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From teenage bride to child blinder: the brutal rise of Rome’s first female emperor
From teenage bride to ruler of the Roman Empire, Irene built a formidable political network, restored the veneration of icons and seized the imperial throne – but at a devastating cost to her own family. Edward J Watts charts her extraordinary life
Published: November 12, 2026 at 11:30 AM
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Sometime after August 797 AD, the Eastern Roman court in Constantinople (now often called the Byzantine court) issued an unremarkable law about inheritances in the name of the new basileus (the masculine Greek noun used for a Roman emperor).
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While the text of the law itself is rather dull, the name of the basileus is not. Because she was named Irene and she was the first woman to rule the Roman Empire using that imperial title.
Unimaginable grandeur
It was impossible to imagine such a fate for Irene when she was born in Athens around 752. Irene’s father was a member of the noble Sarantapechos family, but she grew up in a small city of a few thousand people cut off from the capital, aside for the few days a month when a ship arrived.
The emperor Constantine V, however, believed a marriage joining his son Leo IV to Irene would secure her relatives’ support for his planned campaign to reestablish Roman control over central Greece. So it was that Irene left home for Constantinople in early October 769.
Irene must have been terrified. She was a teenager barely out of puberty, her father had died some years before, and she set sail from Greece accompanied only by a small group of female relatives and attendants.
When she arrived outside Constantinople at the head of a flotilla of silk-draped warships on 1 November, she would have been stunned by the size of the city, the height of its walls, the magnificence of the imperial palace, and the splendour of Hagia Sophia, the world’s largest church. Nothing she had ever seen could have prepared her for such unimaginable grandeur.
Hagia Sophia at dawn. Irene would have been stunned to see such a grand building in Constantinople, after growing up in a small city cut off from Turkey’s capital | Credit: Getty Images
Building a network
As soon as Irene disembarked, she was thrust into a series of choreographed ceremonies that welcomed her to the city, celebrated her engagement, crowned her as empress and solemnised her marriage. Each of these involved receptions in which magistrates, senators, bureaucrats, and their wives all greeted Irene and bowed to the floor beneath her knees.
Few young princesses had the capacity to remember all the people they met on such an important day. Irene was different. She saw individuals within this blur of new faces, and she recognised that each face belonged to a possible ally in a city where she knew next to no one. She soon began constructing a network of powerful supporters based around some of those same people she met that day.
Irene’s position at court became much more secure on 14 January 771 when she and her husband welcomed their first child, a boy they named Constantine. He was what Romans called a porphyrogenitus, which meant ‘born in the purple’, and designated him as an imperial heir who entered the world in a purple chamber of the palace. Porphyrogeniti were both literally and figuratively born into the imperial purple.
Taking power
Constantine VI’s birth enabled Leo IV to assume power without challenge when his father died on 14 September 775 because, unlike his five ambitious half-brothers, Leo was not only the first in the line of succession but he also had a child who could continue the imperial dynasty for another generation.
Soon after Leo took power, he formally designated the five-year-old Constantine as imperial heir and forced his half-brothers to swear a public oath to support the young prince. Less than a year later, they were sent into exile after supposedly breaking this vow.
Irene’s husband, Leo IV designated their young son Constantine as his heir but upon Leo’s death, Irene took power for herself | Credit: Alamy
Whatever Irene did to help sideline these rivals happened outside of the view of contemporary historians. Everyone, however, noticed her political skills when Leo died on 8 September 780 following an infection of his hair follicles he developed from wearing a heavily-jewelled crown on his head for too long.
With Leo’s death, the Roman throne officially belonged to the nine-year-old Constantine VI, but Irene exploited the fact that no living Roman had lived under such a young emperor to take actual power for herself.
A careful balancing act
While several young children had served as emperors in the empire’s 800-year history, none had done so for almost 150 years. Part of this was because the last imperial regency, which extended for only a few months in 641, had been a disaster.
The empress Martina had seized effective control of the state while her son and stepson nominally ruled together, but her regime proved so unpopular that the army quickly deposed the empress, slit her tongue, cut off the noses of her sons, and exiled all of them to the Mediterranean island of Rhodes.
Irene wanted the power Martina briefly possessed while also hoping to avoid her predecessor’s terrible fate. This required a careful balancing act. Some of the first coins issued after Leo’s death featured portraits of Irene and her son on the front and images of the deceased emperors Leo III, Constantine V and Leo IV on the back.
