Episode 290 - The Despot, Theodore Laskaris

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 290 The Despot Theodore Lascaris

Back in episode 258 I talked about the succession plans of the Emperor Alexius Angelos Komnenos.

AAK had blinded his brother Isaac Angelos and seized the throne in 1195.

He was backed by a large aristocratic coalition which gave his regime a broad base of support.

But one of the reasons men threw in their lot with AAK was the hope that he would favour them in his new administration.

Alexius had no son of his own, and so the most tantalizing prospect on offer was that he might designate you

as his successor. This gave the new Vasilefs several years' grace, where the ruling clan all smiled and bowed before him, hoping that their polite acquiescence would lead to promotion and favour.

As the months passed, though, tension began to develop. At some point, the emperor would have to make a decision about the future.

A lucky few would be thrilled with his choice, but the rest would be angry. In early 1199, Angelos Komnenos made his choice.

He announced that his two unattached daughters would be marrying two prominent men of the court, Alexios Palaiologos and Theodore Lascaris.

A double wedding followed at the Vlachonai Palace. The two men were eventually given the title of Despotes, meaning lord or master, the highest rank short of emperor itself.

One of these two men would most likely rule after the emperor's death.

As expected, those not chosen began to talk conspiracy. The following summer, John the Fat made his move, and despite seizing the palace, he was eventually cut down by the Varangian guard.

At some point in the next few years, Alexius Palaeologos disappears from the record. This left Theodore Lascaris as the obvious choice to be the next Roman Emperor.

What's that? Alexius Angelos is sailing here with a Latin fleet. Well, that doesn't sound good.

The city has fallen.

The city has fallen.

Theodore Komninos Lascaris was born around 1174.

As that middle name attests, the Lascarids, like the Angaloi, had married into the Komninoi at some point during the last century.

The family's base was in Western Anatolia, but Lascaris seems to have lived in the capital for the majority of his life.

Theodore had six brothers, several of whom were soldiers, and Theodore was described as a daring and fierce warrior in his youth.

We are told that his build was relatively slight, that he had a dark complexion, along with a long beard which forked at the end.

He was picked up by the Angeloi as a commander of one of the palace guard regiments, and it was in this capacity that he gained the trust and favour of AAK.

Lascaris was about twenty-five when the Emperor married him to his daughter, clearly seeing in Theodore a man he could mould and guide towards higher office.

Having said that, the Vasilafs didn't have limitless faith in Theodore's loyalty, because he didn't tell him about his escape from Constantinople during the First Crusader siege in 1203.

Lascaris was as surprised as anyone when he woke up to the news that his patron had fled in the night. It left Theodore at the mercy of Alexius Angelos, who swiftly took control of the city.

Lascaris was thrown into prison, but was left alive long enough to make his escape. Within a month or so, his friends managed to bust him out and ship him and his family across the water to Anatolia.

We don't know if Theodore had a say in this decision. If he did, then it was a telling one.
His father-in-law had fled west into Thrace, but instead of joining him, Theodore headed east. east.

Anatolia was both a land free of Latin troops and his ancestral home.

Lascaris took his family to Nicaea, the largest and safest city in the region, and begged to be let in.

The leaders of Nicaea offered sanctuary to his wife, Anna, and their three young daughters, but refused to take Theodore in.

This was a wise move since it wasn't clear what the outcome of the Fourth Crusade would be. If the Latins emerged victorious, then Nicaea didn't want to harbour a rebel.

But then again, if Alexius Angelos Komnenos returned to power, then honouring his daughter and granddaughters only made sense.

Lascaris took the deal, kissed his family goodbye, and headed south to try and raise support for his position.

The now thirty year old Theodore must have been a capable politician, because over the next few months he traversed the fragmented political landscape of Western Anatolia and turned himself into its new ruler.

Some towns were loyal to the government of Constantinople, some to the absent AAK, others were being ruled by local strongmen.

Lascaris had to tour around, giving public speeches and pressing the flesh at dinner parties to win people over.

He styled himself as both despot, the title given to him by the emperor, as well as husband of the emperor's daughter Anna.

This was good PR, as it reconciled those who wanted both a local leader and to be able to honour their oaths to the absent emperor.

Lascaris also smartly made contact with Iconium. The Seljuks were going through another period of civil war, which was just as well for the Romans.

