When a Woman Ruled the Romans

Empress Irene and the Practice and Presentation of Power in New Rome

By: Logan (Janicki)

For 800 years, no woman outright challenged the right of men to rule the Romans until Irene of Athens pushed aside her inept son Constantine VI and reigned alone for five years.1 This is not to say that women had not held power as wives of the emperor. However, while they frequently operated behind the scenes, rarely did they serve as regents. Irene’s regency for Constantine VI was nearly unprecedented. Only one woman, the Empress Martina, a century prior, had ever held the throne as regent. The wife of the famous Emperor Heraclius, Martina had attempted a regency for her young son Heraclonas but was quickly overthrown in favor of her deceased husband’s minor grandson from a previous marriage. That regency thus stood as a far-from-promising precedent for Irene’s reign.2 And Irene’s situation was perhaps even worse than Martina’s. Rather than the minor relatives of Heraclius who challenged Martina’s regency, the adult half-brothers of Irene’s husband opposed her regency.3

The best primary source for details of Irene’s reign, Theophanes’s The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, emphasized how unlikely her ascent to the height of imperial power was to show that she clearly enjoyed God’s favor.4 Theophanes, a monk and Irene’s contemporary, began writing his Chronicle around 810 AD, continuing the work of his friend George Synkellos, who had already compiled the research and written a history of the world from creation to Diocletian’s accession as emperor in 284 AD.5 Writing his Chronicle, Theophanes covered events from Diocletian’s reign to his own time and ending in 813 AD, about a decade after Irene’s deposition. His account notably favored Iconophiles like Irene. During this time in Byzantium, the Church wrestled with a dispute over whether icons violated the commandment against the worship of idols. Monks like Theophanes were among the staunchest supporters of icons’ continued acceptance by the Church.6

According to Theophanes’s narrative, Irene began her unlikely rise to power through her marriage to Leo IV, the heir-apparent of the stringently Iconoclast emperor Constantine V, in 769 AD.7 Theophanes provided no reason as to why she was selected to marry Leo IV, making her eventual seizure of power all the more perplexing. When Constantine V died in 775 AD, Leo IV and Irene became the reigning monarchs.8 Leo IV approached the issue of icons more moderately at the start of his reign, according to Theophanes, but died only a few years after his accession in 780 AD, leaving his young son Constantine VI as nominal emperor and Irene exercising most of the imperial powers as his regent.9 Meanwhile, Leo IV’s adult half-brothers loomed, an ever-present threat to Irene’s regency.

Despite the innovation her rule represented, and the challenge of Leo IV’s half-brothers, Irene managed to stay on or around the throne for twenty years after the death of her husband. While she was eventually deposed, she escaped the bodily mutilation normally used to disqualify imperial claimants and died peacefully, albeit in exile, less than a year later. Thus, despite the blackening of her character in some popular histories, such as Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium and the podcast The History of Byzantium, she must be viewed as a successful ruler. Irene ruled for a significant time, during which she achieved major policy goals. Moreover, the empire did not collapse during or as a result of her reign, and she died peacefully in her bed at an advanced age.10

How Irene achieved these successes, however, remains a significant historiographical question. Among recent English language scholarship, three scholars address this question more or less directly, with all three claiming that Irene’s rule did, in fact, have significant precedents making her success as a ruler much less unexpected.11 However, the focus on the precedents for Irene’s reign draws attention away from the constraints placed on her exercise of imperial power, which was derived from Byzantine expectations for women, leading to a flawed understanding of Irene’s rule.

One historian, Bronwen Neil, plainly states that his goal is “to focus on the question of whether [Irene] was regarded as a ‘real emperor’ in Roman, Frankish, and Byzantine sources,” as well as to examine modern scholarship reflecting on her reign and why she fell from power.12 Neil characterizes Irene’s rule as part of a natural progression in which ambitious imperial women gradually took on more visible and powerful roles leading to Martina, who briefly attempted a regency, and then Irene, who successfully managed one. This chronology provides important context to Irene’s success in managing to appear legitimate in taking power but does little to explain how she managed to navigate a position whose responsibilities grew out of the assumption that it would be exclusively occupied by men. As such, Neil’s analysis of the Byzantine sources, such as why Irene was able to execute the unofficial imperial position of chief priest, raises questions the author simply leaves unanswered.13 Neil likewise unconvincingly makes the case that the Franks did see Irene as illegitimate, but not due to her gender. His chief support for this claim comes from the Ancient Annals of the Franks, which, with a “variant reading at the crucial point of the text” indicated that Irene’s usurpation, not her gender, made her illegitimate to the Franks.14 Neil attempts to buttress this view with the Life of St Willehad, an account written later, as well as the correspondence between Charlemagne and Pope Hadrian I.15 However, the quote cited from Life of St Willehad, “with men of the royal family lacking and with the state being administered by a woman’s authority,” implied that Irene, despite marrying into the royal family, could not have legitimately ruled due to her gender.16 Likewise, even granting Neil’s ”variant reading” in Ancient Annales of the Franks, the text likened Irene to another female usurper, the Biblical queen Athaliah, implying gender played a role in Irene’s illegitimacy. Overall, Neil’s argument that Irene’s gender did not much affect whether she was considered a “real emperor” is thus unconvincing.

