The Byzantine Family Tree That Gets the Family Wrong—and Makes History Look Simpler Than It Was

A nephew becomes a son. A usurper becomes a straightforward dynastic heir. A disputed Viking invasion becomes established history. And the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople is offered as an explanation for European overseas expansion that the chronology itself undermines.

Matt Baker's Byzantine Emperors Family Tree, published by UsefulCharts, promises to make more than six centuries of Eastern Roman history understandable through genealogy. It is an ambitious undertaking, and much of the chronology is sound.

But a family tree carries a particular obligation: get the families right.

Baker does not always meet it. More troublingly, the errors extend beyond ancestry. His account repeatedly compresses complicated political struggles into tidy chains of cause and effect, often leaving viewers with a stronger sense of historical certainty than the evidence warrants.

The consequences become clearest when we examine the original historical records and specialist scholarship.

1. A Family Tree That Cannot Always Identify the Family

The first mistake is elementary.

While describing the succession following Emperor Michael IV's death in 1041, Baker explains that Michael persuaded Empress Zoe to adopt his son Michael V from an earlier marriage.

Michael V was not Michael IV's biological son. He was his nephew.

His mother was Maria, a sister of Michael IV, and his father was Stephen, whose earlier occupation as a ship caulker gave Michael V his nickname Kalaphates.

This is not a disputed genealogical interpretation.

Michael Psellos, the eleventh-century Byzantine historian whose Chronographia is one of our most important sources for this period, explicitly identifies Michael V as his predecessor's nephew.

The distinction matters because Michael V's accession was more than a father arranging for his son to inherit. His powerful relatives, particularly John the Orphanotrophos, sought to preserve their family's political control by securing Zoe's acceptance of the young man.

Psellos describes the maneuver in detail.

The central story is not ordinary father-to-son succession. It is a family faction using adoption, imperial marriage, and court influence to maintain its hold on government.

Baker's version removes that machinery and replaces it with an incorrect biological relationship.

The problem appears again when the video reaches Michael VIII Palaiologos, who restored Byzantine rule in Constantinople in 1261.

Baker identifies him as a great-grandson of Alexios II.

That ancestry is incorrect.

Michael VIII was descended through his mother's family from Alexios III Angelos, whose reign ended in 1203.

Historian Dimitri Korobeinikov identifies Michael's parents as Andronikos Palaiologos and Theodora, daughter of Alexios Palaiologos and Irene Angelina. Irene was a daughter of Alexios III.

Michael VIII was therefore a great-grandson of Alexios III, not Alexios II.

In an ordinary historical overview, this might be dismissed as a mistaken numeral. In a video whose entire organizing principle is genealogy, it strikes at the product's central claim to reliability.

Yet the more serious failure is what Baker leaves out.

The Emperor Who Restored Constantinople—and Blinded a Child

The video presents Michael VIII primarily as the ruler who recovered Constantinople and founded the final Byzantine dynasty.

Both achievements are real.

But Michael had acquired imperial authority at the expense of the legitimate young emperor, John IV Laskaris.

Following the recovery of Constantinople in 1261, Michael ordered John blinded and removed him permanently from political competition.

The boy was approximately 11 years old.

The punishment provoked a major religious and political dispute. Patriarch Arsenios excommunicated Michael, and the resulting conflict contributed to the prolonged Arsenite schism within the Byzantine Church.

These were not obscure consequences.

They threatened the legitimacy of the restored imperial government and affected relations between emperors and religious authorities for years afterward.

Earlier in his video, Baker recounts Irene of Athens having her own son blinded to secure sole imperial authority.

He recognizes the brutality and political importance of that event.

Yet when another emperor eliminates a child through the same punishment, Baker moves directly from the reconquest of Constantinople to the founding of a dynasty.

The omission turns a violent seizure of hereditary authority into an uncomplicated restoration story.

That is precisely where a family tree should be most revealing: not merely identifying who succeeded whom, but explaining why the rightful heir did not inherit.

2. The Viking Invasion That Historians Still Debate

Baker next offers an example of Leo VI's wisdom.

He says the Kievan Rus' attacked Constantinople in 907 and that Leo chose diplomacy, granting favorable trading privileges instead of fighting.

It is a satisfying narrative: a clever emperor converts military danger into commercial opportunity.

The historical difficulty is that the supposed invasion of 907 is disputed.

The traditional account comes from the Primary Chronicle, compiled considerably later than the events it describes.

