10 Worst Byzantine Emperors

In 330, Roman Emperor Constantine I moved the seat of the empire out of Rome and refounded it at the Greek city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. Rome had already lost its function as a working capital. Diocletian’s Tetrarchy governed the empire from Nicomedia, Sirmium, Milan, and Trier, while retaining Rome as a title. That administrative seam was never repaired. When Theodosius I died in 395 CE, the empire was divided permanently into East and West, and when the West collapsed in 476, the East carried on.

The people of that eastern half never called themselves Byzantines. They were Romans. Their emperors were acclaimed by Roman procedure, their law descended from Roman codes, and their Greek-speaking culture emerged from centuries of assimilation into Roman society. The label was coined by a German scholar in 1557, a century after the last of them died. Over the thousand years in between, the empire produced formidable rulers and despots, tyrants, and fools who worked tirelessly to run it into the ground. Here are ten of the worst.

Theodosius I gives his niece Serena in marriage to the general Stilicho. Arcadius inherited his father’s half of the empire and never escaped the courtiers who surrounded him. Credit: Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons Arcadius was not so much a bad ruler as barely a ruler at all. He was raised to the purple at the age of five alongside his father, Theodosius I, making him one of the first Byzantine emperors. In 395 CE, at around seventeen, he became the sole ruler of the formalized Eastern Roman Empire. He governed alone until 402, when his infant son Theodosius II joined him as co-emperor. Across the whole of it, Arcadius never managed to assert himself against his own imperial court, which held considerable sway over him.

Real decision-making fell to the people around him: the ministers Rufinus, Eutropius, and Anthemius, and eventually his wife Eudoxia. Arcadius issued a series of laws against heresy and paganism, most likely an attempt to align himself with powerful figures in the church, and he worked at the image of a pious emperor. The reign did produce achievements. Almost none of them trace back to the emperor himself, and several are better explained by his failure to lead than by anything he actually decided.

Ancient Byzantine coins. Much of what is recorded about Alexander comes from hostile accounts written by the aristocrats he stripped of office. Alexander had technically been emperor since 879, when his father Basil I crowned him co-ruler alongside his brother Leo VI, but he took little part in government until Leo died in 912. He then reigned in his own right for barely thirteen months and used that time to drag the empire into war with the Bulgars by refusing the annual tribute owed under a treaty signed in 896. Aristocrats loathed him for his belligerence, his debauchery and pagan practices, his persecution of Patriarch Euthymios’ partisans, and his purge of Leo’s political appointees.

Those same aristocrats wrote the accounts that survive, which is reason enough to read them carefully. Some scholars argue that Alexander was reasonably popular with ordinary Byzantines, even as the upper class turned on him, and that little of what he did was unusual for a Byzantine emperor. The surviving record was produced by and about the people he removed from office. Alexander was an ineffective ruler and a below-average one, but the case that he belongs among the worst rests heavily on the testimony of his enemies.

Irene of Byzantium. Credit: Unknown 8th-century artist, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The reigns of Irene and Constantine VI cannot be separated. Mother and son held the throne together, then against each other, then one after the other, across more than two decades. When the Byzantine emperor Leo IV died in 780 CE, his wife Irene became guardian and co-emperor to their nine-year-old son. Irene was a central figure in the Byzantine Iconoclasm and a committed supporter of restoring icons to the Eastern church, an aim she achieved at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787.

Constantine came of age, resentful of his mother’s influence. His attempt to seize power failed, and Irene demanded that military oaths designate her as the senior ruler, which sparked a revolt in Asia Minor in 790 and drove her from the imperial court. Constantine pardoned her in 792 and accepted her back as co-ruler. When he divorced his wife in January 795 to marry his mistress, Theodote, Irene used the scandal to have him blinded and deposed in 797. Her own negotiations to marry Charlemagne then cost her the throne. A coup in 802 exiled her and installed her finance minister as Nicephorus I.

