| John III Doukas Vatatzes | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans | |||||
.png) 15th-century portrait of John III (from a15th-century codex containing a copy of theExtracts of History byJoannes Zonaras) | |||||
| Emperor of Nicaea ClaimantByzantine Emperor | |||||
| Reign | December 1221 – 3 November 1254 | ||||
| Predecessor | Theodore I Komnenos Laskaris | ||||
| Successor | Theodore II Doukas Laskaris | ||||
| Born | c. 1192 Didymoteicho,Byzantine Empire | ||||
| Died | 3 November 1254 (aged 62) Nymphaion, Byzantine Empire | ||||
| Burial | Monastery of Sosandra, region of Magnesia | ||||
| Spouses | Irene Laskarina Anna of Hohenstaufen | ||||
| Issue | Theodore II Doukas Laskaris | ||||
| |||||
| House | Vatatzes | ||||
| Father | Basil Vatatzes (?) | ||||
| Mother | ... Angelina (?) | ||||
| Religion | Eastern Orthodox | ||||
John III Doukas Vatatzes,Latinized asDucas Vatatzes (Greek:Ἰωάννης Γ´ Δούκας Βατάτζης,romanized: Iōánnēs Doúkās Vatatzēs;c. 1192 – 3 November 1254[1]), wasEmperor ofNicaea from 1221 to 1254. He was succeeded by his son, known asTheodore II Doukas Laskaris.
John Doukas Vatatzes, bornc. 1192 inDidymoteicho, was probably[2][3] the son of the generalBasil Vatatzes, who was killed in battle in 1194, and his wife, a cousin of the EmperorsIsaac II Angelos andAlexios III Angelos.[4] John Doukas Vatatzes had two older brothers. The eldest wasIsaac Doukas Vatatzes (1188–1261), while his younger brother died at a young age. Through his marriage to Eudokia Angelina he fatheredTheodora Doukaina Vatatzaina, who later marriedMichael VIII Palaiologos. The middle brother's name is unknown, but his daughter married theprotovestiariosAlexios Raoul.[5][6]
A successful soldier from a military family, John had risen to the position ofprotovestiarites when he was chosenc. 1216 by EmperorTheodore I Komnenos Laskaris as the second husband for his daughterIrene Laskarina, following the death of her first husband,Andronikos Palaiologos.[7] As husband of Laskaris' firstborn, who had no son of his own, John may have been thede facto heir to the throne, though the question of succession was left open; Laskaris may have hoped his own marriage toMaria of Courtenay in 1219 would produce a male heir.[7] As a result, when John III became emperor in December 1221,[a] following Theodore I's death in November,[10][11] he had to suppress opposition to his rule by Laskaris' brothers,Alexios andIsaac. The struggle ended with theBattle of Poimanenon in 1224, in which his opponents were defeated in spite of support from theLatin Empire ofConstantinople. John III's victory led to territorial concessions by the Latin Empire in 1225, followed by John's incursion into Europe, where he seizedAdrianople.[12]
John III's possession of Adrianople was terminated byTheodore Komnenos Doukas ofEpirus andThessalonica, who drove the Nicaean garrison out of Adrianople and annexed much ofThrace in 1227. The elimination of Theodore byIvan Asen II of Bulgaria in 1230 put an end to the danger posed by Epirus, and John III made an alliance withBulgaria against the Latin Empire.[13]
In 1235 this alliance resulted in the restoration of the Bulgarianpatriarchate and the marriage betweenElena of Bulgaria and Theodore II, respectively Ivan Asen II's daughter and John III's son. In that same year, the Bulgarians and Nicaeans campaigned against the Latin Empire, and in 1236 they attempted a jointsiege of Constantinople.[13] Subsequently, Ivan Asen II adopted an ambivalent policy, effectively becoming neutral and leaving John III to his own devices.
