Episode 309 - Cautious and Weak

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 309:

Cautious and Weak.

Across the past three episodes, we've taken a departure from our usual narrative formula.

In order to understand the significance of church union and the fall of Anatolia, I felt I had to dedicate our attention to those issues alone.

Today, let's try and get back into our usual rhythm.

As I mentioned last time, Andronicus II Palaeologus was born just before Constantinople was retaken.

He therefore spent his youth in the capital, the first prince of the new era of the Roman Empire.

He was married to the daughter of the king of Hungary when still a teenager, and she bore him two sons.

The eldest was named Michael, and when she sadly died in twelve eighty one, the five year old was proclaimed Vasilevs.

As we've discussed in detail, Andronicus had two major crises to deal with during his first decade in office.

One was to reunite the church, the other was to defend Anatolia.

Despite facing a very hostile clergy for several years, I'd say Andronicus handled the Church pretty well.

Everyone but the hard core Arsenites were pacified, and though he faced challenges to his rule from generals in Anatolia, there don't seem to have been any major conspiracies in the capital.

Given that his father's memory had been damned and John Lascaris was still alive, this was no mean feat.

As for Anatolia, though the situation was bad, it may not have been clear just how bad things were until 15 years into his reign.

For the first decade of his time in power, he was able to chase the Turks away whenever he turned up, and so his strategists could claim that the situation was somewhat under control.

Now that was naïve, perhaps, but as we will soon see, Andronicus had plenty on his plate already and couldn't dedicate all his attention to Asia.

Let's catch up on events in Europe and some domestic issues and bring things up to 1303, where we left off last week.

After burying his father, the 23-year-old Andronicus fought a brief campaign against the Epirates to keep them quiet, and later his forces managed to retake Dirachium from the Italians, so initially the situation in Europe looked fairly positive.

The Emperor also remarried, taking for his new wife Yolanda, the daughter of the Marquis of Montferrat, seemingly a clever choice, since the Marquis still claimed to be the king of Thessaloniki, Boniface's old title.

This was given up as Yolanda's dowry.

When Charles of Anjou died, Andronicus persuaded the Venetians to sign a new treaty with the Empire, and since Genoa and Venice were at peace, the Vasilevs made a momentous decision.

He disbanded his father's fleet.

Michael had maintained around eighty warships at great expense.

They were a real deterrent against Latin aggression and helped sweep the Aegean of piracy.

But the Empire was going through a severe financial crisis.

The hyperpyron, the gold coin introduced by Alexius Comninos, was losing its value.

Its twenty and a half carats of gold had declined to fifteen under Michael and was now sliding further and further, down to eleven as Andronicus's reign wore on.

The Romans just couldn't afford to pay all the soldiers and sailors at their disposal, and with lands in Anatolia falling off the tax registers, Andronicus felt he had no choice but to get rid of the navy.

It was a dramatic and dangerous move, which was openly criticised at the time.

After all, an absent fleet is what allowed the Crusaders to sack Constantinople in the first place.

But Andronicus gambled that his father's efforts had put that threat off for a generation,

and he was right that he would need the money to fight the Turks.

Sadly, this economy would not save Anatolia, nor could it maintain the hyperpyron as the dollar of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Venetians would provide the new currency.

They decided around this time to mint their own gold coin, the ducket.

Andronicus' hope was that Genoa would protect the Empire's waters while he focused on fighting in Anatolia, but as ever for the Byzantines, global forces were moving against them.

The arrival of the Mongols in the Middle East had not only affected Anatolia, their presence also indirectly brought Utramir to its end.

The rulers of Egypt, the Mamluks, were one of the few powers to defeat the Mongols in battle.

This victory put them under pressure to maintain a strong presence in the Levant to keep the nomads away from the Nile.

After their victory in 1260, they decided to eliminate the Crusader cities for good.

Antioch fell in 1268, Tripoli in 1289, and Acre was brutally sacked in 1291.

The Latin presence in the Holy Land was effectively over.

This was bad news for the Romans in two ways.

First, it saw a stream of Latin refugees pass through Byzantium, many of them taking up service with the Catholic lords who held lands in the Aegean.

And second, it meant an end to the Venetian concession at Acre.

This had been a key port in the Italians' commercial network, and with Outramir eradicated, they had to reorder their priorities.

Venetian possessions in the Black Sea now became vital to their ability to access eastern markets.

This meant they could not allow the Byzantines or the Genoese to block their access to the Bosphorus.

That same year, 1291, a 20-year peace treaty with the Genoese expired.

Both sides knew war was coming and acted immediately, launching attacks on each other's shipping along the coasts of Greece and Anatolia.

The Romans could do nothing about it.

In the summer of 1296, 75 Venetian warships entered the Aegean heading north.

When it was clear they were coming for the Genoese colony at Gelata, there was mass panic.

The Italians begged the emperor to be allowed to cross the Golden Horn and take refuge behind the Theodosian walls.

Palaeologos agreed and took the precaution of arresting all the Venetians in the city.