Contemporary Byzantine accounts do not independently establish the campaign in the form presented by that chronicle.

In a study published in Studia Ceranea, historian Aleksandr Romensky reexamines the episode and proposes that the famous account may reflect Rus' military recruitment and negotiations rather than the great victorious assault described in later tradition.

His reconstruction connects these developments to Byzantine military needs and the Rus'-Byzantine agreement of 911.

That interpretation remains a scholarly proposal, not a universally established replacement narrative.

But it demonstrates why Baker's confident presentation of a 907 invasion followed by an imperial diplomatic settlement is unwarranted.

An event whose nature remains contested is presented as the unquestioned background to a lesson in imperial wisdom.

There is a related chronological problem.

Baker places the emergence of the Varangian Guard around Leo VI's time.

Rus' soldiers were indeed serving Byzantine military interests by the early tenth century. But the Varangian Guard's conventional institutional foundation is associated with Basil II and the force sent by Vladimir of Kyiv in 988.

Historian Dimitri Obolensky describes Vladimir sending approximately 6,000 Varangian soldiers to assist Basil II during a dangerous rebellion.

The formal creation of the guard is generally associated with this later development, though its institutional origins and evolution require qualification.

Baker's presentation compresses earlier mercenary service and the subsequent formation of an imperial guard into a single historical development.

For a video structured around a precise chronological chart, almost eight decades of difference should matter.

3. Manzikert: The Battle That Supposedly Lost an Empire

In Baker's account, the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 becomes the pivotal catastrophe that opens Asia Minor to Turkish conquest.

Emperor Romanos IV is defeated and captured. Michael VII succeeds him. Within the following years, Turkish forces occupy much of Anatolia.

The sequence of events is broadly recognizable.

The weakness lies in turning that sequence into an overly simple explanation.

Manzikert was an important defeat, but modern scholarship increasingly distinguishes the immediate military outcome from the political disintegration that followed.

In The Campaign and Battle of Manzikert, 1071, historian Georgios Theotokis challenges the traditional depiction of the battle as an irrecoverable military disaster.

He emphasizes that Byzantine aristocratic conflict, civil wars, and the involvement of Turkish forces in those struggles were central to the subsequent loss of Anatolia.

The battle damaged imperial authority. The political system then helped turn that damage into territorial collapse.

That distinction changes how responsibility should be understood.

A defeated emperor does not automatically explain why an empire subsequently loses most of its central territory.

Romanos IV's capture was followed by his removal from power and further struggles among Byzantine elites.

Military resources that might have been used to defend Anatolia became entangled in internal competition.

Historian Jason Roche also challenges the tendency to describe the Turkish conquest as though it were a unified operation directed by one coherent political authority.

His research emphasizes the distinctions between Seljuk rulers and Turkmen groups, as well as the uneven nature of settlement and Byzantine recovery.

Baker's simplified account encourages a familiar conclusion: the empire lost a great battle, and therefore lost Anatolia.

The more disturbing interpretation is that a military defeat became catastrophic partly because the empire's own political leadership failed to preserve its capacity to recover.

That is a stronger historical lesson than the one delivered by the chart.

4. The Crusades Were Not Simply Byzantine Foreign Policy Gone Wrong

Baker credits Alexios I Komnenos with initiating the First Crusade.

He explains that Alexios repaired relations with the pope and persuaded Western Christian rulers to intervene against Muslim forces threatening Byzantium.

The Byzantine request for assistance was real.

Envoys from Alexios appealed for help at the Council of Piacenza in March 1095, and Pope Urban II subsequently launched the First Crusade at Clermont that November.

But an appeal for military assistance is not the same thing as control over the extraordinary religious movement that followed.

Research into the First Crusade distinguishes Byzantine strategic objectives from papal religious ambitions and the individual motivations of Western participants.

The surviving diplomatic evidence is itself complicated. Scholars accept that Alexios requested assistance, but some purported personal letters used to explain his influence over Western rulers have uncertain authenticity.

The result was a movement whose objectives extended far beyond the emperor's original military requirements.

Baker does recognize an important consequence: Crusaders established independent states rather than simply returning all captured territories to Byzantium.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem is the most conspicuous example.

However, his account understates the territorial benefits Byzantium actually secured.

The First Crusade helped create conditions in which Alexios recovered Nicaea and Byzantine forces reconquered significant territory in western Anatolia.

