Michael VIII Palaiologos
Michael VIII Palaiologos (1223 – 11 December 1282) was the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire from 1261 to his death, and had been regent and co-emperor of the Byzantine successor state in Nicaea from 1259 to 1261.
In 1204, Constantinople was captured by crusaders and became the capital of the Latin Empire, a Crusader state. In 1261, Michael sent a small force under Alexios Strategopoulos to scout out Constantinople's defenses from the nearby city of Selymbria in 1261. However, seeing an opportunity upon hearing rumours that the Latin garrison were away raiding an island, Strategopoulos decided to exceed his orders and retake Constantinople, which he achieved by sneaking into the city and attacking it from the inside, marking the end of the Nicene Empire and the restoration of the Byzantine Empire.
By this point however, Constantinople was severely underpopulated and in disrepair, which Michael made some effort to alleviate by recalling exiles who had fled the city in 1204, and population reassignment, doubling the population from 35,000 to 70,000. But the Hippodrome of Constantinople, once a proud symbol of the Empire's Greco-Roman heritage was in a poor state, and Michael made no attempt to restore it. Michael's Empire only held a fraction of its former territory and influence, and it continued to decline over the next two hundred years.