Michael VIII recovered Constantinople in 1261 and founded the last Byzantine dynasty. He also blinded the child he ruled for, forced a church union his people hated, and left Anatolia to the Turks.
Michael VIII Palaiologos was a Nicaean aristocrat and general who made himself regent for a child emperor in 1258, co-emperor shortly after, and sole emperor by blinding the child in 1261.
In the same year his troops recovered Constantinople, and he became the first emperor to rule from the city in fifty-seven years and the founder of the dynasty that held it until 1453.
The rest of his reign was spent keeping it. He subordinated the Byzantine church to Rome to prevent a western crusade against him, and when that failed he financed and encouraged the rebellion that destroyed Charles of Anjou's invasion fleet. Both worked. Neither was forgiven.
He was born in 1223 into the Palaiologos family, one of the great military houses of the Nicaean aristocracy, with descent from the Komnenoi and the Doukai on both sides — which mattered enormously to the legitimacy he later claimed.
He made a career as a general and was twice suspected of treason, on the second occasion submitting to trial by ordeal — he refused to carry the red-hot iron and argued his way out of it, which the sources report with some relish.
When Theodore II Laskaris died in 1258 leaving a seven-year-old son, Michael had himself made regent within weeks and co-emperor within months.
He is one of the few Byzantine emperors whose contemporaries and successors agree on his ability and disagree about nothing else.
What comes through is intelligence applied without much scruple: a soldier who preferred negotiation, a usurper who took enormous trouble over the appearance of legitimacy, and a diplomat who spent twenty years playing the papacy, Genoa, Venice, the Mongols and Aragon against each other and generally won.
The blinding of John IV is the act everything else is read through, and it was not politically necessary in the way that most Byzantine mutilations were — the boy was eleven and had no faction. Pachymeres, who admired his competence, does not defend it. Nor does this archive: it was a calculated removal of a rival who had not yet become one.
Constantinople fell to him almost by accident in July 1261, and he entered it in August behind an icon of the Virgin. The restoration was total in symbol and partial in fact: the city was half-ruined and half-empty, and the empire that returned to it was a Balkan and west Anatolian state, not a Mediterranean power.
The immediate danger was western. Charles of Anjou, having taken southern Italy, spent the 1270s assembling a coalition to restore the Latin Empire, and Michael's answer was the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, at which his envoys accepted papal primacy and the Latin creed.
The union bought him papal protection and cost him his own church. It was rejected almost universally in Byzantium, enforced with imprisonments, and repudiated the moment he died. The empire he saved regarded the price as a betrayal of the thing he had saved it for.
When a new pope withdrew papal protection, Charles of Anjou's invasion was scheduled for 1282, and Michael did what he had always done: he found somebody else to fight it.
Byzantine gold went to Peter III of Aragon, who had a claim to Sicily through his wife, and to the Sicilian nobles who resented Angevin rule. On Easter Monday 1282 Palermo rose against the French garrison in the massacre known as the Sicilian Vespers, and by the autumn Peter had taken the island.
Charles never sailed. Michael wrote afterwards, with justified satisfaction, that if he claimed God had made the Sicilians free through him he would only be stating the truth. He died in December of the same year.
He restored the empire and left it structurally worse off than the Nicaean state he had inherited. The resources went west to hold Constantinople and defend against the Angevins, and the Anatolian frontier — the Nicaean heartland, and the empire's recruiting ground — was stripped of the troops and the subsidies that had held it.
The Turkish emirates filled the space within a generation. One of them was Osman's, and the empire's first defeat by his forces came at Bapheus in 1302, twenty years after Michael's death.
His son denied him a church burial as a Latinizer, and no Byzantine emperor was ever less mourned by the state he had rescued. The dynasty he founded ruled for a hundred and ninety-two years and produced the last emperor to die on the walls in 1453.