of Thrace were the new heartlands of the Empire.

They were where much of the capital's food came from, they were where its soldiers were recruited, and their towns like Adrianople and Didymotichon were now far more important economically and politically than they had ever been.

Young Andronicus's supporters were the young men of Thrace, aristocrats who wanted to control their own destiny.

John Cantacuzinos, for example, was thirty, and had inherited a vast portfolio of estates.

He had been a childhood friend of Andronicus, and now backed him all the way to the throne.

The danger for these men was evident.

If the senior emperor had diverted the succession, then they would have lost out on the lucrative appointments and pro-noias, and in a shrunken Roman world these appointments were more important than ever.

The sitting emperor, Andronicus II, comes out of this conflict as you would expect him to.

In a sense, he'd been humiliated, forced twice into making concessions which undermined his status as God's vice-regent.

But at the same time, he had the decency not to try and murder his own family members, and in a sense, to acknowledge that as a sixty-year-old man, his time on the throne was nearly over.

And so, it was better to give a little to the younger generation, to keep them happy, and to make sure the succession, when it came, was smooth.

You might wonder why his grandson didn't go the whole hog and overthrow the emperor, but no army of this era was a threat to the Theodosian walls, and so an attempt to force the situation was likely to to backfire.

In fact, those serving in Constantinople were more committed to their lord and master than ever, since it was clear that when the transfer of power eventually came, they would be out in the cold.

Chief amongst these courtiers was the Emperor's grand logothete, or prime minister, Theodore Metochites.

A man with little aristocratic pedigree, but a first-rate mind.

A scholar and philosopher, Metochites was both brilliant and corrupt.

He'd grown very wealthy from his high position at court and famously invested it in the Kora monastery, which he re-founded.

The Kora Church is the best preserved Byzantine church in Istanbul today.

Metochites, also an older man in his fifties, was determined to find a way out of this crisis for those around him.

For five years then, a standoffish partnership was formed.

The Bulgarians tried to take advantage of the uncertainty, raiding Thrace and even capturing Philippopolis, but Andronicus and Cantacusinos were equal to the challenge.

They retook the city and raided Bulgarian lands in return.

In 1324, a Mongol raiding party smashed through Bulgaria and into Thrace and was driven off by the young emperor.

Over in Anatolia, Turkish forces were threatening to capture Philadelphia, so the senior emperor sent someone to take care of the situation.

He chose the aging and blind Alexios Philanthropinos.

Alexius was the man who'd had such great success against the Turks thirty years earlier, but had lost his eyes when he declared himself Emperor.

Such was his reputation that the Turks broke off the siege.

But Philadelphia, the only place the Byzantines still controlled in the Meander Valley, only maintained its independence because it sat at the crossroads between three different Beyliks, none of whom wanted the others to possess the city.

John Cantacusenos did lead an army into Bithynia in 1325, but despite some success, he couldn't reach the city of Prusa, which was hard pressed by the forces of Osman.

The senior emperor refused to allow his grandson to march to its relief the following year when the city fell, becoming the new capital of the nascent Ottoman Empire.

Despite this bad news, relations between the generations seemed fairly positive.

On the 2nd of February 1325, Andronicus III was crowned as co-senior emperor in the Achia Sophia, and the following year he married the daughter of the Count of Savoy at his grandfather's suggestion.

It was a surprise to some then when civil war broke out again shortly afterwards.

The trouble began in Thessaloniki.

The governor there now was John Palaeologos, son of Constantine, the emperor's second son, the one whom Andronicus had forced into monastic retirement in the previous civil war.

John therefore represented the alternative line of succession,

and he announced in 1326 that he would no longer be subject to either emperor.

He would rule his Macedonian domains as an independent lord with support from the King of Serbia.

John had just married his daughter to the king and now raised troops and marched eastwards.

The senior emperor rushed to placate him, offering him the title of Caesar and dispatching the insignia of office without any formal negotiations nor any consultation with Andronicus III.

It seemed that the Empire had just agreed to cede a major province to an independent lord who had foreign backing.

Before anyone could react, John died unexpectedly of an illness.

Andronicus and Cantacusinos smelt a conspiracy, and it seems likely they were right.

The marriage between John's daughter and the Serbian king was not a spontaneous union.

It had been arranged in advance by the court.

We know this because the girl was the granddaughter of Theodore Metochites, the prime minister.

John's rebellion was also supported by two senior officers who controlled key fortresses in that region.

The officers in question were both sons of Theodore Metocites.

The Grand Logothete seems to have been trying to create a division of power within the Empire, uniting his family with the other branch of the Palaeologi.

Quite what the ideal outcome of this would have been, we can't be sure.

Was he trying to surround Andronicus III as the government had attempted five years earlier?

Or was he really going to allow Thessaloniki to become independent in order to provide a safe space for people like him to survive the transition to the new emperor?

Whatever the upside, the downside was surely too great to take such a risk.

Civil war?

A Serbian invasion?

A division of the empire into Latin-style fiefs?

Whatever Metacites was up to, it was too clever by half.

And what about the senior emperor?

Did he sign off on all of this?

Or was he being led around by cleverer men?

Andronicus III wasn't going to wait around to find out.

