For most of his reign, John had managed to prevent his own children
from being divided by the sibling rivalries which had bedevilled his own
succession. Yet in the months before his death, his arrangements were
thrown into confusion when Alexios, his eldest son and co-emperor of long
standing, fell ill and died, followed shortly by the next son, Andronikos.
This left John, on his deathbed, with a highly invidious choice between his
older surviving son, Isaac, who was in Constantinople, and the youngest,
Manuel, who was with him in Cilicia. John no doubt voiced many of the
arguments for Manuel’s superiority which the Byzantine sources put into
his mouth, but it is hard to fault the explanation of William of Tyre that
Manuel was chosen in order to ensure the army’s safe return.10 Prompt
action forestalled any attempt by Isaac to take advantage of his presence in
the capital.Manuel was thus able to enter Constantinople and have himself
crowned without opposition. As the winner, he was able to command or
commission the propaganda which represented his election as providential
and inevitable. Yet Isaac nursed a legitimate grievance, and his sympathisers
included his father’s right-hand man, John Axouch. Isaac was not the only
one who coveted his brother’s throne: their brother-in-law, the caesar John
Roger, attempted a coup, backed by a faction of Norman exiles, and their
uncle Isaac was believed to be still awaiting his opportunity. Even apparently
innocuous female relatives, Manuel’s aged aunt Anna and his widowed
sister-in-law Irene, were treated as political suspects. The new emperor was
unmarried and therefore without immediate prospect of legitimate issue.
All in all, the circumstances of his accession put him under intense pressure
to prove himself by emulating his father’s achievements without putting
his inheritance at risk.
The immediate priority was to bring the unfinished foreign business
of John II’s last years to an honourable conclusion. There could be no
question of the emperor leading another grand expedition to Syria, so
Manuel contented himself with sending an army and a fleet to ravage the
territory of Antioch. This and the fall of Edessa to Zengi in 1144 obliged
Raymond of Antioch to come to Constantinople and swear obedience,
while Manuel promised to come to the prince’s aid. There was also the
matter of the German alliance. Manuel’s marriage to Bertha of Sulzbach
had been negotiated and she had come to Constantinople, before he had any
prospect of becoming emperor. It was probably to extract more favourable
terms from Conrad III that Manuel put off the marriage and exchanged
embassies with Roger II of Sicily, against whom the alliance with Conrad
had been directed. When he finally married Bertha, who adopted theGreek
name Irene, in 1146 he had evidently won some sort of unwritten promise
from Conrad, possibly to guarantee Manuel a free hand in the east, but
more likely to give him a share of the conquests from his planned invasion
of southern Italy.
These treaties opened up commitments and prospects which Manuel
did not immediately pursue. Instead, he used the security they gave him
to revert to the limited-objective campaigning against the Turks which had
characterised his father’s reign, with even more emphasis on military victory
for its own sake. The expedition which he led as far as Ikonion in 1146 was
ostensibly in retaliation for the capture of a border fortress in Cilicia. In
effect, however, it was a display of the emperor’s prowess in leading his
army up to the walls of the sultan’s capital and then fighting courageous
rearguard actions in the retreat. This gratuitous bravery was intended to
vindicate Manuel’s youthful heroism in the eyes of his critics. It may also
have been meant to impress the Latins with the emperor’s zeal for holy war.
But it did nothing to help the crusader states, and that help now came in
a form which exposed Manuel’s lack of a strategy for dealing with the fall
of Edessa and the repercussions this was bound to have in the wider world
of Latin Christendom. The fact that the Byzantine sources fail to mention
the event which provoked the Second Crusade suggests that they seriously
underestimated its importance.