Contrarily, Judith Herrin much more fully examines the possible sources of images and ideas of female authority than Neil. Though, unlike Neil, she devoted an entire chapter, “The Imperial Feminine,” to this subject, providing her more room to do so.17 However, Herrin’s argument in “Political Power and Christian Faith in Byzantium,” sidelines the ideas considered in “The Imperial Feminine” to argue that Irene ruled functionally the same as any man did. This makes her argument rather similar to that of Neil, with both unconvincingly making the case that Irene’s gender did not affect how she wielded power during her rule.18

To make the argument that Irene ruled the same as any man did, Herrin denies that the prominence of eunuchs in Irene’s administration was indicative of Irene needing to operate in ways different to male emperors.19 This runs contrary to Herrin’s own acknowledgment of the special reliance empresses had on eunuchs in “The Imperial Feminine,” for they comprised a staff that the empress independently controlled. Herrin, in “Political Power and Christian Faith in Byzantium” points to the later example of Leo VI, who also relied heavily on eunuchs in his administration.20 However, as eunuchs formed a significant part of an empress’s personal staff, Irene, or any woman who ruled the empire, would naturally favor eunuchs from this staff in filling positions in her administration; having already worked with them, Irene would have known who could be trusted with positions of authority.21 Additionally, imperial administrations assumed, rightly or wrongly, that eunuchs were more trustworthy on account of their inability to procreate.22 Whether this in reality limited the potential for senior administration officials to scheme, it was nevertheless “common sense” in Byzantium that eunuchs were more trustworthy, justifying their place in a regime concerned about the possibility of a coup, such as Irene’s.23 Thus, Irene’s decision to employ eunuchs so prominently appears related to the inherent instability her administration faced as a result of her not being a man.

Emphasizing her role as a mother enabling her to rule while her son was a minor, Mark Whittow applies practically the opposite approach from Herrin in understanding Irene’s regency.24 As such, her regency was not the aberration, but her sole rule was. Overall, Whittow’s argument is fairly convincing—but, by arguing Irene’s claim to power came entirely from her motherhood, Whittow cannot fit Irene’s five-year sole reign into his model and leaves it as little more than a footnote. Whittow’s formulation places Irene on the sidelines of the very coup that brought her to power, with Irene only a placeholder as court factions decided on a “real” emperor.

However, evidence shows Irene desired to be recognized as a genuine executor of imperial power. For example, she signed Nicaea II’s declaration of Iconoclasm’s heresy before Constantine VI, and she insisted that the army swear an oath commemorating her before her son, but Whittow’s analysis disregarded these events.25 Additionally, though Constantine VI exiled her after he came of age, Irene’s supporters at court arranged shortly after for her return to the palace. These points all strongly suggest that Irene desired and succeeded in creating legitimacy and a power base for herself independent of her role as a mother. If Whittow’s formulation were correct, then certainly the coup against Constantine VI would not have ended in his blinding and death, as that removed the pretext that allowed Irene legitimately to exercise power. Whittow’s argument is commendable in comparison to Neil’s and Herrin’s for acknowledging that Irene’s gendered role as a mother influenced her rule and for rejecting the idea that Irene became ruler because the imperial institutions would put aside gender if need be to fill the imperial office.26 However, he follows this acknowledgment to an extreme; he considered only one avenue for women to exercise power: as a mother. But Herrin shows in “The Imperial Feminine” that imperial women had plenty of models to draw on in exercising and communicating power.27

To date, scholarly approaches to the study of Irene fall short of achieving a full understanding of her reign. Both models emphasizing continuity between her and other, male emperors, as well as Whittow’s model, which explains Irene’s reign through a narrow aspect of femininity, fail to address adequately all the peculiarities of her reign. Only by acknowledging Irene’s gender and recognizing that she operated not just as a mother but as a woman can all the specific actions and decisions that she took during her reign be properly understood. This paper, in contrast to these scholars, starts from the assumption that Irene’s rule was in fact unusual instead typical. As Carolyn Connor notes in Women of Byzantium, “[g]ender, and what happens when gender roles are bent, will play an important part in the work of writing women back into the histories of Byzantium.”28 This paper, by examining a key case of the Byzantine idea of femininity being challenged and negotiated, also seeks to contribute to that topic.

In approaching the specific details of Irene’s rule, this paper makes a distinction between the practice and presentation of Irene’s power as a ruler. The practice of power can broadly be defined as the actual wielding of imperial power. What policy goals were priorities and how Irene accomplished them, who she staffed her administration with, when and why she made peace or war, which groups within the empire she allied with and which she did not—all these would fall under the term “practice of power” in this paper. The presentation of power refers to how Irene propagandized her reign. What messages she conveyed, to which groups she communicated different messages, the imagery she used on coins, what, where, and for whom she built, and which titles she used are all ways she presented imperial power to the public, and how she represented herself were as important to her successful rule as what she did.

