Theophilos was the last iconoclast emperor, a conspicuous patron of learning and building, and the ruler who watched the Abbasids sack Amorion, his own dynasty's home city.
Theophilos ruled from 829 to 842 and is the most conspicuously cultivated emperor between Justinian and Constantine VII: a patron of scholars, a builder of palaces, and a ruler who took the ceremonial and judicial functions of the office unusually seriously.
He was also the last iconoclast, reviving a policy that had gone quiet, and the emperor under whom the Abbasid caliphate inflicted the heaviest defeat of the century on the empire.
In 838 the caliph al-Mu'tasim marched on Amorion — his own dynasty's home city, chosen for exactly that reason — and destroyed it. He died four years later at twenty-nine.
He was born about 813, the son of Michael II, a provincial soldier from Amorion in Phrygia who had come to the throne by murdering his predecessor in the palace chapel on Christmas morning 820.
He was crowned co-emperor as a child and given a serious education under John the Grammarian, a scholar and committed iconoclast who became patriarch and shaped both his learning and his religious position.
He succeeded in 829 and married Theodora, chosen at a bride-show, who venerated icons — the same arrangement that had produced Irene two generations earlier, and with the same eventual outcome.
The sources are hostile on doctrine and unusually admiring on everything else, which makes him one of the better-attested Byzantine personalities.
He is described riding weekly to the church of the Blachernae so that anyone could approach him with a petition, and hearing cases in person with a reputation for even-handedness that the tradition preserved despite disapproving of him.
The taste for display was famous: a throne room with a gilded plane tree full of mechanical singing birds and lions that roared, a palace built in imitation of the caliph's at Baghdad, and diplomatic gifts designed to impress the very court he was fighting. He also had a genuine intellectual seriousness — the mathematician Leo was his protégé, and the caliph al-Ma'mun is said to have tried to hire the man away.
The eastern war ran throughout his reign and mostly against him. He won a notable success at Zapetra in 837 and celebrated a triumph for it, which provoked exactly the retaliation it should have.
In 838 al-Mu'tasim invaded with one of the largest armies the caliphate ever sent into Anatolia and split it in two. Theophilos was defeated at Anzen, and the caliph marched on Amorion — the birthplace of the dynasty, chosen deliberately as the target.
The city fell after a siege of two weeks and was destroyed, its population killed or enslaved. Forty-two officers taken there were held at Samarra for seven years and executed for refusing to convert; they are remembered in the Orthodox calendar as the Forty-Two Martyrs of Amorion. Theophilos never recovered from it, politically or personally.
His religious policy died with him. Within a year of his death his widow Theodora had restored the veneration of images, and she managed it so as to protect his memory — insisting he had repented before the end, which is what allowed the settlement to be made without condemning the last emperor by name.
What survived was the cultural revival. The patronage of Leo the Mathematician and the scholarship of his reign feed directly into the intellectual flowering under his son and the Macedonians after them.
The Byzantine popular tradition treated him kindly, remembering the emperor who rode out to hear complaints. Given that he lost Amorion and backed the losing side of the empire's longest religious argument, that is a considerable achievement of reputation.