Michael III the Drunkard
Michael III was the last emperor of the Amorian dynasty, and the chroniclers who served his murderer called him the drunkard. He came to the throne in 842 at the age of two, and his mother Theodora governed as regent for fourteen years — restoring the veneration of icons in 843, which ended the iconoclast controversy permanently and is still commemorated as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. She was removed in 856 by her brother Bardas, who became the effective ruler and was an unusually capable one. The reign's achievements belong to that period. Bardas refounded the higher school at the Magnaura under Leo the Mathematician, Photios became patriarch and produced the scholarship that preserved much of what survives of classical literature, and Cyril and Methodius were sent to Moravia in 863 with an alphabet devised for Slavonic — the origin of Slavic Christianity and of Slavic letters. The armies beat the Abbasids at Lalakaon in the same year, reversing two centuries of pressure on the eastern frontier. A Rus fleet attacked Constantinople in 860 and withdrew. Michael's own reputation rests on the account written under the Macedonian dynasty that replaced him, which needed him to be worthless. He raised a Armenian peasant groom named Basil, made him chamberlain, and let him murder Bardas in 866 and then take the crown as co-emperor. Basil had Michael killed in his bedroom in September 867 and reigned for nineteen years. The quarrel with Rome over Photios and over jurisdiction in Bulgaria also began in his reign, and it is the first of the breaks that ended in the schism of 1054. His murder ended a dynasty that had produced the restoration of the icons and began one that produced the empire's high point.
- Lived: 840 CE – 867 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
