Tavern-keeper's daughter from Laconia who married Romanos II, bore Basil II, Constantine VIII and Anna Porphyrogenita, married Nikephoros II Phokas in 963, and was exiled after helping John I Tzimiskes murder him in 969.
Theophano was empress of the Eastern Roman Empire twice: as the wife of Romanos II from 959 to 963, and as the wife of Nikephoros II Phokas from 963 until his murder in December 969. Born Anastaso, the daughter of a tavern-keeper in Laconia, she married the heir to the throne around 956 and bore him three children who lived to adulthood: Basil II, Constantine VIII and Anna Porphyrogenita.
Her reputation is one of the worst of any Byzantine empress. Court gossip accused her of poisoning Constantine VII and Romanos II, and she was implicated in the night-time killing of Nikephoros by his nephew John I Tzimiskes. After six years in exile she returned to court under her sons and is last heard of in 978, working to protect their throne.
Theophano was born around 941 in Laconia in the Peloponnese, possibly at Sparta, and was named Anastaso. Her father, Krateros, is said to have kept a tavern. How she met Romanos, the son of Constantine VII, is not recorded, but after the death of his child bride Bertha of Italy in 949 his father had promised that he could choose his own wife. He married Anastaso around 956, and she took the imperial name Theophano. Her low birth offended the court and coloured nearly everything later written about her. Her son Basil was born in 958 and Constantine in 960 or 961.
Every surviving description of Theophano comes from men who disliked her or wrote for her enemies. Leo the Deacon, writing in the reign of her son Basil II, stresses her beauty and treats her as a moving spirit in the plot against Nikephoros. John Skylitzes and the continuators of Theophanes, pass on the stories that she and Romanos poisoned Constantine VII, that she had Romanos's mother and sisters removed from the palace, and that she poisoned Romanos himself.
The poison stories are the weakest part of this record. Constantine VII died in November 959 after a fever lasting months, and Romanos II died in March 963 after an exhausting hunting trip, two days after Theophano had given birth; his death turned her from a secure crowned empress into an exposed widow with small children, which is hard to square with a motive for murder. Her part in the killing of Nikephoros is much better supported, though the tale of a passionate affair with Tzimiskes may be embroidery. Some modern historians see instead an intelligent, ambitious woman fighting to keep her children's inheritance.
Constantine VII died on 9 November 959 and Romanos II succeeded him at about twenty-one, with Theophano as augusta. The chroniclers claim that at her urging he removed his mother, Helena Lekapene, from influence and sent his five sisters to convents, and that government passed to the eunuch Joseph Bringas while the young emperor hunted and feasted. The great success of the reign, the recovery of Crete from the Arabs, was won far from the palace by the general Nikephoros Phokas at the Siege of Chandax in 961. Romanos came back from a hunting expedition in March 963 already ill, and died on 15 March, two days after Theophano gave birth to their daughter Anna.
Basil II was five and Constantine VIII about three when their father died. Theophano became regent for them, but Joseph Bringas still held the administration, and hereditary succession was a custom rather than a law. She turned to Nikephoros Phokas, the empire's most famous general, whom his troops proclaimed emperor at Caesarea in July 963. Bringas tried to hold the capital against him, but Nikephoros's supporters, backed by the chamberlain Basil Lekapenos, took the city, and on 16 August 963 Nikephoros was crowned in Hagia Sophia. Soon afterwards he married Theophano, pledging to protect her sons, who remained emperors alongside him.
The marriage caused a church scandal. Polyeuktos made Nikephoros do penance for marrying a second time, and when it was alleged that he was godfather to one of Theophano's children, which would have made the marriage unlawful, the patriarch excluded him from communion until witnesses swore that the charge was false. As Nikephoros's wife, Theophano ranked higher than she had under Romanos but had less real power, while her husband spent most of his reign campaigning in Cilicia and Syria.
By 969 Nikephoros was unpopular. His wars needed heavy taxes in years of poor harvests, and his efforts to limit monastic wealth angered the church. His nephew John Tzimiskes, a brilliant general whom he had dismissed, had been allowed back to Constantinople at Theophano's request. On the night of 10 to 11 December 969, John and a handful of conspirators, among them Michael Bourtzes, crossed the Bosporus by boat in a snowstorm, were hauled up the palace wall in a basket, and killed Nikephoros in his bedchamber. Leo the Deacon and Skylitzes say that Theophano had hidden some of the killers in her apartments and left the door of the chamber unbolted.
John I Tzimiskes wanted to marry her, but Polyeuktos refused to crown him unless he punished the killers and expelled the empress from the palace, and John chose the church. Theophano was sent to one of the Princes' Islands in the Sea of Marmara. According to Leo the Deacon she escaped and took sanctuary in Hagia Sophia, was dragged out on the orders of Basil Lekapenos, whom she attacked with insults and blows, and was then banished to a distant convent in the Armeniakon theme.