Byzantine emperor Constantine V was nicknamed Dung-Named by the people who wrote his history
Constantine V ruled Byzantium for 34 years, secured its frontiers and reformed its army. Yet later chroniclers remembered him chiefly as Kopronymos, the Dung-Named, spreading a story that as a baby he had soiled the font at his own baptism. His real offence, in their eyes, was attacking religious images.
Born in Constantinople in July 718, the son of Leo III, he was crowned co-emperor at the age of two, a common Byzantine device for securing succession in a system that was in theory elective. His father marked the coronation with a new silver coin, the miliaresion, worth a twelfth of a gold nomisma, which became a staple of the economy. Constantine married Tzitzak, daughter of the Khazar khagan, who took the baptismal name Irene, meaning peace. Accounts mention a chronic illness, perhaps epilepsy or leprosy, which rebels may have used to question his fitness.
He became sole ruler in June 741 and was almost immediately ousted by his brother-in-law Artabasdos, who seized the capital with the backing of the patriarch. Constantine regrouped among loyal troops at Amorion, won at Sardis in 743 and retook Constantinople that November, publicly humiliating the patriarch by parading him around the hippodrome on a donkey, yet leaving him in office.
Like his father, he opposed the veneration of icons, and he argued the case personally, writing thirteen treatises. His reasoning was that God is uncircumscribable, beyond any boundary, and so cannot be pictured; since Christ is God, neither can Christ. A council he summoned at Hieria in 754 condemned images but refused to follow him all the way, affirming Mary as Mother of God and forbidding the looting of churches. He targeted monasteries, seizing their property and mocking monks and nuns in the hippodrome.
Most accounts come from his enemies, written after the image-lovers finally won, and modern scholars think they exaggerated the destruction; many older icons survived hidden. Their verdict was harsh all the same: in the 9th century his remains were removed from the imperial tomb in the Church of the Holy Apostles. He died on 14 September 775.
Source: Constantine V
