Lost Medieval Cities on the Caspian Sea Littoral

Posted on by demonymonic
Archaeology, Built Environment, Geography, Inter-ethnic relations, Local history, Medieval history,, Natural Environment, Regional History, Town planning

The Caspian “Sea”—geographically more correctly an inland saltwater lake, the biggest of its kind in the world—is bordered by five modern nations, Kazakhstan and Russia (to the north), Azerbaijan (west), Turkmenistan (east) and Iran (south). With a melting pot of ethnicities in the region, below we will meet some medieval cities situated on the Caspian littoral that prospered for a time during the Middle Ages before vanishing entirely from history.

Aktobe–Laeti, located south of Atyrau City on the northern shore of the Caspian Sea (image: researchgate.net)

Lost city of Aktobe–Laeti: Archaeologists whose fieldwork focuses on the Caspian Sea and Caucasus regions have had much to occupy themselves with in recent decades. Systematic excavations started in the 1970s and have unearthed hitherto-disappeared sites like Aktobe–Laeti, a buried urban settlement on the Great Silk Road route that thrived in the 14th and 15th centuries. Atkobi–Laeti is located in the Atyrau (western) region of Kazakhstan. Archaeologists discovered that the settlement contains three cultural layers on top of each other (cf. Troy). Furnaces and fragments found among the debris point to the erstwhile city having skilled artisans in metalwork and pottery crafts. Many of the newly unearthed artefacts are now on display at the local history museum [‘Ancient Land of the Caspian Sea Holds Secrets of the Past’, Aruzhan Ualikhanova, The Astana Times, 15-July-2023, www.astanatimes.com].  

Excavations of Atkobe–Laeti (photo: assembly.kz)

Reconstructing a Golden Horde settlement: It’s estimated that at its peak Aktobe–Laeti housed around 10,000 inhabitants who traded their goods and wares with travelling foreign merchants. It’s key position on the Silk Road linking Central Asia and the lower Volga and evidence of the minting of coins suggest that the city was a prosperous one during these times. Traces of a substantial urban settlement in Aktobe–Laeti having existed, contradicts the established view that the peoples of the Caspian Sea led exclusively nomadic lives (Ualikhanova).

In the 14th century this important city of commerce could be identified on maps of Italian travellers but by the 16th century Aktobe-Laeti had vanished without a trace. There are two theories put forward that account for it’s sudden disappearance – it was submerged under the rising waters of the Caspian, or the city was destroyed by Timur of Samarkand in his vast empire-extending, take-no-prisoners rampage across central and western Asia (Ualikhanova).

Stone tablets from the sunken Bayil Qala (on display in Baku’s Old City) (source: OrexCA)

Sabayil castle, Atlantis for real: Climate change, the damming of some 100 rivers which flow into the sea including the Volga and the flow-on effects of the Aral Sea disaster, have all resulted in a shrinking of the Caspian and an on-going drop in the sea-level. The singular upside of this ominous ecological change, perhaps for archaeologists alone, is the surfacing of the upper sections of the long-disappeared Sabayil (or Bayil) Castle. The structure, built by Shirvanshah Faribirz III in 1232–1235 as an off-shore watchtower 350m from the shoreline to give the citizens of Baku advanced notice of impending attacks on the city. In 1306 the castle sank under water due to a mega-earthquake. The now visible tops of the towers reveals huge stone tablets engraved in both Arabic and Farsi script and decorations depicting imaginary animals and human faces [‘As the Caspian Sea Disappears, Life Goes on for Those Living by Its Shores’, Felix Light, Moscow Times, 27-Apr-2021, 
www.themoscowtimes.com; ‘Sabayil Castle, vicinity of Baku’, OrexCA, www.orexca.com].

Shards from the past: no archeological remains of Ithill have been positively identified; the most persuasive theory is that they were washed away by the rising tide of the Caspian Sea

Caspian cities of the Khazar Khanate: Lost cities were also a feature of the medieval Khazaria Kingdom (a large area mainly to the north and northwest of the Caspian Sea). Prominent among these were Ithill (sometimes written “Atil”) and Balanjar. Ithill’s precise location is unknown, however Russian archeologists claim to have discovered the site of Ithill (near Astrakhan in Northern Dagestan), having unearthed a fortress, flamed bricks (a speciality of the Khazars) and yurt-shaped dwellings. The claim has not been substantiated. On the Silk Road route, Ithill, the Khazaria capital at one stage, at its zenith was a major centre of trade, including the Khazaria slave trade. Ithill’s road to ruin and downfall began in the 10th century after the city was sacked by Kievan Rus led by Prince Sviatoslav I. It may have been rebuilt afterwards but it was again decimated in the 11th century and wiped off the map for keeps. Balanjar was also a capital of Khazaria for a time and a city of considerable importance. It suffered the same fate as Ithill, decimated by nomadic conquerors (in the Arab-Khazar wars), rebuilt but went into terminal decline and was no more heard of after ca.1100𖤓.

