10 - Provincial Separatism in the Late Twelfth Century: A Case of Power Relations or Disparate Identities?

Summary

At the time when the German crusading army under Frederick I Barbarossa was traversing Byzantine lands, that is, in 1189–90, the anonymous author of the Historia de expeditione Friderici Imperatoris recorded that

the kingdom was split into four …; in Cyprus a certain man of royal blood named Isaac had usurped the royal dignity for himself; beyond the Hellespont … a certain Theodore was in rebellion in the region of Philadelphia, while Kalopeter the Vlach and his brother Asan with the Vlachs subject to them were exercising tyrannical rule over much of Bulgaria.

The author was referring to the regions of the Lower Danube controlled by the Vlach chieftains Peter and Asen, the important city of Philadelphia and its neighbouring lands in southwestern Anatolia ruled by the local magnate Theodore Mangaphas and the wealthy island of Cyprus that had been seized by the imperial relative Isaac Komnenos. What is remarkable in his description is not the knowledge of Byzantine internal affairs, but rather the observation that the Byzantine Empire was already in the process of dissolution.

The individuals in question had rebelled against imperial authority and were self-proclaimed rulers. Theodore Mangaphas and Isaac Komnenos had even usurped the imperial title and minted their own coinage. The territories under their control were located in frontier regions of the empire, and they all received, at one point or another, some form of outside assistance: from the Cumans in the case of Peter and Asen, the Normans of Sicily in the case of Isaac Komnenos and the Turks in the case of Theodore Mangaphas. The rebels themselves do not appear to have had much in common: the Vlachs Peter and Asen were foreign subjects of the empire; Theodore Mangaphas was a local magnate with no known connections to the imperial family or court; and Isaac Komnenos was a grand-nephew of the late emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143–80) and a former governor of Cilicia. Nevertheless, their rebellions converged into the ‘perfect storm’, since they represented the major problems confronting the imperial government in the late twelfth century: ethnic separatism in the periphery; the rise of a locally powerful aristocracy in the provinces; and the imperial ambitions of members of the extended Komnenian family.