Michael Bourtzes took Antioch in 969 by escalade against the emperor's express orders, was dismissed for it, and joined the conspiracy that murdered Nikephoros II nine weeks later.
Michael Bourtzes belonged to the eastern military aristocracy — the class of great Anatolian landholding families that supplied the empire's generals and, when provoked, its usurpers.
He is remembered for one night. On 28 October 969 he led about three hundred men up ladders onto the wall of Antioch, seized two towers, and held them for three days until the army came up and the city fell. Antioch had been in Muslim hands for 331 years.
The emperor had forbidden the assault. Nikephoros II had wanted the city to surrender intact and dismissed Bourtzes for disobedience; six weeks later Bourtzes was among the men who murdered him.
His birth is not recorded and the year is a guess from his career; the family was established in the eastern themes and produced officers for generations afterwards.
He appears in the sources as a subordinate commander during the Syrian campaigns of the 960s, by which time he held the rank of patrician and a regional command in the region of Antioch.
By 968 he was one of the two officers Nikephoros left to maintain the blockade of the city, alongside Peter the Stratopedarch, with instructions that were explicit and that he did not follow.
What the record shows is a man of considerable nerve and no great patience with instruction, and it is fair to say the sources find him hard to admire and impossible to dismiss.
The Antioch escalade was a genuine feat — a night climb onto a defended wall with a small force, then three days holding a position that could not be reinforced, sending increasingly desperate messages to a colleague who was in no hurry. It was also a direct breach of orders by a subordinate who judged that success would excuse him.
When it did not excuse him, he took the second decision that defines him. Joining a conspiracy to murder an emperor is not the response of a man who accepted authority easily, and the archive should not smooth that into a story of injured merit. He was proud, he was slighted, and he committed regicide.
The city had been blockaded for a year and its garrison was thin. Bourtzes had built up intelligence from inside and identified a stretch of wall on the slopes of Mount Silpius where the defence was weakest.
On a cold night in late October he went up with about three hundred men and took two towers. The garrison counterattacked repeatedly over the following three days while his party held on, cut off above the city, sending word to Peter the Stratopedarch to bring the army.
Peter came, the walls fell, and Antioch was Byzantine for the first time since 638. The sack that followed was exactly what Nikephoros had been trying to avoid, which is why the reward for the most celebrated feat of arms of the reign was dismissal.
The conspiracy was John Tzimiskes's, and its motives were mixed — ambition, the empress Theophano's hostility to her husband, and the resentment of officers Nikephoros had disciplined. Bourtzes belonged firmly in the third category.
On the night of 10–11 December 969 the conspirators were brought into the palace and killed the emperor in his chamber. Bourtzes was among them.
He prospered under Tzimiskes and afterwards, and eventually governed Antioch itself as doux — the city he had taken and been broken for taking. He was still commanding in the 990s, when he was beaten by the Fatimids on the Orontes in 994 and subsequently dismissed by Basil II.
The Bourtzes family remained prominent in the eastern aristocracy for generations, and Michael is its most famous member.
His career is the clearest illustration in this archive of a structural problem the Byzantine state never solved: the eastern military families produced the commanders the empire could not do without, and those commanders were powerful enough that punishing one was dangerous.
Nikephoros was right on the merits and wrong on the consequences, and both halves of that are worth keeping in view. The order was sound, the discipline was defensible, and it cost him his life.