I know that many people believe that I had designs upon the throne from the moment I learned of the Emperor Manuel’s death, but that was not the case. You will recall that for the decade before Manuel’s demise, I was living contentedly as a vassal of the Emir of Erzurum and the lord of a minor castle in the mountains near Coloneia. I sought no broader scope for my ambitions than to live with Theodora, the woman I loved, and my children by her, Alexius and Irene. It was Manuel who dragged me back into the world of imperial politics by engineering Theodora’s kidnapping and captivity, forcing me to surrender myself to win her freedom. And it was Manuel who then had the idea of requiring me to swear an oath that "Should I see or perceive or hear anything bringing dishonor to your crown, I shall relay this information to you and thwart any such attempt as far as I am able." If I was to act as an honorable man, sensitive to the weighty character of oaths sworn before God, was I not compelled to closely watch events in the capital, and to give voice to my concerns as they developed?

Every fair-minded person must acknowledge the indisputable fact that I took no action to gather supporters or inject myself into the politics of the capital for a full nine months after Manuel’s death. During that period, I remained quietly in Oinaion, while back in Constantinople the Empress-Regent Maria-Xene forswore her vows to enter a nunnery and instead took the protosebastos Alexius into her bed. And I certainly did not compel the protosebastos to encourage the young Emperor Alexius to neglect his studies in favor of attendance at the horse races, or to sell offices to his friends and hangers-on so they could enrich themselves by pillaging the hard-working peasantry in the provinces.

Nor did I encourage the Emperor’s daughter, the porphyrogenita Maria, in her cold-blooded plot to butcher the protosebastos during the annual rites honoring the Martyr Theodore at the sanctuary of Bathys Ryax in February 1181. I played no role in fomenting the mass demonstrations after the porphyrogenita Maria and her husband Ranier took refuge in the Haghia Sophia in April 1181, and I cannot be blamed for the ill-considered and ineptly executed military strike the protosebastos launched against the porphyrogenita and her young Italian husband the following month.

Even when my two sons by my first wife, Manuel and John, were arrested, thrown into prison, and charged with complicity in the porphyrogenita’s murderous plot against the protosebastos, I did not immediately strike out for the capital. (With regard to Manuel – sober, prudent, honorable, and completely lacking in ruthlessness – I was as confident as I could be that the charges were completely baseless. But as to John – impulsive, impatient, not over-squeamish of blood, and as reckless as my own younger self – the allegations sounded entirely in character.)

In the end, it was the porphyrogenita Maria, in the aftermath of her failed murder plot and the protosebastos’s bungled military assault, who called upon me to heed the oath I had sworn to her father to protect the crown. By this point, in late May 1181, things in Constantinople had reached a completely dysfunctional impasse. The porphyrogenita had tried to eliminate the protosebastos, but had failed; he likewise had tried to eliminate her, with no better success. Now the capital and the Empire itself were bitterly divided. The protosebastos’s regime had lost all credibility, but the porphyrogenita lacked the strength to dislodge the protosebastos, who clung to his position and the palace like an octopus clamping its suckers upon a rock when a fisherman seeks to remove it.

Meanwhile, the Empire’s foreign enemies were only too willing to take advantage of the disarray and incompetence that had paralyzed our central authority. Bela III, King of Hungary, attacked the Empire’s lands along the middle Danube around Belgrade, while Sultan Kilij Arslan of Iconium, that crafty opportunist, struck across the frontier to pillage the communities of the upper Maeander Valley and the high plains of western Anatolia.

So when the porphyrogenita Maria wrote to me, how could I not respond? And my response was eminently measured. I did not resort to conspiratorial communications, but instead sent an open letter to the Patriarch Theodosius that was widely copied to others. I made it plain that I was sensitive of the demands of the oath I had taken a year earlier; that I considered the present situation in the capital intolerable; and that unless the Empress-Regent withdrew to a nunnery, the protosebastos surrendered his usurped authority to a broader and more capable regency council, and the remaining prisoners (including my two sons) were released, I would not remain passive in my castle overlooking the Black Sea for much longer.