He began preparations for a final showdown.

He negotiated an alliance with the Bulgarian Tsar to counter any Serbian influence and then advanced towards Constantinople.

The two sides exchanged embassies as Andronicus tried to win over the locals of Thrace to his cause.

In the capital, the Emperor pressured the patriarch into excommunicating his grandson for breaking his agreements, and when the archbishop refused, the emperor placed him under house arrest.

Andronicus advanced to the city in November and paraded in front of the walls.

He was promising a new era of military victory and lower taxes.

Many were keen to let him in, but the guards held firm.

A couple of weeks later, news came from Thessaloniki.

The city was under the command of one of the emperor's other sons, but an influential group of locals sent word that they would declare for Andronicus if he could reach them.

The young Vasilevs raced across Thrace and entered the city in disguise.

When he revealed his identity to the right people, the city was handed over to him.

A string of nearby towns and fortresses sent word that they too were happy to join his side.

Though he had to wait until the following spring, Andronicus could now approach Constantinople on a triumphal march.

He arrived in May, and his timing couldn't have been better.

The Venetians and Genoese were at war again, and the Venetians were blockading the Golden Horn.

This meant grain shipments weren't reaching the population who were becoming hungry.

The Emperor tried to negotiate with the Venetians, but was ignored.

His reign in microcosm.

On the night of the 23rd of May, guards at the St.

Romanos gate let down a rope ladder.

Andronicus's men climbed over the gates, opened them, and their 800 comrades entered the city.

The young emperor ordered them not to loot and to make an orderly advance on the Vlachionai Palace.

There was no resistance left.

The palace staff chanted acclamations as the younger man's forces entered the corridors of power.

Andronicus II was found clutching the icon of the Virgin, begging for his life.

This was granted.

He was actually allowed to live in the palace for several years, before being pushed into monastic retirement.

Metochites was with him, but was sent into exile.

The grand logothete's home was the only one truly plundered by the victorious army.

Andronicus II Palaeolokos died six years later on the thirteenth of february thirteen thirty two.

He was seventy two years old and had ruled the empire for forty six years.

Only Basil II ruled the Empire for longer than Andronicus, and it's quite the contrast between those two reigns.

Basil spent years away from his capital, married to the army.

Andronicus rarely left the palace and let his army and navy run down.

Basil made sure that every neighbour of the Empire knew that he was there.

Andronicus let them push him around.

Of course, the circumstances they inherited were very different, but while Basil's was in many ways the most glorious reign in Byzantine history, Andronicus's is the saddest.

He had to make hard choices given his inheritance, but he never seemed to make the right one.

It's possible that he kept the Empire from suffering shattering defeats which would have done more damage, but his subjects clearly felt that they would rather have taken that chance than watch their prospects wither before their eyes.

As for the civil war which brought his downfall, Antony Caldelles calls it a forced generational transfer of power from men in their sixties to men in their twenties.

The good news for the Romans is how little blood was spilt, and that they now had a young emperor in his prime who was willing to fight for the provinces that they were losing.

The bad news

were the precedents which this civil war set, both the involvement of Serbia and Bulgaria in Byzantine politics, but also the desperation of different factions to get hold of the levers of power.

Of course, this had always been a feature of Byzantine politics, but in the past when men failed to get a position at court, it didn't change their status.

They were still wealthy landowners.

But now that there was so much less land to play with, and the court had consolidated its own holdings into grants of pronoia,

this meant that the faction in power could assign all the pronoia land to its own supporters, in a sense denying outsiders both access to power and the chance to get rich.

But future civil wars will have to wait for another day because we have reached the end of our metaphorical century.

I have been podcasting solidly for nine months now and I need a break.

I will go away and begin the research for our next period of narrative, so there will be a bit of silence on the feed.

If you have questions about this period of narrative do send them in.

Thehistoryofbyzantium at gmail.com is the place to send them, but I'll also pick them up on social media, the website and Patreon.

I have five interviews already lined up for this autumn, and I'm sure others will appear at some point.

I will be hosting Zoom calls for patrons probably around November.

And I'm off to Turkey again to explore the lands of Western Anatolia with some of you.

Email me if you'd like to know more about tours for 2025.

The final piece of news is one I broke to patrons a while ago, which is that I won't be producing any more Byzantine stories episodes until we get to 1453.

Those are the long-form bonus content.

So my focus is the narrative from now until we reach the end, at which point I will definitely be producing a bunch of Byzantine stories on topics that I've been dying to research for years, but have never had the time.

Like science and engineering, the life of a Roman judge, and the greatest conman in Byzantine history, amongst many other topics, I'm sure.

So now when people ask me, what will you do when you get to 1453?

I have an answer.

For those of you who need Roman Empire audio drip-fed into your ears 24-7, why not check out the Autocrat podcast?

Vince and Cassie are going all the way back to before the Roman Republic, to the ancient myths of Greece and Rome, to give you a thorough grounding in the thought world of the Romans before taking up the story of the state itself.

So head over to autocratpodcast.wordpress.com to be reminded of Zeus and Heracles before diving into the Roman story from the beginning, or just search for Autocrat wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you so much for your support and for listening.

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