Nikephoros II Phokas
Nikephoros II recovered Crete, Cyprus and Antioch for the empire and was murdered in his bedroom by his wife and his nephew. He came from the Phokas family, the greatest of the Anatolian military houses, and was the best soldier of his generation: he took Crete in 961 after a siege of nine months, ending a century and a half of Arab raiding from the island, and then campaigned in Cilicia and Syria. He was proclaimed emperor by his troops in 963 on the death of Romanos II, entered Constantinople, and married the widowed empress Theophano, which supplied the legitimacy. His reign was organised entirely around war. He increased taxes, debased the coinage slightly, cut the subsidies to monasteries and forbade new foundations on the grounds that the land was better used for soldiers, and reorganised the army around heavy cavalry — the kataphraktoi — which won battles and cost enormously. He also asked the patriarch to declare soldiers killed fighting the Muslims to be martyrs, and was refused. The result was that he was hated in the capital: bread was expensive, the church was hostile, and the population pelted him in the streets. Antioch fell in 969 after two and a half centuries in Muslim hands, and he was killed in December of the same year. Theophano let the assassins in by a rope from the sea walls, and his nephew John Tzimiskes cut him down on the floor of his own room, where he slept on a panther skin. Liudprand of Cremona, sent as an ambassador by Otto I in 968, wrote a report describing him as a monstrosity of a man, a dwarf with a mole's eyes and a beard like a pig's, which says as much about the failure of the embassy as about the emperor.
- Lived: 912 CE – 969 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader, general