An inscrition dedicated to Basiliscus, Roman Emperor. Credit: Ab Langereis, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Basiliscus earned his reputation before he ever took the throne. In 468, he was given command of a Roman fleet of more than 1,100 ships carrying perhaps 70,000 soldiers, sent to retake North Africa and expel the Vandals. The region had been the real breadbasket of the Western Roman Empire, and losing it had left the West unable to feed or pay its armies. That produced a shrinking cycle in which fewer soldiers held less territory, which in turn supported fewer soldiers still. The expedition was the last serious chance to break it.

It failed catastrophically. Most of the army died, the cost nearly bankrupted the Eastern Roman Empire, and Constantinople abandoned the West to its collapse. Basiliscus then came out on top of a coup that deposed the emperor Zeno in 475, and immediately began making things worse. Many Romans considered him a heretic for his Monophysitism, the belief that Christ’s divine and human natures were one and the same. A fire destroyed much of the capital and its treasures. By 476, he had been exiled, and Zeno was back on the throne.

The deposition of Phocas 610 AD. Credit: Alfred C. Weatherstone, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Phocas took power through a military rebellion against the emperor Maurice in 602, and opened his reign by executing Maurice and his sons. Cruelty, ineptitude, and tyranny followed. He bought peace with the Avars by resuming tribute payments, which drained Constantinople’s coffers while the overextended empire struggled to pay for its own upkeep, and the Persians treated his usurpation as grounds to invade Armenia and Asia Minor. At home he conducted a reign of terror against the nobility and persecuted Miaphysite Christians and Jews until riots broke out across the empire.

In 610 the exarch of Africa revolted, driven by fear of the Persian war and by the resentment Phocas had built everywhere else. He sent an expedition under his son Heraclius, who executed Phocas and founded the Heraclian dynasty. That dynasty then had every reason to blacken its predecessor, and the scholars writing under it duly emphasized his tyranny and incompetence. Phocas was genuinely among the worst Byzantine emperors. Exactly how much worse than the rest is a question the surviving sources are poorly placed to answer.

The Mutilation of the Byzantine Emperors Justinian II and Phillipicus. Credit: Getty Center, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Justinian II’s problem was ambition. Campaigns in 688 and 689 CE brought parts of Thrace and Macedonia back under imperial control, and many of the Slavs he defeated were absorbed into the Byzantine army or resettled as farmers in Asia Minor. Treaties with the Arabs raised their tribute and established joint sovereignty over Cyprus, Armenia, and Georgia. None of it held. The Arabs seized Byzantine holdings in Armenia in 691 and 692, and at the Battle of Sebastopolis they bribed the Slavic commander Neboulos, whose 20,000 men changed sides mid-battle and turned a Byzantine advantage into a rout.

Justinian is said to have retaliated by killing thousands of Slav families in Bithynia. He persecuted the Paulicians and the Monothelites, and tried to have Pope Sergius I arrested for refusing the rulings of the Quinisext Council of 692. Taxes rose to punishing levels. A revolt in 695 put the general Leontios on the throne, and Justinian was exiled with his nose cut off. He returned in 705 with a Bulgar army, took Constantinople, and spent a second reign executing his enemies and creating new ones. A revolt at Cherson deposed and executed him in 711.

The 145th imperial portrait, depicting Alexios III Angelos. Credit: Unknown Byzantine scribes, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Alexios III took the throne in 1195 by staging a coup against his own brother, the emperor Isaac II, imprisoning him and having him blinded. It set the tone for what followed. He was cruel and greedy, and his mishandling of the Balkans worsened the empire’s relationship with the Bulgars, who went on to recognize the supremacy of the Catholic Church over the church in the East. He also spent freely enough to leave the Byzantine treasury badly depleted, a fact that would matter enormously within a decade.

In 1203 his nephew Alexios IV arrived outside Constantinople with an army of crusaders hired to depose him. Alexios III took what treasure he could carry and fled rather than defend the city. What he left behind was an empty treasury, and when the crusaders discovered the new emperor had nothing to pay them with, they sacked Constantinople. The foreign army was not his doing. The conditions that brought it inside the walls, and the absence of anyone willing to hold them, largely were.

