The Guy Who Wrecked The Byzantine Empire: Andronikos Komnenos

As a historian, the one unending debate that always comes up that I can never muster any interest in is the argument over the so-called “Great Man Theory” or, to be more equitable, “Great Person Theory.” It’s not that I don’t agree with the fundamental point that we shouldn’t see history the very old-fashioned way where it’s just a series of heroic individuals changing the world. But I don’t like the other extreme where the engine of history is just abstract social and economic forces. In this case, I think we’re best served by seeking a compromise between the two camps. History is indeed in many ways the story of the ebb and flow of ideas and trends and society-wide assumptions. At the same time, I believe it is also apparent that there really are exceptional people in politics, culture, and the intellectual realm who transcend the limitations of their own times and drag at least part of their society with them or at least unleash forces that had been building up beneath the surface for some time: Julius Caesar, the Prophet Muhammad, Confucius, Christine de Pizan, William Shakespeare, Catherine “the Great”, and so on.

All that said, I’ve always been more interested in the opposite. Let’s call it the “Great Moron Theory.” You can have someone who Napoleon who changed the political and social fabric of the world, without whom the world would be a different place or, at the very least, some of the changes he helped bring about would have taken longer to grow roots or would have come about in different forms. But what about someone like King Charles I, whose incompetence may have single-handedly brought about the temporary fall of the English monarchy and the rise of the English Commonwealth? If a particularly savvy individual can reshape the world, then it follows that a remarkably inept person can do the same.

One of my own favorite examples of Great Moron Theory, and really one of my favorite historical personas of all time, is Andronikos Komnenos, the man who at least inadvertently triggered a chain of events that would doom the Byzantine Empire. He was the wrong person at the wrong time, you might say. The future Emperor Andronikos I was born into the reigning Byzantine imperial dynasty of the Komnenoi. Now, the Byzantines, like the Roman Empire they still thought of themselves as even though they hadn’t controlled Rome in centuries by this point, had a very turbulent but long-lasting political system. Emperors came and went with single emperors or dynasties coming to power and then either dying out or getting overthrown fairly regularly. The classic Futurama episode, “My Three Suns”, which deals with a planet of liquid-based lifeforms whose emperors get routinely murdered and replaced, was clearly inspired by Roman/Byzantine history. If you’re not a fan of Futurama, you might also describe it as a turbo-charged version of the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven. In fact, the Komnenoi themselves originally came to power through a violent military coup.

The Komnenoi, however, were very good at entrenching themselves into the system. They did this by linking themselves with the elite families centered around the capital of Constantinople through a complex web of marriage alliances. This worked to legitimize the dynasty and accumulate upper-class connections and political capital. It also just had the dangerous side effect of growing powerful branches of the dynasty that all had some hereditary claim to the imperial office (this kind of issue is one of the reasons why foreign marriages became common among European monarchies).

For now, though, let’s focus on Andronikos, who was born sometime in the late 1110s, when the Komnenoi were still at their peak. His parents were a Georgian princess, Kata, and the youngest son of Emperor Alexios I (of the First Crusade fame), Isaac. Still, he was roughly the same age as the man who would eventually come to inherit the imperial throne, the future Emperor Manuel I, so they grew up together. At first, like the other Komnenoi princes, it seemed like he would live a quiet but eventful enough life serving various political posts and military functions under the command of the emperor.

Eventually, however, things fell apart. Andronikos was married to a woman whose name has now been forgotten by history. The marriage seems like it was actually a happy one, at least by the standards of royal and aristocratic matches. After all, the sources at least imply that Andronikos was a ladies’ man, with Niketas Choniates, one of the main chroniclers for these events, describing Andronikos as the “handsomest of men” whose face was still “youthful in form” even in old age and was always in great health unruined by gluttony or too much alcohol. But then, Andronikos started a torrid love affair with his own cousin, Eudokia. She was a widow and of course as a man in the Middle Ages Andronikos had to carry less of a stigma for adultery, but apparently the affair was carried on with a lack of discretion that made it a scandal not only among the imperial family, but across Constantinople. When he was confronted about his relationship with Eudokia, he glibly countered that the emperor Manuel himself was sleeping with his niece Theodora (who also happened to be Eudokia’s sister). Never let it be said that Byzantine society’s supposed religiosity prevented their ruling clans from having their moments of Julio-Claudian-style decadence.