John III Vatatzes was greatly interested in the collection and copying of manuscripts, andWilliam of Rubruck reports that he owned a copy of the missing books fromOvid'sFasti.[14][page needed] Rubruck was critical of the Hellenic traditions he encountered in theEmpire of Nicaea, specifically the feast day forSaint Felicity favored by John Vatatzes, which Friedrich Risch suggests would have been theFelicitanalia, practiced by Sulla to venerateFelicitas in the 1st century with an emphasis on inverting social norms, extolling truth and beauty, reciting profane and satirical verse and wearing ornamented "cenatoria", or dinner robes during the day.[15]
In spite of some reverses against the Latin Empire in 1240, John III was able to take advantage of Ivan Asen II's death in 1241 to impose his own suzerainty over Thessalonica (in 1242), and later to annex this city, as well as much of Bulgarian Thrace in 1246.[16] By 1247 he had established an effective stranglehold on Constantinople. In the last years of his reign Nicaean authority extended far to the west, where John III attempted to contain the expansion ofEpirus. Michael's alliesGolem of Kruja andTheodore Petraliphas defected to John III in 1252.[17][18]John III died inNymphaion in 1254, and was buried in the monastery of Sosandra, which he had founded, in the region of Magnesia.[19]
In an attempt to save the ailing Latin empire after the joint Nicaean-Bulgarian siege of Constantinople in 1236, Pope Gregory IX called for a crusade against Nicaea and wrote to John III in 1237 informing him of the impending crusader army.[20] In the face of Bulgarian neutrality, John III sought allies elsewhere, turning to the Holy Roman EmperorFrederick II von Hohenstaufen.[21] Frederick II was the most powerful in Europe and had become the hated enemy of the papacy, having already been excommunicated by Gregory IX in 1227. In a letter composed sometime before his second excommunication in 1239, Frederick II wrote to John III lamenting the power of the pope in the west and praising John III for the power of the Byzantine emperor over the clergy.[22]
Warm relations between the two Roman empires had already begun after theSixth Crusade (1228–1229), undertaken by Frederick II to lift his first excommunication, when Frederick II received a Nicaean embassy bringing gold coins, gold-embroidered silk and horses, among other gifts.[20] By 1238, the two emperors had concluded an alliance. Frederick II agreed to recognize John III as the legitimate Byzantine emperor, albeit with the title "Emperor of the Greeks"[23] (Grecorum imperator / Γραικῶν βασιλεύς), in exchange for mutual aid. That same year, John III sent Nicaean troops to participate in theSiege of Brescia and Frederick II forestalled Gregory IX's crusade headed by the Latin emperorBaldwin II in north Italy, forcing the crusaders to eventually take the overland route to Constantinople in 1239.[24]
In early 1240, John III's wife Irene Lascarina died, and later that year John III married Frederick II's 10-year-old daughterConstance II of Hohenstaufen to cement their alliance, who took the Greek name Anna.[25] Despite the lack of children from the marriage and John III's affair with his wife's lady-in-waiting, the alliance between the two emperors continued until Frederick II's death in 1250.
After Gregory IX's death in 1241, the new pope Innocent IV continued the policies of his predecessor, and attempted to wage war on both emperors. At theCouncil of Lyon in 1245, Frederick was declared deposed as emperor and excommunicated, for, among a multitude of other reasons, marrying his daughter to John III who was called by Innocent IV "that enemy of God and the church."[26] The illegal papal deposition of Frederick II was widely regarded as illegitimate and no European monarch offered support for Innocent’s anti-Staufen crusade. Frederick remained the preeminent monarch in the west. In the east, the pope called for another crusade against John III and entered into negotiations with the Mongols to invade Nicaea, but both efforts were unsuccessful.[27] In the west, Innocent IV was more successful against Frederick II, and a papal-supported rebellion defeated the imperial army at theBattle of Parma in 1248.[28] However, this and other setbacks notwithstanding, the situation remained fluid and Frederick managed to maintain his dominance in Italy. John III continued to send troops, including archers and infantryman, and subsidies to Frederick via Epirus between 1247 and 1250 to aid his father-in-law, who finally checked papal forces in central Italy at theBattle of Cingoli in August 1250 and avenged his reversals in Lombardy. His anti-imperial crusade seemingly crumbling, Innocent’s position in Lyon was dire. During 1250, Frederick had mostly recovered from his recent setbacks and enjoyed relative imperial ascendancy across Italy; however, the great Hohenstaufen emperor died of dysentery in December of that year.[29]
After Frederick II's death, diplomatic activity briefly continued between the two empires, with John III's son Theodore II Doukas Laskaris delivering a memorial speech in which he admired Frederick II's struggle against the hostility of the western aristocracy and clergy.[30] Frederick's son and successorConrad IV sent an embassy to Nicaea in 1253 in order to return Constance-Anna's exiled family back to Italy, but Conrad IV and John III's deaths in 1254 ensured that a possible continuation of the imperial alliance never ensued; after Conrad's IV death, theHoly Roman Empire and theKingdom of Sicily were divided.[31] Frederick's other sonManfred, the last Hohenstaufen king of Sicily, was to prove hostile to the Nicaean cause, invading Nicaea's Albanian coast in 1257 and allying withMichael II Komnenos Doukas against Nicaea in 1259, providing troops for theBattle of Pelagonia.[32] After the Nicaean victory,Michael VIII Palaiologos attempted to marry the widowed Constance-Anna, who had remained at the Nicaean court during the reigns of her stepson andstepgrandson, in order to secure an alliance with Manfred. However, Constance-Anna refused and moved to her brother's court in Sicily in 1261, thus severing all ties with Byzantium and formally ending the alliance started by John III and Frederick II.[33]
John III Doukas Vatatzes married firstIrene Lascarina, the daughter of his predecessor Theodore I Komnenos Laskaris in 1212.[19] They had one son, the future Theodore II Doukas Laskaris. Irene fell from a horse and was so badly injured that she was unable to have any more children.