Khazars were a confederation of Turkic tribes that converted to Judaism in the 8th century (image: Military Review)

Abuskūn: Medieval Persia was the site of a lost city on the southwestern shore of the Caspian Sea, the port of Abuskūn. It’s location is uncertain but most scholars place it in within the Gorgān region. Abuskūn was a prosperous trading hub for its merchants who traded as far away as the land of the Khazars on the Volga trade route. The city’s wealth and vulnerable location made it a sought-after prize for the Rus and their Caspian expeditions. After 1220 Abuskūn is not mentioned in the documents, although in the 14th century a Persian geographer wrote that it had been an island in the Caspian which was submerged due to the sea’s rise in level.

Receding shorelines of the Caspian Sea, Aktaou, Kazakhstan (photo: Alamy Stock Photo)

Abandoned Dekhistan in the desert: Modern Turkmenistan is host to one or two lost cities of its own. The most significant was Dekhistan, aka Dekhistan-Misrian (S.W. Turkmenistan), near the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea…a ruined Silk Road city but at its peak (11th century) a major economic centre and the foremost medieval oasis in the region. It managed to survive the Mongol invasion albeit weakened, limped on till the 15th century but was ultimately undone by large scale deforestation precipitating an ecological disaster (failed irrigation system), turning the city into a ghost town. All that remains are mud-brick foundations, the outlines of a few caravanserais and what’s left of several minarets in varying degrees of decay [‘Ancient settlement of Dekhistan’, Silk Road Adventures, www.silkadv.com].

Dekhistan, deserted former city in Turkmenistan dating back to 3rd century BC (source: advantour.com)

Derbent continuity: Derbent in the Dagestan region of Russia differs from the impermanence of these other medieval Caspian cities in it having achieved a continuity of existence right through to the present day. Archeological diggings reveal that the city has clocked up nearly 2,000 years of continuous urban settlement. The existence of Derbent (romanised as “Derbend”, from a Farsi word meaning “gateway”) as a fortified settlement, was known by Greek and Roman authors as early as the 3rd century BC [‘Citadel, Ancient City and Fortress Buildings of Derbent’, UNESCO, www.whc.unesco.org]. Derbent’s strategic location, nestled tightly between natural barriers—the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains—has seen control of it pass from empire to empire – Persian, Arab, Mongol, Timurid, Shirvan and finally Russian§. Under the Persians it formed part of the northern lines of the Sasanian Empire.

.

Derbent, citadel/fortress, surrounded on three sides by steep slopes and buttressed by thick, massive stone walls (photo: flickr.com)

𖤓 another Khazar city, Samandar—thought to be situated on the western shore of the Caspian roughly midway between Atil and Derbent—was also lost to history during this period

§ so prized because it allowed rulers of Derbent to control land traffic between the Eurasian Steppe and the Middle East [‘Derbent’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

What’s in a Text?: Intentional and Affective Fallacies and the Logical Fallacy of Arguments from Silence

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Medieval history,, Performing arts, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture, Travel, Visual Arts, World history,

Exegesis: Relegating the author In literary and artistic aesthetics the intentional fallacy occurs when readers or viewers use factors outside the text or visual work (such as biographical information) to evaluate its merits, rather than ignoring these “external” factors and relying solely on the textual or visual evidence of the novel, play, poem, painting, etc. to assess the work in question (what’s actually in the text and nothing outside). This key precept of the New Criticism school declares that a poem (or other work of art) does not belong to its author, it is (as stated by the term’s originators WK Wimsatt and MC Beardsley) “detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it”1⃞. Authorial intention is a non-consideration in the assessment of the work. The text or work has an objective status and its meaning belongs solely to the reading or viewing public. The reader’s task in literature, advocates of New Criticism assert, is to eschew subjective or personal aspects such as the lives and psychology of authors and literary history and focus entirely on close reading and explication of the text (A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 1981), edited by M.H. Abrams).

