Justinian II

Justinian II, last emperor of the Heraclian dynasty and known to later generations by the grim epithet Rhinotmetos (the slit-nosed), was born in Constantinople about 668 or 669. He was the son of Emperor Constantine IV and Empress Anastasia and was given the name of the celebrated sixth-century lawgiver and conqueror Justinian I, a choice that advertised dynastic continuity and imperial ambition. Associated on the throne while still a child, he became sole emperor in 685 upon his father’s death, at roughly sixteen years of age. The empire he inherited had survived the great Arab sieges of Constantinople and retained Asia Minor, the Aegean, and fragments of Italy and the Balkans, but it was fiscally strained and demographically weakened. Justinian II set out to reverse decline by energetic, often ruthless, government.

In his first reign, from 685 to 695, he combined military, demographic, and ecclesiastical initiatives. He transferred substantial Slavic populations from the Balkans into the Opsikion and other Anatolian themes, seeking both to deprive Balkan enemies of manpower and to replenish the empire’s soldier-peasantry. Early in the reign a treaty with the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik provided a breathing space and a share of Caucasian revenues, but Justinian later broke the arrangement. The resulting war culminated in the defeat at Sebastopolis in 692, after which many of the recently settled Slavs deserted to the Arabs. In 691–692 he summoned the so-called Quinisext Council, or Council in Trullo, to complete the disciplinary work of the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils. Its canons regulated clerical life, liturgy, and morals; several, notably those touching clerical marriage and the relative rank of Constantinople and Rome, were unacceptable to the papacy. Pope Sergius I refused to sign, and Justinian’s attempt to have him arrested failed. At home the emperor’s need for money produced a harsh fiscal regime. The sakellarios Stephen, a eunuch of Persian origin, and the general logothete Theodotos became notorious for extortion. Discontent in Constantinople and among the military peaked in 695, when the strategos of Hellas, Leontios, was proclaimed emperor. Justinian was seized, publicly mutilated by the slitting of his nose (and, according to some accounts, the cutting of his tongue), and banished to the remote outpost of Cherson in the Crimea, a punishment meant to bar him forever from the throne.

Exile did not break him. After quarreling with the Chersonites and learning that the government of Tiberios III intended to move him, Justinian escaped by sea to the court of the Khazar khagan. There he married Theodora, sister of Khagan Busir, thereby gaining a powerful if unreliable protector. When Byzantine diplomacy induced the Khazars to plot his death, he fled by fishing boat across the Black Sea, surviving a storm that he later attributed to divine favor, and took refuge with Tervel, khan of the Bulgars. In 705 Tervel supplied him with an army. The expedition reached Constantinople but could not force the walls; Justinian then entered the city by night through an aqueduct with a handful of followers, a coup that panicked the defenders and opened the gates. Restored to power, he had Leontios and Tiberios III paraded in chains through the Hippodrome, subjected to ritual humiliation, and put to death. A wide-ranging vengeance followed against officials, soldiers, and civilians who had served the intervening regimes. Theodora, who had been detained by the Khazars, was eventually sent to him and crowned Augusta; their infant son Tiberius was raised as co-emperor. Justinian also honored Tervel with the rank of caesar, an unprecedented distinction for a Bulgar ruler. Militarily he attempted to reassert control in Italy, punishing Ravenna, and to stabilize the eastern frontier, with limited lasting success. His first wife Eudokia is attested as the mother of a daughter.

The second reign, from 705 to 711, reproduced the pattern of overreach that had destroyed the first. Determined to punish Cherson for its earlier disloyalty, Justinian dispatched a fleet and army with orders of extreme severity. The expedition alienated the Crimean cities, the Khazars, and finally the imperial fleet itself. The troops proclaimed the Armenian general Bardanes as emperor under the name Philippicus. When the rebel armada appeared at Constantinople, the capital, weary of Justinian’s reprisals, admitted Philippicus without a fight. Justinian, campaigning in Asia Minor, found his army melting away. He was overtaken and captured in the vicinity of Damatrys in Bithynia and put to death in the autumn of 711. His young son Tiberius, who had been left in the capital, was dragged from the church of the Blachernae, where his grandmother Anastasia had sought sanctuary for him, and killed. With those two deaths the dynasty founded by Heraclius in 610 came to an end. Justinian’s head was sent to the West and displayed in Ravenna and Rome. Contemporary and near-contemporary Greek chronicles, above all the Chronographia of Theophanes, depict him as bloodthirsty and impious; modern historians, while not denying his cruelty, also emphasize his administrative energy, his concern for Roman legal and ceremonial tradition, and the structural difficulties of ruling a seventh-century empire under constant external pressure.