We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
For four years, the Byzantine state was, for all intents and purposes, without an emperor. Like Isaac III before him, Constantine remained sequestered in his grand palace, brooding and contemplating alone in what was becoming a Batatzian tradition. But unlike his great predecessor, Constantine could enjoy some respite from the plague of a troubled mind, namely Raymonde Capet, the beautiful and enchanting sister to the young King Alain of France. Married in 1300, Raymonde had become closer to the Emperor than anyone else in the realm. Naturally, such proximity had its advantages: the throne’s voluminous wealth at her eager fingertips and Constantine’s ready ear. Though an outsider who was only barely fluent in Greek and Orthodox only by expediency, the Empress had by 1302 made herself one of the most influential members of the imperial court.
By a slow process of cajoling Constantine with her mental and physical capabilities, Raymonde achieved the impossible: stirring him from his seclusion. Though still visibly haggard from the rigours of the past and appearing awkward and uncomfortable in court or in the streets of the capital, Constantine was much more like his old self once again. Part of this may have had to do with the momentous historical implications of 1302: it was the centennial of the end of the Megas Batatzes’s minority. To most Greeks and loyal Byzantine subjects, 1202 had marked the end of the ruinous decline and decay of the post-Manzikert period and the start of the meteoric rise to preeminent world power, master of the eastern Mediterranean, conqueror of Rome, savior of Jerusalem, lord of Mecca, subduer of the Saracens, and overlord of the East.
What better way to celebrate and commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Isaac’s assumption of the Throne than yet another military triumph? Or so Raymonde said. Indeed, it was at the Empress’s insistence that Constantine at last agreed that an expedition would be undertaken to finally lay low the Venetian menace for good. Along with historical enmity, the Emperor certainly considered the fact that the city-state retained control of the island of Corfu and the last Greek settlement not under the imperial banner. It was an opportunity to take advantage of Byzantium’s undisputable hegemony in Mediterranean affairs and not only ensure its continuation, but further confirm the sea as a Byzantine lake.
Nor would it likely be a difficult task to accomplish. The Italian republic had fallen far since its heyday as a commercial empire with trading interests stretching from Iberia to Outremer and beyond. In the mid-thirteenth century, with the armies of the Megas crushing one Muslim power after another, many of the once-mighty Arab and Turkish nobility had taken flight rather than weather the inevitable assimilation and conversion efforts. Some had fled to Egypt and Arabia, others to Iberia. Others had not managed to make it that far. One such noble family, the Yousifs, in command of a small flotilla of ships, was forced to turn north to the city of Venice in the face of a squadron of marauding Greek warships. Armed with a small fortune and the political savvy to play the innumerable factions off one another, the Yousif dynasty seized power, maintaining their hold for almost a half century, despite numerous revolts and conspiracies to oust the Muslim Doges.
The war began on May 6, with Venice’s military and financial assets utterly exhausted from almost a decade of constant instability under the generally inept Doge Zayed Yousif. In spite of Raymonde’s prompting, Constantine declined to lead the war in person, delegating command of the armies to be raised for the war. To Manuel Karaionatan was given the the main Italian force gathered at Rome. The secondary expedition to the Venetian base at Corfu was charged to Alexios Achaios, which held a special significance as being the last Greek territory to be liberated by Byzantium. Karaionatan marched north through the obliging Italian duchies fearful of suffering the Emperor’s wrath for noncompliance, and arrived with his army at the city on October 18. It was clear how far Venice had fallen under the Yousifs; the walls were in a state of disrepair, and the city could barely muster a force to defend the length of the walls, let alone sally and attempt to repulse the Byzantines. The siege itself barely lasted three months. On January 19, 1303, Venice surrendered. Corfu had already surrendered without a fight in early December, and in just seven months the fighting was essentially over before it had begun. Ever persistent, Zayed had escaped Venice and taken refuge in Zeta, the last Venetian outpost, which fell on April 5. With that, peace was declared and the Venetian republic that had stood for six centuries was swept away.
But wasn't Venice created in the 5th century, and it declared itself independent also then, when the western empire ceased to exists?
But the Basileios was still their overlord... and has allways been.
As 1303 dawned, Emperor Constantine XI felt is if he had lived for centuries. Though he was only 55 years old, the strain the countless campaigns and pressures of administrating the unruly empire had placed on Constantine were approaching a breaking point. The Emperor continued to shy away from public appearances, and generally neglected his imperial duties, taking whatever solace he could from Raymonde. At times, he could be seen wandering the halls of either the Blachernae or, after inducing a panic by his sudden disappearances, in the Great Palaces, hands clasped behind his back and stooped over, often muttering to himself.
It was clear Constantine had essentially given up on life; whatever advantages and incentives supreme imperial power had once held had long since evaporated in a miasma of pessimistic gloom. Such an attitude was captured in his conduct as Emperor. His gross negligence of the affairs of state became increasingly blatant, and serious; in at least one instance, a diplomatic scandal erupted when it was discovered that Constantine had placed a straw-filled dummy in his place on the throne behind the customary veiled curtain when receiving embassies from a Genoan delegation. In the fall of 1303, the Patriarch accused Constantine of heresy for allowing Muslims a place in the imperial court and freedom to worship accordingly in their quarters. For his part, the Emperor his reported to simply have shrugged and taken a nap.
