Part XXXIV: Musical Chairs (1514-1516)
Eparkhos
Well-known member
Part XXXIV: Musical Chairs (1514-1516)
Alexios’ final purges had cleansed the Trapezuntine state of much of its more debauched and conspiratorial aspects. However, Trapezous was truly a Byzantine state, and no single man could completely cleanse the empire of its darker nature. The efforts of the late aftokrator had gone a long way towards securing the reign of his son, but the responsibility for maintaining this security would fall upon the shoulders of a priest, a diplomat and a slave, far from the most inspiring group of men to oversee a decade (at minimum) long regency. In a place as corrupt as the Trapezuntine Empire, they were hardly the best men for the job….
As the dying emperor’s men ravaged the upper classes of the capital in search for any would-be assassins, the true killer of the emperor was in the wind. Skaramagos had correctly ascertained two things; namely, that Katsarina would double cross him at the first opportunity, and that Alexios might not be dead. He picked his way across the city, shot the guards outside the building where his brother was being held, and rescued him. Then they fled eastwards out of the city, making their way across the breadth of the empire to the eastern frontier. Ever the opportunist, Skaramagos saw a chance in all of this, and was unwilling to pass it up.
Back in the capital, meanwhile, the Three Basils were shakily adapting to the levers of government. As previously mentioned, they were far from good candidates for the regency. Mgeli had spent the last decade and a half traveling across Central Europe, flitting between the courts of Rome, Esztergom and Krakow and even accompanying a Papal expedition led by Antonio Trivulzio against the Barbaries to recover a stricken Trapezuntine merchantman. He was a career diplomat, and while this was a trait that would be useful in pretty much any court throughout history, he had no experience in actually governing. He knew what not to do, of course, having observed many rulers in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond fall from grace and power due to blunders and bad slips, but this wasn’t much help. The Patriarch was even worse off, having spent most of his life as a quiet country priest before being shot up to royal tutor and advocate for the deranged prince-turned-emperor. The task of handling the fractious infighting of the Pontic Church and relations with the other surrounding Patriarchates would have probably been more than he could handle by itself, but having to do that and rule in David’s name was an overwhelming challenge for him. Basileios the Scythian was a career soldier, true[1], but he had little actual battlefield experience other than a few battles in the Samtskheote War half a decade previous and some battles with Karamanid raiders in the Lykos Valley. He was a thoroughly unimaginative commander, and swung between essentially ignoring the actions of the other regents and threatening to have his soldiers murder them anytime they did something that pissed him off. David was a non-entity at this point, unable to even say ‘David Megalokomnenos’, and so the three men were left to blunder their way forward, hoping that they did more good than they did harm.
Alexios’ murder of anyone who looked at him funny had effectively gutted the ranks of the Imperial bureaucracy, aristocracy, and the upper echelons of the army with few exceptions. While this crippled the aforementioned organizations and thus posed a sizable challenge to the new regency, in the long-term it was a boon for the empire’s stability. All but the most tepid and inoffensive servants of the aftokrator had been purged, and this allowed the regents to refill their ranks with loyal and docile men, the kind who wouldn’t pose a threat to either the joint regency or the young David himself. The remainder of 1514 was spent analyzing potential recruits and hand-selecting new administrators and officers. Mgeli was the prime driver behind this, of course, as the Patriarch was already occupied with trying to reform the Pontic Church’s organizational structure and the Scythian was sacking officers left and right in a manner not dissimilar to Alexios’ old purges. While they were distracted in doing this, plotters began to come out of the woodwork, seeking the power that was wielded by a regent for themselves.
Chief among these were Skaramagos and Ioannes Sabbiades who were, funnily enough, half-brothers. Antonio Scaramanga had been rebaptized in the Orthodox Church during the 1480s, and had sired a bastard son who went on to become the commander of the eastern frontier. Alexios, even during his most paranoid flights of fantasy, had never dared to execute a war hero as beloved to many of the commoners as Sabbiades was, and so he had remained as the governor of the eastern military frontier, fighting off Karamanid raids and attacks from the rump Samtskheote state. When his half-brother informed Sabbiades of the ongoing turmoil in the capital, the general saw an opportunity to gain power for himself. He was not a power-hungry man by nature, but having to spend years dreading the approach of every rider from the west had instilled in him a desire to be in complete control of his destiny, a desire which he believed could only be fulfilled by seizing the regency for himself. He had more than enough loyal soldiers to do it--after all, the eastern military frontier was the second-most heavily garrisoned region in the Empire, and most of the soldiers posted there supported him whole-heartedly. He and Skaramagos just needed the right opportunity to take power for themselves.
