Skip to main content

Isaac II Angelo Biography

Isaac II Angelo

(Isaac II Angelo or the Angel;?, 1155-Constantinople, 1204).Emperor of Byzantium (1185-1195 and 1203-1204).He was the first representative of the Angel dynasty.During his years of reign he overcame the many complications that arose, but despite his ability as a ruler, at his death, the Empire was more weakened, mainly due to the problems in the Balkans.

Son From Andronicus the Angel, he occupied the throne of Byzantium on September 12, 1185, after a revolution dethroned Alexius I Komnenos, the last of the Komnenos emperors.It was the harshness of the rule of Alexios and the fear of the Normans, who had recently conquered Thessalonica, the causes that elevated the Angels to the imperial throne.

Isaac II Angelo and his son Alexius IV

The same year as Isaac's coronation, his leader, Alexius Dranas, defeated Norman William II and he put to flight the Norman army that was heading towards Constantinople.After expelling the Normans in the Balkans, an insurrection broke out there against the Empire, led by the Wallachian-Bulgarian brothers Peter and Asen.The basileo commanded his generals against the brothers, but eventually led the troops in person during the campaigns of the next two years, in order to prevent rebellions within the army.

Internal problems forced Isaac to make peace with Peter and Asen in the autumn of 1188 and the Bulgarians declared themselves independent.To ensure peace with the Normans, Isaac allied himself with the King of Sicily, Tancredo di Lecce, and married his daughter Irene to Roger, Tancredo's first-born.

Isaac II signed a pact with the German emperor.Frederick I Barbarossa, for whom he promised to collaborate with him in the Crusade and to supply the German troops on their way to Constantinople.However, aware that Barbarossa had also made an agreement with the Sultan of Iconium, enemy of Byzantium, he in turn established an alliance with Saladin against the Sultan of Iconium and hindered the expedition of the Germans as much as possible.

The ineptitude of Isaac II in negotiations led the Germans to seize Adrianople and Philippopolis and march against Constantinople in early 1190.But faced with the impossibility of taking Constantinople, the two emperors signed the peace and the crusaders crossed the Dardanelles.

Meanwhile, the problem in the Balkans was getting worse.Isaac II organized annual expeditions between 1191 and 1194, which were defeated on all occasions.The campaign of 1194 was especially disastrous, and in 1195 the Basel went to war in person.In April, when Isaac was camped in Kypsella, in southern Thrace, a conspiracy emerged within the royal family, led by Alexios, the emperor's brother.He led an army insurrection, assumed the throne (Alexios III the Angel) and ordered the capture of Isaac, whose eyes were gouged out and held captive in Constantinople.

His reign was plagued with conspiracies.and rebellions.To diminish the power of the nobility, he avoided granting important administrative positions to members of the main families, to whom he assigned a merely military function.Isaac, consequently, relied on the bureaucracy created by him in Constantinople.The emperor showed special attention to administrative, military and diplomatic affairs.

In 1203 Isaac II was restored to the throne, thanks to the efforts of his son, Alexios IV, who reigned together with his father and with the support of the Christians of the IV Crusade.A year later he was assassinated in jail, following the success of a conspiracy by the palace steward, Alejo Ducas Murzuflo, who reigned as Alejo V.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

John boorman Biography

John Boorman (London, 1933) British film director.He began his career as a film critic and editor on television.His most representative works are: Duel in the Pacific (1968), Leo, the last (1970), Defense (1972), Excalibur (1981), The emerald jungle (1984), Where the heart is (1990), I dream I woke up (1991) and Beyond Rangoon (production, 1995).
Post a Comment
Read more

Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini Biography

Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini (Florence, 1876-Havana, 1956) Spanish physician.A scholar of recognized international prestige, he dedicated himself to research on endemic diseases of equatorial Africa and was Professor of Parasitology at the University of Madrid. Gustavo Pittaluga Fattorini He studied Medicine at the University of Rome, where he received his doctorate with a thesis on acromegaly.He was for several years Battista Grassi's assistant, with whom he devoted himself to researching malaria-transmitting insects.In 1903 he arrived in Madrid as a speaker at the International Congress of Medicine, to which he presented a communication on the etiology and epidemiology of malaria.From this moment he settled in Spain and, together with a group of doctors who rallied around him, continued his work as a parasitologist here. In collaboration with Francisco Huertas, among others, he published, Investigations and studies on malaria in Spain (1903), an excellent work in which ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Francesco Robortello Biography

Francesco Robortello (Udine, 1516-Padua, 1567) Italian philologist.He was a teacher of eloquence at various Italian universities (Pisa, Venice, Padua, and Bologna).His main works are: De historica facultate (1548), De vita et victu populi Romani sub imperatoribus Caesaribus Augustis (1559) and his editions of the Poetics of Aristotle (1548).
Post a Comment
Read more

