Nicetas Choniates to his beloved elder brother, the Archbishop Michael of Athens, Greetings.

I am glad to hear that you have safely arrived in the seat of your new archepiscopate. It is true that Athens has greatly declined from the days of its classical glory, even from the days when it was the university of the Roman Empire, but I know you must nevertheless be awed to find yourself performing the holy offices in the Church of the Virgin – once the Temple of Athena Parthenos – atop the acropolis! And while I know you will keenly miss the libraries and resources for study offered by Constantinople, I trust that you will find some consolation for these deprivations by availing yourself of the opportunity to stroll the groves of Plato’s Academy, to follow the old Sacred Way to Eleusis, to ride across the plain of Marathon, and to walk the streets and byways that once were familiar to Themistocles, Pericles, and Demosthenes!

I know you were greatly concerned before you left Constantinople about the increasingly ominous course of events here. Our Empire is like a ship that has lost its helmsman and drifts dangerously closer to a storm-lashed, rocky shore while the officers carouse in their cabins and the crew waits aimlessly for direction. The Empress Maria is a woman of grace and gaiety, who brings a shining ray of light into any room she enters. But she has no head for public affairs, and she has done the State a great disservice through her preferment of Alexius the protosebastos to the position of chief minister. You know the protosebastos’s weaknesses all too well: his indolence, his avarice, his complete want of judgment and foresight.

And now that I am coming to know the young Emperor better with my recent appointment to the imperial secretariat, I see little in him that leads me to believe he will prove a worthy son of his father Manuel. It is true that he is still only a boy of twelve. And it is also true that the protosebastos and the Empress have neglected his education, leaving him to waste his days at draughts, or dice, or betting upon the horse-races in the Hippodrome. But he is nevertheless old enough now to be aware of the nature of his high position and the weight of his future responsibilities, and a youth of real character would demand or seek out for himself the education, instruction and training that the Empress and the protosebastos have so signally failed to provide him. Alas, I see no sign that the young Emperor is at all sensible that the great position which is his birthright entails burdens and labors, as well as affording him the opportunity to gratify his every desire.

Meanwhile, the City talks of nothing but the onward march of Andronicus Comnenus and his army from Pontus. Since the start of his campaign last autumn, he has advanced from Pontus, to Heraclea Pontica, through Paphlagonia, and now to Nicomedia. That city has now gone over to his cause, along with all of the surrounding districts. Indeed, of all Asia, only Nicaea and the cities of the Thrakesian Theme in the Maeander Valley have resisted Andronicus’s blandishments.

With the rebel army now within seven days’ march of the opposite shore of the Bosphorus, the protosebastos roused himself from his nocturnal revels long enough to dispatch General Andronicus Angelus against the rebels with a strong force. But the news has just now reached us that General Angelus encountered the enemy and was heavily defeated in a battle at a village called Charax, which is apparently somewhere near Nicomedia.

I am surprised at this news – and yet I cannot understand why I should be. Ever since the unsuccessful assault on Haghia Sophia last spring, the army has been full of grumblings and mutterings against the protosebastos, whom they blame for their humiliating defeat. Neither the officers nor the rank-and-file have any respect for the protosebastos as a man. And why should they? He has never led them in battle, and he cannot bring himself to stir from his comfortable palace apartments even now, with his position, his power, and possibly his very life in growing jeopardy! I have heard high-ranking officers describe the protosebastos contemptuously as "that dim-witted gigolo who owes everything to Lord Hades and Aphrodite, since he inherited his position as chancellor upon the death of his older brother and has now secured it by taking advantage of the Empress’s vulnerability and weakness.

So now it seems that nothing can stop Andronicus Comnenus’s march short of the Bosphorus. What will happen once he arrives on the opposite shore remains to be seen, for he has no fleet and will not be able to cross the water barrier as long as the navy remains loyal to the regime. But I suspect that once Andronicus’s force lights its campfires upon the heights of Chalcedon, the protosebastos’s time will be short. Something will happen within the City once Andronicus is so near that will bring Alexius down.

And what then? Why am I nagged by doubt that Andronicus Comnenus is actually the savior he declares himself to be? Andronicus is full of pious protestations of his respect for the young Emperor, repeatedly vowing that he has come to protect Manuel’s heir, not to dethrone him. The rest of the City believes it. Copies of his letters to the Patriarch are passed from hand to hand, and the people assert that Andronicus’s frequent quotations from the Apostle Paul prove him to be a devout and godly man. Moreover, from my own service as a provincial revenue collector in Pontus, I know that Andronicus is an able and fair administrator who tried to protect the weak against the power of the great families.

Yet something about him strikes me as deeply false. Those quotes from the Apostle Paul, so reassuring to the City masses, sound to my ear like "a clanging brass." I sense that we are watching a skillful and cunning actor, a wolf in sheep’s garb who will devour the young Emperor as soon as he has him in his charge. I cannot shake a deep conviction that great and terrible evil is approaching, but I know of nothing that can be done to stop it.

Your loving brother,

Principal Source:

Harry J. Magoulias, editor and translator, O City of Byzantium, Annals of Nicetas Choniates (1985), at pp. 137-38

[Author's Note: This is the sixteenth in a series of posts tracing the rise and fall of the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus I Comnenus. These posts cover the period from the death of the Emperor Manuel I in September 1180 to Andronicus's own death just under five years later. The first post in this series -- which is part of a fictional autobiography ostensibly written by Andronicus Comnenus himself -- can be found by clicking here.]