Meanwhile, in the capital, the regency council began to fracture in mid-1515. Previously, Basileios Mgeli and Basileios the Scythian had, if not gotten along very well, at least tolerated each other. However, as Basileios III’s mind began to slip[2]--he was nearly eighty, after all--conflict began to brew between the two men. Mgeli, who had been the chief administrator of the regency simply due to lack of any other would-be clerical minister. As such, he assumed that he would step into the void left by Basileios III’s increasing incompetency. This, however, Basileios the Scythian would not allow. Conventional wisdom held that in order to secure oneself at the top of a Byzantinesque state such as Trapezous, you would need the support of two of the three pillars of the state[3]. With the initial arrangement of the regency, each of the Basileios had held one of these pillars; Mgeli the bureaucracy, Davidopoulos the church and Scythian the army. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be. However, now that Basileios was on the verge of bowing out, the potential for one of the men to gain the advantage was clear to him. Mgeli had not exactly tied to endear himself to him, either, encourage the growth of the city watch and the expansion of the city’s regular garrison as counterbalances to the eleutheroi.
When Basileios III formally declared his retirement in August 1515, Basileios the Scythian sent a detachment of eleutheroi to arrest Basileios Mgeli, so that he could not prevent him from installing a claimant of his own upon the patriarchal throne. The regent was caught completely off-guard and was confined within his apartments within the palace with a few secretaries, unable to reach his network of supporters before he was effectively imprisoned. With his ally-turned-rival reduced, Basileios the Scythian appointed one of his colleagues, a military chaplain known as Thomas the Vainakh, as Patriarch, cinching another one of the pillars of state behind him, or so he thought.
Mgeli knew that the ante was rising with every second, and he had to act quickly if he wanted to keep his head on top of his shoulders. He paid off a guard and slipped out a letterto his cousin up in Tennessee to Sabbiades, traveling through a secret network of couriers he had arranged on the side. He promised Sabbiades a seat on the regency council and command of all the realm’s armies if he would revolt against Basileios the Scythian, hoping that the two would fight each other and allow him to weasel his way out of his present predicament, or at least fire a Parthian shot. Basileios the Scythian, meanwhile, officially deposed Basileios Mgeli a few days later, elevating a fairly obscure notary named Konstantinos Ypsilantis to replace the former emperor’s cousin and join himself and Thomas the Avar as regents. Hoping to tie up a loose end, he had Mgeli paraded out of his cell and put on a ship to Tmutarakan in chains. The ship then sank a few hundred yards from shore with exactly one death. Thus died the last son of Keteon.
While Mgeli himself was dead, his Parthian shot flew straight and true. In September 1515, Sabbiades received the late regent’s offer and, after ruminating on the subject for a time, decided the time was right. He raised the standard of revolt at Artane (OTL Ardahan)[4] on 26 September, and was hailed by his men as the true regent of the emperor David. There were already nearly 5,000 professional soldiers scattered across the section of the frontier under his control[5], and the bandons of the region rallied to his standard. With the harvest already completed, he was able to raise an unusually great number of men, mustering 12,000 men in his army proper even with 4,000 men left behind to guard the frontier from any opportunistic raiders. Sabbiades knew that the most likely strategy his enemies would take would be to keep him trapped on the far side of the mountains for as long as possible, in hopes that he would begin to waver and start to bleed to defections. As such, he drove directly across the mountains, floating down the Akampsis in a two-week long advance to the sea. Vatoume surrendered without a fight on 15 October, securing Sabbiades his foothold on the northern side of the mountains. He turned and swept along the coastal plains toward the capital itself, gathering more men as he marched. His success can be attributed to promises of relief from the rising taxes imposed by the capital and promises of the restoration of the glory of Alexandros II, whom Sabbiades had campaigned beneath on several occasions[6].
