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Biography of Zoë
Name: Zoë
Birth Date: c. 978
Death Date: 1050
Place of Birth: N/A
Nationality: Macedonian
Gender: Female
Occupations: empress
Zoë
The Byzantine empress Zoë (ca. 978-1050) and her sister, the last living members of the great Macedonian dynasty, prolonged their house through marriages and independent rule. The frivolities of their court, however, helped hasten the empire's rapid decline.Zoë was the second of three daughters of Emperor Constantine VIII (reigned 1025-1028), younger brother and unworthy successor to the great Basil II (reigned 976-1025). Little is known of her early life. She remained unmarried until her father lay dying and, with no son to continue the dynasty, sought a son-in-law. Zoës elder sister, scarred by disease, had become a nun, while her younger sister, Theodora, was unattractive and uninterested in marriage. Zoë herself, still lovely despite her 50 years, eagerly accepted long-delayed conjugality. Her husband, the vain and incompetent aristocrat Romanus III Argyrus, soon tired of her, and his neglect drove her ardently to various lovers.After Romanus's murder in 1034, …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…more years. At his death (January 1055) Theodora was left to rule alone, as sovereign in her own exclusive right, for 18 months, until her death in 1056 ended the Macedonian dynasty definitively. Further Reading Zoë figures prominently and vividly in the court memoirs of the contemporary scholar and official Michael Psellus, The Chronographia, which was translated into English by E. R. A. Sewter (1953). An illuminating commentary on this account by J. B. Bury, "Roman Emperors from Basil II to Isaac Komnenos," is reprinted in his Selected Essays, edited by Harold Temperley (1930). A lively sketch of Zoë is in Charles Diehl, Byzantine Empresses (trans. 1963), and she is also described in Joseph McCabe, The Empresses of Constantinople (1913). For the political context of her career see The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4 (1923), and the second edition, pt. 1 (1966); George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (trans. 1956; rev. ed. 1969); and Romilly Jenkins, Byzantium: The Imperial Centuries (1966).
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