Oceans of ink had been spilled on the history of the Roman Republic. Idolized by the Western world as the epitome of a successful democracy founded on the rule of law, its rise and success fascinated political philosophers from Antiquity already; the universalist historian, Polybius, provided one of the most enduring explanations for the Republic’s ascendancy, in its mixed constitution, amalgamating the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy:
“The three kinds of government that I spoke of above all shared in the control of the Roman state. And such fairness and propriety in all respects was shown in the use of these three elements for drawing up the constitution and in its subsequent administration that it was impossible even for a native to pronounce with certainty whether the whole system was aristocratic, democratic, or monarchical. This was indeed only natural. For if one fixed one’s eyes on the power of the consuls, the constitution seemed completely monarchical and royal; if on that of the senate it seemed again to be aristocratic; and when one looked at the power of the masses, it seemed clearly to be a democracy.”[1]
Likewise, the subsequent Fall of the Roman Republic has received even more attention from intellectuals, both ancient and modern. It is easy to see why: the Late Republic was a tale of the dissolution of one of the most stable and effective systems of the ancient world through the personal ambitions and grievances of some of the most illustrious and ingenious Romans ever: Marius, Sulla, and the Triumvirs… a captivating era of history whose appeal is evident in how productions about it will never cease, whether in academia or popular media. And what most historians have concluded as its cause is that, Romans, victims of their own success and having no more major external enemies in the Mediterranean, turned against one another. The civil wars, the culprit for the death of the Republic, not only did not stop in Rome’s imperial phase, but only redoubled in frequency and intensity to the extent that it had become a marker of Roman culture, persisting even when the Roman Empire’s hegemony was under threat from numerous crises in Late Antiquity. For the healthy competition of the Republic between Romans of means, outdoing each other in service to the state, had been replaced by a more violent form of contention in the imperial world, where the title of Emperor held ultimate sway and was desired by all. These civil wars may simply be seen as an alternative form of the Republican election in a now monarchical polity with the same political tradition of meritocracy, as proposed by Anthony Kaldellis in his book, The Byzantine Republic, when explaining the regularity of internal conflict in the Empire of the East, the continuation of Rome in an even more hazardous medieval world.[2]
Having established the prevalence of civil warring in Roman political life, from the Fall of the Republic to the Fall of Constantinople, I invite the reader now to discover perhaps the least known of all civil wars, in perhaps the least known of all Roman successor states: a two decade period of strife in the northeasternmost corner of the Roman world during the mid-14th century, which I would call the “Trapezuntine Twenty Years’ Anarchy” for the lack of a better term.
The Empire of Trebizond (1204-1461) was set up by the Megaloi Komnenoi, the offshoot of the original Komnenian Roman imperial Dynasty (1081-1185) after the Sack of Constantinople in 1204. In the tumultuous world of the Late Middle Ages, this little Empire did surprisingly well, outlasting even the Queen of Cities, not surrendering to the Ottomans until 8 years after 1453. Although its longevity may be largely credited to the flexibility of the Trapezuntine regime, the Megaloi Komnenoi proved to be remarkably faithful to the Constantinopolitan imperial heritage of their Komnenian ancestors and Roman tradition; the most concentrated period of examples, for which it is most convenient to conduct a close study, is precisely this Trapezuntine Civil War, through an analysis of which the politics and society of Trebizond would be brought to light.
Prelude
Ἐνιαυτοὶ γὰρ ἤδη πρὸς τοῖς πεντακοσίοις παρω ήκεσαν χίλιοι Ρωμαίοις ὑποταγείσης, καὶ πολλὰ μὲν ἔφυσαν ἐν τῷ μέσῳ … καὶ ὅμως ἄτρεπτος ἡ πόλις ἡμῖν οὖσα διαμένει καὶ ἀμετάβλητος, οὓς ἡγεμόνας εἵλετο στέργουσα καὶ τὴν γιγνομένην αὐτοῖς ἀποδιδοῦσα πειθώ.
For although nearly one thousand five hundred years have passed since our city submitted to the Romans, and many things have arisen during this time and even more passed away … nevertheless, our city remains unshakeable and unchangeable, loving the masters whom it chose for itself and rendering them their due obedience.
