It's been quite a while since I did a birthday shout out for the simple reason I was running out of the type of people I normally commemorate in this blog. However my interest has been rekindled so I'm very happy to say a happy birthday to Alexios III, Emperor of Trebizond. Of course this does give rise to a number of questions like "what the hell is Trebizond?, Where the hell is Trebizond? and Huh?!! Let me answer those questions a succinctly as I can.
Some empires are built on bloody fisted conquest, others by subtle political manipulations. Then there are empires which are formed largely because everyone who might have been minded to prevent them was busy with something else at the time. The empire of Trebizond falls squarely into this category. The city of Trebizond was (and under its Turkish name of Trabzon still is) a city on the southern shore of the Black Sea. Until 1204 it was a modest and little thought about part of the Byzantine Empire which stretched across the Balkans and a good deal of Asia Minor. Then in 1204 the Fourth Crusade happened. The Fourth Crusade was the latest attempt by the Christian states of western Europe to dispossess the incumbent Moslems of the Holy Land. For various convoluted reasons (Venetian skullduggery) this army of the faith wound up capturing, sacking and burning to the ground Constantinople the capital of Byzantium and the largest Christian city in the world. It never got anywhere near the Holy Land.
Having literally ripped the heart out of the empire the Crusaders then appointed one of themselves as the new emperor, however there weren't all that many of them and outside the smouldering ruins of Constantinople various Byzantine successor states managed to set themselves up on the territory of what had once been the Byzantine empire. Even by these standards Trebizond was a distinct non-entity. It was ruled by descendants of the previous dynasty but one that had ruled the empire proper and that seemed a good enough reason to claim an imperial title for what was little more than a port and a strip of beach front.
Despite this the "empire" survived for over two hundred years until the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II crushed it with a sort of backhand flick of his wrist when he was trying to swat a fly. Our boy Alexios III however reigned when the empire was at its height. "Height" being in this case a somewhat relative term. It was a strip of coastal territory bounded (and protected) by the Pontic Mountains to the south. It also had some claim on a chunk of the southern coast of Crimea on the other side of the Black Sea. Despite its modest proportions Trebizond was quite prosperous having benefited from the Mongol destruction of Baghdad which made it the only surviving city at the western end of the Silk Road. In fact a good deal of the history of Trebizond involves it benefiting from the destruction of other places by other people.
Coming to power in 1349 Alexios immediately discovered that he had a problem; the fact that the empire was surrounded by enemies any one of which could have crushed it with one fist didn't stop the local nobility from constantly intriguing, rebelling and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It is indicative that Alexios was accepted as emperor because he was young and inexperienced and thus the nobility thought he would be an easy mark. A civil war was fought which Alexios managed to win (or at least survive which is much the same thing) and the nobility were brought more or less to heel. Alexios himself gained quite a bit of revenue from confiscating the estates of traitors. The amount of wealth he gained is an indication of the sheer number of traitors he encountered. Nevertheless he persevered and wound up dying of natural causes which, when you're a ruler with a treacherous and murderous nobility counts as a definite win.
Alexios used the money to endow monasteries and, more sensibly, to build up the defences of Trebizond itself. This didn't stop the occasional adventurer, Italian city state, local despot or disgruntled nobleman from attempting to conquer the place but it did make their job a bit harder.
In foreign relations Alexios relied on his sister and his daughters. That is he married them off to every greedy, ambitious neighbour he could find in the hopes that they might be persuaded not to conquer their father in law. This was actually the backbone of Trapuzentine foreign policy for much of its existence and it seemed to work for as long as the supply of daughters lasted.
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