This may have been at least partially why Andronikos was given a military command on the Armenian frontier to the east, a responsibility he completely squandered. Then he was sent instead to serve as a governor over provinces that are today part of modern-day Serbia. There, he allegedly entered negotiations with King Géza II of Hungary to give him some territory in the Balkans in exchange for helping put Andronikos on the imperial throne. Most other Byzantine emperors had people killed or blinded for less. Perhaps because of still warm feelings over their childhood friendship, Manuel only stripped him of his political responsibilities and forced him to remain at court, where he once again began seeing Eudokia. This enraged Eudokia’s family so much they hired assassins to come after Andronikos while he and Eudokia were away with the court in the countryside. Eudokia heard about the plot and warned Andronikos, who took a sword, cut his way through the tent, and made his escape.

Between the scandal that threatened to cause a rupture in the imperial family and the fact that Andronikos kept scheming against Manuel, finally Manuel had Andronikos imprisoned in one of the towers of the imperial palace. Andronikos would be left to fester there for almost a full decade. However, he never stopped trying to escape. Finally, one day, he managed to dig his way through the floor of his cell (I can’t help but imagine he did so through a Shawshank Redemption-esque bit of subterfuge) and made his way to a drainage tunnel. Instead of making a break for it and likely getting caught, Andronikos hid in the crawlways and abandoned passages of the imperial palace. When his (unnamed) wife was also placed in his former prison, to keep her from helping his escape, Andronikos visited her frequently. He even was said to have fathered a son with her during this time, who would be named Ioannes. Once the vigilance of the search parties looking for him slackened, Andronikos escaped Constantinople. He didn’t make it far, though, before he was captured.

His second stint in prison would last six years. Still, Andronikos, who even this second time probably enjoyed fairly decent accommodations, was undeterred. Winning over a servant and always relying on the help of his loyal wife, Andronikos managed to escape using a wax copy of a key and a rope that he used to slide down from a window to the ground. He was nearly caught by some guards, but he managed to trick them into thinking he was a runaway slave. Andronikos even had the foresight to speak Greek badly, making it sound like he was some foreigner who was sold into slavery. A boat captain then came up and claimed that the slave was his property. Of course, the captain had been paid by Andronikos’ wife to help in the escape. Alas, he was caught yet again, this time by the Vlach people of modern-day Romania, who planned to send him as a goodwill gift to the emperor. This time, though, Andronikos escaped from his guards by pretending he had come down with a really nasty case of diarrhea. Taking advantage of the fact that his captors had gotten used to the sight of him dismounting from his horse to squat some distance away, Andronikos left behind a makeshift doppelganger of himself using his cloak and a large stick and fled to his original destination, Kyiv, taking a different highway than the one he was caught on. His cousin, Prince Yaroslav, happened to rule in Kyiv and welcomed the exile with open arms.

One wonders if by this point Manuel regretted all the mercy he showed his cousin. Niketas claims that Manuel saw Andronikos’ antics as a “reproach to himself” and rightfully worried Andronikos would come back to Constantinople at the head of a foreign army. So it is understandable that Manuel opened negotiations with Yaroslav, offering Andronikos a full pardon if he would return. Perhaps feeling the sting of homesickness, Andronikos agreed to Manuel’s terms. Eventually, Manuel even entrusted Andronikos with several military campaigns, although these may have been excuses to get him away from court. In any case, Manuel’s skills as a general were not up to par with his penchant for life as a fugitive.

