Michael VII "Parapinakes" (1071–1078), enthroned by the faction that betrayed Romanos IV after Manzikert, presided over the currency's collapse and the effective loss of Anatolia to the Turks.
Michael VII wore the crown while other men wore the power: his uncle the Caesar John Doukas and the eunuch-logothete Nikephoritzes ran the state that had blinded Romanos IV rather than honour his treaty with the Seljuks — a betrayal that gave Alp Arslan's Turks a grievance and a license.
In his seven years the nomisma's gold content fell to open fraud (his nickname, "Parapinakes", priced it), Norman mercenaries carved a private state in Anatolia, the Balkans revolted, and Turkish war-bands moved from raiding Anatolia to garrisoning it. Two military revolts converged on the capital in 1078; Michael abdicated into a monastery.
Born around 1050 to Constantine X and Eudokia, Michael was crowned co-emperor as a child within his father's dynastic fortifications, and educated by Michael Psellos himself — an education, Psellos boasts, in philosophy, rhetoric, and verse. Even the flatterer admits his pupil preferred iambics to administration.
He was senior emperor in name from 1067, shelved during his stepfather Romanos IV's war-regime, and restored to the front of the coinage by the coup of 1071, when the Doukai used Manzikert to destroy Romanos — repudiating his treaty, defeating him in the field, and blinding him with a brutality that killed him.
The sources converge from opposite directions: Psellos's affectionate portrait of a gentle, bookish, abstemious prince who wrote poetry and shrank from decisions is, in Attaleiates's hostile telling, the same man seen plainly — passive, pliable, absorbed in trifles while the logothete sold offices and cornered the grain trade. Neither historian records of him a single act of cruelty; neither records an act of will.
Byzantines, who expected emperors to be either terrible or holy, found something contemptible in mere harmlessness at the head of a collapsing state; the market nickname Parapinakes — the emperor of the short measure — is the populace's one-word character sketch, and it stuck for good.
The regime's original sin — the destruction of Romanos rather than the ransom of Anatolia — dictated everything after. Freed from the treaty, the Turks raided as conquerors; the Norman condottiere Roussel de Bailleul turned his contract army into a personal principality in Galatia, and the government, unable to defeat him, invited the Seljuks deeper in to do it — hiring the wolf against the dog. The young Alexios Komnenos's capture of Roussel in 1076 was the one clean success, and it announced the family that would inherit the wreck.
Nikephoritzes's fiscal machine — state grain monopoly at Rhaidestos, sold offices, and a nomisma debased toward one-third alloy — financed the court while it burned the currency's thousand-year credit. By 1077 revolts rose east (Botaneiates) and west (Bryennios); the capital's guilds and clergy declared for Botaneiates, and on 31 March 1078 Michael exchanged the purple for a monk's habit at Stoudios, ending as titular metropolitan of Ephesus — "more suited", Attaleiates sneers, "to that dignity than to empire".
Michael's reign fixed the scale of the Manzikert disaster: it was in the 1070s, not in 1071, that Anatolia — the empire's granary and recruiting ground for seven centuries — actually slipped away, as Turkish bands invited against rebels stayed as masters. When Alexios I took power in 1081 the empire was, in effect, a Balkan state with a great city attached.
The debasement bearing his nickname became the textbook case of Byzantine fiscal collapse, undone only by Alexios's currency reform a generation later. His marriage alliance — his son by Maria of Alania betrothed into the Komnenian settlement — let the Doukas blood flow on into the dynasty that replaced him.