The intentional fallacy, elaborated in Wimsatt’s 1954 The Verbal Icon

The intentional fallacy doctrine has a corollary in the affective fallacy which adheres to the same principles. Wimsatt and Beardsley affirmed that evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader, is an erroneous way of approaching the task. Giving rein to the emotions a work of art evokes in you, negates an appreciation of “the (work’s) inherent qualities and craftsmanship” that an objective analysis permits (Prince Kumar, ‘Understand Affective Fallacy from Example’, LitforIndia, 23-Dec-2023, www.litforindia.com).

(source: cornerstoneduluth.org)

Semantic autonomy, Intentionalism, Anti-intentionalism: The intentional and affective fallacies as prescriptive “rules” of hermeneutics held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s, however this is not to say that there was no pushback from scholarly dissenters. Proponents (primarily American) of what is called “Reader-response theory” reject the claims of New Criticism of this prescribed mode of interpreting and critiquing a work of literature. Some of these objected to the fallacy’s nothing outside the text rigidity for constricting exploration of all possibilities of a work’s meanings. Critic Norman Holland frames it in a psychoanalytical context, the reader, he affirms, will react to a literary text with the same psychological responses he or she brings to events in their daily lives, ie, “the immediate goal of interpretation is to fulfil (one’s) psychological needs and desires” (‘Psychological Reader-response Theory’, Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism (2016), www.literariness.org). Theorist ED Hirsch in his “Objective Interpretation” essay also took issue with the expositors of the intentional fallacy thesis, arguing that on the contrary authorial intent (intentionalism) was integral to a full understanding of the work…the only meaning that is permanent and valid is that of the author in question, the reader should confine him or herself to interpreting what the author is trying to say (E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation, 1967) .

𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔 : 𖠔

A quite different kind of fallacious argument is the argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio). This arises when a conclusion or inference is drawn based on an absence of statements in historical documents and source materials…the argument seeks not to challenge or rebut specific things an author includes in a book or document, but is critical of the author for something they should have said but didn’t! The most common instances of the argument from silence in practice relate to biblical debates and controversies, but a contemporary classic example of a non-theological, historical nature, one generating considerable heated discourse, concerns the 13th century merchant and explorer Marco Polo and the famous book of his travels in the East.

Medieval Venezia at the time of Marco Polo (source: Bodleian Library, Oxford)

Medieval world travelogue guru?: Known by various names including Description of the World (Divisament du monde), Book of the Marvels of the World, Il libro di Marco Polo detto il Milione, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, or simply The Travels of Marco Polo, the book is one of the most celebrated tomes in the annals of literature dealing with the experiences of travellers to distant and unknown lands. The story, told and retold in numerous languages over centuries, presents Marco and his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo embarking on an epic road trip along the Silk Road to the court of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Beijing). The book recounts Marco’s travels in Cathay (North China) and Manji (South China), among other Eastern lands. The consensus among most historians is that Signor Polo, despite a tendency to exaggerate and embellish the tales of his travels2⃞, did nonetheless journey to China as he claimed in the book. The publication of Did Marco Polo Go to China? by Frances Wood in 1995 controversially swam against this tide. Wood infers serious doubts about Polo’s achievements, suggesting that despite his being away from his native Italy for the best part of a quarter-of-a-century, he never reached his intended destination China. According to Wood, he got only as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea where he accumulated all of his information on Chinese society and other Asian lands (his source material for the “Travels”) from picking the brains of visiting Persian merchants.

A page from the Polo travelogue

Doubting “Marco’s millions”: What made Wood so convinced that Marco Polo never visited China? Firstly, there is the book’s puzzling itinerary, it proceeds in a disjointed, incoherent fashion, is not uniformly chronological, has some odd detours and gets some geographical place names in China wrong. Then, while acknowledging The Travels of Marco Polo contains references to porcelain (from Fujian province), coal, rice-wine, paper currency and other items, Wood hones in on the fact that the Venetian traveller failed to mention certain other quintessentially Chinese things—namely the Great Wall of China, tea, chopsticks, cormorant fishing and the practice of foot-binding—in the pages of his “Travels’. Wood also picks up on Polo’s failure to learn Chinese during his sojourn in the Middle Kingdom. Allied to these omissions was the absence of Polo’s3⃞ name in any official Chinese document of the period, which Wood believed, further incriminated Marco as the perpetrator of a fraud.