But the protosebastos and the Empress-Regent Maria appeared determined to follow their foolish course to its doom. They could not govern, but they would not surrender the government to others who could.

In late May 1181, Manuel and John’s sister Maria reached my castle at Oinanion after a journey by sea from the capital. She confirmed what I had already heard from others – that my name was spoken throughout Constantinople, from the great houses to the taverns and the hovels, as the only man who had the strength, the intellect, and the will to take over the tiller and steer the state on a safe course before it smashed upon the rocks. And so it was that in the autumn of that year, I traveled 300 miles west along the coast to Heraclea Pontus, the capital of the Paphlagonian Theme [the Byzantine name for a province – A.J.], and began raising troops in that land of hardy mountaineers and mercenaries. At the same time, I sent messengers bearing correspondence to all those notables – not just in the capital, but in the cities and administrative centers of Europe and Asia as well – that I thought I could potentially win to my cause.

It speaks volumes about the protosebastos’s utter ineptitude and bone-deep laziness that he made no attempt to interrupt my activities, even though my base was only 150 miles east of the capital. But that was Alexius – a foppish dandy, a courtier, an intriguer, the kind of well-born nobleman who never fully understands that his high station in life is simply an accident of birth, not a reflection of his own talents or an expression of the Almighty’s divine favor. When things began to turn against him, his only thought was to send someone else to deal with the situation while he continued to enjoy his accustomed luxuries in the palace.

That someone was Andronicus Angelus, a general from a high-ranking and well-connected noble family who was perhaps best known for his brood of six sons. He marched against me with a force that was three or four times the size of my own. Moreover, his troops were all professionals, whereas many of my men were farmers with little military training. But military knowledge and experience count for nothing when the men possessing them have no interest in dying for their cause.

When we met Angelus’s force outside a small village near Nicomedia called Charax, it soon became apparent that his men were deeply reluctant to attack our unimpressive force. So I heeded the advice of one of my eunuchs, rallied my troops, and unleashed them on what should have been an utterly hopeless charge against our enemies with their helmets, mail, shields, and bristling wall of spears. As we ran towards their ranks, I saw a shiver of uncertainty run through those projecting spears, followed by a jostling as hundreds of men began to take a step or two back. Then the enemy troops broke. Most of them simply took to their heels, but many dropped their weapons and indicated a willingness to join our ranks. And so it was that I fought a battle – if you can call it that – and saw my little army nearly double in size.

There was now no military force between me and the shores of the Bosphorus. I marched at once to the heights overlooking Chalcedon, and established my camp on a ridge known as the Little Pine Trees. To hide the small size of my force, I gave orders that our tents should be spread out in a long but shallow line along the very summit of the hills overlooking Chalcedon, and at night I ordered my men to build many unnecessary fires so as foster the belief that our numbers were being swelled by new arrivals.

The military problem I confronted at that point was simple: the protosebastos still controlled a substantial fleet; I had none whatsoever; and there was a water barrier a mile across between my force and its ultimate objective. To underscore that problem, the protosebastos’s admiral, the Grand Duke ( Megadux ) Andronicus Kontostephanos, soon filled the waters of the strait from its south end to the Black Sea with his galleys.

I of course did not take Kontostephanos’s military reputation lightly. He was the most experienced military commander in the Empire’s service. Although he had spent most of his years of service commanding the imperial fleet, he had demonstrated on several occasions – in his victory over the Hungarians on the River Istros in 1167; in his actions during the joint Crusader-Imperial siege of the Egyptian port city of Damietta in 1169; and in his command of the rear guard during the disastrous battle of Myriokephalon four years earlier – that he was as effective in land operations as naval ones. But I did not intend to fight another battle. I felt that the protosebastos’s regime was like a heavy piece of fruit, ripe for the picking and almost ready to fall. All I would need to do was to shake the tree a little more. Once a few more key commanders, officials, noblemen and clerics came over to my side, the protosebastos was bound to lose his grip on power.

