Kingdom of Epirus

A Byzantine successor state in the mountains of western Greece, and separately the kingdom of a king whose victories became a byword for costing too much. Ancient Epirus was ruled by Pyrrhus, who invaded Italy in 280 BCE at the invitation of Tarentum, beat Roman armies at Heraclea and Asculum, and remarked after the second that another such victory would finish him - which is where the phrase Pyrrhic victory comes from. Rome later devastated the region, reportedly enslaving a hundred and fifty thousand people in 167 BCE. The medieval despotate was founded after the Fourth Crusade in 1204 by Michael Komnenos Doukas, one of three Byzantine governments in exile, and its ruler Theodore took Thessalonica and crowned himself emperor in 1227 before being defeated and blinded by the Bulgarians at Klokotnitsa. That defeat left Nicaea to recover Constantinople instead. Epirus survived as a smaller despotate under Serbian, Italian and finally Ottoman pressure until 1479. Its terrain kept it semi-autonomous under Ottoman rule. Ioannina was its principal city. The Vikos gorge is among the deepest in the world. The region straddles the modern Greek-Albanian border. Pyrrhus was a cousin of Alexander and among the most respected commanders of his age. The despotate's capital was Arta, which retains Byzantine churches. Ali Pasha governed the region semi-independently from Ioannina around 1800. Dodona, in Epirus, held one of the oldest Greek oracles, where answers were read from the rustling of an oak. The despotate outlasted the Latin Empire it was founded against by two centuries.

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