Subject to Change
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Subject to Change
Byzantium and the First Crusade
The story of the First Crusade isn't simply one of religious fervor or military conquest – it's a tale of desperate empires, complex political maneuvering, and unlikely alliances that would reshape medieval history. When Byzantine Emperor Alexius I found his thousand-year-old empire crumbling under Turkish advances in the late 11th century, he made an unprecedented move that would change the course of history: he asked the West for help.
What followed was extraordinary. Pope Urban II's call at the Council of Clermont in 1095 unleashed an avalanche of armed pilgrims, knights, and nobles who descended upon Constantinople with a mixture of religious zeal and worldly ambition. From this magnificent yet vulnerable city – positioned at the crossroads of Europe and Asia – Emperor Alexius faced the delicate task of channeling this unpredictable Western force toward his enemies while maintaining control over his own destiny.
Through fascinating firsthand accounts, including the remarkable history written by Alexius's daughter Anna Komnene (the first long-form narrative by any European woman), we discover how the Emperor showered crusade leaders with gifts while extracting oaths of fealty. We witness the crusaders' stunning military successes against Turkish forces at Nicaea and Dorylaeum, followed by the grueling siege of Antioch that nearly broke them. And we see how Alexius's fateful decision not to march to their aid at Antioch planted seeds of distrust that would eventually bear bitter fruit in the catastrophic Fourth Crusade a century later.
The Byzantine perspective on the First Crusade reveals a sophisticated diplomatic dance that initially saved the empire, restoring significant territories and ushering in a period of stability known as the Komnenian Restoration. Yet it also set in motion forces that would eventually contribute to Constantinople's downfall.
Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, russell Hogg. My guest today is David Parnell, who is Professor of History at Indiana University Northwest. David was on the podcast before, of course, when we talked about one of history's top power couples, that is to say the Byzantine general Belisarius and his wife Antonina, and their adventures included marching up and down Italy, occupying Rome and even deposing the then Pope, pope Sylvester, when he failed to declare himself team Byzantium as enthusiastically as Antonina wanted. Well, this time we're revisiting the East Roman Empire, or Constantinople, or the Byzantine Empire, whatever you want to call it. And this time the shoe is very much on the other foot, because now we're in the late 11th century and Constantinople is in deep, deep trouble.
Speaker 1:And the Byzantine emperor of the time, which is to say Alexius I? He's been going through his address book and he's furiously sending messages to pretty much everyone. He can think of the email he sent to Pope Urban. Well, in summary, that reads let's let bygones be bygones, let's forget all about us deposing Pope Sylvester. We are absolutely falling apart here and we would really appreciate it if you could send us some help. And Urban does send some help. In fact, he sends the First Crusade. So that's our subject today. It's Byzantium and the First Crusade. Anyway, welcome back, david, to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Russell. It's a real honor to be back.
Speaker 1:As I say, we're talking about Byzantium and I thought we might start with a rather remarkable character from that part of the world, and that is Anna Komnini, because she was an eyewitness to what the crusade looked like from the Byzantine side. Well, I mean, I say she was an eyewitness, she was pretty young, but she was actually there. So can you maybe tell us a bit about her and what her historical project was, and just something about her life?
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm glad that we're starting with Anna, because she is a remarkable figure, maybe one of the most important women of all of medieval, roman or Byzantine history history. Not from a political perspective, she didn't have immense political power, she was never empress, but she was probably one of the most learned Byzantine women that we know of. She was fiercely intelligent, she was very well educated, she had relationships and knowledge of the circumstances of what was happening in her time. She talked to people, she collected sources and she wrote this remarkable history, almost hagiography, of her father, alexius, and this is one of our main sources for his reign. She named it the Alexiad, a play on words of the Iliad, sort of another nod to her immense classical learning and knowledge. And she's this fascinating woman who grew up within the palace.
Speaker 2:She was known as Porphyrogenita, which the Byzantines took very seriously, and the distinction here is that to be Porphyrogenita or Porphyrogen, if you're male, you have to be born while your father is the emperor.
Speaker 2:So if your father happens to become emperor and you've already been born, then you're out of luck. You can't be born in the purple is what that term means, but if your father is already emperor and then you're born, you're born into a special room in the palace, at least historically, which is this room covered in purple marble. It's the empress's birthing chamber and that means you're born into the purple. It's a special distinction that Anna carries proudly through her whole life that she was born in the purple. She was born about two years after her father, alexius, became emperor. So she's royal, she's fancy, she's well-educated and she writes this history of her father, the Alexiad, which is the first long-form narrative history written by any European woman that we have on record. So it's certainly possible there might have been somebody who wrote something earlier that was lost, but this is the first surviving narrative history written by a woman, which is remarkable.
Speaker 1:And I mean I like the story very much, but when you read about Anna, when you read her stuff, she does seem I don't know if quite I'm never quite sure what the term Karen actually means, but I get this picture of somebody who moans a lot and I guess she did have plenty to moan about, but she does seem to have had quite a miserable life and to have let everybody know about it.
Speaker 2:Yes. So if you read the Alexiad, you know, in addition to all of its wonderful tales of Alexius's daring and the first crusade, you also get a lot of Anna complaining and moaning, as you say, and regretting and mourning. This is a big part of the text and for a long time, historians understood this as sort of her letting out her feminine emotion in her writing. Right, she's showing off how emotional she is because she can't contain it, but some recent work done by Leonora Neville in her 2016 book on Anna has made an interesting argument that she's actually performing a lot of this emotion, that she maybe didn't necessarily personally feel that emotional about things, but she felt a need to sort of show herself as emotional because that was what her audience expected of her, because she's a woman and traditionally writing history is a male thing. So she's trying to navigate this interesting complex of writing a traditionally male-dominated thing as a woman. So she's trying to navigate what that means and that's what a lot of this emotion comes from. That's Lenora's argument, anyway.
