Romanos III Argyros
Romanos III was made emperor at sixty by being given a choice between marriage and blinding, and was found dead in his bath five years later. He was a senator and urban prefect of good family when Constantine VIII, dying in 1028 with no son, decided that he would do as a husband for his daughter Zoe. Romanos was already married. He was told to divorce or be blinded, his wife entered a convent, and he married Zoe three days before the old emperor died. The reign was a sequence of well-intentioned failures. He fancied himself a soldier and a builder and a second Marcus Aurelius, and he was none of them. He remitted the allelengyon, the tax under which great landowners were liable for their poorer neighbours' arrears, which was popular with the powerful and removed the state's chief protection of the peasantry. He built the church of the Peribleptos on a scale that emptied the treasury. He campaigned in Syria in 1030 against the emir of Aleppo, ignored his generals, and lost his camp and very nearly himself at Azaz. His marriage with Zoe collapsed early — he was over sixty and she nearly fifty — and she took up with Michael the Paphlagonian, a young man of a family of provincial moneychangers. Romanos was found dead in his bath in April 1034, drowned or poisoned, and Zoe married Michael the same evening. Nobody at the time believed it was an accident. The abolition of the allelengyon is the decision with the longest consequences. Basil II had imposed it precisely to make the powerful pay for the weak, and its removal is a fair marker for the moment the state stopped protecting the class that filled its armies.
- Lived: 968 CE – 1034 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, administrator