Theodore made peace deals with those in possession of the capital and was able to use the tax revenue he'd gathered to pay for steppe riders to come and fight by his side.

With increasingly bleak news coming from Constantinople, the leaders of Nicaea eventually relented and opened their gates to Las Garis.

Theodore, the despot, was now the effective ruler of Bithynia, the northwest corner of Anatolia.

Further south, local rulers still resisted him, but they would have to wait, since news then came of the the sack of Constantinople.

Theodore heard all the gruesome details from his brother Constantine, who you may recall was the last man chosen to be emperor before the sack.

After Mautsuflos had fled, the remaining Romans headed for the Achia Sophia to elect a new leader.

Constantine had wisely chosen not to accept the imperial title, but was willing to lead the Varangians in a final stand on the Messi.

But when the guard began to break up, Constantine fled and joined his brother at Nicaea.

He was not the last Byzantine to head east. Refugees began arriving by the boatload.
Though this created its own problems, it was a boon to Lascaris' cause.

He could present his newly minted state as the natural home for Roman exiles. Many prominent government ministers and generals appeared and were able to offer their services services to Theodore.

This helped establish a proper Roman government in short order and acted as a magnet for talent from across the empire, as men in distant provinces heard the awful news from the Bosphorus and had to decide what to do next.

None of this would matter, though, if the Latins conquered Nicaea.

In previous episodes we've focused on the Crusader conquest of Thrace and Greece, but they also sent troops into Anatolia in in the summer after the sack.

They had to, since the lands of Bithynia were assigned to the new Latin emperor as his fief.

It was Baldwin's brother Henry who led troops across the water and on to the shore of Anatolia that summer.

Theodore gathered up his army, made up of the garrisoned troops of the region, aristocratic refugees, and Turkic mercenaries, and prepared to face them down.

The results were not pretty. The Latin knight Peter of Brassu defeated the Romans near the coast in December 1204.

Then the following spring, Henry routed an army led by Constantine Lascaris outside the town of Atramition.

The Latins didn't have it all their own way, and they remained short of manpower, but these victories allowed them to hoover up the coastal towns of Bithynia, and many other settlements quickly came to terms with the feared westerners.

As with most things in life, though, timing is everything. A month after Henry's cavalry charge had won the day, his brother Baldwin was dragged off into Bulgarian captivity near Adrianople.

Henry abandoned his position when the call came, but arrived too late to save his sibling.

As you know, the crusader position in Thrace collapsed, and Henry was forced to remain in Constantinople, desperately trying to save the Latin Empire.

This allowed Theodore Lascaris to save face and recover much of the territory that had been lost.

It also gave him time to get some victories under his belt and cement his position in the eyes of the Romans of the East.

He had no shortage of opportunities to hone his military skills. Soon after the Latins departed, he was attacked from the east by the new rulers of Trebizond.

Their story is interesting, but we don't have time to get into it right now.

What I can say is that they made two attempts to force their way through Paphlagonia, the region to the east of Bithynia, to capture a piece of territory, but Lascaris outmaneuvered them and drove them off in both 1205 and 1206.

Theodore next turned south. Three local Byzantine rulers controlled different parts of the Meander Valley, the fertile region which was most directly connected, economically, to the plateau.

In turn, Lascaris defeated or co-opted each of them. He used both carrot and stick, often routing their smaller armies before offering generous terms for their surrender.

This usually included guaranteeing their family estates would remain in their possession.

This brought him control of Philadelphia, the capital of the Thrachision theme, and with it the network of forts which protected Roman territory from Turkic attack.

It was an impressive couple of years for Lascaris. He had expanded his realm, absorbed his rivals, and proved his military credentials.

He even established a small fleet which began reincorporating the coastal islands which had fallen out of the Roman orbit.

When the news reached him that his father-in-law, Alexius Angelos Komnenos, had been captured by Boniface and shipped off to Monferrat, he felt bold enough to have himself declared Roman Emperor.

The elites of Western Anatolia were more than happy to have their former government re-established in this way.

They now had someone to mediate between them and to defend them from the many threats lurking in this scary, destabilized world.

Lascaris had been able to maintain the legal and fiscal structures of the Roman state, rerouting their nodes to Nicaea rather than Constantinople.

This allowed him to create a court there modelled on that of the Komninoi.