Jose Marin Cañas Biography

José Marín Cañas (San José, 1904-?, 1980) Costa Rican novelist.Representative of the indigenous current, his work has as a backdrop the response of the indigenous people to a hostile environment and their fight against the social injustice that oppresses them.His most important novels are Green Hell (1935), in which he describes the Chaco War; and Pedro Arnáez (1942), a tragic peasant story.Of the rest of his production, it is worth mentioning the collection of short stories Los bigardos del ron (1929) together with the novels Tears of steel (1929) and Land of rabbits (1971).
Post a Comment
Read more

Gregorio López Raimundo Biography

Gregorio López Raimundo (Tauste, 1914) Spanish politician.In 1936 he joined the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC).He fought in the civil war and then went into exile in Mexico.Back in Spain, he participated in the general strike in Barcelona (1951), for which he was imprisoned.Secretary general (1955-1978) and president (1978-1981 and 1982-1985) of the PSUC, he was elected deputy to Congress in 1977, 1979 and 1982.He has published Writings.Fifty years of action, 1937-1988 (1989), collection of political texts, and his memoirs, First clandestinity (1993).
Post a Comment
Read more

Heinrich Brüning Biography

Heinrich Brüning (Münster, 1885-Norwich, 1970) German politician, Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, during the final phase of the so-called Weimar Republic, presided over by Paul Hindenburg.A conservative in ideology and a practicing Catholic, Brüning also served as Foreign Minister from October 1932, shortly before Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany.As a specialist in financial affairs, his greatest achievement was to reduce to minimal amounts the war reparations that the Allies had imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles (1919).Unable to solve the country's serious economic problems, he was driven to practice a clearly right-wing policy that allowed him to govern with more or less dictatorial procedures, bypassing the Reichstag itself, which did not prevent him from being a convinced democrat. Heinrich Brüning Heinrich Brüning studied philosophy, history and political science at three different universities.After having made a series of study trips to Fran...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edgar Douglas Adrian Biography

Edgar Douglas Adrian (London, 1889-Cambridge, 1977) British physiologist.Author of important works on the physiology of the nervous system, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1932.Edgar Adrian studied at Trinity College, Cambridge University, graduating in 1911 with the highest marks. Edgar Adrian His interest in the mechanisms of nerve transmission led him to accept a medical position at the Connaught Military Hospital during World War I, where he did research the various nerve injuries and neuroses afflicting the Allied soldiers.In 1920 he became Professor of the Department of Physiology at Cambridge, and three years later he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In November 1925 he managed to record the propagation of the impulse in a single afferent nerve fiber with the Lucas capillary electrometer.He was able to explain the transmission mechanism of nerves with the help of Dr.Zotterman, and later developed a method for transforming electrical impuls...
Post a Comment
Read more

Joseph Quesnel Biography

Joseph Quesnel (1746-1809) Canadian playwright and poet of French origin.Quesnel is remembered, above all, for his confrontations and criticisms of the Catholic Church, which was often outraged in its satirical descriptions.In 1789 he founded a theater, where he performed his opera entitled Colas et colinette, ou Le bailli dupé in 1790.The theater was closed two years after its opening, in 1791.Around 1801 he composed two plays entitled Les républicains français, ou La soirée du cabaret , violent satire in one act, and L'Anglomanie, ou Le dîner à l´angloise .In addition, he wrote several poems, some of them appeared in the newspapers of his time.
Post a Comment
Read more

Gary oldman Biography

Gary Oldman (Leonard Gary Oldman; London, 1958) British actor.Born into a humble family, he studied Drama Art on a scholarship at Rose Brudford Drama College until 1979.He then joined the Greenwich Young People's Theater group and appeared in numerous plays in the early 1980s.He had his greatest success with The pope's wedding , which earned him the Best Actor award from the British Theater Association in 1985. He began working in film in supporting roles.His portrayal of the punk singer Sid Vicious, leader of the legendary rock group Sex Pistols who died of heroin overdose, in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy (1986), made him known internationally.In this role some of the constants of his acting career were already present: giving life to a character at the limit for whose characterization he had to physically transform, in this case lose weight. Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy (1986) In Open your ears ( 1987), by Stephen Frears, delighted the viewer in one of his mos...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jorge Donn Biography

Jorge Donn (Buenos Aires, 1944-Lausanne, 1992) Argentine dancer and artistic director.He began his studies in 1952, at the Escuela del Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.In 1960, he was seen by Maurice Béjart, who was on tour in America with his dance company, and invited him to join it, which Donn did from 1962; two years later he joined it permanently in 1964 and became its first male figure.In 1963 he went to Europe to become a principal dancer with the Ballet du XXe Siècle.With this company he premiered numerous ballets by Maurice Béjart.He was a guest dancer with the New York City Ballet, the Opéra de Paris and the Bolshoi Ballet.In 1980 he was appointed artistic director of the Ballet du XXe Siècle.He appeared in the films Le Danseur (1968) and Les Uns et les Autres (1981).
Post a Comment
Read more