It seems Andronikos found life on campaign boring. Giving up his post as governor of a territory in what is now southeast Turkey and his assignment of waging a war against Armenia, Andronikos decided to go south to the Principality of Antioch, which was along with the Kingdom of Jerusalem one of the Crusader States. He had heard about a beautiful princess there, Philippa of Antioch, who happened to be Manuel’s sister-in-law. By this point, Andronikos’ wife had passed away, so it seems he was genuinely in the market for a new wife. And who better than the daughter of one of the premier nobles of the Crusader States? Andronikos was in his fifties; Philippa was about thirty years younger. Even so, it seems like Andronikos still had it in him, and Philippa was entranced by Andronikos’ great height and his looks. I have to share Niketas’ description of how Andronikos tried to woo the princess:

“In Antioch, Andronikos gave himself over to wanton pleasures, adorned himself like a fop, and paraded in the streets escorted by bodyguards bearing silver bows; these men were tall in stature and sported their first growth of beard and blond hair tinged with red. Henceforth Andronikos pursued his quarry, bewitching her with his love charms. He was lavish in the display of his emotions, and he was endowed, moreover, with a wondrous comeliness; he was like a young shoot climbing up a fir tree.”

Manuel flew into a rage when he heard the news. Andronikos had ruined his plans to subdue Armenia and in the bargain was endangering diplomatic relations with the Crusader States. Manuel went so far as to send one of his men, Constantine Kalamanos, to seduce Philippa himself. However, even though Constantine was much younger, he failed. Apparently Philippa particularly didn’t care for the fact that he was short compared to Andronikos. However, Andronikos proved that he was no chivalric lover out of a fairy tale or romance novel. Hearing of even better prospects (and no doubt also realizing even in his middle age he still got it), he abandoned Philippa the first chance he got. Her reputation ruined, Philippa was many years later married off to an elderly, infirm nobleman.

On the other hand, Andronikos seems to have been enjoying his second youth. He was more than ready for his next love affair, this time with the widowed teenage queen of Jerusalem, Theodora, who also happened to be a niece of Manuel’s. She had been married to the adolescent King Baldwin III, but after he suddenly died of dysentery, her in-laws condemned her to a life of isolation and prayers in a palace. Like Philippa, Theodora fell deeply in love with Andronikos after they met for the first time. This was an even bigger threat to Byzantine diplomacy than Andronikos’ affair with Philippa. Manuel furiously wrote to the royal court in Jerusalem, asking for them to send Andronikos back to Constantinople where he could be blinded like the renegade he was. Luckily for him (but not for the Byzantine Empire), Theodora intercepted some of the correspondence going back and forth between Jerusalem and Constantinople. Without hesitation, she gave up her comfortable life in a gilded cage and went with Andronikos on the run in the Islamic realms. Never staying in one place for long because Manuel’s agents were always behind them, Andronikos ended up in his mother’s homeland of Georgia and then to the realm of one of the Byzantine Empire’s most dangerous neighbors, the domain of the Seljuk Turks. In exchange for leading raids against his own homeland, the Seljuk Sultan granted Andronikos a castle near the Seljuk-Byzantine border.

Andronikos might have finally stayed there for good in domestic bliss with his wife Theodora and their two children, Irene and Alexios. However, the Byzantines somehow managed to capture Andronikos’ family and took them as prisoners back to Constantinople. To his credit, Andronikos seems to have genuinely loved Theodora, so he returned to Constantinople after receiving a promise of clemency. He appeared at the imperial court, with a chain wrapped around his body, and dropped to his stomach on the floor before the emperor. Sobbing, Manuel lifted his cousin and childhood friend to his feet. Even so, Manuel was too wise to ever trust Andronikos again. He was kept under house arrest away from Constantinople at a Black Sea port town. Whether or not Theodora joined him is unclear, since she just disappears from the historical record at this stage. Now one would think this is enough for one person’s lifetime. However, it would turn out that all this was just the first act of Andronikos’ life. In the second act, he would play the part of a murderer and a tyrant, the Byzantine Empire’s answer to Richard III centuries before Richard III actually lived.

