u/RobbazK1ng

Sorry if this isn't allowed but I am writing a chronicle based on alternate byzantine history and thought it may appeal here.

I am posting on substack atm in weekly episode like posts, the preface and book I are out now, you can check it out here: https://substack.com/@gareth930899/note/p-203320526?r=8n74fl

but for the sake of simplicity I'll post the actual text here. hope you enjoy 😉

IMPERIUM ROMANUM

A Chronicle of the Restoration, the Campaigns, and the Great Coalition War

From the Exile at Nicaea to the Submission of the West — Anno Domini 1212 to 1340

Foreword and Prologue

Being the Preface of the Compiler, Written at Constantinople in the Forty-Fourth Year of the Reign of Michael II, Emperor of the Romans

The historian who undertakes to write of events within living memory faces a difficulty that his colleagues working among the safely dead do not. The living can object. They can correct. They can, if they hold sufficient authority and find the historian's conclusions unwelcome, ensure that the historian has occasion to reflect at length upon the wisdom of his choices. The present compiler, Ioustinianos Philanthropenos, Chartoularios of the Imperial Archive, is therefore required to state, at the outset and with a clarity that he hopes will forestall misunderstanding, that this chronicle was composed with the full knowledge and at the express direction of the imperial court, that its principal sources were made available through the generosity of the protonotarios Andronikos Muzalon, and that nothing in the following pages was included without the compiler's confident belief that it was accurate.

This statement is true in every particular. It is also, as the reader who has studied the history of court-sponsored scholarship in any dynasty will understand, insufficient.

What the compiler has attempted — and what he acknowledges he may not have achieved, the gap between the attempted and the achieved being among the most humbling features of the historian's craft — is an account of the restoration of the Roman Empire that is honest in the ways that matter and discreet in the ways that are necessary. These are not always the same ways, and the compiler does not pretend otherwise. He has not, for instance, included everything he knows about the circumstances of certain promotions during the coalition war, nor about the precise nature of the disagreement between the Megas Domestikos Maniakes and the Comes Kantakouzenos during the siege of Trier, nor about the full terms of the arrangement concluded between the princess Anna and the King of Portugal's principal minister in the months before the formal marriage proposal was delivered. These are matters for a different kind of chronicle, written for a different kind of reader, perhaps in a different century, when the principals are safely unavailable to offer corrections.

What he has included is the record of one hundred and twenty-eight years of continuous effort across three reigns, from the day in the spring of 1212 when Theodore Laskaris looked at what he had — one city, a damaged army, an empty treasury, and the conviction that these were sufficient — to the day in the autumn of 1340 when the compiler set down his pen and concluded that the account had reached the natural pause that a living empire's history is the only kind of history to offer.

The sources upon which this chronicle draws are numerous and of varying quality, which is the nature of sources. The private correspondence of Theodore Laskaris, preserved in the collection of the Monastery of the Holy Apostles and copied into the imperial archives at John III's direction, is supplemented during the second and third reigns by the systematic preservation of campaign records, administrative documents, and the official correspondence of the megas logothetes. The Protoasekretis Nikephoros Blemmydes, who served Theodore in the final decade of his reign and who was in several important instances the only witness to conversations that subsequent historians have attempted to reconstruct from secondary evidence, left memoirs of exceptional precision and occasional startling frankness whose full text remains in the Monastery of Chora. The compiler has read them in their entirety. He has quoted from them selectively, on the grounds that Blemmydes's frankness, whilst admirable in its honesty, extends at several points to observations about the characters of men whose descendants are alive and in positions of some influence, and that honesty in a chronicle is most useful when the chronicler is also alive at the time of its publication.

Of all the sources consulted, one requires introduction as well as acknowledgement, since without some knowledge of the man the reader will not be in a position to judge what his appearances in these pages are worth. The chronicler Procopius — who chose the name deliberately, in pointed homage to that earlier, more celebrated Procopius whose sixth-century Secret History had dismantled the official reputation of Justinian and Theodora with the patient precision of a man who had spent years in court service watching the distance between the public account and the private reality, and who considered the exposure of that distance a historian's primary obligation — spent thirty years compiling his History of the Restored Empire from the imperial archives, campaign records, and the testimony of officers and administrators who had served in campaigns conducted a generation before his birth. He attended the court of Michael II in his younger years and was, by the account of those who knew him there, a man whose company was sought by those who wished to be honestly informed and avoided by those who wished to be comfortably flattered, the two groups overlapping rather less than one might hope. He is sardonic where the official accounts are reverential, sceptical where they are credulous, and possessed of the quality that distinguishes a useful historian from a decorative one: the habit of noting what was left unsaid in an exchange with the same precision that other writers reserve for what was said. The compiler has drawn upon him extensively and recommends him unreservedly, with the qualification that several of Procopius's conclusions about specific living individuals are ones that the present work, for reasons that will be apparent, has found it prudent not to reproduce in their original form.

