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Alexios I Comneni, the Byzantine emperor

Alexios I Comneni, the Byzantine emperor (1081 AD)

The Battle of Manzikert

The Battle of Manzikert in 1071 was the end of Basil‘s Armenian Dynasty. The Byzantines had lost Armenia to Alp Arslan and the Seljuk Turks, and Alp Arslan took the Roman Emperor prisoner.

Battle of Manzikert
Who was Alp Arslan?
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Who was Alexios Comneni?

So a new dynasty took over the Byzantine Empire, the Comneni. Alexios Comneni succeeded in reconquering part of what is now Turkey in the 1080s, but he still wasn’t very powerful. All that was left now of the old Roman Empire was part of Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and some of Eastern Europe.

Anna Comneni (his mother)

The rulers of Western Europe didn’t take long to notice how weak the Byzantine empire had gotten. Soon they took advantage of it. Alexios (probably with the help of the New England Saxons) had to fight off Norman invasions of Greece. While Alexios was off fighting, his mother, Anna, ruled in Constantinople.

Norman Greece
The New England Saxons

In 1074, Alexios and Anna welcomed Saxon refugees to Constantinople and gave them help and advice in conquering part of the Crimea from the Seljuks, which they settled as New England.

The First Crusade and the Comneni

Twenty-two years later, in 1096, they welcomed the First Crusade and gave them advice about conquering Jerusalem. They seem to have hoped that the Crusaders would rebuild the Byzantine Empire. But instead, the Crusaders started their own independent kingdoms around Jerusalem.

The First Crusade
Venice in the Middle Ages

John Comnenus (from Hagia Sophia)

John Comnenus (from Hagia Sophia)

Then the Comneni gradually lost control of even more of their land. In Greece, the Normans and the Venetians built castles and took control. The Byzantine army was not strong enough anymore to stop them.

Anna Comneni (his daughter)

Alexios ruled a very long time – 37 years. His power came mainly from his many alliances with the other powerful families of Constantinople. The Comneni finally stopped the civil wars by uniting all the families. Alexios died in 1118 AD, when he was about 65 years old.

What is a convent?
Anna Comneni’s Alexiad

His daughter Anna tried to get power, but her husband didn’t support her. She lost out to her younger brother John. (Anna eventually entered a convent. She used the rest of her life to write a history of her father’s reign, showing why she should have inherited.)

Who was John Comneni?

But John turned out to be a good ruler. He married a Hungarian princess who stayed out of politics. John took advantage of the weakness of the Fatimids to reconquer a lot of Turkey and Syria. His alliance with the Holy Roman Empire kept the Normans under control.

Late Medieval Hungary
Who were the Fatimids?
The Holy Roman Empire

Who was Manuel Comneni?

John died in 1143 of an infected wound. His youngest son Manuel took power just in time to greet the Second Crusade, with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII of France.

Second Crusade
Louis and Eleanor
Who were the Mamluks?

But by this time the Mamluks had taken power in Syria, and they were a much tougher enemy. Manuel ended up losing most of Turkey to the Seljuks, and all of Syria and Lebanon to the Mamluks. He invaded Norman Italy, but was defeated there.

Maria Comneni and Andronikos

Manuel died in 1180, and his wife Maria took power as regent for their 10 year old son Alexios II. But both Maria and Alexios were dead three years later, as Manuel’s cousin Andronikos seized power. Because Maria was from a Catholic Crusader family, after she died, Andronikos’ supporters massacred many Catholics in Constantinople, including a lot of people from Venice. Reportedly the soldiers killed 80,000 people. Andronikos then lost Jerusalem to Saladin four years later.

Who was Saladin?

Alexios IV

Alexios IV

Andronikos became unpopular and was killed in 1185; in the 1190s, the Comneni lost Cyprus too, when Richard of England took Cyprus away from them as part of the Third Crusade.

Richard the Lionhearted
Third Crusade
Henry VI

The Comneni dynasty got weaker and weaker, and lost land in the Balkans to Hungary. The Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who ruled most of Central Europe, started to make plans to take over the Byzantine empire and make it part of his empire.

Alexios III and Alexios IV

When the Fourth Crusade got near Constantinople in 1204 AD, one of the Comneni, Alexios III, had just forced his 20 year old nephew, Alexios IV, out of power. Young Alexios IV promised to pay the Crusaders a lot of money if they fought for him as his mercenary soldiers and got him back into power, just as their ancestors had fought for Alexios I two hundred years earlier.

The Fourth Crusade
What is a mercenary?
Late medieval Venice

But history repeated itself. The Crusaders won the battle, and put Alexios in power again, but Alexios didn’t have the money to actually pay them. The Crusaders sacked and plundered Constantinople as their pay for the fighting, leaving it poor and depressed, and under the control of Venice. That was the end of the Comneni dynasty. Next the Paleologi took over.

Learn by doing: making mosaics
The Paleologi – End of Byzantium

Bibliography and further reading about the Byzantine emperors and empresses:

  

More Byzantine (Late Roman) history
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