The SecondCrusade would have been a major military and political crisis
even if it had been confined to the expedition of Louis VII of France (1137–
80), asManuel was originally led to expect. The size of Louis’ army, his royal
status, which precluded any oath of vassalage to the emperor, and the ties
which bound him and his entourage to the nobility of the Latin east were
sufficient to thwart any effective concordance betweenByzantine claims and
crusader objectives. The problem was more than doubled by the unexpected
participation of Conrad III with an equally huge army and an even touchier
sense of sovereign dignity. His arrival in the east strained their alliance
almost to breaking point, since it brought theGerman emperor-elect where
Manuel least wanted him from where he needed him most, namely as a
threat to Roger II of Sicily. Roger now exploited the situation to seize the
island of Corfu and launch raids on the Greek mainland, whose garrisons
had been redeployed to shadow the crusading armies. It was alarmingly
reminiscent of earlier Norman invasions of Epiros, andManuel responded
by calling on Venetian naval help, in return for which he renewed Venice’s
trade privileges and extended the Venetian quarter in Constantinople.11
In these circumstances, it is understandable that Manuel moved the
crusading armies as quickly as possible across the Bosporus into AsiaMinor,
where the treaty of peace that he had signed with the sultan of Rum may
well have contributed to the appalling casualties they suffered at the hands
of the Turks. These casualties, which rendered the armies largely ineffective
by the time they reached Syria and Palestine, earned Manuel a lasting
reputation as the saboteur of the Second Crusade. However, they did lead
eventually to a renewal of the alliance with Conrad III, who, when he fell
ill at Ephesos in December 1147, acceptedManuel’s invitation to come and
recuperate in Constantinople. Manuel then provided ships and money for
Conrad to continue to Palestine and recruit a new army. On his return
to Europe late in 1148, the two monarchs met at Thessaloniki to agree on
a joint invasion and partition of southern Italy and Sicily. The Byzantine
share was to count as the dowry owing to Manuel from his marriage to
Bertha-Irene. The alliance was sealed by the marriage of Manuel’s niece
Theodora to Conrad’s cousin Henry of Babenberg.
The renewal of theGerman alliance determined the principal orientation
ofManuel’s foreign policy for the rest of his reign. For the next twelve years
he remained committed to a partnership with the Hohenstaufen which he
hoped would bring substantial territorial gains in Italy.Manuel pursued this
goal despite setbacks and distractions, and despite the gradual divergence of
interests between the two empires after Conrad III died and was succeeded
by Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90). As soon asManuel had recovered Corfu
from its Sicilian garrison in 1149, he planned to carry the war into Italy.
The invasion plan was frustrated, first by bad weather, and then by wars in
the Balkans stirred up by the disruptive diplomacy of Roger II. Thus the
campaigns which Manuel led from 1150 to 1155 against the Serbian ˇzupans
of Raˇska and King G´eza II of Hungary were essentially diversions, for all
the energy he put into them and the considerable publicity they generated.
However, the war at sea continued and upon the death of Roger II in 1154
Manuel moved to take advantage of the insecurity and unpopularity of
the youngWilliam I of Sicily (1154–66), reviving the invasion plan of 1149.
Lacking German participation, the campaign eventually came to grief at
Brindisi in 1156, and Frederick disowned it as aGreek initiative which interfered
with his own programme of Roman imperial renewal. Yet for a time,
the Byzantine agents had enjoyed great success, receiving the cooperation
of disaffectedNorman lords and the submission of many towns throughout
Apulia.Manuel did not act as if either the German alliance or the prospect
of a Byzantine revival in Italy had been destroyed by the defeat. His agents
returned to sow disaffection againstWilliam I in 1157, and he continued to
seek collaboration with Frederick Barbarossa even after he had concluded
a peace treaty with William in 1158. In 1160, they were still exchanging
embassies to discuss joint action against Sicily, and a Byzantine request for
a share of imperial dominion in the Italian peninsula.
