Few, if any, rulers in twelfth-century Christendom received as much attention by contemporary chroniclers as the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos I Komnenos (1183–85). Even though Andronikos ruled for less than three years, his rise to power, reign of terror, downfall and gruesome death at the hands of the lynch mob of Constantinople struck contemporaries. In contrast to medieval chroniclers, modern historians have shown little interest in this emperor. While some scholarly attention has been paid to the Greek sources in order to reconstruct the historical facts of Andronikos’s reign, there has been little focus on the Greek historians’ perceptions and representations of their ruler. As to the relatively large number of Latin accounts of Andronikos’s reign, these have been either completely disregarded by historians or dismissed as ‘full of imagined conversations and romantic fictions’ and therefore as being of limited value for the reconstruction of historical events. All these accounts, however, are important, among others, in giving great insight into how a harsh and oppressive rule was viewed in both Byzantium and the Latin world in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. This article examines accusations of tyranny against Andronikos expressed uniformly across Byzantine, French, German–Austrian and English accounts, and explores their meaning and function. To gain a greater appreciation of their significance, these accusations against the Byzantine emperor are subsequently cast against the backdrop of charges of tyranny levelled against other Christian rulers in twelfth-century Christendom. Therefore, the significance of this article extends beyond Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire to the evolution of many other strands of political philosophy of rulership in medieval European history.1

中文翻译：

---

Andronikos I Komnenos：十二世纪欧洲的暴君

12 世纪基督教世界中很少有统治者像拜占庭皇帝安德罗尼科斯一世 (1183–85) 那样受到当代编年史家的关注。尽管安德罗尼科斯的统治时间不到三年，但他的掌权、恐怖统治、垮台和在君士坦丁堡的私刑暴徒手中惨死，震惊了同时代人。与中世纪的编年史家相比，现代历史学家对这位皇帝几乎没有兴趣。虽然为了重建安德罗尼科斯统治的历史事实，一些学者已经对希腊资料给予了关注，但很少关注希腊历史学家对其统治者的看法和描述。至于相对较多的安德罗尼科斯统治时期的拉丁文记载，这些要么被历史学家完全忽视，要么被斥为“充满想象的对话和浪漫小说”，因此对重建历史事件的价值有限。然而，除其他外，所有这些描述对于深入了解 12 世纪晚期和 13 世纪早期拜占庭和拉丁世界如何看待严酷和压迫性的统治非常重要。本文考察了在拜占庭、法国、德国-奥地利和英国账户中一致表达的对安德罗尼科斯暴政的指控，并探讨了它们的含义和功能。为了更深入地了解它们的重要性，这些对拜占庭皇帝的指控随后被用于对 12 世纪基督教世界中其他基督教统治者进行暴政的指控。因此，本文的意义从君士坦丁堡和拜占庭帝国延伸到中世纪欧洲历史上许多其他统治政治哲学的演变。 1