IRENE AND ANNA COMNENA
The distinguished family of the Comneni has already made its appearance
in our narrative. It may be recalled that the last chapter opened
with a march of the great provincial nobles upon the capital, and
the placing of one of their ablest representatives, Isaac Comnenus,
upon the throne. Isaac’s brave life had ended in heroic foolishness.
Terrified by an apparition, he embraced the monastic life, ignored the
natural desire of his brother John to succeed him, and handed the crown
to the Ducas family. During the reign of Eudocia the widow of John
Comnenus, Anna, remained in Constantinople to guard the fortunes of her
children and eventually to help them to secure the throne. She was a
woman of the old Roman build, rather than Byzantine; strong, ambitious,
able and despotic. The Cæsar John Ducas looked on her with just
suspicion, and accused her of treasonable correspondence with Romanus,
when he was struggling to regain his throne. She boldly asserted that
the letters were forged, and brandished an image of Christ in the eyes
of her judges; but it was expedient to condemn her, and she passed to
the melancholy Princes’ Islands.
Michael the Scholar released her as soon as Diogenes was dead, and
she returned to Constantinople, to watch and work. She had something
of the spirit of her father, who had sent so many of the enemy to
the land of shades that he had won the name of Alexius _Charon_: her
mother had been of the great family of the Delasseni. The feebleness of
Michael and the insipidity of Nicephorus gave promise of a successful
revolution, and Anna and her two sons were shrewd enough not to force
the opportunity. The youth had first to learn the mastery of legions
and to marry. There were, in fact, four women in Constantinople, all
able and ambitious, who sought the throne for their children, and
a stupendous amount of intrigue must have been expended. The four
were: Anna Comnena, the Empresses Eudocia and Maria, and the wife of
Andronicus, son of the Cæsar John Ducas. Andronicus had been fatally
wounded in war, and condemned to a lingering death, and his wife
pressed the Cæsar to find good alliances for her three daughters. She
was one of those virile and beautiful Bulgarian princesses who had
found the way to Constantinople, and her eldest daughter, Irene, was
now just marriageable.
The wife of Andronicus--we do not know her name--shrewdly concluded
that an alliance with the Comneni would best serve her ambition, and
she pressed her father-in-law to bring about a marriage between Irene
and Alexis, the elder of Anna’s two sons. Alexis was a very promising
and successful commander who had recently lost his first wife, and he
was not unwilling to wed the fair Irene. Anna Comnena (the younger)
describes the pair for us, with her usual verbosity and inexactness,
premising that it is beyond the power of art to reproduce their
comeliness. Alexis was, it seems, a man of medium height, with very
broad shoulders and massive chest, eyes of “terrible splendour,” and a
look that was “at once both truculent and bland.” He seems, in fact,
to have been a very ordinary young man, with an extraordinary capacity
for ruse and intrigue. Irene (Anna’s mother) was, of course, a paragon.
Her face was “like the moon,” though not quite so round, and her rosy
cheeks and fine blue eyes make the simile somewhat weak; her look, like
that of her husband, was “at once sweet and terrible”--the look of
“a Minerva of heavenly splendour”--and calm and storm succeeded each
other, as on the sea, in her expressive blue eyes; her arms and hands
were like carven ivory, and her constant gestures extremely graceful.
In other words, Irene was a very pretty maiden of thirteen summers at
the time, with a large share of the spirit and temper of her Bulgarian
mother. These fragments of Anna Comnena’s art may serve to illustrate
Gibbon’s indulgent complaint that it is more feminine than the artist
herself.
The prospect of so significant a marriage released a fresh flood of
intrigue. Anna, the mother of Alexis, remembered that it was John Ducas
who had driven her into exile, and would not hear of a match with
his daughter-in-law. The Emperor Michael regarded the marriage with
distrust; his brother Constantine wanted to marry Alexis to his sister
Zoe, Eudocia’s youngest daughter. Through this thicket of obstacles
and intrigues the wife of Andronicus fought her way with spirit, and
not a little bribery, and the marriage took place. We may assume that
this was in the second or third year of Nicephorus, when Irene, who was
only fifteen at her coronation, cannot have been more than thirteen or
fourteen years old.
