About this ebook
In 1282, Andronikos II Palaiologos inherited a resurgent Byzantine Empire. His father had recaptured Constantinople from Latin crusaders just twenty-one years earlier. Anatolia was secure, the Balkans compliant, the treasury functional. The future appeared hopeful.
By 1328, when civil war forced his abdication, that future had collapsed. Turkish warriors under Osman had conquered most of Anatolia. The Catalan Company, hired as saviors, instead ravaged Thrace. Serbia and Bulgaria carved away Macedonia. The hyperpyron — gold currency that had sustained Mediterranean commerce for two centuries — became worthless. Constantinople survived only because its ancient walls remained impregnable.
Andronikos was not evil. He was genuinely pious, learned, generous to monasteries, sincere in his desire to rule justly. His failure resulted from a fatal mismatch between character and circumstance. While he debated doctrine with monks, Turkish ghazis conquered provinces. While he enriched religious foundations, garrison troops went unpaid. While he pursued heavenly favor, his empire collapsed through neglect of earthly necessity.
Drawing on the eyewitness chronicles of George Pachymeres and Nikephoros Gregoras, this biography traces forty-six years of systematic decline — from the defeat at Bapheus in 1302 through the catastrophic Catalan devastation to the brutal civil war of 1321–1328. Andronikos ruled longer than Augustus, longer than Justinian, longer than nearly any Roman emperor in history. That longevity magnified the damage. The territories lost, the currency debased, the precedents established during his reign made Byzantine recovery impossible. When Constantinople fell to Mehmet II in 1453, the catastrophe had origins 125 years earlier.
