Leo VI the Wise
Leo VI issued the last great codification of Roman law in Greek and spent his reign in a quarrel with his own church about his fourth marriage. He was born in 866 and succeeded Basil I in 886, having spent three years under house arrest on suspicion of conspiracy; whether Basil was his father or Michael III was is a question contemporaries raised and nobody can settle. His epithet means the wise or the philosopher, and it refers to his learning: he wrote homilies, poems, and a treatise on tactics, and he was the most bookish emperor since Constantine VII's grandfather. The Basilika, completed under him, was a sixty-book restatement of Justinian's law in Greek, superseding the Latin that had become unreadable to his own judges, and it remained the basis of Byzantine law until 1453. He also issued 113 novels amending it, several of which are exercises in cleaning up laws that were no longer enforced. His personal difficulty was dynastic. Three wives died without giving him a surviving son, and Byzantine church law strongly disapproved of third marriages and forbade fourth ones. He married Zoe Karbonopsina anyway in 906 after she bore him a son, was excluded from the church by the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos, obtained a dispensation from Rome, and deposed the patriarch. The dispute outlived him. The wars went badly: Bulgaria under Symeon, and the sack of Thessalonica by Arab raiders in 904. He died in 912, and the son was Constantine VII. The tetragamy quarrel took a century to settle and produced a formal ruling in 920 prohibiting fourth marriages absolutely. His son's contested legitimacy shaped the next forty years of palace politics, and the boy grew up to be the emperor who wrote the books.
- Lived: 866 CE – 912 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, scholar, lawgiver
