Children of the Fatherland: Antioch, the Beacon of Civilisation in the East

In these years, when Antioch was the bastion of Christianity in the East, when it stood alone against the heathen tide, holding a single fragile flame against the night – one might have expected it to be a grim fortress, barren stone and marching troops, with all its wealth going to its army. But such was not the case. Not only the finest soldiers, but also the best artists and the most erudite scholars flocked to Antioch, casting their defiance against the barbarian kingdoms of the East – and the West. There was, perhaps, a slightly febrile tone to the discussions, an apocalyptic note to the art; men who gather on the edge of a cliff to light fires and dance threats at powerful foes do not produce calm philosophy or paintings of pastoral landscapes. Nonetheless in these years Antioch became not only Christendom’s bastion, but also its beacon; a lighthouse against the encroaching dark.

Drawing to itself the wealth and sophistication of Greek civilisation, the thematic court of Antioch was filled with luminaries, a near-embarrassment of riches; starting with Arkadios himself, whose brilliance lay in politics and intrigue, but extending down to all the great and many minor offices of the court. The outpouring of art and scholarship found its natural counterpart in diplomatic successes within the Empire, starting with the marriage of Arkadios to the daughter of heirless Emperor Leo. Although younger than Arkadios, the Emperor, disappointed in the deaths of his sons and his inability to stem the disintegration of his realm, seemed like much the older man. Thus his passing of the torch to the younger Komnenos dynasty, in the person of his grandson Thomas, may be deemed a fitting accompaniment to the movement of the center of Greek culture.

Observe the brilliance, the education, the sheer magnificence of my court!

Although the Marshal, admittedly, would do better to concentrate on Vegetius and not Ovid.

Observe also that they learn intrigue early in Antioch, as much as in Byzantium. Young Thomas is getting it with his mother’s milk.

Some call it a blessing of the True God; but the honest philosophers of Antioch’s court observe that randomness plays favourites, and where some people collect undeserved joys, others get no luck whatsoever. Perhaps there is balance in all things; if so, surely the Bagratuni dynasty is compensating for the rise of the Komnenoi. Zoe Kabakes has died, without getting her revenge – or, at any rate, it has yet to unfold. For in her declining years she forswore all vengeance and publicly forgave Arkadios – who perforce had to deny yet again that there was anything to forgive. Not that the denial did him any good; in the public mind, he is a killer of children, and that is that. What’s more, for her words the Church has canonized Zoe. Not all vengeance is written in fire and blood; it may be, as the centuries pass, that Zoe will have had the best of the contest after all. But that is for the future. In the present day Zoe is dead and her bastard son David will never sit the throne of Georgia.

It is true that he has found a minor countship in inland Anatolia, a hardscrabble fiefdom of sheep and mountains; held, in defiance of Antioch’s barricade, of the Persian throne. David is not the only minor Anatolian lord to have found a Persian sanctuary from the perennial civil war. But he is the only one to have come to the personal attention of Arkadios… and the only one whose title, passing back through his father Giorgi, would come to a Komnenoi scion – specifically, to his nephew Zenobios. And the only one whose son, also named Giorgi, is dead (so the bitter jest runs) of completely natural causes. In particular, what could be more natural than to die, when your heartbeat is all that stands in the way of a Komnenus inheritance? What could be more natural than to die, when someone puts strychnine in your oatmeal, ground glass in your milk, hemlock in your birthday cake? Why, to survive in such circumstances would violate the order of things! So the gallows-joke runs, in barren upland provinces of Anatolia, where no luck ever comes except it is bad.

Family tree of David and Zenobios

Children of the Fatherland: The Tragedy of Ioannes

What shall it profit a man, if he shall win a kingdom, and lose his son?

