After recommending Manuel to the assembled elite and the army, gaining their acceptance and crowning him, Ioannes II died some days later in the Pratum Palliorum, near Anabarzos; he was in the twenty-seventh year of his reign. Early epitaphs by Theodoros Prodromos talk of a life spent in luxury but constant, successful warfare, with a full and religious family life, all now reduced to a single tomb. Purple does not preserve you from death. His painful and early death would be ascribed by Godfrey, bishop of Langres during the Second Crusade to his anti-Christian assaults on Antioch