Epirus

A deserter builds a province

formationDrafted from Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984)

When the crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204 and set about dividing the Byzantine Empire's provinces among themselves, Michael Komnenos Doukas - a cousin of two recent Byzantine emperors - joined the army of Boniface of Montferrat, the crusade's own leader, as it moved to conquer Greece. He did not stay long. Crossing the mountains into the remote, defensible country of Epirus in the northwest, Michael deserted the Latin cause entirely, presented himself to the Byzantine governor already established at Arta, married the governor's daughter, and made himself the accepted protector of the region's own Greek population.

Arta region, Epirus, Greece · Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984) · Photograph: Commons contributors · CC BY-SA 3.0

A province built on other people's inattention

Epirus's own geography - sea on two sides, mountains on the others - had always inclined the region toward independence, and Michael exploited that isolation methodically rather than dramatically. He played a double game with the Latin powers around him: accepting nominal Venetian overlordship in 1210 to buy time, breaking the arrangement within a few years once his own position had strengthened, then invading Thessaly and retaking Durazzo and Corfu from the very Venetians he had just sworn loyalty to. By the time of his death, probably early in 1215, Michael ruled unbroken territory from Naupaktos in the south to Durazzo in the north, governing from Arta while building up Ioannina as a second center of his own authority.

Arta, Greece · Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984) · Photograph: Vlachos Yorgos · CC BY-SA 4.0

A foundation with no one's permission

Nothing about Epirus's own founding carried the sanction of any emperor, Latin or Byzantine. Michael governed as a self-appointed protector of a Greek population the Fourth Crusade had left to the mercy of whichever local strongman could actually hold ground against foreign claimants - and he held it well enough, and long enough, that the province he built from nothing outlasted the Latin kingdoms that had expected to absorb it. His own half-brother and successor, Theodore, would take the modest foundation Michael left behind and turn it into something considerably more ambitious than a defensive province.

A title nobody actually held

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984)

Every modern account of this state calls it the Despotate of Epirus, and the name is, on the evidence of the state's own contemporary sources, a mistake. Nothing written during Michael I's own lifetime describes him as holding the office of Despot - a genuine Byzantine court title, ranking just below the emperor himself, that could only be conferred by an emperor's own grant. Venetian observers, misled by the coincidence that Michael's family name, Doukas, resembled the Latin word for duke, sometimes addressed him accordingly. But no source shows him actually receiving or claiming the title.

Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984) · William Martin Leake, 1835 · Public domain

A name imposed by later, hostile historians

Michael and his brother Theodore did not even use the family name history now attaches to them. Later Byzantine historians, writing with open hostility toward the Epirote line, styled them "Angelos" - a name neither man used of himself. Both preferred to emphasize their connection to the empire's more prestigious ruling houses, signing themselves Komnenos Doukas rather than accepting the lesser name their critics assigned them after the fact. Even the word "despotaton" itself turns out to be a Latin coinage with a geographical rather than political meaning, one that crept into Greek usage only later, in the Chronicle of the Morea - not a term any thirteenth-century Byzantine writer actually used to describe Epirus's own government.

A rebellion the emperors at Nicaea never legitimized

What the sources agree on instead is that Epirus's rulers were, from the Nicaean perspective, simply rebels - governors who had stopped recognizing any authority above their own and never received, at any point, a formal grant of the rank later history insists on calling them by. Theodore himself swore an oath of loyalty to the emperor at Nicaea before returning to Epirus to help his brother rule, an oath he abandoned entirely once he judged the moment right. The title "Despot," when it was eventually used of Epirus's rulers at all, arrived generations later, applied loosely by writers working from a settled convention rather than from any actual instrument of Byzantine law - and every ruler who bore it, down to the fifteenth century, held it without a shred of hereditary right, because no Byzantine emperor after the initial rebellion ever bothered granting one.