By any public measure, the life of Arkadios must be considered a success. Under his rule the theme of Antioch had expanded north and south, forming a barrier between the infidel and the Mediterranean behind which the Roman Empire could fight its civil wars without interruption. His eldest son, beneficiary of the Antiochene Intrigue, ruled a Caucasian princedom; and due partly to the reputation for ruthlessness Arkadios had acquired during that affair, even the most Byzantine intriguer at the court of Constantinople feared to climb a ladder of daggers stuck in Komnenoi backs. And to crown his achievements, after making the Loyal Peace with the Emperor Dukas by cleaning his court and making him master in his own house, he had cemented the alliance by marrying the Emperor’s daughter, Pulcheria.

And yet public achievement was balanced by private tragedy. At this distance in time it is hard to untangle cause and effect even for the great matters of the day, much less for the internal affairs of families; we cannot say why Ioannes, alone of Arkadios’s sons, should have been the cause of so much grief. Did he feel neglected during his father’s long campaigns? Jealous of his elder brother’s inheritance? For much of his childhood he was attended mainly by servants; was there some darker secret, some unloyal corrupter of youth? We do not know. But where motivation is murky, the facts remain. We know that Ioannes pushed the undoubted privileges of upper-class Roman males well beyond the accepted limits. To the usual moneys paid to dower no-longer-chaste female servants, an expected expense, were added large sums in compensation for actual beatings. Men in Ioannes’s position did not need to use force merely to fill their beds; although dowries were by convention listed in family accounts as “compensation for rape”, this was understood by all to be a polite fiction, avoiding the charge of adultery against the women. Something other than the ordinary randiness of teenaged humans must have been involved.

Arkadios, juggling his many other commitments, nonetheless found time to respond to his son’s crimes – as we may rightly call them at this distance, though at the time they were often referred to, even by enemies of the Komnenoi, as ‘antics’. The recorded public rebukes followed, no doubt, private admonishments; and as Arkadios, like his father, was a conscious reviver of Roman traditions, including the custom of patria potestas, we need not believe that Ioannes’s punishments were limited to hard words. Nor can Arkadios be accused of having used only the stick; as soon as he was of age, Ioannes was allowed to accompany his father on campaign, and given high rank in the army. Indeed this was the most successful of Arkadios’s dealings with his son; on campaign they appear to have found a natural camaraderie, and we hear nothing of ill discipline on Ioannes’s part (although it may be pointed out that rape of enemy women was not considered bad discipline at the time), and much of his military achievements.

But Antioch could not remain forever at war, and in peacetime Ioannes appears to have had all the vices of the combat soldier confined to a big-city garrison. Even if we discount a large part of the stories of drunken brawling as slanders by Komnenoi enemies, we are left with the fact that, in 1119, the city apparently became too hot for him and he left for an extended tour of the provinces. Why Arkadios chose not to simply suppress the mobs baying for his son’s life we cannot know. It is possible that he feared such an order would not be obeyed; but as his soldiers were recruited largely from estates outside the city, rather than from the citymen they would be suppressing, it does not seem likely. Did he feel there was justice in the complaints? Or did he hope that his son could be shocked into reform? Or perhaps he was, for once in his life, battered by events into an uncharacteristic vacillation? We do not know; but it is certain that Ioannes’s bachelor villa, separate from the palace, was put to the torch, that he himself only barely escaped with his life, and that he then left the city for a year, until things had cooled down.

Even so, Ioannes remained sufficiently unpopular in Antioch that Arkadios thought it wise to get him out of the way for a further period; to this end, he made his son military governor of distant Monreal, with the task of converting the heathens there. At this point, it appears that Arkadios had given up on reforming his scapegrace son, and limited himself to damage control; let Ioannes work out his urges, if he must, on poverty-stricken infidel women rather than the daughters of wealthy merchants with connections at court.

Alas, the likes of Ioannes are not so easily disposed of; whatever else one may say of him, he had the Komnenoi genius and strength of will in full measure, and applied it unceasingly to getting into trouble. Arkadios had exiled him to rule the shepherders of dusty Monreal in order to save him from the Antiochene mob; Ioannes took it as a personal insult. Knowing that he could not hope to win an insurrection with the surly militia of his Moslem province, he instead turned – the apple does not fall far from the tree – to thoughts of assassination; but he lacked his father’s subtle hand, or perhaps the money to buy the best. His brother Zenobios survived the ambush he had arranged, and the surviving assassins confessed under torture who had hired them.

