Zeno (emperor)

• 1. Introduction

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  Zeno, the Eastern Roman emperor who ruled from 474 to 491, rose from a mountain people that Rome had long dismissed as barbarians to sit on one of history's most contested thrones. He was born Tarasis, son of Kodissa, in the Isaurian highlands of Cilicia, a region deep inside the Taurus Mountains. When the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire was deposed in 476, the imperial regalia traveled east to Constantinople and landed at Zeno's feet. The man who sent them, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer, explicitly acknowledged Zeno's suzerainty over the West. At that moment, a one-time mountain officer became the theoretical sole ruler of a reunified Roman Empire. Yet Zeno's hold on the throne was never easy. He was overthrown once, besieged, chased into a mountain fortress, betrayed by generals he trusted, and haunted by a religious dispute that outlasted him by nearly three decades. How did a man from a people Romans considered uncivilized survive on that throne for seventeen years? And what did he leave behind when he finally died on the 9th of April, 491?

• 2. The Isaurian Outsider

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  Tarasis was born in Rusumblada, a settlement later renamed Zenopolis in his honor. His father was Kodisa, his mother Lallis, and his brother Longinus. The Isaurians inhabited the core of the Taurus Mountains, in what is now the Konya and Bozkir area of Turkey. Rome had governed them for over five centuries, yet still regarded them as borderland barbarians. One thing set them apart from the Goths and other Germanic peoples who filled the late Roman army: the Isaurians were Nicene Christians, not Arians. That distinction mattered enormously. It meant they were not formally barred from the imperial throne.

  The earliest surviving record of Tarasis dates to 464, when he obtained letters written by Ardabur, son of the powerful Alan military commander Aspar. Those letters showed that Ardabur had invited the Sassanid king to invade Roman territory. Tarasis handed them to Emperor Leo I, who used the evidence to strip Ardabur of his command, thereby weakening Aspar's grip on the army. As a reward, Leo appointed Tarasis comes domesticorum, one of the most prestigious offices in the Empire. Leo praised the act to Daniel the Stylite, a holy man both men consulted before military campaigns.

  To marry into the imperial family and make himself more acceptable to Constantinople's population, Tarasis took a Greek name: Zeno. The name belonged to a prominent Isaurian general, Flavius Zeno, who had fought against Attila in 447 and served as consul the following year. Whether that general was Zeno's actual father is disputed by modern historians, but the name carried enough prestige that borrowing it was a political act in itself. In mid-to-late 466, Zeno married Ariadne, elder daughter of Leo I. The following year their son was born and named Leo, staking a claim on the succession that left no room for ambiguity.

• 3. Overthrown and Restored

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  On the 29th of January, 474, Zeno was crowned co-emperor by his seven-year-old son, Leo II, whose own brief reign had just begun after Leo I's death eleven days earlier. When the boy fell ill and died later that year, Zeno became sole emperor of the East. His first significant diplomatic act was to send a senior officer named Severus as ambassador to the Vandal king Genseric, who was raiding the Empire's coastal cities. Severus secured what the sources describe as an "eternal" peace: Romans could ransom prisoners from Vandal captivity, and the Vandal persecution of Nicene Christians in their territory would end.

  Despite that success, the Senate and the public never warmed to Zeno. His legitimacy rested entirely on his marriage to Ariadne and his relationship with the dowager Empress Verina. On the 9th of January, 475, Verina, who wanted to replace Zeno with her lover Patricius, joined forces with her brother Basiliscus. The generals Illus and Trocundes, on whom Zeno had counted for Isaurian support, were persuaded to join the plot. Zeno fled Constantinople with Ariadne, his mother, a group of Isaurian followers, and the imperial treasury. Illus caught up and besieged him in a mountain fortress, also capturing Zeno's brother Longinus as a hostage.

  Basiliscus then destroyed his own coalition from the inside. He had Verina's candidate Patricius executed. He allowed the mob to massacre the Isaurians remaining in Constantinople, alienating Illus and Trocundes. He levied heavy taxes because Zeno had taken the treasury. He backed the Miaphysites, enraging the Chalcedonian people of Constantinople. A great fire that burned large sections of the city was blamed on him as well. When Zeno's bribes reached Illus, and then the general Armatus, Basiliscus was finished. In August 476, Zeno besieged Constantinople and the Senate opened the gates. Basiliscus sought sanctuary in the baptistery of Hagia Sophia, surrendered after extracting a promise that no blood would be shed, and was sent with his family to a fortress in Cappadocia, where they were enclosed in a dry cistern and left to die of exposure.

