Empress Zoe
Zoe was born in the purple, married three emperors, adopted a fourth, and was empress in her own right at sixty-four. She was the daughter of Constantine VIII and the niece of Basil II, and the legitimacy of the Macedonian dynasty ran through her and her sister Theodora after the male line ended in 1028. She was about fifty when she was first married, to Romanos III, on her dying father's orders, which is a comment on how little the court had thought about the succession. Romanos was found dead in his bath in 1034 and Zoe married her lover Michael the Paphlagonian the same day; contemporaries drew the obvious conclusion and Psellos, writing later, more or less says so. Michael IV was epileptic and increasingly absent, and his brother the eunuch John ran the state and pushed Zoe aside. She was persuaded to adopt Michael's nephew as her son, and he took the throne in 1041 as Michael V and exiled her to a convent within four months — which produced a rising of the whole population of Constantinople, the only one of its kind, that dragged him from sanctuary and blinded him. Zoe and Theodora then reigned jointly for two months in 1042, with two thrones in the audience chamber, before Zoe married Constantine IX to restore a male emperor. She was interested in perfumes, spent enormously, and had no children. She died about 1050, and Theodora outlived her and reigned alone. Her mosaic portrait in the south gallery of Hagia Sophia shows her beside an emperor whose head and name have been replaced at least once, which is either the record of her marriages or of a later restoration, and either way is the neatest surviving comment on her career.
- Lived: 978 CE – 1050 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: empress, head_of_state
