Michael III ruled from 842 to 867. His reign restored the icons, converted the Bulgars, sent Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs and broke the eastern frontier open — and his successor's historians recorded him as a drunk.
Michael III came to the throne in 842 at the age of two and was murdered in 867 at twenty-seven. Between those dates the empire restored the veneration of icons, destroyed the emirate that had been raiding Anatolia for a generation, converted the Bulgars, and sent a mission to the Slavs that produced a written Slavonic language.
He personally directed very little of it. His mother Theodora governed as regent until 856, and his uncle Bardas ran the state as Caesar for most of the decade after that.
What he is remembered for is drinking, chariot-racing and blasphemous horseplay, on the authority of writers working for the dynasty founded by the man who killed him. The reign and the reputation are almost unrelated, and separating them is most of what an article about him has to do.
He was born in 840, the son of the emperor Theophilos and the empress Theodora, and became emperor at two when his father died.
The regency was his mother's, and its defining act came in 843: the restoration of the icons, ending the second iconoclast period and the dispute that had run since Leo III. It is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar as the Triumph of Orthodoxy, and it happened in Michael's name while he was three years old.
He grew up as a ceremonial emperor in someone else's government, which is the beginning of the problem. In 856 he took power in his own name, with his uncle Bardas removing Theodora and the minister Theoktistos, and Bardas then held the substance of authority as Caesar.
The hostile portrait is vivid and specific: a young man who drank, spent public money on the hippodrome, staged mock church processions with a companion dressed as the patriarch, and neglected the empire to his favourites. It comes from Theophanes Continuatus and the chroniclers working under Basil I and his descendants.
The motive for it is not hidden. Basil murdered a reigning emperor and needed the act to look like a deliverance, and the surviving histories were written by and for his dynasty. Almost none of the discreditable material is corroborated outside that tradition.
What can be said with more confidence is that he was young, was governed by capable relatives, and elevated a Macedonian groom named Basil to co-emperor on his own judgement — a decision that killed him within a year. That is a real failure of judgement, and it does not require the drunkenness to explain it.
The 860s are among the most productive decades in Byzantine history. At the Lalakaon in 863 his uncle Petronas encircled and destroyed the army of the emir of Melitene, and the eastern frontier that had been a source of annual raids became a frontier the empire could push.
In the same year the brothers Cyril and Methodius were sent to Great Moravia, and the alphabet and liturgical language they devised became the foundation of Slavonic Christianity and letters — arguably the most durable thing any Byzantine government ever did.
In 864 the Bulgar khan Boris accepted Christianity from Constantinople, bringing the empire's most persistent European enemy into its religious orbit. And in 860 a Rus' fleet appeared before the capital itself, the first appearance in this archive of a people who would matter for centuries.
Basil, a peasant from Macedonia who had risen through the stables and the emperor's favour, was crowned co-emperor in 866 after arranging the murder of Bardas.
In September 867 Michael was killed in his bedchamber by Basil's men. He was twenty-seven and had no son; Basil took the throne unopposed and founded the dynasty that ruled for nearly two centuries.
The new regime's historians then explained the killing. Michael became the drunk who had squandered an empire, and Basil the providential rescuer — a version that held for a thousand years and is only now routinely qualified.
The verdict has been reversed slowly and incompletely. Modern historians generally credit his reign with the eastern turn, the Slavonic mission and the Bulgar conversion, while noting that the credit belongs more to Theodora, Bardas, Petronas and the patriarch Photios than to the emperor himself.
That is a fair judgement and it is still not the popular one. "Michael the Drunkard" remains the label, which is a lesson about who writes history worth stating plainly rather than implying.
His body was moved to the Church of the Holy Apostles by Leo VI — Basil's successor, and possibly Michael's son, since Leo's mother had been Michael's mistress before Basil married her. The Macedonian dynasty may have descended from the emperor it was founded on murdering.