The Byzantine imperial family that held the throne between the Macedonian and Komnenian dynasties, on the eve of the disaster at Manzikert.
The Doukai were one of the oldest and grandest families of the Byzantine aristocracy, with roots in Paphlagonia. They came to the throne in 1059 when Constantine X Doukas succeeded the abdicating Isaac I Komnenos.
Constantine X, a civilian aristocrat suspicious of the army, slashed military spending and favoured the bureaucratic elite of Constantinople — a policy that weakened the frontier defences just as new enemies pressed on every side.
When Constantine X died in 1067 his widow Eudokia married the general Romanos Diogenes to give the empire a soldier-emperor. Romanos IV rebuilt the neglected army and marched east against the Seljuk Turks, but at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 he was betrayed by the Doukas faction, defeated, and captured — the first Roman emperor taken alive by a Muslim ruler.
The Doukas court repudiated him on his release, and in the civil war that followed the empire’s hold on Anatolia collapsed.
Constantine X’s son Michael VII took sole power, but he was a scholarly, ineffective ruler nicknamed "Parapinakes" ("minus a quarter") for the debasement of the coinage and grain measure under him. His reign saw the final loss of Byzantine Italy to the Normans in 1071 and rebellions across the shrinking empire.
Michael was overthrown in 1078, and after a few more short reigns the throne passed to the Komnenoi, who would restore Byzantine fortunes.
The Doukas emperors are remembered above all for the catastrophe of Manzikert and the loss of Anatolia that followed — a turning point that opened the Byzantine heartland to Turkish settlement and helped set the stage for the Crusades.
The family itself remained powerful: Doukas women married into the Komnenian dynasty, and the name recurred among the Byzantine elite for centuries.