Manuel’s basic and consistent objective was the acquisition of the coastal
towns of Apulia; they hadGreek populations, had belonged to the theme of
Langobardia before 1071, and control of them would prevent the recurrence
of invasions like those of Robert Guiscard, Bohemond and Roger II.12
Beyond that, Byzantine territorial aims in Italy were flexible, and by 1160 it
seems that Manuel had traded his empire’s historic claims to Calabria and
the Naples area in return for the recognition of a right to the Pentapolis,
the area comprising the city of Ancona and its hinterland. Ancona was
the Byzantine base of operations in 1155–6, and it had been chosen for
this purpose in 1149. It may well, therefore, have been designated in the
treaty of 1148 between Conrad and Manuel as belonging to the Byzantine
sphere of influence. Justification for the Byzantine claim could have been
found in the fact that the Pentapolis had been part of the old exarchate of
Ravenna (see above, pp. 449–53). While the coastal towns of Apulia were
ruled by the king of Sicily, Ancona was the only alternative to Venice as
a gateway for Byzantine agents, envoys, troops and subsidies to reach the
empire’s Italian and German allies – and Venice was basically opposed to
any Byzantine revival in Italy.Once the coastal towns of Apulia also reverted
to Byzantine rule, possession of the Pentapolis would have given Manuel
control of almost the entire east coast of Italy.
The failure of his negotiations with Frederick Barbarossa in 1160 caused
Manuel to try an alternative to the German alliance, which was coming
under strain for other reasons. Frederick’s increasingly strident imperialism
made him less receptive to the idea of sharing sovereignty in Italy with the
Greek empire. Indeed, his programme of reclaiming imperial rights, which
he had stated at the diet of Roncaglia in 1158 and showed every sign of
enforcing, threatened to change the balance of power in Italy and make the
Hohenstaufen empire the main danger to Byzantium’s western flank. At
the same time, his quarrel with Pope Hadrian IV (1154–59), and his refusal
to recognise the canonical election of Hadrian’s successor, Alexander III
(1159–81), made him an embarrassment for Manuel’s relations with other
parts of Latin Christendom, particularly the crusader states. Above all, the
bond of kinship between the two emperors was severed when Manuel’s
German wife Bertha-Irene died in 1159.
From 1161,Manuel aligned himself with Pope Alexander III and all who
took his side against Frederick and the antipope elected by Frederick’s
council of Pavia in 1160. Thus relations between Byzantium and Alexander’s
main European supporter, Louis VII of France, began to improve for
the first time since the Second Crusade. Manuel’s main diplomatic priority,
however, was to cultivate close relations with all those in the Italian
peninsula who, like Alexander, felt threatened by Frederick’s expansionism.
Chief among them was the king of Sicily, and Manuel twice entered
into negotiations with a view to marrying his daughter to William I’s s
William II (1166–89). But Manuel also poured money into creating an
extensive web of potential supporters among the towns and the aristocracy
throughout Italy. Byzantine money helped to rebuild the walls of Milan,
razed at Frederick’s orders in 1162. To the pope himself, Manuel not only
gave material support but offered the prospect of reuniting the Greek and
Roman churches, and several discussions were held. In return, the pope
gaveManuel to understand that he would consider recognising him as sole
Roman emperor.13
This ambition seems like a vastly unrealistic escalation of Manuel’s previous
aims, but it is unlikely to have involved any major political changes,
other than excluding Frederick Barbarossa from Italy and giving Manuel
the senior place among the rulers of Christendom. For the pope to entertain
the notion, it must have been predicated on a guarantee to maintain the
status quo in Italy: the continued existence of the communes in the north,
the papal lordship in the centre and the kingdom of Sicily in the south. It
is far from certain that the arrangement would have involved any territorial
concessions such as Manuel had sought from the Hohenstaufen. The
ulterior aim of Manuel’s diplomacy after 1160 may have been to pressurise
Frederick Barbarossa into renewing the alliance. The prospect of renewing
it in 1170–2 was certainly enough to make Manuel pull out of a marriage
treaty withWilliam II of Sicily for what he thought was a better offer from
Frederick. The offer did not materialise, and the ‘cold war’ resumed, but the
episode demonstrated that whatManuel sought above all was a partnership
with the sovereign powers of the Christian west that would guarantee security
for his empire within negotiated territorial limits. In the papal alliance
as in the Hohenstaufen alliance, Italy was the focus for negotiation, and
Ancona remained the Byzantine gateway to Italy.