Coins issued in AD 790-792, featuring portraits of Irene and Constantine VI on one side (left) and deceased emperors on the other (right) – these designs emphasised the continuation of the imperial dynasty | Credit: Silbury Coins Ltd
They emphasised that Irene and Constantine VI together represented the imperial dynasty’s fourth generation. The public acclamations preserved in our sources also suggest that people in Constantinople were encouraged to speak about Irene and Constantine VI as “our emperors”.
And the empress made sure that everyone knew about a coffin found by a man in Thrace that foretold the reappearance of Jesus “in the reign of Constantine and Irene”.
Brutal and efficient response
Irene’s regency faced its first major test just six weeks later when her allies in the city exposed a plot to replace Irene with Nicephorus, one of Leo VI’s half-brothers. Irene responded brutally and efficiently.
The nobles backing the plot were publicly whipped, forcibly enrolled in the clergy, and then sent into exile. Nicephorus and his brothers were also arrested, tonsured (their heads shaved), and compelled by Irene to “administer communion to the people on the feast of Christ’s nativity”.
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Their status as priests effectively disqualified them from further imperial office while the public administration of communion left no doubt about their new clerical status. That Christmas morning, the empress and Constantine VI “went in a public imperial procession to the church” so she could watch their humiliation.
Irene replaced the other coup plotters with men drawn from the network of eunuchs and other socially stigmatised people she had quietly been building since she arrived in the capital. Her most important aide became Staurakios, a court eunuch who she made “the head of everything and [who] administered all matters”.
She placed a second eunuch named John in command of all the soldiers in Asia and sent Theodore, a third eunuch, to Sicily where he was tasked with putting down a revolt.
The end of iconoclasm
As Irene’s loyalists came to dominate the government and military, some of the people strongly associated with Constantine V and Leo IV transformed into supporters of Irene. One of these pivots made a particularly big impression on Constantinopolitans.
Constantine V, his father Leo III and his son Leo IV were Iconoclasts who restricted the religious veneration of images of Jesus and saints in public and private worship. Irene, however, favoured the use of icons and was looking for an opportunity to end Iconoclasm while she controlled the state.
A 9th-century illustration shows someone melting an image of Christ. As empress, Irene sought to end iconoclasm and bring images into worship
Her chance came in 784 when Paul, the Patriarch of Constantinople, abruptly resigned his position and withdrew to a monastery. With tears in his eyes, he told Irene and a group of visiting Constantinopolitan senators that he had retired because he was ashamed that he “sat on the throne of the priesthood while God’s Church was suffering oppression” from the Iconoclast emperors.
He then informed the visiting dignitaries that “they would not find salvation unless an ecumenical council took place and the error…is corrected”. Rather conveniently, he died shortly after the meeting concluded.
Irene selected Tarasios, another of the palace officials with whom she had developed a relationship over the past decade, to serve as the new Patriarch of Constantinople.
Tarasios was an interesting choice. He was not yet a priest and he refused to accept ordination unless the church council condemning Iconoclasm that Paul had recommended was convened.
Tarasios’s conditional acceptance of the job was no doubt coordinated with Irene, but it allowed her to claim that she had no option but to call a church council with representatives from Rome and Constantinople as well as all the other most important episcopal sees of antiquity. It was the seventh, and final, ecumenical church council recognised as legitimate by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
Power and limitations
Irene’s council showed both the power and limitations of the web of supporters she had built during her time in the palace. Her people had spread across the top leadership positions of the Roman bureaucracy, church and army, but she had not won over the rank and file in any of those institutions.
This became clear when a violent protest by the tagmata (an elite army unit created by the Iconoclast Constantine V and stationed in the capital) disrupted the first session of the council just after it convened in Constantinople’s Church of the Holy Apostles on 1 August 786.
Irene reacted deftly. She summoned the eunuch Staurakios, sent him to an army he had recently commanded in Thrace, and ordered those soldiers to march to the capital so they could disarm the rebellious troops of the tagmata.
Irene discharged all the rebels and reformed the tagmata with soldiers and officers who were loyal to her. She then reconvened the church council in September 787 in the smaller and less politically fractious city of Nicaea, the site of the first ecumenical council called by the emperor Constantine I in AD 325.
