The brief imperial house of Nikephoros III Botaneiates, the elderly general who held the Byzantine throne between the Doukas and Komnenos dynasties.
The Botaneiatai were a distinguished family of the Anatolian military aristocracy, the class of provincial generals who had long supplied Byzantium with soldiers and emperors. Nikephoros Botaneiates rose through decades of campaigning on the empire’s eastern and Balkan frontiers, and claimed a lineage reaching back to the great tenth-century house of Phokas and beyond.
His bid for the throne came in the crisis years of the 1070s, when the empire reeled from the loss of most of Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks and from repeated civil wars among its generals.
In 1078 Nikephoros, already an old man, revolted against the ineffective Michael VII Doukas and was proclaimed emperor, entering Constantinople and marrying Michael’s empress, Maria of Alania, to bolster his legitimacy. His short reign was consumed by fresh rebellions — including that of Nikephoros Bryennios, whom he defeated with the help of a young general named Alexios Komnenos — and by the empire’s continuing military and financial collapse.
The luxury manuscripts he commissioned, such as the homilies of John Chrysostom now called Coislin 79, show him in full imperial majesty, but the reality of his rule was a state contracting on every front.
In 1081 the very general who had served him, Alexios Komnenos, turned against the childless old emperor and seized Constantinople. Nikephoros abdicated without much resistance and retired to a monastery, where he soon died. His overthrow brought Alexios I to the throne and inaugurated the Komnenian dynasty that would stabilise and partly restore the empire.
The house of Botaneiates thus amounts to a single reign, but a pivotal one: the last flicker of the old Anatolian military aristocracy’s hold on the throne before the Komnenoi remade the Byzantine state.