increasing friction amongst the various Italian groups in the city. Sections of Byzantine opinion were irritated by what was perceived to be the acceptance of 'western' customs in court circles. Manuel Comnenus' not altogether successful attempt to introduce jousting is often cited, but far more obnoxious to the Byzantine aristocracy were the increasing numbers of imperial marriages with western princesses which deprived them of a traditional method of gaining influence at court. But the political thinking behind them was clear. The creation of a system of Mediterranean alliances--with Venice, the empire, and the kingdom of Jerusalem--was aimed at the encirclement, and, if possible, the eradication of Norman power in southern Italy. But after Manuel's unsuccessful invasion of Italy in 1150, the political spectrum began to change. Venice had been seriously alarmed by the prospect of Byzantine troops marching as far north along the Adriatic coast as Ancona and when, in 1164, Hungarian possession of Croatia and Dalmatia was accepted by the empire, the old alliance with Byzantium began to crumble.

It was the tacit acceptance of the loss of imperial power in the Balkans which was one of the most obvious signs of weakness in the empire. Old spheres of influence were lost in the rise of new, independent states. Grand gestures might be made, such as the triumphal entry of Manuel Comnenus into Antioch in 1159, at which the king of Jerusalem took a minor role and at which Byzantine lordship over the city was, for a short time, reasserted. But the dynastic struggles in the empire which followed Manuel's death in 1180 reveal the real power vacuum in the empire. The young Alexius II Comnenus ruled for only three years ( 1180-3) and came increasingly under the control of a distant cousin, Andronicus Comnenus, a battle-scarred veteran of wars in the east with an unsavoury personal reputation which was the talk of the eastern Mediterranean. The coup which brought the Angelus family to power in 1185 and in which a mob tore Andronicus to pieces in the Hippodrome was the culmination of a century of aristocratic resentment at the success of the Comneni in keeping power in the empire in the hands of their own family. But the Angeli were not themselves

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