A. D. teen years; and as the power both of the Seljouks and the Mongols was now declining in Asia Minor, he gradually 1266-1280. acquired a position of complete independence, and ventured to make war on the Turkoman tribes on the frontiers of his dominions. His endeavours to increase his own power had, however, rendered him unpopular among the nobles and military chiefs of Trebizond, whose assumption of individual authority, and whose attempts to arrogate to themselves the complete control over the financial and judicial affairs within their possessions, he determined to repress. In one of his military expeditions he was deserted by the nobles who accompanied him. Their object in deserting their sovereign was to turn the defeat of the imperial army to their own advantage, by weakening the central power; for they feared the increased authority of the emperor's administration, in matters of finance and justice, far more than they desired the extension of the limits of the empire or the prosperity of their country. This treacherous retreat left Georgios a prisoner in the hands of the Turkomans at the moment he expected to drive them from the range of Mount Tauresion, where they had begun to settle. tion, which styles him Emperor of the Romans. The single-headed eagle was a common type of the Byzantine empire, and by no means peculiar to the empire of Trebizond, before the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders. It may be seen on the inlaid floor, as it is often represented, picking out the eyes of a hare. The inscription at the side of the picture is as follows: “ ΕΝΧ, Τῷ Θῶ ΠΙΣΤΟ BACILEY Και ΑΥΤΟΚΡΑΤΩΡ ΡωΜΑΙΟΝ KTHTOP THCAMON ::: TAVTH MANHA OKOMNHNOC." It must be observed that the title used by Manuel is precisely that of the Byzantine emperors, as may be seen in the drawing of the emperor Basil II., from an old MS. of the ninth century; so that, if the inscription had been discovered at Nicæa or Nikomedia, it would be attributed without hesitation to the Byzantine emperor, Manuel I. Comnenus.-See Seroux d'Agincourt, History of Art-Painting, plate xlvii. 5, English edit. CHAPTER III. TREBIZOND INDEPENDENT. INTERNAL FACTIONS. SECT. I.-REIGN OF JOANNES II. ALLIANCE WITH THE EMPIRE OF CONSTANTINOPLE-A.D. 1280-1297. JOANNES II., the third son of Manuel, ascended the throne in the year 1280, as soon as the news of the captivity of his brother Georgios reached the capital. The empire of Trebizond was now completely relieved from its vassalage to the Mongols, and its history assumes a new character. Hitherto, we have known little of its internal condition; henceforward the memorials of its intestine factions, the intrigues of the palace, and the vices of the emperors, form the prominent features in the records of the empire; but we hardly obtain a glimpse of the nature of the commerce or the social organisation of the people, that furnished the financial wealth of the ruling classes, and enabled the nobles, the courtiers, and the sovereigns, to amuse themselves with alternate feats of war and sensuality. Joannes was a weak young man, whom the heads of the aristocratic party expected would prove a convenient tool in their hands. The state of society in the thirteenth century, not only at Trebizond, but over all the world, required that the sovereign should be a man of energy in order to preserve his authority. It was an age in which law and legislation exerted no control on the actions of men, and in which religion ceased to uphold the temporal CONDITION OF POPULATION OF THE EMPIRE. 397 $ 1. power of princes. The talents and the will of the vigorous CHAP. III. ruler could alone repress the tyrannical conduct of his own officers, the aristocratic insolence of the noble classes, and the anarchical propensities of the populace. Want of roads insulated each little district; experience was as difficult to acquire as a lettered education; wealth, in such a society, was concentrated in the hands of a few landlords; public opinion had no existence; legal tribunals were powerless, and justice slept. The supreme authority in the state was consequently irresponsible; and for power of such a nature, emperors, nobles, and ministers of state fought and intrigued with an energy and at a risk which now excites our surprise, when we couple this boldness with the worthless characters of the individual actors. Able and energetic sovereigns are, from the nature of man, not of frequent occurrence on despotic thrones, after power has been transmitted in the same family for some generations. The palace is rarely a good school for education. The family of Grand-Komnenos displayed at least an average deficiency in all great and good qualities, from the reign of Joannes II. to the extinction of the empire. Part of the difficulties, however, in which this emperor and his successors were placed arose from the state of society, as well as from their own incapacity and mal-administration. Mankind was beginning to feel the operation of those social causes which have replaced