Birthday Greetings #38

Happy birthday to Manuel II Palaiologos, Byzantine emperor.  Manuel was the second son of the utterly worthless emperor John V whose forty year reign was an unmitigated catalogue of disasters.  Even Manuel's worst detractors would have to admit he did better.  He was named heir to the throne because his older brother revolted against their father (he did this twice and managed to imprison John both times.  John was imprisoned on no fewer than four separate occasions by various enemies during his reign).  Manuel managed to free his father with Turkish help (the Turks rather liked the idea of a babbling halfwit on the Byzantine throne) and for his pains was sent as a vassal/hostage to the Turkish camp.  In this capacity he had the cheerful experience of being part of the Turkish army besieging the city of Philadelphia which was the last Byzantine outpost in Asia Minor.

When his father finally answered his few remaining subject's prayers and died Manuel sneaked away from the Turkish camp and was crowned in Constantinople to the irritation of the Sultan.  The Turkish Sultan at the time was a chap named Bayezid whose nickname "the Thunderbolt" gives a pretty good indication of what happened to people who irritated him.  Bayezid swept through the remaining Byzantine lands like, well, a thunderbolt and laid siege to Constantinople.  The siege would go on for eight years.

Some five years in Manuel entrusted governorship of Constantinople to his nephew (the son of that brother who revolted against their father) and travelled to western Europe hoping to gain aid.  He didn't gain aid although he gained a good reputation.  He is the only Byzantine emperor to visit England and he spent a good deal of time in Paris charming the locals, impressing them with his learning, writing treatises and lobbying for aid.  One can't help wondering if the role of distinguished refugee was somewhat more appealing than that of first candidate for head on a spike when Bayezid makes it over the walls which would have been his position in Constantinople.

It didn't come to that though.  Manuel and the empire were saved by sheer blind luck.  In 1402 Bayezid tangled with possibly the only person in the world more psychotically dangerous than he was, a Mongol descended warlord by the name of Timur.  At the Battle of Ankara Timur ripped the heart and guts out of the Ottoman army and captured Bayezid himself who (according to legend at least) spent the rest of his life in an iron cage.  With the siege lifted and the remnants of the Ottoman army cheerfully backing various contenders for the throne Manuel and the tattered shreds of his empire were given a breathing space.  Some adroit diplomacy with one of the Ottoman contenders won back the city of Thessalonica and a small scale military campaign recaptured the European coast of the Sea of Marmara.  A quick glance at Constantinople's location will show that this was essentially recapturing your own front verandah but it was the first victory the Byzantines had had in decades and morale rose accordingly.  With this under his belt Manuel took his army to the Peloponnese (capturing a few Aegean islands along the way) to strengthen the defences of what was now the largest patch of territory left to the empire.

It couldn't last of course.  As Manuel grew older his son and heir became more prominent and swiftly demonstrated that he had the survival instincts of a lemming on crack.  While Manuel had skillfully navigated through the various tides of the Ottoman civil war and had wound up as a cautious friend of the eventual victor his son John rapidly managed to irritate him immensely and towards the end of Manuel's life Constantinople was once again under siege.  The new sultan was eventually bought off with a fair amount of grovelling and such money as the empire had left but Manuel was now a tired and broken old man.  He retired to a monastery and died in 1425.  He would probably have been astonished to learn that the empire would survive him by another twenty eight years.