This paper explores images of imperial demise in the Madrid Skylitzes manuscript, the most ambitious illustrated history produced in the Mediterranean between late antiquity and the thirteenth century. Housed in the National Library of Spain (Matritensis graecus Vitr. 26-2), this history written in Greek, was in fact produced for Roger II of Sicily. 

         Royal death had the potential to greatly destabilize society, therefore medieval images of it consistently stress dynastic continuity and divine favor.  In contrast, the images of imperial demise in the Madrid Skylitzes break down the boundaries of cultural decorum, demystify the ritualized moments of instability, and aggressively articulate the bloody reality of Byzantine imperial transfer of power.  While in official Byzantine art the emperor served as the embodiment of divine grace, the Madrid Skylitzes miniatures regularly, and dramatically, reverse the power and charisma of the imperial body.  Within a single sequence, an emperor can be visually transformed from the head of the Byzantine body politic into a bloody severed head offered on a pole for public inspection.

         These powerful, startling images are adjacent to chronicle passages that verbosely condemn imperial assassinations and excoriate the masterminds behind the murders. The juxtapositions between text and images highlight three kinds of politics embedded in the visual narrative: the patron’s politics of inclusion and exclusion, the imperial body as a site of politics, and the cultural weight of the Byzantine body politic within the Mediterranean world.