This was, perhaps, the one thing that could have roused Arkadios to his full measure of ruthlessness. Any other crime he could have condoned; against any outside foe, he would have fought to protect his son, even the black sheep of the family. But for Komnenoi to plot against Komnenoi was unforgivable; and in a letter to Zenobios, Arkadios took upon himself the full responsibility of a paterfamilias, of keeping order within the family. Nor was this an empty phrase; Arkadios raised no armies and sent no agents. Instead he himself travelled to Monreal, and was welcomed by his son; and as they sat at meat, Arkadios drew his dagger, and with his own hands killed Ioannes. Thus he maintained the unity of the Komnenoi, and their reputation for utter ruthlessness when roused to anger; but it is reported, and we may well believe, that he wept as he struck.

Such is the tragedy of Ioannes; and the judgement of Arkadios has stood the test of time. “My son Ioannes”, he says in his Memoirs, “was not a good man. But a father cannot cease to love his child, merely because the child is in the wrong. And it is not right that parents should bury their children.”

O my son Ioannes, o Ioannes, my son, my son!

Children of the Fatherland: 1086-1093 session summary

A very brief session summary for 1086-1093. For my part, the main excitement was that my ruler came of age, and I married him to the eldest daughter of the King of Georgia. Unfortunately, on the death of that worthy’s old wife, he got himself a new one, who proved fertile. Happily for me, her first son was declared a bastard, saving me from the trouble of taking action; and I got the second one with a nice clean assassination, Int 18 versus 11. It’s nice when inconvenient people have Depression and Pneumonia and other traits which make them easy targets.

I was, nonetheless, a bit in doubt about whether to take the opportunity, on the grounds that the Komnenoi are utterly loyal to the Empire. Arkadios has even acquired the Loyalist trait. But I came to the conclusion that, although the game won’t allow it, there’s no particular historical reason why a Roman citizen couldn’t take a King title and continue to consider himself a subject of the Emperor, or Senate as the case might be. (And indeed there are several cases, although mostly from the Republic, of local rulers making the Roman Senate the heir of their crown. Usually there would be a Legion nearby on completely unrelated business.) Thus, for AAR purposes I’ll consider myself Proconsul, not King, of Georgia. Also, anyone attacking Byz, I will attack.

I also married my uncle to a sonless Italian Count’s eldest daughter, but that scheme fell through when he produced three daughters in a row and then keeled over from pneumonia. C’est la vie.

There has been a wholesale slaughter of Immortals due to people never reporting in, so there are slots open if anyone wants to play one. For those Immortals who are following but not writing AARs, could you make the occasional “I’m still here” post so I don’t delete you by mistake? The Immortals I did not eliminate are as follows: Telarias (wrote an AAR, hasn’t been heard from since), Laidech (clearly and strongly present), Radulf (active on Ederon), Leviathan (not active this week), Carbonater (sent me orders last week, otherwise silent), and Rasputin (posted two AARs this week, couldn’t be quiet to save his life). If there’s anyone who has been deleted and still wants to play, make a noise.

Children of the Fatherland: The Antiochene Intrigue

His father Mikael had shaped his life to become a byword for the virtue of loyalty: Although constantly at odds with his namesake, the Mad Emperor Michael, he nevertheless raised his banner and fought, season after season, to put down rebellion against Rome, and indeed died of the wounds he sustained while leading Antiochene troops in northern Anatolia. If Stilicho had been the last of the old Romans, Mikael could thus claim, posthumously, to be the first of the new. Arkadios, raised by his uncle Iohannes with that example always held before him, continued the tradition of unquestioning allegiance despite any personal difference with the Emperor. Nonetheless, it was not for loyalty but for ruthless cunning in intrigue that he became known; and if his father had shown the world what it meant to be Roman, Arkadios demonstrated why the adjective Byzantine had been added to its lexicons.