It is through Procopius — and through his instinct for what official representations conceal — that the compiler was led to the question that has shaped the arrangement of this preface. There exist, at the time of writing, two great mosaics that frame the reign of Michael II in the understanding of posterity, and the compiler proposes to describe them here not because they are the most important artefacts of the age — they are not, though they are magnificent — but because they illustrate, more precisely than any argument he might construct, the particular difficulty of the task this chronicle has set itself.

The first mosaic hangs in the apse of the restored Lateran Palace at Rome, commissioned in the twelfth year of the Emperor's reign — when Michael was in his middle sixties, his hair still more dark than grey, his campaigns east of the Euphrates not yet complete — and finished by Constantinopolitan craftsmen who were brought to the city at considerable expense and installed in a workshop within the Vatican precincts for the purpose. It depicts the Emperor in the precise manner of the Justinian panel at San Vitale in Ravenna — full imperial vestments of purple and gold, the loros draped across his chest, a sceptre in his right hand and a jewelled orb in his left, flanked on one side by soldiers bearing the Chi-Rho on their shields and on the other by clergymen carrying processional crosses. His face is that of a man of approximately sixty years, severe in expression, with large dark eyes that look directly outward from the tesserae with an attention that several visitors to the palace have described as disconcerting. The inscription above his head reads MICHAEL II IMPERATOR ROMANORUM. The gold ground behind him is entirely without architectural detail, as the great Ravenna mosaics always are, because the intention is not to place the Emperor in a particular room but in an eternal one. It is the earlier of the two mosaics, and the compiler notes it as such, since it matters to what follows.

The second mosaic is in Constantinople, in the vestibule of the Chalke Gate through which every important procession of the imperial capital has passed since the original gate was built seven centuries ago. It was commissioned in the thirty-eighth year of the Emperor's reign, shortly after the fall of Trier, and is therefore a recent work — completed within the memory of a great many living witnesses to the campaigns it depicts. It shows the Emperor mounted upon a white stallion whose nostrils are shown flared and whose forelegs are raised above a field of trampled banners: the fleur-de-lis of France, the quartered lions of England, the black eagle of the German Empire, the red cross of the Swiss Confederation. Before the horse, the towers of a great Germanic city burn. Behind the rider, the armies of Rome stretch into a background of gilded tesserae from which individual soldiers gaze outward with the serene indifference that Byzantine art always gives to the victorious. The Emperor himself wears a halo, and the craftsmen have rendered him in the heroic manner that the tradition demands — which is to say rather more vigorous than the evidence of the same period would entirely support, though the compiler understands the artistic convention and does not propose to argue with it. The halo did occasion considerable theological disputation at the time of the mosaic's completion, the arguments about which have been preserved in the Patriarchal records in far greater detail than anything the participants subsequently accomplished in any other field of endeavour. It was Procopius who put the matter most concisely in a marginal note discovered in a copy of his History held at the Monastery of the Holy Apostles: "The Patriarch's objection was that halos are reserved for the sanctified. The imperial court's response was that the Emperor had sanctified himself by his deeds, and that if the Patriarch could identify anyone else who had taken Rome, destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate, and defeated nine western armies within living memory, they would willingly defer to that person's theological authority in the matter. The Patriarch could not. The halo remained."

Both mosaics are accurate, in the narrow sense: the Emperor was present at the Lateran, the Emperor did ride before the burning towers, the western banners were indeed trampled. What they cannot convey — what no mosaic can convey, the form being inhospitable to the kinds of truth that historians spend their lives pursuing — is what lay beneath and behind those surfaces. They cannot show the nine hundred and forty-seven men of the Legio VI Ferrata who died in the breach at Trier on the day the towers burned. They cannot show the Emperor's expression in the hours before the Lateran commission was ordered, or the nature of the conversation that preceded the ordering of it, or what the craftsmen were told to leave out. The gold ground of the Ravenna-style mosaic is the most beautiful and the most radical form of historical omission available to the artist: it places the subject outside of time and context entirely, suspended in eternity, answerable to nothing so mundane as the actual sequence of events that produced him. The historian's task is to provide what the gold ground removes. This is not, it should be said, a criticism of the mosaics. They are doing what mosaics are for. The trouble arises only when the mosaic is mistaken for a chronicle, and the present compiler has written this preface in part to ensure that the chronicle which follows it is not mistaken for a mosaic. It is also, he suspects, why Procopius named his History what he did.

