Alexios I Komnenos: The Komnenian Restoration of Byzantium

Alexios I Komnenos was Byzantine emperor from 1081 to 1118 and the founder of the Komnenian dynasty. He came to power when the empire was collapsing after the defeat at Manzikert and decades of civil war, and in 37 years of almost constant warfare he drove back the Normans, crushed the Pecheneg nomads and, with the help of the First Crusade, recovered western Anatolia. Historians call the revival he began the Komnenian restoration.

An empire in crisis

When Alexios was born, around 1057, Byzantium still looked powerful. Within twenty years it was in deep trouble. After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 rival generals fought over the throne, while Turkish groups spread across Anatolia; by 1081 a Turkish ruler, Suleiman ibn Qutulmish, held Nicaea, close to the capital. In the Balkans the Pechenegs, a Turkic people from the steppe, raided south of the Danube.

In the west the Normans of southern Italy had taken Bari, the last Byzantine city in Italy, in 1071. Their leader Robert Guiscard was preparing to invade the empire itself. The gold coinage had been debased so heavily that its value was collapsing.

Rise to power

Alexios was a nephew of the emperor Isaac I Komnenos and grew up in a military aristocratic family led by his formidable mother, Anna Dalassene. As a young general he served the emperors Michael VII and Nikephoros III Botaneiates, defeating several rebels. In 1077 or 1078 he married Irene Doukaina, linking the Komnenoi to the powerful Doukas family.

In early 1081, fearing for their position at court, Alexios and his brother Isaac left the capital and won over the army. Their troops entered Constantinople on 1 April 1081 and plundered parts of the city. Botaneiates abdicated and became a monk, and Alexios was crowned on 4 April. He soon made his mother regent during his campaigns, granting her wide powers in a formal decree.

War on three fronts

The Normans (1081–1085). Robert Guiscard landed in Epirus in 1081 and besieged Dyrrachium (modern Durrës, Albania). Alexios was heavily defeated outside the city in October 1081 (see Battle of Dyrrhachium). He responded with diplomacy and money. He paid the German king Henry IV to attack Robert’s ally, Pope Gregory VII, and granted Venice wide trading privileges in return for naval support. Robert’s son Bohemond won further victories in 1082, but Alexios held him at Larissa in 1083. Robert died of illness in July 1085, and the invasion collapsed.

The Pechenegs (1087–1091). Alexios suffered a serious defeat at Dristra on the Danube in 1087, and the Pechenegs then raided as far as Thrace. In alliance with the Cumans, another steppe people, he destroyed the Pecheneg army at the Battle of Levounion on 29 April 1091. Byzantine and later writers describe a massacre that effectively ended the Pechenegs as an independent power.

The Turks. In the same years the Turkish emir Tzachas of Smyrna built a fleet and threatened Constantinople from the sea. Alexios used diplomacy and rivalry among Turkish leaders to contain him, but he lacked the troops to retake the interior of Anatolia.

The appeal to the West and the First Crusade

In March 1095 Alexios’s envoys attended Pope Urban II’s council at Piacenza and asked for help against the Turks. Alexios probably hoped for Western knights to serve as mercenaries under his command. Instead, Urban’s sermon at Clermont in November 1095 launched the First Crusade, and tens of thousands of armed pilgrims crossed Byzantine territory in 1096–1097.

Alexios handled them carefully. He supplied food, escorted the armies and persuaded most leaders to swear oaths promising to return former imperial lands. In June 1097 Nicaea surrendered to Byzantine forces, and the crusader victory at Dorylaeum let Byzantine troops recover the western Anatolian coast and river valleys.

Relations broke down at Antioch. Bohemond kept the city after its capture in 1098, claiming that Alexios had failed to help the crusaders. Bohemond later invaded the Balkans from Italy, but in 1108 he was forced to accept the Treaty of Devol, recognising Alexios as his overlord. The treaty was never put into effect.

Reforms at home

Alexios ruled through his family. He created new court titles, such as sebastokrator for his brother Isaac, to rank his relatives above the old nobility, and tied leading families to the dynasty through marriage. Grants of revenue from land, called pronoia, were used to reward soldiers and supporters, although the scale of this practice in his reign is debated.

Around 1092 he reformed the coinage, introducing a new gold coin of high purity, the hyperpyron. The Church was also a concern: he confiscated church treasures to pay for his wars, tried the philosopher John Italos for heresy, and had the Bogomil leader Basil burned in Constantinople, an unusual act for a Byzantine emperor.

Last years and succession

In his final years Alexios campaigned against the Seljuks of Rum, winning a battle near Philomelion in 1116. He fell ill and died on 15 August 1118. His wife Irene favoured their daughter Anna and her husband Nikephoros Bryennios, but Alexios ensured that his son John II Komnenos succeeded him. Anna later wrote her father’s biography, the Alexiad (see Anna Komnene and the Alexiad).

Key people

• Anna Dalassene (c. 1025–c. 1102): Alexios’s mother, who ran the civil government as regent in the early years of the reign.
• Irene Doukaina (born 1066): his wife, whose Doukas family connections helped secure his coup; she later founded the Kecharitomene convent in Constantinople.
• Isaac Komnenos: his elder brother, given the new rank of sebastokrator and a leading role at court.
• Robert Guiscard and Bohemond: the Norman father and son who invaded the empire in 1081 and fought Alexios for most of his reign.
• John II Komnenos (r. 1118–1143): his son and successor, who continued the restoration.

Assessment and legacy

Historians judge Alexios in different ways. His admirers point out that he inherited a bankrupt state with almost no army and left a functioning empire. Critics argue that his reliance on family rule narrowed the governing class, that the privileges granted to Venice weakened Byzantine trade in the long run, and that his handling of the crusaders left a legacy of mistrust between Greeks and Latins.

Western chroniclers of the First Crusade often portrayed him as cunning and unreliable, accusing him of abandoning the crusaders at Antioch. Byzantine sources, above all his daughter’s history, present him as a patient statesman surrounded by enemies. Modern scholars tend to see him as a pragmatic ruler who used diplomacy, money and delay as much as battle.

His successors John II and Manuel I built on his foundations, and for most of the 12th century Byzantium was again one of the leading powers of the Mediterranean world.

Timeline

• c. 1057: Alexios Komnenos is born.
• 1081, 1 April: His troops enter Constantinople; he is crowned on 4 April.
• 1081, 18 October: Defeat by Robert Guiscard at Dyrrhachium.
• 1085, 17 July: Robert Guiscard dies; the Norman invasion ends.
• 1091, 29 April: Victory over the Pechenegs at Levounion.
• c. 1092: Coinage reform and the new hyperpyron.
• 1095, March: Byzantine envoys appeal for help at Piacenza.
• 1097, June: Nicaea surrenders to Byzantine forces during the First Crusade.
• 1108: Treaty of Devol with Bohemond.
• 1118, 15 August: Alexios dies; John II succeeds him.

Why it matters

Alexios took over a state many contemporaries expected to fall and handed his son a stable empire with sound money, a working army and recovered coastlands. His request for Western soldiers helped set the Crusades in motion, with consequences for East and West that lasted for centuries. The Komnenian dynasty he founded ruled until 1185.