• 4. The Western Empire's End

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  While Zeno was blockaded in Isauria during Basiliscus's reign, the western empire was collapsing. The western emperor Julius Nepos had been a close partner of Zeno's, even minting coins bearing the names of Zeno, Leo II, and himself. In August 475, the western military commander Orestes revolted and forced Nepos to flee Italy for Dalmatia, then installed his own son Romulus Augustus on the throne. One year later, as Zeno was retaking Constantinople, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer overthrew both Romulus and Orestes.

  Odoacer and the Roman Senate sent an embassy to Constantinople carrying the imperial insignia. Their request was pointed: dissolve the formal separation of the empire, let Zeno rule as sole emperor, and give Odoacer the titles of patrician and official imperial governor of Italy. At the same moment, the exiled Julius Nepos sent a separate embassy asking Zeno for troops and money to retake Italy. Zeno's response preserved Rome's legal fiction without giving anyone what they actually wanted. He told the Roman Senate that Nepos was still their rightful emperor. He told Odoacer to receive his patriciate from Nepos first, though he would also grant it himself. Odoacer was left in effective control of Italy; Nepos kept his title and the scraps of western territory outside Italy, but no army to use them.

  Nepos was assassinated in 480. Odoacer invaded Dalmatia, ostensibly to punish the killers and also to absorb the territory. Zeno legitimized that annexation too. Odoacer in turn recognized Zeno as the sole ruler of a reunified empire in name, but began calling himself king rather than merely governor. The western empire was gone, and what replaced it was a polite legal arrangement between two men who each needed the other's acknowledgment more than they needed each other's cooperation.

• 5. Generals, Brothers, Rivals

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  Marcian, who tried to seize the throne in 479, came from both sides of imperial history: his father was the western emperor Anthemius, and his maternal grandfather was the eastern emperor Marcian. He had been consul twice, in 467 and 472, and had married Ariadne's sister Leontia, making him Zeno's brother-in-law. In Constantinople, he gathered troops composed of citizens and foreign soldiers at the house of a man named Caesarius, south of the Forum of Theodosius. His forces marched simultaneously on the imperial palace and on the house of Illus. During the day, the rebels overwhelmed the imperial troops, and citizens attacked from rooftops. Only after nightfall, when Illus moved an Isaurian unit from nearby Chalcedonia into the city and bribed Marcian's soldiers to stand aside, did Zeno escape.

  Marcian fled to the church of the Holy Apostles and was arrested with his brothers. Zeno sent them to Caesarea in Cappadocia. They attempted an escape; Marcian was recaptured and forced to become a monk in Tarsus, or possibly imprisoned in the Isaurian fortress of Papurius. He escaped again, raised new troops, and attacked Ancyra, before being defeated and captured by Trocundes, brother of Illus.

  Illus himself, Zeno's most capable general and repeated savior, eventually turned against the emperor. Both Zeno and the dowager Empress Verina had tried to have Illus killed; an assassin hired on Ariadne's behalf only wounded him. Illus withdrew from court with his friend Pamprepius, a man named Leontius, and his brother Trocundes. In 484, he raised the standard of revolt and had Verina, whom he had released from her prison at the fortress of Papurius, crown Leontius as emperor at Tarsus. The general he had once rescued was now his most dangerous enemy. A fresh army sent by Zeno in 485 defeated the rebels near Seleucia and drove them into Papurius. After four years of siege, the fort fell by treachery. Illus and Leontius were beheaded in 488, and their heads sent to Constantinople.

• 6. Two Theoderics and Italy

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  From 472 onward, Zeno faced constant pressure from two Ostrogothic leaders who shared a name and not much else. Theoderic the Amal, later known as Theoderic the Great, led the Moesian Ostrogoths and was the son of Theodemir. Theodoric Strabo, the leader of the Thracian Ostrogoths, was a rival with whom the Amal was in permanent competition. Zeno's strategy was to keep them fighting each other rather than attacking Constantinople, but the two men proved capable of cooperating when it suited them.

