Andronikos II Palaiologos
Andronikos II reigned for nearly fifty years and presided over the loss of Anatolia. He succeeded his father Michael VIII in 1282, and his first acts were a repudiation. Michael had recovered Constantinople in 1261 and had kept the west off by submitting the Greek church to Rome at the Council of Lyons, which his own clergy and people had never accepted; Andronikos renounced the union immediately and buried his father without ceremony. His problem was money. The empire's revenues were a fraction of what they had been, the Italians held the trade, and the currency had been progressively debased. His solution was to disband the fleet in 1285, on the reasoning that Genoa was an ally and could supply ships, which saved a great deal and left the empire dependent on the Genoese and the Venetians, who then fought their wars in Byzantine waters. The frontier in Anatolia collapsed in the same period. The Turkish beyliks, among them Osman's, took the interior through the 1290s, and the empire's response was to hire the Catalan Company — some 6,500 mercenaries who won a battle, murdered their own employer's officers or had them murdered, and then spent years plundering Thrace and Macedonia. He was a serious patron of scholarship, and the period produced good historians, philologists and astronomers. His grandson rebelled against him and deposed him in 1328 after a civil war. He died a monk in 1332. Disbanding the fleet is the decision most often cited against him, and the defence is that he could not pay for it. The empire he handed on was a Balkan state with a foothold in Asia, and the beylik that took its Anatolian territory became the Ottoman Empire.
- Lived: 1259 CE – 1332 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