Obviously, there is some overlap between these two categories. For example, her favoring of Iconophiles acted both to create a specific public image and to help find loyal allies for her administration. However, for the most part, when analyzing specific incidents, this overlap disappears. Irene represented herself and Constantine VI as the new Helena and Constantine in the wake of Nicaea II.29 This had no practical use other than as propaganda, even if her broad policy of favoring Iconophiles involved both the practice and presentation of her power. As such, separating the analysis into these two broad categories serves as a worthwhile and effective analytical tool.

The Practice of Power: War, Diplomacy, and Administration

When Irene of Athens arrived in the capital of the empire on November 1, 769 to marry Leo IV, she, accompanied by a fleet draped in silk, immediately was introduced to the prominent families of the capital, who were eager to meet the future empress.30 Theophanes was certain that the entrance befitted a future ruler.31 Although it cannot be verified, it is likely that her family was influential in central Greece, for Irene was to marry the designated heir of Constantine V.32 By this time, the empire was no longer in immediate mortal danger from the Caliphate, as the costly failure of the 717 AD siege of Constantinople appeared to have dissuaded further attempts at outright conquest of the Byzantine state.33 Around the time of the 717 AD siege, the Emperor Leo III introduced the religious doctrine of Iconoclasm, which remained state policy when Irene took power as regent in 780. As regent, Irene would reverse this doctrine with the Second Council of Nicaea; and her quarrels with her son Constantine VI over the subject as he came of age would lead her to blind him, evidently quite brutally, as he died shortly afterward.34 Irene managed to stay in her unusual position as the first woman to rule the Roman state alone for another five years, despite constant scheming around her to remove her or otherwise expedite her succession.35

Irene seems to have believed that it would be unacceptable for her to lead an army as a result of her gender, as soldiering and martial prowess were significantly masculine-coded in Byzantine culture. An illustration of the eunuch general Theodore Krateros in the Madrid Skylitzes, an illuminated copy of John Skylitzes’ Synopsis of Histories, produced in Sicily in the twelfth century and now kept in Spain’s national library in Madrid, exemplifies this point.36 Krateros, having defeated and captured an Arab, was depicted with a beard, a key signifier of masculinity in Byzantium, despite eunuchs usually being depicted without them.37 This imagery suggests that the masculine connotations of soldiering were strong in Byzantium, as evidently the artist concluded that Krateros could not be a good soldier without being a “full” man. The earlier scholar Procopius’s need to justify the success of eunuch generals with prophecy in one of his histories further suggests military service was normally exclusive to non-eunuch men throughout Byzantine history.38 If she wanted contemporary proof of soldiery as a male-only occupation, Irene needed only to look at the mutiny that her eunuch general Staurakios suffered in 782 AD. In command of the force tasked with responding to Harun al-Rashid’s raid, Staurakios was turned over to the enemy by his own officers.39 If a eunuch was problematic as a commander, a woman certainly would have been as well.

The uncertain loyalties of the army’s generals compounded Irene’s perceived inability to lead an army. According to Theopanes, Michael Lachanodrakon, a talented commander whose career began during the reign of Constantine V, twice conducted persecutions of Iconophiles, and, as Irene came to align herself with the Iconophile cause, holdovers like Lachanodrakon from earlier Iconoclast regimes in the military appeared untrustworthy to serve as commanders going forward.40 Even assuming that Theophanes’s accusations against Lachanodrakon were entirely later fabrications to justify his removal by Irene, the mere existence of officers who were not totally loyal and dependent on Irene for their position presented a problem, as she could not lead an army to defend herself in a potential civil war against a general turned would-be emperor. Putting aside the officers, the failure of the church council of 786 AD in Constantinople on account of a mutiny of soldiers within the city showed that even the lower ranks of the soldiery were invested in Iconoclasm.41 This meant that the army as a whole was unreliable for Irene, and, unable to campaign herself and perhaps win the soldiers’ loyalty away from the memory of Constantine V, she was forced to seek other methods of resolving her conflicts with the neighboring powers.

