The degree of the enemy pressure [Persian, Arab, Slavic] on fortress-Constantinople in the seventh century can be gauged by the remarkable facts that in 618 or 619 even the heroic Emperor Heraclius was with difficulty deterred from evacuating it, and that in 662 Heraclius’s grandson the Emperor Constans II did transfer the Empire’s capital to Syracuse. However, after Constans’ assassination at Syracuse in 668, the capital immediately reverted to Constantinople; and it reverted again in 1261 from Nicea – the seat of the refugee-capital of the principal surviving fragment of the East Roman Empire after the capture of Constantinople and the seizure of the major part of the Empire’s European dominions by the Venetians and the French in and after 1204.
Constans’s twelve-day visit to Rome in 663 was the first by an Emperor since the fall of the Empire in the west. There was, I think, only one after it: a desperate one by John VIII Palaiologos in 1423, which led to the Union of Florence.
The Empire of Nicea was founded by the Laskaris family and was the largest of three states founded by aristocrats fleeing the Fourth Crusade. The recapture of Constantinople in 1261 was launched from here. The modern city is İznik.
The Empire of Trabzon or Trebizond was founded by the Komnenos family with support of Queen Tamar of Georgia. It ruled part of the Black Sea coast until 1461, when its ruler, David, surrendered to the Ottoman Mehmed II. (I collect historical Davids, so there’s another: David of Trebizond.) Wikipedia: “Its demographic legacy endured for several centuries after the Ottoman conquest in 1461, and a substantial number of Greek Orthodox inhabitants (called Pontic Greeks) remained in the area until the early 20th century. At that time, the remainder of Orthodox Christian inhabitants in the area were deported to Greece (starting in 1923), as determined by the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This agreement did not include local Muslims who spoke Greek dialects, who live in the Trebizond area to the present day.”
The Despotate of Epirus was founded on the Greek mainland by the Komnenos Doukas family and survived, under different dynasties, until the Ottomans took it 1479. Its capital was at Arta, with an interlude in Ioannina.
First sentence of Rose Macaulay’s novel The Towers of Trebizond: “‘Take my camel, dear’, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”
On June 1 1997 in Trabzon I met two unforgettable brothers: Ali Kemal Yılmaz and Yusuf Ziya Yılmaz.
Cities on the Move, OUP, 1970
January 19 2012 at 1:55 am
I’ve already referred to the sloppy editing of this book, for which I blame OUP. The first sentence here has “the seventh century B.C.”. The index omits this reference to Syracuse.