European Kingdoms

Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire
Prelude to the Comnenian / Komnenian Dynasty (AD 1057-1059)

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From the start, the capital of the newly-created Eastern Roman empire was based at Constantinople, dedicated by Emperor Constantine 'the Great' in AD 330. In AD 395, the Roman empire finally suffered a permanent split, creating formal Eastern Roman and Western Roman empires within Europe and beyond, acknowledging what had existed in practise for many years.

The successful two hundred-year reign of the 'Macedonian Dynasty' by 1025 had restored Constantinople as the dominant power in the Balkans and Near East, with apparently secure frontiers along the Danube, in the Armenian highlands, and beyond the Euphrates. The Romans had also succeeded in exporting Christianity to the Rus.

These success were though a last 'hurrah' for the empire. It had managed to double its shrunken territory under the Macedonians, but the successor 'Non-Dynastic' ruler and then the brief 'Comnenian Prelude' and the 'Dynasty of the Ducas' entirely reversed that positive trend.

Constantinople was now struggling for its existence. All of its frontiers had been breached, nomads were entering Anatolia and the Danube provinces, while the Normans had seized the empire's Italian territories in Apulia and elsewhere.

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(Information by Peter Kessler, and from External Links: History of the Byzantine Empire (Live Science), and The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire, Jonathan Shepard (Ed, Revised Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2008, and available via the Internet Archive).)

1057 - 1059

Succeeded Non-Dynastic ruler. Abdicated.

late 1050s

Having been harried by the Cumans, the reduced Pechenegs lose control of the entire left-bank steppe in the late 1050s, and later the right bank after which their remnant seems to migrate westwards into Danubian Eastern Roman territory or across the Carpathians into Hungary.

1059

Isaac I is succeeded by the reign of Constantine X, founder of the Ducas dynasty.