Andronikos I Komnenos: Tyrant of Twelfth-century Europe

Abstract

Few, if any, rulers in twelfth-century Christendom received as much attention by contemporary chroniclers as the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos I Komnenos (1183–85). Even though Andronikos ruled for less than three years, his rise to power, reign of terror, downfall and gruesome death at the hands of the lynch mob of Constantinople struck contemporaries. In contrast to medieval chroniclers, modern historians have shown little interest in this emperor. While some scholarly attention has been paid to the Greek sources in order to reconstruct the historical facts of Andronikos’s reign, there has been little focus on the Greek historians’ perceptions and representations of their ruler. As to the relatively large number of Latin accounts of Andronikos’s reign, these have been either completely disregarded by historians or dismissed as ‘full of imagined conversations and romantic fictions’ and therefore as being of limited value for the reconstruction of historical events. All these accounts, however, are important, among others, in giving great insight into how a harsh and oppressive rule was viewed in both Byzantium and the Latin world in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. This article examines accusations of tyranny against Andronikos expressed uniformly across Byzantine, French, German–Austrian and English accounts, and explores their meaning and function. To gain a greater appreciation of their significance, these accusations against the Byzantine emperor are subsequently cast against the backdrop of charges of tyranny levelled against other Christian rulers in twelfth-century Christendom. Therefore, the significance of this article extends beyond Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire to the evolution of many other strands of political philosophy of rulership in medieval European history.1