British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The Eastern Mediterranean in the Thirteenth century:
identities and allegiances
Abstract
Marriage Strategies 1204-1261
Michael Angold
The Latin conquest of Constantinople in April 1204 followed by the defeat of the crusaders at the battle of Adrianople less than a year later meant that the establishment of the Latin Empire was a traumatic affair. It was left to Henry of Hainault (1206-16) to impose Latin rule on Romania, as the former Byzantine Empire came to be known. Such success as he had was due to his willingness to come to terms with those that had seized power in the localities, be they Lombard, Greek, Frank, Bulgarian or whatever. Marriage alliance had an important role to play, as we see in Henry's dealings with Michael Doukas of Epiros, Alexios Slavos of Melnik, and the Bulgarian tsar Boril (1207-18). Relations with the Laskarids of Nicaea were more complicated. In 1213 they came to terms. Theodore I Laskaris's marriage to an Armenian princess in the same year may not have been a complete coincidence, for it brought him into the framework of crusader dynastic politics. In any case, Theodore Laskaris soon had the marriage dissolved and sought instead the hand of a niece of Henry of Hainault, while proposing that his daughter Eudokia marry the latter's successor Robert of Courtenay. Marriage alliances also bound the Latin and Greek rulers of the Greek lands; best known being the marriage contracted in 1258 between the Epirot princess Anna and William II Villehardouin, the prince of Achaia. But did these marriages produce some kind of cultural fusion? This is a problem highlighted by a member of the Villehardouin family, who became Orthodox patriarch of Antioch, and by a member of the Palaiologos family, who was the abbess of a Latin convent in the Peloponnese.