The dynasty that ruled Byzantium from 867 to 1056, took the empire to its greatest medieval extent, and produced its finest art, law and scholarship before running out of heirs.
The dynasty is named for the theme of Macedonia in Thrace, not for the ancient kingdom, and its founder was a peasant. Basil I came to Constantinople from a provincial family, made his career in the stables through a talent for horses and physical strength, and attracted the attention of the emperor Michael III.
He rose to become chamberlain, then co-emperor, and got there by arranging the murder of the Caesar Bardas in 866 and then of Michael himself in September 867.
The historians of the dynasty he founded then spent two centuries explaining that this had been necessary — which is why Michael III is remembered as a drunk, and why the Amorian material in this archive has to be read against the grain.
The Macedonians took the empire's intellectual life seriously in a way no dynasty had since Justinian. Basil I began a systematic revision of the law, and Leo VI completed it as the Basilika — Justinian's corpus in Greek, reorganised and made usable.
Constantine VII is the emblem of the period: a ruler who spent decades sidelined from actual power and used them to compile the Book of Ceremonies and the De Administrando Imperio, both of which this archive draws on as sources for how the empire understood itself and its neighbours.
The art of the period — the Paris Psalter, the Joshua Roll, the mosaics of Hagia Sophia including the one above — is the finest Byzantine work after late antiquity, and the deliberate revival of classical models in it is why the century is often called the Macedonian Renaissance.
The military record is the strongest of any Byzantine dynasty. The frontier moved outward continuously for more than a century, though much of the fighting was done by generals who were not Macedonians at all.
Crete was retaken in 961, Cilicia and Cyprus in 964–965, Antioch in 969 — all under Nikephoros Phokas and his officers, and all in the reigns of Romanos II and the two soldier-emperors who ruled in the name of his sons.
Basil II then annexed Bulgaria in 1018 after a thirty-year war, restoring the Danube frontier for the first time since the seventh century. At his death in 1025 the empire ran from the Danube to the Euphrates and had money in the treasury.
Basil II never married and left no child. His brother Constantine VIII ruled three undistinguished years and left two daughters, Zoe and Theodora, and the throne passed through Zoe's three husbands and an adopted son.
Theodora, the last of the line, ruled alone in her seventies and died in 1056 without an heir. The dynasty had lasted 189 years and ended for the simplest possible reason.
What followed was rapid. The treasury Basil II had filled was spent, the army he had built was run down in favour of mercenaries, and in 1071 at Manzikert the empire lost Anatolia. The gap between the greatest extent and the catastrophe is forty-six years.
The Macedonian period is the one later Byzantines looked back to, and the one modern historians generally regard as the empire's medieval peak: militarily dominant, administratively competent, intellectually productive and financially solvent at the same time.
Its weakness was structural and it was never solved. The empire had no rule of succession, so the throne depended on whether a capable adult male existed at the right moment, and twice in this dynasty the answer was no — filled once by soldier-emperors marrying in, and at the end by nobody at all.
The Macedonian emperors are also the reason this archive can be written. The Book of Ceremonies, the De Administrando Imperio, the Basilika and the chronicles compiled under their patronage are a large part of what survives about the middle Byzantine centuries.