The next successor was Romanos Doukas, an aged uncle of Konitos. This crippled old man was the only one who had what it took to rebuild the Empire. Scraping together the scatters armies and filching troops from old garrisons, he built a motley collection of troops, pulled it together and set out to retake Anatolia. His successor, the present Emperor Michael, was the one who oversaw the armies, as his father died a week after the army left Konstantinoupolis. Anatolia was recovered from the small sultanates and emirates that had sprung up across it. Once more Byzantine armies bordered the great Seljulk Sultanate, and our buffer state of Cilician Armenia, who we saved many a time from detruction. Michael did not lead the armies himself, but mostly left the work to some of his more capable family members. In the west, Giorgios, a young man of the royal house, set out for the independent town of Bari, hoping to regain a foothold in Italy for the Empire with a very few troops. He found it was already under siege when he got there, by the Norman house of the Sicilians. Their attack failed, but Nikeforos was then able to destroy the battered garrison. However, a second Sicilian army came, much larger than the first, and decided they may as well siege the place anyway. They killed Giorgios and slaughtered his men. Giorgios had a young cousin, Nikeforos, who was in Serbia at the time, raising mercenary reinforcements for the Italian fighting. He marched into Italy, and beat off the Normans from Bari, then launched into a full-scale war.

His unparalleled genius in siege command allowed him to take and hold the southern Italian cities - Bari, Capua, and the Sicilian capital of Mileto, against terrible odds. He held Mileto outnumbered three to one against the main Sicilian army, finally breaking their power in the peninsula, although he himself only had forty men left after the siege and had to be rescued by reinforcements for Greece. However, once the Sicilians were removed, the Byzantines were able to wipe the Norman kingdom from the map. They now held the heart of the mediterranean, although they had little popularity and holding it would be difficult.

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