Nikephoros II Phokas

Nikephoros Phokas was born around 912 into one of the most formidable military dynasties of the Byzantine world. The Phokas family held vast estates in Cappadocia, the rugged plateau country of central Anatolia, and had supplied the empire with senior commanders for three generations ^[1]. His grandfather, the elder Nikephoros Phokas, had campaigned successfully in southern Italy under Basil I, and his father, Bardas Phokas, rose to the supreme field command of Domestic of the Schools ^[2].

Growing up in such a household meant an apprenticeship in war rather than in the salons of Constantinople. The Anatolian frontier of the early tenth century was a zone of constant raiding between Byzantine themes and the Muslim emirates of Tarsus, Melitene, and Aleppo, and the sons of the great eastern families learned soldiering young ^[1]. Nikephoros absorbed both the tactical craft of border warfare and the austere, intensely religious temperament that would mark his entire life. Contemporary accounts describe a man who wore a hair shirt, abstained from meat, and slept on the floor even at the height of his power ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Nikephoros II Phokas should begin with this double inheritance: aristocratic command of the Anatolian armies on one side, and a monkish personal severity on the other. The combination made him one of the strangest figures ever to wear the imperial purple ^[3].

Nikephoros advanced steadily through the eastern military hierarchy under Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos. By the early 950s he held the governorship of the Anatolikon theme, and around 954 or 955 he succeeded his father as Domestic of the Schools, commander in chief of the field armies of the East ^[2]. In that role he confronted the most dangerous enemy on the frontier, the Hamdanid emir Sayf al-Dawla of Aleppo, whose raids had humiliated Byzantine forces for a decade ^[4].

Working closely with his brother Leo Phokas and his talented nephew John Tzimiskes, Nikephoros reversed the balance. Byzantine columns took the fortress town of Hadath in 957, and the frontier war swung decisively in the empire's favor ^[4]. His reputation was sealed by the great expedition of 960 to 961, when the emperor Romanos II entrusted him with an armada assembled to retake Crete. The island had been in Arab hands since the 820s and its corsairs had terrorized Aegean shipping for over a century ^[5].

Nikephoros landed in the summer of 960, fought through a difficult winter siege, and stormed the fortified capital of Chandax in March 961 ^[5]. The reconquest of Crete ended the pirate emirate and restored Byzantine naval control of the Aegean, an achievement several previous expeditions had failed to deliver. He followed it almost immediately with a lightning campaign in the East, sacking Sayf al-Dawla's own capital of Aleppo in December 962 ^[4].

The sudden death of Romanos II in March 963 left the empire to two small boys, Basil and Constantine, under the regency of their mother Theophano and the eunuch chamberlain Joseph Bringas. Bringas distrusted the victorious general and tried to strip him of his command ^[2]. The move backfired. In July 963 the eastern armies gathered at Caesarea in Cappadocia proclaimed Nikephoros emperor, and he marched on Constantinople ^[1].

Street fighting broke out in the capital as Bringas attempted resistance, but the population and key officials, including the parakoimomenos Basil Lekapenos, swung behind the general. On 16 August 963 Nikephoros was crowned in Hagia Sophia by Patriarch Polyeuktos ^[2]. He then married the widowed empress Theophano, presenting himself not as a usurper but as guardian of the legitimate young emperors, whose rights he formally preserved ^[3].

The marriage caused an immediate scandal. Polyeuktos initially barred the emperor from the sanctuary, citing church rules on second marriages, and a dispute arose over whether Nikephoros had stood godfather to one of Theophano's children, which would have made the union uncanonical. The quarrel was smoothed over, but relations between the soldier emperor and the patriarch remained cold for the rest of the reign ^[3].

Any account of Nikephoros II Phokas achievements has to start with the eastern reconquests, the most dramatic Byzantine territorial gains in three centuries. As emperor he continued to command in person. In 964 and 965 his armies systematically reduced the fortified cities of Cilicia: Adana, Mopsuestia, and finally Tarsus, the great raiding base that had launched attacks on Anatolia for two hundred years ^[4]. In the same year, 965, a Byzantine expedition recovered Cyprus, ending the long condominium arrangement with the caliphate ^[2].

The climax came in Syria. Byzantine forces pressed toward the Orontes valley, and in October 969, while Nikephoros was in Constantinople, his commanders Michael Bourtzes and Peter the stratopedarches captured Antioch, one of the great patriarchal cities of early Christianity, lost to the empire since 637 ^[1]. Weeks later Aleppo accepted a treaty that made the Hamdanid emirate a tributary client. The frontier that Nikephoros left behind ran far beyond anything his predecessors had known ^[4].

He was also a military intellectual. Two surviving treatises are associated with his circle: the Praecepta Militaria, a practical manual on infantry and cavalry tactics attributed to the emperor himself, and a work on skirmishing warfare reflecting the border-fighting methods his family had perfected ^[6]. His legislation tried to protect the soldiers' landholdings that underpinned the theme armies, restricting the ability of great landowners and monasteries to absorb peasant and military plots ^[1]. A famous novel of 964 even curtailed new monastic foundations, arguing that existing houses should be endowed before fresh ones were built, a striking measure from so devout a ruler ^[3].

Nikephoros had been married once before his imperial wedding, and the death of his young son Bardas in a riding accident reportedly deepened his ascetic leanings. For a time he seems to have contemplated abandoning the world for a monastery altogether ^[3]. His closest spiritual friend was the monk Athanasios of Athos. With funds and privileges granted by Nikephoros, Athanasios founded the Great Lavra on Mount Athos in 963, the first of the great monasteries that still crown the peninsula, and the emperor is honored there as a co-founder to this day ^[7].

His marriage to Theophano was, by most accounts, political and loveless. Sources hostile to the empress paint her as ambitious and unfaithful, though modern historians treat those portraits with caution since they were written after her disgrace ^[2]. What is clear is that the emperor's domestic austerity, his hair shirt and his narrow camp bed, sat oddly beside the ceremonial splendor his office demanded.

Foreign visitors left vivid impressions. Liudprand of Cremona, ambassador of Otto I in 968, wrote a venomous account of his reception, mocking the emperor's appearance and manners, but even his caricature confirms Nikephoros as a blunt soldier with little patience for diplomatic flattery ^[8]. Negotiations over a marriage alliance with the western empire collapsed amid mutual insults about which ruler had the right to call himself emperor of the Romans ^[8].

Military glory did not translate into popularity at home. The endless campaigns required heavy taxation, and Nikephoros debased no coinage but did introduce the lighter tetarteron nomisma while collecting taxes in the full-weight coin, a practice contemporaries resented ^[1]. Grain shortages, high prices, and the visible privileges of the army bred anger in Constantinople. During a riot in 967 the emperor was pelted with stones, and he responded by strengthening the fortifications of the Great Palace, turning his residence into a citadel ^[2].

Foreign affairs added strain. A dispute with Bulgaria over tribute led Nikephoros to invite the Kievan prince Sviatoslav to attack the Bulgarians in 968, a maneuver that succeeded too well: the Rus came, conquered, and showed no interest in leaving, creating a crisis on the Danube that his successors would have to resolve ^[1]. Relations with Otto I in the West remained hostile after the failed embassy, with fighting flaring in southern Italy ^[8].

Within the palace, resentments hardened. Nikephoros had dismissed John Tzimiskes from his command, and the empress Theophano had grown close to the sidelined general. On the night of 10 to 11 December 969, conspirators were smuggled into the palace, reportedly with the empress's help. They found the emperor asleep on the floor beside his devotional icons, woke him, tormented him, and killed him. Tzimiskes was proclaimed emperor before dawn ^[2]. Patriarch Polyeuktos crowned the murderer only after Tzimiskes did penance and banished Theophano ^[3].

The verdict of Byzantine posterity was double edged. An epitaph attributed to John of Melitene captured it in a single line, observing that the man had conquered everything except a woman. Yet the conquests themselves endured. Crete, Cyprus, Cilicia, and Antioch remained imperial for generations, and the momentum Nikephoros created carried through the reigns of John Tzimiskes and Basil II to the empire's medieval apogee ^[1]. Military historians still study the Praecepta Militaria as key evidence for the tenth century Byzantine army, including its heavily armored kataphraktoi cavalry ^[6].

His religious legacy proved equally durable. The Great Lavra flourished, and Mount Athos grew into the leading monastic center of the Orthodox world, an institution that traces its formal beginnings to the emperor's patronage of Athanasios ^[7]. In parts of the Orthodox tradition Nikephoros came to be venerated for his piety and his violent death, and later legend even credited him with seeking recognition of fallen soldiers as martyrs, a request Polyeuktos refused ^[3].

For readers of any Nikephoros II Phokas biography, the essential Nikephoros II Phokas facts form a study in contradiction: an ascetic who loved war, a defender of small landholders who taxed them hard, a founder of monasteries who limited monastic wealth, and a conqueror undone not on a battlefield but in his own bedchamber. Few Byzantine emperors accomplished more in six years, and few ended more grimly ^[2].