Emperor Manuel died in 1180, leaving the empire to his 11-year-old son Alexios. Since he was clearly too young to rule on his own, real power was held by Alexios’ mother Maria of Antioch (who just happened to be the sister of poor Philippa) and her lover, Manuel’s nephew, who was also confusingly named Alexios. Opponents of Maria of Antioch’s regime rallied around Andronikos, who seemed like a more natural choice for regent than some foreigner (who had become a nun after her husband’s death but was sleeping with her husband’s nephew, to boot). This leaves a very good question of why would anyone pick him of all people. None of the sources offer a clear answer, but for me I think it’s more than likely that the stories of Andronikos’ adventures and him thumbing the nose at the emperor himself completely eclipsed the memories of him as an irresponsible and incompetent governor and general. As the brilliant podcast The History of Byzantium points out, “Everybody knew who he was.”

A riot erupted in the city, with citizens calling for Andronikos to be put in charge. Soon enough, Andronikos arrived at Constantinople, declaring that he was there to protect little Alexios. Maria of Antioch had no choice but to give Andronikos a seat at the table. As soon as Andronikos entered the city, the bloodshed started. The rioters had been attacking and looting the neighborhoods where the Italian merchants in the city lived. Rather than calling for calm, Andronikos let the soldiers who accompanied him to the city join the riots. Reports that went back to the west claimed that all the patients of a hospital were massacred, among other atrocities. However exaggerated these reports might have been, it seems Andronikos was more than willing to ride a xenophobic wave for his own benefit.

Soon after Andronikos became regent, he ordered that Maria of Antioch’s lover and unofficial co-regent Alexios be blinded, a punishment that Andronikos himself had earned but avoided for so many years. Manuel’s daughter, also named Maria, and her husband Renier of Montferrat were both found dead. It was suspected they were poisoned by Andronikos’ eunuch servants. Maria of Antioch was forced to retire to a convent. Later accused of conspiring with her brother-in-law, who happened to be the King of Hungary, Andronikos forced the 14-year-old Emperor Alexios II to sign his own mother’s death warrant. She was strangled with a cord of silk. Again, whatever Andronikos’ state of mind at this time, he was not at all reluctant to hand out severe penalties for the crimes he himself had committed. Also, Theodosios, the patriarch of Constantinople who also served Maria of Antioch, was forced out and replaced by a lackey. Theodosios did little to resist, no doubt suspecting what his fate would be if he made a stand.

The path was now clear. Perhaps further galvanized by reports of the growing buyer's remorse among the elite, Andronikos made noises about retiring from the regency and returning to his home on the Black Sea coast. Right on cue, a crowd of citizens gathered, calling for Andronikos to be made co-emperor with Alexios II. A deputation of leading Constantinopolitans was said to have thrown themselves at Andronikos’ feet, begging him to stay and help guide the young, orphaned emperor (never mind that it was Andronikos who orphaned him) while Andronikos threatened to leave the city forever or even kill himself if he wasn’t left in peace. Andronikos had worked quickly to make connections with the guilds and the citizen bodies of Constantinople, so it was easy enough to arrange for “spontaneous” outbursts of support. Perhaps turning a blind eye to the systematic elimination of the Italian merchants was part of the deal Andronikos had made with the citizen leaders. Whatever the truth, Andronikos was solemnly crowned emperor. Such arrangements did have precedents in Byzantine history and actually went smoothly, like the tenth century emperor Romanos I, who reigned as co-ruler with the boy emperor Constantine VII and apparently never tried to dislodge the junior emperor.