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To marry the eldest daughter of a sonless King is not, of itself, unusual. Such marriages became a traditional reward in fairy tales because they were, after all, not impossible, but something that could be dreamt of and, very occasionally, accomplished; and if a literal King is a rarer catch than, say, a wealthy landowner, Arkadios was himself a feudal magnate of no small water. In any case, the marriage was arranged before Arkadios had reached his majority, and might be held to be the work of his uncle, or perhaps of the Chancellor, Iakobos. A diplomatic stroke, to be sure, bringing Georgia – sometimes-ally, sometimes-enemy of the Roman state in its perennial struggle with Persia – firmly into the Roman orbit; but not one to build a legend as enduring as that of Odysseus.

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To plan on leaving a kingdom to a son is nothing so very unusual in a feudal lord; nor is it an unusual misfortune for the father-in-law to suddenly recover his virility and sire a son, cutting his grandson out of the line of inheritance. Many a magnate has ground his teeth over such a contretemps. But Arkadios was unusual in his reserves of low cunning, even at the age of eighteen. (Iohannes was by this time well into the sickness that would eventually kill him, and bedridden; the theory sometimes advanced, that he and not Arkadios was responsible, does not bear close examination.) He orchestrated a campaign of gossip and sniping – in a court four hundred miles from his own – against Giorgi’s young Queen, Zoe of Samos; in an early example of a coordinated propaganda campaign, the slanders eventually became so widely believed, in every land bordering the Black Sea, that Giorgi (by this time an old and sick man) felt he had no choice but to disown his son David, lest the realm erupt in civil war on his death. 

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Even so, the Bagratuni king and his strong-willed young Queen were not the sorts to give up easily. Sick as he was, Giorgi still hoped to produce an heir who would be incontestably of his body. With Zoe’s full cooperation, he installed her in a tower with only women for companions, the famous Amazon Guard; built an impenetrable maze of traps around the tower; and grimly – or perhaps not so grimly, for Zoe was a famous beauty as well as a woman of brilliance in her own right – went about the business of convincing the world that his second son, named Giorgi to hammer the point home, was legitimate.

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The scheme worked, so far as it went; Arkadios did not even try for a second round of slanders. Having exhausted cunning, he now used ruthlessness and plausible deniability instead: Even now, there is no proof that he ordered the death of his cousin. Infant mortality being what it was, Giorgi’s and Zoe’s grief was shared by many a peasant who had no land to be disputed among heirs. But qui bono? Giorgi, his illness much worsened by depression, was certainly not alone in his belief that Arkadios had had a hand in the apparent crib death.

Roman and Byzantine. Mikael and Arkadios. Loyalty and ruthlessness. Such are the two faces of the Komnenoi.

Children of the Fatherland: To Hold the East

Extracts from To Hold the East, a documentary about the Byzantine civil disorders of 1095-1115. (Which should not be confused with the Byzantine civil disorders of 1066-1076 or the Byzantine civil disorders of 1080-1089.)

(View: Burning villages, horsemen riding down a fleeing child, someone screaming in the background. Then Constantinople, and we swoop down through an office window to see a fat man in silk signing papers. As we come in closer we can see that they refer to “the recent scandal of the Strategos Manuel Boutoumites and the courtesan Antheia”.)

Voiceover: The first decade of the twelfth century saw the old scenes of war and disruption repeated yet again over the western half of the Empire, as overmighty vassals extended their power. With a child on the throne, Constantinople was in disarray, the factions (bureaucracy, church, army – or rather armies, each Strategos jockeying for supplies and recruits) spending more time struggling to establish their dominance than enforcing the peace which made such dominance valuable.

(View: Map of the Empire, with battle sites and sieges marked with flames. The Theme of Antioch is picked out in a lighter colour; there are no battles within it.)

Voiceover: The eastern regions of the Empire, however, particularly the border march of the Theme of Antioch, were peaceful, except for the successful expedition against the Moslem emirate of Edessa.

(View: Farmers tending fertile fields; women trampling grapes. A disciplined column of armoured men, with the Two Lions banner of Antioch and the Imperial Eagle at the front.)