Court titles reflected familial proximity to the emperor, and though Las Garris promoted men of talent, he also aimed to marry them into the new ruling coalition.

Theodore was a generous man. He was happy to confirm the locals in their traditional rights and privileges, while also finding grand estates for new arrivals to enjoy.

He was able to do this by taking possession of all the land that that Constantinople's occupation had forfeited.

So he absorbed crown lands, church lands, and monastic estates, keeping plenty for himself, but also dishing them out to his supporters.

Within a decade, Western Anatolia looked to Nicaea as their Constantinople in exile, and Lascaris as their new vasilefs.

Unlike his rivals in the West, Theodore didn't struggle for money.

His new realm was a prosperous place, and by maintaining the tax system he was able to keep the currency afloat and therefore pay the army.

In fact, Lascaris was able to hire Latin mercenaries to fight for him.

Rather living up to their portrayal as greedy sell-swords in Conniates' history, many Western knights preferred the guarantee of Nicaea's gold to the papal claim that fighting for the new Latin Empire would save their souls.

Though Lascaris was hailed as emperor, events would allow him to underline that status a few years later. In twelve oh six the sitting patriarch John Camatiros passed away.

John had been holed up in the same Thracian town as Conniates until his death, though Conniates had now moved to Nicaea.

The Latins had established a new Venetian-run patriarchate at Constantinople and refused to allow the Romans to name a new patriarch of their own.

So the remaining Orthodox clergy of the Empire began to deliberate over what to do next.

Their great fear was that without a leader they would be absorbed by the Latins and their orthodoxy would be tarnished.

By 1208, senior churchmen formally petitioned Lascaris to convene a church council, which he did, in Holy Week of that year, at Nicaea.

The assembled prelates selected Michael Ottorianos as the new Patriarch of Romania.

Of course some denied the lawfulness of this assembly, given the absence of so many bishops from across the empire, but many others were relieved, and gratefully offered their support to the new archbishop.

The first act of Michael's patriarchate was to officially crown Theodore Lascaris as Emperor of the Romans. On Easter Sunday, 6th of April, he placed the imperial diadem on Theodore's head.

To some extent, Theodore had succeeded where Baldwin, Boniface, and Caloyan had failed. He was certainly a more widely supported imperial figure than any of them.

But he was not forced, as they were, to do battle over the corpse of Constantinople. This allowed allowed him greater flexibility and more time to complete his project.

Of course, until he did regain the city, his legitimacy would remain in question.

A fact that was made plain when a serious contender to his throne emerged, a man we know all too well, Alexius Angelos Komninos.

AAK was sipping some wine in a Monferrat palace when news came that he was heading back to Romania. What was going on? he asked.

Well, someone had offered Boniface's family a ransom for the former emperor. And, well, times are tough, so we're taking the money.
Who had paid this ransom is a question we'll answer next week.

For now, though, Alexius was on a boat and headed for Greece. Once there, he was given freedom to choose his next move.
AAK had kept up on the news and was determined to get back to the top.

He wanted to be Roman Emperor again and felt that the new state created by his son-in-law was his by right.

So he asked to be taken to Anatolia, where he would demand that Theodore hand Nicaea over to him.

Now, of course, Alexius was no fool, he wasn't going to do what Mautsuflos had done and turn up alone and empty-handed.

Oh no, he was going to meet his son-in-law on the battlefield, backed by a Seljuk army.

Aak

knew that his son-in-law was not going to share power with him. Why would he? Why would he bring back a failure who'd abandoned his capital when he, Theodore, was now a success in his own right?

So Alexius asked to be sailed to Atalia, where he would request an audience with the Sultan.

Timing is indeed everything, Alexius thought, as he bowed before the Seljuk Sultan of Rum.

Because the man who'd emerged victorious from the Turkic civil wars was a man that he knew well, Kai Khusro.

Kai Khusro, a title rather than a name, was the youngest son of Kilij Aslan II,

the man who'd defeated Manuel Komninos at Mirio Kefalon.

When the old sultan died his youngest son seized power, but predictably his brothers challenged him and drove him out of Iconium.

Khusro had fled to Constantinople, where he became a guest of the emperor, Alexius Angelos Komninos. The young Turk would live at the Byzantine capital for the next seven years.

The two men knew each other well. Khusro may even have been adopted or baptized by the Vasilefs.

