A day to remember a tragic event in my family:
On
August 15, 1118, Basileios Alexios I Komnenos (1048-1118), Byzantine Emperor, died in Constantinople.
At the moment of his succession to the throne in 1081, his daughter, the historian Anna Komnena, would say, the Byzantine Empire reached from Adrianople to the Bosporus.
When he died, the Empire once more stretched from the Balkans to the centre of Anatolia, and was in a much better shape than it had been for a long time.
The Komnenoi were one of the most distinguished aristocratic families of the Empire, Alexios uncle Isaakios had reigned for a couple of years from 1057-59. Alexios embarked on a military career to become one of the foremost generals of the Empire during the reign of Manolis II Dukas.
After the death of Manolis the Empire had been torn apart in Civil Wars, and the eventual victor of these conflicts, Nikephoros III had turned out to be a weak Emperor, not capable of holding the crumbling Empire together.
At Easter 1081, General Alexios Komnenos, having already been proclaimed Emperor by parts of the army, entered Constantinople with his mainly mercenary troops, persuaded a grateful Nikephoros to abdicate and thus ascended to the throne.
The main task for the new Emperor was only too clear: In order to only have the slightest chance to survive much longer, the Empire must regain its old heartlands, Anatolia, from the Seljuk Turks.
But before Alexios could dedicate himself to this enterprise, he had to deal with another enemy, the Norman Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia. Robert had established a power base in Dyrrachium in the Byzantine province of Epiros, and from there threatened to advance further into Greece to conquer the capital.
With the help of the Venetians and the Seljuk Sultan of Nikaia, and lots of good fortune and after Roberts untimely death, Alexios finally managed in1083/84 to drive the Normans out of Epirus and recapture Dyrrachium, where he lost a battle against Robert Giuscard only a year before.
When the Normans had gone, the Pechenegs and Kumans, two semi-nomadic Turkic people, came, pillaged Thrace for a few years; and only in 1091 Alexios defeated the two tribes decisively.
At last, his hands were free and he could finally turn his attention to the Seljuks.
At this point, Alexios must have had a sudden inspiration, a cunning plan that seemed a good idea at the time. He appealed to Western Europe for help to drive the Muslim Seljuks out of Anatolia.
Somehow his message must have been misunderstood, then when the first help arrived in 1096, instead of the expected mercenary troops, half of Western Europe came down the Balkans and not to expel the Seljuks from Anatolia, but to march straight down to Palestine to re-conquer the Holy cities of Christendom.
Alexios had opened a Pandora s Box and without knowing it, had started the Crusades that were to ravage the Eastern Mediterranean for the next two centuries.
Only with great diplomatic skill managed Alexios to divert the passing Crusader armies from Constantinople, and persuaded them on the way to swear allegiance to him, recognize him as their sovereign and to hand all conquered territories back to the Empire.
The Crusaders, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, duly defeated the Seljuks, returned much of Anatolia back to the Byzantine Empire, and serious problems only began when they came to Antioch, which Bohemond ,the son of his old arch-enemy Guiscard, refused to give back to Alexios. But thats another story.
Alexios managed to hold on to the regained lands for the last twenty years of his reign, concentrated his efforts on re-organising the internal structures of the Empire, shifting the power away from the Imperial bureaucracy to the land-owning feudal aristocracy, and on persecuting the heretic dualist sects that had sprung up everywhere in the Empire.
Alexios I Komnenos
After a reign of 37 years, Alexios I Komnenos died in the evening of August 15 1118 in the Palace of the Magana in Constantinople, and shortly before his death he designated his son Ioannis as his heir, thus founding a dynasty that lasted until the last reigning Komnenos, David, the last Emperor and "Megas Komnenos" of Trebizond surrendered his city to Mehmet II in 1461.
Alexios I Komnenos had taken over the Empire at one of its lowest points, restored it once again to a serious power in the Levant and in the Balkans, and thus he and his successors at least temporarily halted the inevitable decline of the Byzantine Empire.
Anna Komnena's account of her father's reign can be found here:
Anna Komnena: The Alexiad
What else happened on this day?
1620 The Mayflower leaves Southampton, to bring the first English settlers to North-America
1945 Nine days after the Atom bombing of Hiroshima, Japan capitulates unconditionally, and WW2 comes to an end.
1947 After more than 200 years of British rule, India gaines independence.
Full list:
Wikipedia
Edited by Komnenos