ALESSIO I COMMENO, emperor of BYZANTIUM. — He reigned from 1081 to 1118. He belonged to a feudal family originally from Comune in Thrace, but transplanted to Asia Minor; his uncle Isaac had already been emperor from 1057 to 1059, but had been unable to retain power because of the opposition of the Byzantine bureaucratic aristocracy. The situation of the empire at A.’s accession was grave: Anatolia had been invaded by the Turks, and the Italian possessions had been conquered by the Normans, who, at the very beginning of his reign, landed on the Albanian coast with the plan of occupying Macedonia and the entire empire. A. succeeded in securing the alliance of Venice, at the cost of serious commercial concessions, which gave the Venetians mercantile predominance in the Levant. In 1085 the death of Robert Guiscard put an end to the Norman danger. It was time to think about the Seljuk Turks, who had established the Sultanate of Rum at Iconium, but the sudden invasion of Thrace by the barbarian Pechenegs endangered the very existence of the empire. An alliance with the tribe of the Polovtsi (or Cumans) enabled A. to destroy them (1091).
In these grave dangers A. had been compelled to resume negotiations with the Holy See in order to put an end to the schism of Michael Cerularius. The emperor aimed to remove every obstacle in order to obtain military aid from the princes of the West. The negotiations lasted a long time, from 1088 to 1095, and were connected with the appearance of an imperial embassy at the Council of Piacenza, where Urban II pleaded the cause of Byzantine and Eastern Christianity in general. Thus, between the Council of Piacenza and that of Clermont, the plan of the crusade took shape. There were not, it seems, negotiations between the Pope and A.; the appearance of the crusading princes on the Bosporus was a new event that compelled the emperor to clarify his position. The crusade was now based on the conclusion of a faedus between the empire and the princes, who, in return for its aid, undertook to recognize A.’s rights over all the territories reconquered from the infidels. Relations between A. and the crusaders remained cordial until the siege of Antioch, but Bohemond’s unlawful occupation of that city, and A.’s delays, having halted in Anatolia in the struggle against the Turks, led, in the summer of 1098, to an open rupture with the crusaders, who resumed their expedition without further concern for the Byzantine Empire. Hence the legend of the deceitful and treacherous emperor, examined and refuted by recent scholarship. In reality, A. continued on various occasions to support the Crusaders; relations were difficult only with Bohemond of Antioch, who, among other things, in 1108 again attempted to land at Durazzo and conquer Macedonia, but without success. In any event, A. had managed to save the Byzantine Empire from this crisis as well. His final years were occupied with internal reorganization and struggles against the Turks.