Michael VIII Palaiologos
Michael VIII recovered Constantinople in 1261 with an army somebody else had built and a piece of luck. He was a general of one of the great aristocratic families, appointed regent for the seven-year-old John IV Laskaris in 1258 after the murder of the previous regent, and crowned as co-emperor within months. The recovery of the city was not planned. A Nicaean general named Alexios Strategopoulos was passing near Constantinople with a small force in July 1261, learned that the Latin garrison and the Venetian fleet had sailed off to attack an island in the Black Sea, was shown an unguarded passage by local farmers, and walked in. Michael was told several days later and entered the city in August through the Golden Gate behind an icon. He then blinded the eleven-year-old legitimate emperor and confined him for life, for which the patriarch excommunicated him and which the church did not forgive. The reign afterwards was a long defensive diplomacy against a west that intended to take the city back. He bought off, married off and outmanoeuvred Charles of Anjou for twenty years, and accepted the union of the churches at Lyons in 1274 — which his own clergy and population rejected furiously — purely to remove the papal sanction for a crusade against him. The Sicilian Vespers of 1282, which destroyed Charles's plans, were substantially financed by him. He paid for it by stripping the Anatolian frontier, where the Ottomans emerged twenty years later. The dynasty he founded ruled the longest of any in Byzantine history and had the least to rule. It held the throne for 192 years while the empire shrank to a city, and its members spent most of that period fighting each other for it.
- Lived: 1223 CE – 1282 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader, diplomat
