Theophilos
Theophilos was the last iconoclast emperor, an energetic administrator, and the last Byzantine ruler to be defeated in a way that ended a dynasty's confidence. He succeeded his father Michael II in 829 and had been educated by John the Grammarian, the most learned iconoclast of the age, whom he made patriarch. He enforced the ban on images with more conviction than his father, though he stopped short of executions: the monks Theodore and Theophanes were exiled after having twelve lines of insulting verse tattooed on their faces, which is where the name Graptoi comes from. His reputation otherwise is unusually good. He sat in judgement personally, riding weekly to a church so that anyone could petition him, and the stories of his judgements against powerful men — including one against his own wife over a merchant ship — were still being told centuries later. He built extensively, including a palace of automata with a gold plane tree and mechanical birds designed to impress ambassadors, and reorganised the frontier provinces into smaller commands. The war with the Abbasids went badly. He raided Syria successfully, and the caliph al-Mu'tasim answered in 838 by taking Amorion, the city his family came from, and killing or enslaving its population. He is said never to have recovered from it. He died of dysentery in 842 at about twenty-nine, leaving a two-year-old son, and his widow Theodora restored the icons within a year and had him excepted from the anathemas. His reign is also where Byzantine contact with the Abbasid world shows most clearly. The palace automata were copies of Baghdad's, his envoys reported on the caliph's court, and the mathematician Leo was reportedly invited to Baghdad by al-Ma'mun and kept at home by an emperor who did not want to lose him.
- Lived: 813 CE – 842 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, patron_of_arts
