Chapter I
On November 13 1183, Manuel I died of a lingering illness. His only son, the seventeen year old Alexius, took the throne without conflict.
On the surface, with Roman armies in both Anatolia and the West having been largely successful in their endeavors, the state looked stronger than it had been since Manzikert, just over a century previously.
But with the treasury depleted and relations with the Holy Roman Empire and Papacy grown chilly, the Empire that the young basileus had inherited could easily lose more than it had gained from his father's conquests.
Worse, the dynatoi had taken advantage of Manuel's inability to focus on any one area long enough to secure it to strengthen their position, some even at the expense of the state. While the Komnenoi were closely allied to the Empire's military aristocracy, that did not make the growth of the powerful less worrisome - if anything, it offered the opportunity for those who saw the young emperor as a puppet to use the situation for their benefit and further undermine imperial control.
In an effort to concentrate on internal affairs, Alexius chose to abandon some of Manuel's western conquests, establishing Bosnia and Serbia as mostly autonomous Roman client states as well as returning control of Dalmatia and eastern Croatia to King Béla of Hungary. King Béla, who had maintained friendly relations with Manuel even after losing his claim to the imperial throne in 1169 in favor of the emperor's own son, promised his friendship to the young Emperor, considerably lightening the burden of defending the Empire's western territory.
But even with foreign affairs running smoothly, internal problems could still bring down the Emperor. Even Isaac Comnenus, grand nephew of Manuel I, would be part of the problem, taking advantage of his newly founded freedom to seize control of the island of Cyprus and proclaim himself emperor, a situation which would trouble the empire for three years before a combination of an Imperial fleet and Isaac's own overconfidence would see him overthrown and the island returned to imperial control.
And then there was the imperial bureaucracy. Corrupt, unsupervised, and cruelly grinding down the peasantry - which by coincidence would only serve to further the problem of the dynatoi, as the only ones able to resist the pressures of the tax collectors. It is not surprising that between all of these problems that the Frankish states in the Levant - nominally Imperial vassals but de facto independent - would be ignored almost entirely until it became clearly that the usual squabbles between Frank and Saracen had become dangerously tilted in favor of the latter.
In October 1187, the great Muslim leader Saladin had taken the city of Jerusalem, and most of the Frankish kingdom of the same name. Had this been all, it would have been startling but hardly unpleasant - better an honest Saracen than a Frank who couldn't be trusted as far as one could throw a fully armored cataphract. Unfortunately, the West disagreed. And as the Roman Empire stood between the kingdoms of the West and the Holy Land, Alexius's response would be crucial to the Empire's fate.
The First Crusade had been bad, though not disasterous - the Empire had even recovered some of its territory in Anatolia as a consequence. But the the Second Crusade had been worse, with the Franks loudly blaming "Greek treachery" as the source of their failure rather than their own incompetence. If things continued to decline, how long would it be until the so-called warriors of Christ turned on the Empire, heading not for Jerusalem but for Constantinople? When news arrived that Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor of the so-called "Holy Roman" Empire, had taken the cross, it seemed almost inevitable.
Something would have to be done to reverse the trend of increasing hostility between Rhoman and Frank. Attempts at religious union in his father's day had certainly not helped, and even if they could help the likelihood would be that it would increase tensions internally against the emperor - hardly more desirable than a foreign invasion, which could at least be bought off. Or could it? Frederick was a man known for a formidable temper and an ability to hold grudges, and it seemed rather more likely that he would take offers of gold as a sign of Roman weakness and grow more demanding rather than less.
