Nikephoros III Botaneiates
Nikephoros III took the Byzantine throne at about seventy-five, held it for three years, and gave it up without a fight. He came from an old Anatolian military family and had spent a long career on the frontiers, serving under a series of emperors and commanding in the Balkans and the east. The empire he seized had just lost the battle of Manzikert in 1071, and the consequence was not the defeat itself but the civil wars that followed it, during which rival claimants hired Turkish mercenaries and let them into Anatolia, so that within a decade the Seljuks held most of the interior. He revolted against Michael VII in 1077 as general of the Anatolic theme, marched on Constantinople with Turkish troops supplied by Suleiman ibn Qutalmish, and was proclaimed emperor in 1078. He then faced a second rebel, Nikephoros Bryennios, whom he defeated using more Turkish troops and a young general called Alexios Komnenos, and a third, and a Norman invasion of the Balkans under Robert Guiscard. His reign was spent buying support: he devalued the coinage further, distributed offices and titles wholesale, and married the wife of his living predecessor, which the church accepted reluctantly. Alexios Komnenos revolted in 1081 with the backing of the aristocratic families Nikephoros had been unable to control, and the mercenaries in the capital opened the gates and sacked it. Nikephoros abdicated rather than fight, entered a monastery, and reportedly said that the loss of his diet troubled him more than the loss of the throne. The Komnenian dynasty that replaced him lasted a century and stabilised what was left, largely by making the aristocracy the state rather than fighting it. He died a monk a few years later, and no one recorded exactly when.
- Lived: 1002 CE – 1081 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader
