Vatatzes and the East (1)

 

In 1225 Theodore Ducas, ruler of Epirus, attacked Thrace and expelled the garrison of John Vatatzes, emperor of Nicea. These two were vying over supremacy in the Roman world, after the fall of Constantinople to the Latins in 1204. Vatatzes failed to mount an immediate counter-attack, even though Thrace was the ancestral homeland of his family. 

This looks strange, since Vatatzes had previously adopted a policy of aggression: in 1224 he defeated a coalition of Latins and Anatolian Byzantine partisans at Poemanenum in Bythnia, before sending an advance guard under his 'protostrator', Ises, to seize the ancestral lands in the Hebrus (Maritza) Valley of Thrace. Instead of military action, Vatatzes ordered his Patriarch, Germanus II, to wage a propaganda war against the clergy of his rival, Theodore. 

This was not because Vatatzes wanted to avoid a fight, but due to the sudden appearance of a host of Seljuq Turks on his eastern frontier. Germanus, in one of his diatribes against Theodore's clergy, alluded to the impending campaign: 

“...I have established a new paradise for the church in Anatolia, and anointed as its protector a guardian with a blazing sword, the Autocrator John, united in spirit with the highest light, who now goes forth face-to-face to meet the faithless Agarenes..."

 The 'Agarenes', a term thought to derive from the biblical Hagar, an Egyptian slave woman in the book of Genesis, referred to the Turks.