Quick Facts
Also spelled:
Alexios I Komnenos
Born:
1057, Constantinople, Byzantine Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]
Died:
August 15, 1118 (aged 61)
Title / Office:
emperor (1081-1118), Byzantine Empire
House / Dynasty:
Comnenus family
Notable Family Members:
spouse Irene Ducas
daughter Anna Comnena

Alexius I Comnenus (born 1057, Constantinople, Byzantine Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]—died August 15, 1118) was the Byzantine emperor (1081–1118) at the time of the First Crusade who founded the Comnenian dynasty and partially restored the strength of the empire after its defeats by the Normans and Turks in the 11th century.

The third son of John Comnenus and a nephew of Isaac I (emperor 1057–59), Alexius came from a distinguished Byzantine landed family and was one of the military magnates who had long urged more effective defense measures, particularly against the Turks’ encroaching on Byzantine provinces in eastern and central Anatolia. From 1068 to 1081 he gave able military service during the short reigns of Romanus IV, Michael VII, and Nicephorus III. Then, with the support of his brother Isaac and his mother, the formidable Anna Dalassena, and with that of the powerful Ducas family, to which his wife, Irene, belonged, he seized the Byzantine throne from Nicephorus III.

Alexius was crowned on April 4, 1081. After more than 50 years of ineffective or short-lived rulers, Alexius, in the words of Anna Comnena, his daughter and biographer, found the empire “at its last gasp,” but his military ability and diplomatic gifts enabled him to retrieve the situation. He drove back the south Italian Normans, headed by Robert Guiscard, who were invading western Greece (1081–82). This victory was achieved with Venetian naval help, bought at the cost of granting Venice extensive trading privileges in the Byzantine Empire. In 1091 he defeated the Pechenegs, Turkic nomads who had been continually surging over the Danube River into the Balkans. Alexius halted the further encroachment of the Seljuq Turks, who had already established the sultanate of Rūm (or Konya) in central Anatolia. He made agreements with Sulaymān ibn Qutalmïsh of Konya (1081) and subsequently with his son Qïlïch Arslan (1093), as well as with other Muslim rulers on Byzantium’s eastern border.

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At home, Alexius’s policy of strengthening the central authority and building up professional military and naval forces resulted in increased Byzantine strength in western and southern Anatolia and eastern Mediterranean waters. But he was unable or unwilling to limit the considerable powers of the landed magnates who had threatened the unity of the empire in the past. Indeed, he strengthened their position by further concessions, and he had to reward services, military and otherwise, by granting fiscal rights over specified areas. This method, which was to be increasingly employed by his successors, inevitably weakened central revenues and imperial authority. He repressed heresy and maintained the traditional imperial role of protecting the Eastern Orthodox church, but he did not hesitate to seize ecclesiastical treasure when in financial need. He was subsequently called to account for this by the church.

To later generations Alexius appeared as the ruler who pulled the empire together at a crucial time, thus enabling it to survive until 1204, and in part until 1453, but modern scholars tend to regard him, together with his successors John II (reigned 1118–43) and Manuel I (reigned 1143–80), as having effected only stopgap measures. Judgments of Alexius must be tempered by allowing for the extent to which he was handicapped by the inherited internal weaknesses of the Byzantine state and, even more, by the series of crises precipitated by the western European Crusaders from 1097 onward. The Crusading movement, motivated partly by a desire to recapture the holy city of Jerusalem, partly by the hope of acquiring new territory, increasingly encroached on Byzantine preserves and frustrated Alexius’s foreign policy, which was primarily directed toward the reestablishment of imperial authority in Anatolia. His relations with Muslim powers were disrupted on occasion, and former valued Byzantine possessions, such as Antioch, passed into the hands of arrogant Western princelings, who even introduced Latin Christianity in place of Greek. Thus, it was during Alexius’s reign that the last phase of the clash between the Latin West and the Greek East was inaugurated. He did regain some control over western Anatolia; he also advanced into the southeast Taurus region, securing much of the fertile coastal plain around Adana and Tarsus, as well as penetrating farther south along the Syrian coast. But neither Alexius nor succeeding Comnenian emperors were able to establish permanent control over the Latin Crusader principalities. Nor was the Byzantine Empire immune from further Norman attacks on its western islands and provinces—as in 1107–08, when Alexius successfully repulsed Bohemond I of Antioch’s assault on Avlona in western Greece. Continual Latin (particularly Norman) attacks, constant thrusts from Muslim principalities, the rising power of Hungary and the Balkan principalities—all conspired to surround Byzantium with potentially hostile forces. Even Alexius’s diplomacy, whatever its apparent success, could not avert the continual erosion that ultimately led to the Ottoman conquest.

Joan Mervyn Hussey
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Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which survived for a thousand years after the western half had crumbled into various feudal kingdoms and which finally fell to Ottoman Turkish onslaughts in 1453.

The very name Byzantine illustrates the misconceptions to which the empire’s history has often been subject, for its inhabitants would hardly have considered the term appropriate to themselves or to their state. Theirs was, in their view, none other than the Roman Empire, founded shortly before the beginning of the Christian era by God’s grace to unify his people in preparation for the coming of his Son. Proud of that Christian and Roman heritage, convinced that their earthly empire so nearly resembled the heavenly pattern that it could never change, they called themselves Romaioi, or Romans. Modern historians agree with them only in part. The term East Rome accurately described the political unit embracing the Eastern provinces of the old Roman Empire until 476, while there were yet two emperors. The same term may even be used until the last half of the 6th century, as long as men continued to act and think according to patterns not unlike those prevailing in an earlier Roman Empire. During those same centuries, nonetheless, there were changes so profound in their cumulative effect that after the 7th century state and society in the East differed markedly from their earlier forms. In an effort to recognize that distinction, historians traditionally have described the medieval empire as Byzantine.

