Byzantine Culture

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Michael VIII Palaiologos

Michael VIII took back Constantinople in 1261, founded the last Byzantine dynasty, blinded a child emperor and bought off a western invasion with a church union nobody wanted.

Michael VIII is the most consequential Byzantine emperor of the later Middle Ages and one of the least loved by his own subjects. He recovered Constantinople from the Latins after fifty-seven years, founded a dynasty that lasted until the end, and kept the empire alive against a western coalition assembled specifically to destroy it. He also blinded the eleven-year-old legitimate emperor, was excommunicated by his own patriarch, imposed a church union that the population refused, and died under that excommunication with no Orthodox funeral.

Nicaea

After the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople in 1204, Byzantine political continuity passed to three successor states. The strongest was the empire of Nicaea in western Anatolia, which had a functioning administration, a defensible territory, and — after 1208 — a patriarch in exile.

Michael Palaiologos, born about 1223, belonged to the highest military aristocracy and was related to the Komnenoi, Doukai and Angeloi. He was a successful general with a reputation for ambition; in the 1250s he was tried for conspiracy under Theodore II Laskaris, cleared by an ordeal he managed to avoid undergoing, and fled for a period to the Seljuk sultanate, where he commanded Christian troops.

When Theodore II died in 1258 leaving an eight-year-old son, John IV, Michael manoeuvred his way from regent to co-emperor within a year, and was crowned in January 1259 — before the child.

Pelagonia

The military achievement that made his position secure came in the autumn of 1259 at Pelagonia in Macedonia, where a Nicaean army under Michael’s brother John destroyed a coalition of the prince of Achaea, the despot of Epiros and Manfred of Sicily. The victory removed every serious rival claimant to the Byzantine inheritance at a stroke and delivered the prince of Achaea as a prisoner, later ransomed for the fortresses of Mystras, Monemvasia and Maina — the nucleus of the Despotate of the Morea.

The Recovery of the City, 1261

The actual recapture was almost an accident. In July 1261 a Nicaean general, Alexios Strategopoulos, was passing near Constantinople with about eight hundred men on a reconnaissance. Local farmers told him that the Latin garrison and the Venetian fleet had left on an expedition to the Black Sea. A party got in through an unguarded postern or over the wall by night, opened a gate, and the city was taken with negligible fighting. The Latin emperor Baldwin II escaped by ship.

Michael, who was in Anatolia, heard the news two days later. He entered Constantinople on 15 August 1261 on foot, behind an icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, through the Golden Gate — a deliberately penitential and Marian staging, described in the icon of the Hodegetria.

The city he entered was in poor condition: depopulated, partly burnt in the fires of 1203–1204, its churches stripped, its palaces decayed. Michael spent heavily on repairs, resettlement and the rebuilding of the walls, and it is to his reign that the great Deësis mosaic in Hagia Sophia is usually assigned — a work discussed in the Deësis mosaic.

The Blinding of John IV

In December 1261, on the boy’s eleventh birthday, Michael had John IV Laskaris blinded and confined in a fortress on the Marmara, where he lived for another fifty years.

The patriarch Arsenios Autoreianos excommunicated the emperor for it. Michael had Arsenios deposed in 1265, which converted a personal quarrel into a schism: the Arsenite party refused communion with the official church for decades, and the dispute outlasted Michael, his son and most of the participants. It was a permanent domestic weakness, and it is the main reason the dynasty’s founder was so widely disliked.

Holding Off the West

The political problem of Michael’s reign was Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France, who took southern Italy and Sicily in 1266 and openly planned to restore the Latin empire. Charles assembled alliances with Venice, the exiled Baldwin II, the Serbs and the Bulgarians.

Michael’s counter-moves were a model of Byzantine diplomacy under pressure:

  • He rebuilt a fleet and used the Genoese, Venice’s rivals, as a naval counterweight, granting them the suburb of Galata — a concession with long consequences, as the Byzantine navy explains.
  • He subsidised and encouraged opposition to Charles inside Italy and in Aragon.
  • He sought union with the papacy, on the calculation that a pope could forbid an attack on a Catholic empire.

The union was concluded at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, where Michael’s envoys accepted Roman primacy, the filioque and the Latin position on purgatory. It achieved its purpose: successive popes restrained Charles for eight years.

At home it was rejected almost universally — by the monks of Athos, by much of the episcopate, by Michael’s own sister, who said publicly that it would be better for her brother’s empire to perish than for the faith to be betrayed. Michael imprisoned, exiled and blinded opponents, which did nothing to make the union popular.

