Alexios I Komnenos

Alexios I Komnenos seized the Byzantine throne in 1081, when the empire was losing ground on every side, and held it until his death in 1118. Fighting Normans, Pechenegs and Seljuk Turks in turn, he stopped the decline and began the recovery known as the Komnenian restoration. His request for western soldiers helped set off the First Crusade, and his daughter Anna Komnene made him the hero of her history, the Alexiad.

Alexios was born around 1057, the son of John Komnenos and the formidable Anna Dalassene, and a nephew of the emperor Isaac I. As a young officer he fought the Seljuks under Romanos IV and then served Michael VII and Nikephoros III against rebels. He put down the revolt of the Norman mercenary Roussel de Bailleul by 1076, and as commander of the western field army from 1078 he defeated the usurpers Nikephoros Bryennios and Nikephoros Basilakes.

With the Normans of southern Italy preparing to invade, Alexios and his brother Isaac joined a plot backed by the powerful Doukas family and the empress Maria of Alania. They slipped out of Constantinople in February 1081 while their mother kept the emperor distracted from sanctuary in Hagia Sophia, gathered an army, bribed the western troops guarding the walls and entered the city on 1 April. To keep Doukas support, Alexios married Irene Doukaina and accepted the young Constantine Doukas as co-emperor, an arrangement he dropped after his own son John was born in 1087. For years his mother effectively ran the government while he campaigned.

Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond took Dyrrachium and Corfu and pushed into Thessaly. After several defeats, Alexios paid the German king Henry IV 360,000 gold pieces to attack the Normans in Italy, and when Guiscard died in 1085 most losses were recovered. The Pechenegs, allied with heretical Paulician and Bogomil rebels in Thrace, defeated him in 1087. When they returned in 1090 while the Turkish emir Tzachas threatened Constantinople by sea, Alexios allied with the Cumans, said to number 40,000, and destroyed the Pechenegs at Levounion on 29 April 1091.

Alexios had courted the papacy from about 1090, and in 1095 his envoys asked Pope Urban II for help at Piacenza. He wanted mercenaries; instead the pope launched the First Crusade. Alexios moved the disorganised People's Crusade quickly into Asia Minor, where the Turks annihilated it in 1096. From the larger armies of princes such as Godfrey of Bouillon and Bohemond he extracted oaths to hand over former imperial territory. Nicaea surrendered to him in 1097, and after the victory at Dorylaeum his forces regained much of western Asia Minor and the islands of Chios and Rhodes. Relations soured at Antioch, which Bohemond kept, but in 1108 Bohemond was forced to accept Byzantine overlordship by the Treaty of Devol.

In 1092 Alexios replaced the badly debased gold coinage with a new, purer coin, the hyperpyron, the basis of a reformed currency system. He governed through a web of marriage alliances, binding the great families to his own and inventing new court titles for relatives. This reduced the risk of revolt, though he still faced more rebellions than any other emperor, and it later made kinship more important than merit. His last years brought harsh persecution of the Bogomils, whose leader Basil he had burned, and renewed war with the Seljuks, whom he defeated at Philomelion in 1117. He died on 15 August 1118 and was succeeded, despite his wife's support for Anna and her husband, by his son John II.

Our 1100 map shows the Byzantine Empire after the First Crusade, with western Asia Minor recovered under Alexios and the Seljuks holding the interior.