Yet such accusations were the final breaking point. To be branded a heretic after all he had done to crush the enemies of the faith and spread Orthodoxy to the farthest reaches of Mesopotamia proved devastating. While no one in the empire took such a claim seriously, for the Emperor, it was a final betrayal from the nation he had whole-heartedly served and ruled for much of his life. Having come of age in the waning days of the reign of Isaac III, to be rejected by the Church and nobility so fiercely made it seem he was, in the end, nothing but a failure. Constantine soon fell into a deep depression, secluding himself even from Raymonde for days at a time. His hermitage immediately began to undermine the Capetian empress’ influence at court, forcing her to look for other options.
The situation dragged on as it always had, the court and the Emperor’s servants assuming the Emperor’s neglected roles and responsibilities. But an empire of such size and scope could not possibly function long without an emperor at its head, guiding the affairs of state. Much to their credit as both administrators and manipulators, Raymonde and the privy council continued the charade for almost a year and a half. But by the spring of 1305, it had become obvious to even the most bedazzled of Constantine’s supporters who really controlled the strings of power in Constantinople. Some suspected Constantine had been crippled in some dastardly palace coup, prompting a short-lived riot in March 1305, but most agreed that the Emperor was unfit to continue as sovereign of the Byzantine Empire. The situation posed a serious problem: namely, what to do with Constantine? To eliminate him or forcibly sideline him would certainly cause a political crisis and undermine the heir’s legitimacy in the eyes of the nobility and commoners. But, in all likelihood, Constantine would not willingly cede the imperial dignity.
Constantine ultimately decided for the de facto regency council. On April 11, 1305, the Emperor, long bedeviled by his depression, attempted to commit suicide. The accounts as to its exact nature are conflicting. The first major version claims that Constantine attempted to hang himself in his bed chambers, only to be cut down at the last moment by Raymonde. The other was that he attempted to throw himself off a balcony, but the fall was broken by group of jongleurs passing underneath the window. Whichever story is true, and though Constantine appeared to be uninjured, the regency confronted the Emperor with an ultimatum: either abdicate the throne or name a co-emperor to assume the responsibility of the affairs of state. For the Batatzian emperor, who like his predecessors had always prided themselves for reigning alone, the latter option was unacceptable, and on April 13, Constantine XI relinquished power to his eldest surviving son, Christopher. Until recently, the Emperor’s ultimate fate remained a mystery, but newly uncovered sources reveal that, despite Raymonde’s apparently sincere objections to the contrary, Constantine left the capital in a self-imposed exile, taking up residence in a small mountain monastery north of Jerusalem.
Constantine XI Batatzes had been 57 years old when he was forced to abdicate the throne. His reign had lasted twenty-five years, the longest an emperor had ruled since Isaac III. It was also, without question, the most interesting time since the Megas’s death, filled with idealistic reform, war both nightmarish and heroic, political collapse abroad, palace intrigue, and, most of all, tragedy. Constantine was very much like his father in that he was determined to save the Empire from the forces that would tear it apart. But his vision of what that salvation entailed differed markedly, and the results were just as dissimilar. Almost certainly, Constantine died just a few years later considering himself to have been a failure. The idealistic and hopeful man Constantine had been upon taking up the imperial mantle after his father’s death was replaced by the broken, cynical husk responsible for more death and destruction than any other man since the time of Attila.
But more than that, Constantine XI’s “death,” as it was regarded, perhaps rightly, by contemporary Byzantines, ultimately proved to be a great turning point in the Batatzian dynasty, much as Isaac’s death had been previously. Arkadios, Constantine, Isaac, and to a lesser extent Romanos, had all been men of a similar stock. They were men of vision and of ideas. They were men who lived and matured in a world on the brink of destruction, a world of constant danger and where the very fabric of society seemed to be tearing itself apart. They also saved that world, restoring it to such power and prestige that it was once more the envy of the known world, a shinning jewel of culture and civilization in a sea of barbarism and darkness. Much of this is evident in one of the great pieces of literature of the era, the great Batatziad, an ordered collection of the various writings and scholarly works of those four emperors. The tone and focus of the multi-generational narrative varies wildly even within each section, but the overarching theme of the great search they all conducted to express the essence of the world they were a part of, the legacy of Rome and the hope for the New Rome, that seemingly imperceptible quality, continues throughout. That the Batatziad ends with Constantine bidding his reader ado should not be lost on observant reader. As much can be gleaned from Emperor Christopher’s silence as from all the words ever said about him.
The generation that rose to maturity in the centennial of the end of Isaac Megas’s minority had never truly known that peril that plagued their forefathers’ very existence. Theirs was a world of wealth and glory, of military adventures like the expedition to Venice that promised great gains with little effort. They were, in effect, spoiled. So began the reign of Emperor Christopher Batatzes.
