Bardanes Tourkos
At this point, some of his major supporters deserted him and, reluctant to engage the loyalist forces in battle, Bardanes gave up and chose to surrender himself.
[3] The Byzantinist Warren Treadgold, judging from both his name and epithet, speculates that he may have been of mixed Armenian and Khazar blood,[4] an opinion shared by the historian Jean-Claude Cheynet.
[5] Cheynet suggests that the Khazar parentage belonged to a member of the entourage of Empress Irene of Khazaria, the wife of Emperor Constantine V (r. 741–775), and hence a certain proximity of Bardanes to the imperial court.
In 797, as strategos (military governor) of the Thracesian Theme, this same Bardanios supported the Empress-mother Irene of Athens when she usurped the throne from her son.
In the next year, probably in preparation for a campaign against the Arabs following Nikephoros' refusal to continue the annual payment of tribute to the Abbasid Caliphate, the emperor apparently appointed Bardanes to the post of monostrategos (lit.
[14] Among the Byzantine chronicles that report on Bardanes's revolt, the 10th-century Theophanes Continuatus and the 13th-century Synopsis Chronike indicate that the troops were motivated chiefly by economic concerns.
Bardanes, on the other hand, had a good reputation in this regard, fairly dividing the booty won from the campaigns against the Arabs amongst the soldiers.
According to another story however, before his revolt, Bardanes, accompanied by his three principal associates, Thomas the Slav, Leo the Armenian and Michael the Amorian visited a holy man at Philomelion to learn of the prospects for the uprising.
He has therefore also been seen as the representative of the opposition by the traditional elites to Nikephoros's policies, both in the confessional area, where the Emperor maintained a carefully neutral stance towards both iconoclasts and iconophiles, and in the socio-financial sphere, where new taxes on landed property and the expropriation of ecclesiastical estates hurt their interests.
[19] This desertion further discouraged Bardanes, and, reluctant to face the loyalist army in battle, he opted for a negotiated surrender through the mediation of Joseph, the hegumenos (abbot) of the Kathara monastery who had officiated at Constantine VI's second marriage.
Bardanes received a letter signed by the Patriarch Tarasios and several leading senators which guaranteed that neither he nor his subordinates would be punished if they surrendered.
[20] Satisfied by these assurances, on 8 September Bardanes left his army and, through Nicaea, sought refuge in the monastery of Herakleios at Cius.
The other thematic generals who took part in the revolt were also dismissed from their posts, the metropolitan bishops of Sardis, Amorion and Nicomedia were punished for their support of the uprising by exile to the small island of Pantelleria off Sicily, while the soldiers of the Anatolian armies were left unpaid for a year.
Most scholars believe in Nikephoros' direct involvement, but Treadgold holds it likelier that the soldiers acted on their own, since Bardanes was no longer a credible threat to the Emperor.
