For just as each animal mates with its own tribe, so it is right that each nation should marry and cohabit not with those of other race and tongue but of the same tribe and speech. To summarize this principle, Constantine VII writes:įor each nation has different customs and divergent laws and institutions, and should consolidate those things that are proper to it, and should form and develop out of the same nation the associations for the fusion of its life. Constantine VII considered this “a sufficient warning to restrain anyone who is minded to emulate his evil deeds.” Note that in either case the Khazar princess was said to have been baptized, but this changed nothing. Constantine VII makes the application clear: foreign mixture leads to religious sin. Either way, the Khazar influence led Leo IV to seize one of the Patriarch’s jewels from the Hagia Sophia without permission and set it upon his forehead as a crown, at which point he was struck down with an illness that eventually killed him. Constantine VII claims that Leo IV married a Khazar, while secular sources say that his father married a Khazar, making Leo IV half-Khazar. What’s really interesting is that he explicitly connects #3 with #1.
After a long section outlining the history of many of the nations surrounding the Byzantine Empire, Constantine VII went on to highlight the bad ends and soiled legacies of those emperors who violated secular and religious law and custom in their dealings with foreigners.Īccording to Constantine VII, there were three cardinal sins a Byzantine emperor could commit in regards to foreign peoples.
Constantine vii de administrando imperio help how to#
1 One of his biggest legacies is his book De Administrando Imperio (“On the Administration of the Empire”), written with the intention of giving his son a guide on how to run the empire both internally and externally. He was, however, a very skilled administrator and is often referred to as a “scholar emperor” due to his collecting and writing of books and sponsorship of the arts. Constantine VII was the fourth emperor in the Macedonian dynasty, and due to the fact that he spent much of his reign as co-emperor, he was not a particularly strong executive. He was a member of the Macedonian dynasty, a line of very competent emperors who stabilized and expanded the Byzantine Empire, giving it its second wind after three centuries of shrinking borders following the conquests of Justinian the Great. Constantine VII pictured being crowned by ChristĬonstantine VII was a tenth-century Byzantine emperor (AD 905 – 959).