PHILIPPICUS: The One-Eyed Emperor Who Restored Heresy

How does an emperor lose an empire in twenty months?

Between November 711 and June 713, Philippicus Bardanes ruled what remained of the Roman Empire. An Armenian general who seized power by coup, he inherited a state already gutted by Arab conquests. The treasury was empty. Arab fleets gathered to destroy Constantinople. Bulgars ravaged Thrace.

Philippicus chose theology over survival.

While Arab shipyards built the largest invasion fleet in decades, the emperor convened councils to debate Christ's will. While soldiers went unpaid and frontiers collapsed, he commissioned religious icons and restored Monothelitism—a heresy condemned thirty years earlier. The Pope severed communion with Constantinople.

This meticulously researched biography reveals how doctrinal obsession nearly handed the Christian capital to Islam. Drawing on chronicles by Theophanes and Nicephorus, papal records, and contemporary theological treatises, it chronicles the brutal murder of Justinian II, the theological split between East and West, the military preparations Philippicus ignored, and the desperate coup that saved Constantinople months before the Arab siege.

Here is incompetence as spectacle, religious fanaticism as policy, and the razor-thin margin by which empires survive their worst leaders.

For readers who enjoyed Tom Holland's Persian Fire or Adrian Goldsworthy's imperial biographies, this delivers scholarly rigor and narrative drive.

The empire survived. Philippicus did not. His eyes paid the price.