Latin Empire-Byzantine Empire War, Third

The Greek empire of Constantinople is restored when the Latin rulers are expelled in 1261.

The Greeks generally are exultant at the recapture of Constantinople from the Latins in 1261, but a few realize that the center of gravity has shifted from Asia Minor to Europe.

In the end, this concern with Europe is to prove fateful, for it will lead to the neglect of the frontiers in the East and with that neglect eventually to the conquest and settlement of all of Asia Minor by the Turks.

The period of Latin rule over Constantinopole, from 1204 to 1261, has been the most disastrous in the city's history.

Even the bronze statues have been melted down for coin; everything of value has been taken, including sacred relics, torn from the sanctuaries and dispatched to religious establishments in Western Europe.

Meanwhile, Lascarid supporters in Asia Minor threaten Michael VIII Palaeologus, despite his military successes, with rebellion.

He succeeds, in the eyes of many Greeks, in legitimating his rule, when Nicaean forces under the command of Alexios Strategopoulos, with the aid of the Genoese, the traditional rivals of Venice, are able to recover Constantinople, almost casually.

Whether as the result of Michael's carefully planned ruse or of accident, or both, the great city falls to his general on July 25, 1261, ending the long-shaky Latin Empire and its sadly diminished domain.

Emperor Baldwin II flees the city, and the Venetians are dispossessed of their lucrative commercial center.

Michael, reiterating his claim to the imperial title, has himself crowned sole emperor in the church of Hagia Sophia in August.

On his entrance in Constantinople, Michael abolishes all Latin customs and reinstates most Greek ceremonies and institutions as they had existed before the Fourth Crusade.

He is acutely aware of the danger posed by the possibility that the Latin West, particularly his neighbors in Italy (Charles I of Sicily, Pope Urban VI, and the Venetians) will unite against him and attempt the restoration of Latin rule here.

John IV, relegated to the background since 1258, is blinded in December and imprisoned in a fortress in Bithynia; spending the remainder of his life as monk, he will die there.

Under the Treaty of Ninfeo, the emperor rewards the Genoese with privileges that challenge the Venetian monopoly of trade and opens up to Genoa the Black Sea markets.

The Palaeologan dynasty is to rule the resuscitated Roman Empire until Constantinople falls permanently to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

The restored Empire of Constantinople begins waging war to take control of Bulgaria in 1261, seizing the Bulgarian ports of Anchialus and …

…Mesembria.

Jacques Pantaléon, having attracted the attention of Innocent IV at the first Council of Laon, had undertaken for the papacy two missions in Germany, one of which had been to negotiate the Treaty of Christburg between the pagan Prussians and the Teutonic Knights.

Created bishop of Verdun in 1253, Alexander IV had made him Patriarch of Jerusalem two years later.

Pantaléon had returned from Jerusalem, which is in dire straits, and had been at Viterbo seeking help for the oppressed Christians in the East when Alexander IV died, and after a three-month vacancy Pantaléon is chosen by the eight cardinals of the Sacred College to succeed him, on August 29, 1261, taking the name of Urban IV.

Elected a couple of weeks after the Greeks’ recapture of Constantinople as the one-hundred-and-eighty-second pope, Urban endeavors without success to stir up a crusade to restore the Latin Empire.

The imperial Greek forces crush the recently rejuvenated Bulgarian state by 1262.

The Greek rulers of Epirus and Thessaly, like the emperors in Trebizond, refuse to recognize Michael VIII as emperor.

Trebizond continues as a separate state after the Nicaean Greeks recover control of Constantinople.

The empire’s eponymous capital, which has formed the basis of several states, has throughout history been an important meeting point for international trade and cultural exchange due to its strategic location which controls the east-west (Asia-Europe) and north-south (Russia-Middle East) trading routes.

It becomes a major commercial center, and is today the capital of Turkey’s Trabzon Province.

Many in Anatolia, loyal to the memory of the Laskarid emperors who had enriched and protected them, condemn Michael VIII as a usurper.

Having rendered John ineligible for the throne, Michael quickly marries off John's sisters to foreigners, so their descendants cannot threaten his own children's claim to the imperial succession.