Speaker 1:I mean one thing I felt I think maybe I got this wrong when I first read it she's sent off to, or she ends her life in, a convent, and I think she's sent there after a failed palace coup of some kind which she is implicated, and I also thought that being sent to a convent, well, that sounded pretty terrible, but I'm not sure. When I read a bit more it didn't sound like such a terrible life at all.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, so this is very interesting. Convents and monasteries are at the heart of not just religious life but high-level political life in the Byzantine world. So if you're a successful emperor or aristocrat or general, what you want to do at the end of your life is found a monastery in your name and then you know, the monks will pray for you and you'll get all sorts of k on political life. But also, on the other side, they can be high-level prisons for the upper class. So if you fall afoul of the current emperor, then you might be packed off to a monastery or a convent and this can have different levels, can have different levels. You could be actually forcibly tonsured as a monk or ordained as a priest or forced to take orders as a nun, and then you are actually living as the monks and nuns do in that facility and you have to follow their ordained rule. Or you might just be sent there to live there alongside them in sort of an internal exile where you don't necessarily become a monk or a nun, you just sort of live among them and they're in a way your wardens or your jailkeepers.
Speaker 2:But Anna's case seems to be very interesting in that, as far as we can tell she seems to have apartments designed for her in the convent that you are mentioning.
Speaker 2:So this is a convent called Kakeratomene, which means full of grace, and it's founded by Anna's mother, irene, as part of her charitable giving near the end of her life as part of her charitable giving near the end of her life and she sets up within it some apartments for herself to use and for Anna to use, and these apartments are a retreat is a good way to put it. They're not a part of the convent proper, so it's not like it's a cell and that the person who lives there is a nun. It's like there's a luxury apartment grafted on to the convent which the royal women can use at their leisure, so they can go there for a weekend, for a getaway, and then leave and come back to the palace or whatever other residences they might own. So Anna has this option to live in the convent. And then there's a little bit of a disagreement among historians about whether she's actually forced to live there, whether it's an exile or whether she chooses to live there sometimes.
Speaker 1:And I mean I sort of feel like I'm getting distracted before we even properly got going. But let's assume that it is. I don't really think it was a punishment. It feels like she was just putting herself slightly out of sight of everybody and keeping her head down while she continued to live a perfectly pleasant life. But when men fell foul of the system they seemed to be quite often blinded. They were occasionally they were executed. Is that something that happens to women, or do they get lesser punishments?
Speaker 2:Yes, not particularly. Women don't get that kind of punishment that men get. They typically get shipped off at worst. So the example I can think of is the Emperor Irene in the 9th century, so most famous because she's Byzantine Emperor at the time that Charlemagne is crowned in Rome, and this is one of the reasons given by the Pope at the time, pope Leo, for crowning Charlemagne. He says well, the Emperor in Constantinople is a woman and you can't have a female emperor. So Irene, when she's overthrown, she's not blinded or executed, she's just sent off to a convent on an island, so she's sort of put over there to go be a nun. So this is typically what happens to women. They don't usually suffer the more extreme punishments that Byzantine men do if they fall afoul of the emperor.
Speaker 1:And I'm sort of picking up there that you called Irene emperor. Is this now the new style? We call actresses actors now? We have to call everybody emperor now.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, I think this is something that I would style only a couple of women in Byzantine history, and that's because Irene ruled without a husband and without a son, so she ruled literally without any male family members that she was ruling on behalf of. She wasn't a regent, so I guess it's similar to queen regnant, right, but we don't really have an empress regnant category, so I call her emperor in that sense.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, well, I should get us back on track again because I've, as usual, diverted us. So, anna, as you say, she writes the Alexiad, you know, the sort of Iliad of her father. So let's talk a little bit about Alexius, because I sort of looked him up to sort of see what his dates were and I was fascinated to see that he becomes emperor at the age of 24 and he reigns from 1081 until 1118. And that's a reign of 37 years, right, and that really suggests stability, but that would be completely misleading. So do you want to say a little bit about Alexius?
Speaker 2:Alexius is this very complicated figure. I think when enthusiasts read about Alexius and when they think about him, they tend to think about him almost entirely as this heroic figure who saved the medieval Roman or the Byzantine Empire. And he's one of the greatest emperors to have ever lived. And it's certainly true that he was an incredibly important figure who did bring about the restoration of the Roman state, but he did so in a very particular way which seems to have riled up a lot of his fellow Byzantines or medieval Romans. They weren't united in liking him. So I think an interesting statistic about Alexius that you can put alongside his restoration of the empire is that in the first 15 years of his reign before the first crusade arrived, he had four major conspiracies against him, not one, not two, not three four major conspiracies against him that he had to put down. And then, even after the crusade was over and he had even more success, he still had conspiracies against him throughout the 1100s, almost all the way up to the point of his death the 1100s, almost all the way up to the point of his death. So he's a polarizing figure.
Speaker 2:He's successful, but he seems to irritate a lot of people in the way he goes about what he's doing, and part of that seems to be that Alexius is very interested in securing the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, for himself and his family. He puts his family above almost everything else. His family gets all the key positions in the government, his extended network of relatives, through marriages. They're sort of brought into this extended family network. They sort of dominate the whole thing, and this is something that had not really been the case in the empire up till now. This is kind of new to have one family so utterly dominating the situation. So I think a lot of this resentment against Alexius is from those elite families who in previous generations had participated in the ruling of the empire in various ways, through holding civilian offices and military generalships, and now they find themselves locked out by the system that Alexius creates.
Speaker 1:And I'm struggling to remember. Did Alexius ascend to the throne? How does he get to be emperor?
Speaker 2:You're laughing. Yeah, you know. Alexius ascends to the throne in very difficult circumstances. There's a decade of chaos, really, between the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 to 1078. And Alexius is called as a very young man to support the emperor by putting down these rebellions.
Speaker 1:I'm sure he did a great job.
Speaker 2:Well, he does half of a great job, because he puts down one of the rebels and then he decides the other rebel is actually pretty okay and he lets this guy into Constantinople and the reigning Emperor, Michael, then has to retire and become a monk. So he's done half the job well as a young man. He's defeated one rebel and the other rebel he lets into Constantinople and lets him become emperor, but he's only emperor for about two years and then Alexius rebels against him and makes him become a monk, and then Alexius becomes emperor. So he becomes emperor under circumstances which are not entirely straightforward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can really complain when people rebel against him. He seems to have been quite the rebel himself.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right, you know they're following his footsteps.
Speaker 1:So one thing that always confuses me, because people say Constantinople has got this brilliant strategic location, but it seems as if when they aren't being attacked by some vicious tribe out of the Balkans, then they're being attacked from the other side, by the Arabs or by the Turks from Anatolia. So sometimes they're being attacked from both sides at the same time. So why do people say that Constantinople has got this marvelous strategic location? It just seems to be a magnet for trouble.
