About this ebook
On September 15, 668, the Roman Emperor Constans II was struck down in his bathhouse by a trusted chamberlain wielding a soap dish. Thus ended one of the most controversial reigns in Byzantine history—twenty-seven years of catastrophic losses, religious persecution, and a desperate gamble to rebuild imperial power in the West.
Constans was eleven when courtiers placed the purple on his shoulders in 641. Arab armies were consuming the empire's richest provinces. Enemies pressed every frontier. He responded with ruthless pragmatism: his uncle's nose slit, his own brother murdered, Pope Martin I exiled to die in the Crimea, the theologian Maximus the Confessor's tongue torn out and hand severed. Then, in an act without precedent, he abandoned Constantinople entirely—ruling from Syracuse for six years, crushing his Italian subjects with taxes, dreaming of victories that would never come.
This biography follows Constans from his childhood accession through theological controversy and military disaster to his sordid death at the hands of Armenian conspirators. Here is seventh-century Byzantium in all its complexity: ancient certainties collapsing, new realities born in blood and fire.
Constans II was the hinge between the ancient world and the medieval. His story has been too long neglected.
