Manuel I Komnenos

“ He had been all the years practically buried in certain cells of the convent of St. Irene on the island of Prinkipo, and now he came forth an old man, blind and too enfeebled to walk. Borne into private audience, he was regarded by Constantine with tender sympathy.
"And thou art that Manuel who made the good fight at Plati?"
"Say rather I am he who was that Manuel," the ancient replied. "Death despises me now because he could not call my decease a victory." ”

“ Yet for the most part they were successful wars, for Manuel was a good cavalry officer if he was but a reckless statesman, and his fiery courage and untiring energy made him the idol of his troops. At the head of the veteran squadrons of mercenary horsemen that formed the backbone of his army, he swept off the field every enemy that ever dared to face him. He overran Servia, invaded Hungary, to whose king he dictated terms of peace, and beat off with success an invasion of Greece by the Normans of Sicily. ”

“ This prince first resided with the emperor Johannes Porphyrogenitus, with whom he was a great favourite; but on his death, and the succession of Manuel Comnenus to the throne, Thoros left Constantinople, disguised as a merchant, and proceeded by water to Antioch, from whence he went to Cilicia, and with the assistance of the priests and nobles found himself at the head of a formidable army, and soon established himself on the throne of his ancestors. When these news reached Constantinople, Manuel became highly incensed ”

“ The younger son, Dom Manuel, a young man of eighteen, was proclaimed king, in the gloomy afternoon of that sad day, with the title of Manuel II. His proclamation to the people made mention of the "abominable crime," declared his adhesion to the Constitution, and promised his every effort for the welfare of his country and the affection of his people.
Manuel was not educated for the throne, and now under the horror of the awful murder, and with the heavy burden of an unexpected royalty, he made every sacrifice to bring about a thorough pacification. ”

“ With the valor of a soldier, he did not unite the skill or prudence of a general; his victories were not productive of any permanent or useful conquest; and his Turkish laurels were blasted in his last unfortunate campaign, in which he lost his army in the mountains of Pisidia, and owed his deliverance to the generosity of the sultan. But the most singular feature in the character of Manuel, is the contrast and vicissitude of labor and sloth, of hardiness and effeminacy. In war he seemed ignorant of peace, in peace he appeared incapable of war. ”

“ He was handsome and eloquent, but licentious; and at the same time active, hardy, courageous, and an excellent soldier. His early years were spent in alternate pleasure and military service. In 1141 he was taken captive by the Turks-Seljuks, and remained in their hands for a year. On being ransomed, he went to Constantinople, where was held the court of his cousin, the emperor Manuel, with whom he was a great favourite. Here the charms of his niece, the princess Eudoxia, attracted him. She became his mistress, while her sister Theodora stood in a similar relation to the emperor Manuel. ”

“ Ali Pasha, the grand vizier of Bajazed, blockaded Manuel in Constantinople, and urged the citizens to dethrone him and declare for John, the son of Andronicus, the elder son of the late emperor John. But after the Turks had continued near the capital for upwards of a year, Manuel attacked and defeated both them and his nephew John.
The greater part of the Morea was still under the rule of the empire. Bajazed organised a great expedition of fifty thousand men for its conquest. ”

“ They belong, Professor van Millingen has also clearly proved, to at least three periods, to the days of Heraclius, of Leo, and of Manuel Comnenus. After the Kerko-Porta the Theodosian walls turned eastwards; when the palace of Blachernae was defended it was probably by the erection, after the fifth century, of a new wall. The wall of Manuel Comnenus, built to give additional protection, left the earlier wall on an inner line of defence.
The wall of Manuel is stronger than that of Theodosius, but it has no moat; it resisted all the efforts of the Turkish artillery in 1453. ”

