cahn

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

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From:

selenak

In the latest episode of the History of Byzantium podcast, the podcaster, Robin, interviewed (not for the first time) Dr. Anthony Kaldellis, one of the top current authorities on Byzantium, and this time he cajoled the historian to provide a personal "Top Ten Greatest Emperors" list, which is the kind of fannish thing academic historians otherwise avoid or at least don't admit it. It made for a very interesting and amusing episode. Now, most of the Emperors won't be familiar to you guys (yet?), but I thought I'd share a bit about those who are, and what Kaldellis said about them. Also, important to note that he did give his criteria for how he defines "great" - as having mastered the various sides of the job, not just military but political, in a way that the positives outweigh the negatives of your reign, and/or as having left a lasting big and transformative impact on the realm. Oh, and several of the Emperors he picked were ones who became Emperors at a time of crisis and had to pick up from a devastating situation, which if they mananaged to steer the realm into a recovery makes it all the more impressive. Hence, for example, Leo III, who was Emperor when the big original Islam Conquest wave had pummeled Byzantium for almost a century to the point where the Arabs had pushed the Romans back to Constantinople itself and were besieging it - it was this Leo who managed to get Constantinope through both of the big Arab sieges, the second one lasting over a year, and to turn the tide so that Byzantium started to go on the offensive again. (With his son Constantine V. - another one who made the list who according to the podcaster was grossily vilified by later historians because under him iconoclasm reigned and all the later historians were iconophiles - being the one who started to reconquer the Byzantine territories in a big way. Since the podcast has gone through the 1204 Fourth Crusade sacking, the contrast between Constantinope withstanding over a year of an Arab army camped outside and collapsing centuries later when a bunch of French, German and Venetian soldiers with far less manpower were is indeed great and points to the difference in leadership.

So, of the Emperors we already talked about, on the list at place 7 is Alexios I. Komnenos, the first of the Komnenos Emperors and hero of his daughter Anna's Alexiad, who came to power after the collapse of the Macedonian dynasty post Basil II led to a series of no good Emperors, ambitious generals fighting each other, and no one able to muster a defense against the Turks and Normans taking this as their cue for invading from all sides. It was this Alexios who as I told you,

cahn, after taking power thought he might be able to solve his problem by writing to the Pope and asking said Pope to rouse some Latins to help against the Turks, with the Pope (Urban, currently ousted of Rome and residing in France because Henry IV HRE had installed an antipope in Rome) taking this as his cue to regain leadership of Christendom by calling for the First Crusade and telling folk to go to Jerusalem.

Alexios isn't the only Komnenos on the list; also there is his grandson Manuel Komnenos, despite the severe downside of not having killed cousin Andronikos. Both Komenoi gets credit for having been dealt a bad card by fate but playing it very well and with a mixture of diplomacy, guile and determination reestablishing (Alexios) or keeping (Manuel) the Byzantine Empire for what would turn out the last time as a serious power to be reckoned with among the other big powers of the era.

Also on the list: the first villain of Judith Tarr's novel The Eagle's Daughter, John Tsimitsikes. (At No.5, no less.) Professor Kaldellis argues that Uncle Nicopheros Phokas was a great general but a really bad Emperor with his complete lack of political skills and ability to piss everyone off instead, and that his murder caused not a single riot in a city famous for its riots but everyone going "yeah, we're cool with that" when before he became Emperor they'd hailed the guy as the bringer of victory, greatest hero ever says something about this. So John inherited (well, murdered to get) a mess, and in record time managed to smooth everything out, including relations with Otto I HRE (whom Nicopheros had refused a Byzantine bride for not yet Otto II to) by providing his niece, Theophanu, and in his subsequent reign managed to keep both the army and the people happy; he was a good general in his own right but importantly didn't give Constantinople the impression they were living under a military dictatorship and that the state existed to feed the army as Nicopheros had done. And he won back the church/the patriarch. That he did so by pinning the entire murder on Theophano the older ("Who as far as I can tell had done nothing wrong" says Kaldellis) and ruined her reputation with historians forever was morally wrong but statesmanlike right, as it allowed the Patriarch to accept him and for unity of church and state to be restored.

John is at No.5 and thus outranks Theophano's eternally unmarried son Basil II (who is at point 7) despite Basil's fame as the Bulgar Slayer because while Basil had his realm in so good a grip as to be able to remain away from the capital for years, that's exactly one of the downsides in Kalldellis' pov: Basil's reign had inner peace and outward won wars (he was called "a cat among mice"), yes, and lasted longer than any other Roman Emperor's reign, but there was no corresponding floroushing of the arts and of civil life (as, say, in the time of Augustus), because the Emperor was hardly ever in the capital and didn't support any alternate centre of culture, either. Plus, of course, the lack of a succession arrangement by preventing his brother who would succeed him from having any responsibilities before that to learn the ropes, and his brother's daughters' from marrying, thus knowingly killing the dynasty, and not establishing a top general to succeed him, either.

Not on the list at all: Justinian. Who had gigantic plusses but also gigantic minuses and in the end the minuses outweighed the plusses for Kaldellis, not least because all the wars Justinian started to restablish the Roman Empire in Italy and Spain were just too much in the end for his successors to handle and completely depleted the previously well filled treasury.

So who is number 1? It is... drumroll... Constantine. Because, says Kaldellis, you can't beat Constantine for sheer impact. Choosing the backwarter army garnison of Byzantium and turning it into Constantinople being one of the two biggest transformative changes he was responsible for. He did it for strategic reasons, because of the way a city at this geographical point could be defended in a way original Rome never could be and because it was able to connect East and West, and it did all that and more for millennia. It's questionable whether any other location (say hello, Ravenna) could have done that and became what Constantinople did, and no Constantinople, no East Roman Empire for the next millennium, and no Istambul.

