About this ebook
Nikephoros II Phokas was the most feared military commander in Christendom — a cold, iron-willed general who slept on the floor, despised luxury, and spent his life turning the Byzantine Empire's enemies into footnotes.
He ended a century of pirate terror with a single, devastating invasion of Crete. He dismantled Arab strongholds across the Mediterranean one by one. His frontline troops loved him so completely they made him emperor by acclamation.
It was the worst thing that ever happened to him.
The palace was not a battlefield Nikephoros understood. Born into a Cappadocian warrior clan, hardened by decades of border warfare, he ruled Constantinople the only way he knew — like a frontline camp. He alienated the church. He enraged the aristocracy. And he made the fatal mistake of trusting Theophano, the empress whose loyalty had already outlasted one emperor.
On the night of December 10, 969, she opened the palace doors.
His nephew John Tzimiskes walked in with drawn swords. The greatest general of the Christian world bled out on his own bedroom floor.
He saved an empire that could not wait to be rid of him.