But that did nothing to stop the fleet.

The Venetians landed at Galata and began setting fire to everything, including Roman houses.

The Genoese armed themselves and with some imperial troops by their side they advanced and attacked the Venetian marines.

The Venetians withdrew, but the damage was done.

Andronicus' impotence had been laid bare.

The Italians had landed unopposed and sacked a part of Constantinople.

All he could do in response was to confiscate Venetian property.

War was now being openly fought in Byzantine waters between the two Italian powers.

The Venetians retook all the islands off the coast of Greece, which Michael's navy had captured.

They also seized an imperial barge with tax revenue on it and dared the emperor to stop them.

Andronicus was in a difficult position.

The Venetians had essentially declared war on him, but the empire could do nothing to retaliate without a navy.

The Romans were left waiting for things to play out and hoping for the best.

When Genoese thugs murdered several Venetian aristocrats on the streets of the capital, the Emperor Emperor had to send ambassadors to Venice to apologize and to swear that the Romans had nothing to do with it.

In 1298 the Genoese scored a massive victory over the Venetians off the Dalmatian coast.

The two sides were becoming exhausted and signed a peace treaty the following year, but the Venetians technically remained at war with the Romans.

To bring matters to a head, the Venetians recruited some pirates and sailed unmolested into the Golden Horn in 1302.

They dropped anchor near the Vlachernai Palace and set fire to nearby buildings.

The Italians then captured some refugees from Anatolia and tortured them in view of the walls.

Andronicus protested in the strongest terms, ransomed those he could, and agreed to send ambassadors to Venice.

A new treaty was signed later that year, but relations between the two sides remained tense.

By now everyone in Europe was aware of the Turkish advance in Anatolia, and the fact that the Empire's best troops were bogged down there.

The first to take advantage of the situation were the Serbians.

They brushed aside the Roman garrisons of Skopje and Durachium and threatened to capture more towns.

Andronicus had to offer the Serbian king his six-year-old daughter in marriage to preserve the borders, a decision which drew much criticism.

As the crisis deepened, Andronicus began to fret about his legitimacy.

Refugees were filling the streets of Constantinople and agitating for change.

The Emperor appeared in public regularly to try and seem responsive to their needs.

He held public assemblies and rode through the streets to hear petitions.

His clergy preached charity to their rich congregants, and Andronicus made donations to support their efforts, despite having little money to spare.

Tensions with the Latins continued in more intimate ways.

Palaeologus' wife, Yolanda, did not care for her husband's attention after their seventh child was born, and in a sure sign of the fading influence of Roman norms, she argued with him over the inheritance of her children, suggesting that Andronicus divide the empire up into fiefs for her offspring, as the Latins did.

Obviously, the Vasilevs refused to do this.

Not only would it go against Roman tradition and good sense, but his first two sons by his previous wife were in line to succeed him rather than his children by her.

When the Vasilevs made this clear in 1303, she decamped to Thessaloniki, which she still considered to be part of her inheritance.

For the next 14 years, she would live there running her own court.

1303 was also the year that Roman and Alan troops returned to Constantinople, having been defeated by the marauding Turks.

Andronicus had now been in power for 20 years.

The green 23-year-old had become a forty-three-year-old man hardened by disappointment and difficult times.

He had held the line in Europe and brought his church closer together, but the past few years had badly exposed the Empire's vulnerability.

The collapse of Anatolia meant the loss of nearly half the state's revenue and manpower, and Anatolia had been the reliable heartland of the Nicene recovery.

The European provinces, though fertile in theory, were surrounded on every side by enemies.

The Venetians remained a looming menace, and the behavior of Andronicus's wife was an utter embarrassment.

I think Andronicus does deserve some of the blame for what had been happening in Asia, but it's worth remembering that the Turks kept appearing in waves.

Despite the defeats suffered in the 1290s, the Romans still held most of the towns in the north of Anatolia and along the the coast.

It was only in 1300, when new tribes appeared through every mountain pass that the imperial position collapsed.

By 1303, it was clear that the Romans were about to lose Anatolia for good, and Andronicus's options were limited.

If he recruited a native army strong enough to fight for the land, there was every chance that disaster would follow.

If the army won, their general could overthrow the emperor.

If the army lost, it could endanger the European provinces and if the army was to be properly trained and equipped, it could empty the treasury.

It was at this point that the Emperor was contacted by Roger de Flore,

the captain of a band of Catalan mercenaries who had been fighting in Sicily, in the very war which Michael helped start between French and Spanish forces.

Roger had a colourful career, to say the least.

Though he was born in Sicily, he cut his teeth in Outremere, or what was left of it, as a sailor in the service of the Knights Templar.

He was accused by the Pope no less of being an apostate and a thief, and so turned to piracy.

It was in this capacity that he returned to Sicily to fight in the wars unleashed by the Vespers.

Once peace broke out in thirteen oh two, Roger was no longer needed, and saw service in Byzantium as a way to avoid the legal charges against him in the west.

He offered to clear Western Anatolia of Turks in exchange for cash and a title.

At his back were an army of 1,500 cavalry and 5,000 foot soldiers, a large army by the standards of the day, and one staffed by tough, experienced soldiers who were ready to get rich.

You can see why Andronicus jumped at this offer.

Losing Anatolia was a complete disaster.

He had to do something.

But as we just outlined, sending a native army posed all sorts of problems.

Here was a fresh source of manpower, complete with an experienced general.

Of course, the problem with this arrangement was obvious to everyone.

The Catalans were a mercenary army, with their own officers.

How could the Romans control them once they were loose in Anatolia?

Worse still, Roger was demanding an eye-watering amount of money, something in the region of three times the salary paid to regular soldiers.

It seems likely that if the total was taken seriously, then keeping the Catalans in the field would indeed bankrupt the state.

And yet Andronicus said yes.

Presumably, he believed that he could negotiate at a later date, and that when some of the company died it would reduce the bill.

But he was taking a huge risk, and given the very recent history of Latin troops running amok in Byzantium, it feels like the Emperor was not just tempting fate, but slapping it across the face.

Since we're now all caught up, I'm going to pause the narrative for to day.

The full disastrous story of the Catalan Company will be told next week.

What I'd like to do now is to discuss the personality of the Emperor.

Michael Palaolojos was a really interesting character, charming and charismatic, a good soldier and a schemer, willing to be ruthless and impious to get what he wanted, clever, but not always wise.

His son cuts a very different figure.

We aren't told a huge amount about his personality, but historian Warren Treadgold sums him up as cautious, conscientious, devout, and weak.

It's a fair description of how he appears in the sources, but is that who he was?

He had an incredibly difficult inheritance.

His father was hated by many segments of society, and Andronicus's very legitimacy was called into question by the fact that he had been crowned and educated by the pro-union regime.

The state was rapidly running out of money, just as waves of Turkish migration upset the richest part of the empire, so no wonder he appears cautious and weak.

Andronicus' options shrank with each passing year.

If he'd maintained his navy, he might have been accused of abandoning Anatolia, but when he decommissioned his ships, he was immediately humiliated by the Venetians.

So, what about conscientious and devout?

Conscientious?

Certainly.

Few Byzantine emperors could afford not to be.

But devout?

There's no reason to doubt it.

He is said to have prayed and fasted diligently.

He worked closely with his patriarch, and was often seen in the company of priests.

But in a way, he had to do that.

As you know, he was hard at work trying to repair the rifts in the church, and with his legitimacy in question, binding himself to the church was an act of political survival.

We can't can't conclude from this that his father was a rascal and he was a choir boy.

He was certainly no ascetic, he had twelve children that we know of, three of them out of wedlock, and his puritanical patriarch Athanasios was often frustrated by the emperor's lack of support, accusing the Vasilevs of throwing away his petitions and dodging meetings with him.

So can we say anything with confidence about Andronicus aside from the fact that he lived through very difficult times?

As I mentioned earlier, Palaeologos was born just before Constantinople was retaken.

He therefore spent his youth in the capital, as the first prince of this new era of the Roman Empire.

And I've come to wonder if this influenced Andronicus in his decision to remain in the capital for much of his reign.

His predecessors, by necessity, had moved around their domains.

Nicene emperors toured the provinces in order to manage their administration and maintain close relationships with the aristocracy.

Andronicus, by contrast, spent most of his time in Constantinople.

Though he did campaign in Anatolia for several years, he didn't feel safe there and retreated to the Bosphorus.

He led one campaign in Europe early in his reign, but thereafter let his son and other generals do the fighting for him.

Across the past millennium, many good emperors had done the same, but that was when Constantinople's rule was feared.

Now that Byzantium was in a vulnerable state, it probably needed a militarily active emperor to hold everything together.

This doesn't seem to have suited Andronicus.

He stayed put and tried to direct the world from its centre.

Increasingly, the emperor lent on career bureaucrats rather than military men to run his government.

During the course of his reign, he had essentially three prime ministers who he worked closely with.

Each was a very learned man without an aristocratic lineage.

They owed their rise to the emperor's favour, and in turn, he favoured them, allowing them to marry into the royal family, something which Andronicus's father had used against Theodore Lascaris II.

Andronicus clearly felt safer promoting those without dangerous names, like Comninos or Dukas, and tried to balance their power against the men with names who might try to overthrow him.

A potential conclusion from this is that Andronicus was better at maintaining power than he was at exercising it, that Constantinople provided him with shelter from which to avoid being the hardened military leader which the Empire needed.

But I am wary of simplistic conclusions.

It may be that a hardened military emperor who fought in Anatolia in person would have died in battle, prompting a civil war and further chaos.

Palaeologos at least provided stability at a time of great change.

Perhaps cautious, conscientious, devout and weak is all we can say about him up to this point.

However, hiring the Catalans was far from a cautious decision.

It was a gamble.

And as we'll see next week, it turned out to be a game of Russian roulette.

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Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratches from the California lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.