Nikephoros II Phokas took Crete in 961, Cilicia and Cyprus by 965 and Antioch in 969, ruled as emperor from 963, and was murdered in his own bedchamber by the general who succeeded him.
Nikephoros Phokas came from the Cappadocian military aristocracy, the class that supplied the empire's generals for generations, and spent his career on the eastern frontier before the reconquest of Crete in 961 made him the most celebrated soldier in the empire.
Two years later the army proclaimed him emperor. He married Theophano, the widow of Romanos II, and ruled as senior emperor over her two small sons — one of whom, Basil II, would become the greatest of the Macedonian emperors.
He spent six years as emperor conquering and was murdered in his bedroom in the seventh, by the general he had trusted most and the empress he had married.
He was born around 912 into the Phokas family, whose men had held high command since the ninth century, and his father Bardas Phokas was Domestic of the Schools before him.
He rose through the eastern commands in the 940s and 950s in a period when the frontier was already moving in the empire's favour, and by 954 held the Domesticate himself.
His reputation before Crete was for method rather than dash: careful supply, night marches, fortified camps, and a preference for attritional campaigning that ground down opponents rather than seeking a decisive battle.
He is one of the few Byzantine emperors whose personality is described consistently by writers with different agendas, and what they describe is austerity to the point of strangeness.
He wore a hair shirt under the imperial robes, slept on the floor of his chamber on a leopard skin, ate no meat, and was closer to the monastic world than to the court — he was a patron and friend of Athanasios, founder of the Great Lavra on Mount Athos, and had considered taking vows himself.
That did not make him gentle. He was a hard commander and a harder emperor, and his one genuinely striking religious argument was an attempt to have soldiers killed fighting Muslims declared martyrs — which the church refused, on the ground that killing disqualified a man from that honour whatever the cause. The refusal says as much about Byzantine religion as the request says about him.
The Cretan expedition of 960–961 was the campaign that made him. He landed against opposition, invested Chandax, kept the army supplied through a winter that four previous expeditions had refused to face, mined the walls and stormed the city in March.
He went east immediately afterwards and sacked Aleppo in 962. As emperor he took Cilicia in 964–965, opening the Taurus passes for good, and Cyprus in the same period, which completed Byzantine control of the eastern Mediterranean sea lanes.
Antioch fell in 969, the greatest of the recoveries — a patriarchal city that had been in Muslim hands for more than three centuries. Nikephoros was not present, and the manner of its taking is a story that belongs to the men who actually did it.
Government did not suit him as well as war. The conquests were expensive, and he paid for them with heavy taxation, a debased lighter coin alongside the full-weight one, and confiscations that fell on the church.
He legislated against the growth of monastic landholding, which he regarded as unproductive wealth, and against the great estates swallowing the soldier-farmers the theme system depended on. Both were defensible policies and both made powerful enemies.
A famine in the capital, an unpopular currency, a court that found him graceless, and a church he had antagonised left him isolated in the city while he remained idolised in the camps. He built a wall around the palace, which the chroniclers took as a sign that he knew.
The conspiracy was led by John Tzimiskes, his nephew by marriage and the best general in the empire after himself, and it had the cooperation of the empress Theophano.
On the night of 10–11 December 969 the conspirators were smuggled into the palace and found the emperor asleep on the floor of his chamber rather than in his bed, which nearly saved him. He was killed there.
Tzimiskes took the throne and ruled for seven years, continuing the eastern campaigns. Theophano, who had been an emperor's daughter-in-law, an emperor's wife twice over and a conspirator against the second, was exiled — Tzimiskes had no intention of marrying her.