“ A thousand of the bravest janizaries fell before the walls; while the Greeks, fighting under cover of their battlements, lost only 130 killed and wounded. Murad II did not renew his attack on Constantinople, and the last act of Manuel’s reign was to sign a treaty of peace, by which Murad left the empire in possession of a few cities in Thrace, of Thessalonica, and a few forts near the mouths of the Strymon, Mount Athos, Zeitounion, and some places in Thessaly. Manuel also engaged to pay the sultan an annual tribute of three hundred thousand aspers. ”

“ John and Manuel purchase Ottoman aid at the price of giving up Philadelphia, the last Byzantine possession in Asia Minor.
1391—Manuel, serving as vassal in Ottoman army, is threatened with loss of eyes, if Emperor John does not demolish the towers on the walls of Constantinople, which he has rebuilt. He obeys and dies soon after. Manuel escapes from Brusa upon learning of his father’s death. His flight is followed by the first Ottoman siege of Constantinople.
1396—Bayezid contemplates taking Constantinople by assault, but is deterred by arrival of crusaders in Hungary. ”

“ Manuel Comnenus during the first part of his reign was the close friend and ally of the western emperor Conrad III., but after Conrad's death, he formed the ambitious plan of realizing in Europe a sovereignty like that of Justinian, and hoped to compass it in conjunction with Rome, the enemy of the Hohenstaufen. His forward policy carried war into Italy; he seized Ancona. But his strength was unequal to such designs. His Latin sympathies, no less than his financial extravagance, made him highly unpopular at home ”

“ Manuel was with the Turkish army at Brousa when he learned the death of his father in 1391. He escaped secretly, hastened to Constantinople, and succeeded in being proclaimed as the sole occupant of the imperial throne. Bajazed, who had become sultan on the assassination of his father, Murad, in 1389, taken by surprise at the escape of his hostage, at once presented alarming demands. He asked that the Turks should have a resident cadi within Constantinople itself and that Manuel should declare himself to be the sultan’s vassal and pay tribute. ”

“ His history of the reign of Manuel and of his father, Colo-Joannes, is one of the best of the Byzantine histories.
Comnena, Anna, Ἀλεξίας, Augsburg, 1610.
Anna Comnena, daughter of Alexis I Comnenus, was born 1083 A.D. Gifted by nature with rare talent, she was instructed in every branch of science. After the accession of John, 1118, she was exiled for conspiring to place her husband upon the throne. During her retirement she composed the biography of her father. The Alexias is history in the form of artistic romance. ”

“ There can be no good administration among an utterly demoralised people. When the emperor returned to Constantinople, he carried with him some of the most turbulent and intriguing of the Peloponnesian chiefs, who had, previous to his arrival, contrived to appropriate the greater part of the taxes levied on the people to their own use. Indeed the most important result of Manuel’s visit was the introduction of such a degree of order in the provincial administration, that a fixed sum could be regularly remitted to the imperial treasury at Constantinople. ”

“ He learned on his way home that his enemy Bajazet had been defeated by Timur at Angora, and that the Ottoman Empire was utterly ruined. On reaching Constantinople he deprived his nephew Joannes, who had ruled during his absence, of the imperial title, and banished him to Lemnos. Joannes had already placed the Greek Empire in a state of vassalage to the Tatar conqueror; Manuel ratified the treaty, and paid to Timur the tribute which he had formerly paid to Bajazet. Rarely has the world seen a more total defeat than that sustained by the Ottoman army. ”

“ To the greater part of the Byzantine series, we cannot reasonably ascribe the love of fame and of mankind. The virtue alone of John Comnenus was beneficent and pure: the most illustrious of the princes, who procede or follow that respectable name, have trod with some dexterity and vigor the crooked and bloody paths of a selfish policy: in scrutinizing the imperfect characters of Leo the Isaurian, Basil the First, and Alexius Comnenus, of Theophilus, the second Basil, and Manuel Comnenus, our esteem and censure are almost equally balanced ”