Basileios the Scythian was, understandably, more than a little concerned by the vast rebel host that was currently marching towards the capital with all haste. He scrambled together a host, mustering 3,500 of the 5,000 eleutheroi[7] and marching out from the city mustering bandons from the lands surrounding the city. Most of these conscripts weren’t exactly eager to fight and die for the claim of some barbarian who had no distinguishing victories or endearing traits other than his money and his title, and fewer still were willing to do so against the war hero Sabbiades. As such, he was able to muster a host of 8,000, which was by now outnumbered by more than 2:1 and growing. Basileios decided his best option was to try and blunt Sabbiades’ advance and force him to endure a winter siege, which would hopefully affect the rebel army in a manner similar to Mustafa II’s thirty years before. However, this would never come to pass.
After watching his predecessor be murdered on his orders, Konstantinos Ypsilantis had quickly deduced that Basileios could not be trusted. He had begun plotting against his nominal ally almost at once, managing to neatly insert himself into much of Mgeli’s network. Within a few weeks, he had managed to turn the regular garrison and the city watch to his side with a number of well-placed bribes. As soon as the bulk of the eleutheroi were a day’s march beyond the city, he ordered the city gates to be closed, then fled the palace for the army barracks in the upper town. Ypsilantis’ loyalist forces quickly coalesced, and within a few hours they and the city watch had managed to secure all of the lower and upper towns. A traitor opened one of the citadel’s sally gates, and he and his soldiers were able to fight their way through into the palace complex and the eleutheroi barracks there within. The battle here was fierce, as the narrow corridors and small, disjointed buildings reduced much of the fighting to one-on-one duels. The city watch and the regular garrison took heavy losses as the disciplined eleutheroi fought desperately, but weight of numbers was on their side and they eventually cut off and then took the Imperial chambers. Ypsilantis personally shepherded David out of the building, after which he turned the cannons on the citadel walls about and threatened to blow the palace to kingdom come if the eleutheroi didn’t lay down their weapons. Some kept fighting, but most of them reluctantly surrendered and were led away in chains. By the end of the day, all but the most isolated tunnels and chambers in the warren beneath the palace had been swept of their defenders. David, stuttering on every word due to an unfortunate speech impediment, proclaimed the deposition of Basileios the Scythian and Thomas the Avar (who had been imprisoned when the coup began) and elevated Ypsilantis to sole regent.
Ypsilantis, I mean David, immediately drafted a chrysobull declaring that the Scythian was deposed. After hastily making and signing copies, riders were dispatched to distribute these messages amongst his camp. Sure enough, most of the bandons took this as an opportunity to abandon the field, rushing away to their homes and families. Basileios of course denounced the message as false and treasonous, but this did not prevent the eleutheroi from fracturing as several junior commanders attempted to arrest their captain as a rebel. While the eleutheroi were busy fighting themselves and the bandons fleeing in all directions, Sabbiades decided this was as good a time as any to attack, and his army surrounded and then overran the divided enemy camp. Basileios the Scythian was found barely alive and was tied to the back of a horse leg-first, dragged for several miles over sharp rocks on his face, then tied in a sack with a rabid dog and thrown down a well[8]. Sabbiades then resumed his march on the capital, arriving outside the city just as winter was setting in on 8 December 1515.
Ypsilantis was essentially forced to let them in, as Sabbiades had a worryingly large siege train consisting of cannons captured at a supply depot at Kapnanion and several dozen more taken from cities along his marching route. Sabbiades entered the city in a triumphant march, being hailed as a liberator by many of the residents of Trapezous, a fact which only further unnerved Ypsilantis. However, the most worrying thing that happened that winter for the new regent was Sabbiades’ proclamation that he ought to be coregent, as he had been promised such a role by Mgeli before his untimely death. Ypsilantis obviously didn’t want to give up his power to a man who already wielded so much, but with a large army camped in the lower town, it wasn’t exactly like he could say no. On 14 December, Ioannes Sabbiades was raised to co-regent with Ypsilantis, returning the city and the empire to an uneasy power-sharing agreement. It would not last long.
