Byzantine Emperors: From Constantine to Constantine XI, eleven centuries of Roman rulers

The Byzantine emperors ruled the eastern Roman Empire from Constantinople for more than eleven centuries, from Constantine I, who dedicated the city in 330, to Constantine XI Palaiologos, who died defending it on 29 May 1453. By our count, 90 rulers held the throne as senior emperor in that time. None of them called himself Byzantine: they were emperors of the Romans, basileis tōn Rhōmaiōn, and saw themselves as the heirs of Augustus in an unbroken line.

This page lists every one of them, with the date of the reign, the dynasty, how each came to the throne, how each reign ended, the chronicler who tells us most about it, and where you can still see the emperor today, in a mosaic, a manuscript, a coin or a building. Below the list, we look at what the whole sequence reveals: how often the throne was seized by force, why so many emperors were blinded or sent to monasteries, and which rulers left the deepest mark. For how the office itself worked, from coronation to the limits of an emperor’s power, see our guide to imperial power in Byzantium.

Timeline of the dynasties

Eleven centuries of rule fall into some fifteen ruling families, separated by short and usually violent interludes. The chart shows each dynasty to scale. The gaps between the coloured bands are the reigns of emperors who founded no lasting line, and the shaded band marks the 57 years when Constantinople was held by the Latins and the legitimate emperors ruled from Nicaea.

Dynasty labels follow common modern usage; several “dynasties” were joined by marriage or adoption rather than descent, as the table below shows.

The complete list of Byzantine emperors

Who is on this list. 

We list the 90 emperors who reigned as sole or senior ruler from Constantinople, or from Nicaea between 1204 and 1261. Junior co-emperors who never ruled alone, Western emperors such as Valentinian I and Gratian, the Latin emperors of 1204–1261 and the rulers of Trebizond and Epirus are left out. Basiliscus and Artabasdos are included and marked as rival emperors: both held Constantinople, were crowned there and struck coins. Usurpers who never ruled from the capital are listed separately below the table. Emperors with two reigns are classified by how they first came to power and how their last reign ended.

Each reign is classified twice: by how the emperor came to power and by how the reign ended. The categories are simple on purpose, so that the whole sequence can be compared; the note in brackets gives the detail. The “main source” is the Byzantine historian or chronicler on whom our knowledge of the reign chiefly rests, which is often a hostile witness. Use the buttons to show one period, type a name to search, or click a column heading to sort.

How emperors came to power

Byzantium never had a law of succession. In theory the emperor was chosen by God, and that choice was made visible through the acclamation of the army, the senate and the people of Constantinople, followed by coronation in Hagia Sophia by the patriarch. In practice, legitimacy went to whoever could secure those acclamations, which is why the reigns in our table divide almost evenly between emperors who inherited the throne and emperors who took it.

How Byzantine reigns ended

More than two in five Byzantine emperors lost the throne by force or pressure. One in four was murdered, killed after being deposed, or mutilated.

Just over half of the emperors in our table, 47 of 89, died on the throne of natural causes, and even that figure includes five deaths that contemporaries attributed to poison. Four were killed in battle: Julian in Persia in 363, Valens at Adrianople in 378, Nikephoros I against the Bulgars in 811 and Constantine XI on the walls of Constantinople in 1453. The rest were removed, and the way they were removed is one of the most distinctive features of Byzantine politics.

Killing a deposed emperor was common, especially in the turbulent 7th and late 12th centuries. But Byzantium also developed two ways of ending a reign without (too much) bloodshed on the throne. The first was mutilation. An emperor was expected to be physically whole, so blinding a rival or slitting his nose was meant to disqualify him for ever: Heraklonas, Justinian II, Philippikos, Constantine VI, Michael V, Romanos IV and John IV all suffered it. Justinian II proved the rule could be broken, returning in 705 – with a gold prosthetic nose to take a bloody revenge (a somehow satisfying version, even if it might be a later tradition). The second was the monastery. Eleven emperors in our table were deposed and forced to take monastic vows, from Romanos I Lekapenos, sent to an island monastery by his own sons, to Michael VII Doukas, who ended his career as metropolitan of Ephesus. For the role of monasteries as places of retirement and exile, see our article on Byzantine monasteries.

A single abdication was truly voluntary: Isaac I Komnenos, ill and discouraged, gave up the throne in 1059 and retired to the Stoudios monastery. Every other emperor who “abdicated” did so with an army at the gates.

How we counted: 89 reign endings, because the joint reign of Zoe and Theodora in 1042 did not end in a fall: power passed to Constantine IX on Zoe’s marriage, and both women remained empresses. Figures are rounded and are based on the classification in the table above.

Emperors by period

Byzantine history is usually divided into three periods. Each has its own full article on this site; the summaries below show how the emperors of each age fit into the story. For the whole sequence of events, see our complete history of the Byzantine Empire.