medieval life by modern habits. Masses of the population were growing up beyond the ordinary movement of the old social routine. Slavery was disappearing, without creating any immediate opening for the employment of free labour. Popular anarchy, aristocratic oppression, royal rapacity, and military cruelty, were often the throes of a society in which men were driven to despair in their endeavour to obtain a subsistence or defend a hereditary right. The convulsions which destroyed the old system threatened for several generations to depopulate all $ 1. CHAP. III. Western Asia and great part of Europe; nor has a large portion of the East yet attained a political organisation suitable to social improvement. The history of the empire of Trebizond offers us a miniature sketch of this great social struggle, drawn in faint colours and with an indistinct outline. The records of the reign of Joannes II. are extremely confused. Ducange and Gibbon supposed that he was the first sovereign of Trebizond who assumed the imperial title; but the discovery of the Chronicle of Panaretos enabled Fallmerayer to restore the title of emperor to the earlier princes. The critical sagacity of Ducange had almost divined the true position of Joannes, even from the scanty materials at his disposal. There can be no doubt that the form of the coronation ceremony, and the title of the emperors of Trebizond, had remained, up to this period, precisely what that of Constantinople had been at the time the city fell into the hands of the Crusaders. Joannes II. was crowned emperor of the Romans; and no especial political significance would probably have been given to the title, as constituting him a rival to the throne of the Byzantine emperor, Michael VIII. (Paleologos,) had it not been for the religious disputes that distracted the empire of Constantinople. Michael had rendered himself unpopular among the orthodox by forming a union with the papal church. 1 Ducange, Familiæ Augustæ Byzantine, p. 192, quotes at length the authorities from which he drew his inferences. Gibbon, chap. Ixi., vol. xi. p. 254, follows Ducange even in the error of mistaking the name of Μέγας Κομνηνός, or Grand-Komnenos, for Komnenos the Great. Fallmerayer, Geschichte, 135, has explained the true connection of the passages of Ogerius, the protonotary of Michael VIII., and of the Armenian historian Haithon, cited by Ducange, by means of the light thrown on this period by the Chronicle of Panaretos. Fallmerayer, however, thinks that Joannes II. made a great change in the title of the emperors of Trebizond by receiving the crown as emperor of the Romans; but the date of the embassy of Ogerius, and the words of Pachymeres, i. 353, who says that Michael sent several embassies to Trebizond on the subject of the imperial title, indicates that the preceding emperors bore the same designation. Joannes, indeed, could not otherwise, as we are informed he did, plead the impossibility of laying aside a title familiar to his subjects by long usage. JOANNES II., THE RIVAL OF MICHAEL VIII. 399 § 1. The fealty of the Greeks was not considered to be due to CHAP. III. an emperor of doubtful orthodoxy. Michael had been pardoned, by the lax morality of the Greek people and church, for dethroning and putting out the eyes of his young ward, the emperor John IV.; but he was condemned as an outlaw, by the ecclesiastical bigotry of Byzantine society, for seeking to unite the Greek and Roman, or orthodox and catholic, sections of the Christian church. A powerful party in his own dominions, and a large body of Greeks living beyond the bounds of his empire, were eager to dethrone him. Fortunately for Michael, the people of Europe and Asia were not agreed on the rival emperor they wished to place on the throne of Constantinople. The European Greeks looked to the despot of Epirus, or to John, prince of Thessalian Vlakia, both of whom called themselves Komnenos; but the Asiatics, and a considerable party at Constantinople, invited Joannes II. of Trebizond to place himself at the head of the orthodox Christians, as the undoubted heir of the imperial house of Komnenos, and as already crowned emperor of the Romans. Michael was regarded as a usurper, from the fact of his having ceased to be orthodox, since no apostate could reign over the true believers. Joannes was utterly destitute of the talents necessary to profit by the advantages of his position, nor had he any councillors around him capable of contending with a veteran diplomatist and experienced sovereign like Michael. No man estimated the exact danger of his situation better than Michael himself; and though his fears at times seemed to indicate a nervous sensibility, there can be no doubt that there was reason to apprehend a general rebellion in support of any rival claim to the imperial title at this momentous crisis. At the very time Joannes II. was crowned emperor of the Romans at Trebizond, Charles of Anjou, the papal vassal-king of Naples, threatened to invade the Byzantine empire, as |