A crumbling section of the not-so-great wall in north China built prior to Polo’s time (photo: John Man, The Great Wall)

Wood herself is perpetrating a pattern of reasoning which is problematic by recourse to an argument from silence. As Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2010) (ISBN0-415-96219-6Routledge pp. 64–65) note, “arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray.” Academic critics have been quick to pinpoint the shortcomings and misconceptions in Wood’s argument. There are, they counter, manifestly valid reasons why Polo would not refer to the Great Wall, for one, it was largely not there in the period of his residency in China! The impressive edifice of the Great Wall as we think of it was primarily a product of the Ming Dynasty (from 1368, three-quarters of a century after the Polos’ stay)…what there was of the not-so-Great Wall prior to that was a much more modest, unprepossessing sight (“a discontinuous series of derelict, pounded earth ramparts”) (‘F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go To China?’, A Critical Appraisal byI. de Rachewiltz, http://openresearch–repository.anu.edu.au). With the matter of the Chinese penchant for tea-drinking, perhaps Polo didn’t think the topic simply sufficiently noteworthy to rate a mention4⃞. The question of the omission of foot-binding, chopsticks and Polo’s linguistic ignorance of Chinese in the travelogue can all be accounted for. China and the royal court was under Mongol control (Yuan Dynasty) in Marco’s time, accordingly Polo moved in those circles, tending not to mix with the (Han) Chinese population. and so lacked the motivation (or opportunity) to learn Chinese. Likewise, he wouldn’t have encountered many upper class Chinese women in their homes, this was the strata of society that practiced female foot-binding, not the Mongols. Again, with chopsticks, not a utensil of choice for the Mongols who Polo tended to fraternise with (Morgan, D. O. (1996). Marco Polo in China-Or Not [Review of Did Marco Polo Go to China?, by F. Wood]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6(2), 221–225. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25183182). As for “the Travels’” silence on fishing with cormorants, the activity was not a widespread phenomena in China during the Yuan era, confined to the remoter areas of Sichuan Province (‘Cormorant Fishing in China’, Sally Guo, China Travel (Upd. 04-April-2021), www.chinatravel.com).

MP (source: caamadi.com/de/marco-polo-in-venice)

Filtered Marco Polo – Rustichello et al: And there’s another line of thought when considerating the book’s glaring omissions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies that Frances Wood doesn’t seem to have factored into her thesis…The Travels of Marco Polo, the published book we read today, is a different beast in form and content to the original article from the late 1290s. In fact the original manuscript which Polo dictated to his amanuensis, an imaginative romance writer Rustichello de Pisa —who had licence to inject his own theatrical flourishes and flavour into Marco’s original story—was lost early on, so “the Travels” have gone on an untraceable and interminable journey through “dozens of translations of translations, none of which are necessarily accurate” (‘The Travels of Marco Polo: The True Story of a 14th-Century Bestseller’, Anna Bressanin, BBC, 09-Jan-2024, www.bbc.com). Of the 54 extant manuscripts (out of around 150 distinct copies in all languages), no two copies are entirely alike with “improvements” and edits made by each copyist and translator. We should also remember that Marco was in prison, relying on his memory to recount a multitude of events and experiences, some of which stretched back over 20 years, hardly surprising then if readers have to contend with the recollections of a not entirely reliable narrator (‘Marco Polo’s book on China omits tea, chopsticks, bound feet’, Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post, 04-Oct-2020, www.amp.scmp.com).

The Marco Polo saga has spawned a long history of film and television versions with romantic adventure taking precedence over story accuracy

Heavily redacted archives: The issue of Polo’s claim to have been an official in Kublai Khan’s service—and in particular governor of Yangzhou—was seized on by Dr Wood who pointed out that Marco’s name does not appear in any historical official Chinese archives. Rather than being necessarily proof of Marco fabricating a presence in China as Wood assumes, other factors may explain the discrepancy…no other Italian merchants known to have visited medieval China are mentioned in any Chinese sources, even the Papal envoy to the Great Khan’s court, Giovanni de Marignolli, doesn’t rate a mention (‘Marco Polo was not a swindler. He really did go to China’, Science News, 16-Apr-2012, www.sciencedaily.com). Another factor germane to this is the fact that the Ming (Han) Dynasty that succeeded the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty initiated the practice of erasing the records of earlier non-Han officials (Morgan).

(source: LibriVox)

One particularly vocal critic of Did Marco Polo Go To China?, Sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel from the University of Tübingen, produced a research paper demonstrating that Marco’s descriptions of currency, salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly in China were of a standard of accuracy and uniqueness of detail5⃞, that produces a very high level of proof that Polo had to have been in China, close to the wheels of power, to be privy to such comprehensive knowledge (www.sciencedaily.com).

Chinese salt production (source: Wellcome Images)

The “logical fallacy of weak induction”: Frances Wood’s iconoclastic book was certainly an attention-grabber, both for medieval scholars and Sinologists and for the general public, causing a furore upon its publication in 1995 and spawning several TV documentaries. China and the world of the Great Khan is a central tenet of the Marco Polo story, making it unthinkable to most scholars, almost a sacrilege, to suggest that the legendary Venetian traveller never set foot in the Middle Kingdom! The weight of the counter-argument unleashed against Wood’s thesis throws a spotlight on the hazards of trying to “treat the absence of evidence as evidence itself”, as Steven Lewis summarises the fallacious nature of the argument from silence (‘The Argument from Silence”, Steven Lewis, SES, www.ses.edu).

(image: silk–road.com)

Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo go to China? (1995, Secker & Warburg, London)

1⃞ Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 ‘Intentional Fallacy’ essay to some extent has its antecedents in the earlier debate between CS Lewis and EMW Tillyard, published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), in which Lewis argued that an author’s own personality and biography has negligible to zero impact on the literary text, while Tillyard enunciated the contrary position: that an author’s own imagination and story can have an indelible influence on a work of literature

 2⃞   and there had been doubters even in Marco’s time and later about some of his more wilder and fantastic claims, earning him the epithet Il Milione or “the Millions”) (aka “Marchus Paulo Millioni”). Wood’s particular slant on Polo’s book follows the lead of earlier German Mongolists

3⃞ who had claimed to have been an emissary in the emperor’s service

4⃞ Wood herself concedes that Rustichello may have edited out references to tea on the grounds of it being “of no interest to the general public”

5⃞ and corroborated by Chinese documents

The 13th Century Latin Empire: A Patchwork of Loosely Arranged Fiefdoms and Principalities Nominally under the Central Authority of Constantinople

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
International Relations, Medieval history,, Military history, Regional History

The siege of Constantinople in 1204, by Palma il Giovane

In earlier blogs we have seen how the ruling elites from aristocratic Byzantine Greek families managed to carve out chunks of the vast Byzantine Empire and establish their own imperial dynasties in the early 13th century. The three rump states of Trebizond, Nicaea and Epirus all came into being at the expense of the Latin Empire. Their action was a reaction to the Crusade leaders from Catholic Europe who had deposed the old regime in Constantinople (the Angelos dynasty) and proceeded to divvy up the imperial Byzantine lands among themselves and their financial backers. The latter, representing the political and commercial interests of Venice, a key player in the whole enterprise, did very well, netting three-eighths of the old empire’s strategic possessions including Crete) and innumerable war spoils from Byzantium. The crusader hierarchy elected from their leaders, Baldwin, Count of Flanders and Hainaut, as the first Latin emperor of Constantinople.

Nomenclature: the term “Latin Empire” was not contemporary to the period, and was only applied by historians in the 16th century to distinguish the Crusader feudal state from the classical Roman Empire and the  Byzantine Empire (both of which called itself “Roman”). The term “Latin” was chosen because the crusaders—Franks, Venetians, and other Westerners—were Roman Catholic and used Latin as their liturgical and scholarly language in contrast to the Eastern Orthodox locals who used Greek in both liturgy and common speech. The Byzantines referred to the Latin Empire as the Frankokratia (“rule of the Franks”) or the Latinokratia (“rule of the Latins”). The crusaders themselves in documents tended to use the expression “Empire of Constantinople” or more commonly referred to the empire as “Romania” and themselves as “Romans” [Jacobi, David (1999), “The Latin empire of Constantinople and the Frankish states in Greece”, in Abulafia, David (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. V: c. 1198–c. 1300, (Cambridge University Press), pp. 525–542].

Latin imperial crest

Attempts by the Crusader state to expand its imperial boundaries was hampered by constant conflict with its neighbours, the Bulgarian Empire to the north and the three Byzantine successor states. Baldwin I didn’t last long as Latin emperor, his army was crushed by Tsar Kaloyan’s Bulgarian troops at the Battle of Adrianople, with Baldwin captured and dying in prison later in 1205. Latin fortunes improved for a while with his successor, Henry of Flanders (for competence, the pick of the Latin emperors by a wide margin), who won back most of the lost territory in Thrace and concluded a successful peace treaty with the Bulgarian enemies after marrying Kaloyan’s daughter.

After Henry’s death there was a swift turnover of Latin regents🄰 and the Despotate of Epirus stepped up its campaign to wrest the Kingdom of Thessalonica from the Latin Empire, finally capturing it in 1224. The threat from Epirus receded however after the Epirotes were badly beaten by the Bulgarians under Tsar John Asen (Battle of Klokotnitsa, 1230)…around this time the burgeoning power of the Empire of Nicaea replaced Epirus as the principal Byzantine threat to the Latin state.