Early period, 324–717: 31 emperors

The early emperors still ruled a Mediterranean empire, spoke and legislated in Latin, and governed from a city that was rapidly becoming the greatest in Christendom. The line runs from Constantine’s family through the Theodosian and Leonid houses to Justinian I, whose reconquests in Italy and Africa marked the high point of the age. The 7th century brought near-collapse: Heraclius defeated Persia only to lose Syria, Palestine and Egypt to the Arabs, and the twenty years after the second fall of Justinian II saw six emperors in quick succession. Read more about the Early Byzantine period.

Middle period, 717–1204: 45 emperors

Leo III’s defence of Constantinople against the Arabs in 717–718 opened a new era. The Isaurian emperors fought over icons, the Macedonian dynasty led the empire to its medieval peak under Basil II, and the Komnenoi rebuilt it after the disaster of Mantzikert in 1071. The period also had more violent successions than any other, ending with five emperors in the last nineteen years before the sack of 1204. Read more about the Middle Byzantine period.

Late period, 1204–1453: 14 emperors

After the Fourth Crusade, the legitimate line continued in exile at Nicaea under the Laskarid dynasty, which recovered Constantinople in 1261. The Palaiologoi then ruled for nearly two centuries, the longest dynasty in Byzantine history, over an empire that shrank to the capital, a few islands and the Peloponnese, until Constantine XI died in the fall of Constantinople. Read more about the Late Byzantine period.

Twelve emperors who shaped Byzantium

Which emperors were the greatest is an old argument with no settled answer. Rather than rank them, we have chosen twelve whose reigns changed the empire’s territory, law, faith or institutions for good, spread across the three periods.

Justinian and Basil II are the usual answers to the question of the greatest emperor; for the case for and against, we’ll rate in a future article the greatest and worst Byzantine emperors.

Empresses who ruled

Titles, names and nicknames

The early emperors used the Roman titles imperator, caesar and augustus. Greek gradually replaced Latin, and from the reign of Heraclius the official title became basileus, the Greek word for king, which the Byzantines reserved for their own emperor and, grudgingly, for the Persian king ⚠ CHECK: the adoption of basileus is usually dated to 629. Later emperors styled themselves “faithful in Christ, basileus and autokrator of the Romans”. The heir was crowned co-emperor; caesar and, from the 12th century, despotes became the highest titles below the throne. Our glossary of Byzantine terms explains these and other court titles.

Many emperors are better known by nicknames, some given in their lifetime, others invented by hostile chroniclers.

Emperor	Nickname	Meaning and origin
Justinian II	Rhinotmetos	“Cut-nose”, after his mutilation in 695
Constantine V	Kopronymos	“Dung-named”, an insult from the iconophile side, claiming he soiled the font at his baptism
Leo IV	the Khazar	His mother was a Khazar princess
Michael II	the Amorian; the Stammerer	From his home town and a speech defect
Michael III	the Drunkard	A label spread by the chroniclers of the dynasty that murdered him
Leo VI	the Wise	For his learning and writings
Constantine VII	Porphyrogennetos	“Born in the purple”
Basil II	Boulgaroktonos	“Bulgar-slayer”, attested only from the 12th century
Michael V	Kalaphates	“The caulker”, his father’s trade
Alexios V	Mourtzouphlos	Probably “bushy-browed”

Where to see the emperors today

No statue of a Byzantine emperor survives in Constantinople in its original place, but their faces are still easy to find. In Hagia Sophia, the mosaics of the galleries and entrances show Leo VI, Alexander, Constantine IX with Zoe, and John II Komnenos with his family, while the south-west vestibule shows Constantine and Justinian offering the city and the church to the Virgin. In Ravenna, the panels of San Vitale give the only contemporary portraits of Justinian and Theodora, and the Privileges mosaic in Sant’Apollinare in Classe shows Constantine IV.

The emperors’ buildings tell the same story in stone: the walls of Theodosius II, the Hippodrome where they faced the people, the remains of the Great Palace, and family foundations such as the Myrelaion of Romanos I and the Pantokrator of John II, now mosques. The red porphyry sarcophagi outside the Istanbul Archaeology Museum come from the emperors’ burial church of the Holy Apostles. Beyond the capital, the palace of Nymphaion recalls the emperors of Nicaea, and Mystras the last Palaiologoi. Our guide to Byzantine Istanbul lists what can be visited.

Manuscripts and coins complete the gallery. The Madrid Skylitzes, in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, illustrates the reigns of the 9th to 11th centuries in hundreds of miniatures; the Psalter of Basil II in Venice and the Paris Gregory in the Bibliothèque nationale de France carry imperial portraits; and the coins and seals catalogued by Dumbarton Oaks show almost every emperor as he chose to be seen.

Frequently asked questions

Further reading and sources

Sources and reference works used for the article

• A. Kazhdan (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1991), entries on each emperor.
• A.H.M. Jones, J.R. Martindale and J. Morris, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, 1971–1992).
• Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (Berlin, 1998–2013).
• P. Grierson, Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (Washington, 1966–1999).
• Dumbarton Oaks, “God’s Regents on Earth: imperial dynasties”, online exhibition of imperial seals.

Image rights
When not indicated below the picture.
Portrait of Constantine VII, ivory from the Pushkin Museum: Wooofer, CC BY-SA 4.0