One further matter requires address. The present chronicle covers one hundred and twenty-eight years, three emperors, and the transformation of a single provincial city into the dominant power in the known world. This is more material than any honest chronicler can treat with full justice in a single volume, and the compiler does not claim to have achieved what the scope of the subject demands. Battles have been compressed. Individuals who deserve extended treatment have received a paragraph or a sentence. The administrative history of John III's reign — which is, in the compiler's considered assessment, the most consequential period in the dynasty's history and the one that receives the least proportionate treatment in the present volume — has been handled with a brevity that subsequent scholars will, he hopes, have occasion to remedy. The coalition war has been treated in somewhat greater detail than the preceding century of conquest, on the grounds that the coalition war's events are both more recent and more immediately relevant to the condition of the world as the compiler writes, and that the reader approaching this chronicle in 1340 has rather more personal interest in the outcome of the siege of Trier than in the details of the Grain Reserve Ordinance of 1233.

The compiler offers this chronicle to its readers with the hope that it will convey something of what the restoration of Rome actually was: not the inevitable unfolding of a predetermined destiny, not the product of divine favour extended to a peculiarly deserving dynasty, not the consequence of military genius operating without friction or cost or loss, and not the gold ground of a Ravenna-style mosaic in which the subject stands outside of time, answerable to nothing except the artist's conception of eternity. It was the product of continuous, disciplined, expensive human effort sustained across three generations by men and women who understood what they were attempting and did not stop until it was done. Whether that understanding constitutes heroism or merely determination, and whether the two are, finally, distinguishable, the compiler leaves to the reader's judgement.

He is aware that the Emperor has opinions on this question. He has elected not to ask.

Written at Constantinople, in the month of October, in the year of Our Lord 1340.

Together, the two mosaics frame a story that took one hundred and twenty-eight years to write and cost, by the most conservative estimates available to the present historian, in excess of nine hundred thousand lives. It began in a single provincial city in Bithynia in the year 1212, with a man who possessed one city, a damaged army, and the conviction — which his contemporaries found variously inspiring and delusional in proportions that shifted with the political weather — that the empire had not died in 1204 but had merely contracted, temporarily, and would expand again when the right man applied the right pressure in the right places.

This is the account of how that conviction proved to be accurate.

Book I — The Fall and the Exile (A.D. 1204–1212)

The Fourth Crusade entered Constantinople on the thirteenth of April, 1204, and the chronicler Niketas Choniates — who was present and whose account remains the most detailed we possess — described what followed as the blackest Thursday in the history of the world. Choniates was not a man given to rhetorical extravagance, having spent thirty years writing careful administrative prose for the late Komnenian court, and when such a man reaches for the most extreme expression available to him, the historian is well advised to attend to what he says. What occurred between the breaching of the seawall on the Golden Horn and the formal enthronement of the Latin Emperor Baldwin of Flanders a month later was not merely the conquest of a city. It was the systematic dismantlement of the most sophisticated civilisational apparatus that the Christian world then possessed. The Library of the Patriarchate, assembled across eight centuries of monastic and imperial patronage, was burned in stages over three days, the soldiers tearing pages for bedding and kindling without apparent awareness that they were destroying knowledge existing in no other copy anywhere in the world. The great equestrian statue of Justinian, which had stood in the Augustaion since the sixth century, was melted into coin. The sacred vessels of the Hagia Sophia were stripped from the altars and distributed amongst soldiers who had come nominally to defend the Christian faith and who expressed that defence by desecrating its principal shrine on the eastern shore of Europe. Choniates records that a Venetian courtesan was seated in the Patriarch's throne and sang dancing songs whilst soldiers drank communion wine from the sacred vessels around her. Whether this incident occurred precisely as described is, at this distance, impossible to verify. Procopius, writing more than a century later, remarks drily that it may or may not have occurred as Choniates states, but that the spirit of the account is entirely accurate to what followed, and that any man who doubts it is invited to examine the subsequent behaviour of the Latin Empire and to explain how its rulers came by such habits if not from their first days in the city.

The Latin Empire established under Baldwin was parcelled amongst its conquerors with the efficiency of men who had planned the division before securing the conquest. Venice received Crete, the Ionian Islands, and the principal trading ports — understanding, with its characteristic commercial clarity, that territory without trade routes was merely expensive to garrison. The French crusading lords received the European territories. Various Flemish, Champenois, and Burgundian knights received Anatolian fiefs and placed garrisons in cities whose Greek populations regarded them with the silent hostility of the occupied and the patience of those who believed, however distantly, that occupation would not endure.

