As the last emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Manuel Komnenos seems to have done everything during his 37-year reign, but nothing has been done: Italy has not been defeated, the Battle of Myreo Sephalong has been defeated, the Sultanate of Rûm has not been destroyed, and the north has not made much progress compared to the time of John II. Considering that after the fall of the Komnenos Dynasty and the beginning of the Angelos Dynasty, a major uprising against the Eastern Roman Empire broke out in Bulgaria, and the Second Bulgarian Empire was officially established, which shows that the class contradictions within the Roman Empire in the Manuel era were very acute.
Manuel I and Empress.
In 1180, at the age of 61, Manuel died after laying a pile of mines for the Empire, succeeded by his 13-year-old son, Alexios II. Although this child was also called Alexios, he was far from his great-grandfather Alexios I. But after all, this child is only 13 years old at this time, and the future is long, but what no one expected is that this child has no chance to grow up. More than 50 years ago, when John II thwarted the plot of his sister Anna Komunen and his mother, John II's younger brother Isaac Komnenos became his brother's most powerful helper, but the brothers soon turned against each other, and after Isaac's plot was crushed, his sons fled in fear of John II's revenge. But John II, arguably one of the most benevolent kings in the entire Eastern Roman Empire, did not hold his brother accountable, and Andronica was just born.
Portrait of Andronica I.
When Andronica appeared in the officialdom of the Byzantine Empire, it was already the reign of Manuel I, and Andronica was a very handsome aristocratic man, and the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire described him as "strong and handsome in his body in the most proportional proportions, and although his demeanor was not polite, he showed the spirit of a manly man, coupled with a resolute countenance, a tall figure, the muscles of an athlete, and the demeanor of a soldier." "Like many aristocratic youths, he joined the armies of the Roman Empire to fight against the Turks, and was once a prisoner of war, later redeemed, and appreciated by his cousin Manuel I, but soon began his abstract youth and middle age."
Compared to his pious and thrifty father John II and mother Hungarian princess Irina, Manuel I's life can be said to be quite erotic, the emperor often fooled around with his niece Theodora, and Andronica mixed with Theodora's sister Eudocia, and Eudocia even accompanied Andronica to Cilicia in southern Asia Minor as a military governor, where Andronica launched an attack on the Armenians, but ultimately failed, Soon after, he was arrested for rebellion. After 12 years in captivity, he managed to escape from Constantinople, where he was captured by the Wallachians on the way to escape, and then he escaped again, this time to Kievan Rus', where he was warmly received by the Grand Duke of Kiev, and a few years later, Manuel pardoned him for his crimes and returned to Constantinople for his role in the Eastern Roman Empire's invasion of Hungary with the Grand Duchy of Kiev. I believe that Emperor Manuel would have been blind if he had known in advance what his cousin had done after his death.
John II.
Before Alexios II was born, Manuel was ready to choose Béla III of Hungary as his heir, and married his daughter to him, and gave him a Greek name: Alexios. Andronica opposed the Hungarians to become the next Roman emperor, so he was driven to Cilicia, where he launched another war against the Armenians, and then he was beaten again, but after this fiasco, Andronica actually fell in love with a noble girl Philippa in Antioch, this Philipa was none other than the sister of Queen Mary, in other words, Philippa was the sister-in-law of Emperor Manuel, and Manuel could no longer bear this abstract master of the Roman Empire, After Antronica heard the sad news, he abandoned Philippa and fled to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where Antronica became married to Theodora, the widow of Baldwin III, the former king of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Portrait of Alexios I.
It is hard to imagine the wonderful expression on Manuel Komnen's face when he heard the news, in short, the emperor officially issued an arrest warrant for Andronica, but Theodora and Andronica soon fled, and in the following time they reached Damascus, from Damascus to Georgia, and then from Gru to the Sultanate of Rom in Asia Minor. However, he was soon punished, Theodora and the two children she gave birth to were captured by the Eastern Roman army and returned to Constantinople, and he had to go to Constantinople to ask the emperor for forgiveness, he had a man tie his body in chains, and then dragged him to the palace to confess to Manuel very reverently, and the emperor finally forgave him and placed him in Wenye, in the north of Asia Minor, in 1180, the year of Manuel's death.
Emperor Manuel's original match was a princess from the Holy Roman Empire, who unfortunately went ahead of the emperor. After the death of his original wife, Manuel took a new wife from the vassal Duchy of Antioch, and this woman was named Mary, who was later called Mary of Antioch, and the two married and gave birth to Alexios II. After Manuel's death, Mary of Antioch naturally became the queen mother, and the chief regent of the Komnenian dynasty took Alexios Komnenos as the emperor's right-hand man, but the queen mother and Alexios were far inferior to the Empress Theodora of the Justinian dynasty, and the ruthlessness was far less than that of the Macedonian Empress Theofano, and its clumsy rule aroused the dissatisfaction of the Romans. Manuel's daughter Maria and her husband clashed violently with Alexioskomonen, an assistant to the Empress Dowager, and the turmoil in Constantinople ended in the defeat of the princess, who sent a fatal letter to Andronica in Winder, an act that ultimately cost the emperor's life and that of Princess Maria herself.