And so, like an aspiring lover laying siege to a woman’s affections, I undertook to seduce the remaining notables who counted in the city across the water. I have had a fair amount of experience in that line, of course. When undertaking such a campaign, the right words and a proper sense of timing are critical. In this case, the right words meant conveying the sense that I intended nothing more than to assume the regency for a few years, after which I would bequeath my responsibilities to a more mature Alexius II and retire once again to the Pontus. For it was one thing to ask the Empire’s most august personages to accept me as a replacement for the clearly inept and ineffective protosebastos as the chief figure in the regency, with responsibility for supervising the young Emperor Alexius’s education and training in statecraft. It would have been a very different and far more difficult thing to persuade them that it was appropriate for me to wholly displace the young Emperor and pack him off to some monastery. And so it was vital that they not suspect that by this point, I would be satisfied with nothing less than the throne and the imperial crown – and I had no intention of sharing them with anyone.

Similarly, just as a hopeful lover must move with proper deliberation if he is to persuade a woman to surrender her virtue, so I could not afford to press my suit prematurely. Some of the key personages I needed to bring around – including the Grand Duke Andronicus and the Patriarch Theodosius – were both deeply honorable and deeply suspicious of me (as well they should have been). They might only come around once all of their aides and subordinates had been persuaded to support my cause. So I could betray no hint of impatience, nothing that suggested I was grasping for the crown. Instead, I must give the impression that I had reluctantly forsaken the ease of a comfortable retirement to answer the call of the State for my services one last time.

Oh, and of course – dress matters in such circumstances. So when the envoys from the protosebastos and the merely curious began to make their way across the straits to my camp, I often appeared before them in striking garments that I knew would occasion yet more discussion back in the City. Thus, I greeted the Patriarch Theodosius when he at length crossed the water in a violet-colored caftan of Iberian weave and a greyish-black peaked cowl that set off my thick mane of snow-white hair – a honest legacy of both my years of experience and the privations I suffered during nine years in Manuel’s dungeons.

I thoroughly enjoyed this campaign of seduction, with an Empire as the prize. Soft spring breezes blew across our encampment, which commanded on clear days a splendid view of the City’s walls, towers, church domes, and the pavilions and gardens of the Great Palace spilling down the slopes of the First Hill. (If I looked carefully, I could just make out the tower where I had been incarcerated for six years after my first escape, and I could also discern the stretch of wall I had slipped over in the night during my second, successful bid for freedom in 1164.)

During the intervals between embassies from the city, my companions and I enjoyed hunting in the forests that spread along the undulating hills that overlook the Bosphorus, full of fragrant cypresses, umbrella pines for shade, sycamores with their ivory trunks, horse chestnuts with their tall, spiky white blossoms, and fragrant, resiny terebinths. At that point in the early spring, the Judas Trees bring forth their pink blossoms, and the wisteria vines are heavy with their lavender blooms. So it was pleasant to wait.

My campaign met with both successes and failures. Andronicus Angelus, whom I had so lately humiliated in battle, came over to me with his six sons. He had good reason to fear the wrath of the protosebastos after his failure at Charax; others, even more cynical than I, whispered that he could not accurately account for the funds that had been entrusted to him to finance his campaign. The Patriarch Theodosius, however, proved more resistant to my blandishments. In retrospect, I think I laid it on too thick with him: Upon his arrival I greeted him by throwing myself down in front of his horse’s hooves, then rose to my knees, licked the soles of his feet, and hailed him as the savior of the young Emperor Alexius, champion of truth, rival of John Chrysostom, etc., etc. (I think the comparison to John Chrysostom, in particular, was over the top: Theodosius was a scholar, not a charismatic, golden-tongued preacher of Chrysostom’s ilk, and he saw himself clearly enough to understand that.) At the end of my effusive display, Theodosius appraised me with cold skepticism and then replied in a dry, even tone leavened with irony: "Previously, I had only heard the report of you; now I have seen you, and have come to know you very well."

