The Komnenian restoration is the term used by historians to describe the military, financial, and territorial recovery of the Byzantine Empire under the Komnenian dynasty, from the accession of Alexios I Komnenos in 1081 to the death of Andronikos I Komnenos in 1185. At the onset of the reign of Alexios I, the empire was reeling from its defeat by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. The empire was also being threatened by the Normans of Robert Guiscard, who were invading the Balkans from their base in southern Italy. All this occurred as the empire's military institution was in disarray and had grown increasingly reliant on mercenaries. Previous emperors had also squandered the large gold deposits of Constantinople, so the defense of the empire had broken down, and there were few troops to fill the gaps. The Komnenoi nevertheless managed to reassert Byzantine pre-eminence in the Mediterranean world, militarily and culturally. Relations between the Byzantine East and Western Europe flourished, epitomized by the collaboration of Alexios I and later emperors with the Crusaders (Alexios was instrumental in calling the First Crusade). The scattered and disorganized Byzantine army was restructured into a competent fighting force that became known as the Komnenian Byzantine army. Although the empire rapidly disintegrated after the death of the last Komnenoi emperor, Andronikos I, in 1185, the Komnenian Restoration represented the final apex of the fifteen-hundred year history of the Roman Empire. Before the Komnenoi In the decades before the Komnenoi, the Byzantine Empire had been on a steady decline due to many factors, the most important being the political conflict between the state bureaucracy in Constantinople and the Byzantine military aristocracy. In almost every year since the death of Emperor Basil II, the aristocracy rose up in revolt across the empire, east and west causing the army to move back and forth exposing their borders to raiding parties of Normans, Pechenegs or Turkic horsemen. The empire's holdings in Southern Italy were finally lost to the Normans under Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond of Taranto, who quickly turned to the weakly held Balkan provinces of Byzantium that were ripe for plunder. In the countryside, there existed a free peasantry unlike in Western Europe. However, the growing power of the aristocracy led to the dismantling of the free peasantry and the enlargement of private estates by the aristocracy, sometimes through purchases but often