 Good morning everybody. I'd like to begin not simply by expressing my gratitude to Hans and Gulchan for their usual goodness in having invited me here, but to say how enormously enjoyable it is to be back here. There were times during the past two years when I began to suspect that I would never leave England again. But the crisis, or at least that particular crisis, passed and here we are again, and it is, I'll repeat, a genuine pleasure to look around this room and see so many old faces. Oh, I'm sorry, perhaps I should. To see so many friendly faces. And a number of new faces as well, so thank you everybody. I'm starting with a rather eccentric topic. What is my subject? Andronicus conanus, the Byzantine Trump. This is, this will be a somewhat oblique talk. It's not something which will have any particular message which I will drive home like a hammer into your heads. There is a message to it, but it's a message which I hope I shall be able to leave to your own no doubt fertile imaginations. Let me begin, and let me begin where I ended the last talk I gave on late antique early medieval history. The last time, those of you who are here, the last time I spoke about this general subject, I discussed the revolution, the internal revolution that saved the Byzantine Empire, the medieval Roman Empire, the Eastern Empire. There are many different names for this particular period and this particular state structure. I prefer to use the term Byzantine Empire for the simple reason that it's something that everybody recognizes. Also, once you get past late antiquity, there is a distinctive civilization which deserves a more individual name than simply medieval Roman Empire. But let me, let me refresh you on what I discussed the last time I was here to talk about late antiquity. This is the restored Roman Empire of the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD. In the 4th century, the Empire had been split in half with the eastern part ruled from Constantinople, the western part from Rome, Milan, Ravenna, wherever. The western part very quickly fell away, the eastern part survived and flourished, and then in the middle of the 6th century the Emperor Justinian reached out from Constantinople and reconquered all of those western territories, Italy, North Africa, a large but unknown slice of southern Spain. And the historians would generally agree that this was a particularly glorious and successful reign. It couldn't hide the fact, however, that the later Roman Empire was not the kind of society that most of us, that any of us indeed, would like to see. It was a top-heavy society in which a very small, immensely rich hereditary nobility dominated the land, owned most of the productive land in the Empire, and a large, a large for its day, bureaucracy, completed the process of ruling class parasitism. Most ordinary people were taxists, indentured laborers. There was not much in the way of free and independent, ordinary working-class labor within the later Roman Empire. Then, from the middle of the 6th century and through the 7th century, you have a series of great hammerblows, the Persians and then the Arabs, the Northern Barbarians, the Avars, the Slavs. You have the Turks floating away somewhere in the east. These put the Empire under enormous pressure, and it looked as though the Empire would break up. Indeed, after the Arab conquests of the 7th century, the Empire is reduced to that. It is reduced to a rump of its former self. However, the Empire survived by going through a process of internal reform or a revolution from the top. What happened was that in the surviving core territories of the Empire, those vast noble estates were confiscated. The senatorial aristocracy was liquidated, not by murder necessarily, but largely by confiscations, buyouts, various tax pressures. The land of nobility disappeared. In its place, you see the emergence of a free peasantry. These people are given in alienable plots of land in exchange to military service. You see an enormous shrinkage of the great cities. You walk into one of the great cities of the Empire and you are no longer in the world of late antiquity of vast ceremonial buildings and lavish bathing complexes and free or subsidized distributions of food. You see much more medieval cities and this, this is what saved the Empire. When the Arabs invaded the Persian Empire in the 630s, they conquered the entire territory in a single campaign. Yet again and again these vast Arab armies crashed into a wall of armed freeholders and gradually the Arab impetus was blunted and then the Empire went on the offensive, reconquering many of the lost territories, reincorporating islands, firming up border regions, clearing barbarians out of various areas, converting the barbarians to Christianity, and then persuading them in various ways to learn Greek and to become Greeks. This is the lowest point in the Empire's fortunes in the early Middle Ages, around 717, the second great siege of the city when Greek fire was used. Over the next few hundred years the Empire went on the offensive and by 1025 this is the restored Empire. If you compare it with the Empire ruled by Augustus or by Constantine, it is about a quarter at the most. Yet in the changed circumstances of the Middle Ages, this is the largest and the richest and the most powerful state system in the Mediterranean world. The influence of this Empire reaches through its promotion of Christian orthodoxy, all the way up to the Arctic Circle taking in the Ukraine and Russia. Its economic influence spreads through the entire Middle East, indeed for a while Egypt is a satellite of this Empire. Egypt, which in ancient times had been the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, is now dependent on shipments of corn from the Black Sea running through the Empire. The Empire's armies are unbeatable. The Empire can reach out and take or retake any areas it pleases, but again in the changed circumstances