Nikephoros III Botaneiates, an aged Anatolian general, seized the throne from Michael VII in 1078 and held it three chaotic years before the Komnenoi took it from him in 1081.
Nikephoros Botaneiates was past seventy-five when he raised his revolt at Nicaea in 1077 — a grandee of the Anatolian military class with fifty years of service from the Pecheneg wars to Manzikert's aftermath. The capital, sick of the Doukas regime, opened its gates by acclamation in March 1078.
His reign was a coda played too late: three years of blinding rivals, emptying the treasury with donatives, and marrying Michael VII's living wife, while the young Komnenoi generals won his battles for him. On Easter Day 1081 Alexios Komnenos's troops sacked their way into the city, and the old man exchanged the purple for the habit without a fight.
Born around 1002 into the Botaneiatai — Anatolian military aristocracy whose court genealogists, once he was emperor, obligingly traced him to the ancient Phokades — Nikephoros served through the eleventh-century army's whole arc of glory and decay: against the Pechenegs in the 1040s (where his fighting retreat saved a broken army), at the side of Isaac Komnenos's coup in 1057, as governor in the Balkans and Anatolia.
Passed over repeatedly for the throne he thought his due — Eudokia had considered him for the marriage that went to Romanos Diogenes — he watched the Parapinakes regime lose his native Anatolia, and in October 1077, as strategos of the Anatolic theme, had himself proclaimed emperor, reaching Nicaea with Turkish auxiliaries hired from the very enemy.
The paradox of Botaneiates is that our fullest praise of him — Attaleiates's History, dedicated to him — and our sharpest mockery — Anna Komnene's Alexiad, written for the family that deposed him — describe recognisably the same man from opposite motives: personally brave, open-handed to the point of fiscal ruin, courteous, and simply too old. Anna grants the fine soldierly presence and notes the exhaustion behind it.
The reign's conduct shows an old campaigner's instincts without an old statesman's: rivals blinded promptly (Bryennios, Basilakes — by his Komnenos generals' hands), the treasury poured out in ranks and stipends to buy the capital's love, and the scandalous third marriage — to Maria of Alania, whose husband Michael VII lived as a monk — accepted for dynastic cover. Contemporaries read it as the establishment's last, cynical improvisation; within three years the improvisers themselves went over to Alexios.
Every month of the reign burned inheritance: the donatives and promotions emptied what Nikephoritzes's extortions had gathered; Anatolia, garrisoned by the Turkish "allies" of the civil wars, slid finally out of imperial administration — by 1081 Suleiman ibn Qutalmish sat at Nicaea itself, across the water from the capital. The rebellions of Bryennios and Basilakes in the Balkans were crushed for him by the young Alexios Komnenos, each victory raising the general the throne could not afford to reward enough.
When the childless old man let the succession drift toward a favourite, the Komnenoi struck first, with the Doukai — their in-laws — behind them. Alexios's army entered Constantinople through a suborned gate on 1 April 1081 and sacked its own capital for a day; Botaneiates, refusing to let more blood be shed for him, walked to the Peribleptos monastery and took the tonsure.
Botaneiates closed the eleventh-century carousel of short-reigned soldier-emperors, and his failure defined his successor's programme: everything Alexios I built — the family-consortium government, the new coinage, the western alliances — answered deficiencies Botaneiates's three years had made undeniable.
He survives best in art history: the Coislin 79 manuscript's portraits of him enthroned amid his court are among the finest imperial images Byzantium ever produced — painted, with perfect period irony, for a reign the texts remember as bankruptcy.