Irene retired to a convent, taking the monastic name Eugenia, and died there in summer of 1240.[34][page needed]John III married as his second wifeConstance II of Hohenstaufen,[19] an illegitimate daughter of EmperorFrederick II by his mistressBianca Lancia. They had no children.
John Vatatzes the Merciful, Emperor of the Romans | |
|---|---|
 St. John Vatatzes the Merciful King, Emperor of Nicaea and "the Father of the Greeks" | |
| Emperor | |
| Venerated in | Eastern Orthodox Church |
| Majorshrine | Didymoteicho,Western Thrace andNymphaion (Ionia) modern-dayKemalpaşa,Turkey |
| Feast | 4 November |
| Attributes | Imperial Vestment |
John III Doukas Vatatzes was a successful ruler who laid the groundwork for Nicaea's recovery of Constantinople. He was successful in maintaining generally peaceful relations with his most powerful neighbors, Bulgaria and theSultanate of Rum, and his network of diplomatic relations extended to theHoly Roman Empire and thePapacy. Among the armed forces he used were the largeCuman communities he had settled to guard Western Anatolia against invasions byOghuz-Turkmens.[35][36][page needed]
John III effected Nicaean expansion into Europe, where by the end of his reign he had annexed his former rival Thessalonica and had expanded at the expense of Bulgaria and Epirus. He also expanded Nicaean control over much of theAegean and annexed the important island ofRhodes,[37] while he supported initiatives to freeCrete from Venetian occupation aiming toward its re-unification with the Byzantine empire of Nicaea.[38][page needed] Styling himself the true inheritor of the Roman Empire, John III encouraged justice and charity, and provided active leadership in both peace and war despite hisepilepsy. He carefully developed the internal prosperity and commerce of his realm, which became known for bountiful harvest festivals reportedly drawing on traditions from the Felicitas feast days described in the missing 11th book ofOvid's Book of Days.[39]
A half-century after his death, John III was canonized as a saint, under the name John Vatatzes the Merciful[b] and is commemorated annually on4 November.[40]George Akropolites mentions that the people saw to the construction of a temple in his honour inNymphaeum, and that his cult as a saint quickly spread to the people of western Asia Minor.[citation needed] On the same day, since 2010, theVatatzeia festival is organized atDidymoteicho by the localmetropolitan bishop.[41] Alice Gardiner remarked on the persistence of John's cult among the Ionian Greeks as late as the early 20th century, and on the contrast she witnessed where "the clergy and people ofMagnesia and the neighbourhood revere his memory every fourth of November. But those who ramble and play about his ruined palace seldom connect it even with his name."[42]
His feast day is formally an Eastern Orthodox holiday, although it is not commemorated with any special liturgy; there are two known historicalakolouthiai for him, including an 1874 copy of an older Magnesianmenaion for the month of November, which shows that in the 15th and 16th century, he was venerated as "the holy glorious equal of the Apostles and emperor John Vatatzes, the new almsgiver in Magnesia."[43][page needed] The relevant hymns are preserved in only one known manuscript in the library of the Leimonos monastery on Lesbos, Greece, and include references to the feast day for the almsgiver John Vatatzes.[44] John III Vatatzes' feast day has largely fallen out of favor other than in the church dedicated to him in his birth city ofDidymoteicho.[45]
The generations after John Vatatzes looked back upon him as "the Father of the Greeks."[46][c] It is also the case that many in the religious and academic community consider John Vatatzes to be the best candidate for the identity of the "Marble Emperor" in direct contrast with those who claim thatConstantine XI is in fact the legendary reposed king.
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Media related toJohn III Doukas Vatatzes at Wikimedia CommonsJohn III Doukas Vatatzes Laskarid dynasty Born: unknown 1192 Died: 3 November 1254 | ||
| Regnal titles | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Emperor of Nicaea 1221–1254 | Succeeded by |