By the time he was elevated as regent, both Sabbiades and Ypsilantis were plotting to have the other bumped off. The reasons for this were rather obvious, as Ypsilantis feared that his nominal partner would try to overthrow him and Sabbiades feared that his nominal partner would try to have him killed. Unfortunately for them, neither of them was an especially skilled plotter, and so throughout December 1515 and into January 1516, they made a series of clumsy, badly-handled assassination attempts against each other. Be it poison, the assassin’s knife or barrels of power, they tried it. Skaramagos had disappeared somewhere into the Qutlughid Empire back in July, and so Sabbiades was left without his best assassin, which was no doubt extremely frustrating. By February, the two regents had holed up in opposite wings of the palace and refused to speak to each other. Why Sabbiades didn’t just outright depose Ypsilantis at the first opportunity is unknown--it is possible that the regent, with nothing left to lose, might try and repeat Mgeli’s little stunt and plunge the country into civil war--but it would prove to be a fatal mistake.
On 23 February 1516, Sabbiades finally threw up his hands and said ‘Screw it’. That morning, several dozen of his soldiers burst into Ypsilantis’ wing of the palace, hacking down the regent’s guards and rushing into his personal rooms. They pulled the man they found sleeping there from his bed and realized, to their shock, that it was not in fact him. Ypsilantis had started sleeping in an adjoining closet out of fear of being killed in his sleep, and while the soldiers had been busy he had fled into the tunnels beneath the palace. Furious that his quarry had been lost, Sabbiades ordered his men to spread out through the tunnels and hunt him down. For two days they searched, finding nothing, as Ypsilantis fled between different store rooms and hidden tunnels. Finally, on the third day, he presented himself before a group of soldiers and demanded to be taken to Sabbiades. The general had his former co-regent brought before him, taunting him before he had him executed. However, Ypsilantis retorted in kind, mocking him for his clubfoot and weak leg. Sabbiades flew into a rage and began screaming at him, causing the soldiers holding him to shrink back. Seizing the opportunity, Ypsilantis pulled a concealed dagger--from where is not known, but given that the wound later became severely infected, many historians have a guess[9]--and stabbed Sabbiades in the arm, missing his chest by a few millimeters. Absolutely apoplectic now, Sabbiades grabbed Ypsilantis and threw him out of nearby window, sending him hurtling seven hundred feet to the bottom of the Kontos Valley.
Sabbiades was proclaimed as David’s regent later that same day, but he would not have long to enjoy it. He refused treatment for his wound until he had been formally invested, not wanting to waste time getting it cleaned. He allowed it to be treated afterwards, but it was too late. It was already infected, and within a few days the infection worsened into severe blood poisoning. By 27 February, he was in agonizing pain and took so much opium that he couldn’t move from his bed. A day later he was dead, and David was left without a regent once again.
By now, the people of Trapezous were thoroughly fed up with the regent roulette, and the garrison and the bureaucrats agreed. After a bit of deliberation, the city garrison invited the megas doux, the highest-ranking officer who had stayed clear of this mess, to take the regency. Loukas Ratetas[10] had worked his way up to the admiralty from a lowly rower on an Imperial galley, and was well-respected by all because of his honesty, loyalty and genial nature. He had actually been raised to his office in 1511 because he was the only captain who Alexios had trusted, and he had been sufficiently inoffensive to survive the following years. He was at Kerasounta, overseeing the loading of new cannons onto his galleys, when Sabbiades died. After a brief caretaker regency by Patriarch Nikolaos (Thomas had been deposed by Ypsilantis), Ratetas arrived in the city on 12 March and formally accepted the regency, becoming David’s seventh and final regent.
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[1] Although this wasn’t exactly a willing decision since he was, y’know, a slave.
[2] Basileios III likely had an early form of dementia as early as Nikephoros’ reign, but it truly became impactful during his regency.
[3] That is, the army, the bureaucracy and the church. Huh, A-B-C. The ABCs of Byzantium, perhaps?
[4] This was the capital of the eastern frontier, the largest settlement conquered from the Samtskheotes
[5] The size of the Trapezuntine military had ballooned during the long peace between 1486 and 1517. Note: This span is referred to as the long peace due to the lack of major foreign wars, the war between Basileios the Scythian and Sabbiades being the only major civil conflict and the Samtskheote War being the only foreign conflict, which didn’t inflict much damage on the Empire itself.
[6] Alexandros led several small campaigns against Karamanid raiders that I glossed over.