Constantine X, Michael VII, and Eudokia. Credit: Unknown Byzantine artist, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Constantine came from a well-connected family and inherited the Byzantine throne after Isaac I appointed him his successor. He was popular. He presided over legal hearings personally and restored benefits and status to people who had suffered under Isaac’s reign, cultivating an image of piety that served him well early on. Then, during his first year on the throne, he decided the Byzantines needed to save money and began efforts to downsize the army. In a period of peace that might have been defensible.

This was not a period of peace. The empire was ringed by the Pechenegs, the Normans, the Uzes, the Hungarians, and the Seljuk Turks, and all of them noticed the weakness. Armies moved across imperial territory, wreaking havoc in Armenia, Anatolia, the Balkans, and southern Italy, while parts of Greece revolted over taxation. Constantine died in 1067, having handed his successors a set of powerful new enemies and no army to meet them with. They were forced to deal with those enemies from the back foot, and the empire’s decline accelerated.

Alexios IV Angelos. Credit: Anonymous Russian manuscript illuminators, 1560-1570s Facial Chronicle (Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible) (in 10 volumes: pdf, pdf with translation) Public domain image, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Alexios IV brought the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople. His uncle Alexios III had imprisoned him and his father, the emperor Isaac II, in 1195 and blinded the latter, and revenge was essentially the whole of his plan. He offered the leaders of the crusade, Boniface of Montferrat, Venice, and Philip of Swabia, soldiers, funds, and supplies in exchange for the throne, and promised the submission of the Byzantine church to Rome. For Enrico Dandolo, the Doge of Venice, a sympathetic emperor meant dominance in trade in the east.

The crusading armies reached Constantinople on June 24, 1203 CE. Alexios III fled, Alexios IV was installed, and only then did he discover the treasury was empty. Broke, deep in debt to an angry Catholic army camped outside, and already unpopular thanks to his uncle’s propaganda, he was strangled by the usurper Alexios V in early 1204. The crusaders sacked the city, melting relics down for coinage and destroying palaces, churches, and manuscripts. The empire fragmented, with Greek claimants at Nicaea, Trebizond, and Epirus, while the crusaders ruled Constantinople as the Latin Empire until 1261.

Andronicus I Comnenus. 1183-1185. Credit: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. https://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons Andronicus ruled for two years and did damage that outlasted the dynasty he ended. He marched on Constantinople in 1182 to unseat Manuel I’s unpopular widow, Maria of Antioch, and his arrival emboldened anti-Latin mobs to kill the westerners living in the city, mostly Genoese and Pisans, in what is now known as the Massacre of the Latins. Resentment of the Catholic enclaves had been building since Alexios I granted various Western cities special trading rights. Andronicus did not incite the killing, but he allowed it to proceed unchecked.

He claimed to be protecting the boy emperor Alexios II. Instead, he arranged Maria’s death and took the crown as co-emperor in 1183, then had Alexios strangled two months later. To cement his legitimacy, the sixty-five-year-old married the dead boy’s widow, Agnes of France, who was around thirteen. He did reform some things, banning the sale of public offices and punishing corrupt officials, but he also reversed Manuel’s pro-Western policies. Bela III of Hungary invaded in 1183, Sicilian Normans took Thessalonica in 1185, and the Holy Roman Emperors Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI threatened the capital. A mob killed him that September.

Judging Byzantine emperors means arguing with the sources as much as with the record. Nearly everything known about Phocas was written under the dynasty that overthrew him, and Alexander’s debauchery reaches us through aristocrats he had stripped of office. What survives that scrutiny is a pattern. The empire absorbed cruelty far better than it absorbed carelessness: Justinian II butchered thousands, and the state tolerated him through two separate reigns, while Constantine X merely stopped paying for his army and left his successors to face the Seljuk Turks with nothing to meet them. The reigns that did permanent damage were the ones that spent something the empire could not replace, whether that was the fleet lost off North Africa, the frontier garrisons dissolved to balance a budget, or the trust of the Latin West that Andronicus destroyed and Alexios IV could not buy back.