Voiceover: This tranquility was mainly due to the loyalty of the Strategos of Antioch, Arkadios Komnenos. In spite of his reputation for ruthless slyness, acquired chiefly in the Antiochene Intrigue which put his eldest son in line for the crown of Georgia, he refused to raise his banner against a rightful Emperor – even an underage one completely dominated by his court.

(View: The Komnenos palace in Antioch; we zoom in to see ARKADIOS KOMNENOS dictating a letter – specifically, the famous Tirade on Loyalty. Visible through the scene is the ragged and stained parchment preserved in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, with his words being written by a feather quill. As he speaks he walks back and forth, emphasizing his words by slamming his right hand into the left.)

Arkadios: And therefore, dear Cousin, I must refuse your offer, and pray that God in His Mercy does not chastise you too harshly for entertaining it; for its presence in your mind is surely a device of Satan. I have belaboured the evil of plotting against God’s anointed, and will say no more, but I leave you with a final thought. If the Komnenoi can overthrow the Dukas because the rightful Emperor is in the thrall of his court, then what shall prevent the Malakoi, the Bourtzes, or the Phokas from overthrowing the Komnenoi, when one day one of my dynasty is in the thrall of his court because he is young and inexperienced – as indeed they rise, now, against the Dukas?

(View: A map of the empire, with regions flaring into the red of rebellion and war, and fading again, while a counter in the corner ticks off the years 1100-1106 month by month.)

Voiceover: And rise they did. But the loyalty of the Komnenoi was about to be put to its hardest test. In the chaos of the disorders, many lesser lords sought the strong protection that Constantinople was no longer providing. The Strategos of Antioch, with his powerful army – stronger than that of the Emperor himself, weakened after years of disorder and poor finances – and reputation for war-luck from campaigns against the infidel, was an attractive protector. And, seeking to hold the Empire together in the face of its near disintegration, Arkadios did not turn anyone away – although it was rather debatable whether he had a legal right to accept the oaths of lords already sworn to the Emperor.

(View: The map of the empire again, with blue blotches marking the new extensions of the Theme of Antioch – even as far west as the Adriatic coast. Through the map we can see pirate galleys descending on Rhodes.)

That dubious legality was the problem: For when the Count of Rhodes called on his new overlord for protection against pirate raids out of the Aegean islands, Arkadios was bound to respond… and a faction in Constantinople, seeing an opportunity to reassert sovereignty over the increasingly over-mighty eastern lord, declared that by taking arms against the Aegeans – still nominally loyal to Constantinople by virtue of not having bothered to declare themselves independent – Arkadios was in rebellion. For Arkadios, this was the final straw.

(View: A sword being forged; the clang-clang-clang of the hammer beating it underlies the narration.)

Arkadios: Enough is enough. The Emperor’s person is sacred, and none shall harm a hair on his head. But the court at Constantinople must be cleansed; if possible by the gentle light of reason, if necessary by sword and flame. I have drawn my sword against the infidel, and there are many in Constantinople today who owe their lives and freedom to my work. And they will repay their debts by naming me traitor, and calling down raiders on those whose lives I am sworn to protect?

[The documentary now covers the swift westwards march of the veteran Antiochene troops. Poorly garrisoned after years of supplying reinforcements for the Emperor's field armies, the Imperial forts on the Anatolian side of the Straits fell quickly, and Arkadios was able to cross over and lay siege to Constantinople itself. In spite of repeated offers of peace, however, the bureaucratic faction at Constantinople refused to negotiate.]

(View: A model of the walls of Constantinople, with Arkadios’s siege camp outside.)

Voiceover: With the Antiochene army actually outside the walls, the court was finally restored to contact with reality. Although Constantinople had seen off sieges in the past, Arkadios had brought enough men to build and man a fleet of galleys and close the harbour; worse, the population of the city saw him as a saviour, a strong man to take the throne and end the years of chaos. Arkadios, however, maintained that he had taken the field not against the Emperor Leo, but against his corrupt court, and this thin legal fiction allowed the young Dukas – who at fifteen could no longer be completely disregarded as a player in his own right – enough leeway to save his crown. Against the advice of his court, the Emperor Leo left the walls under flag of truce to negotiate with Arkadios.