Unable to make war, Irene instead chose to make peace. In 782 AD, she concluded a peace treaty with the Caliphate to end al-Rashid’s raid and return Staurakios. While she had to pay costly tribute to maintain the treaty, given the risks associated with even attempting a martial response to Arab incursions Irene likely saw the treaty as well worth the cost. To some degree, this course of action may have also increased her popularity on the empire’s periphery, as the area’s inhabitants seemed to harbor no great love for the empire and would likely have been quite pleased that Arab raids had been ended without their having to supply an imperial counter-attack.42

The prevailing peace between the two powers likely could have continued, had not Constantine VI and Nikephoros I been so keen to prove themselves men and competent rulers through military action. As evidence, take Harun al-Rashid having wrote to Constantine VI attempting to de-escalate mounting tensions between Abbasids and the Byzantines during Constantine VI’s attempt at sole rule. Later, Irene’s eventual successor, Nikephoros I issued a bold demand for repayment of the tribute given during Irene’s reign to justify restarting hostilities with the Abbasids.43 Notably, Nikephoros’s demand for the tribute to be repaid cites “the frailty and foolishness of women” as the root of the tribute arrangement, further suggesting Irene made peace with the Abbasids since leading an army was not an option for her.44

Similarly, because the Franks were encroaching on Italy and the Papacy during her reign, Irene’s arrangement for Constantine VI to be married to Charlemagne’s daughter Rotrud (Erythro) should be viewed as an attempt to broker peace between the two powers and avoid a war. The Byzantine strategic situation in Italy was, at the time, in a poor state.45 Notably, in Theophanes’s narrative, the betrothal was arranged just as an army was sent to pacify a revolt in Sicily and was not broken off until after Nicaea II had concluded its proceedings and reunited Byzantine Christendom with the Papacy over the issue of icons.46 While Charlemagne’s reluctance to part with his daughters is generally well known, the timing of the betrothal and its end suggest that Irene deliberately chose to make the match to buy time to shore up the Byzantine position in Italy. The betrothal largely precluded any moves that Charlemagne may have been considering making against the Byzantine sphere of influence while it was in effect. By the time Irene decided to end the match, the revolt in Sicily had been quelled, the empire was once again fully in communion with the church (while the Franks were still suspicious of icons), and a Byzantine expedition was in the works to conquer parts of Lombardy from the Franks and place them under the control of a client king.47 The Byzantine position was undeniably stronger in Italy by the end of the betrothal as compared to its start, and this coincidence seems too favorable for the empire to have been entirely accidental. Thus, in both East and West, because of her limitations militarily, Irene opted for clever diplomacy to advance both the empire’s and her own interests.

Simply avoiding conflict with troublesome actors within and outside the state was not Irene’s only response to the difficulties of ruling the Roman state as a woman. Like Martina before her, Irene could not trust the army, and other possible emperors existed, making reliable allies an absolute necessity to prevent a coup or civil war.48 Eunuchs were one group from which Irene was to draw as she began placing allies in positions of power and bending the state to her will. With eunuchs being a significant part of empresses’ palace staff, Irene had been in the palace and leading this eunuch staff for six years at the time of Leo IV’s death.49 By that point, she certainly would have known whom she could trust to look after her interests and who was competent. Eunuchs were given greater trust as a result of their inability to father children—This fact reduced their ability to provide a clear succession plan to potential coup supporters, who above all would want to ensure their interests be looked after by a long and stable dynasty. Although this did not necessarily prevent eunuchs from plotting against their imperial employers (as a eunuch could always place a fertile family member on the throne), there nevertheless remained a cultural “common sense” in Byzantium that eunuchs were trustworthy. Moreover, eunuchs were also associated with angels, who obviously could not lie.50 Thus, it is not surprising that eunuchs appeared prominently as generals and bureaucrats in Irene’s reign, given that a pool of them had already been vetted by their service to Irene while she was Leo IV’s empress, and the cultural stigmas attached to them, which would have made them attractive to Irene given her tenuous rule.

Plausibly, similar reasoning motivated Irene’s appointment of family members into important positions within the imperial administration. Following Irene’s arrival in Constantinople as Leo IV’s wife and continuing even after her deposition, others bearing her surname, Sarantapechos, appear in a number of places: a cousin was married to the Bulgar khan, a relative married the future emperor Staurakios, her uncle Constantine was perhaps strategos (commander) of the Helladics during Irene’s reign, and his son Theophylact was a spatharios at that time as well. A reason for this may have been that, similar to Irene’s eunuch staff, she would naturally have been familiar with her family members and from there be able to pick out those competent and trustworthy enough to trust with authority. Additionally, her family was perhaps even less likely to plot against her than eunuchs were. Especially after Constantine VI’s blinding, it would have been in the interest of the Sarantapechos family to keep Irene on the throne until her death, thereby hopefully providing family members with a dynastic claim to rule.

Obviously, the dynastic connection was not infallible. Dynastic claims were not sacrosanct in Byzantium, and only one family member could ultimately make good on such a claim, so it would have doubtlessly crossed the minds of highly placed Sarantapechoses to hasten Irene along and place themselves on the throne.51 But, taking the risk of an actual coup attempt, especially given Irene’s talent for ferreting them out, would certainly have been harder to justify to oneself when simply waiting out the clock seemed a viable option. Even if imperial ambitions were not to be found among the Sarantapechoses, the family members whom Irene empowered, at the very least, would have feared the loss of the family’s prominence in a new administration, especially as Irene came to associate herself and her supporters with Iconophilism and her opponents with Iconoclasm, which would have helped ensure their continued loyalty.52