- Bessarion of Trebizond, Encomium, on the Roman history of Trebizond[3]
When Bessarion, the future Renaissance Cardinal who almost attained the throne of St Peter, reflected upon his native Trebizond in the 1430s, he realized that the city had been continuously faithful to Roman tradition for a millennium and a half. Since Pompey the Great’s conquest of Pontos until his day, there had not been a day when Trebizond was not lorded over by Romans. A less eye-catching conquest of the Late Republic compared to Gaul or Egypt, Caesar could not overshadow his fellow triumvir forever, not in the accomplishment of durability. For, as Bessarion claims in the 15th century:
“In previous times, dictators, consuls, the senate, and generals led and directed the Roman state; afterward, a monarch took control and passed down to posterity the imperial regime. This form of government has been that preferred by the Roman people and their subjects to this day, even though the imperial capital moved to Byzantion and the eastern half of the empire.”[4]
Neither regime changes, nor the tides of history, ever wavered the Trapezuntines’ devotion to Rome. The Eternal Empire proved to be less perpetual than it boasted; already in Antiquity the West was forever lost to Rome, and while the East defiantly withstood the test of time, its cities were all wrested from Roman hands at one point or another. Not even the mighty Queen of Cities, Constantinople, managed to evade the Crusaders’ ravishment and domination… the only exception was Trebizond and its environs. Its unique geography and citizens formed a special pocket of resistance that fended off not only the flooding of Turks into Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert, but also the Latin partition of the Roman world after the Fourth Crusade.
The Romanitas of Trebizond thrived despite these challenges. The Sack of Constantinople sent Romans seeking refuge in all other parts of their Empire in 1204, and one of those regional centers was Trebizond, taken over by the brothers Alexios I and David Megas Komnenos, grandsons of the last Komnenian Emperor to have ruled in Constantinople, Andronikos I. These Emperors of Trebizond claimed to not only be upholding Roman imperial tradition, but also planned to reclaim the City, the seat of their forefathers.
Circumstance, however, halted their advance, and the Megaloi Komnenoi were confined to merely their holdings around Trebizond while the Palaiologoi in Nicaea recaptured Constantine’s City in 1261. Now transformed into regional hegemons, the Trapezuntine Komnenian Dynasty of the late 13th and early 14th century adapted to their situation and set out to preserve the realm left to them; in time they proved to be not just outstanding custodians of the Roman Pontos, but also innovative and flexible rulers that made their statelet flourish. Especially under Alexios II Megas Komnenos (1297-1330), it could be said that Trebizond reached its apogee: it was an Empire wealthy from Silk Road commercial profit, adorned with the most magnificent churches and monasteries, properly defended by their energetic Emperor and impenetrable mountains, with a rising Academy of Trebizond that attracted intellectuals all over to come learn astronomy……
And everything seemed to be going so well, until a century before Bessarion lifted his plume to extol the virtues of his fatherland for posterity: A civil war broke out.
By the Empire of Trebizond, the Roman constitution praised by Polybius had long changed form: the dual consuls have been replaced by the ruling Megas Komnenos Dynasty, the Senate by the Trapezuntine archontes, but the Roman Populus remained the Roman Populus, and continued to uphold Roman political tradition, even after 1500 years. Harmonious cooperation between the monarchical, aristocratic and democratic elements would still produce results akin to the ideal constitution before: the Emperor issuing decrees and commanding the military, the archontes serving in the bureaucracy and addressing their regional concerns, the people approving or condemning the conduct of their superiors; but their dysfunction led to discord. The Emperor relied heavily on the support of the people and the loyalty of his archontes, and an example of one who lacked both would be Georgios Megas Komnenos (1266-1280), uncle of Alexios II. An ambitious autocrat with grand designs that didn’t sit well with his Empire, Georgios was deposed when the archontes betrayed him to his Mongol overlord Abaqa Khan in a faraway location, and when he attempted to regain his throne with a foreign army, the people of Trebizond repelled him from their gates, showing their preference for the new Emperor, Alexios II’s father Ioannes II Megas Komnenos. Georgios, nicknamed the “Wanderer” by his own subjects, exemplified this dysfunction; but since his rivalry with the archontes and the populace did not take place within the capital city, these struggles ended relatively quickly and bloodlessly. This would not be the case if Trebizond itself became the battlefield of these three classes.