The other big one is of course Christianity, having gone through its greatest prosecution wave under Diocletian just a generation earlier. The decision to legitimize it and do make it in fact a state religion changed and shaped not just the Roman Empire but all of world history from this point onwards. Now whether it was for the better or worse than if he hadn't done that is arguable, but what can't be argued is that it was a transformative change of an unequalled magnitude until the Reformation came, and perhaps even beyond that.

Kaldellis: "All this said? He was a murderous bastard. I mean. Never mind Nero, there's no other Emperor until then who killed that many members of his own family. Being a subject of Constantine was arguably good to be. But a family member?"

Pre-Constantine Emperors and their record at killing family members: hmmm. Let's see about Nero and him:

Nero: his mother, his stepbrother (and cousin), his first wife (and cousin, sister to said stepbrother). Possibly his second wife as well, though the story of Nero kicking Poppea in the stomach when she was pregnant is debated and might have been made up.

Constantine: his wife Fausta, his oldest son Crispus, his nephew (son of one of his sisters), his father-in-law (Maximian, though that depends whether you count "forced to commit suicide", his brother-in-law (Maxentius, the guy defeated in the "In this sign you will conquer" battle at the Milvian Bridge).

Mildred, you're better with the later Emperors, how about Caracalla, didn't he off his brother? Anyone else from the family?

And then there's good old Augustus, the very first Emperor. I suppose it depends whom you count as family and whether you include babies.

Augustus: killed (as in ordered dead, not personally killed, which is true for Constantine as well): Caesarion ("too many Caesars are not good", he's supposed to have said), Uncle Julius Caesar's son by Cleopatra, Marc Antony's oldest son by Fulvia, Antyllus, and many years later Antony's younger son by Fulvia as well who supposedly had a love affair with Augustus' daughter Julia; said Julia had a daughter also called Julia (which is why novelists usually call her Julilla), who like her mother ended banished by Augustus to an island, and her newborn baby exposed to die under the pretext of being illegitimate (though Julilla's husband denied any adultery had taken place and was banished as well for doing so). Then there's the question of just who ordered the equally banished grandson Postumus' death - Postumus was executed immediately after Augustus' death, and the order could have come from Tiberius, Livia or possibly Augustus himself (in the event of his death).

Anyway, back to Constantine - Robin the podcaster asks whether Professor Kaldellis counts Constantine destroying the Tetrarchy as a minus or a plus, and whether in his opinion Constantine needed to do that in the situation he was in.

Kaldellis: "Oh no, he didn't have to. That was sheer ambition. However, the Tetrarchy had been going off the rails at this point already, long before Constantine made his play. It's questionable whether it was ever a workable model beyond Diocletian's personal reign."

Mildred? Going by everything I've read for your Yuletide Madness treat, he's right there, but I didn't go in too deep.

From:

cahn

This is greeeeat! I'm so glad you are keeping me up to date on this. (I'm inching closer to Canossa in the German History podcast; not yet there. But this is all making me vaguely think more about rereading the John Julius Norwich's Short History of Byzantium book, which I realize isn't the most accurate but which I remember being quite entertaining. (Though I obviously didn't retain very much.)

a personal "Top Ten Greatest Emperors" list, which is the kind of fannish thing academic historians otherwise avoid or at least don't admit it.

Heeee! But they totally should more often! (Though I can see that this would just lead to unending arguments!)

It was this Alexios who as I told you, [personal profile] cahn, after taking power thought he might be able to solve his problem by writing to the Pope and asking said Pope to rouse some Latins to help against the Turks

Ah, yes, he sounded quite reasonable :)

that his murder caused not a single riot in a city famous for its riots but everyone going "yeah, we're cool with that"

Ha! Okay, yeah, that sounds fair :)

Not on the list at all: Justinian. Who had gigantic plusses but also gigantic minuses and in the end the minuses outweighed the plusses for Kaldellis, not least because all the wars Justinian started

Huh! Okay, that makes sense.

Choosing the backwarter army garnison of Byzantium and turning it into Constantinople being one of the two biggest transformative changes he was responsible for. He did it for strategic reasons, because of the way a city at this geographical point could be defended in a way original Rome never could be and because it was able to connect East and West, and it did all that and more for millennia. It's questionable whether any other location (say hello, Ravenna) could have done that and became what Constantinople did, and no Constantinople, no East Roman Empire for the next millennium, and no Istambul.

Oh, that's really interesting!
Okay, tell me about Ravenna? The only thing I know about it is that it has lots of mosaics (I would love to go see these someday) and that it is where my boy Dante went after being exiled from Florence (I'd love to visit it for that reason too). Wiki tells me it was the capital of the Western Roman Empire for a little while?

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Mildred, you're better with the later Emperors, how about Caracalla, didn't he off his brother? Anyone else from the family?

I, haha, maybe ten years ago I was, but these days I can't remember who on earth killed who, other than yes, Caracalla killed Geta. I do remember that.

However, the Tetrarchy had been going off the rails at this point already, long before Constantine made his play. It's questionable whether it was ever a workable model beyond Diocletian's personal reign."

Mildred? Going by everything I've read for your Yuletide Madness treat, he's right there, but I didn't go in too deep.

From everything I've read, I agree, but one day we'll do Classics salon and do a deeper dive!

(I have to say, I've *never* studied any historical period as deeply as we're studying 18th century history. Truly, the alchemy is powerful, and it is the *best*.)