About this ebook
Staurakios, son and heir of Emperor Nikephoros I, received the imperial purple in Constantinople while paralyzed from the neck down, his body shattered by wounds suffered in the worst military catastrophe Byzantium had endured in living memory. His father lay dead in the mountain passes of Bulgaria. The Bulgarian Khan Krum had fashioned Nikephoros's skull into a drinking cup. The imperial army was gone. And the new emperor could barely whisper.
He held the throne for sixty-eight days.
Staurakios: The Paralyzed Emperor Who Abdicated After Two Months is the electrifying account of one of the strangest, most revealing reigns in all of Roman history. This is not the story of conquest or legislation or military triumph. It is the story of what happens when the most powerful institution in the medieval world collides with the total physical collapse of the one person at its center — and cannot look away.
At the heart of the drama stands not just Staurakios but the empress Theophano, his wife, who waged a fierce, calculating battle to keep her husband on the throne — and herself in power — against an inner circle of generals, courtiers, and the dead emperor's own brother-in-law Michael Rangabe who circled the sickroom like wolves. The Great Palace of Constantinople, home to centuries of ceremony and calculated murder, became the stage for a sixty-eight day power struggle that gripped an entire empire.
Drawing on Theophanes the Confessor, Patriarch Nikephoros's Short History, John Skylitzes's Synopsis of Byzantine History, and modern scholarship from Warren Treadgold, John Haldon, Mark Whittow, and the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, this biography reconstructs not only those two extraordinary months but the world that produced them — a Byzantium still raw from a century of iconoclast religious war, haemorrhaging territory to Arab armies in the east and Bulgarian cavalry in the Balkans, and discovering in the cruelest possible way that imperial legitimacy means nothing when the emperor cannot lift his hand to command.
Staurakios accomplished nothing. Left no monuments. Won no battles. Passed no laws.
Yet in those sixty-eight days, the Roman Empire asked itself the question that every system built around a single human being must eventually face: what do you do when the person at the top simply cannot function?
The answer, when it came, was brutal, swift, and utterly Byzantine.