The First Decade (1330-1340)[5]
Ημέτερος ἥλιος ὑπὸ γῆν, καὶ σκότους ἡμεῖς εὐθέως ἀνάμεστοι· τὸ ἡμέτερον ἔδυ φῶς καὶ ζόφωσις ἡμᾶς εὐθὺς καὶ γνόφος ἐκάλυψεν, ὁ φαίνων λύχνος ἀπέσβυστο καὶ ὠδῖνες θανάτου παραυτίκα καὶ χείμαρροι πικρίας ἡμᾶς ἐξετάραξαν.
Our sun is under the earth, and we are immediately mixed with darkness; our light has set and darkness has straightaway covered us, the shining lamp has been extinguished, and the pains of death have dawned upon us immediately, and torrents of bitterness have disturbed us.
- Konstantinos Loukites, Encomium to Alexios II, on the death of Alexios II which unleashed the following civil war[6]
Alexios II the Great Komnenos died suddenly from bubonic plague in 1330 and left his throne to his son, Andronikos III Megas Komnenos, a ruler unkeen on sharing power. As Alexios II was a model Komnenian Emperor, he sired a swarm of children, and out of his six descendants, four were male. Michael “Azachoutlou” and Georgios “Achpougas” Megas Komnenos were two of Alexios’ sons who were unfortunate enough to be in the Trapezuntine capital with Andronikos, and they perished by their jealous brother’s whims. Unbeknownst to him, in rediscovering the timeless Ancient Roman tradition of fratricide, Andronikos would unleash another Classical Roman plague: civil war, and of a much more brutal caliber than that of their Palaiologan contemporaries to the west, who were learning to act ever more humanely.
Andronikos was repaid in kind by fate, and he ruled just a bit over a year before dying in early 1332, acceded by his young son Manuel II Megas Komnenos, an 8 year old boy who reigned for only 8 months, for the sins of his father tarnished his reputation among the people. Not even the success of Manuel’s military against the Turks of Chalybia could save him from the gruesome coup about to take place, as Andronikos failed to assassinate his last brother, a loose end residing in distant Constantinople named Basileios Megas Komnenos. The final son of Alexios II was invited to return home and seize power, and he usurped from his nephew, then purged the palace of the boy’s supporters, the megas doux (admiral of the imperial fleet) Lekes Tzatzintzaios and his family, in the most sanguine fashion: the new Emperor ordered the megas doux and his son, the megas domestikos (commander-in-chief) Tzambas, to be executed, while his wife Syrikaina was stoned to death. The replacement for Tzatzintzaios was Ioannes the Eunuch, who Basileios trusted to be his loyal megas doux, but instead raised the flag of revolt on behalf of the helpless Manuel in 1333. To tackle the problem, Basileios applied the brutally direct solution of his late brother Andronikos: he simply murdered his hitherto imprisoned nephew.
