Leo IV the Khazar
Leo IV reigned for five years, moderated his family's war on religious images, and left the throne to a wife who reversed everything. He was born in 750, the son of Constantine V and a Khazar princess — which is why he is called the Khazar — and was crowned co-emperor at the age of one. He succeeded in 775 into a family policy that had been running for half a century. His grandfather Leo III had begun the iconoclast campaign and his father had enforced it with a violence that emptied monasteries, and Leo IV inherited both the doctrine and the enemies it had made. His own position was milder. He did not repeal the councils, and he stopped the active persecution, appointed monks as bishops, and was married to Irene of Athens, who came from a region where images had never stopped being venerated and who was almost certainly an iconophile when he married her. The sources report that he discovered icons in her rooms late in the reign and ceased to share a bed with her, which may or may not be true and is the sort of story the later monastic chroniclers enjoyed. He campaigned against the Abbasids in Syria with some success and continued his father's Bulgarian policy. He crowned his son Constantine VI co-emperor in 776 against opposition from his own half-brothers, whose conspiracies he punished by tonsuring rather than blinding. He died in 780 of a fever, and Irene ruled as regent and restored the icons at Nicaea in 787.
- Lived: 750 CE – 780 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