The peace ofVenice in 1177, in which FrederickBarbarossa and Alexander
III settled their differences and Italian affairs without reference toManuel,
put an end to the latter’s hopes of either territorial gains in Italy or a western
imperial crown.However, it was neither the end of his diplomacy nor of his
deeper ambition to align his dynastic programme of imperial restoration
with the power structure of Latin Christendom from which his empire had
been perilously excluded at the time of the Second Crusade. That ambition
was as close to being realised at his death in 1180 as it would ever be. He
had failed to secure a working relationship with Frederick Barbarossa, but
he remained on good terms with Alexander III, his daughter had married
Renier of Montferrat, from the major magnate family of north-western
Italy, and his son was betrothed to the king of France’s daughter.
On other fronts, while Manuel did not neglect the security and the
extension of the empire’s borders, his initiatives were ultimately shaped by
the aim of being taken into partnership by the great powers of the west.
The crusader states provided an ideal opportunity for him to enhance his
credentials in western eyes. The disaster of the Second Crusade had left
them increasingly vulnerable to Zengi’s successor, Nur al-Din (1146–74),
who had taken over Damascus following the failed crusader offensive, and
had made the kings of the west wary of getting involved in a major new
expedition to the Holy Land. Although they were responsive to the plight
of the Latin settlers, their own domestic problems and mutual rivalries kept
them in Europe, while the armed pilgrimages undertaken by some of their
vassals did not properly compensate for the lack of a general crusade. In the
circumstances, the princes of Outremer turned increasingly to Byzantium
for military and financial aid and the Byzantine emperor was only too
pleased to avoid the recurrence of a general crusade.14
Soon after the Second Crusade, the northern principalities suffered a
crisis: Raymond of Edessa was killed in battle in 1149 and Joscelin II of
Edessa was captured a year later.Manuel bought the remaining castles of the
county of Edessa from Joscelin’s wife and attempted to persuade Raymond’s
widow Constance to marry his recently widowed brother-in-law, the half-
Norman caesar John Roger. However, the castles soon fell to the Muslims,
and Constance rejected John Roger in favour of Reynald de Chˆatillon, a
recent arrival from France. Neither these failures nor Reynald’s subsequent
raid on Byzantine Cyprus in conjunction with Thoros II (1148–68), the
Armenian prince of Cilicia, drew an immediate response from Manuel,
who was occupied with the war with Sicily.Only when this was over did the
emperor intervene personally with a showof force.Moreover, his expedition
to Cilicia and Syria in 1158–9 was not, despite superficial resemblances, a
repeat of those conducted by his father. It followed the conclusion of a
marriage alliance with Baldwin III, king of Jerusalem (1143–63), who in
1157 broke with crusader precedent and sought a bride from the Byzantine
imperial family. Thus the reassertion of imperial supremacy in Cilicia and
Antioch, and the humiliation of Reynald and Thoros, were performed with
the full cooperation of the senior potentate in Outremer, who accepted
them as the ritual price the Latin settlers had to pay for Byzantine material
aid, and as the necessary prelude to joint military action againstNur al-Din
by all the local Christian powers.
Although this action was cut short when Manuel was recalled to Constantinople
by news of a conspiracy, he continued to work closely with the
crusader states. It was to Tripoli, and then to Antioch, that he looked for
a new bride after Bertha-Irene’s death in 1159. He married Maria of Antioch,
daughter of Raymond and Constance, in 1161, and some fifteen years
later strengthened his connection with her brother, Prince Bohemond III
(1163–1201), by providing the latter with a Komnenian bride. The connection
with Jerusalem was briefly interrupted at Baldwin III’s death in 1163
but resumed when the king’s brother and successor, Amalric I (1163–74),
decided he could not do without Byzantine aid and negotiated a marriage
to another imperial relative in 1167. Following a treaty in 1168, a Byzantine
naval force joined Amalric in an invasion of Egypt in 1169, and the
king came to Constantinople to negotiate a fresh agreement in 1171. The
resulting plans for further joint operations against Egypt were halted upon
Amalric’s death in 1174, but were back on the agenda in 1176–7, when a
Byzantine fleet was despatched to Palestine. These ventures came to nothing
militarily, but they proved that the empire would deploy impressive
resources in offensive as well as defensive support of its Latin allies, and
thus undoubtedly helped to impede the counter-crusade ofNur al-Din and
Saladin. Manuel further bolstered the Latin settlements both by providing
their princes with generous subsidies, and by ransoming their knights who
were captured in battle. In return, the emperor asked only for due recognition
of his overlordship, and for fulfilment of the long-standing treaty
agreement to appoint a Greek patriarch in Antioch.