Irene’s decision to reverse Iconoclasm was perhaps the most significant in assuring her continued reign, despite the risks in such a move. The army revolt that ended the first attempt at a church council in 786 AD evinces this point.53 As Whittow keenly observes, by ending Iconoclasm, Irene implicitly associated opponents of her rule with Iconoclasm and supporters of her rule with Orthodoxy.54 While this had significant propaganda benefits, it also served almost totally to break the state to her will. To her enemies, now essentially forced to champion the Iconoclast cause by challenging the “New Helena,” anyone whom Irene promoted in her administration was seen as an Iconophile who could not be trusted to support a new Iconoclast administration, if and when she was overthrown. The men whom she promoted surely were aware of this too. If Iconoclasts—that is to say, enemies of Irene—were to take power, their careers would almost certainly have been over. Thus, all that Irene had to do to guarantee the continued loyalty of much of the state apparatus was to ensure that she was the only viable alternative to a potential Iconoclast administration.

For this reason, Irene tolerated the rivalry between Aëtios and Staurakios during her sole reign. Essentially, as long as the palace officials failed to coalesce around another Iconophile-friendly candidate, they had to stick with Irene or risk their infighting allowing an Iconoclast to assume power and end their careers. Even when Aëtios brought to Irene credible accusations of Staurakios’s plot against her in 799 AD and 800 AD, she simply reprimanded Staurakios and forbade officials from approaching him. This punishment seems weak coming from a woman who had found no issues in humiliating, flogging, and blinding anyone who threatened her position in the past. However, when considered in the context of her strategic goal in ending Iconoclasm, this break in her character is not evidence, as Treadgold hypothesized, of a loss of nerve, but rather of a continuation of the strategy that she had been using to ensure ultimate loyalty to her already.55 As Whittow points out, it was only a short two years after Staurakios’s death that Irene was deposed; by meting out such mild punishments for Staurakios, Irene showed an awareness of Staurakios’s value as a counterbalance to Aëtios, attempting to preserve a crucial part of that palace dynamic.56 With her position tenuous enough to allow the ordained and mutilated half-brothers of Leo IV to be seriously considered as viable alternatives, such measures were necessary to protect Irene’s position.57

The Presentation of Power: Legitimacy Through Faith and Works

Given the precariousness of Irene’s position, ensuring the loyalty of imperial officials would not have been sufficient on its own to prevent her deposition. Irene also needed to maintain the loyalty of the general populace. To do this, she needed to find ways to balance her position as ruler of the empire with the expectations of what a woman in Byzantium was supposed to look and act like. Her reign thus had more than a few examples of clear imperial propagandizing; miracles such as a coffin with an inscription predicting her regency being found and the return of a relic thrown into the ocean by Constantine V are clear fabrications straight from Irene’s propaganda machine. Moreover, the strategic goal of the “campaign” of Irene and Constantine VI into Thrace seems to have been to combat the populace’s ignorance of the reigning emperors, rather than any foreign enemy.58 Irene seems to have been keenly aware of the need to present the power that she wielded as regent and later, as sole sovereign, in a way that did not disrupt too dramatically Byzantine sensibilities about female behavior. One of the most important ways that Irene presented herself was as the restorer of Orthodoxy. This was a role that she could take on without necessarily appearing to step out of place for how a woman “ought” to act. If anything, that such “lowly” people reversed Iconoclasm may have been proof to contemporary witnesses of her divine favor, as the praise that Theophanes sings of her and her son at the start of his account suggests.59 Irene’s patronage of the Iconophile cause and acclamation alongside Constantine VI as a new Helena and Constantine are evidence enough of the key role that returning religious peace to the empire played in her official propaganda.

However, her cultivation of such an image did not begin with that acclamation nor with her attempts to call a church council. From nearly her first day as regent, she contrasted her pious rule with the irreverent and unOrthodox behavior of the other Isaurian dynasts, as exemplified by the Christmas mass in 781 AD. At this mass, the half-brothers of Leo IV—newly ordained as punishment for the attempt of the eldest, Nikephoros, to seize power—were made to administer the communion as priests, while Irene and Constantine VI arrived in imperial procession to “return” the crown that Leo IV had allegedly stolen shortly before his death.60 Reducing the sons of an emperor to literal servants of the faithful, given their roles in the mass, was undoubtedly a humiliation and the attempt of Irene and her administration to project their power to the notables in Constantinople.

The mass’s intended message for anyone who could have opposed Irene seems to have been as follows: “Even members of the Isaurian dynasty are not so prestigious as to prevent Irene from stripping them of office, title, and status.” Along with this, such a public showing of the half-brothers’ new status served not only as a warning but as a clear announcement that no other legitimate dynastic contenders to the throne remained. Because simply ordaining the half-brothers and quietly exiling them to a monastery could have left room for doubt and rumors that perhaps someone with a legitimate dynastic claim was still available, to show the half-brothers’ new status as clergymen made sure that no one in Constantinople could claim ignorance of the fact that Constantine VI was the only remaining member of the Isaurian dynasty who could legitimately be emperor. This increased the chances that the population of Constantinople would see any future coup attempts or rebellions against the regency government as naked power grabs, whatever reason the theoretical traitors cited.