However, Andronikos was…well, Andronikos. He must have still been impatient because less than a month later, he had Alexios II secretly strangled with a bowstring. The teenager’s body was then loaded with weights and dropped into the Bosporus Strait. Later, when the King of Sicily produced a pretender to the Byzantine throne claiming to be the still alive Alexios II, Andronikos was said to have quipped, “He must have been a very good swimmer.” Compounding his crime, Andronikos turned his attention to Alexios II’s betrothed, Agnes, the daughter of King Louis VII of France. The marriage had been arranged when Manuel was still alive, and Agnes, who took the more Greek-friendly name of Anna, had been sent to live in Constantinople to learn Greek and Byzantine manners. She was only about twelve years old. The now about 63-year-old Andronikos decided to marry her in Alexios II’s place. The marriage was likely purely political, a way to keep Anna from becoming a figurehead for any resistance movement without angering the French king. Still, even writing in a time with very different norms for marriage and age than our own, the sources very clearly decried the match. Eustathius, for example, poignantly writes, “Sometimes, they say, she would imagine in her dreams that she saw the young Alexius, and would cry out his name, and she alone knew what she suffered.” No doubt these accounts preserve some of the disgust people felt at the time.

From the start, Andronikos’ reign was a disaster. Besides having to deal with resistence from the military aristocracy based in Anatolia, Serbia pushed for independence, the King of Hungary marched across the border with an army and set about occupying some territory, and the King of Sicily besieged and looted one of the empire’s largest cities Thessalonika in the name of the aforementioned fake Alexios II. Andronikos decided the best response to the crises on the borders was a campaign of terror close to home. He carried out a number of public executions, which were actually relatively rare in the Byzantine Empire compared to western Europe, leaving the bodies of rebels to hang in towns and cities. Also, he had the limbs of his enemies amputated. The uniquely Byzantine punishment of blinding was a favorite punishment too, so much so he was given the poetic nickname, “Hater of Sunlight”, in honor of all the people’s sight he had taken. When Andronikos took the rebellious city of Prusa in Anatolia, he had one of the eyes of a bishop who seemed sympathetic to the rebels taken out. Niketas continues that Andronikos:

“returned to the palace delighting in such trophies, leaving behind the cultivated vines of the Prusaeans that climbed trees in close embrace weighted down with the bodies of the hanged like so many clusters of grapes. He allowed none of the impaled to be buried; baked by the sun, they swayed in the wind like scarecrows suspended in a garden of cucumbers by the garden-watchers.”

Andronikos’ own son Manuel, whose mother was Andronikos’ first unknown wife, was disgusted with his father’s behavior and opposed it. So Andronikos instead appointed his other, more loyal son Ioannes as co-emperor. Ioannes did not try to tamper down his father's lust for blood and revenge, if an account that just before he was deposed he planned to have numerous citizens, especially foreigners, in the just looted city of Thessalonika executed was any indication.

To be fair, Andronikos did spare some of his enemies. Among the rebels he showed mercy to was Isaac Angelos, who was related to the Komnenoi through a daughter of Emperor Alexios I. The Angeloi had been one of Andronikos’ earliest supporters in his bid for the regency. However, Andronikos would later regret this one bit of mercy. Isaac would soon enough prove to be the McDuff to Andronikos’ Macbeth. In fact, months later after he had the opportunity to have Isaac killed but spared him, Andronikos did change his mind and sign an order for Isaac’s arrest. Isaac, who happened to be staying in Constantinople, killed the officer sent to arrest him and rushed through the streets to claim sanctuary in a cathedral. When word of what happened spread, a large crowd gathered, pledging to protect the life of the emperor's would-be victim no matter what. With that, the pressure valve that had been under the city since the start of Andronikos’ reign began to erupt. A mob forced the patriarch of Constantinople to declare Isaac Angelos the new emperor.

