Irene ruled the Byzantine Empire as regent and then in her own name, restored the veneration of icons at the Second Council of Nicaea, and had her own son blinded to keep the throne.
Irene was an orphan from Athens brought to Constantinople in 769 to marry the heir of a dynasty that had spent forty years suppressing the veneration of religious images — which she venerated.
When her husband Leo IV died in 780 she became regent for their nine-year-old son, and she governed the empire, with one interruption, for the next twenty-two years.
She reversed the religious policy of the dynasty she had married into, was pushed aside by her son, came back, had him blinded, and ruled for five years as sole monarch. She was deposed in 802 and died in exile within a year.
She came from a noble Athenian family, was orphaned, and was selected as a bride for Leo IV in circumstances the sources do not explain — possibly a bride-show, possibly a deliberate choice of someone without a powerful family behind her.
That she was an iconophile marrying into the iconoclast house is either a remarkable oversight or evidence that the policy was less absolute at court than the later sources suggest.
She bore Constantine in 771. In 780, months before Leo's death, a group of courtiers was caught with icons and punished, and the sources link the episode to a rupture between the imperial couple.
She is one of the most consequential rulers in this archive and one of the hardest to judge fairly, because the two things she is known for point in opposite moral directions.
The iconophile sources, who owe her everything, praise her piety and her firmness. They also have to record that she blinded her son, and they largely do so without comment, which is its own kind of statement.
What the record shows is exceptional political skill: she outmanoeuvred her husband's brothers, purged and rebuilt the army command, called and controlled a general council of the church, and recovered power after being removed from it. And it shows that she would do anything at all to hold it. Both are true and neither cancels the other.
Her first attempt at a council in 786 was broken up by iconoclast soldiers who invaded the church with drawn swords. She responded by transferring the units concerned out of the capital on a pretext and disbanding them.
The Second Council of Nicaea met in 787 and condemned iconoclasm, restoring the veneration — not worship — of images and defining the distinction that Orthodox theology has held to since.
It did not settle the matter permanently; iconoclasm returned under Leo V in 815 and was only finally ended in 843. But the theological framework was set here, and it is the reason her memory is honoured in the Orthodox church despite everything else.
Her son removed her from power in 790, restored her in 792, and by 797 had destroyed his own support. In August she had him seized and blinded, and took the throne herself.
She ruled for five years and issued coins and documents in her own name, in some cases using basileus, the masculine title. She cut taxes heavily, which was popular and fiscally ruinous, and negotiated with Charlemagne — a marriage between them was discussed, which would have reunited the empires on paper.
In October 802 her finance minister Nikephoros led a palace coup, and she was exiled to Lesbos, where she died within the year.
She restored the icons and ended the first iconoclast period, which is why she is a saint in the Orthodox church, and she blinded her son, which is why she is not much celebrated anywhere else.
Her sole rule had a consequence she cannot have wanted. In the west, a woman on the imperial throne was treated as a vacancy: on Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome, on the argument that there was no emperor in Constantinople. The two-empire problem in medieval Europe begins here.
She was the last of the Isaurian line to rule, and the dynasty that had held the walls in 718 ended with her deposition by a treasury official.