Roche documents the Byzantine recovery of towns and territories in 1097 and 1098.

The outcome was therefore neither straightforward Byzantine success nor complete betrayal.

It was a mixture of cooperation, territorial recovery, divergent ambitions, and mounting mistrust.

Baker also credits the First Crusade with placing Muslim armies on the defensive for approximately 200 years.

This is an especially sweeping generalization.

The Muslim political world was not a single army operating under unified command, and the balance of power shifted substantially during the crusading period.

The Crusader County of Edessa fell in 1144. Saladin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187.

Those events alone make an uninterrupted two-century Muslim defensive posture impossible to sustain.

The broader significance is not merely that the chronology is compressed.

Baker treats a changing struggle among numerous Christian and Muslim powers as though the First Crusade established one durable strategic condition lasting two centuries.

The historical record is considerably less convenient.

The Fourth Crusade: A Financial Crisis With a Much Longer History

The Fourth Crusade receives another condensed explanation.

Alexios IV seeks Western help to recover his family's throne. The Crusaders restore him, but the Byzantine rulers cannot pay what they promised.

Relations collapse, and the Crusaders eventually capture Constantinople in 1204.

Unpaid obligations were certainly important.

But the financial crisis did not begin with the failure of the restored Byzantine rulers.

Before reaching Constantinople, the Crusaders had already encountered serious difficulties financing the Venetian fleet intended to carry them east.

In 1202, they participated in an attack on Zara, a Christian city, after disputes involving transport costs and outstanding obligations.

Historian Gregory Bell's research examines the logistics, debts, and decisions behind this earlier diversion. He also challenges parts of the conventional interpretation of why the army was unable to proceed as originally planned.

By the time the expedition reached Constantinople, it was already carrying the consequences of financial commitments, altered objectives, and deeply compromised political decisions.

The Byzantine succession crisis offered another opportunity to finance the expedition.

The eventual conquest of Constantinople cannot be understood adequately by starting the financial story only when Alexios IV failed to pay.

Nor should it be reduced to money alone.

Religious hostility, competing political ambitions, Venetian interests, and the deteriorating relationship between Latin and Byzantine Christians also shaped the outcome.

A 2012 study of the Fourth Crusade's motives nevertheless makes an important argument for the central role of outstanding debts, demonstrating that financial explanations deserve serious weight.

The criticism is therefore not that Baker mentions unpaid money.

It is that he begins too late and explains too little.

The Crusaders did not suddenly discover financial pressure after entering Constantinople.

They arrived with a history of financial crisis and military diversion already behind them.

5. Christianity Did Not Split Neatly in 1054

Baker describes the Great Schism of 1054 as the occasion when the Western and Eastern churches formally separated into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

The date is familiar, and the confrontation was significant.

On July 16, 1054, papal representatives placed an excommunication document against Patriarch Michael Keroularios and his supporters on the altar of Hagia Sophia.

The patriarch subsequently excommunicated the papal representatives.

But the incident was not a single, universally accepted act that instantly created two entirely separate Christian civilizations.

The breach developed through disagreements over ecclesiastical authority, religious practices, theology, and political relationships.

The historical significance of 1054 must be distinguished from the later process through which separation became durable.

Henry Chadwick's study East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church makes the problem particularly clear.

He explains that Orthodox historical interpretations often assign greater significance to later events, including the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the unsuccessful attempts at reconciliation at Florence.

The divisions were real in 1054, but the meaning of their permanence developed through subsequent centuries.

There is a revealing contradiction in the simplified timeline.

If Christianity had become completely and definitively divided in one formal event in 1054, why did Byzantine emperors continue negotiating religious reunion for centuries afterward?

Those negotiations were not incidental.

Michael VIII pursued church union at Lyons in 1274, partly in the context of the restored empire's political vulnerability.

John VIII later pursued another major agreement at Florence in 1439.

Both initiatives encountered serious resistance.

The repeated attempts to reunite the churches demonstrate that their institutional relationship cannot be reduced to a single moment when everything supposedly ended.

The Schism was a historical process, not a switch thrown in 1054.

Baker's date is useful as a landmark.

It becomes misleading when treated as a complete explanation.

6. Constantinople Fell in 1453. Europe's Trade With Asia Did Not.

Perhaps the video's most consequential oversimplification comes at the end.

Baker connects the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to the Age of Discovery, suggesting that the loss of Byzantine trade routes to the east helped drive Western European exploration and eventual overseas colonization.