Speaker 2:I think you're right to call it a magnet. It is a magnet because it is this linchpin between the European side of the empire and the Asian side of the empire, or today we might say between Europe and Asia, if we wanted to do that. I don't want to get into any political disputes about where Turkey fits into the geopolitical world here, but it's this linchpin between these two halves of the empire and it focuses a lot of traffic that way. So traffic coming from Europe comes down into the Balkans and must be funneled that way, and traffic coming from the Middle East goes through Anatolia and must be funneled towards Constantinople. So it happens to sit at this strategic position, which is both excellent for governing the surrounding territory, but, as you say, it is a magnet. It draws peoples towards it, including, you know, potentially enemy armies.
Speaker 2:And I think the major reason that Constantinople is actually quite a significant strategic point and is defensible is simply because to be really threatened it has to be attacked from both sides at once, which, as you suggested, does happen a couple times throughout the empire's history, but is relatively rare.
Speaker 2:So you know, if you have hordes of Scythian barbarians coming down from the Danube to attack Constantinople, but nobody's on that Anatolian side, then there's no problem. They hold the walls and they bring in food and goods through the Sea of Marmara and over from Anatolia, no problem. And then, on the other hand, if you've got Turks coming and attacking from Anatolia but the European side is clear, then again there's no problem. You hold them off on the seaside and you bring in goods over land. So it's very difficult to isolate Constantinople. It requires a lot of coordination from both European and Asian sides. And then, even if you get all that coordination, it has these massive, thick walls that were built in the reign of Theodosius II back in the early 5th century, that are still standing and still the most impressive fortifications in the entire world. Nobody is able to breach them until the 4th Crusade.
Speaker 1:And I guess they've also got food coming in from the Black Sea, which is another advantage.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah, you got the Black Sea as well, and there's plenty of grain coming from what is today.
Speaker 1:Ukraine. Why is it so weak? Because at this stage, by the time of Alexius' reign, the backs really are up against the wall. So why is the empire so weak?
Speaker 2:Yes, Alexius takes over in 1081, and he assumes the rule of an empire that is essentially disintegrating. It's falling apart at the seams. There's almost no bright spots when he becomes emperor, and this is a little confusing because a generation before the empire had been the single strongest country in the entire Mediterranean world, probably in all of Europe and Africa as well. It is enormously powerful in the mid-11th century, in the decades following the reign of Emperor Basil II, and that all starts to unravel with this infamous Battle of Manzikert in 1071, between the Emperor Romanus Diogenes and the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan. Seljuk Sultan, Alp Arslan.
Speaker 2:The real problem here is not the battle itself, which it does seem that Romanos lost because he was captured so kind of hard to argue with that. He's captured by Alp Arslan and held hostage, and the sultan gives him remarkably generous terms. The sultan says okay, well, I'll release you. You can go back to Constantinople, just cede me a little land over here and then pay me an annual payment and maybe we'll make a marriage alliance. And Romanos says great, that's very generous, I will happily do that.
Speaker 1:Deal.
Speaker 2:The problem is everybody back home thinks that this shows Romanus' weakness. So when he gets back home after this deal has been negotiated, a civil war occurs. The Ducas family attacks and there's a civil war for the next couple of years. That distracts the empire at a key moment because even though the sultan may have made a deal with Romanos, there are lots of mostly independent, nomadic Turkish groups that don't obey the sultan. So the sultan and his men may abide by the deal and refrain from entering the empire, but all these independent Turkish nomadic groups, they don't care about any deal. They start entering the empire, taking advantage of the civil war. And so by the time the civil war is over, there are already Turks sort of all over eastern Anatolia.
Speaker 2:And then it only gets worse because the emperor who wins the civil war is not Romanos. He is defeated and blinded and sent off to an island. And the man who wins is Michael VII, and he is essentially a non-entity. He's a wet paper bag, he does hardly anything, he does not contest the attempts of the Turks to enter Anatolia.
Speaker 2:And the situation continues to dissolve and get worse. And when finally the Romans try to do something about this, they send over a Norman mercenary named Russell, ironically, and this mercenary decides to rebel and claim land for himself, and then the empire has to fight him. And then the empire ends up hiring some of these Turks to fight the Norman mercenary who was supposed to attack the Turks. And so you know. Needless to say, the situation goes haywire very quickly and the empire focuses on maintaining its position in the Balkans and not on Anatolia, with the result that the situation in Anatolia completely falls apart. The empire loses control over most of what had been its major heartland there, and by the time Alexis becomes emperor, there is very little left of Byzantine-controlled Anatolia. It is largely under control of independent Turkish governors and emirs and nomadic groups.
Speaker 1:I wonder, of all the many enemies we could be talking about, of the empire, but I feel we ought to talk about one of the enemies, which is going to feature later, which is the Turks and the Arabs and the Muslim powers. And I get so confused because you've got the Turks, you've got the Arabs, you've got the Caliphate, and I'm just not quite clear how the Muslim world is organized at this time, even if you can use the word organized. So can you say a bit about what's happening in the Muslim world and how that's shaped?
Speaker 2:Sure. So the Muslim world is itself going through major convulsions during this period, and it's partially those convulsions that are going to enable the first crusade later to slip through and have the kind of success that it does. So if you, if you want to go back a little ways, as you said, you know, classically the Muslim world is governed by a strong, centralized caliphate. Muslim world is governed by a strong, centralized caliphate, First the Umayyad caliphate, which is based in Damascus, and then later the Abbasid caliphate, which is based in Baghdad. And the Abbasid caliphate has been the strongest Muslim power for more than a century but by the time we're talking about, is beginning to see its power weaken. And its power is weakening for multiple reasons, but two that we should mention are that the lands of Egypt have been seized by a Shiite group of Muslims out of North Africa, who become known as the Fatimids. So they take over all of North Africa and Egypt, depriving the Abbasid Caliphate of those regions. And then this nomadic group arrives that we call Turks. They sweep down out of Central Asia and, although they'll later be a problem for the Byzantine emperor Romanos, at this time they're mostly a problem for the Abbasid caliphate. They do, conveniently enough for the Abbasids convert to Islam during their travels. But that just means that they think that they now should sort of be the ones that control the Islamic world. So they sweep in and they begin to take over. And they don't depose the Abbasid caliph he's still there in Baghdad, but they essentially monopolize military control over his caliphate.
