 Surrounded by would-be usurpers and
assassins, no incompetent emperor remained God's vicar on earth
very long. Of the 88 emperors from Constantin I to XI, 13 took to a monastery.
Thirty others died violently - starved, poisoned, blinded, bludgeoned, strangled,
stabbed, dismembered, decapitated.
The skull of Nicephorus I ended up as a silver-lined gobled from which Khan Krum of the Bulgars toasted his boyars. The Empress Irene was so obssesed with retaining power that she had her son blinded and took his title of emperor. Even the sainted Constantine the Great had his eldest son slain and his wife suffocated in her bath. |