It is a popular explanation.

The historical evidence creates two immediate problems.

First, European maritime expansion was already underway before Constantinople fell.

Portugal captured Ceuta in 1415.

Portuguese expeditions reached Madeira during the following years, and Gil Eanes rounded Cape Bojador in 1434.

These developments preceded the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople by decades.

Portugal was already pursuing Atlantic exploration, commercial opportunities, territorial ambitions, and maritime expansion before the event supposedly helped set that process in motion.

The Portuguese Navy's own historical chronology records these developments.

Second, the fall of Constantinople did not terminate European trade with Ottoman-controlled territories.

The historical record provides an unusually direct counterexample.

In April 1454, less than a year after Constantinople's conquest, Venice concluded a commercial agreement with the Ottoman government.

The agreement protected arrangements for Venetian merchants and diplomatic representation.

Historian Ali Humayun Akhtar discusses this treaty in Italy and the Islamic World, explaining that it renewed earlier commercial arrangements rather than inventing an entirely new relationship.

Venetian-Ottoman trade relationships already existed before the conquest and continued afterward.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art independently documents the extensive commercial exchanges between Venice and the Ottoman Empire throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The Ottomans supplied spices, raw silk, cotton, grain, and other goods. Venetian merchants supplied manufactured products.

War sometimes interrupted trade, but the two powers continued to depend economically on one another.

This does not establish that Ottoman expansion had no effect on European commercial calculations.

Control of ports, changing political authority, tariffs, warfare, and competition for profitable routes could all influence decisions about trade and exploration.

But the evidence does not support a simple story in which Ottoman conquest closed Europe's eastern connections and forced Europeans to discover alternative routes.

A more defensible explanation recognizes that European maritime expansion began earlier and developed through overlapping commercial, political, technological, and religious motivations.

The problem with Baker's closing argument is therefore substantial.

He offers one of the largest developments in world history—the expansion of European overseas empires—as a consequence of a turning point whose timing and commercial effects do not establish the suggested causal relationship.

A memorable historical explanation is not necessarily a sound one.

7. The Greatest Weakness Is the Appearance of Certainty

Baker's video is not devoid of historical substance.

Irene's seizure of power, the Macedonian revival, Basil II's conquest of Bulgaria, the significance of Vladimir's Byzantine marriage, the Crusades, the Latin occupation of Constantinople, and the Ottoman victory in 1453 all belong in a history of the Eastern Roman emperors.

The family-tree format also provides genuine value.

It makes complex dynastic succession visible and allows viewers to follow relationships across centuries.

But its advantages create a danger.

A chart gives an impression of settled order. Names connect through precise lines. Reigns begin and end at definite points. One ruler replaces another, and the story advances.

Historical evidence is rarely so obliging.

Some genealogical relationships are uncertain. Some celebrated events survive primarily through later chronicles. Some political outcomes have multiple competing explanations.

A responsible historical account distinguishes established events from disputed traditions and offers enough context to prevent an interpretation from masquerading as a fact.

Baker sometimes does this.

He explicitly acknowledges uncertainty surrounding the paternity of Leo VI and the possible relationship between Basil I and Michael III.

That willingness to qualify uncertainty makes the omissions elsewhere more difficult to excuse.

The video can recognize an unresolved paternity question while presenting the disputed Rus' campaign of 907 as straightforward fact.

It can describe Irene blinding her son while omitting Michael VIII's blinding of John IV.

It can portray the Fourth Crusade as a disastrous betrayal while neglecting meaningful Byzantine territorial gains from the First.

And it can end with a grand explanation for European maritime expansion without considering that Portugal's voyages began decades before 1453.

These are different kinds of shortcomings. Some are factual mistakes; others are incomplete explanations or disputed interpretations treated too confidently.

They should not be confused.

But they reinforce the same editorial concern.

The video is most vulnerable precisely where its smooth storytelling makes complicated history look settled.

Verdict: A Useful Chart Is Not a Substitute for Historical Judgment

The most damaging discovery is also the simplest.

A video devoted to Byzantine genealogy incorrectly identifies Michael V's biological father and misstates Michael VIII's imperial ancestry.

Those mistakes are independently verifiable.

The more consequential weaknesses arise when dynastic violence, religious division, warfare, diplomacy, and economic history are made to fit explanations that are easier to remember than to defend.

