Romanos II reigned from 959 to 963 and died at twenty-four. Crete was retaken and Aleppo sacked in those four years, by generals he had the sense to appoint and leave alone.
Romanos II was born in the purple, succeeded his father Constantine VII in 959, and was dead at about twenty-four in 963. His reign lasted three and a half years.
In that time the empire retook Crete after a century and a half and sacked Aleppo, which is a better military record than most emperors manage in decades. He was present for none of it.
The question the sources leave open, and cannot close, is whether that is a criticism. He appointed the right generals, gave them what they needed and did not interfere, which is a real if unglamorous form of competence — and it is also exactly what a pleasure-loving young man with capable ministers would look like.
He was the son of Constantine VII, the scholar-emperor who wrote or commissioned the Book of Ceremonies and the De Administrando Imperio, and was crowned co-emperor as a small child.
He married twice. The first was a diplomatic match to a Provençal princess who died young; the second, which produced the emperors of the next generation, was to a woman of obscure and much-discussed origin who took the name Theophano.
Hostile tradition made her an innkeeper's daughter and Romanos a young man ruled by her, and later histories added her to the deaths of both her husbands. Almost none of it is verifiable, and much of it is the standard treatment of a low-born empress in Byzantine writing.
The portrait in the sources is of an amiable, handsome, athletic young man devoted to hunting and the games, who left government to his ministers — above all the eunuch Joseph Bringas — and to his generals.
It is not a hostile portrait so much as a dismissive one, and it should be read carefully. Byzantine writers had a settled idea of what a serious emperor looked like, and it did not include enthusiasm for the hunt; the same authors describe his father as a scholar too absorbed in books to rule, so the family could not win either way.
What can be said is that he made two decisions that mattered more than anything a more diligent emperor could have done at his desk. He sent Nikephoros Phokas to Crete, and he sent him east afterwards. Judgement in appointments is not nothing.
The Cretan expedition sailed in 960 under Nikephoros Phokas with the resources of the state behind it, and it succeeded where the attempts of 843, 866, 911 and 949 had failed — the difference being an army supplied through a winter siege rather than withdrawn before it.
Chandax fell on 6 March 961, the emirate was extinguished, and Aegean piracy ended with it. The plunder came back to Constantinople with the army and the triumph was celebrated in the capital.
Nikephoros went east the following year and sacked Aleppo, the Hamdanid capital, while his brother Leo Phokas held the Anatolian frontier. In four years the empire had taken the Aegean back and put the principal Muslim power in northern Syria on the defensive.
He died on 15 March 963, four days after coming back exhausted from a hunt. He was about twenty-four and had reigned three and a half years.
Poisoning was rumoured immediately and attached, as such rumours did, to Theophano — who was pregnant with their daughter at the time, and who gained nothing by it. No source offers evidence, and the suddenness of a young man's death was reason enough for the story in a court that expected them.
His sons Basil II and Constantine VIII were five and three. Within months Nikephoros Phokas had been proclaimed by the army, had married Theophano and had taken the senior throne — and the boys survived to inherit it, which given the century they were born into is the most surprising part of the whole sequence.
The reign is a genuine problem of attribution, and worth stating as one rather than resolving. The achievements are large, the emperor's personal part in them is invisible, and the sources are more interested in his hunting than in his appointments.
What is not in doubt is that the tenth-century reconquest gathered its decisive momentum in these four years, and that the men who carried it out — Nikephoros and Leo Phokas — were his choices.
His real legacy is his younger son. Basil II, five years old when his father died, ruled for half a century and took the empire to its greatest extent since Justinian.