The Latin empire, now led by Baldwin II (known as Porphyrogenitus – “born to the purple”), was economically diminished and reduced in area to little beyond the city of Constantinople itself. Baldwin spent much of his long reign as emperor scurrying round the courts of Western Europe cap-in-hand in a largely fruitless quest for aid for Constantinople’s impoverished state. Nicaea meanwhile was tightening the screws on Constantinople. In 1259 the Nicaeans defeated the Principality of Achaea, a vassal state of the Latin Empire (Battle of Pelagonia). The loss of Achaea, the strongest of the Frankish states in Greece, was a decisive blow for the Latins in the defence of their imperial capital.

Seal of Baldwin II Porphyrogenitus

After a failed attempt to take Constantinople in 1260 the Niceans were ultimately successful in the endeavour the following year, without planning to do so. A small force of Nicaea on a scouting mission in the proximity of Constantinople’s walls fortuitously discovered that virtually the entire garrison and the Venetian fleet had temporarily vacated the city, leaving it defenceless. Seizing the opportunity the Nicaeans located an unguarded entry point and stormed the city, capturing it in the name of Nicaea’s emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos. The Latins had lost, irrevocably, their Byzantine empire, with their remaining possessions reduced to a few enclaves in southern Greece, the title of emperor was nonetheless retained, in name only, by a succession of claimants up until 1383.

Composition of the Latin Empire: The empire was a feudalistic polity, comprising numerous vassal states or fiefdoms, including the Duchy of Philippopolis (northern Thrace); Lemnos (island in the Aegean); the Kingdom of Thessalonica (Macedonia and Thessaly)🄱; the County of Salona (modern Amfissa in central Greece); the Marquisate of Bodonitsa (central Greece)🄲; the Principality of Achaea (encompassing the Morea or Peloponnese peninsula🄳; the Duchy of Athens (encompassing Attica, Boeotia and parts of southern Thessaly); the Duchy of Naxos (or of the Archipelago) (encompassing most of the Cyclades islands); the Triarchy of Negroponte (island of Negroponte (modern Euboea); the Principality of Adrianople (modern Edirne, eastern Thrace)🄴; the County palatine of Cephalonia and Zakynthos (several Ionian islands)🄵. All of these entities and regions within the Byzantine world were ultimately absorbed by the Ottoman Empire.

The Latin Empire entities, Venetian possessions and the Byzantine rump states

Encumbrances to empire: The Latin Empire was intended to recreate the Roman Empire in an eastern setting (Byzantium) with a Catholic monarchy, but as a political entity it only lasted a mere 57 years (cf. the preceding Byzantine Empire which, established by Constantine in 330 CE, was in its 874th year when Constantinople was sacked). The Latin Empire failed abjectly to establish itself as an enduring power, the seeds of which were present from the onset. The Crusade leaders started dividing up who gets what part of the Byzantine “pie” before they had started the process of conquest in some of the regions (in fact the conquest of the former Byzantine imperial space was never completed). The approach to the whole task lacked cohesion. Moreover, the “individual expeditions undertaken by various Latin knights and commoners, as well as by the Venetian state, prevented systematic implementation of the partition plan”. The territories the Latins occcupied in the European part of “Romania“ and the Aegean, as a consequence, became “a mosaic of (mainly small) political entities”[David Jacoby, ‘After the fourth crusade: The Latin empire of constantinople and the Frankish states’, (Jan. 2009) DOI:10.1017/CHOL9780521832311.028 in The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c.500–1492 (pp.759-778)]. These separate smaller “principalities and regions were in principle dependent on the Latin emperor’s suzerainty “ but were in “de facto (terms) practically independent entities” [Filip Van Tricht, The Latin Renovatio of Byzantium: The Empire of Constantinople (1204–1228) (2011)]. All of this worked against the task of making the empire centrally unified and coherent. Allied to this, Venice’s singular pursuit of its self-interest by its nature worked to the detriment of crusader goals. Another factor weighing down the Latin Empire was its economic decline, heavily in debt to the Venetians, Latin emperors were forced to resort to hocking their royal jewels to meet their costs. A succession of wars with the Bulgarian Empire and the Byzantine claimants proved costly. By the time of the last Latin emperor, Baldwin II, the population of the once-great metropolis Constantinople had plummeted alarmingly.

