Constantine X Doukas
Constantine X cut the army to save money and left the empire unable to defend itself. He was a member of the Doukas family, one of the great civil aristocratic houses, and came to the throne in 1059 when Isaac I Komnenos abdicated to a monastery and named him — on the advice of Michael Psellos, who had a considerable interest in which faction governed. His reign was the triumph of the capital's civil bureaucracy over the provincial military families, and its policy followed from that. He reduced the army's numbers and pay, allowed the frontier forces to decay, and preferred to buy off enemies rather than fight them, on the reasonable-sounding argument that soldiers were expensive and had made and unmade the last several emperors. The enemies did not cooperate. The Seljuks took Ani in 1064 and raided into Anatolia and Cilicia repeatedly, the Normans took the last Byzantine positions in southern Italy, and the Oghuz Turks crossed the Danube in 1064 in numbers and were stopped by plague rather than by the army. He also filled the senate with placemen and the administration with his relatives. He died in 1067 leaving young sons under the regency of his wife Eudokia, who had sworn not to remarry and did so within a year — to Romanos Diogenes, a general brought in precisely because the frontier had collapsed. Romanos was destroyed at Manzikert four years later, and the Doukai then destroyed him. His reign is the standard example of a rational economy that destroys the thing it economises on. Cutting the army was defensible in each individual budget and left the empire with no field force at the moment it needed one, and Anatolia was lost within a decade of his death.
- Lived: 1006 CE – 1067 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