The Sicilian Vespers

The endgame came in 1282. Charles had finally obtained papal permission for his expedition and assembled a fleet. On 30 March 1282 the population of Palermo rose against the French garrison, and the revolt — the Sicilian Vespers — spread across the island. Peter III of Aragon, whose claim Michael had been funding, landed in August and took Sicily.

Michael wrote in his own memoir that if he could say he had been the instrument of the Sicilians’ liberation, he would be saying that God had given him the means. Modern historians differ about how decisive Byzantine money was among the many causes of the Vespers, but the Byzantine contribution is documented and Michael’s own claim is not empty.

He died in December 1282 on campaign in Thrace. Because he had died in communion with Rome and under Orthodox excommunication, his son Andronikos II gave him no public funeral and no imperial burial, and immediately repudiated the union.

Assessment

The case for Michael: he restored the capital, destroyed the rival Greek claimants, deterred a western invasion for two decades, rebuilt a navy, recovered ground in the Peloponnese, and re-established an imperial administration that functioned for another century and a half.

The case against: the recovery of Constantinople itself may have been a strategic error. The Nicaean state had been compact, defensible and solvent; defending a half-ruined metropolis on the Bosphorus consumed resources that had previously gone to the Anatolian frontier, and it was that frontier which dissolved in the two decades after his death, allowing the emirates — including the Ottomans’ — to establish themselves. The union bought time at the cost of domestic legitimacy; the Arsenite schism poisoned church politics for forty years; and the reliance on Genoa handed the Black Sea trade to a foreign power.

Both cases are strong, which is why Michael VIII remains one of the genuinely arguable figures in Byzantine history.

The Arsenite Schism

The blinding of John IV produced a church split that outlasted everyone involved, and it is the clearest case in Byzantine history of an ecclesiastical quarrel with no doctrinal content at all.

The patriarch Arsenios Autoreianos excommunicated Michael for the act and refused to lift the sentence. Michael had him deposed in 1265 on procedural grounds and replaced. Arsenios’s supporters — the Arsenites — refused communion with the official church, and the refusal hardened into a party with its own clergy, its own monasteries and a following among the poor of the capital and in Anatolia.

The dispute ran for roughly forty-five years, through three patriarchates, and was formally settled only in 1310 under Michael’s son, by a ceremony in which the dead Arsenios’s remains were brought to Hagia Sophia and a document of absolution was read out over them.

Two things made it so durable. The Arsenites had the better of the moral argument — the emperor had blinded a child to take his throne — and the Anatolian frontier population, neglected by Michael’s western-facing policy, found in the schism a vehicle for a grievance that had nothing to do with church law. The frontier’s alienation in exactly these decades is part of why the Turkish emirates established themselves so easily.

The Anatolian Cost

Michael’s reign is the point at which the empire’s strategic priorities inverted, and the consequences were permanent.

The Nicaean state he inherited had been built around the Anatolian frontier: the akritai, the frontier soldiers, held land on favourable terms in exchange for service, and the Laskarid emperors had maintained the arrangement carefully.

After 1261, resources went west and north. Michael’s revenues funded the rebuilding of Constantinople, subsidies to Italian powers, a fleet for the Aegean, and campaigns in Greece and the Balkans against Charles of Anjou. The Anatolian frontier troops had their privileges reduced and their tax exemptions withdrawn, and Pachymeres — who is explicit about this — reports the resulting desertion and disaffection.

Within two decades of Michael’s death the frontier had dissolved. The emirates of western Anatolia, including Osman’s, established themselves in the 1290s and 1300s in territory that had been securely Byzantine when Michael took the throne.

The judgement this invites is harsh and is widely made: that recovering Constantinople cost the empire Anatolia, and that Anatolia was worth more.

Pachymeres

The reign’s principal historian deserves introduction, because almost everything above depends on him.

George Pachymeres (1242–c. 1310) was a Constantinopolitan cleric and official who lived through the recovery of the city, the union of Lyons and its repudiation. His Relations historiques covers Michael VIII and Andronikos II in detail.

He is hostile to the union, sympathetic to the Arsenites, and unusually interested in administration, taxation and the frontier — subjects most Byzantine historians ignore. He is also candid about his own uncertainty, frequently noting where he does not know something, which is rare enough in the genre to be worth remarking.

For the fall of Anatolia in particular he is effectively the only witness, and modern accounts of how the Ottoman emirate emerged rest heavily on a handful of his chapters.

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