  At a moment Zeno had arranged for the Amal to strike Strabo, the two leaders instead met at Mount Soundis, discovered the Roman reinforcements Zeno had promised were absent, and together demanded that the Ostrogoths be allowed to extend their settlement territory southward in Moesia. Strabo commanded an army 30,000 men strong. Zeno tried bribing the Amal; the Amal refused. Rather than press a military advantage his forces had briefly achieved, Zeno let the Amal move through Thrace, plundering as he went.

  Strabo died in an accident in 480 or 481, after his cavalry horse stumbled and threw him onto a spear. Theoderic the Amal became king of the entire Ostrogothic nation. In 484, Zeno appointed him consul, the first time a non-citizen barbarian had held that distinction. He then deployed him against Illus and the usurper Leontius. But in 486, Theoderic revolted again and attacked Constantinople, cutting the city's water supply. Zeno bought peace and offered a solution that removed the Gothic threat from the Balkans entirely: Theoderic would invade Italy, defeat Odoacer, and establish his own kingdom there. Theoderic agreed in 487. The arrangement all but eliminated the Germanic military presence in the eastern Balkans, which was precisely what Zeno had been trying to achieve for over a decade.

• 7. The Henotikon and Its Fractures

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  The theological dispute Zeno inherited had been building since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which ruled that Christ possessed two distinct natures. The Miaphysites held that Christ had one nature; they were strong in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor. The Patriarch of Alexandria, Peter Mongus, was a Miaphysite. The people of Constantinople, however, were Chalcedonian, which is partly why Basiliscus's Miaphysite sympathies had turned the city against him.

  Zeno needed eastern provincial loyalty, and Acacius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, shared an interest in narrowing the gap between the factions. In 482, Zeno issued the Henotikon, meaning "Act of Union", a document drafted with Acacius's counsel and addressed to the ecclesiastical parties in Egypt. The Henotikon affirmed the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as the sole expression of faith. It condemned both Eutyches and Nestorius, accepted the twelve chapters of Cyril of Alexandria, and described Christ as the "only-begotten Son of God, one and not two." The teaching of Chalcedon was not explicitly rejected; it was simply passed over in silence.

  Pope Felix III in Rome refused to accept this silence as neutrality. He excommunicated Acacius in 484, triggering what became known as the Acacian schism. That rupture between Rome and Constantinople lasted until 519, nearly three decades after Zeno's death. The Henotikon satisfied no one fully; it was a political document dressed in theological language, and the theological parties knew it. In 489, Zeno took a more direct religious action by closing the Persian school of Edessa in Mesopotamia at the request of Bishop Cyrus II, because the school promoted Nestorian teachings. The school relocated to Nisibis, its original home, prompting a wave of Nestorian migration into Persia and strengthening a Christian tradition that would persist for centuries beyond Zeno's reign.

• 8. Death, Succession, and the Backgammon Hand

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  Zeno died on the 9th of April, 491, of dysentery or epilepsy, having ruled for seventeen years and two months. Both of his sons had predeceased him: Leo died in 474, and Zenon, his first son by his earlier wife Arcadia, died in youth while living at court. Empress Ariadne chose the succession herself, selecting a courtier named Anastasius. Zeno's brother Longinus then revolted, starting the Isaurian War.

  The later chroniclers George Kedrenos and Joannes Zonaras, writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, added a more gruesome account of his end. They claimed that Ariadne had Zeno sealed alive in a tomb while he was unconscious from drink or illness, and that passersby were ordered to ignore his cries. The story held that he survived for a time by eating the flesh of his own arms. Historians regard the tale as almost certainly false; no earlier or contemporary source mentions it, despite the fact that those sources were themselves hostile to Zeno's memory.

  What has survived from his life with more confidence is an unusual document: a backgammon hand. In 480, Zeno, who played a game called tabula, nearly identical to modern backgammon, encountered a position so unlucky that he wrote an epigram about it. The poet Agathias reproduced the epigram roughly half a century later. In it, Zeno describes his red pieces: seven checkers in one stack, three stacks of two checkers each, and two lone exposed pieces. He threw his three dice and got 2, 5, and 6. The rules required him to use all three results, but every available move would break one of his two-checker stacks, exposing them to capture and collapsing his position entirely. Some historians consider it the first recorded bad beat story in human history. The emperor who survived coups, sieges, exile, and the fall of Rome could not escape a terrible roll of the dice.