However, the image that Irene crafted for herself at this moment can only fully be understood within the context of her role in the mass: the returner of the “stolen” crown.61 That Leo IV stole the crown and died as a result seems to have been more propaganda, but it was evocative propaganda, which harkened back to the supposed hatred of holy relics that Leo IV’s father, Constantine V, had harbored.62 While not necessarily the same vice as Constantine V’s hatred of relics, portraying Leo IV as having coveted the Church’s crown was meant to show that the previous two Isaurian emperors were both fundamentally unable to respect the church and its property, no matter how important. The full function of Leo IV’s half-brothers administering the communion now starts to come into view. The Isaurian line, this entire event implies, was incapable on its own of respecting the Church. The disrespectful treatment of its relics by both previous Isaurian emperors exemplified this. With God himself having punished Leo IV, it then fell to Irene, as God’s chosen ruler, to correct the Isaurians’ wrongs and ensure that Constantine VI was raised to be a pious ruler. Irene thus arranged for the “stolen” crown to be “returned,” now adorned with even more jewels, which also returned the “proper” order of things: the Roman state was defended, and the Church was enriched.63 Likewise, Leo IV’s half-brothers’ ordination and administration of communion at this mass served to “correct” the Isaurian dynasty itself, by forcing its remaining members to respect the Church by making them servants of it and its congregation.

However, this example is not necessarily a case in which Irene’s gender truly stood as an impediment. While the fact that she was running a regency government, with dubious legitimacy, likely fed into her decision to perform the mass that way, any emperor could have propagandized themselves in a similar way. To see Irene adjusting ceremony to her gender one must look to the 799 AD celebration of Easter Monday, when Irene set out in the usual procession from the church of the Holy Apostles. However, she did so with an important change; rather than ride a horse, she was drawn in a large golden chariot with four men aboard as well.64 Irene’s understanding of gender and its communication likely informed this, for the act of riding a horse had strong masculine and martial connotations in Byzantium. As shown in the Madrid Skylitzes, the act of successfully riding a horse and defeating a captured Arab was enough to justify depicting the eunuch Theodore Krateros as a bearded man.65 Even in Digenis Akrites, the Byzantine epic poem about a Byzantine soldier on the borderlands with the Caliphate, the hero raped a woman for her “immodesty” because she disguised herself and fought as a man.66 For both reasons, it simply would not do for Irene to appear mounted on a horse and as a soldier in such a public event.

Instead, she found a way to make the best of a difficult situation. A large chariot provided three benefits for Irene to ingratiate herself to the people of Constantinople. One benefit was that the four-horse chariot, even packed as it was with five passengers, could carry far more coinage to distribute to the assembled spectators than could a single horse and rider. Indeed, Theophanes commented, “[Irene] distributed largess in abundance” during this procession.67 Unsurprisingly, the masses were likely to see a generous emperor as a good emperor. By opting for a mode of transportation which was better able to accommodate her strategic generosity, Irene exhibited an obvious grasp of this concept.

Moreover, from her position on the chariot, she enhanced the performance of her gender to the crowd. Above the crowd on a horse, the rider naturally appears prominently, drawing attention to themselves in a way that was believed to be unfitting of a good Byzantine woman.68 Caught between her duty as the sovereign to conduct this procession and the expectations of a woman, Irene opted for a mode of transportation that allowed her to still act as a woman as best she could. Not only did a chariot lower her visibility by keeping her closer to the ground, but it made her less visible behind the four men guiding the horses pulling the chariot. This position relative to the crowd had another benefit as well. Since most women were assumed to be unable to control their emotions, much of being a good woman in Byzantium was through ostentatious attempts to do so.69 Her position closer to the crowd made it easier for her to show the crowd how hard she was trying to control her emotions in response to their adulations and to allow better for strategic breaks in that control, which would naturally involve her generously rewarding the populace with the coinage onboard the chariot. The use of a chariot, therefore, was not simply a concession to the patriarchal order but also one designed to manipulate that order and its assumptions to increase her legitimacy among the average Constantinopolitan.

Finally, by employing the use of a large chariot for this procession, Irene gained a chance to confer a unique and incredibly prestigious honor on the men she chose to accompany her upon it. Undoubtedly then, choosing who to accompany her was a political move, aimed to reward and ensure future support among key members of the empire’s elite. One man on whom she bestowed this honor, Constantine Boilas, is perhaps the least important and the hardest to explain of those on her chariot, being mentioned only during this event in Theophanes’ narrative.70 If anything, Boilas’s presence suggests more about Saint Ioannikios. By including a member of Ioannikios’ family, Irene showed his family to have been far more influential than his hagiography lets on.71

The brothers Sisinnios, and Niketas, strategos of Thrace and domestic of the Schools, respectively, also accompanied Irene. That two members of this same family appeared in the procession immediately speaks to the family’s influence. Given Niketas’s importance to Aëtios’s move against Staurakios later that year, Irene may have been aiming with this gesture to keep the family loyal to her personally, rather than to a court faction. Alternatively, their presence on the chariot and Niketas’ later alliance with Aëtios shows the influence that Aëtios’s faction already had in the court, and their presence here was a symbolic concession to appease it. In either case, although this move evidently failed to stop Niketas from contributing to palace intrigues, it shows Irene’s awareness that she had to use any means possible to curry favor with the elites who could depose her and actively experimented with new ways of earning their loyalty.

This experiment was not entirely a failure either. Bardanes Tourkos, strategos of the Thrakesians, and later of the Anatolics, also accompanied her on this procession. According to Theophanes’s account, Tourkos made no trouble for Irene during the remainder of her reign.72 This honor seems to have been so effective in gaining Tourkos’s loyalty that he later revolted against Nikephoros I in support of Irene’s restoration to the throne.73 Although Tourkos’s revolt was likely more to advance his own career than to salvage Irene’s, it nevertheless attests to the success that this gesture had in securing the continued loyalty of an important commander in the East.

Irene’s agency as a ruler was somewhat limited by her gender. She did not simply “rule as a man,” but she also showed signs of being aware of these limitations, actively crafting policy and cultivating an image that worked within these limitations. The result was that she was able to rule as a woman while appearing as one. She made no effort to hide that she was a woman; in fact, excepting her novels in which she titled herself basileus, she used female titles and appeared prominently on coinage throughout her regency and reign.74 The imperial system did not dispassionately allow a woman to take the reins of power when it became necessary. In fact, too many at the time, namely, the supporters of Leo IV’s half-brothers, it must have seemed entirely unnecessary for a woman to lead the empire. Irene’s success has implications for understanding the later course of Byzantine imperial politics and women’s place within it. Without doubt, one of the most important factors in Irene’s success was that she took advantage of the ongoing controversy over Iconoclasm to find loyal allies for her administration. In asking why later imperial women could or could not take outright power, this key factor must be considered. While Irene’s boldness certainly led her to realize that antagonizing the Iconoclast controversy was the correct move to ensure her continued rule, the existence of this controversy was largely out of her control. This confluence of a bold, shrewd woman with a reasonable claim on power and a divisive issue that allowed her to create a party of loyalists seems to have been what finally allowed a woman to challenge the assumption since the Roman state’s inception that a woman could not rule. After all, not long after Irene and amid a renewal of Iconoclasm as official state policy, Empress Theodora would come to power and again declare it heresy, in that case for good.

