Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos
Constantine VII was emperor in name for fifty-four years and in fact for fifteen, and spent the rest of the time writing books. He was born in 905, the son of Leo VI by a fourth marriage that the church regarded as uncanonical, which is why he was called Porphyrogenitus — born in the purple chamber — as an argument for a legitimacy that was contested from birth. He was crowned as an infant, and his reign was managed by regents until Romanos Lekapenos, the admiral of the fleet, married his daughter to him and then had himself crowned senior emperor in 920, reducing Constantine to a signature for a quarter of a century. Romanos's own sons deposed their father in 944, and the people of the capital would not accept them, so Constantine finally took power in 945 at forty. What he did with the interval is the reason he is remembered. He assembled and commissioned a body of work that is the foundation of what we know about the medieval Byzantine state: a handbook of court ceremonial recording rituals in obsessive detail, a survey of the empire's provinces, a study of the peoples on its frontiers written as advice to his son, and encyclopaedias of history, agriculture and law compiled from older texts. Much of what survives of lost classical writing survives through those compilations. As emperor he legislated to protect peasant landholdings against the great families, campaigned in the east, and received a Kievan princess whose visit he described himself. He died in 959. He is also the source of the recipe for Greek fire being a state secret, of the description of the mechanical throne that rose towards the ceiling to impress ambassadors, and of the instruction that no imperial princess should be married to a foreigner. His son poisoned him, according to one chronicle, which may be a courtesy of the genre.
- Lived: 905 CE – 959 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, scholar, writer
