Leo II

Leo II was Byzantine emperor for about ten months as a child and is remembered for crowning his own father. Born around 467, he was the grandson of the emperor Leo I through his mother Ariadne, and his father was Zeno, the Isaurian general Leo I had brought to Constantinople as a counterweight to the Alan commander Aspar. That is the whole of the politics. Aspar had made three emperors and effectively controlled the army, and Leo I broke his power by recruiting Isaurians — regarded in the capital as barbarians who happened to live inside the frontier — and by marrying his daughter to their leader. Aspar and his sons were murdered in the palace in 471. Leo I died in January 474, having crowned his grandson co-emperor a few months earlier, and the boy became sole emperor at about six. The senate and the court did not want an Isaurian on the throne and would not accept Zeno directly, so the arrangement was managed through the child: Leo II crowned his father co-emperor in the Hippodrome in February 474, which gave Zeno the legitimacy no vote would have. Leo II died in November of the same year, aged about seven, of an unrecorded illness. The suspicion that Zeno or Ariadne had arranged it was immediate, and one later account has Ariadne substituting another child to save him, which is the kind of story that attaches to every convenient royal death. Zeno reigned until 491. He is among the shortest-reigning and youngest emperors in Roman history, and his one recorded act made the dynasty that followed.

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