Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
By his wife Anne, a woman of masculine spirit and a policy, he left eight children: the three daughters multiplied the Comnenian alliance with the noblest of the Greeks: of the five sons, Manuel was stopped by a premature death; Isaac and Alexius restored the Imperial greatness of their house, which was enjoyed without toil or danger by the two younger brethren, Adrian and Nicephorus.
The herald, after the flourish of trumpets was finished, commenced in. these words: "By the authority of the resplendent and divine Prince Alexius Comnenus, Emperor of the most holy Roman Empire, his Imperial Majesty desires it to be made known to all and sundry the subjects of his empire, whatever their race of blood may be, or at whatever shrine of divinity they happen, to bend Know ye, therefore, that upon the second day after this is dated, our beloved son-in-law, the much esteemed Caesar, hath taken upon, him to do battle with our sworn enemy, Robert, Count of Paris, on account of his insolent conduct, by presuming publicly to occupy our royal seat, and no less by breaking, in our Imperial presence, those curious specimens of art, ornamenting our throne, called by tradition the Lions of Solomon.
The statue fell in the reign of Alexius Comnenus, and was replaced by the cross. The palladium was said to be buried under the pillar. Zeuxippus was an epithet of Jupiter, and the baths were a part of old Byzantium. The great reign of Constantine was ended. The new capital, Constantinople, which after fifteen centuries still perpetuates the name of its imperial founder, had outrivalled Rome.
After a siege of seven weeks, Nicea was surrendered, not, however, into the hands of the European soldiers who had conducted the siege, but to the shrewd Alexius. At Doryleum, in a desperate battle the Turks were defeated; but, on their march eastward, they wasted the lands which they left behind them. The crusaders suffered severely from disease consequent on the heat.
Here they throve, until their desertion of the Emperor Alexius in his war against Robert Guiscard and the Normans ended the toleration hitherto extended to the exercise of their religion, and the "thirteenth apostle," as his literary daughter Anna Comnena styles him, entered on a plan of forcible conversion. Alexius also dealt severely with another body of heretics.
Attend to me now," he said aloud, "my wife, my daughter, and thou, dear Edward, and you shall learn, and you three only, my mode of navigating the vessel of the state through these shoals." "Let us see distinctly," continued Alexius, "the means by which they propose to act, and these shall instruct us how to meet them.
If, therefore, Alexius Comnenus was, during his anxious seat upon the throne of the East, reduced to use a base and truckling course of policy if he was sometimes reluctant to fight when he had a conscious doubt of the valour of his troops if he commonly employed cunning and dissimulation instead of wisdom, and perfidy instead of courage his expedients were the disgrace of the age, rather than his own.
Yet, instead of the simplicity of style and narrative which wins our belief, an elaborate affectation of rhetoric and science betrays in every page the vanity of a female author. The genuine character of Alexius is lost in a vague constellation of virtues; and the perpetual strain of panegyric and apology awakens our jealousy, to question the veracity of the historian and the merit of the hero.
Of a space of eight hundred years, the four first centuries are overspread with a cloud interrupted by some faint and broken rays of historic light: in the lives of the emperors, from Maurice to Alexius, Basil the Macedonian has alone been the theme of a separate work; and the absence, or loss, or imperfection of contemporary evidence, must be poorly supplied by the doubtful authority of more recent compilers.
On the other hand the crusading chiefs, as already subjects of other sovereigns, gave their fealty to the Emperor as their liege lord only for the time during which they might remain within his borders, and undertook to restore to him such of their conquests as had been recently wrested from the empire. The policy and the bribes of Alexius had overcome the opposition of Bohemond.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking