Leo VI was born on 19 September 866 and as the second son of the emperor Basil I (867-886), he was crowned as junior emperor in 870 and then became direct heir to the throne on the premature death of his older brother Constantine in 879. And then on the death of basil in 886 after a hunting accident, Leo VI ascended the throne.
It all seems relatively straightforward. However, there were considerable rumours regarding Leo’s parentage. Indeed, the familial relations at the time of the transfer from the Amorian to Macedonian dynasties were particularly messy.
Leo VI’s mother was most certainly Eudokia Ingerina, who was the wife and empress of Basil I; however, before she was Basil’s wife, Eudokia was the mistress of the emperor Michael III. Indeed, she had been Michael’s mistress even before he himself was married to Eudokia Dekapolitissa. It seems that Michael had been disallowed from marrying Ingerina due to her family being iconoclastic (and possibly due to having some Varangian blood), which saw his mother and regent, Theodora, disapprove. Unwilling to court a scandal through divorce but perhaps keen to keep his mistress close by, Michael had Ingerina married to his friend, Basil the Macedonian, who was first forced to divorce his first wife, Maria (Basil ‘consoled’ himself with taking the emperor’s older sister, Thekla, as his own mistress for a time.).
While Eudokia Dekapolitissa remained Michael III’s legal wife throughout his reign, there is little record of her, suggesting that she was largely a political non-event. This is perhaps also highlighted in her good treatment by Basil upon his accession. As a widow, he allowed her to return to her natal family and nothing else is heard about her.
But despite this marriage, Ingerina continued as Michael’s mistress. And so, when Leo was born in 866, rumours abound that his father was not Basil, but the emperor himself. Indeed, it has also been suggested that Leo’s other brothers Constantine and Stephen (who became patriarch) was not only the son of Ingerina, rather than Basil’s first wife, Maria, but also possibly the son of Michael III (Tougher (1994) 22; (1997) 43-44).
It is possible then that of all Basil’s sons to survive to adulthood (it seems that a first son by Maria named Bardas for Basil’s father died young) – Constantine, Leo, Stephen and Alexander – only Alexander was actually the biological son of Basil as he was born in 870, three years after the murder of Michael III, a murder that Basil himself orchestrated and participated in.
All of these boys were officially the sons of Basil, but it is possible that even Basil himself questioned their paternity. This has seen Basil’s elevation to co-emperor as being a tacit recognition that Leo was actually Michael’s son. But then Michael III himself, officially, had no children and therefore no obvious heir apparent, so appointing a seemingly trusted friend like Basil to a position of succession, especially when he had three sons (officially).
This was not the only controversy claimed regarding Basil I’s personal life. When George the Monk describes the relationship between Basil and Michael, he uses the Greek word ποθος (pothos), which was usually used by Christian sources to describe the desire between a husband and wife. This raises the question of could Basil’s unlikely rise to power – a lowly peasant who rose to become emperor – have been in part because of a closer than ‘just good friends’ relationship between Michael and Basil? (Tougher in James (1999)). Even Basil’s preservation of the illegality of male homosexuality and its capital punishment in his Basilika law code (Morris in Yoder and Kreuter (2011)) does not necessarily disqualify any sort of notion of a sexual relationship between the emperor and his peasant underling.
The rumours (or indeed knowledge) of Leo’s true parentage may have contributed to what was an increasingly poor relationship between Basil and Leo, exacerbated by a general dislike between them. The death of Ingerina in around 882 seems to have removed an ameliorating influence on the enmity between the pair. One flashpoint appears to have been Leo’s marriage to Theophano, a match that was chosen by Basil and disliked by Leo.
The source record is not completely clear, but while Theophano would be Leo’s first empress upon his accession in 886 and she did given Leo a daughter called, Eudokia Porphyrogenita, it could be that he had taken Zoe Zaoutzaina as his mistress before Basil’s death. The emperor then retorted to the rejection of his match-making by marrying Zoe off to a Theodore Gouniazizes, an obscure court official.
The enmity between Basil and Leo only escalated, with the former coming to believe that the latter planned to assassinate him in revenge for the murder of Michael III. The emperor may even have gone as far as to imprison Leo on suspicion of connection to a discovered plot and for appearing in the emperor’s presence in possession of a knife. The imprisoning of the heir apparent led to public rioting, but even with that, it took the intervention of the Constantinopolitan patriarch, Photius, to prevent Basil having Leo blinded and therefore removed from the succession. And Leo still seemingly faced up to three years of imprisonment.
Basil I died on 29 August 886 after an accident while out hunting. His belt reputedly got caught on the antlers of a deer, leading to him being dragged 16 miles through the woods. An attendant managed to cut the emperor loose with a knife, but so consumed with suspicion, even paranoia, had Basil become that he accused his saviour of planning to murder him and had the attendant executed. And just to twist the metaphorical knife a little further, after contracting an ultimately fatal fever, Basil gave voice to his suspicions that Leo had been behind this ‘assassination attempt’.
It must be said that for all the suspicions of murders and disputed parentage, there was no questioning of Leo’s succeeding Basil when the latter succumbed to the fever. However, this does not little or nothing to dispel those rumours – as we have seen, Leo and Stephen had both been publicly presented as the sons of Basil. And even if he had shown some favouritism towards his definite biological son, Alexander, Basil had made no move to disown Leo or Stephen. Because of this, the identity of Leo’s biological father is completely moot in dynastic terms, even if it remains an intriguing question of biological fact; a question that Leo VI played into with one of his first acts as emperor being to have Michael III reburied in the Church of the Holy Apostles – was this because Leo was or at least personally believed that he was Michael’s son? Or that he saw some political benefit to such a claim?
