Episode 303 - Pinch Me

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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium episode 303

Pinch Me

Michael Palaiolokos was fast asleep when news reached him that Constantinople had fallen to his forces.

It was one of his sisters who told him the astonishing news, and Michael asked her to pinch him to make sure he wasn't dreaming.

This was the news that all Romans had been waiting to hear for half a century.

The hated Latins had been sent packing, and true Romans once again occupied the city of Constantine.

It was time to rejoice, right?

Right

over at Nicomedia, a high-ranking official called Michael Sinakarim had a different reaction.

Pulling hairs from his beard in anguish, he exclaimed, What sins have we committed that we should live to see such misfortune?

From now on no one should hope for any good since the Romans have once more set foot in Constantinople.

Did Synacharim really say these words?

He probably expressed something milder which has grown stronger as others repeated it, but memories of his anxiety reflect a very real concern on the part of those at Nicaea about the potential consequences of retaking Constantinople.

And that's what today's episode is all about.

On a mundane level, the capture of the city meant that everyone was going to have to move.

You couldn't keep the capital at Nicaea.

The government, the church, the army would all have to uproot and migrate to the Bosphorus.

All the basic arrangements of life were undone.

And if you said, no, I'm going to stay at Nicomedia, for example, then you would tumble down the hierarchy, since all the top jobs would be based in the city from now on.

This would inevitably lead to a deprioritization of Anatolia in imperial thinking.

Under Lascaris and Vitatses, the state was on the doorstep of its citizens, responsive to their needs and quick to sense danger on the frontiers.

Once the government was in Constantinople, then Thracian Thracian concerns would loom larger than those of the Meander Valley.

On a deeper level, there was a real worry about what moving back to Constantinople might mean for what had been established securely at Nicaea.

Slight digression.

We often call the American President the leader of the free world.

It's a poetic statement which can be understood in a dull way to simply mean that he or she is the leader leader of the most powerful country that operates in a democratic manner.

But if we think about it a little more, leader of the free world is a very emotive and powerful statement, casting those in the club as something morally admirable and those not as something different, and it confers both status and responsibility on that figure.

The Romans had many similar phrases and conceptions of themselves.

One which we've touched briefly on in the past was the idea that Constantinople was the new Jerusalem, a place where the true Christian faith was enshrined and protected, a sort of Noah's Ark keeping the faithful safe from the storms and floods outside.

The sense that Orthodox belief needed a guardian had transferred quickly to Nicaea after the sack.

The elites who formed around Theodolas Garus began to see their purpose in these terms.

God may have cast them out of their home, punishment for sin, no doubt, but it was their challenge to preserve the Orthodox faith for the sake of humanity.

This they had been doing successfully for the past half century.

After all, they had chosen a new patriarch who was widely accepted as the legitimate successor to those who'd sat on the throne of the Ahia Sophia, and they had steadfastly refused to give in to Latin attempts to unite the churches under the Pope's authority and practices.

Hatred of the Latins, not only for sacking their capital, but for attempting to tamper with Orthodoxy itself, had only grown over the last few decades.

The first Nicene patriarch, Michael Otorianus, wanted to offer absolution to those who died fighting the Latins, while one of his successors, Germanus II, urged Vertatses to rebaptise the Latins in their own blood.

Such rhetoric was easier to issue from Western Anatolia than it would be from Constantinople itself.

The Nicene state had not been free of Latin influence as you know, Western troops fought in the army and Latin merchants and monks were visible but Nicaea was a self consciously Roman state who kept the Westerners at arm's length.

Such detachment would not be possible from the great palace.

Constantinople was now inseparable from Latin interests.

Michael Palaiologos had just signed an agreement with the Genoese granting them sweeping rights throughout the empire, and even though they had just fled, the Venetians would have to come back.

They were too deeply invested in Byzantine territory, as was the whole crusading movement.

Men and materials had to pass through Byzantium to reach Utramir.

The Latins also had legal claims to Byzantine land thanks to their occupation.

Baldwin II was still out there claiming to be Emperor of Constantinople, and as we've seen repeatedly, Westerners will use titles as pretexts for aggression.

The Pope now considered the entire Roman world to be under his ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and since his authority was meant to be universal, he could hardly abandon that position.

Would he call another crusade to crush what strength the Romans had left?

This was why men like Michael Sennacherim were anxious.

At Nicaea they had been able to preserve their traditions free of the taint of compromise with the Latins, but that wouldn't be possible once the Empire had returned to a city so prominent in the networks which connected the West to the rest of the world.

Even if you step away from the ideological and religious concerns about the move back to Constantinople, the geopolitics were complex and treacherous.

As I just mentioned, the Venetians were not going to stay away.

They had bases on the Greek mainland and in the Aegean.

Crete was essential to their new empire, and they had spent their time at Constantinople exploring the Black Sea, which had previously been barred to them.

