Constantine VIII
Constantine VIII was co-emperor for sixty-six years and sole emperor for three, and did almost nothing with either. He was the younger son of Romanos II and was crowned in 962 as an infant, alongside his brother Basil II, while a succession of soldier-emperors governed and then while Basil governed. Basil II spent fifty years campaigning, destroyed the Bulgarian empire, doubled the state's revenue and left the treasury full. Constantine spent the same fifty years at court, hunting, at the races and at the table, and by every account was entirely content with the arrangement. He became sole emperor in 1025 at sixty-five. His three-year reign undid a good deal. He reversed Basil's legislation protecting peasant landholding against the great Anatolian families, on whose support he depended; he neglected the army that had won everything; and he used blinding freely and casually against anyone reported to him as a threat, which the sources note as a change of tone rather than of method. He also had no son. His decisive act was the last one. Dying in 1028, he had his second daughter Zoe married to the urban prefect Romanos Argyros, who had to divorce his own wife to accept, and who became Romanos III three days later. Everything that followed for the next thirty years — Zoe's three husbands, Michael V, the joint reign with Theodora — proceeds from that arrangement. The Macedonian dynasty ended with his daughters. The contrast with his brother is the standard illustration of what personal rule means in practice. Fifty years of a soldier's accumulation were spent by a man who had spent those same fifty years at the races, and the state never recovered the Anatolian smallholders that Basil had legislated to protect.
- Lived: 960 CE – 1028 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
