Manuel I Komnenos’ policy towards the sultanate of Rum and John Kontostephanos’ embassies to Jerusalem, 1159–61
Bibliographic record
Abstract
William of Tyre and Constantine Manasses each present complementary accounts of the embassy sent by Manuel I Komnenos and headed by John Kontostephanos to Baldwin III to secure Manuel a new bride following the death of the empress Bertha-Eirene of Sulzbach. They are contradicted by an entirely different story told by John Kinnamos. This has resulted in a range of confusing solutions put forth in the scholarship on the politics of the aftermath of Manuel’s journey to Cilicia and Syria in 1158-59, which has tended to focus on the implications of the emperor’s choice of Maria of Antioch over Melisende of Tripoli. This article brings a range of rhetorical sources into the discussion of whether John Kontostephanos made one or two embassies to the Latin East. It argues that the Seljuk sultanate based at Konya was, as of early 1159, the missing piece in Manuel’s efforts to surround the empire with clients in the east. On the return to Constantinople, the emperor precipitated a crisis with the new sultan Kilij Arslan II that spiralled into a broader conflict. The short ensuing war explains the context and logistics of Kontostephanos’ embassies and casts Manuel’s eastern foreign policy in a wider perspective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".