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Alexius I of Byzantium

Alexius I of Byzantium (1048-15 August 1118) was Emperor of the Byzantine Empire from 1 April 1081 to 15 August 1118, succeeding Nicephorus III and preceding John II. Alexius was a legendary Byzantine emperor who defeated the invading Normans in the Balkans in the 1080s, recovered much of Anatolia from the Turkish Seljuks from the 1090s to the 1110s, and vassalized the Crusaders of the Principality of Antioch in 1108. His legacy was immortalized in the Alexiad.

Biography[]

Alexius was born in 1048, the nephew of Emperor Isaac I of Byzantium. He served under Romanus IV of Byzantium during his campaigns against the Seljuk Turks, and he later put down rebellions in Asia Minor, Thrace, and Epirus. From 1074 to 1076, he crushed Roussel de Bailleul's mercenary uprising, but, with the backing of the House of Doukas, he rebelled against Emperor Nicephorus III of Byzantium in 1081. On 1 April 1081, after bribing the Western European mercenaries protecting Constantinople, Alexius entered the city in triumph and became Emperor. He then presided over a 37-year reign which began with the Norman Apulian invasion of the Balkans; Robert Guiscard captured Dyrrhachium and Corfu and besieged Larissa in Thessaly. Alexius suffered several defeats before bribing the Holy Roman Empire to invade Italy in 1083, distracting the Normans from Greece. Guiscard's death at Corfu in 1085 ended the Norman threat, and he then crushed a revolt of the Pechenegs. With the Balkans pacified, Alexius turned his attention to the advance of the Seljuks in Anatolia. In 1096, he formed a tenuous alliance with the Crusaders, hastily ferrying the People's Crusade armies into Anatolia to be rid of the pillaging peasants, and later sending his right-hand man Tatikios to ensure that the crusaders returned all of the lands they recovered. Much of western Asia Minor was reconquered following the Battle of Dorylaeum in 1097. In 1108, Alexius forcibly vassalized the Principality of Antioch, as Prince Bohemond I of Antioch had resisted Byzantine overlordship and even besieged Dyrrhachium. In 1116, Alexius began an offensive against the Seljuk sultan Malik Shah, defeating him at the Battle of Philomelion in 1117. He died a year later.

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