Manzikert becomes the battle that lost Anatolia, when subsequent political disintegration deserves much greater attention.

The Crusades become an intervention that Byzantium requested but could not control, without sufficient distinction between the different campaigns, their financial pressures, and their territorial outcomes.

The Great Schism becomes a formal rupture in one year.

And Constantinople's fall becomes a convenient explanation for Europe's overseas expansion.

None of this requires treating Baker as dishonest or rejecting his entire project.

The evidence establishes a narrower and more damaging conclusion.

UsefulCharts succeeds at making Byzantine history easy to follow, but several of its explanations become unreliable when tested against the historical record.

An attractive family tree can tell us who ruled.

It cannot, by itself, establish why events happened.

And when the family relationships themselves are wrong, even that first promise becomes questionable.

References

1. Matt Baker, Byzantine Emperors Family Tree, UsefulCharts, YouTube. Watch the original video. The primary work examined here, including its treatment of imperial genealogy, military events, religious divisions, and historical causation.

2. Michael Psellos, Chronographia, Books IV–V, eleventh century; E. R. A. Sewter translation, Yale University Press, 1953; Fordham University digital edition. Read Book V. Psellos explicitly identifies Michael V as Michael IV's nephew and describes the political maneuvering surrounding his accession. The account is contemporary but reflects the author's own political judgments.

3. Dimitri Korobeinikov, “Two Paradoxes of Border Identity,” Identities and Ideologies in the Medieval East Roman World, Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Read the research chapter. Establishes Michael VIII's ancestry through the family of Alexios III Angelos and describes his earlier political position in Nicaea.

4. Ruth Macrides, “The New Constantine and the New Constantinople – 1261?”, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1980. Read the research article. Examines Michael VIII's restoration of Constantinople and documents the circumstances surrounding the blinding of John IV.

5. “Emperor and Church in the Last Centuries of Byzantium,” Studies in Church History, Cambridge University Press. Read the research article. Explains the political and religious consequences of Michael VIII's usurpation, including the Arsenite schism.

6. Aleksandr A. Romensky, “From Enemies to Allies: The Mystery of Prince Oleg's Campaign against Constantinople,” Studia Ceranea, 2021. Read the research article. Reassesses the disputed 907 campaign and proposes an alternative interpretation involving diplomacy and military recruitment.

7. Dimitri Obolensky, “Cherson and the Conversion of Rus': An Anti-Revisionist View,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1989. Read the research article. Describes Vladimir's military assistance to Basil II and the Varangian contingent associated with developments in 988.

8. Georgios Theotokis, The Campaign and Battle of Manzikert, 1071, Arc Humanities Press, 2024. Read the introduction. Reexamines the battle's actual military consequences and emphasizes the subsequent civil wars that accelerated Byzantine territorial losses.

9. Jason T. Roche, “In the Wake of Mantzikert: The First Crusade and the Alexian Reconquest of Western Anatolia,” History, April 2009. Read the research article. Challenges simplified accounts of Turkish conquest and documents Byzantine territorial recovery during the First Crusade.

10. “The Call from the East: The Letters of Alexios I,” Rewriting the First Crusade, Cambridge University Press, 2024. Read the research chapter. Distinguishes the accepted Byzantine request for Western military assistance from disputed documentary evidence concerning Alexios's wider diplomatic appeals.

11. Gregory D. Bell, “Unintended Consumption: The Interruption of the Fourth Crusade at Venice and Its Consequences,” Journal of Medieval Military History, 2023. Read the research chapter. Investigates the logistical and financial problems that redirected the Fourth Crusade before the intervention in Constantinople.

12. Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church, Oxford University Press, 2003. Read the epilogue. Explains why the lasting division between Eastern and Western Christianity cannot be adequately represented by the events of 1054 alone.

13. Ali Humayun Akhtar, “The Venetian Republic Turns Global,” Italy and the Islamic World, Cambridge University Press, 2026. Read the research chapter. Documents Venice's 1454 commercial agreement with the Ottomans, contradicting claims that the conquest of Constantinople ended European trade through Ottoman territory.

14. “Venice and the Ottomans,” Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read the historical overview. Documents continuing commercial exchange between Venice and Ottoman territories during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the trade in spices and silk.

15. “The Navy: 700 Years Serving Portugal at Sea,” Portuguese Navy, official historical chronology. Read the chronology. Establishes that major Portuguese maritime expeditions preceded Constantinople's fall in 1453.