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.

Comments

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).

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 ...

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).

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).

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...

Gaspare Diziani Biography

Gaspare Diziani (Belluno, 1689-Venice, 1767) Italian painter and printmaker.Disciple of S.Ricci, he inherited from his master the intense brushwork and brilliant chromaticism ( Limosna del venerable Paoli ), which save the conventional scenographic approach of his compositions.

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...

John kerr Biography

John Kerr (Ardrossan, UK, 1824-Glasgow, id., 1907) British physicist.He studied at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Lord Kelvin.He investigated the behavior of light rays in a transparent medium (particularly liquids and cubic crystals) to which an intense electric field is applied transversely.Kerr observed that said medium became birefringent, that is, that the light is resolved into two components (one parallel and the other perpendicular to the field), so that the light beam emerges from the circularly polarized medium, since the two components propagate at different speeds and therefore in different phases.This electro-optic effect, called the Kerr effect, has found important applications in the study of lasers and communications.

John Millington Synge Biography

John Millington Synge (Rathfarnham, Ireland, 1871-Dublin, 1909) Irish playwright, a key figure in the Irish literary renaissance of the early 20th century.Born into a Protestant family, he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin.He studied music in Germany and later went to Paris, where he lived poorly for some years; During this period, he became interested in the novelists of French naturalism, prepared essays on literary criticism, and composed elegantly crafted poems, characterized by accents of deep tenderness. John Millington Synge In Paris he met WB Yeats, his compatriot poet who led him to return to Ireland and be inspired by the lives of the poor peasants and fishermen of his land.In the Aran Islands, the western outpost of Irish territory eternally beaten by rain and wind, a Catholic colony had lived there since Cromwell's time to avoid persecution.The difficulty of relations with civilization, the hard work necessary to obtain the scarce resources from the ocean an...

Giovanni Battista Venturi Biography

Giovanni Battista Venturi (Bibiano, present-day Italy, 1746-Reggio nell'Emilia, id., 1822) Italian physicist.He was a professor at the Modena School of Military Engineers and at the University of Pavia.His name is linked to research in the field of fluid mechanics, in the course of which he achieved important results in the study of the movement of liquids in the converging trunks of a conduit.Based on these studies, the American physicist Herschel made the measurement device known as the Venturi tube, which has a conical constriction at its outlet end and which, by applying Bernoulli's theorem, allows-from the pressure difference between the normal section and the constricted section-determine the flow rate of the fluid that passes through it.Venturi also conducted studies in the field of optics-particularly on color theory-and acoustics.