Raiktor

Raiktor ( medium Greek Ῥαίκτωρ ; † after 1081 ) was a Byzantine Monk , 1081 as the pretender against Kaiser Alexios I. occurred.

Life

Raiktor was a follower of the Norman Duke Robert Guiskard , who had expelled the Byzantines from southern Italy in 1071 and, due to his military successes, developed the even more ambitious ambition to subjugate the Byzantine heartland with the capital Constantinople . As a pretext, Guiskard used the claim that Emperor Michael VII Dukas , deposed by Nikephoros Botaneiates in 1078 and sheared as a monk, had fled to his court in Salerno and would now be brought back to the throne with Norman help. According to Anna Komnena , the Norman had previously searched for a presentable Greek monk on pilgrimage in Crotone and found the right figure for his “charade” in Raiktor. According to a less plausible version, also rumored by Anna Komnena, the initiative for this fraud came from the monk himself, who is said to have been the former cupbearer (pinkernes) Michael VII.

There was considerable opposition to Robert Guiskard's war plans against Byzantium within the Norman nobility. These intensified when the ambassador, Raoul , who had returned from Constantinople, reported that he had met the real Michael Dukas as a monk in a monastery. Although the official reason for war had ceased to exist, Guiskard held on to the exposed pretender, and in May 1081 he crossed 150 ships from Brindisi to Greece with an army of 30,000 men and got involved in the Byzantine theme of Dyrrhachion .

When he arrived at Dyrrhachion , Guiskard presented his puppet emperor in a pompous procession in front of the city walls to get the defenders to surrender peacefully. However, they remained unimpressed, so that the Normans had to take up the siege of the city . The new emperor Alexios I called the Venetians for help, but Guiskard found out about it in good time and had them received by his son Bohemond in the name of "Emperor Michael" on their arrival . After that, Raiktor's trail is lost; The Norman ruler probably dropped the alleged Michael Dukas before his hasty return to Italy because he had proven unsuitable for his purposes.

Bohemond undertook a renewed attack on Dyrrhachion in 1107, this time as a pretender an alleged son of the emperor Romanos IV with him.

swell

• Anna Komnena , Alexiade 1 , 31-32 and 39-40

literature

• Jean-Claude Cheynet: Pouvoir et contestations à Byzance (963-1210) (= Publications de la Sorbonne. Series Byzantina Sorbonensia. Vol. 9). Reimpression. Publications de la Sorbonne Center de Recherches d'Histoire et de Civilization Byzantines, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-85944-168-5 , p. 87 No. 109.
• Basile Skoulatos: Les Personnages Byzantins de l'Alexiade. Analysis Prosopographique et Synthèse (= Recueil de Travaux d'Histoire et de Philologie. Sér. 6, Vol. 20, ZDB -ID 437846-5 ). Nauwelaerts, Louvain-la-Neuve 1980, p. 178 (At the same time: Louvain, Universität, Dissertation, 1978).

Web links

• Raiktor in the Prosopography of the Byzantine World