Theodore I Laskaris
Theodore I Laskaris made a Byzantine state out of nothing in Anatolia after the crusaders took Constantinople. He was a son-in-law of Alexios III and was in the city during the siege of 1204, fighting on the walls, and crossed to Asia when it fell. What he found there was not a government. The Latin empire claimed everything, Greek local magnates had set themselves up in the towns, the Seljuks of Rum held the interior, and a rival Greek state formed at Trebizond while another emerged in Epirus. He spent three years fighting local Greek notables before he could fight anyone else, and was proclaimed emperor at Nicaea and crowned in 1208 by a patriarch he had installed, which supplied the legitimacy the whole project needed. The battle that made him was at Antioch on the Maeander in 1211, where the Seljuk sultan invaded with the deposed Alexios III in his baggage as a claimant. Theodore's army was largely destroyed, he met the sultan in single combat by most accounts and killed him, and the Seljuk force dissolved; Alexios III was captured and sent to a monastery. He then fought the Latins to a standstill and obtained a treaty in 1214 fixing a frontier that held. What he left his son-in-law John Vatatzes was a compact, defensible, solvent state with a capital, a court and a patriarch. Nicaea recovered Constantinople in 1261, forty-nine years after his death in 1222. His achievement is easy to miss because the recovery of the city belongs to someone else. Between 1204 and 1214 he turned a fugitive court into a functioning empire with a frontier, and every Greek claim to legitimacy for the next half-century rested on the patriarchate he set up at Nicaea.
- Lived: 1174 CE – 1221 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader, founder
