Isaac I Komnenos
Isaac I Komnenos was put on the throne by the Anatolian generals, tried to make the state solvent in two years, and gave up. He came from a Paphlagonian military family and had been a commander in the east, and was proclaimed emperor in June 1057 by the officers whom Michael VI had publicly humiliated at an Easter reception. He beat the imperial army at Petroe near Nicaea and was accepted in the capital when the patriarch and the population turned against his predecessor. His programme was fiscal. The treasury had been emptied by decades of court expenditure and the purchase of loyalty, and he cut the pensions and salaries of the civil aristocracy, revoked grants made by his predecessors, and confiscated a portion of the surplus revenues of the monasteries — which had grown enormously wealthy and paid nothing. He also had himself depicted on the coinage with a drawn sword, which contemporaries read exactly as it was meant. Every one of those measures made an enemy of a group that could write. The patriarch Michael Keroularios, who had helped make him and expected to be consulted, opposed him and was arrested and exiled and died before his trial. Isaac then fell ill on a hunting trip in November 1059, was persuaded that he was dying, and abdicated in favour of Constantine Doukas rather than his own brother. He recovered, and lived out two more years as a monk at the Stoudios monastery, where he worked in the kitchen and wrote on Homer.
- Lived: 1005 CE – 1061 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader
