John III Doukas Vatatzes
John III Vatatzes governed the Byzantine state in exile for thirty-three years and left it strong enough to retake Constantinople. He was a soldier of a Thracian family who married the daughter of Theodore I Laskaris and succeeded him at Nicaea in 1222, over the objection of the late emperor's brothers, whom he defeated with Latin help and then blinded. What he built was a working state rather than a court in exile. He encouraged agriculture directly, requiring landowners to be self-sufficient, keeping his own model farms and paying for an imperial crown out of the profits of an estate's poultry — a story his subjects repeated for a century. He forbade the import of Italian luxury goods, ran a surplus, kept taxes low enough that the Latin-ruled peasantry across the frontier compared their position unfavourably, and founded hospitals, monasteries and libraries. The territorial expansion followed from the solvency. He took most of the Latin Empire's Asian possessions, crossed into Europe and absorbed Thrace and much of Macedonia, took Thessalonica from the rival Greek state of Epirus in 1246, and reduced the Latin Empire to Constantinople and its suburbs. He negotiated with the pope, with Frederick II — whose illegitimate daughter he married — and with the Mongols after they destroyed the Seljuks in 1243. He died in 1254 having encircled the city without attacking it. His grandson was murdered by Michael Palaiologos, who entered Constantinople in 1261 with the army Vatatzes had paid for. The Greek church made him a saint. He is the most competent ruler the Byzantine world produced after the eleventh century and is almost unknown outside it. His reputation among his own subjects was as the merciful, and his feast day is still kept in parts of Greece.
- Lived: 1193 CE – 1254 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader, administrator