Nicaea’s symbolic importance helped obscure the fact that security concerns rather than religious inspiration determined its selection.
The concluding session of the Council of Nicaea represented the high point of Irene’s political career. It began with an invocation celebrating both Irene and Constantine as the orthodox, victorious and peace-loving ‘emperors’ of Rome.
The Second Council of Nicaea, depicted in the 10th-century Menologion of Basil II. This council celebrated Irene’s rule, helping to cement her authority as an ‘emperor’ of Rome | Credit: Alamy
The attendees next called on God to “grant them a peaceful life” and “sustain their rule” since they were “the new Constantine and Helena”, a reference to Rome’s first Christian emperor and his mother.
But, unlike Helena, Irene was the dominant member of this imperial partnership. It was Irene who took the council’s document restoring icons from the patriarch of Constantinople. It was Irene who signed it first. And it was Irene who then “gave it to her son and co-emperor to sign it second”. This was her empire and her moment of triumph.
Public tensions
Irene suffered significant damage to both her public standing and political position over the next few years. Military reverses caused civilians and soldiers to doubt that God really did support the restoration of icons. And, as Constantine VI became an adult, he and those around him grew frustrated that his mother’s regency, which was intended to be temporary, had somehow become permanent.
Tensions between mother and son became public when Constantine VI tried to fire Staurakios from a military command in 790. Irene stepped in, had the emperor flogged, and confined him to his chambers in the palace for a few days. She then sent a message to all military units asking that they take an oath to never permit her son to rule independently as long as Irene lived.
The soldiers in the capital made this vow, but armies in Asia Minor rallied behind the emperor. They instead swore that “they would not accept his mother Irene as basileus ”, demanded that the emperor be allowed to travel to their base, and led him back to Constantinople.
When he arrived home, Constantine had Irene imprisoned, purged the eunuchs and commanders loyal to her, and ordered Staurakios to be whipped publicly before forcing him to become a cleric.
An engraved portrait of Empress Irene and Constantine VI. The power struggle between mother and son was protracted and often vicious | Credit: Getty Images
Irene was not finished, however. After two military defeats in 791, Irene’s supporters appealed to Constantine VI to restore Irene to power. Constantine not only agreed to this, but he also foolishly allowed his mother to purge the men who most fiercely backed the emperor from his Asian armies. This left Constantine dangerously short of powerful allies four years later when he divorced his popular wife Maria so that he could marry one of his mother’s attendants.
Irene seized on the discontent her son’s remarriage caused. For much of the autumn of 796, she cajoled and bribed members of the tagmata to “help her depose her son and become sole ruler herself” as soon as an appropriate moment presented itself.
That moment came on 17 July 797 when some of Irene’s friends seized Constantine from a warship and took him to the purple room of the palace in which he was born. There “they blinded him in a cruel and vicious manner with a view to making him die at the behest of his mother and her advisors”. It is not clear how much longer he lived after this, but Constantine VI was now permanently ineligible to rule.
The cost of power
This is why the single word, basileus, that appears in the law on inheritance with which we began means so much. It encapsulates the extraordinary political skills and ruthlessness that enabled Irene to transcend the limits eighth-century Roman society imposed on provincials, worshippers of icons, and women.
A c797 AD solidus depicts Empress Irene. Her “extraordinary political skills and ruthlessness” allowed her to be the first Roman woman to rule in her own right | Credit: Getty Images
But it also points to the costs people like Irene needed to absorb to achieve what they wanted. Irene sidelined family members, imprisoned friends, and mutilated her own son so that she could wield the power that came along with that masculine imperial title.
Irene spent more than half of her life playing and, mostly, winning a series of high-stakes political games in Constantinople. No other Roman woman had ever before played them so well. But even Irene eventually misread the loyalties of the people around her.
She lost her throne on 31 October 802 following a coup organised by Nikephoros, the man she had placed atop the imperial fiscal department. She was exiled and died on the island of Lesbos on 9 August 803.
While Irene was the first Roman woman to rule in her own name, she was not the last. She had shown Romans that a talented woman’s gender did not preclude her from supplanting an incompetent basileus. Other Roman imperial women would follow in her path – and learn from her mistakes.
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Edward J Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Romans: A 2,000-Year History (John Murray Press/Basic Books, 2025)
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