Alexios I Komnenos (Ancient Greek: Ἀλέξιος Κομνηνός, romanized: Aléxios Komnēnós, c. 1057 – 15 August 1118), Latinized as Alexius I Comnenus, was Byzantine emperor from 1081 to 1118.

After usurping the throne, he was faced with a collapsing empire and constant warfare throughout his reign, Alexios was able to curb the Byzantine decline and begin the military, financial, and territorial recovery known as the Komnenian restoration.

Despite initial defeats, Alexios secured an alliance with Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and drove back the Normans, recovering most of Byzantine losses by 1085.

Desiring western support, he took reconciliatory measures towards the Papacy, and in 1095 his envoys made a formal appeal to Pope Urban II at the Council of Piacenza.

At the subsequent Council of Clermont, Pope Urban formally called the First Crusade, which began a year after and concluded with much of western Anatolia restored to Byzantine rule.

[5][6] under Michael VII Doukas Parapinakes (1071–1078) and Nikephoros III Botaneiates (1078–1081), he was militarily employed, along with his elder brother Isaac, against rebels in Asia Minor, Thrace, and in Epirus.

[citation needed] While Byzantine troops were assembling for the expedition, the Doukas faction at court approached Alexios and convinced him to join a conspiracy against Nikephoros III.

Under the pretence of making a vesperal visit to worship at the church, she deliberately excluded the grandson of Botaneiates and his loyal tutor and met with her sons' Alexios and Isaac and went with them to the forum of Constantine.

However, the rest of the female members of her family in order to be allowed to gain entrance although the church was at that time closed, pretended to be pilgrims from Cappadocia who had been penniless and wanted to prostrate the holy icons before their return trip.

As if she were weighed down with old age and worn out by grief, she walked slowly and when she approached the actual entrance to the sanctuary made two genuflections; on the third she sank to the floor and taking firm hold of the sacred doors, cried in a loud voice: "Unless my hands are cut off, I will not leave this holy place except on one condition: that I receive the emperor's cross as guarantee of safety".

[20] During this time, Alexios was rumored to be the lover of Empress Maria, the daughter of King Bagrat IV of Georgia, who had been successively married to Michael VII Doukas and his successor Nikephoros III Botaneiates, and who was renowned for her beauty.

As a measure intended to keep the support of the Doukai, Alexios restored Constantine Doukas, the young son of Michael VII and Maria, as co-emperor.

[22] This situation changed drastically, however, when Alexios' first son John II Komnenos was born in 1087:[23] Anna's engagement to Constantine was dissolved, and she was moved to the main Palace to live with her mother and grandmother.

At the outset he faced the formidable attack of the Normans, led by Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond, who took Dyrrhachium and Corfu and laid siege to Larissa in Thessaly.

Led by a pretender claiming to be Constantine Diogenes, a long-dead son of the Emperor Romanos IV,[32] the Cumans crossed the mountains and raided into eastern Thrace until their leader was eliminated at Adrianople.

[38][39][40] The help he sought from the West was some mercenary forces, not the immense hosts that arrived, to his consternation and embarrassment, after the pope preached the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont later that same year.

[41] This was the People's Crusade: a mob of mostly unarmed poor peasants and serfs, led by the preacher Peter the Hermit, fleeing from hunger in their home regions to a promised land of milk and honey.

[45] Alexios met the Crusader leaders separately as they arrived, extracting from them oaths of homage and the promise to turn over conquered lands to the Byzantine Empire.

[49] Around this time, in 1106, the twenty-fifth year of his reign, Hesychius of Miletus records that the sky suddenly darkened and a "violent southern wind" blew the great statue of Constantine at the Strategion from its column, killing a number of men and women nearby.

[50] In 1116, though already terminally ill, Alexios conducted a series of defensive operations in Bithynia and Mysia to defend his Anatolian territories against the inroads of Malik Shah, the Seljuq Sultan of Iconium.

[55] Alexios was for many years under the strong influence of an eminence grise, his mother Anna Dalassene, a wise and immensely able politician whom, in a uniquely irregular fashion, he had crowned as Augusta instead of the rightful claimant to the title, his wife Irene Doukaina.

[57] As such, Dalassene was the effective administrator of the Empire during Alexios' long absences in military campaigns: she was constantly at odds with her daughter-in-law and had assumed total responsibility for the upbringing and education of her granddaughter Anna Komnene.

[59] These included: Under Alexios the debased solidus (tetarteron and histamenon) was discontinued and a gold coinage of higher fineness (generally .900–.950) was established in 1092, commonly called the hyperpyron at 4.45 grs.

[44] This measure, which was intended to diminish opposition, was paralleled by the introduction of new courtly dignities, like that of panhypersebastos given to Nikephoros Bryennios, or that of sebastokrator given to the emperor's brother Isaac Komnenos.

[66] Although this policy met with initial success, it gradually undermined the relative effectiveness of imperial bureaucracy by placing family connections over merit.