An emperor ambushed in the mountains

expansionDrafted from Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453, Volume II (1928)

Theodore Komnenos Doukas inherited a defensive province from his brother and immediately began treating it as something considerably larger. Where Michael had focused on holding what he had against encroaching Latin and Venetian neighbors, Theodore set his own sights on driving the Latins out of Greece altogether - beginning with an act bold enough to announce the change in ambition to all of Western Europe at once.

An emperor who never reached his own capital

In 1216 the Latin Emperor Henry of Constantinople died, and the barons who had crowned him chose his brother-in-law, Peter of Courtenay, to succeed him. Peter traveled to Rome first, where the pope crowned him in a church deliberately chosen to avoid any confusion with the coronation of Western emperors, and then set out to reach Constantinople by land, landing near Durazzo with his own troops. Theodore ambushed him in the mountains of Epirus, destroyed the greater part of his escort, and took Peter himself captive. The Latin emperor died in Epirote custody without ever setting foot in the capital he had been elected to rule - the first real blow any Greek successor state had struck directly against a reigning Latin emperor, and one that spread alarm through courts as far away as France.

Durrës, Albania · Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453, Volume II (1928) · Photograph: Anneli Salo · CC BY-SA 3.0

A kingdom that could no longer defend itself

Theodore's ambitions did not stop at ambushing traveling emperors. The Latin Kingdom of Thessalonica, established after Boniface of Montferrat's own death in 1207, had survived on the strength of a series of energetic rulers, but by the early 1220s it had none left capable of holding off both of its main threats, Bulgaria and Epirus, at once. Theodore made war on the kingdom directly and, in 1222, took Thessalonica itself with little real resistance - ending, after only eighteen years, the first of the Fourth Crusade's own creations to fall entirely.

A base too large to stay merely a province

With his own territory now running unbroken from the Adriatic to the Aegean and the second city of the old Byzantine world in his hands, Theodore judged that the modest office his brother had built was no longer adequate to what he had actually accomplished. What followed was not a request for recognition from any existing authority, but a direct claim to stand above all of them.

Crowned by a bishop with no right to crown him

peakDrafted from Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453, Volume II (1928)

Taking Thessalonica settled, in Theodore's own mind, a question that had been open since 1204: which of the surviving Greek claimants had the better right to call himself Roman emperor and heir to Constantinople. John Vatatzes had just taken the Nicaean throne in 1222 as the son-in-law of its previous ruler - a connection by marriage rather than blood. Theodore, a genuine member of the Angelos, Komnenos and Doukas families whose names had filled the imperial throne for generations, considered his own claim self-evidently the stronger one.

Ohrid, North Macedonia · Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453, Volume II (1928) · Photograph: Petar Milošević · CC BY-SA 4.0

A coronation the legitimate church would not perform

The obstacle was ceremonial rather than military. The Patriarch of Constantinople, the only figure with unquestioned authority to crown a Roman emperor, was already installed at Nicaea and had already crowned Vatatzes himself. The metropolitan of Thessalonica, unwilling to encroach on the patriarch's own prerogative, refused Theodore's request directly. Theodore turned instead to Demetrius Chomatenus, the autocephalous archbishop of Ohrid - a hierarch who answered to no patriarch at all, and who crowned and anointed Theodore anyway, with, according to his own letters, "the general consent" of the senate, clergy and army in the western territories. Theodore began signing his own official documents with the full imperial style: "Theodore in Christ God Basileus and Autocrat of the Romans, Doukas."

A court convinced its moment had arrived

The letters of John Apocaucus, metropolitan of Naupaktos and one of the best-documented voices at Theodore's own court, show how seriously the new title was taken by the clergy who had helped install it. Thessalonica was openly discussed as a stepping-stone rather than a destination; Constantinople itself was treated as the near-certain next step, and several of Theodore's own bishops judged the path there considerably shorter from Thessalonica than from Nicaea. For a brief window, Epirus stood as a genuine rival empire rather than a defensive rebel province - the two Greek claimants to Rome's own inheritance, plus the fading Latin Empire still clinging to Constantinople itself, forming three separate courts each convinced it alone would eventually restore Byzantium.