They would have to normalize relations with Palaeologos somehow, even if just to stop the Genoese from becoming too powerful.

The Genoese themselves couldn't entirely be trusted.

They had every incentive to work with the incoming administration, but ultimately, they were not Roman subjects.

Don't forget the spectre of the Mongols either.

Refugees passed through Constantinople all the time, talking of the terror which the steppe riders inspired in all who crossed them.

A Byzantine empire, restored to the Bosphorus, which crowed too loudly about its own magnificence, might draw the wrong kind of attention.

Then there were those powers contesting control of Roman land directly.

Latin colonies remained in the Aegean and in Greece.

Though they were not threatening on their own, they acted like distress beacons, constantly trying to attract the interest of Western courts to invest in their survival.

Then there was Epirus, which remained effectively independent of Nicene control.

The return of an emperor to Constantinople did not lead the Romans of Greece to abandon their independence.

The past fifty years had allowed an Epirate way of doing things to emerge, which people in Greece felt was just as valid as the Nicene way of doing things.

They viewed Palaeologos' capture of Constantinople with ambivalence.

It was viewed as generally positive to have a Roman back in charge of the city, and they rejoiced at the return of the patriarch to the Achia Sophia, but they did not welcome return to Constantinople's political authority.

They enjoyed the looser administration and more responsive government that the Dukas family provided.

No doubt, this is how the people of Western Anatolia would have responded if it was an Epirate leader who'd got to Constantinople first.

This was one of the consequences of the Latin splintering of the Roman world, where once there was only one emperor that all Romans could unite around, there was now an acceptance of the devolution of power.

The existence of an independent Roman state, at Epirus, but also at Trebizond, added a further complication for the emperors of Constantinople.

Those states provided safe havens for political rivals or for critical Roman voices who couldn't easily be silenced.

Previously the emperors could eventually cow most political opposition, but now those who opposed their policies had places to go and pulpits to speak from.

This new decentralized world is what made the return to Constantinople such a complex matter.

As much as he might want it to be the case, Michael Palaeologos couldn't click his fingers and return to an empire that functioned like that of Manuel Komnenos.

The Roman world no longer orbited strictly around the gravitational pull of its capital.

Not only were Epirus and Trebizond shelters for alternate visions of Roman government, but the territory in Europe had been pulled in multiple different directions by the shifting domination of Latin, Bulgarian and Roman regimes.

This had led to a slackening of the administrative and fiscal apparatus of the state, which it would be tricky to re-impose.

For example, urban centers like Thessalonica now had their own charters, defending their rights from state interference.

This had been the price of the elites of those cities to switch sides during the wars of the past five decades.

That meant imperial officials were not allowed to intervene in how these cities were run.

And that meant customs duties and other forms of taxation, including property taxes, were not to be collected there.

The key men in these towns began to meet regularly, forming their own local government.

Now, as far as we can tell, these arrangements only applied to the urban centre itself, which needless to say was much smaller than cities are today.

The countryside, which stretched for hundreds of miles around, was still taxable, in theory, but there was no getting around the fact that wealthy residents of the Balkans had been empowered in a way that the old empire had discouraged.

Clearly, they were going to need to be consulted carefully about any changes to the status quo.

If not, they had the potential to welcome enemies of the Vasilevs into their midst.

This meant the work of a provincial governor was far trickier than it had ever been.

Constant negotiation with local interests would be necessary to get anything done, something which the Latins took for granted and had helped spread across Romania, but which was anathema to an emperor who wanted his will to be done immediately by loyal officials.

A related problem was the growth of pro-noias and exemptions.

Exemptions from tax or certain duties were increasingly handed out to gain the loyalty of different aristocrats or monasteries.

This was simpler and cheaper than putting everyone on the payroll, while pro-noia was the arrangement by which the emperor assigned certain lands to someone and allowed them to collect taxes directly from the people who lived there.

In exchange, this official would be expected to provide a certain number of troops for the army.

In theory, this system still depended on the emperor's favour.

The pro-noia assigned to you wasn't yours by right, and you can see why the Nicene Emperors expanded this system, since it was administratively simpler than resurrecting the theme system, which required constant attention and maintenance.

But a pro Noa system was prone to inefficiencies, because it was dependent on the relationship of the individual lord to the emperor.

If the emperor wasn't vigilant or in a strong position, then his aristocracy could be lax or provide the bare minimum they were required to in order to maximise their own profit.

Again, interpretation and debate were being introduced into a system that had once depended on top-down authority.

When the Nicene Emperors lived amongst their people in Western Anatolia, such informal arrangements were easier to manage.

Once they were distant in the halls of the great palace, they would be dependent on the competence of their nobles and officials, who, as we've seen, didn't always have the state's best interests at heart.

The move back to Constantinople was also going to be expensive.

The Latins had left the city a shadow of its former self, and there was no way Palaeologos could leave it in that condition.

He would have to invest heavily to bring some of its lustre back if the city was going to resume its role as a showcase for Roman authority.

