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Basil’s rise started when, as a young servant, he encountered the richest woman in the empire, Danielis, a widow who owned 3,000 slaves and eighty estates and became his patroness – and surely his lover. It may be that he spent many years with her before she introduced him to the courtier who brought him to the notice of young Emperor Michael III, an expert on horseflesh, who hired him as a groom, then as a bodyguard, then as a chamberlain. Michael restored Roman rule in Greece and, guided by his mother, ended the iconoclastic agony, but he was infatuated, probably sexually, by the heft of the muscled Basil, thirty years older than him. Born in Thrace, known as the Macedonian but probably an Armenian, Basil was the ‘most outstanding in bodily form and heavy set; his eyebrows grew together, he had large eyes, a broad chest’ and a morose expression. The emperor enjoyed watching him in wrestling bouts with Bulgarian champions. When Michael resented his influential uncle, Basil executed him, leaving the unibrowed horse whisperer as his omnipresent parakoimomenos – He Who Sleeps Beside (the imperial chamber). While his marriage was childless, Michael had a son by his mistress, Eudokia Ingerina, whom he soon shared with Basil (Basil seems to have been irresistible to men and women). To legitimize this son, Leo, he ordered Basil to marry Eudokia and crowned him co-emperor, giving him his own sister Thekla as mistress. When Michael, boozing hard, widely nicknamed the Drunk, had second thoughts and plotted his favourite’s murder, Basil got in first, assembling a family hit squad (including his father and brother) that broke into the imperial bedchamber, stabbed the inebriated emperor and sliced off his hands – possibly vengeance for the unchristian homosexual side of their relationship.

It was an unlikely rise, but the uneducated Basil turned out to be a serious and intelligent basileus,^* fighting the Arabs, codifying the laws and striking the Bulgars. He was never quite sure whether Leo was his or Michael’s and disliked the nerdy boy. Basil died in 886 at the age of seventy-five after a hunting accident which saw him dragged for miles, his clothes having been snagged in a stag’s antlers: his groom was executed for cutting the emperor’s belt to free him from the antlers (it was illegal to bare a blade in front of the emperor). When he died, Emperor Leo too was unsure who his father was, but he honoured the giblets of Michael, which he buried in the Church of the Apostles along with Basil.

Talented, scholarly but tormented, Leo the Wise held back the Arabs in the east but lost his last strongholds in Sicily to Arab invaders, who then landed in southern Italy and threatened not just his last territories but Rome itself.

In 846, Arab raiders had landed at Ostia and then struck Rome, looting St Peter’s. Now that they were advancing again, Pope John VIII, who had seen the Arabs assault Rome, alternately begged Emperor Leo and the Carolingian kings to send help. Constantinople had traditionally selected and menaced popes, and Justinian had kidnapped one. Now the popes were on their own: the chaos in Italy, the loss of papal incomes to the Arabs, the fall in prestige and the rise of voracious Italian barons undermined John VIII, who was poisoned then bludgeoned to death by his own clergymen. Thus opened a bloody new era, dominated by a single extraordinary woman: Marozia. If Cleopatra can be regarded as a feminist heroine, so should Marozia, ruler of Rome, and mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, lover and murderess of a succession of popes and princes.

The turmoil that had started with the killing of John VIII culminated in the trial of a dead pope. In January 897, the corpse of Pope Formosus, who had been dead for over a year, was exhumed, dressed in its papal robes, enthroned and then placed on trial for perjury and violation of canon law before a synod in Rome, chaired by his successor Stephen VI, with a deacon representing the cadaver as its lawyer. Found guilty, Formosus was stripped naked, the three fingers he used for papal blessing were cut off and his body was flung into the Tiber. The motive for this necrospectacle was to undermine the legitimacy of a predecessor and so enhance the legality of the new pope. But it did not work: Stephen was strangled, and three popes were then elected by different factions. But one, Sergius III, managed to win the backing of Teofilatto, Marozia’s father, and they murdered the other two.