(View: A row of crucified men, with ravens poking at their flesh. One of the men is still alive, and jerks feebly as a bird tears his eye out.)

The resulting compromise saved face for everyone. Arkadios’s troops entered the city peacefully, without a sack, and were welcomed as liberators. With this force at his back, Leo was able to become master in his own palace for the first time; the personal forces of the nobles and the wealthy bureaucrats were no match for a field army blooded against the infidel, even had they been united. The most obnoxious players of palace intrigue were crucified, Arkadios being intent on demonstrating enough ruthlessness that it would not be necessary to repeat the campaign. Others had their wealth or estates confiscated, refilling the State treasury – from which, it must be said, a good portion of their gold had come in the first place. In his turn, Arkadios was confirmed as Strategos of Antioch, and given the additional title Shield of the State.

Children of the Fatherland: Goals and roleplay

Since there were not many great events in the last session, this week’s AAR (note that we’re having a one-week hiatus due to the Midsummer festivities in Scandinavia) will focus on my plans for the game.

First, as you may have noticed, the Komnenoi are loyal to the Empire in spite of personal differences with the Emperor. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve got the “Seriously at odds with my liege” event, and chosen to reconcile. And since I have, at the moment, a claim on the main title of the Emperor, and he’s beset on all sides by rebellious vassals (being nine years old; the Dukas AI has an absolute talent for putting Byz in its usual state of quasi-meltdown), it’s quite a temptation to join the civil war, put a strong man on the throne, end the internal strife, and present a united face to the barbarians. However, Arkadios refuses to do that, because of the issue of legitimacy. If a Komnenos can do it when a weak Dukas sits the throne, what’s to prevent a different Strategos from doing it when, in some future year, a weak Komnenos sits there? The Empire has never lost a war except when it was riven by internal disputes, usually over who should be Emperor. The Komnenoi in their Theme of Antioch are the eastmost line of defense, marcher lords who glare across the crumbling frontier at the hordes of the infidel; nobody is more aware than they of the danger in thinking internal enemies more important than external ones. Thus, I will try for the allegiance of Counts disloyal to the Emperor; I may march on rebellious Dukes and, if I win, take their lands for Antioch and not Byzantium; and certainly there is no objection to marrying the Emperor’s eldest daughter, if he gets around to having one. But the Two Lions will not be raised in rebellion against Rome.

Thus my internal goals; what of external ones? Obviously I will strive to extend the power and glory of Rome, although the full project of Justinian is likely out of reach for Crusader Kings. Indeed, in Crusader Kings playing a blob is rather annoying even though it’s by no means impossible; I’ll try, therefore, to play historically by creating allied Kingdoms on my borders, rather than expanding directly. Thus, if I win big against Russia, I may annex the Crimean peninsula, but expansion into the steppe proper will be done by creating a Kingdom there and putting a Komnenos kinsman on the throne. Similarly, in the Balkans I’ll expand as far as the Danube, but if I need a buffer against Poland it’ll be done by creating a Hungarian kingdom. In the Levant, my goal is a vassal-ally Kingdom of Jerusalem.

An exception is the Mediterranean islands, in order of priority Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Baleares. If at all possible these will be added to the Empire, ideally as demesne of the Emperor. This is because they will be important naval bases for EU3; with a good navy and enough bases, you can spend 400 years projecting power against anyone with a Med coastline who annoys you, while being relatively safe from retaliation. Conversely, you don’t want anyone else owning islands close to your own coastline.

Overall, then, the plan is to maintain Byzantium at its pre-Manzikert borders; put the Komnenoi on the throne without a civil war; create buffer kingdoms to protect the civilised core from barbarian armies; and gain naval control over the Med by acquiring island bases. We shall see how it goes.

Children of the Fatherland: 1077-1086 session summary

The Immortals were an interesting idea that didn’t work out that well; only Blayne was able to retain interest and post regularly.