To maintain legitimacy after shedding so much Roman blood, Basileios turned to the sovereign of Constantinople (and nominally the whole Roman world) Emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos, who sent his illegitimate daughter Eirene Palaiologina to wed the Emperor of Trebizond in 1334, but in the coming years his popularity did not surge as he wished, rather plummeted. His ruthless political persecution, kinslaying, exacerbated by a recent Turkic raid that came dangerously close to the imperial capital in 1335, caused widespread discontent among the Trapezuntine populace, who demonstrated their dissatisfaction by pelting stones at their Emperor on the occasion of a solar eclipse during Lent 1336. For the subjects of the Komnenian Empire, to whom astronomy is almost a national science,[7] this portent was none other than a sign of divine displeasure. In the same year, the stargazing Trapezuntines produced a horoscope, which grimly predicted rebellions of the grandees, further restlessness from the people and disobedience of the army.[8]
And yet, perhaps not all was against Basileios? Since astronomy was a study in which Trebizond surpassed Constantinople considerably, there was a great influx of Constantinopolitan scholars into Pontos, eager to learn from the renowned Academy of Trebizond. One of them was the distinguished author, Andreas Libadenos,[9] who arrived in Trebizond around 1336. In his most famous work, his Periegesis, an account detailing his travels and impressions across the Eastern Mediterranean, he refers to Basileios as “everlastingly remembered (ἀειμνήστου)”[10] and generally writes of this Emperor with a positive outlook. Perhaps this is an early showing of how those aligned with Constantinople would support a Constantinople-backed Emperor, as was later developed in the civil war, but a more plausible explanation could simply be that the political climate of the Trapezuntine Twenty Years’ Anarchy period was unsuitable for honest assessments from its intellectuals. Michael Panaretos, the Trapezuntine historian who sourced much of the narration today, is neutral towards Basileios in his chronicle, and Libadenos, who witnessed the unfolding of the pending chaos firsthand, also left much unsaid. Both later served a new master, the eventual victor of the civil war, Alexios III, son of Basileios. It would be unwise to heap criticism upon the father of their current lord, whose very birth was also a topic of controversy.
The future Alexios III was born with the name Ioannes in 1338, as the second son of Basileios, but not of Empress Eirene Palaiologina, no. He and his elder brother, confusingly named Alexios before Ioannes-Alexios III later took the name, were born to the Emperor by his mistress, lady Eirene of Trebizond. The following year, Basileios even married the Trapezuntine Eirene while still legally bound to the Palaiologan Eirene, becoming the only bigamous Roman Emperor in history. Although tacitly allowed by the clergy of Trebizond, the Patriarch of Constantinople objected to the mistreatment of the legitimate Empress Palaiologina. Then in 1340, Basileios died suddenly, leaving his succession unclear. The factionalism brewing at Trebizond for years now finally burst out, leading to a full scale civil war involving most of Trapezuntine society from 1340 until the triumph of Alexios III a decade later.
In the words of Andreas Libadenos, whose Constantinopolitan connections brought upon him much misfortune for the next few years when more local-leaning parties were ascendant: “approaching the terrible end of the Basileios Komnenos, as if some swirl of misfortunes and calamities descended upon us with the terrible plagues of the Egyptians…For now that he has departed to God, the terrible things of evils have been unleashed upon us…”[11]
[1] The Histories of Polybius, Vol. III of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1923, p297.
[2] Kaldellis, A. (2015). The Byzantine Republic : people and power in New Rome. Harvard University Press, 138.
[3] Bessarion, Encomium to Trebizond, translated in Kennedy, S., Michaēl Panaretos, & Bēssariōn. (2019). Two works on Trebizond. Harvard University Press, 157
[4] Ibid, 157-159.
[5] For this section, the historical narration is directly sourced from the chronicle of Michael Panaretos, in Kennedy, S., Michaēl Panaretos, & Bēssariōn (2019). Two works on Trebizond. Harvard University Press, 9-13. Other supplementary information, like the writings of Andreas Libadenos and modern scholarship, are cited regularly.
[6] Loukites, K., Encomium to Alexios II Komnenos, in Κωνσταντίνου του πρωτονοταρίου και πρωτοβεστιαρίου του Λουκίτου επιτάφιον εις τον εν βασιλεύσιν αοίδιμον εκείνον και τρισμακάριστον κύριον Αλέξιον τον Κομνηνόν, Παπαδόπουλος-Κεραμεύς, Α. (1891), Ανάλεκτα Ιεροσολυμιτικής Σταχυολογίας Ι, St. Petersburg, 423.
[7] Shukurov, R. (1995). AlMA: the blood of the Grand Komnenoi. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 19(1), 180.
[8] Karpov, S. История Трапезундской империи, Серия Византийская библиотека, 217.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Libadenos, A., Periegesis, inΠαρανικας, Μ. (1874), Συμβολη εἰς την του Ποντου ἱστοριαν, Ἀνδρεου Λιβαδηνου περιηγησις, 34.
[11] Ibid 25
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