Speaker 2:There's an Abbasid caliph, but he's not really in charge, other than sort of nominally in charge maybe. And all of these Seljuks. There's at least one strong Seljuk sultan, that's Alp Arslan, but he only commands the largest group of the Seljuks. There are other Turks that don't obey him, and sort of various Turks grab up different cities. I'll take this one and you take that one. So much of the Muslim world is carved up by these Turkish emirs or governors who are controlling individual cities, but they don't necessarily have any relationship to each other, any loyalty to each other. They owe a nominal loyalty to the Abbasid caliph, but that's purely nominal. So the Middle East is essentially this patchwork quilt of small Turkish Muslim principalities, and then the Fatimids down in Egypt and then the Byzantines trying to do whatever they can up in Anatolia. So the situation is chaotic at the time of the First Crusade to say the least.
Speaker 1:Okay, well then, maybe we should. At long last, we should actually turn to the Crusaders and, I guess, to Pope Urban II. So maybe we're not quite at the stage of talking about the Crusaders yet, actually, because we should talk a little bit about the papacy, I think so. It feels like the papacy, for centuries, has been a relatively weak institution, but at this stage it's really beginning to flex its muscles, and maybe the crusade is part of all that. I don't know. So do you want to say a bit about what is the state of the papacy at this stage?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 2:So scholars of the Crusades and of the papacy in general do see the Crusades as a part of a sort of reformation of the papacy, an attempt to strengthen the papacy, an attempt by the popes to sort of put themselves out front and center in Western Christendom.
Speaker 2:So this is a period in which the Popes have been struggling with the Holy Roman Emperors of what is today Germany and arguing sort of over who is the head of the Western world, the head of the church or the secular head, the emperor. And as part of this argument there's been this reform movement within the church to strengthen the oaths of clergy, to strengthen the role of the Pope, and the Crusades really does come out of that. So the Pope is looking at ways to assert his leadership of the Western world and also to sort of help with what he sees as some of the problems of the Western world, which is quite a lot of violence, especially among these elites that we sort of uniformly lump into this term, knights. Right, there's a lot of knightly violence in early medieval Western Europe, and the popes are looking to assert their leadership, decrease Christian-on-Christian violence and provide some kind of outlet for that energy, while also servicing the spiritual needs, as they see it, of their flock in Western Europe.
Speaker 1:And I'm not sure he's really relevant to our story, but I just, uh, I felt we had to. Well, I thought I had to mention him because we have we don't just have a Pope, we also have an anti-Pope. And I just love the idea of an anti-Pope because you kind of wonder what will happen if they're in the same room together. You know what terrible explosion will take place. Um, but, uh, but, but. But. I place but, I guess Clement III, because he's the anti-pope, who a lot of people thought was the real pope. But with the passage of history, you know, the Roman Catholics have decided no, no, he was never the pope, but I guess he was on the side of the Holy Roman Empire and sort of acknowledging their strength. Is that the idea?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So that's a part of this tail end of this investiture conflict between sort of emperors and popes over who should be in charge. And the emperors would find their own man to be pope and say, oh, this guy's pope because he thinks I should be in charge. I should be the Holy Roman Emperor, right, yeah? And then the popes who are elected by their cardinals and bishops in Rome say no, no, we should be in charge because we're the church.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, as I said, it's just a little bit of a digression, but I do find that aspect of it well, both entertaining and quite interesting. But anyway, shall we get on to the crusade itself? Absolutely so, can you just describe the calling of the crusade, which was pretty dramatic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So at the Council of Clermont in southern France in 1095, the Pope announces this new opportunity for anybody who's interested, and the opportunity has several parts to it.
Speaker 2:It has an opportunity to help your co-religionists, your brother and sister Christians in the East, as the Pope says, who are under threat by the Turks and he tells these lurid stories about the Turks defiling altars and kidnapping children and raping women and devastating Christian communities in the East.
Speaker 2:And at the same time as helping your fellow Christian, you can make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the patrimony of Jesus Christ, and you can there save Christ's lands, which are also under the dominion of the horrible sort of bloodthirsty Turks. And finally, the Pope promises if you do all of this, it will be in my power to grant you a remission of your sins. So this is sort of the major argument for the Crusades is that you are helping your brother Christians, you are saving the land of Jerusalem and you are giving forgiveness of your sins. So this dramatic moment is carefully staged by the Pope beforehand to make sure he has maximum attendance for this announcement. But this is really only the first call. Then he goes to other cities and towns and churches and he repeats this for almost a year constantly preaching this message. So a big part of the story of the success of the First Crusade, as far as manpower, is just the Pope's indefatigable recruiting drive to get people to do this drive to get people to do this.
Speaker 1:It does seem just a remarkable enterprise, because nobody's tried to do anything like this before. At least I don't think so, certainly not on this scale, because it's going to take a massive army to get over and take Jerusalem. I don't know if the Pope is naive or what, but the size of the army that forms is beyond all his expectations, surely?
Speaker 2:Yes, I don't know what the Pope exactly expected to be the result of this. It's not clear how many people he was hoping for versus how many actually signed up, but it's certainly a surprise to see what happens. The crusade is wildly popular and in fact proceeds in multiple waves, so I couldn only the main body of the crusade. There's the People's Crusade before that, which potentially has just as many, and then there's an additional wave of the First Crusade that follows a little bit later. They're delayed in 1101, and that's probably got another 40,000 to 50,000. So we're talking enormous numbers of people that accept the Pope's call and even then they only barely succeed.
Speaker 1:So less wouldn't have done it, and yet it was kind of far more than they could have expected. So I'm just slightly flummoxed by it all. And then the other bit that slightly confuses me. I mean, I thought that the Popes joking aside, I also thought that the Popes in Byzantium, you know, they're always falling out over these abstruse matters of ritual and of the exact form. What's the word of the mass? Is it Of the creed? They're always falling out over the exact form of the creed. So when he says you're going to help the Christians in the East, does he mean the Byzantines or does he just mean Christians generally?
