Irene of Athens

Irene of Athens was Byzantine empress consort, regent, and finally empress regnant in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. She was born in Athens, in the Theme of Hellas, to a Greek family of local prominence usually identified with the Sarantapechos clan; a patrician named Constantine Sarantapechos is recorded as her relative. Her exact year of birth is not preserved in the sources and is only estimated from her marriageable age. In 769 Emperor Constantine V summoned her to Constantinople as a bride for his son Leo. She arrived in the capital on 1 November 769, was married to Leo on 17 December in the palace church of the Virgin of the Pharos, and was crowned empress. Their son Constantine was born on 14 January 771. After Constantine V died in 775, Leo reigned as Leo IV until his own death on 8 September 780. Irene, already known as an opponent of iconoclasm, became regent for the child emperor Constantine VI.

During the regency Irene placed trusted eunuchs, above all Staurakios, in high office and moved to undo the iconoclast settlement of the Isaurian emperors. In 784 the iconoclast patriarch Paul IV resigned; Irene had her secretary Tarasios, still a layman, ordained and installed as patriarch so that a council could be prepared. Troops still loyal to iconoclasm broke up a first gathering in the Church of the Holy Apostles in 786. In September and October 787 the council met instead at Nicaea. This Second Council of Nicaea, recognized as the seventh ecumenical council, condemned iconoclasm and restored the veneration of icons, distinguishing veneration from worship. Irene also directed foreign policy: her forces campaigned against the Abbasid Caliphate, and she negotiated with the Franks, including a betrothal between Constantine VI and Charlemagne’s daughter Rotrude that was later cancelled.

As Constantine VI grew older, mother and son became rivals. In 790 the soldiers of the Armeniac theme mutinied, proclaimed Constantine sole emperor, and forced Irene into retirement within the palace. She returned as co-ruler in 792. Constantine’s repudiation of his first wife Maria of Amnia and his marriage to her lady-in-waiting Theodote in 795 provoked the so-called Moechian controversy and alienated monastic opinion. In 797 Irene’s partisans captured Constantine. On 19 August he was blinded in the Porphyra, the purple chamber in which he had been born; he died of the wounds, the exact interval being uncertain. Irene then ruled alone from 797 until 802. She was the first woman to govern the Byzantine Empire in her own right and issued nomismata and laws in the name of Irene basileus, using the masculine imperial title.

Her government remitted certain urban taxes and was remembered in Constantinople for generosity, though the treasury suffered. After Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800, the chronicler Theophanes recorded that a marriage between Irene and Charlemagne was discussed as a way of reuniting the imperial dignity; nothing came of it. On 31 October 802 senior officials led by Nikephoros, the logothete of the genikon, deposed her in a palace coup. Nikephoros was crowned the next day. Irene was sent first to the monastery of the Theotokos which she had founded on the island of Prinkipo in the Sea of Marmara, then further away to Lesbos. She died there on 9 August 803.

The Eastern Orthodox Church venerates Irene as a saint, commemorating her on 9 August, chiefly for the restoration of the icons at Nicaea. Her remains were later associated with the monastery she had founded on Prinkipo. Later historians have judged her reign in sharply different terms: as the restorer of Orthodoxy, as a ruthless dynast who destroyed her own son, and as the first female sovereign of the Roman Empire in the East. The principal contemporary narrative remains the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, written from an iconophile standpoint that favored her religious policy while recording the violence of 797.