Civil War
The first round of the civil war began shortly after her accession. Three opposing parties had formed: first was that of Irene, the family of Amytzantarants, and her Byzantine mercenaries provided courtesy of her father; second was of the opposing nobles under the Lord of Tzanich, the captain-general of the Scholarioi and a part of the imperial bodyguard loyal to the memory of their late Emperor, and the third party was that of the Grand Duke John the Eunuch of Limnia. The rebel nobles encamped themselves in the Monastery of St. Eugenios in the capital, but Grand Duke of Limnia decided to join Irene and helped her deal with the rebels. They bombarded the monastery, destroying it almost completely, and defeated the rebels in early July 1340.
In the same time, affairs of the Empire went worse as the Turkmen attacked Trebizond and marched up to the walls of the capital itself. A first attack was repelled but the second could not be stopped by the demoralized army of Irene, and the Turkmen set fire to much of Trebizond without being able to capture it. The catastrophe was exacerbated by the outbreak of an epidemic, which Panaretus states as having come about from the foul stench of the rotting corpses of horses and men.
Read more about this topic: Irene Palaiologina Of Trebizond
Famous quotes related to civil war:
“A war between Europeans is a civil war.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.”
—Derek Mahon (b. 1941)