Justin II

After two disastrous campaigns, in which the Persians overran Syria and captured the strategically important fortress of Dara (Mesopotamia), Justin reportedly lost his mind.

The historian Previte-Orton describes Justin as "a rigid man, dazzled by his predecessor's glories, to whom fell the task of guiding an exhausted, ill-defended Empire through a crisis of the first magnitude and a new movement of peoples". Previte-Orton continues,

The temporary fits of insanity into which Justin fell warned him to name a colleague. Passing over his own relatives, he raised, on the advice of Sophia, the general Tiberius to be Caesar in December 574, adopting him as his son,

and withdrew into retirement. In 574, Sophia paid 45,000 solidi to Chosroes in return for a year's truce.

According to John of Ephesus, as Justin II slipped into the unbridled madness of his final days he was pulled through the palace on a wheeled throne, biting attendants as he passed. He reportedly ordered organ music to be played constantly throughout the palace in an attempt to soothe his frenzied mind, and it was rumoured that his taste for attendants extended as far as "devouring" a number of them during his reign. The tardy knowledge of his own impotence determined him to lay down the weight of the diadem; he showed some symptoms of a discerning and even magnanimous spirit when he addressed his assembly, Read Less