🄰 this period was the Latinokrakaria

🄱 Thessalonica’s short history as an quasi-independent entity was characterised by ongoing warfare, principally with the Bulgarian Empire before being conquered by Epirus (1224)

🄲 both Salona and Bodonitsa originally were vassal states of the Kingdom of Thessalonica

🄳 Achaea, the strongest of the Crusader states, exercising suzerainty over the Lordship of Argos and Nauplia. Achaea continued to prosper even after the eclipse of the Latin Empire. Its main rival was the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea which eventually succeeded in conquering the principality

🄴 the Principality of Adrianople committed itself to a course of fluidity in regard to the dominant powers venturing into its orbit, shifting allegiances readily from Constantinople to Epirus to Bulgaria to Nicaea during the 1220s for the quid pro qua of retaining its local autonomy [Filip Van Tricht, ‘The Byzantino-Latin Principality of Adrianople and the Challenge of Feudalism (1204/6–ca. 1227/28)’, www.core.ac.uk]

🄵 in addition to these both the Genoese and Venetians possessed colonies in the Greek islands and in mainland Greece at one time or other (Genoa: including Lesbos, Lemnos, Thasos, Samothrace, Ainos, Lordship of Chios and port of Phocaea; Venice: including Crete, Corfu, Lefkas, Tinos and Mykonos)

The Vicissitudes of a Balkans Byzantine Successor State in the High Middle Ages: Despotate of Epirus and the Empire of Thessalonica

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, Medieval history,, Regional History

The turmoil and political upheaval in the wake of the sacking of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204 fragmented the unity of the vast Byzantine Empire into a patch-quilt of separate parts. Epirus«𝕒», a region which encompassed parts of modern Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and northern Macedonia, formed itself into one of these independent states, known by modern historiographic convention as the Despotate of Epirus✴︎. Its founder and first despot was Michael I Komnenos Doukas (a member of the deposed Byzantine imperial house of Angelos) with the state’s capital initially (and mainly) situated at Árta in N.W. Greece. Michael’s reign saw some expansion by conquest into neighbouring Thessaly at the expense of the Lombard lords and for a brief time, control over the Lordship of Salona. Michael’s realm also became a refuge and centre of resistance for Greeks opposed to the intrusions of the Latin Crusaders [‘Michael I Komnenos Doukas’, Wikipedia, en.m.wikipedia.org].

Epirus (source: world history.org)

✴︎ for accounts of the history of other Byzantine successor states see also the earlier articles on this site: Byzantine-Lite: The Empire of Trebizond under the Komnenos Dynasty and The 13th Century Empire of Nicaea: An Empire in Exile and the Restoration of Imperial Byzantine

Epirus imperial dreams – the Empire of Thessalonica: The Epirote State rulers soon found themselves embroiled in conflict with several of the other regional players, namely the other successor states, the Bulgarians (their former allies) and the Latins (Franks, Italians, etc). Michael I was assassinated in 1218 and replaced by his half-brother, Theodore Doukas, who extended the “empire” eastward, capturing Thessalonica from the Latins in 1224. Theodore duly established the “Empire of Thessalonica” and had himself crowned as emperor.

Tsar John Asen II, Battle of Klokotnitsa (image: reddit.com)

Battle of Klokotnitsa and aftermath: Theodore’s dream of ensconcing himself in Constantinople at the head of a greater Epirus-centred empire came crashing down at the Battle of Klokotnitsa in 1230. Theodore’s forces were attacked by both Bulgaria (under Tsar John Asen II) and the Nicene Empire (under John II Vatatzes) and comprehensively beaten. Theodore was captured, Bulgarian troops poured into Epirus and the despotate–cum–empire was reduced to vassal status vis-a-vís the Bulgarians. With Theodore imprisoned for seven years, the Epirote imperial leadership passed to his brother Manuel Komnenos Doukas, under whose reign the downslide continued, much of the earlier conquests in Macedonia and Thrace were lost. Meanwhile, in Epirus, Michael II, illegitimate son of the founder of Epirus Michael I, assumed control of a diminished Epirus and was recognised as despot (1230–ca.1267/1271). During Michael II’s rule the Epirote state was progressively reduced in size and power…in 1264 Michael was forced to recognise the suzerainty of Michael VIII Palaeologus whose rival successor state had ousted the Latins from Constantinople and restored the Byzantine Empire under the Nicene emperors.