Despite his considerable investment in Latin Syria, Manuel did not
revisit the area after 1159. On the other hand, he returned more than once
to the Danube frontier after King G´eza II of Hungary died in 1161, leaving
a disputed succession. The position of Hungary between the German and
Byzantine empires, and adjacent to the empire’s Serbian vassals, gave it a
strategic importance inManuel’s growing conflict of interest with Frederick
Barbarossa, which increased his concern to ensure that it was in friendly
hands.His kinship with theHungarian royal dynasty via his mother, and the
empire’s historic claim to certain frontier areas of the kingdom, also incited
his intervention in Hungarian affairs (see below, pp. 684–5). Although
Manuel initially failed to install his first candidate, Stephen IV, repeated
campaigning from 1162 to 1167 ensured the future succession of his next
prot´eg´e, B´ela III, and the cession to the empire of B´ela’s patrimony, consisting
of the central Dalmatian coast and an area south of the middle
Danube known as Frangochorion, which included the old Roman frontier
capital of Sirmium. B´ela III lived in Constantinople from 1164, where he
was betrothed to Manuel’s daughter Maria and regarded as heir apparent
to the throne until the birth of the emperor’s son Alexios in 1169. He took
power inHungary at the death of his brother Stephen III in 1172 and served
the empire loyally while Manuel was alive.
On the empire’s other land frontier, in Asia Minor, Manuel’s preferred
policy was similarly one of trying to maintain and improve the status quo by
drawing the main regional power, the sultanate of Rum, into the imperial
orbit. After some fighting in 1159–60, Manuel welcomed the sultan, Kilij
Arslan II (1156–92), to Constantinople in 1161. The two rulers concluded
a treaty whereby the emperor ritually adopted the sultan as his son and
undertook to subsidise his wars against his Turkish rivals; in return, any
important cities recovered from the latter were to be surrendered to the
emperor, and the sultan promised to prevent raids on the empire’s territories.
Kilij Arslan did not keep his side of the treaty, which effectively allowed
him to unify Turkish Asia Minor under his rule. But it brought peace to
western Anatolia for fourteen years, and it set up an effective Islamic rival
to the rising power of atabey Nur al-Din of Damascus, which helped the
crusader states. Only when the death of Nur al-Din in 1174 changed the
configuration of power in the Islamic world did Manuel adopt a policy
of confrontation with Kilij Arslan, building fortresses on the Anatolian
plateau to control the routes to the east in 1175, and then mounting a major
expedition to conquer the sultan’s capital of Ikonion in the following year.
It is clear from the publicity surrounding Manuel’s offensive in Asia
Minor that it was not only a belated move from appeasement to reprisal,
but also a holy war intended to restore AsiaMinor to imperial rule and open
up the land route for pilgrims to Palestine. The grand expedition of 1176
was thus, above all, the culmination ofManuel’s long attempt to redeem the
failure of the SecondCrusade, which had come to grief in the borderlands of
AsiaMinor. It was meant to finish, under imperial leadership, the business
that had got out of imperial control in the First Crusade. The resounding
defeat which the expedition suffered atMyriokephalon was correspondingly
devastating for Manuel’s attempt to take over the crusading movement
and to reverse a century of Turkish occupation in Asia Minor (see below,
pp. 716–17). Yet the empire’s army, finances and borders were intact; its
power in the Balkans and its influence in eastern Europe had never stood
higher. Louis VII of France gave a big vote of confidence by sending his
daughter Agnes as a future bride for the young Alexios II Komnenos (1180–
3). There is no knowing how things would have developed if Manuel had
not died only four years after the battle.
