Alexander

870 – 913 · Generation XXII · Emperor (r. 912–913) · Macedonian

Alexander was the third son of Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty, and Eudokia Ingerina, born in the purple on 23 November 870. Unlike his elder brother Leo, whose paternity was disputed between Basil and his predecessor Michael III, Alexander was born years after Michael’s death. His father crowned him co-emperor in 879, after the death of Basil’s eldest son Constantine.

For thirty-three years he was junior emperor to his brother Leo VI. When Leo died on 11 May 912, Alexander became senior emperor beside Leo’s young son, Constantine VII. He celebrated by becoming the first Byzantine emperor to put the word autokrator on his coins. He dismissed most of Leo’s men, among them the admiral Himerios and the patriarch Euthymios, shut Constantine’s mother Zoe Karbonopsina in a nunnery, and restored Nicholas Mystikos as patriarch.

His reign lasted barely a year. In the east the forces of the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir attacked, and he brought on a war with Simeon I of Bulgaria when he would not pay the tribute customarily sent on a new emperor’s accession. He died on 6 June 913, reportedly of an illness brought on by overeating and drink. The sources are uniformly hostile, painting him as idle, debauched and malicious, and even accusing him of offering pagan sacrifices to a golden boar in the Hippodrome to cure his impotence. He was rumoured to have planned to castrate his nephew to bar him from the throne. That never happened, but he left the boy with a hostile regent, Nicholas Mystikos, and with a Bulgarian war that would last for years.

Place in the family

Alexander was the younger of 2 children of Basil I and Eudokia Ingerina recorded in this archive.

One of 19 people of Macedonian (811–1057) in this archive. The empire’s widest reach — a house of soldier-emperors and scholars.

Parents

Basil I (811 – 886)
Eudokia Ingerina (840 – 882)

Siblings

Constantine (860 – 879) (half)
Leo VI (866 – 912)

Sources

Alexander (Byzantine emperor) · Wikipedia
Leo VI the Wise · Wikipedia