Constantine VI
Constantine VI was blinded on his mother's orders in the room where he had been born. He came to the throne in 780 at nine, on the death of his father Leo IV, with his mother Irene as regent, and the central fact of his life is that she never intended to stop being regent. She restored the veneration of icons at the second Council of Nicaea in 787, which was the reign's achievement and was hers. He was betrothed to a daughter of Charlemagne and the engagement was broken; he was married instead to an Armenian chosen by his mother. He was proclaimed sole ruler by the army in 790 when he was nineteen, after the soldiers of the Armeniac theme objected to being asked to swear an oath naming Irene first, and he recalled her to the palace within two years, which was a mistake. His own record was poor: defeats by the Bulgars and the Arabs, and the mutilation of his uncles and of the general who had made him emperor, which lost him the army's sympathy. He then divorced his wife and married his mistress in 795, producing a schism in the church known as the Moechian controversy, in which the Stoudite monks refused communion with anyone who accepted the marriage. Irene organised the conspiracy and had him seized and blinded in August 797, in the purple chamber, deliberately and in a manner intended to kill. He died soon afterwards, and she reigned as emperor in her own name. The blinding of an emperor by his own mother was also used in the west as an argument that the imperial throne was vacant, which is part of the justification offered for crowning Charlemagne in Rome three years later. Irene reportedly negotiated a marriage with him and was deposed before it went anywhere.
- Lived: 770 CE – 797 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