Manuel conducted his warfare and his diplomacy with lavish ceremony
and rhetorical publicity which explicitly recalled Constantine and Justinian.
This and the autocratic style which he adopted in his legislation and regulation
of church doctrine led Niketas Choniates to assert, and modern
scholars to accept, thatManuel dreamed the impossible dream of restoring
the Roman empire in all its ancient glory. Careful attention to the reality
behind the rhetorical and ceremonial image reveals that Manuel’s Roman
imperialism was more concerned with security than expansion.15 It is true
that at different times he sought the elimination of the two main neighbouring
states, the Norman kingdom of Sicily and the Seljuq sultanate of
Rum, which had recently been founded at the empire’s expense. However,
he did not do so consistently and he acted only within the framework of
an alliance.Manuel’s imperialism only began to depart from tradition after
1160, when he was obliged to seek an alternative to the German alliance.
The main departure (though even this had precedents) was that instead
of following the time-honoured practice of weakening the empire’s neighbours
by setting them against each other or destabilising their regimes,
Manuel sought to establish a ring of reliable satellite kingdoms which he
strengthened against their enemies in return for their support. The kingdom
of Jerusalem, Hungary, the sultanate and the kingdom of Sicily were
all tried in this role to a greater or lesser extent.
In general, it seems clear thatManuel sought allies and clients more than
he sought territories. As we have seen, he hoped that the German alliance
would give him control over the Adriatic coast of Italy, while fromHungary
he gained Frangochorion and the Dalmatian coast. Otherwise, apart from
his rather belated crusade of reconquest in AsiaMinor, his main identifiable
objective was the coastal area of Egypt, which was to be the Byzantine
share in the partition of the country agreed between Manuel and Amalric
in 1168 and, presumably, in later renewals of their treaty. This was hardly
a programme to restore the empire of Justinian. At the same time, it was
more than random opportunism. The Egyptian coast, including the ports
of Alexandria and Damietta, was the most sought-after trading destination
in the Mediterranean. Possession of the east coast of Italy together with
possession of the Dalmatian coast would have given the empire control
of the Adriatic and thus of the access to eastern markets from Venice, the
main trading city in the Mediterranean.
Realisation of all these territorial goals would have allowed the empire
to dominate the commerce of the easternMediterranean and thus to renegotiate
its treaties with the Italian maritime republics. That this was indeed
Manuel’s aim is suggested, first, by his considerable investment in theByzantine
navy, and, secondly, by the evolution of his policy towards Venice, an
evolution which parallels his adoption of a less indulgent line in dealing
with the Byzantine church, the other main beneficiary of economic privilege.
In 1148, during the crisis of the Second Crusade, he had extended the
already exceptional privileges enjoyed by Venetian merchants throughout
the empire, but in 1171 he ordered their arrest and the confiscation of their
goods. The Pisans and Genoese to some extent took their place, but not
with the same exemption from the 10 per cent sales tax. Pisa was unable to
negotiate an improvement to the terms of its original treaty with Alexios I
(see above, p. 625), which had allowed a total exemption only on bullion
exports, and a 6 per cent reduction on imports of other goods. TheGenoese
were originally admitted on the same basis in 1155, but had to accept further
restrictions on the 6 per cent concession in 1169.16
In the light of recent work on Byzantium in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, it is clear thatManuel’s power was more impressive and his ambitions
more moderate than previously thought. However, his achievements
still fell short of his ambitions, and his military failures against Sicily and
the Turks were spectacular, perhaps more so than his successes againstHungary.
The empire declined so rapidly after his death that historians from
Niketas Choniates onwards have sought, and continue to seek, the seeds of
its decline in his reign and in his policies.Modern commentators have also
looked for structural weaknesses in the imperial regime of the Komnenian
dynasty.
World History