Having no other options, Andronikos fell back to his most valuable skill: running away. He sailed into the Black Sea, hoping to once more reach Russia. This time, however, he was found out and captured. As he was taken back to Constantinople, he sang a song of lamentation, hoping that it would move his captors to let him go out of pity. However, there was no pity to be had. He was dragged into the presence of the new emperor in a metal collar used for animals and his right hand, with which he signed countless death warrants, was cut off in the emperor's presence. After several more days in prison, Isaac ordered that Andronikos be handed over to the tender mercies of the still raging mob. They gouged out one of his eyes and then forced him on a camel and paraded him around the Forum of Constantinople in a parody of an old-fashioned Roman triumphal procession. As he was marched around, the mob showered him with excrement and urine and stones and stabbed him with hot metal, with one woman pouring boiling water into his face. When the camel reached the Hippodrome, which was where the people of Constantinople usually showed their acclaim or their contempt for their leaders, he was hung upside down from a stone lintel where people beat him with clubs and slashed him with blades. One man, according to Niketas, shoved a sword down his throat. Needless to say, Andronikos did not survive for long. I started this account by comparing Andronikos to Charles I, but it goes without saying that Charles I got off way easier than the one-time Adonis of Byzantium.

I should give a postscript: although it was said Anna (the former Agnes) went with her husband into exile, she was shown mercy by the new regime. She lived comfortably in the palace as befitted a former empress. When she reached adulthood, she took a general, Theodoros Vranas, as her lover. The two simply lived together as lovers until finally the Latin emperor in Constantinople, Baldwin I, pressured them into getting married.

As for Andronikos, I still consider him to be an example of Great Moron Theory. He could have lived comfortably into old age instead of ending up being beaten and cut apart to death by a mob. There’s no suggestion in the sources that he may have felt genuinely threatened by Alexios II’s mother and Manuel’s family, the way King Richard III may have actually felt targeted by his in-laws before he decided on the course to claim the English throne for himself. I know some people consider it gauche to psychologically diagnose historical figures, but I can’t help but wonder if Andronikos might have received a modern bipolar diagnosis or some sort of personality disorder. He certainly seems to have had a serious impulse control problem, which may have only manifested when he reached adulthood, that confounded his contemporaries and historians alike.

Even those historians admit Andronikos wasn’t all bad. Instead of seeing a wave of self-serving and otherwise pointless brutality, you can see Andronikos’ purges in Anatolia as a heavy-handed attempt to break the military aristocracy that had a grip on the eastern provinces. Also during his brief regency and two-year reign he tried to improve water circulation in Constantinople (after all, he had intimate experience with drainage systems) and tried to reform the corrupt and inefficient tax collection system. Even so, it’s hard to read about his reign without seeing what we today might today call unforced errors. Did he really have to massacre his own family to keep his grip on power, after he had already cultivated popular support and had neutralized Alexios II’s unpopular, foreign mother and her lover? It doesn’t seem so. What is more certain is that his naked power grab had completely broken the system his predecessors had carefully established. After the honeymoon period was over, Isaac Angelos would struggle to obtain the same degree of legitimacy the Komnenoi enjoyed, to the point that he was overthrown by his own brother, who became Emperor Alexios III. This was the first domino to fall in a series of events that would lead to the Fourth Crusade, when Constantinople would be sacked and conquered by a crusading army from the West. And the Fourth Crusade itself was a major blow to the sustainability of the Byzantine Empire, helping eventually bring about the final fall of the empire and Constantinople becoming Istanbul.

But maybe Andronikos was just a symptom or a catalyst speeding along something that was happening or going to happen anyway. The regency of Maria of Antioch was already a toppling regime, after all. Nor did Andronikos cause the cracks in the foundation, such as the gap between the elites in Constantinople and the military aristocracy out in Anatolia or how much a wide swathe of the elite had some blood claim on the imperial office. Also, he can’t be blamed for the increasingly obvious fact that the powers to the west were becoming a growing threat to the Byzantines. Nonetheless, it seems undeniable that Andronikos’ coup and how badly he damaged the place on his way in and out were a pivotal crossroads on the empire’s road to collapse.

The only definite conclusion I have is that there really needs to be a movie based on Andronikos’ life. I’d pay anything to watch that.