Notes

  1. Warren T. Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 422-424.
  2. ibid, 310, 417.
  3. ibid, 417.
  4. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near East History, AD 284-813, ed. Cyril A. Mango, Roger Scott, and Geoffrey Greatrex (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 626.
  5. Patricia Varona and Óscar Prieto, “Three Clergymen Against Nikephoros I: Remarks on Theophanes’ Chronicle (AM 6295-6303),” Byzantion 84 (2014): 498, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44173412.
  6. Treadgold, A History, 552.
  7. Theophanes, Chronicle, 613.
  8. ibid, 619.
  9. ibid, 626.
  10. John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 115; Robin Pierson, “Episode: 79: A Mother’s Love,” August 14, 2015, in The History of Byzantium, produced by thehistoryofbyzantium.com, podcast, https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/2015/08/14/episode-79-a-mothers-love/.
  11. “Recent” here should be taken to mean “published between 1995 and 2019.”
  12. Bronwen Neil, “Regarding Women on the Throne: Representations of Empress Eirene,” in Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, ed. Bronwen Neil and Lynda Garland (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 115.
  13. ibid, 116.
  14. ibid, 125-6.
  15. ibid, 126-7.
  16. ibid, 127; emphasis mine.
  17. Judith Herrin, “The Imperial Feminine,” in Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 161-193.
  18. Judith Herrin, “Political Power and Christian Faith in Byzantium: The Case of Irene (Regent 780-790, Emperor 797-802),” in Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 204.
  19. ibid, 196, 199, 200, 203.
  20. Herrin, “The Imperial Feminine,” 177; Herrin, “Political Power and Christian Faith,” 196.
  21. Herrin, “The Imperial Feminine,” 177.
  22. Herrin, “Political Power and Christian Faith,” 196.
  23. Theophanes, Chronicle, 654. For example, Aëtios, one of the two most important eunuchs in Irene’s administration during her sole rule, was supposed to have been plotting against Irene to put his brother on the throne.
  24. Mark Whittow, “Motherhood and Power in Early Medieval Europe, West and East: The Strange Case of Empress Irene,” in Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe: Essays Presented to Henrietta Leyser, ed. Henrietta Leyser (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 81.
  25. Lynda Garland, “Irene (769-802),” in Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium AD 527-1204 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 80-82.
  26. Whittow, “Motherhood and Power in Early Medieval Europe,” 78-79.
  27. Herrin, “The Imperial Feminine,” 161-193; Whittow, “Motherhood and Power in Early Medieval Europe,” 81.
  28. Carolyn Connor, Women of Byzantium (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), xii.
  29. Garland, “Irene,” 80.
  30. Theophanes, Chronicle, 613.
  31. Garland, “Irene,” 73; Theophanes, Chronicle, 613.
  32. Garland, “Irene,” 73.
  33. Treadgold, A History, 349; Ralph-Johannes Lillie, “The Byzantine-Arab Borderland from the Seventh to Ninth Century,” in Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Florin Curta (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005), 19.
  34. Garland, “Irene,” 80-81, 86-87.
  35. Theophanes records six serious attempts by high palace officials to depose Irene or set their favored candidate as her successor during her five years of sole rule; see Theophanes, Chronicle, 650-657.
  36. Michael Grübart, “The Man in the Street: Some Problems of Gender and Identity in Byzantine Material Culture,” in Material Culture and Well-Being in Byzantium (400-1453): Proceedings of the International Conference (Cambridge, 8-10 September 2001), ed. Michael Grübart, Ewald Kislinger, Anna Muthesius, and Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007), 52.
  37. ibid, 56.  Specific to the place of beards and their masculine connotations, see Shaun Tougher, “Bearding Byzantium: Masculinity, Eunuchs, and the Byzantine Life Course,” in Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, ed. Bronwen Neil and Lynda Garland (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 153-166.
  38. ibid, 163.
  39. Treadgold, A History, 418.
  40. Theophanes, Chronicle, 614-5.
  41. ibid, 635-6.
  42. Ralph-Johannes Lillie, “The Byzantine-Arab Borderland,” in Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis, 19.
  43. Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 92, 96.
  44. ibid, 96.
  45. Theophanes, Chronicle, 627-8.
  46. ibid.
  47. ibid, 627-8; Neil, “Regarding Women on the Throne,” 127.
  48. Treadgold, A History, 309-310, 417.
  49. Herrin, “The Imperial Feminine,” 177.
  50. Herrin, “Political Power and Christian Faith,” 196; Tougher, “Bearding Byzantium,” 164.
  51. Leonora Neville, Byzantine Gender (Leeds, UK: ARC Humanities Press, 2019), 84.
  52. Whittow, “Motherhood and Power in Early Medieval Europe, West and East,” 81.
  53. Theophanes, Chronicle, 635.
  54. Whittow, “Motherhood and Power in Early Medieval Europe, West and East,” 81.
  55. Treadgold, A History, 422.
  56. Whittow, “Motherhood and Power in Early Medieval Europe,” 84.
  57. Theophanes, Chronicle, 650-651.
  58. ibid, 607, 627, 631.
  59. ibid, 626.
  60. ibid, 626-7.
  61. ibid, 625, 627.
  62. Regarding the credibility of accusations of Leo III and Constantine V’s targeting relics in addition to their Iconoclasm, see John Wortley, “Iconoclasm and Leipsanoclasm: Leo III, Constantine V, and the Relics,” in Studies on the Cult of Relics in Byzantium up to 1204 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 253-279.
  63. Theophanes, Chronicle, 627.
  64. ibid, 651. I’ll also note here that I have seen Judith Herrin describe the arrangement of the chariot as having the men walking on the ground alongside and holding the reigns, in Women in Purple. However, I am writing this addition to the footnote in 2023, and I’m not going back and finding the specific page. You have the book and the author, and the specific page describing the event in the primary source. If you take issue, go figure it out yourself, jackass.
  65. Grübart, “The Man in the Street”, 56.
  66. Neville, Byzantine Gender, 49.
  67. Theophanes, Chronicle, 651.
  68. Neville, Byzantine Gender, 38.
  69. ibid, 38-9.
  70. Theophanes, Chronicle, 651.
  71. ibid, 651-652; “Venerable Joannicus the Great,” Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, accessed March 6, 2020, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2019/11/04/103171-venerable-joannicius-the-great.
  72. Theophanes, Chronicle, 651-4.
  73. ibid, 659.
  74. Garland, “Irene,” 87.

Bibliography

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Norwich, John Julius. A Short History of Byzantium. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

The History of Byzantium. Episode 79, “A Mother’s Love.” Performed by Robin Pierson. Published August 14, 2015, on Thehistoryofbyzantium.com, https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/2015/08/14/episode-79-a-mothers-love/. Accessed December 13, 2019.

Tougher, Shaun. “Bearding Byzantium: Masculinity, Eunuchs and the Byzantine Life Course.” In Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, edited by Bronwen Neil and Lynda Garland, 153-166. Burlington: Ashgate, 2013.

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Wortley, John. “Iconoclasm and Leipsanoclasm: Leo III, Constantine V and the Relics.” In Studies on the Cult of Relics in Byzantium up to 1204, 253-279. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.