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Manuel I Komnenos and his second wife Maria of Antioch
Italy (c. 1150)
The Vatican Library, Rome
The reign of Manuel I (1143-1180) marked the high point of the revival of the Byzantine empire under the Comnenian dynasty. It was however followed by a rapid decline, leading to the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. His foreign policy was a natural response to the Western crusading movement and the expansionism of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa. What he ruled was more than the impoverished rump of a once great empire, or a society whose development had been arrested by a repressive regime. The twelfth century is a distinctive, creative phase in Byzantine history, when the empire maintained existing traditions and trends while adapting to a changing world.