of the Middle Ages, the Empire has no interest in the reconquest of Syria or Egypt or any area which is now predominantly Muslim. Because whereas the Roman Empire itself was a multi a multinational, a multi-ethnic, a multi-religious institution where a senatorial aristocracy floated freely above the mass of Semites, Slavs, Barbarians, Greeks, Latins, etc. This is a Christian orthodox Empire and it does not have the institutional or the cultural ability or willingness to absorb large numbers of non-Christians. And so the Empire's main activities are in conquering the area south of the Danube and moving the Empire's border back up to the Danube and also firming up its domination of southern Italy. Is this a particularly free society? I suppose the answer is yes. Most societies before the modern period had freedoms that we can barely conceive. Slavery has not been abolished, but it has substantially died out and it seems that the majority of people within this Empire are free peasants. Tilling their hereditary freeholds, putting on their armor and going out and fighting little wars every so often to defend or to extend the Empire. There is no doubt that in the Middle Ages this Empire was the place where people had the richest and the most secure lives. Now, this is the Empire as it was in 1025 at the death of Basil II, the greatest of all the Byzantine military emperors, and the borders are particularly fortunate. To the north you have the Danube, which has always been a relatively impassable river. To the south you have those deserts and the southern borders of the Empire are fringed by Islamic emirates, which are satellites or even outright protectorates of the Empire. To the east you have Armenia, which is another protectorate of the Empire. The Empire is surrounded on all its borders by natural frontiers or by allies or by outright protectorates. It seems that the Empire has come through the turbulence of the early medieval period. It has triumphed. It has won. And looking out from the walls of Constantinople, the greatest and richest city in the known world, it was possible for the for the intellectuals of this restored Empire to tell themselves that history had come to an end. The troubles of the past were over. There had been a happy ending. The Empire was rich, the Empire was powerful, the Empire was secure, and the future would be very like the present forever and ever and ever. And there was a most remarkable cultural revival around this time in the Empire. Manuscripts which had lain dormant in libraries for many centuries were pulled out and republished and quite often our earliest manuscripts of standard writers like Plato, Thucydides, Herodotus go back to the 10th century in Byzantium and they go back no further than that. We owe our current possession of the Greek classics to the cultural revival in Constantinople of the 10th and 11th centuries. However, in 1025 Basil II died. He left no male heirs and for the next 50 years the Empire was ruled by a succession of rather weak emperors. And here is where the problem begins. The Basil II himself and his predecessors had been very hostile to the idea of a landed nobility and indeed during this middle period of Byzantine history, you do not see much use of family names, a sure indication that there is no particular nobility. Individuals are promoted to positions of importance in Byzantine government and it's often very hard to work out who their fathers were and impossible to know who their grandfathers were and often we don't know who their children were. They rose and they fell as individuals. It was a rather fluid meritocracy. After the death of Basil II, you see the almost immediate emergence of a landed nobility, people who are hungry for more and more land and the only way in which they can satisfy their hunger is of course by the usual means to any landed nobility of dispossessing the free peasantry, getting hold of their land by various legal and semi-legal means and turning these people from independent free holders into indentured tenants of various kinds. You also have the almost immediate regrowth of a large bureaucratic apparatus, a large and wealthy bureaucratic apparatus. Without a strong emperor to repress these tendencies, Byzantine society is rapidly taken over by this new ruling class of bureaucrats and nobles and there is of course a large grey area in which people are noble bureaucrats or bureaucratic nobles. Now these people had interests which we would regard as naturally contrary to those of the empire as a whole. It is not unusual for a ruling class to have interests which are not in perfect alignment with those of the country over which they preside and this seems to have been particularly the case in the Byzantine Empire of the 11th century. In the early years after the Basil II's death, the militarized peasantry would turn out in the traditional way in their armor with their weapons saying we've come to perform our military service and their new overlords would say oh, you've come to the military service, have you? Well, we don't have any wars for you to fight so why don't you go home? Indeed, don't come back next year. Listen, just give us some money and we'll relieve you from this no doubt irksome duty of putting on armor and taking up weapons and marching 50 or 100 miles to your mustering points. Yes, just go home, put your weapons away, let them fall into rack and ruin, just pay us some money and we'll let you off. And that's what the free peasantry did and of course once the free peasantry is disarmed it stops rather quickly from being a free peasantry. And back in the capital the rulers told themselves, you know, we've got this wonderful idea. It's so much more efficient, it's so much more economical. If we need to fight a war, we don't get these smelly peasants who will start telling us how the empire should be ruled and start questioning what we do with the tax money. No, no, what we do is we hire