Theodore Doukas

Deposed Theodore returns as king-maker: In 1237 Theodore returned to Thessaloniki and deposed Manuel and installed his son John as emperor of Thessalonica. However, under pressure from the Nicaean Empire John was forced to abdicate in 1242 in favour of John III Vatatzes, the Nicaean emperor. In 1246 Thessalonica was lost to Nicaea for keeps. Over in Epirus Michael II was succeeded by his son Nikephoros I whose sovereign power was challenged by Charles I of Anjou and Sicily with whom he eventually entered into an alliance (Nikephoros acknowledged himself as Charles’ vassal). Later, Nikephoros allied himself with Charles’ son and successor Charles II, which led to conflict with the Byzantines.

Map of Epirus, ca. 1250 (source: anistor.gr)

Epirus’ fragile autonomy: Thomas I followed the same perilous path as his father Nikephoros after succeeding him in ca. 1297. Thomas clung precariously to power as Epirus lunged from alliance to conflict with both the Angevins and the Byzantines. Ultimately, Thomas was assassinated by his Italian-Greek nephew Nicholas Orsini, Count of Cephalonia (Ionian islands) in 1318. Nicholas, in control of southern Epirus, conspired with the Republic of Venice to retake the north including the city of Ioannina but was unsuccessful. In 1323 he was in turn usurped by his brother John II Orsini. The pattern of instability persisted…Epirus lost its independence to the Byzantine Empire in 1338 before briefly winning it back (with the assistance of Catherine I, Latin empress), only to lose it yet again to Byzantium, all within the space of two years. In 1348 it was the turn of the Serbs under (King) Stefan Dušan who incorporated Epirus and Thessaly into the Serbian Empire. After the Serbs came the Albanians…in 1367 the Despotate of Árta, an Albanian clan led by Pjetër Losha, attacked and besieged the Despotate of Epirus’ capital Ioannina.

Neapolitan ambitions for the Hellenes: Árta as a mainly autonomous despotate and then lordship persisted until 1416 when the incumbent despot’s rule was terminated by another Italian incursion. Neapolitan count, Carlo I Tocco (hereditary count palatine of Cephalonia and Zakynthos) took Arta as part of a systematic territorial expansion in Greece«𝕓». Carlo reached the limit of his expansion in the 1420s when the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos’ army cut short Carlo’s attempts to expand his influence into the Despotate of the Morea (the Peloponnese).

Carlo I, Cephalonia and Epirus coat-of-arms

Epirus, the final chapter: Under Carlo I’s successor, Carlo II, the Tocco dynasty lost Ioannina in 1430 to the encroaching Ottoman conquest of Byzantine lands, as well as almost all of their possessions in Eripus by ca.1448«𝕔». At this time the fate of Epirus and the other post-1204 successor states of the Byzantine Empire had been well and truly sealed by an ongoing preoccupation with civil wars, conflict between themselves and religious disputes to the neglect of the greater threat posed by their common enemy from Asia Minor«𝕕».

Michael I Komnenos Doukas

Epirus, manoeuvring between east and west: Epirus, perched centrally between the east (Byzantium and Anatolia) and the west (western Europe), was in a special position, trying to carve its own niche in the region while competing for advantage and influence against the vested interests of more powerful players (namely Anjou, Venice, Sicily, Bulgaria, Serbia, Nicaea, Ottomans). The Epirote state’s despots through this era pursued two strategies for survival: it sought to protect its power base from its Latin enemies, while at the same time maintaining its independence from the rest of the Byzantine states. In a Byzantine world in which loyalty was a fluid commodity, Eripus found itself compelled by the power imbalances it faced to constantly swap its allegiances between the Latins and the Byzantines [Evangelos Zarkadas, ‘The Despotate of Epirus: A Brief Overview’, Mapping Eastern Europe, Eds: M.A. Rossi and A.I. Sullivan (accessed October 14, 2023), http://mappingeasterneurope.princeton.edu].

Ioannina (photo: theplanetd.com)

Postscript: Paucity of sources on Epirus Historians have long lamented the scarcity of surviving sources on Epirus, especially from the depostate itself. Probing this medieval Byzantine-Greek chapter has been hampered by an absence of historical narratives and biographies of the despots. The chronicles that do survive are those of Byzantine historians from Constantinople such as George Pachymeres (13–14th centuries) [Donald M Nichol, in Zarkadas].

«𝕒» or in the form some prefer, “Epiros”

«𝕓» adding it to Corinth and Megara captured by him earlier

«𝕔» Carlo II’s son Leonardo III ruled as the last Despotate of Eripus up to Epirus’ ultimate coup d’grâce by the Ottoman Empire

«𝕕» the last remnant of Epirus, Vonitsa, fell to the advancing Ottomans in 1479