Three Greek successor states arose from the wreckage. The Komnenian dynasty established itself in Trebizond on the Black Sea coast, geographically defensible but strategically peripheral. The Angelos dynasty, in the person of Michael Angelos — an illegitimate scion of the old imperial house who had been kept pleasantly distant from the court during the empire's better years and who now found that distance an asset — established the Despotate of Epirus in the western Greek lands and Albania. Procopius's portrait of Michael Angelos is one of his better efforts: "He had the gift of making every man he spoke with feel that he had been offered a particularly advantageous private arrangement, whilst simultaneously offering the same arrangement to each of three separate parties. The remarkable thing is not that the arrangements eventually collapsed, but that he maintained them as long as he did." And in Nicaea, the Bithynian city known for its silk trade and its fortified walls, Theodore Laskaris gathered what he had and began the business of deciding what to do with it.

Theodore was thirty-two years old at his coronation by the Patriarch Michael Autoreianos in the Cathedral of the Koimesis in the spring of 1206. He was the son-in-law of the last legitimate Emperor Alexios III, which gave him a claim to the imperial succession that was legally impeccable and politically complicated by the existence of at least four other men making essentially equivalent claims in different locations. His physical appearance is described consistently across the sources: of moderate height, dark-complexioned, with a beard worn shorter than the prevailing fashion, and eyes that his admirers called penetrating and his enemies called cold. He was not, by the accounts of those who served closest to him, a demonstrative man. He did not make speeches before battles. He did not weep at funerals. Those who knew him well noted that his amusement was most reliably provoked not by jests or entertainments but by the gap between what men claimed they would do and what they subsequently did — a quality that made him an exceptionally good judge of character and an occasionally uncomfortable companion.

Procopius, having apparently interviewed men who remembered his court, writes that Theodore's relationship with his Empress, Anna Laskarina, was one of the period's better-concealed political arrangements: "She was considerably more intelligent than the sources she controlled permitted to be recorded, and her husband understood this, which is why the sources she controlled said nothing about her at all. The megas logothetes Akropolites, who was loyal to the Emperor as one is loyal to one's own survival, once remarked in private correspondence that the Empress's knowledge of which provincial governors were extracting rather more than the assessed revenues allowed, and how she had obtained this knowledge, was a subject he preferred not to examine too carefully. The Emperor examined it with considerable care and acted on it with characteristic efficiency."

The first acts of Theodore's reign were administrative rather than military, because he understood with a clarity that the more romantic of his later admirers have sometimes found puzzling that an army fed on enthusiasm and provincial taxes alone would not survive a second winter in the field. He convened a full audit of the treasury within a month of his coronation, dismissed three provincial governors whose accounts did not tally with established revenues, and renegotiated the grain supply contracts the city held with the farming communities of the Bithynian plateau, simultaneously improving the terms offered to the farmers and reducing the proportion lost to the intermediary merchants who had been profiting extravagantly from the arrangement for rather longer than the records clearly showed. None of these measures were glamorous. All of them were necessary, and Theodore appears to have regarded the distinction between glamorous and necessary as one of the more dangerous confusions available to a ruler.

He reorganised the army from the ground upward, reviving the pronoia system of military land grants and — in a decision that his surviving critics found variously bold and affected — deliberately restoring the Roman legion as the fundamental unit of military organisation. The first reconstituted formation was the Legio I Nicaena, named for the city of exile, formally constituted in the winter of 1212 with an establishment of five thousand men in ten cohorts of five hundred each, engineering and artillery attached, commanded by the Comes Konstantinos Doukas. At the time of its founding it consisted of approximately two thousand two hundred men in four provisional cohorts, imperfectly equipped and incompletely trained. The Comes Doukas later noted in a letter to his brother that the formation "resembles a legion in name and ambition and in almost nothing else, but the Emperor has expressed confidence that the resemblance will improve, and one learns not to contradict him on matters of this kind." The following year brought the Legio II Victrix — named with a confidence that, as Procopius remarks, "at the time of its founding considerably outran the evidence" — and work began on what would become the Legio III Macedonica. By 1215 the army had grown from two thousand to approximately eight thousand organised soldiers, supported by themata levies and a fleet of thirty-eight dromons giving the empire its first credible amphibious capacity. By 1212, he was ready to move.

Hi everyone, I thought this would be the best place to post my alt history chronicle of Byzantine history post 4th Crusade up till the mid 1300's Its a long read but this is Part 1 of 21. I will be posting weekly on substack for anyone who fancies a read.

https://garthvader420.substack.com/p/imperium-romanum

After the Siege of Trier in 1334 at the height of the Germanic Wars, the resurgent Roman Empire under Michael II Laskaris pushed on into the Holy Roman Empire, which ultimately led to the subjugation of feudal Europe.