Despite being part of such familial dispute, Leo VI’s own love life was as complex and controversial as his parentage. We have already met his first wife, Theophano, chosen for him by Basil for the connection to her powerful Martinakioi family. As seen, despite the dislike of the match, this union did produce a child in Eudokia Porphyrogenita; however, she died in 892 and there were no more children. This was because not only had Leo taken Zoe Zaoutzaina as his mistress, but also because Theophano appears to have entered a Blachernae monastery – whether this was strictly of her own choosing is left open by the sources.
Zoe does seem to have taken over Theophano’s place in the palace and imperial court, but it is unclear exactly what her status was between 893 and 897. Was Leo’s marriage to Theophano declared void or ended by divorce? Or was that marriage still valid, with Zoe remaining the imperial mistress until after Theophano’s death on 10 November 897?
With the widowing of both Leo and Zoe (with Leo implicated by some of the sources in the poisoning of Zoe’s husband, Theodore), they were free to marry. This second union (for both) produced two children, both daughters – Anna, who is thought to have died young and then been buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles, and a second daughter of unclear name, with both Anna and Eudocia recorded.
While there is some record of this second daughter possibly being betrothed to Louis the Blind, king of Provence and briefly Holy Roman Emperor (901-905) and even suggestions that the marriage took place and produced two children, Charles-Constantine, Count of Vienne, and Anna of Provence, who married Berengar, Holy Roman Emperor (915-924), there are also considerable doubts that this marriage ever took place. But while Leo and Zoe may have produced a daughter who secured a good match, there was as yet no male heir to succeed Leo as Roman emperor. And when Zoe then died in May 899, it could have been due to complications from a further pregnancy.
However it came about, the death of his second wife with no male issue left Leo in a bind – he wanted a legitimate male heir [technically, he already had an heir in his younger (half-?)brother, Alexander, who had been co-emperor since 879, but Leo might have already seen some of the defects that were to colour his eventual reign]. Leo himself was still young enough, in his mid-30s and as emperor he had his choice of partners; however, for any male heir to be legitimate required a marriage and in Roman law and church practice of the time, third marriages were illegal.
As emperor, Leo VI could change the law, but he needed dispensation from the church in order to achieve its blessing. He gained this from the patriarch of Constantinople, Antonius II, who had succeeded Leo’s brother, Stephen, in 893. Leo’s choice fell upon Eudokia Baiana, recorded as being from the Opsikon theme, which by this point encompassed what is now north-western Turkey. There is not much else known about her, other than after marrying Leo in the spring of 900, she son fell pregnant, only to die in childbirth on 12 April 901. The child also perished, but may have been a boy named Basil.
Leo was now back in the same hole he had found himself in upon the death of Zoe, except this time, the new patriarch Nicholas Mystikos vehemently opposed a fourth marriage. Instead, Leo took another mistress, Zoe Karbonopsina, niece of his admiral, Himerios, holding off marrying her until she had given him a son – the future Constantine VII – on 17 May 905. This marriage was only achieved by ignoring Nicholas, who, despite reluctantly baptising Constantine VII, continued opposing the fourth imperial marriage to the point that he was deposed in 907. However, even the new patriarch, Euthymius, refused to outright support the marriage between Leo and Zoe Karbonopsina, before reaching a compromise with the emperor that saw Leo do penance to atone for his fourth marriage and pass a law making fourth marriages illegal. Only then did Euthymius crown the infant Constantine on 15 May 908.
Despite all the controversy then, it appeared that Leo had got what he wanted – a male son and heir to succeed him; however, it was nearly all undone on 11 May 912 when Leo VI died aged just 45, with Constantine still not 7 years old…
So after all that, Leo VI was succeeded by Alexander anyway… who turned out to be reputedly one of the worst Roman emperors, with the admittedly hostile sources accusing him of being a lazy, lecherous, malignant, idolatrous drunk who provoked damaging wars with the Abbasids and Bulgars and reputedly threatened to castrate Leo’s son Constantine VII to exclude him from the succession, before dying of a stomach disease brought on by his drinking and gluttony…
Only on his deathbed did the childless Alexander fully accept Constantine VII as his heir…
Bibliography
Morris, S. ‘The Gay Male as Byzantine Monster: Civil Legislation and Punishment for Same-Sex Behaviour,’ in Yoder, P.L. and Kreuter, P.M. (eds.) The Horrid Looking Glass: Reflections on Monstrosity. Leiden (2011) 125-137.
Tougher, S. The Reign of Leo VI (886-912): Personal Relationships and Political Ideologies. Ph.D thesis University of St Andrews (1994).
Tougher, S. The Reign of Leo VI (886–912): Politics and People. Leiden (1997).
Tougher, S. “Michael III and Basil the Macedonian: just good friends?,” in James, L. (ed.) Desire and Denial in Byzantium: Papers from the 31st Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1997. Aldershot (1999) 149-158.
Tougher, S. ‘Eudokia Ingerina and the “Macedonian Dynasty”: The Visible Woman’, in Chiratii, M.C. and Marín, R.V. (eds.) Mujeres imperiales, mujeres reales: Representaciones públicas y representaciones del poder en la Antigüedad tardía y Bizancio. Leiden (2021) 357-372.
Comentários