Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 Read Free Page A

1 In his vain attempts to buy back the support that he had so unnecessarily lost, Nicephorus had virtually emptied the imperial treasury; and inflation, which had already begun under Michael VII, 2 spiralled more dizzily than ever. Without a stronger hand at the helm, there could be no hope for Byzantium.
    Meanwhile, as the popularity of Nicephorus declined, so that of Alexius Comnenus steadily grew, until he was generally looked upon in Constantinople and beyond as the only possible saviour of the Empire. He had first seen action under his elder brother Manuel during the expedition against the Seljuk Turks in 1070, when he was fourteen; 3 since then, whether fighting against the Turks or against Byzantine rebels, he had never lost a battle. He had proved himself a superb general, and because he had led them again and again to victory his soldiers loved and trusted him. But Alexius had other qualifications too, just as important in Byzantine eyes. He came from imperial stock, his uncle Isaac Comnenus having briefly occupied the throne some twenty years before; his mother, the immensely ambitious Anna Dalassena, was known to have brought up each of her five sons — of whom Alexius was the third - in the belief that he might one day become Emperor. Moreover his marriage to Irene, granddaughter of the Caesar John Ducas and daughter of that Andronicus Ducas who had so shamefully betraye d Romanus Diogenes at Manzikert assured him the support not only of the richest and most
    For more about plural marriages, and in particular the jour marriages of the Emperor Leo the Wise, see Byzantium: The Apogee, Chapter 8.
    He was popularly known as Parapinaces, or 'Minus-a-quarter', since the gold nomi sma, after having remained stable for more than five hundred years, was said to have lost a quarter of its value during his reign. (Sec Byzantium: The Apogee, p. 359.)
    According, that is, to his daughter Anna Comnena (The Alexiad, I, i), whose biography of her father is the fullest - and by far the most entertaining - contemporary record that we possess. Zonaras, on the other hand, claims that when Alexius died in 1118 he was seventy; if so, he would have been born in 1048, and by 1070 would already have been twenty-two. Anna's testimony is not always to be trusted, but such early baptisms of fire were not unusual in the Middle Ages and in this case we can probably accept her word. She was, after all, in a far better position to know.
    4 See Byzantium: The Apogee, pp. 352-3.
    influential family in the Empire but of the clergy (whose Patriarch until his death in 1075 was John Xiphilinus, a Ducas protege) and most of the aristocracy as well.
    For these very reasons, however, Alexius had enemies at court; it was here above all that he needed a champion, and he found one in the Empress herself. Mary had no love for her new husband, who was after all old enough to be her grandfather. As the former wife of Michael VII, her first loyalty was to the Ducas family, of which Alexius was a member by marriage. Perhaps she knew that (as the contemporary chronicler John Zonaras reports) two of her husband's cronies, a sinister pair of barbarian origin named Borilus and Germanus, were plotting to destroy the young general, and felt it her duty to protect him; possibly too, aware that her husband was considering naming a distant relation as his successor, she was trying to safeguard the interests of her son Constantine. It may even be - and subsequent events were to lend the theory additional weight -that she had fallen in love with Alexius, and saw herself in the role of Theophano to his Tzimisces. 1 Any of these hypotheses may be true, or none of them; we have no means of telling. All we know is that, some time in 1080, Mary of Alania adopted Alexius Comnenus as her son.
    Botaneiates seems to have made no protest. A weak man, utterly dominated by his wife, he seems by now to have been quietly sinking into senility. Far from raising any objections, towards