[7] I think this is the right number, but I might be a little off. I don’t have my notes in front of e.
[8] This was the fate of an Armenian vassal lord who tried to assassinate Nikephoros I back in the 10th Century. Supposedly, this was copied from the same punishment this lord gave to a bishop who pissed him off.
[9] This is exactly what you think it is.
[10] This is the same Loukas Ratetas captured the Čandarid flagship at the Battle of Sinope in 1468.
Alexios’ final purges had cleansed the Trapezuntine state of much of its more debauched and conspiratorial aspects. However, Trapezous was truly a Byzantine state, and no single man could completely cleanse the empire of its darker nature. The efforts of the late aftokrator had gone a long way towards securing the reign of his son, but the responsibility for maintaining this security would fall upon the shoulders of a priest, a diplomat and a slave, far from the most inspiring group of men to oversee a decade (at minimum) long regency. In a place as corrupt as the Trapezuntine Empire, they were hardly the best men for the job….
As the dying emperor’s men ravaged the upper classes of the capital in search for any would-be assassins, the true killer of the emperor was in the wind. Skaramagos had correctly ascertained two things; namely, that Katsarina would double cross him at the first opportunity, and that Alexios might not be dead. He picked his way across the city, shot the guards outside the building where his brother was being held, and rescued him. Then they fled eastwards out of the city, making their way across the breadth of the empire to the eastern frontier. Ever the opportunist, Skaramagos saw a chance in all of this, and was unwilling to pass it up.
Back in the capital, meanwhile, the Three Basils were shakily adapting to the levers of government. As previously mentioned, they were far from good candidates for the regency. Mgeli had spent the last decade and a half traveling across Central Europe, flitting between the courts of Rome, Esztergom and Krakow and even accompanying a Papal expedition led by Antonio Trivulzio against the Barbaries to recover a stricken Trapezuntine merchantman. He was a career diplomat, and while this was a trait that would be useful in pretty much any court throughout history, he had no experience in actually governing. He knew what not to do, of course, having observed many rulers in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond fall from grace and power due to blunders and bad slips, but this wasn’t much help. The Patriarch was even worse off, having spent most of his life as a quiet country priest before being shot up to royal tutor and advocate for the deranged prince-turned-emperor. The task of handling the fractious infighting of the Pontic Church and relations with the other surrounding Patriarchates would have probably been more than he could handle by itself, but having to do that and rule in David’s name was an overwhelming challenge for him. Basileios the Scythian was a career soldier, true[1], but he had little actual battlefield experience other than a few battles in the Samtskheote War half a decade previous and some battles with Karamanid raiders in the Lykos Valley. He was a thoroughly unimaginative commander, and swung between essentially ignoring the actions of the other regents and threatening to have his soldiers murder them anytime they did something that pissed him off. David was a non-entity at this point, unable to even say ‘David Megalokomnenos’, and so the three men were left to blunder their way forward, hoping that they did more good than they did harm.
Alexios’ murder of anyone who looked at him funny had effectively gutted the ranks of the Imperial bureaucracy, aristocracy, and the upper echelons of the army with few exceptions. While this crippled the aforementioned organizations and thus posed a sizable challenge to the new regency, in the long-term it was a boon for the empire’s stability. All but the most tepid and inoffensive servants of the aftokrator had been purged, and this allowed the regents to refill their ranks with loyal and docile men, the kind who wouldn’t pose a threat to either the joint regency or the young David himself. The remainder of 1514 was spent analyzing potential recruits and hand-selecting new administrators and officers. Mgeli was the prime driver behind this, of course, as the Patriarch was already occupied with trying to reform the Pontic Church’s organizational structure and the Scythian was sacking officers left and right in a manner not dissimilar to Alexios’ old purges. While they were distracted in doing this, plotters began to come out of the woodwork, seeking the power that was wielded by a regent for themselves.
