Isaac I Komnenos, Emperor of the Romans

Isaac (Ισαάκιος) I (c.1007-c.1075) was Roman Emperor from September 1057 to his death in 1075. Issac was the first member of the Komnenid Dynasty, which began to reverse the decline of the Roman Empire.

Early Life
He was the son of Manuel Erotikos Kommenos, a General in Anatolia under Emperor Basil II. On Manuel's deathbed in 1020 he commended his two surviving sons Isaac and Ioannes to the emperor's care. Basil had them carefully educated in a Monastery, and afterwards advanced them to high official positions. During the reigns of Basil's immediate successors, Isaac won the confidence of the army. From 1042 to 1057, he served as commander of the field army in Anatolia. In 1057, after being humiliated by the Emperor Micheal VI, he rebelled in Papahlagonia, and joined with the nobles of Constantinople in a conspiracy against Michael VI. Issac was proclaimed emperor by the army on June 8,1057, and on August 26 he defeated an Army loyal to Michael VI in the Battle of Polemon. This victory secured his hold on the throne and on September 1, 1057 he was Crowned Emperor of the Romans.

Reign as Emperor
Isaac I Komnenos was crowned Emperor of the Romans on September 1, 1057. He inherited a system that was close to total collapse. The empire was at its greatest territorial extent since the rise of Islam, sprawling from Italy to the Caucasus, but inside the all real authority had collapsed, and corruption had flourished for over thirty years. Gradually, the armed forces, descendants of the legions of old, had fallen into disrepair, starved of funds by an ever growing court bureaucracy that feared a military revolt that would place a competent Emperor on the throne of Constantine and Justinian. However, despite all of this bureaucracy’s attempts, a military adventurer by the name of Isaac had now seized the throne. The Empire would never be the same again.

Isaac’s first act as Emperor was to pay off his fellow generals and send them away from Constantinople, he had no wish to himself be overthrown. He did not instantly start slicing down at the bureaucrats either, to do so would have been political suicide. Instead, he turned his attention to the imperial coffers, which now lay nearly empty. Immediately, he began a program of confiscating territories given as bribes by his incompetent predecessors on the throne.

However, when he turned his attention to Church possessions, he faced much more opposition. In 1058 he entered into a major dispute with Patriarch Michael Keroularios, which ended in the Emperor deposing his Patriarch and the Patriarch dying in exile. Isaac’s popularity plummeted. On the other hand, he still held the support of the army, which any strong Emperor understood to be key, and was able to lead them to a stunning victory against the Pecheneg barbarians in 1059, returning to Constantinople in triumph. In just two years, he had reversed the Empire’s downward spiral, and begun the second stage of the spectacular Roman renaissance that dominated the middle Ages.

1060 was a quiet year for the Emperor, who kept his head down and worked quietly to keep everything running properly in the state. He began the trimming of the bureaucracy, including dismissing the chronicler Michael Psellus. Because of this, our information for Isaac’s activities for the next couple of years is very poor. We know that in 1062, his brother John was dispatched to southern Italy, where he had some success in expelling the Normans from the peninsula. However, Isaac had concentrated the larger part of the still recovering imperial army in the Caucasus and Syria because of a much larger threat, so the Normans were still able to retain part of the “boot” of Italy and use this as a launch pad to conquer Sicily. A map of the area can be seen at the bottom. Purple shows areas returned by John Komnenos to full imperial control, red is under Norman rule, and red and grey stripes are undergoing Norman conquests.

The reason that Isaac was so unwilling to send troops to what he considered an unimportant side-theatre was the rise of the Seljuk Sultanate to the east. Ever since their emergence from the steppes in 1037, the Seljuks had slowly been taking control in Baghdad, until by 1064 their empire was the largest state the Islamic World had seen since the early 9th century. And like all young empires, the Seljuks were bent on outward expansion. For the first few years of Isaac’s reign, the Seljuk threat had been limited, because of a civil war in their empire, but in 1064, young Alp Arslan had emerged triumphant, and taken the title of Sultan. He now ruled over a state that stretched from the Tigris to the Oxus, and he had his eyes of the riches of the Roman Empire.

Soon after his accession, Arslan led his armies across the River Euphrates, into the Theme of Kappadokia. Isaac, at Iconium at the time, immediately headed eastward to confront the Sultan, and the two armies met at Manzikert, one of the furthest Eastern outposts of the Empire. The battle was indecisive, and by the sixth day of skirmishing, the Sultan offered the Emperor peace in exchange for money with which to conquer the Levant and Egypt, under the control of the Seljuks’ only rival for power in the Islamic world, the Fatimid Caliphate. After some haggling, Isaac agreed, and the Turk turned southwards. Basing his forces at Byzantine Antioch, he quickly captured Damascus which became his regional centre of power. In 1066, he marched on Jerusalem, and also captured the city, but disaster struck. Marching into the city, he was assaulted by a Shiite fanatic who drew his dagger and rushed upon the sultan. Alp Arslan, who took great pride in his reputation as the foremost archer of his time, motioned to his guards not to interfere and drew his bow, but his foot slipped, the arrow glanced aside and he received the assassin's dagger in his breast. Alp Arslan died as a man who could have changed the face of the world forever, but ended up as a footnote on the relentless march of history. Back in the empire meanwhile, Isaac was about to embark on a second major assault on the Orthodox Church. The Patriarch by this time was John VIII, a much more sensible and retiring figure than Michael Keroularios, who understood fully the consequences of defying the Emperor. Therefore it was agreed in early 1067 that almost two thirds of the land owned by monasteries would be donated to “the poor”—in this case the peasant small holders who formed the backbone of the Imperial armies. Although many monks protested against this, they were generally simply ignored by the Imperial authorities. The people in this case supported the Emperor; the arrogance of the monks was becoming hard for them to bear, and none of them could refuse the land that he had so generously donated them. Isaac Komnenos had now ruled as Emperor of the Romans for a decade, and in that time he had been able to totally reverse the downward spiral that his Empire had entered into. Ten years of his own hard work had restored the armies to the greatest military force in the Christian world, one that had held the Seljuk menace at bay. The Emperor thus saw no reason to ever leave Constantinople again, and he didn’t. In 1071 he raised his twenty three year old nephew Alexius to the position of co-Emperor, and in 1075 he passed away at the age of seventy, his empire intact, his church united, and his army stronger than at any time in the past fifty years. The future for the Empire looked bright, and indeed it was.