Anastasius I
Anastasius I became Byzantine emperor at about sixty and left the treasury with 320,000 pounds of gold in it. He was a palace official from Dyrrachium, a silentiary — a court usher — with no military career and a reputation for piety, and had been considered for a bishopric. The empress Ariadne chose him in 491 on Zeno's death, and married him. He had one eye of a different colour from the other, which is what the nickname Dicorus records. The reign is remembered for the finances. He abolished the chrysargyron, a tax on urban trades payable in gold that fell hardest on the poorest and had produced accounts of families selling children to pay it, and the celebrations at Edessa lasted a week. He reformed the copper coinage into a system of denominations that actually worked for small transactions, replaced the tax-collecting curial class with salaried officials, and cut waste in the army and the provinces — and still left the largest reserve any Byzantine emperor accumulated. He built the Long Walls in Thrace against Bulgar raids. The religious policy was the failure. He was a Monophysite in a state whose western half held to Chalcedon, and his attempt to insert a Monophysite phrase into the liturgy produced riots in Constantinople in 512 in which the crowd offered the throne to a passing official. He came to the Hippodrome without his diadem and offered to abdicate, which turned it. He died in 518, aged about eighty-eight. Justinian spent the reserve he left on reconquering the west within a generation.
- Lived: 430 CE – 518 CE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, administrator