Chief among these were Skaramagos and Ioannes Sabbiades who were, funnily enough, half-brothers. Antonio Scaramanga had been rebaptized in the Orthodox Church during the 1480s, and had sired a bastard son who went on to become the commander of the eastern frontier. Alexios, even during his most paranoid flights of fantasy, had never dared to execute a war hero as beloved to many of the commoners as Sabbiades was, and so he had remained as the governor of the eastern military frontier, fighting off Karamanid raids and attacks from the rump Samtskheote state. When his half-brother informed Sabbiades of the ongoing turmoil in the capital, the general saw an opportunity to gain power for himself. He was not a power-hungry man by nature, but having to spend years dreading the approach of every rider from the west had instilled in him a desire to be in complete control of his destiny, a desire which he believed could only be fulfilled by seizing the regency for himself. He had more than enough loyal soldiers to do it--after all, the eastern military frontier was the second-most heavily garrisoned region in the Empire, and most of the soldiers posted there supported him whole-heartedly. He and Skaramagos just needed the right opportunity to take power for themselves.
Meanwhile, in the capital, the regency council began to fracture in mid-1515. Previously, Basileios Mgeli and Basileios the Scythian had, if not gotten along very well, at least tolerated each other. However, as Basileios III’s mind began to slip[2]--he was nearly eighty, after all--conflict began to brew between the two men. Mgeli, who had been the chief administrator of the regency simply due to lack of any other would-be clerical minister. As such, he assumed that he would step into the void left by Basileios III’s increasing incompetency. This, however, Basileios the Scythian would not allow. Conventional wisdom held that in order to secure oneself at the top of a Byzantinesque state such as Trapezous, you would need the support of two of the three pillars of the state[3]. With the initial arrangement of the regency, each of the Basileios had held one of these pillars; Mgeli the bureaucracy, Davidopoulos the church and Scythian the army. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be. However, now that Basileios was on the verge of bowing out, the potential for one of the men to gain the advantage was clear to him. Mgeli had not exactly tied to endear himself to him, either, encourage the growth of the city watch and the expansion of the city’s regular garrison as counterbalances to the eleutheroi.
When Basileios III formally declared his retirement in August 1515, Basileios the Scythian sent a detachment of eleutheroi to arrest Basileios Mgeli, so that he could not prevent him from installing a claimant of his own upon the patriarchal throne. The regent was caught completely off-guard and was confined within his apartments within the palace with a few secretaries, unable to reach his network of supporters before he was effectively imprisoned. With his ally-turned-rival reduced, Basileios the Scythian appointed one of his colleagues, a military chaplain known as Thomas the Vainakh, as Patriarch, cinching another one of the pillars of state behind him, or so he thought.
Mgeli knew that the ante was rising with every second, and he had to act quickly if he wanted to keep his head on top of his shoulders. He paid off a guard and slipped out a letter
While Mgeli himself was dead, his Parthian shot flew straight and true. In September 1515, Sabbiades received the late regent’s offer and, after ruminating on the subject for a time, decided the time was right. He raised the standard of revolt at Artane (OTL Ardahan)[4] on 26 September, and was hailed by his men as the true regent of the emperor David. There were already nearly 5,000 professional soldiers scattered across the section of the frontier under his control[5], and the bandons of the region rallied to his standard. With the harvest already completed, he was able to raise an unusually great number of men, mustering 12,000 men in his army proper even with 4,000 men left behind to guard the frontier from any opportunistic raiders. Sabbiades knew that the most likely strategy his enemies would take would be to keep him trapped on the far side of the mountains for as long as possible, in hopes that he would begin to waver and start to bleed to defections. As such, he drove directly across the mountains, floating down the Akampsis in a two-week long advance to the sea. Vatoume surrendered without a fight on 15 October, securing Sabbiades his foothold on the northern side of the mountains. He turned and swept along the coastal plains toward the capital itself, gathering more men as he marched. His success can be attributed to promises of relief from the rising taxes imposed by the capital and promises of the restoration of the glory of Alexandros II, whom Sabbiades had campaigned beneath on several occasions[6].
Basileios the Scythian was, understandably, more than a little concerned by the vast rebel host that was currently marching towards the capital with all haste. He scrambled together a host, mustering 3,500 of the 5,000 eleutheroi[7] and marching out from the city mustering bandons from the lands surrounding the city. Most of these conscripts weren’t exactly eager to fight and die for the claim of some barbarian who had no distinguishing victories or endearing traits other than his money and his title, and fewer still were willing to do so against the war hero Sabbiades. As such, he was able to muster a host of 8,000, which was by now outnumbered by more than 2:1 and growing. Basileios decided his best option was to try and blunt Sabbiades’ advance and force him to endure a winter siege, which would hopefully affect the rebel army in a manner similar to Mustafa II’s thirty years before. However, this would never come to pass.