“ Manuel entered into a treaty with this claimant to the Ottoman throne, by which, in the event of his succeeding in establishing his succession, the city of Gallipoli and all the cities on the shores of the Black Sea, taken from the Greek Empire by the Turks, were to be restored to it.
In spite of this scandalous treachery to Islam, the so-called Mustapha succeeded in raising a large army in Europe, with which he defeated the troops who adhered to Murad. He then crossed the Dardanelles into Asia with his army in vessels supplied by the Emperor Manuel. ”

“ When we compare the reforms of Manuel with the legislation of Orkhan, we are astonished at the great intellectual superiority displayed by the Ottomans at this period. The Greek emperor adopted only a few temporary devices to arrest the progress of social putrefaction in a diseased society. His own talents and the energies of his people were incompetent to make any bold efforts for extirpating the sources of the evil, and for infusing a spirit of honesty and patriotism into Greek society. ”

“ The Eastern Empire ceased to be formidable on the death of Manuel (1080) , and Hungary was free once more to pursue a policy of aggrandizement. In Dalmatia the Venetians were too strong for her; but she helped materially to break up the Byzantine rule in the Balkan peninsula by assisting Béla III. Stephen Nemanya to establish an independent Servian kingdom, originally under nominal Hungarian suzerainty. ”

“ The eldest of the sons of Manuel, John Palæologus the Second, was acknowledged, after his father's death, as the sole emperor of the Greeks. He immediately proceeded to repudiate his wife, and to contract a new marriage with the princess of Trebizond: beauty was in his eyes the first qualification of an empress; and the clergy had yielded to his firm assurance, that unless he might be indulged in a divorce, he would retire to a cloister, and leave the throne to his brother Constantine. ”

“ Each was competent to ruin an empire already verging on its decline.
The disaster which the Angeli brought on their realm was rendered possible only by its complete military and financial disorganization. As a military power the empire had never recovered the effects of the Seljouk invasions, which had robbed it of its great recruiting-ground for its native troops in Asia Minor. After that loss the use of mercenaries had become more and more prevalent. The brilliant campaigns of Manuel Comnenus had been made at the head of a soldiery of whom two-thirds were not born-subjects of the empire. ”

“ As the grandson of St Ladislaus, Manuel had Hungarian blood in his veins; his court was the ready and constant refuge of the numerous Magyar malcontents, and he aimed not so much at the conquest as at the suzerainty of Hungary, by placing one of his Magyar kinsmen on the throne of St Stephen. He successfully supported the claims of no fewer than three pretenders to the Magyar throne, and finally made Béla III. (1173-1196) king of Hungary, on condition that he left him, Manuel, a free hand in Dalmatia. The intervention of the Greek emperors had important consequences for Hungary. ”

“ The people are skilled in the Greek sciences, and live in comfort, every man "under his vine and under his fig-tree." They hire soldiers, whom they call barbarians, out of all nations, for their wars with the sultan of the Zogarmion, or Turks. They have no martial spirit themselves, but, like women, are unfit for warlike enterprises. [1]
The long reign (thirty-seven years) of Manuel, which terminated, however, in the emperor's death at the comparatively early age of fifty-eight, was chiefly occupied with wars and campaigns. ”

“ Before their departure, the crusaders received envoys, the event of whose solicitations afterward gave a new character to their expedition. At the death of Manuel Comnenus, emperor of the east, Andronicus, his brother, seized upon the throne and murdered his nephew, Alexius II., who had succeeded. Either urged by indignation or ambition, Isaac Angelus, a distant relation of the slaughtered prince, took arms against the usurper, overthrew and put him to death; after which he in turn ascended the throne of Constantinople. ”

“ Manuel's son, Alexius II., was only thirteen years of age when his father died. For the first two years of his reign the court was troubled by the perpetual intrigues of the cousins and relations of the emperor for the post of protosebastos. Nor were the intrigues confined only to the court. Factions were formed, and faction fights in the streets of the city brought with them their usual train of plunder and outrage. Looking about for a strong man, the Greeks could find no one but Andronicus, whom they invited to become prime minister, and who speedily made himself emperor. ”