mercenaries. It's a wonderful arrangement. You see, instead of having a standing military, what we do is we hire bands of mercenaries, they come, they do the job, we pay them off and it's so much cheaper. And because everyone knows that we dominate the west, the eastern Mediterranean, why do we actually need to have a navy? Let's just let that fall to pieces as well. Everyone knows that we're the bosses, so they won't challenge us. We don't need, in order to project power, we don't actually need to have the power to do so. And so the money was spent in Constantinople and on buying out the free peasantry and the bureaucracy grew and the large landed estates grew. And I must admit the cultural revival continued in full swing and everybody agreed that the empire was the greatest and the richest thing in the known world and that it would go on forever and ever and ever. Now the Turks have been floating around for centuries. They were used as mercenaries by the emperor Justinian. However, after the arrival of Islam in the Near East, the Turks increasingly converted to Islam and they entered the service of the Baghdad Caliphate and they were particularly able and energetic and the Arabs were in one of their periodic ages of decadence. And gradually the Turks took over until eventually they effectively took over the Caliphate of Baghdad and the new Turkish rulers of this Caliphate decided on a course of expansion and one day they decided to invade the empire. Let me go back to this map. Look at this area here in the east of the empire, Mansiket. It's not quite a border town but it's not far from the border. In 1071 there was a Turkish incursion. The emperor Romanus hurried out from Constantinople at the head of the usual mercenary army and everybody expected the Turks to be chased off and the empire would pay a subsidy to stop them from coming back but instead the Turkish leader a man called Alp Arslan inflicted a total and catastrophic defeat on this mercenary army. The mercenaries ran away and the emperor himself was taken prisoner and there is a dialogue recorded between the Turkish leader Alp Arslan and Romanus which went something like this, the Turkish leader, if our circumstances were reversed and I were your prisoner what would you do with me? And the emperor replied well of course I'd parade you through the hippodrome in Constantinople and then I might have you killed. And the Turkish leaders reply I'll go one better than that. I release you. And he sent him back to Constantinople with no army, just a Turkish guard. All hell broke loose in Constantinople. The emperor was deposed as being useless and there was a period of turbulence and then a young man, Alexius Connainus became the emperor in his 20s, a man of enormous ability but he faces, he rules, not this empire, the empire of 1025, he rules this empire, the empire of 1071 onwards. The Turks have taken all of the Asian territories of the empire and the Turks have established their capital in Nicea which is just three days march from Constantinople. And the empire is now confined to its European territories which are themselves coming under increased pressure from the Normans in southern Italy. You'll see that the empire is being cleared out of its Italian possessions by the Normans. Now Alexius comes to power and his job is to sort out the mess. The obvious response to the crisis is to repeat the process of internal reform or revolution of the sixth and seventh centuries which is to repress the landed nobility, to cut down on the bureaucracy, to lower taxes, to recreate that free landed militarized peasantry but Alexius finds that the special interests in Constantinople are absolutely untouchable. They have told him, save us, save the empire but don't do anything to us. That's the deal. So what can Alexius do? His job is to save the empire, to restore the empire but not by touching the interests of any of the groups whose own consistent misrule of the empire for half a century has brought the empire to this difficult position. His answer, in the west the Normans are coming across from Italy and they're nibbling away at the western fringes of the Balkan peninsula. The empire has no navy and this is a war that needs naval support. The empire has no navy but the city of Venice has naval forces and the city of Venice has until recently been a semi-protectorate of the empire. So Alexius calls on the Venetians, please will you supply us with naval support for our firming up of our western frontiers and the Venetians say of course how many ships do you want? And the Venetians provide lavish naval support and the Normans are very briskly cleared out of western Greece. They're kicked back into Italy where they're kept. The empire's western borders have been secured very briskly and very efficiently but why were the Venetians so eager to provide the asked for naval support? The reason is, the deal is, that the Venetians will supply unlimited naval support for the empire's operations in the Adriatic. In return for that, Venetian merchants within the empire will be freed from all external and internal tolls. Now think about it, you're a Greek merchant in Thessalonica sending silk here there and everywhere. As an imperial subject, you must pay all of the tolls, you must pay all of the taxes on the transport of your goods. And because the taxes are going up, these tolls are increasingly onerous. The Venetians down the road have established themselves in a little colony in Thessalonica, they are completely free of these taxes. And so the answer is, that the Venetians very quickly established themselves in all the main cities of the empire, indeed eventually in Constantinople itself there is a Venetian settlement of 60,000 people. These people very quickly take over the whole internal and external carrying trade of the empire. They do not pay taxes to the empire, they bankrupt the imperial traders and they have very quickly become what you might call