Sunday, March 24, 2019

Birthday Greetings #77

Happy birthday to Andronikos III Palaiologos, Byzantine emperor.  He was one of the last Byzantine rulers who could claim the title emperor without people sniggering behind his back.  As a young man he inadvertently murdered his brother, caused his father to die of grief and launched a civil war against his grandfather, the reigning emperor, who perhaps understandably had decided the young man wasn't an appropriate person to inherit the imperial title.


Actually Andronikos didn't inherit the imperial title.  He beat his grandfather in a rather desultory civil war which lasted on and off for seven years and pinched the title while the old man was still alive.  In fairness it has to be pointed out that his grandfather had been a lousy emperor and there were plenty of people who apparently thought a young, reckless, murder happy degenerate might be an improvement.  Strangely they were right.


Andronikos wasn't particularly interested in running the empire.  What he liked was war, hunting and parties.  He got plenty of all three.  He was however a delegator of genius.  At least he got the credit when the person he delegated to turned out to be a genius.  One of the ambitious young men who had hitched their wagon to his star was a guy named John Kantakouzenos who turned out to be a brilliant administrator and a gifted diplomat.  Andronikos cheerfully dumped the day to day running of the empire on him while he got on with the wars.


The wars didn't exactly go well.  In fact "not well" is probably a pretty good description of how the wars went.  This wasn't entirely Andronikos' fault.  He had inherited (or rather stole) a politico-military disaster from his grandfather.  The Turks had overrun much of Asia Minor while the Serbs and Bulgarians were squabbling over which of them was going to overrun the Balkans mopping up the empire on the way through.  An attempt to halt the Turks led to a defeat in which the emperor was wounded.  After that he stuck to wars on the western side of the Sea of Marmara.  He got into a war with Bulgaria and lost.  Then the empire was invaded by Serbia.  Andronikos won that one by assassinating the Serbian commander (a turncoat Byzantine) and hustling the disorganised Serbs out of the empire before they really figured out what was going on.


While actual wars were somewhat problematic military heavy diplomacy turned out a little better (thanks largely to Kantakouzenos) and the regions of Thessaly and Epirus were restored to imperial control through a combination of sweet talking and enthusiastic sabre rattling.  These were not inconsequential gains and if Andronikos had been given time to consolidate them he might have been able to rebuild the empire as a reasonably solid state.  Unfortunately the selfish bastard chose this moment to inconveniently die of malaria.  His son was only nine years old but fortunately the loyal and capable John Kantakouzenos was there to act as regent.  You can see where this is going.  The ensuing civil war tore what was left of the empire into shreds.

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