I did not know then that the Emperor Manuel had spoken in detail about me to Theodosius before his death. And my late cousin had known and observed me closely for many years, even if his jealousy and fear often caused him to misjudge me. In the future, I must remember to study an interlocutor more closely before deciding how to receive him.

My lack of success winning over the Patriarch proved not to matter, however, for a short time thereafter, my agents succeeded in reaching an agreement with the Grand Duke Andronicus Kontostephanos, bringing him, the fleet, and his marines over to my side. Overnight, the Bosphorus was transformed from a barrier to a bridge. I would have given much to have heard the protosebastos’s impotent recriminations and expressions of lachrymose self-pity after that news was brought to him, and he was suddenly forced to stare his ruin, unblinking, in the face.

So that I would not seem too eager to seize the fruits of power, I did not immediately cross the Bosphorus. Instead, I remained for a while on the heights above Damalis, receiving daily parties of well-wishers and the merely curious who crossed over from the city. Meanwhile, my agents and supporters took control of the capital from the disconsolate and defeated protosebastos. They sent a party of Varangian Guards, hulking Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons bearing huge axes, to place the protosebastos in custody within his chambers inside the Palace; later, at the prompting of the Patriarch, who was concerned that the city mob might storm the palace and lynch him, I had him rousted out in the middle of the night (I couldn’t resist that touch, knowing how much he loved his sleep!) and transferred to the House of Michaelitzes, a portion of the Patriarchal Palace.

I made a point of consulting with the Senate and other notables as to what should be done with the protosebastos. Personally, I would have been delighted to put him to death: after all, he had tried to kill me himself back in 1155 when I was enjoying my affair with his sister Eudocia, and he followed that up by engineering my unjust imprisonment, which lasted for nine years. But the consensus of the nobles was that he should be subject to the time-honored punishment of blinding; and even the clergy did not raise a strong complaint to that sanction.

The protosebastos spent a miserable few days as a prisoner at the Patriarchal Palace waiting to learn his fate. His guards imitated my example by refusing to let him sleep. Only the Patriarch showed Alexius any kindness – he who, less than twelve months earlier, in his arrogance and pride, had launched a brazen attack on the Haghia Sophia itself! Theodosius spent hours sitting and talking with him, bearing with a truly Christian patience his whining and lamentations and urging the guards to cease their mistreatment of this pathetic and inadequate man who had so recently been their master.

Soon enough, the protosebastos faced his day of judgment. He was hustled out of the Patriarchal Palace one morning, placed aboard a pony, and led through jeering crowds down to the waterfront, where he was unceremoniously bundled aboard the dirtiest and smelliest fishing smack my agents could find. On the passage to the eastern side of the strait, he had one final chance to enjoy the sunlight and admire the grandeur of the City and the gardens and domes of the Palace quarter, if he were disposed to do so. Then he was brought ashore – haggard and hollow-eyed with exhaustion and fear, unshaven and utterly broken in spirit – and dragged before me. I had the pleasure of haranguing him, enumerating his failures and inadequacies and venting the hatred and contempt I had felt for him for fully twenty-seven years. Then I gave him over to those who handle such things, and I heard him screaming in terror and pain while his eyes were gouged out. Afterwards, we packed him off to a monastery near the Black Sea, there to live out what remained of his days in the darkness he had always so relished.

Thus passed the protosebastos Alexius, who had possessed neither the will to reform the state nor the courage necessary to retain the high position he had so recklessly assumed. I, in contrast, possessed both a keen understanding of the Empire’s problems and the will necessary to address them. But before I could undertake the difficult task of restoring the Empire, I must first take some additional steps to secure my own position. And I had a few scores to settle as well – a reckoning for those nine years of living death to which I had been consigned by the Emperor Manuel in the dungeons of the Prison of Anemas and the Great Palace. To these tasks, I now turned my attention.

Principal Sources:

Charles M. Brand, Byzantium Confronts the West, 1180-1204 (1968), at 31-41

Harry Magoulias, ed., O City of Byzantium, Annals of Nicetas Choniates (1984), at 81, 85-96, 102-05, 127-140