After watching his predecessor be murdered on his orders, Konstantinos Ypsilantis had quickly deduced that Basileios could not be trusted. He had begun plotting against his nominal ally almost at once, managing to neatly insert himself into much of Mgeli’s network. Within a few weeks, he had managed to turn the regular garrison and the city watch to his side with a number of well-placed bribes. As soon as the bulk of the eleutheroi were a day’s march beyond the city, he ordered the city gates to be closed, then fled the palace for the army barracks in the upper town. Ypsilantis’ loyalist forces quickly coalesced, and within a few hours they and the city watch had managed to secure all of the lower and upper towns. A traitor opened one of the citadel’s sally gates, and he and his soldiers were able to fight their way through into the palace complex and the eleutheroi barracks there within. The battle here was fierce, as the narrow corridors and small, disjointed buildings reduced much of the fighting to one-on-one duels. The city watch and the regular garrison took heavy losses as the disciplined eleutheroi fought desperately, but weight of numbers was on their side and they eventually cut off and then took the Imperial chambers. Ypsilantis personally shepherded David out of the building, after which he turned the cannons on the citadel walls about and threatened to blow the palace to kingdom come if the eleutheroi didn’t lay down their weapons. Some kept fighting, but most of them reluctantly surrendered and were led away in chains. By the end of the day, all but the most isolated tunnels and chambers in the warren beneath the palace had been swept of their defenders. David, stuttering on every word due to an unfortunate speech impediment, proclaimed the deposition of Basileios the Scythian and Thomas the Avar (who had been imprisoned when the coup began) and elevated Ypsilantis to sole regent.
Ypsilantis, I mean David, immediately drafted a chrysobull declaring that the Scythian was deposed. After hastily making and signing copies, riders were dispatched to distribute these messages amongst his camp. Sure enough, most of the bandons took this as an opportunity to abandon the field, rushing away to their homes and families. Basileios of course denounced the message as false and treasonous, but this did not prevent the eleutheroi from fracturing as several junior commanders attempted to arrest their captain as a rebel. While the eleutheroi were busy fighting themselves and the bandons fleeing in all directions, Sabbiades decided this was as good a time as any to attack, and his army surrounded and then overran the divided enemy camp. Basileios the Scythian was found barely alive and was tied to the back of a horse leg-first, dragged for several miles over sharp rocks on his face, then tied in a sack with a rabid dog and thrown down a well[8]. Sabbiades then resumed his march on the capital, arriving outside the city just as winter was setting in on 8 December 1515.
Ypsilantis was essentially forced to let them in, as Sabbiades had a worryingly large siege train consisting of cannons captured at a supply depot at Kapnanion and several dozen more taken from cities along his marching route. Sabbiades entered the city in a triumphant march, being hailed as a liberator by many of the residents of Trapezous, a fact which only further unnerved Ypsilantis. However, the most worrying thing that happened that winter for the new regent was Sabbiades’ proclamation that he ought to be coregent, as he had been promised such a role by Mgeli before his untimely death. Ypsilantis obviously didn’t want to give up his power to a man who already wielded so much, but with a large army camped in the lower town, it wasn’t exactly like he could say no. On 14 December, Ioannes Sabbiades was raised to co-regent with Ypsilantis, returning the city and the empire to an uneasy power-sharing agreement. It would not last long.
By the time he was elevated as regent, both Sabbiades and Ypsilantis were plotting to have the other bumped off. The reasons for this were rather obvious, as Ypsilantis feared that his nominal partner would try to overthrow him and Sabbiades feared that his nominal partner would try to have him killed. Unfortunately for them, neither of them was an especially skilled plotter, and so throughout December 1515 and into January 1516, they made a series of clumsy, badly-handled assassination attempts against each other. Be it poison, the assassin’s knife or barrels of power, they tried it. Skaramagos had disappeared somewhere into the Qutlughid Empire back in July, and so Sabbiades was left without his best assassin, which was no doubt extremely frustrating. By February, the two regents had holed up in opposite wings of the palace and refused to speak to each other. Why Sabbiades didn’t just outright depose Ypsilantis at the first opportunity is unknown--it is possible that the regent, with nothing left to lose, might try and repeat Mgeli’s little stunt and plunge the country into civil war--but it would prove to be a fatal mistake.
