About this ebook
When Constantine V left Constantinople to fight the Arabs, his brother-in-law Artabasdos seized the throne in a lightning coup. For two years, the Byzantine Empire had two emperors—one holding the legendary capital, the other commanding the military heartland of Anatolia.
Between them lay an irreconcilable war over sacred images that had already consumed a generation.
Inside This Book:
The dramatic seizure of Constantinople and immediate ecclesiastical coronation. The theological gamble that reversed two decades of iconoclasm and rallied monks, clergy, and believers to a rebel's cause. The brutal civil war across Asia Minor while Arabs and Bulgars watched from the borders. The betrayal that opened Constantinople's gates on a November night in 743. The terrible vengeance—blinding, imprisonment, and systematic erasure from memory.
Based on Primary Sources:
Chronicles of Theophanes the Confessor, Byzantine documents, numismatic evidence, archaeological findings, and theological treatises. Every claim grounded in historical evidence, every battle reconstructed from sources, every motive analyzed through eighth-century Byzantine political culture.
For Readers Who Want:
Rigorous scholarship with narrative power. Political intrigue of generals, dynasties, and ecclesiastical politics. Military history analyzing strategy and medieval warfare. Religious controversy that shaped empires. Biography refusing to simplify complex figures into heroes or villains.
Written in the tradition of Mary Beard, Tom Holland, and Adrian Goldsworthy.
Artabasdos ruled only two years, but his rebellion revealed fundamental truths about Byzantine power: how emperors were made and unmade, why religious conviction could justify civil war, what happened when military force confronted dynastic legitimacy.
Constantine V spent decades trying to erase him. This book resurrects what imperial censorship tried to destroy.
