A Christmas Tale from Constantinople – In 820AD the Emperor Leo V was alone praying when men dressed as clerics came into the chapel. He tried to defend himself with a candelabrum but was cut to pieces, with his body soon to be tied to donkey and dragged around the hippodrome! It really is one of the most interesting stories to come out of the infamous stories of the palace in Constantinople.
Leo was already planning to execute his enemy Michael for a conspiracy against him on Christmas Eve, sentencing him to be burned alive. However, his wife Theodosia did not like the idea of such a harsh act of violence tainting the celebration of Christmas – Leo “reluctantly agreed.” That mistake would be fatal. “Unluckily for him, there were indeed undetected conspirators” within the Great Palace – Michael was in chains but he still had Leo in his grasp.
In the words of Warren Treadgold: “At four o’clock on Christmas morning Leo was to hear Mass in the palatine chapel of St. Stephen in Daphne, of course without his bodyguards. That very night the plotters assembled a select band of armed men, dressed them in a clerical garb, and brought them to the palace, where the papias admitted them and led them to the chapel. When the emperor came in, the supposed clerics took him wholly by surprise.” They drew weapons and “despite his desperate attempts to defend himself with a candelabrum, they easily hacked off his arms, legs, and head. They then brought Michael (II) from his prison, pulled imperial robes over his legs-irons—which they could not remove at once—and acclaimed him emperor.”
Shockingly, the body of Leo would soon be desecrated brutally. “The murderers dragged Leo’s truncated corpse out of the palace and into the Hippodrome, where they stripped it and tied it to an ass, which they drove around racecourse. Then they rounded up Leo’s wife, mother, and four sons, put them on a boat with Leo’s body, and sent them to a monastery on the nearby island of Prote. There they castrated all four sons, as Leo had castrated the sons of Michael Rhangabe, but less gently. The youngest, Theodosius, died from the operation, and the second son, Basil, became temporarily mute. As the three youngest boys were under seven and the eldest, Symbatius-Constantine, was about seventeen and unmarried, that was the end of Leo’s dynasty.” Michael II tried to use being in prison as an alibi, but it was fairly clear he orchestrated the whole thing. Leo should not have listened to his wife…
Source: The Byzantine Revival by Warren Treadgold
shadowsofconstantinople.com 