Alexios II Komnenos
Alexios II Komnenos became emperor as a child of eleven upon the death of his father Manuel I in 1180. He was the product of Manuel I's second marriage to Marie of Antioch, a Latin princess, and his Latin blood and his mother's pro-western regency made him deeply unpopular with a Constantinople population already resentful of the privileges enjoyed by Italian merchants and western settlers. The regency was overthrown by Andronikos Komnenos, a cousin of Manuel I, who arrived in Constantinople in 1182 capitalizing on popular anti-Latin sentiment and provoking or enabling the massacre of the Latin community of Constantinople in April 1182, in which thousands of western merchants, women, and children were killed and churches sacked. Andronikos gradually sidelined and then killed the regent protosebastos. Alexios II was forced to sign the death warrant of his own mother. In September 1183 Andronikos had the young emperor strangled with a bowstring and his body thrown into the Bosphoros. Alexios II reigned for three years without ever exercising any real power. He was thirteen years old when he was murdered.
- Lived: 1169 CE – 1183 CE
- Nationality: byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
