ALEXIOS I KOMNENOS, Emperor of Byzantium. - He reigned from 1081 to 1118. He belonged to a feudal family originally from Comne 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 the accession of A. 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 program of occupying Macedonia and the entire empire. A. managed to secure 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 the moment to think of the Seljuk Turks, who had created the sultanate of Rum at Iconium, but the sudden invasion of the Pecheneg barbarians in Thrace jeopardized the very existence of the empire. The alliance with the tribe of the Polovtsians (or Cumans) allowed A. to destroy them (1091).
In such grave dangers A. had had to resume negotiations with the Holy See to put an end to the schism of Michael Cerularius. The emperor aimed to remove every difficulty in order to obtain military aid from the princes of the West. The negotiations lasted a long time, from 1088 to 1095, and are connected with the appearance of an imperial embassy at the Council of Piacenza, at which Urban II pleaded the cause of Byzantine and Eastern Christendom in general. Thus between the Council of Piacenza and that of Clermont the plan of the crusade matured. There were, however, it seems, no negotiations between the Pope and A.: the appearance of the crusading princes on the Bosporus was a new fact that compelled the emperor to define his position. The crusade was now based on the conclusion of a faedus between the empire and the princes, who bound themselves, in order to obtain its aid, to recognize the rights of A. over all the territories that might be reconquered from the infidels. Relations between A. and the crusaders were cordial until the siege of Antioch, but the undue occupation of that city by Bohemond, and the delays of A., who 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 any further concern for the Byzantine empire. Hence the legend of the lying and faithless emperor, examined and refuted by recent studies. A. in reality continued on various occasions to favor the Crusaders; relations were difficult only with Bohemond of Antioch, who, among other things, in 1108 again attempted the landing at Durazzo and the conquest of Macedonia, but without result. A. had succeeded in any case in saving the Byzantine empire even from this crisis. His last years were occupied with internal reorganization and with struggles against the Turks.
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Francesco Cognasso