When talking about the end of the Isaurian dynasty's rule of the Byzantine Empire and the era of the Petty Emperors, there is one figure who is often overlooked: Strategos Elpidios "the Just."
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| A picture of a man assumed to be Elpidios. |
Elpidios' early reign started off with a brief civil war as several of the counts below him sought greater influence. With hired Bulgarian mercenaries, Elpidios put down the revolts alone, stripping the rebels of their titles-a clear sign he hoped to pass control of Sicily on to his son.
Allying himself with the Lombards occupying most of the Italian peninsula, Elpidios married Gerberga, a Lombard princess (perhaps having designs on their throne). He assisted in their wars against Serbia, but Elpidios vanished into obscurity before much could be made of it.
On the death of Konstantinos V, Elpidios saw an opportunity in killing the newly crowned Emperor, Leon IV, to destabilize the realm. With a little ingenuity and an...unorthodox assassination method, he succeeded, maneuvering himself into becoming the regent for the seven-year-old Konstantinos VI.
Now fearing the Emperor's wrath in several years, Elpidios worked to oust him from power. It was during this time he met with Strategos Iordanes of Chaldea, offering to support him on the throne in return for Elpidios' safety.
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| Elpidios' iconoclasm (and conversion of all of Sicily to the heresy) rendered him unpopular at court. |
Elpidios played only a minor role in the ensuing war, offering his own levies to supplement those of Iordanes. By this point, however, his own life was falling apart. Elpidios' wife had contracted syphilis, and in one of his many rages, he threw her into the dungeon, where she died. His son, Agamemnon, had renounced the Iconoclast heresy. None of his plans had born fruit, and he slowly began to care less and less for the justice which gave him his epithet.
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| Basileus Iordanes Ironside, soon after his coronation. |
The newly-crowned Basileus Iordanes I began his reign by immediately renouncing Iconoclasm, to Elpidios' chagrin. Elpidios briefly revolted in a bid for Sicilian independence, but he was too weak to stand against the Imperial legions. Brought before the Basileus in chains, Elpidios was stripped of his titles and locked in the dungeons of Constantinople, where he would face execution a scant few weeks later.
Elpidios' ambitions failed him, but in his efforts to see Agamemnon crowned King or Emperor, he destabilized the Byzantine Empire further. While the Isaurians had successfully reclaimed some Imperial territory, the squabbling among the Strategoi would force the Empire into a gradual decline, culminating in Constantinople itself being sacked in 1234 by the Buklamanid Caliphate.
This reads less like a story and more like someone scrolling through a Crusader Kings save file.
ReplyDeleteThe problem isn't that the events are implausible. Crusader Kings is built on absurd chains of events. The problem is that almost every paragraph is just another thing that happened: he got a title, fought a revolt, got married, murdered the emperor, revolted, lost, died. It's a chronology, not a narrative.
The title calls him "the Just," but we never really get inside that contradiction. How does someone earn that name and then become a scheming, increasingly ruthless political operator? That's the story. Instead, we're mostly watching the game log with a little connective tissue.
The irony is that CK2 generates incredible stories naturally. The challenge isn't documenting every event. It's deciding which events matter enough to build a character around. Sometimes one betrayal, one impossible choice, or one catastrophic mistake tells us more than twenty screenshots of succession politics.