a state with an estate, imperium in imperio. That is rather sad. But Alexios has firmed up the western borders. Now for retaking the Asian territories, Alexios needs an army, not a navy an army, and the Venetians can't provide that. Alexios could perhaps have armed the peasants, but they would upset the land in nobility who have a complete stranglehold over government policy, and so that is not an option. He could recruit mercenaries from the north, Orthodox Christians, but for various reasons that is out. And so if Alexios wants to raise an army to reconquer the lost territories, the only place to look is west. And there is a long tradition of recruiting mercenaries from the west. They have been doing it for many centuries. So Alexios is right to the pope in the 1090s saying, could you arrange for the recruitment of a number of western mercenaries who will fight under my leadership to regain the lost territories of my empire in Asia? The pope urban the second looks at this and thinks, I've got a better idea. But that's another little story. I think what matters is that in Constantinople, this is how they see the west. This is how the west was for many centuries. Rather vicious, but simple minded barbarians, you don't want the fighting against you, but you can recruit these people as mercenaries and they'll fight for you, at least their palms are silver, occasionally with gold. They'll fight, you can then pay them off or perhaps you can avoid paying them off. You can turn them against each other. And this is probably what Alexios had in mind when he wanted the pope to oversee the recruitment of some western mercenaries. He thought that something like this turning up in Constantinople to be licked into shape by the imperial generals and he would then lead these people out and clear the Turks from Asia Minor. Sadly the empire has lost track of developments in western Europe and the westerners no longer look like this. They look like that. This is a somewhat laser picture, but you get the idea of what is going on in the west. These people have long since given up on tattooing their faces and smearing butter in their hair and running through their forests, howling and waving swords. They are increasingly doing things like that and there's some statistics which show the great increase in the population of the Mediterranean world and western Europe in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. What Alexios expects is 10 or 20,000 barbarian mercenaries to turn up and enlist under his banners. What does turn up under the walls of Constantinople is not a vast army but vast armies of heavily armed western knights, horses, chain mail, feudal lords, led partly by the papal legate himself. Now what these people do is again another part of the story and I must hurry up. But Alexios takes one look at these vast armies, doesn't let them into the walls of Constantinople, instead he gets the leaders inside one at a time and says to them, I want you to promise that any territories of my empire that you reconquer, you give them to me, anything else is yours. Most of the crusader leaders, let's call them, say, yeah, I'll do that. And then Alexios wishes them bon voyage, gets them across the straits into Asia and breathes a sigh of relief as the cloud of dust gets smaller and smaller on the horizon. Then of course these people, they go straight through the Turks like a hot knife through butter, a medieval blitzkrieg, the battle of Dorrelium destroys Turkish power in this region for many centuries. And the crusaders storm south, they take Antioch and then they hurry on to Jerusalem and very quickly they have established these crusader states in the Holy Land. And there they become a complicating factor in the empire's diplomacy for the next two centuries. But Alexios has achieved his purpose, which is to restore a great deal of the empire's Asian territory. There is the restored empire of 1180. It has not been possible to clear the Turks out of Central Anatolia, but all of the more productive coastal regions of the Asian provinces are back inside the empire and it looks to outsiders as though Alexios and his son and grandson have done a splendid job. They have restored the empire, but of course they haven't. Inside the empire everything is quietly rotting away. The Venetians, they continue to grow in numbers and in strength, applying a financial and increasingly a naval stranglehold to the empire. Alexios' grandson Manuel, he decides that the best way to check the Venetians is by giving trading privileges to the other Italian city-states. Now isn't that a bright idea? What it means is now there are civil wars in Constantinople between the Genoese and the Venetians and there's nothing the emperor can do to stop it. And the tax base is shrinking and the remaining peasantry, the people who do pay the taxes and the imperial merchants, they are bled white in taxes. The entire, virtually all, economic activity in the empire is increasingly sucked into the orbit of the Italian merchants. The empire has no navy, it has no army, it still relies on the goodwill of western mercenaries and by the end of the reign of Manuel in 1182 the empire is beginning to crumble, its borders are beginning to give way again. And so what can be done to save the empire? And here we come to the subject that I talk and I'm only going to talk about him briefly Andronicus. A man of enormous ability, a descendant of Alexius Cumnanus, a member of the Cumnanus family he took power in 1182. Manuel died in 1180 leaving his 10-year-old son under the regency of his widow Maria of Antioch. And for various reasons Maria of Antioch is actually French and the empire not only is being absorbed by various Italian merchants, its ruling class, its nobility is increasingly western in its outlook and indeed in its personnel. These are increasingly French speaking peoples. Maria of Antioch is the regent. She naturally favours the western merchants and