Speaker 2:He does mean the Byzantines. Yeah, he's referring to them and it's true that there is falling out between East and West over various issues, including the creed, but I think at this time that's not seen as such a big deal. So I think a lot of our understanding of that is sort of colored by what comes a little bit later. At this point in the 11th century there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of recrimination about it. We have no evidence that Pope Urban and Emperor Alexius saw themselves as at odds in any way religiously. I don't think either side was terribly concerned about that particular difference at that very moment. And we know that Alexius is interested in this help and that the Pope is interested in offering it, because we know that Alexius reached out to the Pope and asked him for some kind of help. So this is one of the things that prompts the Pope's call to Council of Clermont.
Speaker 1:You say we know that. How do we know that?
Speaker 2:Well, we know that because we have evidence that the Pope and the Emperor were actually corresponding. There's letters going back and forth, with the Emperor saying hey, you know, we've had some success with having small numbers of, you know, mercenaries from Frankish lands, come and help us fight the Turks. Maybe we could get a few more. It's not clear that the emperor is actually requesting an entire crusade, but he's asking for help.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So I was sort of joking about him going through his address book, but there is actually some truth on it. He is asking pretty much everyone he can think of, yes, okay, so maybe we should talk about the men who make up the crusade and, in particular, quite interested in the leaders. And there was two that sort of I don't know how many leaders there are of the crusade and maybe that's something we can talk about, but there's two that sort of jump out. One is Bohemond, who perhaps isn't going to be the most popular choice when he shows up in Constantinople. And then there's Raymond of Toulouse, who's this enormously wealthy man and you kind of think what on earth are you doing? I think he was quite old by the time he took on the crusade. What on earth are you doing going off to Jerusalem at that time of your life? So do you want to just say a bit about what kind of men are the leadership and how are the leaders organized? Is somebody in charge or how does it?
Speaker 2:work. I think that's a great place to start because I think it's very important to emphasize there is no single leader of the first crusade. So one of the issues with the crusades in general as far as military expeditions is that they are not organized by a single state. They are not, you know, efficiently run military hierarchy with a clearly defined leader. The leader in some sense is the Pope, because he called for the crusade, but the Pope doesn't travel with the crusade, he stays in Rome. So you have a sort of spiritual leader that is the Pope's legate or representative. For the first crusade it's Bishop Adhemar of Lepuy and he has some influence over what the crusade does, but he is a bishop rather than a general or a knight or a warrior, and so for military leadership the crusade relies upon the experience of some very capable military leaders, but none of them are acknowledged as the sole leaders. So you mentioned two of them, raymond and Bohemond, but we've also got several others Robert of Normandy, hugh of Vermandois, there's about six to seven, sort of Godfrey of Bouillon, really important crusade leaders, and they sort of act almost in a council or committee fashion to run the crusade, which will explain the number of the crusade's sort of curious choices and difficulties along the way, because no single man can claim to be fully in charge. And this actually suits the interests of the Emperor Alexius, because when they arrive there's sort of no unified opposition to what he's going to ask them to do. So he's able to take advantage of this to sort of deal with each of these leaders piecemeal, one by one, instead of having to deal with a unified large army outside of his capital city. But Bohemond, as you mentioned, is the one that Alexius knows the best, and not for good reasons.
Speaker 2:The same year that Alexius becomes emperor, we talked mostly about the problems in Anatolia and how that situation has fallen apart because of the Turks. But the same year Alexius becomes emperor, his empire is invaded from the other direction by the Normans of Southern Italy. Robert Giscard and his son Bohemond land in what is today Western Greece in 1081. And Alexius has to sort of drop everything, get together the army and rush off to fight them. And fight them. He does, and he loses three battles in a row to them. So he's not doing terribly well here. Eventually Robert has to return back to southern Italy because there's a rebellion against him and Alexius uses that opportunity to defeat Bohemond and force him back to follow his father. So Alexius survives the attack, but he knows very well who this Bohemond is and is probably nonplussed, to say the least, that Bohemond is one of the leaders of this crusade that's coming towards him.
Speaker 1:And you mentioned who is it? Robert of Normandy. Am I right in thinking that he's the eldest son of William the Conqueror as we English know him? Yes Well, william the Conqueror as we English know him.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Because I think he has a miserable time of it, because I think by the time he gets back from the crusade he's promptly put in prison Because he's been away too long. So I felt rather sorry for him. But then, as he is the son of the man who sort of took over my country, I don't feel that sorry for him Less sympathetic.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, okay, so you say that he takes advantage of the fact that these leaders are divided and I think I'm right in saying that they actually each lead their own little armies and that they turn up at different times, so Alexius is able to use that fact as well. So what's Alexius' strategy?
Speaker 2:So Alexius' strategy as the Crusaders arrive is first. I guess I should acknowledge this first before we get to sort of his hostile strategy First is supportive. The crusaders arrival is only possible because Alexius enables it. So, as you mentioned, each of these crusade leaders is coming with a small army and armies need to be fed. So Alexius arranges for their arrival by establishing storehouses and distribution centers along their marching routes so they can come through the empire and be fed as they're approaching Constantinople. So I think we should acknowledge that before we go to sort of the confrontation aspect is that Alexius is enabling their arrival, so he may not have expected quite such a large response, but he's well prepared by the time they do arrive and he's got, you know, all the fixings in place for them to be able to make this trip to Constantinople successfully. And when they get to Constantinople he continues this. So his first thing is I'm going to give you all gifts. I'm going to give you gold and silver and fancy silks and I'm going to shower you with fine food and entertainment and make sure you're all happy.
Speaker 2:And we know this is the case because Anna tells us this is one of Alexius's strategies, but also we have evidence from some of these crusade leaders themselves. Some of these crusade leaders themselves Stephen of Blau, wrote back to his wife to say that Alexius showers gifts on all of us and that he gives the greatest presence and he has no equal alive on earth today. The man is so amazing, so whatever he was giving them, it was apparently very impressive. But the gifts come with a string attached. So this is the sort of more confrontational aspect of his strategy. He wants the crusaders to swear an oath to him, and the oath is a fairly simple one comes from that feudal structure of oaths in Western Europe where knights swear oaths to their lords and lords swear oaths to their vassals. So Alexius is copying from this in a way that these Western leaders will understand. Swear to be my man.