When his patron fled in the face of the Fourth Crusade, Khusro tried to interest the Latins in helping him regain his throne. They demured, so he did it himself.

The Sultan was more than happy to honour his former host and back him in an attack on Nicaea.

The Turks had been unable to take advantage of Byzantium's humiliation because of their own civil wars, but now Khusro could put that right.

Iconium had a history of backing Byzantine rebels, lending them troops to raid the Meander Valley and cause chaos. On this occasion, the Sultan seems to have wanted more.

He He was going to join AAK personally on the battlefield. Presumably, his price for helping the former emperor was a piece of Byzantine territory.

Lascaris knew that this was the most serious threat he'd ever faced. The Turkic army was said to be several thousand strong, including steppe riders.

At most, he could command just over 2,000 men, 800 of whom were Latin mercenaries.

But he had no choice. He had to face them down.
If he allowed them to storm through the Meander Valley, then men would begin turning to his father-in-law for relief.

It was the summer of 1211 when the Turks began to move west into Roman territory, terrorizing the locals as they went.

They approached the city of Antioch on the Meander, about eighty miles east of Ephesus, and put it under siege.

Theodore led his forces down to meet them. With the city about to fall, Theodore told his men to abandon most of their supplies and race for the battlefield.

In the engagement which followed, the Latin troops formed the vanguard and stood firm in the face of a Turkic onslaught.

The Westerners insisted on fighting hand to hand with their lighter armed but far more numerous foe.

The Latins inflicted serious casualties on the Turks, but were eventually overwhelmed and cut down almost to a man.

The Roman forces were seemingly not offering great support. Some even fled when it became clear that the Turks were about to envelop their allies.

At this point we're told that Caikusro located Theodore Lascaris on the battlefield and charged at him.

Confident that his cavalry was superior in every way to their Roman counterparts, he landed a mighty blow on the Emperor with his mace and unhorsed him.

But Lascaris landed safely, pulled himself together, and in the chaos of the melee managed to slice one of the legs of the Sultan's mighty steed.

Kai Khusro tumbled to the dirt, where Nican soldiers fell on him and cut off his head.

This astonishing showdown is recorded in both Byzantine and Islamic histories, so we know the gist of it at least is true.

The Turks abandoned the field of battle, and Lascaris was left to ponder exactly how he'd managed to survive.

This was a tremendous victory for Lascaris. Few in Western Anatolia could doubt his legitimacy now.

He made a new peace treaty with the Turks, and in the aftermath of the battle, he captured his father-in-law. What a reunion that must have been.

Unfortunately, Alexius Angelos Comeninos had to lose his eyes as the price of his continued existence.

He was installed in a monastery near Nicaea and left in peace until his death a year or two later.

Despite all he had gained from this victory, Lascaris had also seen his army sliced in half, a fact that was not lost on the Latins of Constantinople.

Within months, the Emperor Henry had launched an invasion to take advantage of the situation.

He easily drove the Vasilevs from the field of battle and seized a number of fortresses in the region of Pergamon.

As usual, the Latins didn't have the manpower to dominate the countryside, but they now held strong points right across the center of Theodore's realm.

In response, Lascaris decided to turn to diplomacy.

With Henry called away to the Balkans again, the two sides concluded a truce, and Theodore made friendly overtures to the papacy and the Venetians as well, recognizing that he needed time to build his forces back up again.

Unlike Baldwin, Boniface, and Caloyan, Theodore was in no hurry to fill the power vacuum. He'd worked very hard to establish a state which could survive the storms rushing by.

In time he would plot a path back to Constantinople, but for now he rested,

as shall we.

Theodore's success story is an advert for the positive legacy of the Komninoi.

Alexius John and Manuel had invested in the defences of Western Anatolia, and they had proved sturdy enough to withstand attacks from east and west.

It was also another example of Roman taxpayers being crucial to imperial stability.

While Henry went scratching around the Balkans for revenue, Lascaris could rely on Byzantine farmers handing over their surplus without complaint.

If he could keep driving their enemies away, they would continue to believe that his tax collectors had a right to be there.

One problem which Theodore could do nothing about, though, was that there was another Roman state making the exact same claims as Nicaea.

That they were the true government in exile, that they were keeping orthodoxy alive in the face of Latin pressure. Next time, we move on to their vantage point.

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