John was a scion of the
Kourkouas family, a clan of
Armenian origin that had established itself as one of the chief families among the
Anatolian military aristocracy by the early 10th century. His father,
Romanos Kourkouas, was a senior military commander in the 960s, and the son of the great general
John Kourkouas, who held the post of
Domestic of the Schools (commander-in-chief of the
Byzantine army) for 22 years and led the Byzantine armies against the Muslim
border emirates in the period 926–944. John was also cousin of
John Tzimiskes, another general who became emperor on 969–976. John is first mentioned in 970, during the Byzantine campaigns in
Bulgaria in the aftermath of the
invasion by
Sviaroslav of
Kievan Rus'. At the time, John held the high rank of , likely due to his kinship with the new emperor. The main Byzantine forces, under the veteran commander
Bardas Skleros, were occupied in Anatolia with the suppression of the revolt of
Bardas Phokas the Younger, so Kourkouas received command of an army sent to
Arcadiopolis to confront Sviatoslav's Rus'. According to the contemporary historian
Leo the Deacon, he was inexperienced, and prone to idleness and drunkenness, and thus encouraged the Rus' to persist in their raids into the Byzantine territories in
Thrace. After the suppression of Phokas' revolt, in summer 971, Tzimiskes himself set out at the head of the imperial army against the Rus'. The Byzantines
laid siege to the fortress of
Dorostolon on the
Danube, which became the scene of several fights as the Rus' sortied to destroy the Byzantines'
siege engines. During one such sortie against the positions held by Kourkouas, he was killed after he fell from his horse; judging from his richly decorated armour, the Rus' initially thought that they had killed Tzimiskes himself. Leo the Deacon claims that he had been drunk and, and just received an imperial reprimand for having pillaged churches in Bulgaria. ==References==