Speaker 2:Alexius says swear to respect the territory of the Romans and to return any lands you conquer that used to be Roman back to me. So this is the oath that Alexius wants them to swear, and the crusade leaders have varying reactions to this oath. Some of them are more or less happy to say, okay, sure you got it, emperor, that's a great oath. I'll them are more or less happy to say, okay, sure you got it, emperor, that's a great oath. I'll swear it right now. Others of them refuse for what might be reasons of sort of their own desires, like maybe they don't want to turn over lands because they really want to create their own principalities. And still others seem to refuse, sort of out of a principle that they are on a crusade and that they swore an oath to God for this crusade and therefore they don't think there should be any temporal oath to a secular ruler as part of their religious obligation. So you know, there's a variety of responses, but the long and short of it is eventually everybody swears the oath in some form or another.
Speaker 1:Everybody swears the oath in some form or another. Two things I want to say. I mean. One is I get the sense that a typical feudal oath in the West there's mutual obligations Whereas I think the oath that Alexius wants to get is kind of one-sided.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right. So in a typical feudal oath there's going to be obligations on both sides and it's going to be a binding oath, the sense that it was for the time being of this, this crusade action, like while they're traveling through roman lands.
Speaker 2:So I think that there's maybe some mutual understanding on both sides that, yes, it's limited in this way, but they're still expecting alexius to come along with them. I think this is where there's a little bit of of a disconnect between crusaders and alexius. Yeah, alexius thought that he had the obligation to support the crusaders, sort of financially and logistically, and they expected him to support them militarily and in person. So these crusade leaders because they don't have a single leader, many of them probably expected alexius to be that single leader. They expected him to become a crusader, to bring his forces and to go along with them on the journey. And Alexius demurs on that, expresses no interest in that portion of the obligation. So whether it was part of the oath or not, I don't know, but certainly it was part of the expectation that many of the crusaders had and Alexius did not share that.
Speaker 1:And the other thing I wanted to say about oaths is that they're taken desperately seriously in the West. Whatever might be in your heart, other people will judge you if you break an oath, because there is no enforcement mechanism other than an oath. So if you're seen to be somebody who will break an oath, nobody can trust you right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, these oaths are considered very important, which is in some ways, ironic, because one of the reasons the West has so much violence at this period is because they're constantly breaking these oaths and fighting with each other over them. That goes my theory. But no, they think it's very important. That's why they fight over it when people break these oaths. So yeah, it's a core part of this sort of Western culture, but it's also something that they themselves frequently break.
Speaker 1:One thing I want to say about the Crusaders is that at this stage, a Western knight fully equipped with all his horses, with all his fully equipped with all his horses, with all his equipment, with all his armor, with all his weapons, I mean he's a formidable man of war and it's quite noticeable that I mean maybe they're lucky, whatever, but they do score a string of military successes against the Turks who just aren't ready for them military successes against the Turks, who just aren't ready for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, these knights are formidable and they have tactics that the Turks are unprepared for. The Turks are not used to fighting this kind of battle and these knights arrive all of a sudden in Anatolia and they are able to have their way with the Turks in several engagements in what is today Western Turkey. And it seems that the knights are partially fortunate in that they may not have a giant Byzantine army with them, but they do have a Byzantine advisor with them. So Taticius, a general sent by Alexius, travels with the crusaders, provides them advice. The knights are also fortunate in that they are well-supplied. You make the point that these knights are formidable mid of war, but they're also they require a lot to keep them going right. You've got this knight with his charger and then he's got a squire and his squire's got his backup horses.
Speaker 2:It requires a lot of food to keep all these knights and horses alive, and this is all provided by the emperor on the early part of the First Crusade, so he's making sure that they can stay healthy enough to do the fighting, he's providing them advisors to give them tips on when and where to encounter the Turks, and together it all seems to work pretty well for the First Crusade.
Speaker 1:I do wonder if it might have gone a lot worse, in a way, if Alexis had been there trying to tell them what to do, because presumably they know the business of fighting pretty well. One thing that struck me when I was looking at all this was their first big objective is Nicaea, and it sort of just slaps you in the face just how bad things were for the Byzantine Empire, because Nicaea, I mean it's not exactly in the suburbs of Constantinople, but it's not far. I mean I don't know how far it is from Constantinople to Nicaea, I mean 50 miles, 80 miles. I mean it's right up there. And that's the first piece of work that they're set to do by Alexios.
Speaker 2:Okay, so maybe we want to re-record this part, but I just pulled it up in case we're curious. Nicaea is 140 kilometers from Constantinople.
Speaker 1:I mean it's incredible and you know it's basically Anatolia is gone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So we're in this situation here where the empire really has almost no control over Anatolia. Right, they have to fight for Nicaea, which is that close to Constantinople. Even the coastal regions of Anatolia are under the control of Turkish governors. The empire controls maybe a little bit. He controls what is today Nicomedia. We know that right before the First Crusade Alexios was fortifying Nicomedia, so that's even closer to Constantinople than Nicaea. So he has this tiny corner of Anatolia basically a starting point for the first crusade, but otherwise it's all Turks.
Speaker 1:But even though they don't have any control. The people living there they're still, presumably they're still Christian. They're still thinking that their loyalty is to the Byzantine Empire. It's just that for some reason, there's somebody else in charge temporarily, but there's still a structure there to be reclaimed right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think that's a very good point that all of this is relatively recent. It's been at the time of the First Crusade, probably 20 years or less, that most of these lands have seen Turkish rule. So, you know, there's still a good number of people that not only are Christian but still remember who the emperor is, or at least who the emperor was at the time that they lost their Roman rulership, and that are ready to be returned to the empire. So there's a thin veneer of Turkish overlordship that can fairly easily be swept aside from many of these lands at this point.
Speaker 1:And we say that Alexius doesn't accompany the crusade, and that's right, but they do send their own armies out, sort of in parallel. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right. So this is part of Alexios' strategy, which is actually very clever. While the First Crusade is marching inland from Nicaea down to what will eventually be Doraleum, where they'll fight the Turks again, alexios dispatches one of his armies, under the command of his brother-in-law, john Ducas, along the coast of Anatolia through what the Greeks used to call Ionia. So he's capturing cities all along the coast, the famous ones, ephesus, and then he goes inland to Sardis and then to Laodicea and to Polybidos. So he's taking over all these lands and ends up essentially restoring the northwestern quadrant of Anatolia to the emperor, alongside the actions of the First Crusade. So it's like two parallel armies operating, one the Crusade and one John Dukas. So you mentioned the Battle of Dorylaeum, so is that another success for the crusaders? How does that go? And they next reach Doraleum in July 1097. And here they encounter the big army of the Turks in a set piece battle, and the crusaders are nearly defeated because they're broken into two. The vanguard has moved ahead of the main body.