the landed aristocracy and the empire continues to crumble. And then Andronicus, who's well past the first bloom of youth in his 60s, he takes power in a series of coups. He kills, he gets himself nominated as co-emperor by young Alexius II, this 10-year-old boy. Alexius is then bullied into signing the death warrant for his mother Maria of Antioch. And Alexius then manages to get young Alexius, Andronicus manages to get young Alexius poisoned. And so Andronicus is now the emperor in Constantinople. Although he's 65, he takes a 12-year-old wife, Maria, the daughter of King Louis VII. But although he has a French connection himself, his ideas are not at all friendly to the west. Andronicus has a good understanding of what's gone wrong and what needs to be done. It is necessary somehow to prize the Venetian stranglehold away from the empire's throat. It is necessary to bring these foreign merchants under some kind of control, either to expel them or to make them pay the same taxes as the domestic merchants. It's also necessary to start looking at many of the land transactions over the past few centuries and to reduce the size and the power of the landed aristocracy and to restore a free peasantry from which the empire will then be able to recruit its own native armies. But how do you do this? How do you do this in a city, a vast, wealthy city that is absolutely controlled by the landed nobility, by the bureaucracy and by the western merchants? How do you do this? Andronicus' answer is to murder everybody. His first big act is to oversee a massacre of the Italian merchants in the city. 60,000 of them killed or chased away. He then starts to purge the aristocracy. He starts to purge nobility rather. And then he purges the bureaucracy making corruption a crime punishable by death. Anyone who gives him a funny look is put to death. He breaks the long-running custom in the empire of not killing your political opponents. The idea for many centuries has been that somebody loses an intrigue. He's sent off to a monastery if he's particularly a nuisance. He's blinded and then sent off to a monastery. You don't kill your enemies. It's something barbarians do but civilized men don't do that. Andronicus doesn't regard himself as a civilized man. Anyone who gives him a funny look or gets in the way of his policy of restoration is put to death. Andronicus is very, very popular with the people because he's doing. What he's doing is he is prizing the teeth of not one vampire but a several vampires from their vital arteries. But of course just having the support of ordinary people doesn't count for a lot when you have the entire ruling class ranged against you. At last in 1185 Alexius gets himself, sorry, Andronicus gets himself into a dispute. In September 1185 there is a palace coup and a morp bribed by the remaining Latin merchants and by various other interest groups. Andronicus pulls him down from his high position and spends three days torturing him horribly to death. Here is a 15th century French representation of his death. I won't go into the gory details. It's unpleasant. Eventually Andronicus still alive is hung upside down between two pillars in the hippodrome and two executioners compete at how deep they can thrust swords into his body. The body is then torn apart and the remains are left there to rot and they remain in place for several years afterwards. After this Isaac Angelus becomes the emperor and he is completely in the pockets of the Italian merchants. All of Andronicus is rather stern laws against corruption and against the unlawful appropriation of peasant lands are repealed or ignored. But everything carries on in quite a jolly way in Constantinople for the next 20 years until in 1204 for reasons that again I won't explain the fourth crusade turns up led by the doge of Venice Dandolo whose gravestone you can still see in the upper galleries of the Hagia Sophia and although Constantinople has for many centuries been regarded as an absolutely safe city behind its walls of course the people in charge of the empire haven't bothered maintaining the city walls they haven't kept an army, they haven't kept a navy and they haven't even spent money on keeping the city walls in good order the Venetian ships get very close to the sea walls which in those days were much closer to the sea than they are nowadays if you go to Istanbul there's a big road which separates the sea walls from the sea but in those days you can sail right up to the sea walls you can see that the crusaders are getting across the battlements on the masts of the Venetian ships and well what happens next is three days of loosing and burning at the end of which the empire is partitioned among the various crusader leaders and the Venetians take everything they want so Andronicus' revolution which started out with a great deal of promise and certainly started out with a correct analysis of the empire's position a revolution which enjoyed a great deal of support among common people in the city and in the country districts was defeated by an absolutely immovable ruling class and within 20 years the empire had been ripped apart, its capital city taken and burned and looted and although that is not the end of the Byzantine empire it is the end of the Byzantine empire as the great system richest and most powerful state system in the eastern Mediterranean I did put in a last slide called lessons but I'm not going to discuss that I'm not going to discuss it for a number of reasons I really have reached the end of my time although Hans said I could have more time I'm not going to take more but the other reason is that I think you can work out for yourself what the lessons are and that's something which we may choose to discuss in the question and answer session so with that I'll thank you for your patience in listening to this explanation of a rather obscure area of history and give way to the next speaker so thank you very much everybody