A rupture that could not be undone by ceremony alone

Theodore's coronation produced an immediate and lasting split - not only political, between Thessalonica and Nicaea, but ecclesiastical, between the western Greek hierarchy that had crowned him and the patriarchate that had crowned his rival. Neither side possessed the strength to force the other's submission outright, and for six years the two empires simply coexisted as rivals, each waiting for an opening the other could not prevent. That opening, when it came, arrived from neither of them.

Klokotnitsa

contractionDrafted from Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453, Volume II (1928)

The empire Theodore had built at Thessalonica did not fall to either of the rivals it had spent six years watching most closely. It fell to an ally. When the child Baldwin II inherited the Latin throne of Constantinople in 1228, John Asen II of Bulgaria maneuvered to have himself named regent - a scheme that, had it succeeded, would have delivered Constantinople into Bulgarian hands without a single battle. Latin barons and clergy blocked the plan, but Asen's ambitions did not stop there, and an alliance formed instead between Bulgaria and Theodore's own empire, aimed loosely against their shared Latin and Nicaean rivals.

An ally struck down before the suspicion could be tested

The alliance did not survive its own success. After Bulgarian and Epirote forces together took Adrianople, Theodore grew suspicious that Asen's own ambitions in Constantinople threatened his position as much as any outright enemy's would - and rather than wait to find out, broke the alliance himself and opened hostilities against Bulgaria without warning. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. The two armies met in 1230 at Klokotnitsa, and Asen's forces, reinforced by Cuman cavalry, destroyed Theodore's own army outright. Theodore himself was captured.

A conqueror's own words, carved in stone

An inscription John Asen II had carved on a marble column at Trnovo records the victory in his own voice: "I have captured the Emperor himself, Theodore Komnenos, with all his boyars, and taken all the countries from Adrianople to Durazzo." The claim was not exaggerated.

Bulgaria annexed the greater part of Theodore's own empire in a single stroke, and what remained of Greek rule in the region split into two much smaller pieces - Thessalonica, held afterward by Theodore's brother Manuel, and Epirus proper, reduced to something closer to Michael I's own original province than to the empire Theodore had briefly built atop it.

Church of the Holy Forty Martyrs, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria · Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453, Volume II (1928) · Photograph: Svik · CC BY-SA 3.0

A prisoner who could not stay content with captivity

Theodore's own captivity did not end quietly. Treated leniently at first, he was accused before long of plotting against Asen's own life, and on the discovery of the plot was blinded - a punishment that ended any possibility of his own return to power, whatever became of the empire he had lost. The battle that broke him also broke, for good, the only realistic chance a western Greek claimant ever had of restoring Byzantium before the eastern one, at Nicaea, did it instead.

Defeated twice, submitting neither time

contractionDrafted from Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984)

Thessalonica, ruled after Klokotnitsa by Theodore's brother Manuel, lasted only until 1246, when John Vatatzes of Nicaea took the city outright and ended what remained of the rival empire Theodore had once built there. Epirus proper submitted to Vatatzes's own suzerainty the same year - the last of the Fourth Crusade's Greek successor states to accept that Nicaea, not a western Greek court, would be the one to bring Byzantium back.

An alliance that collapsed before the battle started

Epirus's own rulers did not stay quiet under Nicaean overlordship for long. By the late 1250s, Michael II - governing from Arta - had married one daughter to Manfred of Sicily and another to William of Villehardouin, prince of Achaia, assembling a coalition broad enough that he judged himself ready to challenge Nicaea's own emperor, Michael Palaiologos, for Thessalonica once again. The armies met at Pelagonia in 1259, and Michael's own coalition disintegrated before serious fighting even began: his son Nikephoros and Michael himself withdrew by night, his illegitimate son John deserted to the Nicaean side outright, and his allies' own cavalry was cut off and captured. Nicaean forces occupied Epirus itself in the aftermath, driving Michael as far as the island of Cephalonia and occupying Arta, Ioannina and towns as far north as Durazzo. Epirote independence looked, to contemporaries, finished for good.

Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

A recovery that outran the news of Constantinople's own fall

It was not finished. While Nicaea's own attention turned toward Constantinople itself - recovered from the Latins in July 1261, restoring the Byzantine Empire under Michael Palaiologos - Michael II had already sailed back from Cephalonia, fought his way into Arta, and rallied enough of his own scattered forces, including reinforcements his son Nikephoros brought back from Italy, to drive the occupying garrisons out of Epirus entirely. The inhabitants of Arta and Ioannina, offered a choice between their own native rulers and incorporation into a restored empire governed from Constantinople, made their own preference for the former unmistakably clear.

A refusal repeated against a legitimately restored emperor

What followed was, if anything, more stubborn than what had come before. Even after Constantinople's own recovery gave Michael Palaiologos every formal claim to be the legitimate restorer of Byzantium, Michael II refused to recognize his authority over Epirus and resumed open war before 1261 was even out - defeating and capturing the Nicaean general who had won at Pelagonia two years earlier, and forcing imperial expeditions against him in both 1262 and 1263 before Nicaea's own attention was pulled elsewhere by more pressing concerns in Asia Minor. A polity that had already lost an empire at Klokotnitsa and a war at Pelagonia still would not accept that either defeat settled the question of who governed its own territory.

Two and a half centuries of borrowed names

afterlifeDrafted from Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984)

Michael II's own stubborn recovery bought Epirus another two and a half centuries of existence, but not two and a half centuries of stability. Two marriage alliances did more to determine the territory's own fate than any of its wars did: Michael's own daughter Helena's marriage to Manfred of Sicily in 1259 signed away Epirote territory to the kingdom of Sicily, and in 1294 the marriage of his granddaughter Thamar to Philip of Taranto signed away more of it to the Angevin house of Naples. Neither union brought the territory any real benefit in exchange - simply new foreign landlords for towns whose own populations remained Greek regardless of which distant crown claimed their taxes.

Arta, Greece · Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984) · Photograph: Vassiliki Feidopoulou · CC BY-SA 4.0

A title claimed by everyone who could get away with it

The rulers who followed - Greek, then Italian, then Serbian, then Albanian in turn - continued to call themselves Despot of Epirus, or some variant of it, long after the title had any connection to an actual Byzantine grant. A Serbian occupation held Ioannina through the 1340s and 1350s; a separate Albanian principality controlled Arta for a time afterward; the Italian Orsini family, then the Buondelmonti, then the Tocco family in turn claimed the same office from Italy. Carlo I Tocco, who briefly reunited most of the old Despotate's own scattered territory in the early fifteenth century, was according to the sources the last ruler who could plausibly be called a genuine Despot in any sense connected to the original office - and even his own reunification did not survive his death, falling apart within a year among his squabbling heirs.

Cities falling one by one, in no particular hurry

The Ottoman conquest of what remained of Epirus did not arrive as a single campaign. Ioannina fell in 1430, Arta in 1449, and Vonitsa, the last of the old Despotate's own cities still in Christian hands, held out until August 1479 - by which point the rest of Greece and the Balkans had already been absorbed into Ottoman rule around it. The fall of the Ionian islands that followed in the same year brought a documented cruelty stark even by the standards of the age: officials who had served the Tocco family were killed outright, and many of the islands' inhabitants were deported to the Sea of Marmora, where the sultan is recorded as having forced separated husbands and wives to remarry across ethnic lines as a deliberate experiment in producing a new population from the mixture.

An ending that closed a story two hundred and seventy years long

What had begun in 1204 or 1205 as one deserting officer's refusal to serve the Latins, and had briefly become, under Theodore, a genuine rival to the empire eventually restored at Nicaea, ended in 1479 the same way every other Byzantine successor state in the region eventually did - absorbed into an Ottoman Empire that had, by then, long since stopped needing to distinguish between a genuine Despot and a foreign adventurer who had simply borrowed the name.

Ioannina, Greece · Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (1984) · Photograph: Annatsach · CC BY-SA 4.0