Speaker 2:So the vanguard is surrounded by the Turkish army and the Turks perhaps think the vanguard is it and they're about to win.
Speaker 1:No-transcript that one of the great Christian cities Is that what they call a patriarchate?
Speaker 2:That's correct. So there are five patriarchates of the Christian world. There is Antioch, jerusalem, alexandria, constantinople and Rome. So in the period we're talking about, constantinople and Rome tend to get almost all of the attention because they are the ones that are still under Christian rule. But these ancient patriarchates in Antioch, jerusalem and Alexandria, according to the Orthodox anyway, are sort of equal in authority to Rome and Constantinople and are very important. So Antioch is a major Christian center. It's the place where followers of Jesus were first called Christians. It's where St Paul was commissioned to go on his missionary journeys, so it's a very important center of Christianity.
Speaker 1:And is there still a patriarch? Do they still talk to each other or are they split off in some way?
Speaker 2:Yes, there's still a patriarch in Antioch. He is a part of the circle of Orthodox bishops, so he is still in communication and communion with the patriarch of Constantinople. And this will be a key sticking point in the future, after the crusade ends up taking Antioch, because the crusaders wish to replace the patriarch with a Latin patriarch, one from the West, who will sort of bow the knee to the pope, and that's a whole other set of arguments.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I mean Antioch is where the crusade basically it almost breaks, doesn't it? I mean, it's just a for them, it's an absolute horror story.
Speaker 2:Yes, antioch almost becomes a disaster for the crusaders. They arrive at Antioch in October of 1097, but Antioch is much too large and well fortified for the crusade to storm or capture. So they surround it to try to starve it out, and this takes them all the way until June of 1098. So well, over seven months of sitting outside Antioch throughout the winter, both sides suffering, the crusaders running out of food, the people inside Antioch running out of food. There's starvation, there's disease. The army of the crusaders is just about broken when, at the 11th hour in June 1098, bohemond is able to bribe his way into Antioch and open up a gate and all the crusaders rush in and take it and they think they're doing well, and then they're immediately besieged by a relieving Turkish army from what is today Mosul in Iraq.
Speaker 2:And so now the crusaders who have just got into Antioch can't leave Antioch, and now they're the one besieged. And finally, at the end of June, they said enough is enough and they open up the gates. They just rush out to attack the Turks, and you know a desperation maneuver and they actually defeat them, and so the crusade is saved and you know we'll be able to proceed on from there. But it's a very close run thing there for many months.
Speaker 1:And let's just talk a little bit about Bowman. We've already spent a huge amount of time, but a lot of his authority comes from the fact that he is. When it comes to fighting, he's an absolute monster, that man.
Speaker 2:Yes, bowman is very successful. He's one of the leaders most responsible for the victory at Dora Leum we mentioned earlier. He's the one man who figures out how to get into Antioch, and then he's the one that leads the rally, the sally forth at the end of June against the Turkish relief army, and wins that one. So Bohemond comes off very well in battles against Turks on the First Crusade.
Speaker 1:And apart from, perhaps, personal ambition and greed, whatever you call it he wants Antioch for himself, and his argument, as I understand it, is that the emperor has not lived up to his side of the oath, so he's free from his oath. He doesn't have to hand back Antioch. Am I right in thinking that Alexius has effectively abandoned the crusade at this stage?
Speaker 2:Yes, this is the big question, right? The question over which the occupation of Antioch turns is did Alexius abandon the Crusaders? And Alexius had been very helpful up to a certain point with the Crusades, as I said earlier. He provided them logistical support, he provided them food and supplies and guides and advice and he makes sure their rear is clear with this other campaign he's running in Western Anatolia. So he's providing support and the Crusaders recognize that support, really all the way up to Antioch and in Antioch, those long months of desperate waiting outside the city as their supplies dwindle and the winter is cold and all that, some of the opinion begins to turn and they really desperately want Alexius to come in person to help them. And it appears that Alexius is planning to do so. So at this point he's sort of wrapped up the campaign in Western Anatolia. He's collected the army together at a town called Philomelium in Western Central Anatolia. He's preparing to march from Philomelium and follow the crusaders down to Antioch and support them there and at this key moment he receives several visitors as he's making this decision have run away from the siege of Antioch.
Speaker 2:So not every crusader stayed to the bitter end. Some of them thought that this is it? We're all doomed, we can't possibly win. And they left. They ran, and included among them was Stephen of Blas, most famous for being married to the daughter of William the Conqueror. So Stephen comes to Alexius at Philomelium and he says so. Stephen comes to Alexius at Philomelium and he says it's over, the crusaders are definitely going down. You can go after them.
Speaker 2:But is more recent, which one reflects the accurate information, and Alexius decides to not go forward, to not go to Antioch, to turn back and head back home instead. Now, this is a choice which has been questioned ever since it happened. It was questioned from the immediate moment by the Crusaders and it's been questioned by modern historians ever since. Does this constitute an abandonment of the Crusaders, an abandonment of his suzerainty over them? If he's not willing to go with them, does he really count as their lord anymore, according to those oaths that he had before? And I think Alexius made a conservative choice which he thought was good for his empire, but there was no way the crusaders were ever going to understand it that way. They were going to understand it as being abandoned and as the emperor not helping them.
Speaker 1:So I think this is certainly one of the turning points in why they decide to allow Bohemond to claim Antioch in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Well, he says the emperor didn't come we asked him to to detest Bohemond and doesn't want them to get anti-Och, or whether he really takes the oath seriously. But one thing that suggests he takes it seriously is that he's taken an oath never to return to France, which it suggests to me that he took the religious side, that he took the oaths themselves very seriously indeed.
Speaker 2:Yes, raymond is intending to die in the Holy Land and is uninterested in returning home and seems to have maintained a good relationship with Alexius throughout the Crusade and even after the First Crusade is over. So he's one of Alexius' favorites and Anna says all these wonderful things about Raymond and the Alexiad and you know he outshone all the other crusaders like the sun outshines the stars in the sky. He was so wonderful and you know clearly this is self-interested. He's so wonderful because he's loyal to Alexius because he's loyal to Alexius.
Speaker 2:But yes, Raymond and Alexius seemed to have a very good relationship throughout this time, for whatever reason. I don't know if it's religious reasons, sincerity of oath, maybe they just personally clicked. Lots of possibilities there.
Speaker 1:About 100 years later 1204 I'm thinking about that is 100 years later, isn't it? Yeah, we have the Fourth Crusade, where the Western crusaders take and sack Constantinople and really it's the greatest catastrophe that the empire has really ever suffered. And are the seeds of that sown in Antioch? Or can you not really connect the two?
Speaker 2:So you can connect the two through a roundabout way? I don't think Alexius turned— Well what?
Speaker 1:I'm trying to say is are the seeds of distrust between the Latin world and the Byzantine world really sown, then? Because afterwards the propaganda against the Byzantines sort of gets into overdrive, as I understand it.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly. Yeah, you put it that way. That's exactly how I would put it. So the seeds are sown, then, and they sprout in the forms of propaganda. So because Alexius turns back at Antioch and Bohemond claims Antioch, that leads to further conflict between Alexius and Bohemond, which leads to Bohemond going back to Italy, and he's the one that spreads all these terrible stories about Alexius, and he even asked the Pope to declare a crusade against Alexius as far back as the 1100s, and so the seeds of this conflict and this idea that a crusade may be called against the Byzantine Empire, may be organized against the Byzantine Empire, go all the way back to Bowman here. So I think that's fair to point out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, well, look, I suppose we ought to finish up. You're more interested, I think, in the interplay between the Byzantines and the crusaders, but do you want to just finish us off with what happens after Antioch?
Speaker 2:Sure Well, the Crusade struggles a little bit.
Speaker 2:At first, after Antioch, there is disagreements about what to do, first over who's going to control Antioch, then over how the Crusade should proceed south.
Speaker 2:So it takes a little bit of time to get going again. They sit outside of Antioch for the next several months throughout the winter and then deep into the spring, and they finally get in their heads okay, well, we should head down south now, which they do, and they largely bypass most of the cities on the coast of what is today Lebanon and Israel, and they make it down to Jerusalem, which is one of the goals established for them by Pope Urban II in 1099. And they're able to take over the city in July of 1099, july 15th of 1099. And they have a great bloodletting and take over the city. And then they go and they clasp their hands in prayer in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and give thanks to God for their successful crusade. So the crusade has the ending desired by the Western participants who reach Jerusalem, they liberate the city, as they see it, and they earn their forgiveness of sins, as promised by the pope.
Speaker 1:And is there any revisionist history here? Because we always hear about this terrible bloodletting that takes place once they capture the city, but is there any revisionist history to the effect to say no, no, no, nothing as bad as this happened. This is all exaggerated talk, for whatever reason. It's a bit like the Romans, who loved to exaggerate the enemy casualties because that was part of the glory of the battle. And I just wonder did Jerusalem effectively cease to exist as a going concern? Because it doesn't seem to have done so. If everybody's dead, how did it carry on?
Speaker 2:Yes, I think there's some revision here in the sense that the massacre is not as bad as what some of our sources intimate, right. So we have some sources say that they killed so many people that blood flowed down the streets as high as everybody's ankles, which is, you know, an enormous amount of blood would have required killing many more people than actually lived in Jerusalem. So there's clearly some exaggeration going on here. I think most modern historians today would probably agree there is a massacre.
Speaker 2:The Crusaders probably do kill people, but that it's not necessarily particularly worse than other massacres that occur when a city is captured, so very frequently in the Middle Ages. If a city is captured, not by surrender, but when it's stormed by the enemy army, there's little mercy shown. You run through the city, you kill anybody who's foolish enough to stand out in the street and make themselves a target. You capture and enslave people that are hidden in houses, and you know it's generally an unpleasant thing, say the least. This is like that, maybe a little bit worse because there's this sort of rush of spiritual and emotional energy, but it's not the kind of extreme massacre that you know it may be perceived to be.
Speaker 1:And as far as the, I mean let's forget about 1204 and the Fourth Crusade. As far as Byzantium is concerned, I mean, it seems like they've got a fantastic result out of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think Alexius is pleased with the result of the First Crusade overall. Clearly, Antioch continues to give him Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Speaker 1:What are you saying? They don't even have Nicaea when it starts. Has he not got back the whole of Anatolia more, or?
Speaker 2:less. He's gotten back the northwest quadrant of Anatolia, which is something it's a big improvement. I think Alexius potentially could have done more if he'd been a little bit more ambitious, if he'd wanted to roll the dice more. We talked about the decision to turn back at Philomelium earlier. What if he'd not done that? What if he decided to push forward and see what he could accomplish? Alexius has done well with the First Crusade. He is pleased with the result. Could he have done more, potentially? But it's worked out very well for the empire. And I think this is something that when enthusiasts focus on the way the Crusades hurt Byzantium, they don't think about the way the First Crusade really helped. And you're right, it's a big help. It enables Alexius to establish control over lands maybe equal to a third of what he'd had before.
Speaker 1:And what happens to Byzantium, say in the next, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to go on. You know, because you know, we all know what happens in the end. But you know, for the next 10, 20, 30 years is it a relatively stable situation or do they lapse back into their bad habits of coups and counter-coups?
Speaker 2:We have a remarkably stable situation from the end of the reign of Alexius up through 1180. Alexius is succeeded by his son John, who's then succeeded by his son Manuel. So there's stability in the politics, there's stability in geography, so the empire is able to further consolidate what Alexius had grabbed during the First Crusade, stitch together a very stable empire there in Western Anatolia, expand into Southern Anatolia and connect up to Northern Anatolia. So quite a bit of land has been recovered and stabilized. It's called the Komnenian Restoration for the name of the dynasty, the Komnenian Dynasty. It's a stable and largely happy time for the empire.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, I guess, on that happy note, at least a happy note for the empire, for the dynasty, maybe we should end it there. Okay. So, david Parnell, thank you very much indeed.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you.