The latter term is derived from the name Byzantium, borne by a colony of ancient Greek foundation on the European side of the Bosporus, midway between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The city was, by virtue of its location, a natural transit point between Europe and Asia Minor (Anatolia). Refounded as the “new Rome” by the emperor Constantine I in 330, it was endowed by him with the name Constantinople, the city of Constantine. The derivation from Byzantium is suggestive in that it emphasizes a central aspect of Byzantine civilization: the degree to which the empire’s administrative and intellectual life found a focus at Constantinople from 330 to 1453, the year of the city’s last and unsuccessful defense under the 11th (or 12th) Constantine. The circumstances of the last defense are suggestive too, for in 1453 the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds seemed briefly to meet. The last Constantine fell in defense of the new Rome built by the first Constantine. Walls that had held firm in the early Middle Ages against German, Hun, Avar, Slav, and Arab were breached finally by modern artillery, in the mysteries of which European technicians had instructed the most successful of the Central Asian invaders: the Ottoman Turks.

The fortunes of the empire were thus intimately entwined with those of peoples whose achievements and failures constitute the medieval history of both Europe and Asia. Nor did hostility always characterize the relations between Byzantines and those whom they considered “barbarian.” Even though the Byzantine intellectual firmly believed that civilization ended with the boundaries of his world, he opened it to the barbarian, provided that the latter (with his kin) would accept baptism and render loyalty to the emperor. Thanks to the settlements that resulted from such policies, many a name, seemingly Greek, disguises another of different origin: Slavic, perhaps, or Turkish. Barbarian illiteracy, in consequence, obscures the early generations of more than one family destined to rise to prominence in the empire’s military or civil service. Byzantium was a melting-pot society, characterized during its earlier centuries by a degree of social mobility that belies the stereotype, often applied to it, of an immobile caste-ridden society.

A source of strength in the early Middle Ages, Byzantium’s central geographical position served it ill after the 10th century. The conquests of that age presented new problems of organization and assimilation, and those the emperors had to confront at precisely the time when older questions of economic and social policy pressed for answers in a new and acute form. Satisfactory solutions were never found. Bitter ethnic and religious hostility marked the history of the empire’s later centuries, weakening Byzantium in the face of new enemies descending upon it from east and west. The empire finally collapsed when its administrative structures could no longer support the burden of leadership thrust upon it by military conquests.

Statue of of the Roman emperor Nero with the lighthouse in the background at Anzio, Lazio region, Italy
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The empire to 867

The Roman and Christian background

Unity and diversity in the late Roman Empire

The Roman Empire, the ancestor of the Byzantine, remarkably blended unity and diversity, the former being by far the better known, since its constituents were the predominant features of Roman civilization. The common Latin language, the coinage, the “international” army of the Roman legions, the urban network, the law, and the Greco-Roman heritage of civic culture loomed largest among those bonds that Augustus and his successors hoped would bring unity and peace to a Mediterranean world exhausted by centuries of civil war. To strengthen those sinews of imperial civilization, the emperors hoped that a lively and spontaneous trade might develop between the several provinces. At the pinnacle of that world stood the emperor himself, the man of wisdom who would shelter the state from whatever mishaps fortune had darkly hidden. The emperor alone could provide that protection, since, as the embodiment of all the virtues, he possessed in perfection those qualities displayed only imperfectly by his individual subjects.

The Roman formula of combating fortune with reason and therewith ensuring unity throughout the Mediterranean world worked surprisingly well in view of the pressures for disunity that time was to multiply. Conquest had brought regions of diverse background under Roman rule. The Eastern provinces were ancient and populous centres of that urban life that for millennia had defined the character of Mediterranean civilization. The Western provinces had only lately entered upon their own course of urban development under the not-always-tender ministrations of their Roman masters.

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Each of the aspects of unity enumerated above had its other side. Not everyone understood or spoke Latin. Paralleling and sometimes influencing Roman law were local customs and practices, understandably tenacious by reason of their antiquity. Pagan temples, Jewish synagogues, and Christian baptisteries attest to the range of organized religions with which the official forms of the Roman state, including those of emperor worship, could not always peacefully coexist. And far from unifying the Roman world, economic growth often created self-sufficient units in the several regions, provinces, or great estates.

Given the obstacles against which the masters of the Roman state struggled, it is altogether remarkable that Roman patriotism was ever more than an empty formula, that cultivated gentlemen from the Pillars of Hercules to the Black Sea were aware that they had “something” in common. That “something” might be defined as the Greco-Roman civic tradition in the widest sense of its institutional, intellectual, and emotional implications. Grateful for the conditions of peace that fostered it, men of wealth and culture dedicated their time and resources to glorifying that tradition through adornment of the cities that exemplified it and through education of the young who they hoped might perpetuate it.

Upon that world the barbarians descended after about 150 ce. To protect the frontier against them, warrior emperors devoted whatever energies they could spare from the constant struggle to reassert control over provinces where local regimes emerged. In view of the ensuing warfare, the widespread incidence of disease, and the rapid turnover among the occupants of the imperial throne, it would be easy to assume that little was left of either the traditional fabric of Greco-Roman society or the bureaucratic structure designed to support it.

Neither assumption is accurate. Devastation was haphazard, and some regions suffered while others did not. In fact, the economy and society of the empire as a whole during that period was the most diverse it had ever been. Impelled by necessity or lured by profit, people moved from province to province. Social disorder opened avenues to eminence and wealth that the more-stable order of an earlier age had closed to the talented and the ambitious. For personal and dynastic reasons, emperors favoured certain towns and provinces at the expense of others, and the erratic course of succession to the throne, coupled with a resulting constant change among the top administrative officials, largely deprived economic and social policies of recognizable consistency.