On 23 February 1516, Sabbiades finally threw up his hands and said ‘Screw it’. That morning, several dozen of his soldiers burst into Ypsilantis’ wing of the palace, hacking down the regent’s guards and rushing into his personal rooms. They pulled the man they found sleeping there from his bed and realized, to their shock, that it was not in fact him. Ypsilantis had started sleeping in an adjoining closet out of fear of being killed in his sleep, and while the soldiers had been busy he had fled into the tunnels beneath the palace. Furious that his quarry had been lost, Sabbiades ordered his men to spread out through the tunnels and hunt him down. For two days they searched, finding nothing, as Ypsilantis fled between different store rooms and hidden tunnels. Finally, on the third day, he presented himself before a group of soldiers and demanded to be taken to Sabbiades. The general had his former co-regent brought before him, taunting him before he had him executed. However, Ypsilantis retorted in kind, mocking him for his clubfoot and weak leg. Sabbiades flew into a rage and began screaming at him, causing the soldiers holding him to shrink back. Seizing the opportunity, Ypsilantis pulled a concealed dagger--from where is not known, but given that the wound later became severely infected, many historians have a guess[9]--and stabbed Sabbiades in the arm, missing his chest by a few millimeters. Absolutely apoplectic now, Sabbiades grabbed Ypsilantis and threw him out of nearby window, sending him hurtling seven hundred feet to the bottom of the Kontos Valley.
Sabbiades was proclaimed as David’s regent later that same day, but he would not have long to enjoy it. He refused treatment for his wound until he had been formally invested, not wanting to waste time getting it cleaned. He allowed it to be treated afterwards, but it was too late. It was already infected, and within a few days the infection worsened into severe blood poisoning. By 27 February, he was in agonizing pain and took so much opium that he couldn’t move from his bed. A day later he was dead, and David was left without a regent once again.
By now, the people of Trapezous were thoroughly fed up with the regent roulette, and the garrison and the bureaucrats agreed. After a bit of deliberation, the city garrison invited the megas doux, the highest-ranking officer who had stayed clear of this mess, to take the regency. Loukas Ratetas[10] had worked his way up to the admiralty from a lowly rower on an Imperial galley, and was well-respected by all because of his honesty, loyalty and genial nature. He had actually been raised to his office in 1511 because he was the only captain who Alexios had trusted, and he had been sufficiently inoffensive to survive the following years. He was at Kerasounta, overseeing the loading of new cannons onto his galleys, when Sabbiades died. After a brief caretaker regency by Patriarch Nikolaos (Thomas had been deposed by Ypsilantis), Ratetas arrived in the city on 12 March and formally accepted the regency, becoming David’s seventh and final regent.
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[1] Although this wasn’t exactly a willing decision since he was, y’know, a slave.
[2] Basileios III likely had an early form of dementia as early as Nikephoros’ reign, but it truly became impactful during his regency.
[3] That is, the army, the bureaucracy and the church. Huh, A-B-C. The ABCs of Byzantium, perhaps?
[4] This was the capital of the eastern frontier, the largest settlement conquered from the Samtskheotes
[5] The size of the Trapezuntine military had ballooned during the long peace between 1486 and 1517. Note: This span is referred to as the long peace due to the lack of major foreign wars, the war between Basileios the Scythian and Sabbiades being the only major civil conflict and the Samtskheote War being the only foreign conflict, which didn’t inflict much damage on the Empire itself.
[6] Alexandros led several small campaigns against Karamanid raiders that I glossed over.
[7] I think this is the right number, but I might be a little off. I don’t have my notes in front of e.
[8] This was the fate of an Armenian vassal lord who tried to assassinate Nikephoros I back in the 10th Century. Supposedly, this was copied from the same punishment this lord gave to a bishop who pissed him off.
[9] This is exactly what you think it is.
[10] This is the same Loukas Ratetas captured the Čandarid flagship at the Battle of Sinope in 1468.
Thanks