Portrait of Alexios I.
When Manuel was alive, he admired the so-called "chivalry" of the West very much, and the court of Constantinople was full of Latins, and the Eastern Romans (Greeks) did not refer to the Latin people in the ancient Roman era, but to the Catholics of Western Europe, including the Venetians, who were once the remnants of Western Rome. In Manuel's time, these Latins not only acted as mercenaries, but also became tax collectors for the emperor, and the Komnenos were heavily taxed, and the reputation of these tax collectors can be imagined. In the era of Alexios, the founding emperor of the Komnenos Dynasty, in order to save the Eastern Roman Empire, which was about to perish, Emperor Alexios I was forced to give the Venetians preferential trade rights in exchange for the assistance of the Venetian navy, and the taxes paid by the Venetians for their goods were reduced, so the reputation of the Venetian merchants was also infamous among the Eastern Roman people.
Mosaic of Byzantine emperors in Hagia Sophia
Andronica took full advantage of the anti-Latin sentiment in Eastern Rome, especially in the city of Constantinople, as well as the letter of the eldest princess Maria's request for help, and soon launched a rebellion in Asia Minor, and approached Constantinople A bonus, but he could never have imagined that only five years later he himself would die at the hands of the mob of Constantinople, like these Latins.
Andronika first seized power and imprisoned Queen Marie, who forced the little emperor to sign the order to carry out her mother's death sentence and then ordered Mary to be strangled in the deep palace, and the little emperor was not spared, he was strangled a few days after his 14th birthday. The little emperor's head was cut off and thrown away, his body was put into a lead coffin and sunk into the Golden Horn, and the little emperor's unfortunate wife was a French princess, who was only 14 years old at the time, and was also forcibly married by Andronica. Her Royal Highness Princess Maria, who had sent a letter for help, had already died in the previous purge of the Komnenos royal family of Constantinople by Andronica. By 1182, at the age of 64, Andronika Komnenos was seated as Roman emperor.
The ruler of the Macedonian dynasty: Basil II
From a handsome aristocratic guy with a sturdy physique to a thief who opposes the emperor, a "traveler" who runs around, a "military strategist" who has lost a series of battles, a "scumbag" who abandons his young lover, and then a traitor who defects to the enemy country with another lover, and a poor worm who prostrates at the emperor's feet and begs for forgiveness after being forced to return to the motherland.
In the past 40 years, Andronica's life can be said to be "colorful", of course, this colorfulness is in quotation marks. And his wandering around the map and being wanted and driven out of Constantinople by the emperor's cousins again and again gave his life experience a bit of abstract and absurd comedy. Upon his ascension to the throne, Andronika also became Andronika I, who would continue his life on the throne and die three years later in a very abstract way, ending the Komnenos dynasty founded by his grandfather, Alexios I.
During the short three-year reign of Andronika I, the most frequently cited atrocities were the purges of the Komnenos and the repression and sacking of "rebellious cities" such as Nicaea and Bursa, where he severely punished those who dared to disrespect him, even throwing them off the walls and throwing them to their deaths. But there is a diametrically opposed assessment of his short reign: Andronica's reign was more just than Manuel's, and he pushed through reforms to depose corrupt officials, but this pitiful achievement was eventually drowned in suspicion, purges, and killings caused by Andronica's dirty methods to take the throne.
Finally, in 1185, the inhabitants of Constantinople embraced Isaac Anglos as the new Roman emperor, and Andronica was arrested, and over the next two days, he was subjected to extremely cruel abuse, his eyes gouged out, one of his hands cut off, and finally dragged by the mob between the two fallen stone pillars of the Colosseum, where two Italian mercenaries slashed him with their swords, and Andronica died at the age of 67. I can only say that such a way of death is really unique, I am afraid that if you look through the history of the Roman Empire, you will not find a second Roman emperor who died so abstractly.
Behind him was a more abstract empire, and the "mines" planted in Manuel's era were detonated one after another: the Bulgarian aristocracy took advantage of the antipathy of the people at the bottom to the Byzantine tyranny and launched an uprising to form the Second Bulgarian Empire; Manuel's time gave a large amount of land to the nobility, accelerating the tendency of excessive concentration of land in the hands of the nobility since the end of the Macedonian dynasty, and by the time Isaac II ascended the throne, the Eastern Roman Empire was already full of separatist forces, after Isaac II was overthrown by Alexios III, Alexios III became the de facto "mayor of Constantinople", and after more than 10 years of survival, the Eastern Roman Empire finally ushered in the fateful year of 1204.
Isaac II.
But what is quite dramatic is that in 1204, nearly twenty years after Andronika himself was killed by the mob of Constantinople, his two grandsons, with the help of the Georgians, conquered the eastern territories of the former Komnenian dynasty: Trabzon, creating the Trabzon Empire, which continued the rule of the Komnenians until 1461, when it was conquered by the Ottoman Turks.