Leo VI and the Transformation of Byzantine Christian Identity

Leo VI (b. 866, r. 886–912) was indeed a decidedly unexpected emperor. Treated as the second son of Basil I, despite suspicions circulating at the time that Basil’s predecessor, Michael III, was his biological father, he became heir apparent as a result of the death of his elder brother Constantine on the field of battle in 879. In August 883, he was accused of plotting to kill his father and spent three years under house arrest, being released in July 886 and restored to imperial favour a mere six weeks before Basil I was killed in a hunting accident. During his extended confinement, he avoided being blinded (and hence permanently disqualified from imperial office) only through the intervention of the patriarch Photios and Basil’s political adviser, Stylianos Zaoutzes. His accession to the imperial office on 30 August 886 therefore would have struck contemporaries as unexpected. As Meredith Riedel observes, Leo VI was also an unusual emperor. In an era of conflict with Bulgars, Arabs and others, Leo VI was a non-campaigning emperor, compelled to navigate the fall-out from distant conflicts from the Great Palace in Constantinople. Victories and defeats over external opponents both had domestic implications. He was also a scholar, to whom a substantial and varied body of literature has been attributed—indeed, he was termed ‘the Wise’ during his lifetime, certainly by 899. This, too, makes him unusual, for Byzantine emperors tend to be approached through the writings of others rather than in their own words. The extant works associated with Leo VI include the long military treatise known as the Taktika, the law code initiated by his father known as the Basilika, 113 individual pieces of legislation called Novellae, and 42 homilies (all but three of which were delivered by the emperor in person in either the Palace or various churches in Constantinople on major feast days during the liturgical year). This is ample material through which to examine Leo VI’s understanding of the role of the emperor and his religiously charged conception of the empire and Byzantine cultural identity. Riedel’s monograph is focused on recovering the imperial ideology of Leo VI as he himself expressed it

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