Justinian II was deposed and mutilated in 695, exiled to the Crimea, retook Constantinople in 705, and reigned a second time until he was killed in 711 — the last of the Heraclian dynasty.
Justinian II came to the throne at sixteen in 685 as the fourth generation of his family to rule, and had the confidence of a man who had never known anything else.
His first reign lasted ten years and ended in revolt: he was deposed in 695, had his nose slit and his tongue slit to disqualify him from ever ruling again, and was exiled to Cherson in the Crimea.
He came back. In 705 he retook Constantinople with Bulgar help, ruled a second time for six years, and was killed in 711 with his son — the end of the dynasty Heraclius had founded a century earlier.
He was born about 668, the son of Constantine IV, and succeeded at sixteen with a full treasury, a settled church and a frontier that his father had stabilised on all sides.
His early campaigns went well: he pushed the Arabs back in Armenia, resettled Slavic populations from the Balkans into Anatolia to fill out the army, and negotiated favourably with the caliphate over Cyprus and Armenia.
The trouble was domestic. He taxed hard, built expensively, and used two officials — a former monk and a eunuch treasurer — whose methods of raising money made him hated by exactly the classes that could remove him.
The consistent impression is of ability wrapped in an absolute inability to judge how far he could push people, and after 705 of something considerably darker.
The first reign shows real vision. The coinage reform is a genuinely original act of political theology; the Quinisext Council of 692 codified church discipline in ways still binding in Orthodoxy; the population transfers were ambitious administration. All of it was done without any sense that resentment accumulates.
The second reign is revenge. He came back to punish, executed the men who had deposed him, and sent expeditions against Cherson, the city that had exiled him, with orders the sources describe as exterminatory. Whether ten years of mutilated exile explains that or merely occasioned it is not recoverable, but the change in him is the one thing every source agrees on.
In 695 the army and the city rose, led by the general Leontios. Justinian was deposed, and instead of being executed he was mutilated — nose and tongue slit — on the reasoning that a disfigured man could not be emperor, and exiled to Cherson.
The reasoning failed. He escaped Cherson, married the sister of the Khazar khagan, escaped an assassination attempt arranged with the reigning emperor, sailed through a storm on the Black Sea, and made an alliance with the Bulgar khan Tervel.
In 705 he entered Constantinople through a disused water conduit with a small force, took the palace and the throne, and had his two predecessors publicly humiliated and beheaded. Tervel was rewarded with the title of Caesar — the first foreign ruler ever granted it.
His return broke the convention that mutilation ended a career, and later Byzantine politics is harsher for it: if a slit nose was not enough, blinding and death became the safer options.
The Quinisext Council and the coinage are the durable achievements, and both were assertions of the same idea — that the emperor governed a specifically Christian order and could say so on the currency and in canon law.
His death in 711 ended the Heraclian dynasty after a hundred and one years. Six emperors followed in six years, until a provincial general took the throne in 717 with an Umayyad army marching on the capital.