This would be a drain on the treasury in a way that the cities of Western Anatolia had not been.

The emperors there had, of course, continued to wear regalia and hold grand receptions, but no one expected them to be on a world-class level.

Remember that Vitatses had encouraged his subjects to be self-sufficient and had publicized his own frugality.

For a Nicene Emperor, modesty was a sign that you were spending your money wisely.

For an emperor of Constantinople, ostentatious display would be essential.

Throughout this period of narrative, I've had a question at the back of my mind.

It's one that was posed by listener JM after the sack.

He said,

Do you think there is validity in seeing 1204 as the end of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the successor states as a definitive break?

Also, would your answer be different if Constantinople was never retaken?

It's a fantastic question, and I read it out on the podcast at the time, but my answer was, I don't know.

Although I'm aware of the gist of what happens next in our story, I don't know any details until I get there.

My assumption was always that, no, 1204 was not the end of the Roman Empire.

It only properly ended in 1453.

Antony Caldellus's new history runs that length, so who am I to quibble?

As we've delved into the last fifty years, though, I have begun to have some doubts.

Throughout this podcast, there were times when the Romans controlled little more than Constantinople itself, and yet they always came back.

And one of the things I was aware of in that process was that it was those things contained within the city which were in essence what kept the Empire going.

The palace, the regalia, the patriarchate, the relics, the icons, the gold, the departments of state, their records and their tax rolls.

Even when the Arabs or the Turks or the Bulgarians laid waste to vast tracts of land, the government at Constantinople could always march out in the aftermath and begin administering those territories again.

They had the records and the people were invested in those records.

Those pieces of paper could prove that you owned what you said you did.

And if you needed the government to back you up, then you would gladly pay them tax in return.

That's what kept the empire functioning, even in the darkest of days.

So if Constantinople gets sacked, what happens then?

What happens when something inviolate is violated?

What happens when authority is shattered, or tax records are lost, or destroyed, or at least in dispute?

When Michael Palaeologos marches back into Constantinople, the Empire of the Komninoi will not suddenly reappear.

Michael is marching back in as the Emperor of Nicaea, the Emperor of Western Anatolia, not as the undisputed Vasilevs.

Nicaea had preserved much of the apparatus of the Roman Empire, the patriarchate, the coinage, the tax rolls at least of Western Anatolia.

But so much had been lost, the great bureaucratic departments of state had disappeared.

There was no need for such complexity if all you control is Western Anatolia.

The slimmed-down administration which emerged there was obviously modelled on the pre-SAC government, but inevitably it had begun to morph into something new.

And as we've just discussed at length, Constantinople no longer commands people the way it once did.

The Latin SAC had broken the unitary state.

It had reformed in Nicaea, but its ability to dictate terms was now limited, and that is a problem.

So much of the story of Byzantine survival across the past millennia was was the willingness of people to accept the authority of Constantinople, whether out of loyalty to its claims or fear of its armies.

Now that loyalty had been divided, and those armies had been shattered.

Michael Palaeologos would enter the great palace claiming that the old ways had returned, but the reality on the ground was quite different.

The road ahead for the Roman Empire was tough and treacherous.

Perhaps, quote, no one should hope for any good is a bit strong, but we will all have to be more realistic in our expectations.

Does all of that mean that the Empire really ended in 1204 and that this successor state is just an expanded Nicaea and not the return of the Roman Empire?

I think at this stage I'd have to give a slightly mealy-mouthed answer.

A majority of Romans, just, but still a majority, believed that this was a continuation of the earlier empire.

And I think all Romans believed that a Roman government should rule from Constantinople, just as it always had.

So I have no reason to not call this the Roman Empire.

It certainly was a Roman state trying to revive that empire.

But it might be that for those studying imperial power as it was formulated by Augustus and enshrined in this particular space by Constantine, that something was fundamentally lost in 1204.

Certainly many books covering aspects of Roman life stop at that date, because what comes afterwards is so different to what went before.

I don't think it's fair to look ahead to 1453 and declare the results inevitable.

It was still possible that Michael Palaiologos would restore those central organs of state, and that the empire would resume some of its old gravitational pull.

But as we've discussed today, it will be an uphill battle.

Yet again, the Byzantines find themselves at the bottom of their Sisyphian hill, putting their shoulder to the boulder, prepared to push it back up to the top once more.

One thing I can answer for certain is the last part of Listener JM's question.

Would your answer be different if Constantinople was never retaken?

Yes.

If no Roman power retakes Constantinople, even if they go on for centuries as, say, the Empire of Nicaea, then I think they are just the Empire of Nicaea.

If you want to be the Roman Empire, you have to have the giant imperial capital with all the attendant headaches.

Next time, I will answer listener questions about the past sixty years, and then after that, it will be time to join Michael Palaiologos' triumphal procession as he marches back into the Queen of Cities.

We get it.

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