Paphlagonian woman chosen by Theophilos at a bride-show in 830, regent for their son Michael III from 842 to 856, who ended the second period of Byzantine iconoclasm in 843 and is venerated as a saint of the Orthodox Church.
Theodora was empress of the Eastern Roman Empire as the wife of Theophilos from 830 to 842 and ruled as regent for their son Michael III from 842 to 856. A provincial woman from Paphlagonia chosen at a bride-show, she kept the veneration of icons alive in the women's quarters of an iconoclast palace and passed it on to her children.
Fourteen months after her husband's death she assembled the council that brought icons back into the churches, and the procession to Hagia Sophia on 11 March 843 became the Feast of Orthodoxy, kept ever since on the first Sunday of Lent. Her government also drove back a Bulgar invasion, raided Egypt, sacked Anazarbus and kept the treasury full, but in 856 she lost power to her son and her brother Bardas, and she ended her life confined in a convent.
Theodora was born around 815 at Ebissa in Paphlagonia, on the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor, to Marinos, a middle-ranking army officer, and Theoktiste Phlorina. Her family is usually thought to have been of Armenian descent, though no contemporary calls her Armenian. Her uncle was the general Manuel the Armenian, and she had three sisters and two brothers, Bardas and Petronas, who both rose high after her marriage.
In 830 Euphrosyne, the stepmother of Theophilos, gathered young women from the provinces for a bride-show in the palace. Later chroniclers tell how the emperor first approached the poet Kassia with the remark that evils came to men through a woman, and passed her over when she replied that better things had come through one too. Theodora received the golden apple instead. She was crowned in the church of Saint Stephen at Daphne on 5 June 830 and married in Hagia Sophia.
Theodora is known mainly through tenth-century chronicles written under the Macedonian dynasty, the continuation of Theophanes, Genesios and Symeon the Logothete, whose authors had every reason to honour the empress who ended iconoclasm. They present her as pious, sensible and dignified: firm with the deposed iconoclast patriarch John the Grammarian, loyal to her husband's memory and grief-stricken at the murder of her minister Theoktistos. Several of their stories, such as the exchange with Kassia, are plainly literary.
Behind the saintly image there is evidence of a tough politician. When Theophilos took one of her attendants as a mistress she made the affair public, and he apologised with a new palace for their daughters. Told by a holy man named Symeon to step aside, she is said to have answered that she would rule with a firm hand, as her husband had taught her. Modern historians disagree about how much of the government was hers and how much belonged to the eunuch Theoktistos, some giving him effective power and others, such as Lynda Garland, crediting her with real authority. Her first coins, which show Theodora alone on the obverse with her son and eldest daughter on the reverse, suggest how she saw her own position.
Theophilos was a convinced iconoclast, and Theodora seems to have kept icons secretly in her own rooms. The chroniclers say her mother Theoktiste taught the young princesses to kiss icons when they visited her, until the little Pulcheria told her father about the beautiful dolls in her grandmother's chest; Theophilos stopped the visits, but none of the children grew up an iconoclast. Theodora bore five daughters and two sons, one of whom drowned in a palace cistern as a small child; the other, Michael, was born in 840.
She appeared beside Theophilos at his triumphs in 831 and 837. When he was dying of dysentery in January 842, Theophilos commended his wife and two-year-old son to his officials and named advisers to assist her, chief among them the logothete Theoktistos.
Theophilos died on 20 January 842. Theodora governed with Theoktistos, her brothers Bardas and Petronas, and her relative Sergios Niketiates. In March 843 this small circle, meeting with sympathetic clergy in Theoktistos's house, reaffirmed the council of 787 that had condemned iconoclasm, deposed John the Grammarian and installed Methodios as patriarch. To spare Michael a heretic father, Theodora insisted that Theophilos had repented on his deathbed. On 11 March 843 court and clergy carried icons in procession to Hagia Sophia.
The regency was harsh towards those outside the new consensus: Theodora ordered the Paulicians of eastern Asia Minor to convert or die, and many survivors fled to Umar of Melitene and fought for him. Abroad the record was mixed. An invasion of Crete in 843 was abandoned when Theoktistos hurried home on a false rumour that Theodora meant to crown a new emperor, and in 844 Umar defeated him at Mauropotamos. Against that, the Bulgar khan Presian was driven back in 846, Byzantine ships burned Damietta in Egypt in 853, and in 855 an army sacked Anazarbus in Cilicia and took 20,000 prisoners. When she left office the gold reserves were larger than when she took charge.
By 855 Michael III was fifteen and resented his mother's control. Theodora and Theoktistos held a bride-show for him and married him to a woman of their choosing, rejecting his mistress. Bardas, sent away from court after Mauropotamos, returned with the young emperor's backing, and in November 855 Michael and Bardas had Theoktistos killed in the palace; Genesios says Theodora ran to save him and was driven back. She would not be reconciled with her son, and on 15 March 856 Michael declared himself sole emperor. Theodora accepted her removal without a struggle and stayed in the palace until 857 or 858, when she and her daughters were confined in the convent of Gastria.