Andronikos I Komnenos
Andronikos I spent thirty years as an adventurer, seized the throne at sixty-four, and was torn apart by a crowd three years later. He was a first cousin of Manuel I, exceptionally tall, handsome and charming into old age, and spent most of his life in exile or in prison for conspiracy. He escaped from the palace prison twice, fled to the Rus, to the Seljuks, to Georgia and to the crusader states, seduced two of his own cousins and eloped with the widowed queen of Jerusalem, and was hunted across the Near East by imperial agents. Manuel died in 1180 leaving an eleven-year-old son under the regency of a Latin mother, and Andronikos marched on the capital in 1182 as the boy's protector. The city admitted him and massacred its Latin population, thousands of Italian merchants killed in their own quarter. He then removed everyone in sequence — the regent's adviser, the empress Maria, and finally the boy Alexios II, strangled with a bowstring — and married the child's twelve-year-old widow. His government had a genuine programme. He attacked the corruption of the provincial administration, ended the sale of offices, paid officials properly, and was popular with the peasantry and hated by everyone who had been living off them. He enforced it with executions on a scale that became a terror. A Norman army took Thessalonica in 1185, the city rose, and he was handed to the mob in the Hippodrome, where he was mutilated over several days. The Angeloi followed.
- Lived: 1118 CE – 1185 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
