LEONTIUS: The General Who Lost His Nose and His Throne

Leontius never wanted to be emperor. As commander of Byzantine armies against relentless Arab invasions, he faced a doomed expedition to reclaim North Africa from Islamic conquest. Failure meant imprisonment and execution under the young tyrant Justinian II.

In three desperate days, Leontius transformed from condemned prisoner to Augustus, overthrowing Justinian in a coup that ended with the emperor's nose slit in the Hippodrome before eighty thousand witnesses. For three turbulent years (695-698), this reluctant usurper governed an empire bleeding territory to the Umayyad Caliphate while Arab fleets seized the last Byzantine strongholds in North Africa.

Then his own general did to him exactly what he had done to Justinian.

This is the true story of the Twenty Years' Anarchy, when six emperors ruled and fell in rapid succession, when rhinokopia—ritual mutilation—transformed political rivals into noseless warnings, and when one mutilated emperor achieved the impossible: Justinian II returned from exile, reclaimed his throne, and dragged both Leontius and his successor into the Hippodrome for the most spectacular display of imperial vengeance in Byzantine history.

Drawing on Theophanes Confessor, the Chronicle of 754, contemporary numismatics, and the latest scholarship on seventh-century Byzantium, this biography reconstructs a forgotten emperor whose career illuminates the brutal machinery of Byzantine power politics. Here is the Roman Empire at its most savage: generals who became emperors, emperors who became prisoners, and the terrible cycle of rebellion, mutilation, and revenge that nearly destroyed the last remnant of Rome.

For readers of Mary Beard, Tom Holland, and Adrian Goldsworthy, Leontius offers a fresh perspective on the twilight years of the Roman world, when empires were won and lost in days, and when a single blade could transform emperor into exile—or corpse.

The purple was not a crown. It was a death sentence waiting to happen.