Theophilos
Theophilos was the last Byzantine emperor to champion iconoclasm and one of the most culturally refined rulers of the middle Byzantine period. Son of Michael II, he received an excellent education and combined a passionate commitment to justice and artistic patronage with a zealous form of iconoclasm. He renewed the persecution of icon venerators, including flogging and mutilating monks who painted or displayed icons. Yet Theophilos was no crude fanatic: he was genuinely interested in theology and presided over a court of considerable intellectual activity. He was a great builder, expanding and beautifying the Great Palace of Constantinople with new halls and mechanical wonders reportedly inspired by Abbasid palaces, including golden automata - mechanical lions and birds - that impressed foreign ambassadors. Against the Arabs he had mixed results, most painfully the sack of Amorion in 838, the ancestral city of his dynasty, which humiliated him deeply. He died in 842 from a chronic illness before the final resolution of iconoclasm, which his widow Theodora accomplished in 843 at the Triumph of Orthodoxy.
- Lived: 813 CE – 842 CE
- Nationality: byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, patron_of_arts