The Empress Eudocia had now played her last card, and resigned herself
to the life of the monastery; it remained to secure the favour of the
lovely Empress Maria. Isaac Comnenus had married her cousin Irene, and
had therefore the _entrée_ of her palace. The Slavonian ministers of
Nicephorus watched him and his brother with concern, but he won the
affection of Maria and, by generous distribution of money, the service
of her eunuchs. It was presently announced that the Empress Maria
proposed to adopt the successful young commander of the troops, Alexis
Comnenus, and when this ceremony had been performed both brothers were
at liberty to make lengthy visits to the Empress. It is not difficult
to accept the rumour that the relation of Alexis to his “mother” was
not entirely filial. Alexis was no ascetic, and he notoriously strayed
from his girl-wife. On the other hand, Maria had not shown much
delicacy in marrying the white-haired sensualist, and the privilege
of intimacy with a handsome young general of thirty-seven, her eunuchs
being bribed in his and her favour, would be appreciated by her. Her
mind was not strong and penetrating enough to see through the trickery
of Alexis. He posed as an unambitious general, loyally devoted to her
reign and that of her son.
The Emperor Nicephorus probably felt that the young men would await the
natural termination of his imperial orgies before seizing the throne,
and seems to have regarded them with a certain genial indifference. His
ministers, however, knew that their fortunes were ruined if Alexis came
to the throne, and they insisted that Nicephorus must name a successor.
He chose his nephew, a handsome young noble named Synadenus. Maria was
now seriously alarmed, since the accession of Synadenus would mean the
monastery for her and, possibly, death for her son, and she allowed
the Comneni to witness her tears. They were, they said, devoted to her
cause. Nay, they swore on the holy cross that they would acknowledge no
rulers but Maria and her son, and she promised, in return, that they
should be informed of any step that might be contemplated against them
in the palace. I am following, almost entirely, the narrative of Anna
Comnena, who enlarges with the most candid pleasure on the deceit of
her father, and assures us that her grandmother, Anna, was the soul of
the plot. In the palace of the Comneni councils were held daily, and
the virile mother directed the movements of her sons. It was a time of
great anxiety. One night Nicephorus invited Alexis and Isaac to his
banquet, and Anna depicts them nervously glancing round them during
the meal for the guards or assassins who might have been summoned to
despatch them. But Alexis, a master of ruse and insinuation, won the
Emperor, and, when a charge of treason was afterwards brought against
him, he easily cleared himself.
At last a message came to the mansion of the Comneni from Maria that
Barilas (one of the Slav ministers) intended to seize the throne and
put out the eyes of Alexis; and it was decided that the time had come
for action. Alexis hastily made a tour of the city, persuading some,
bribing others, until he had a large number of officers and Senators
bound by secret oath to support him. Anna meantime made preparations
for the flight of the family during the night. The chief weakness of
their position was that a young relative of the Emperor had recently
married a young girl of their family, and lived, with a tutor, in an
outlying part of their mansion. Anna, regarding the tutor as a spy,
locked them in their rooms when they were asleep, and before dawn
the whole Comneni family set out on foot to cross the city. At that
hour of the night there was little watch in Constantinople, and the
nervous band--the mother, the two brothers with their wives, children,
and sisters, and a few servants--passed safely and silently down the
colonnaded main street as far as the Forum of Constantine, where horses
awaited the men. They bade each other farewell in the darkness of
the early spring morning, and the brothers galloped to the Blachernæ
palace, where they broke into the stables, chose the swiftest horses,
hamstrung the rest of the horses, and fled to the army which awaited
them in Thrace.
The women and children made their way noiselessly back along the Mese
to the cathedral. As they went along the street, the glare of a torch
appeared in the distance and they found themselves inconveniently
accosted by the tutor spy. Anna kept her presence of mind, however.
They had heard, she said, that they were accused of some crime and they
were going at once to St Sophia, but as soon as the day broke they
would go to the palace to demand justice, and she begged the tutor to
go on to the palace to announce their intention. As soon as he had
gone, they made for the house of Bishop Nicholas, an annexe of the
cathedral into which fugitives were admitted during the night. Rousing
the doorkeeper, they announced themselves--they were all heavily
veiled--as a party of women who had just landed at the quays from the
east, and who would render thanks to the Almighty before repairing to
their homes. They were admitted to the church, and, when the officers
of the infuriated Emperor arrived, in the early morning, they found
that nothing less than a violation of the sanctuary would put the women
in the power of Nicephorus. Anna, in fact, clung to the gates of the
sanctuary, and exclaimed that the soldiers would have to cut off her
hands to remove her from the church, as the Slav ministers threatened.
Isaac’s wife Irene, an Iberian princess like her cousin Maria, followed
the example of her mother-in-law, and we must imagine the younger Irene
and the children standing by, with large and tearful blue eyes, taking
their first lesson in Byzantine politics. Nicephorus temporized, and
swore to spare their lives. Anna shrewdly stipulated that his oath
should be taken on the large cross which the Sybarite Emperor always
wore, and, when this had been brought and the oath guaranteed to them,
the women passed from the church to the palace-fortress-monastery at
Petrion, on the Golden Horn. There they were soon joined by the wife
and mother-in-law of George Paleologus, a dashing young commander who
had fled with the Comneni, and, by sharing their delicate meats and
wines liberally with their jailers, they secured a constant account of
the progress of the insurgent brothers.
They heard presently that Alexis and Isaac had safely reached the camp
in Thrace, and that it had needed only a little further intrigue on the
part of Alexis for the troops to proclaim him Emperor. The next news of
importance was that the brothers were encamped with their troops on the
higher ground without the city walls, and Nicephorus was distracted and
terrified. But we may tell in few words the success of the Comneni. The
formidable walls of Constantinople were held by the Varangian guards
and Immortals, on whose blind fidelity a ruling (and paying) Emperor
could always rely. But the extravagance of Nicephorus had in three
years exhausted the treasury--its doors stood open for any man to enter
the empty building--the troops were few, and uncertain mercenaries had
to be enlisted in the defence. Alexis bribed the German soldiers who
held the tower overlooking the Blachernæ gate, and at dawn of Maundy
Thursday (1081) his troops poured into the city.
It is one of the few points in favour of Alexis that he here made a
very human blunder which might have cost him his life and his ambition.
Instead of holding his troops to scatter the guards, who had retreated
upon the palace, he rode at once to Petrion to see that the women were
safe, and his soldiers--a motley and savage crowd of Thracian and
Macedonian mercenaries--spread with fiendish delight over the city,
violating nuns in the monasteries and burdening themselves with wine
and loot. Paleologus saved them by a bold and crafty seizure of the
fleet, cutting off the Emperor’s retreat to Asia. Nicephorus wavered
between the vigorous counsels of his ministers and the command of
the patriarch that he should abdicate and prevent civil war, but his
hesitation enabled the troops to rally, and, with a melancholy farewell
to his perfumed baths and opulent banquets, he suffered himself to be
shipped to the opposite shore and shaved into a monk.
The Empress Maria is described as trembling in her palace during these
critical days of the Holy Week, clinging to her boy Constantine, a
pretty seven-year-old lad with curly golden hair and pink and white
complexion. Alexis had apparently deceived her, and the Comnenian
women would have little consideration for her. For some days, however,
she remained in quiet possession of her apartments, and a very keen
discussion took place in Constantinople as to the intentions of Alexis.
He had put Irene, with her mother and sisters, in the lower and older
palace, while he, his mother, brother, and other relations had taken
residence in the more important Bucoleon palace, by the water. Did he
propose to put away his doll-wife and wed the riper beauty? Such things
had happened before, and the careful reader of Anna Comnena’s discreet
narrative will easily believe that that was the intention, or the
disposition, of Alexis. He had treated Irene with coldness and disdain
(other chroniclers tell us), and been unfaithful to her. But the little
Irene had her party, or Maria had her enemies, and the indecision of
Alexis was forced. Paleologus drew up the fleet before Bucoleon. When
Alexis sent orders to him that the sailors must not acclaim Irene,
he boldly replied that he had “not done all this for Alexis, but for
Irene,” and her name rolled from galley to galley. Next the Cæsar John
Ducas intervened, and urged Maria to retire; probably he sought favour
with Anna. Alexis still hesitated, and Irene was not crowned with him.
Speculation in the city was now seething, but a curious circumstance
soon ended the hesitation of Alexis. His mother was devoted to monks
generally, and one in particular she so esteemed that she insisted on
his being appointed at once patriarch of Constantinople. The actual
patriarch, Cosmas, swore that he would not resign in favour of the monk
until he had crowned Irene, and Anna had now an additional incentive
to press her son. Within a week of the coronation of Alexis the second
coronation took place, and Irene began to share the bed and the throne
of her husband. The last hope of Maria had gone down before her more
virile and older antagonist, and she prepared to retire. Her son
Constantine was clothed with the imperial dignity, and an imperial
rescript, written in the red or purple ink and signed with the golden
seal of the Emperor, guaranteed their safety. With this precious
document Maria retired, accompanied by her son, to a somewhat remote
palace in the imperial domain, and we may briefly dismiss her from the
story. Some years later a pretext was found to remove her from her
semi-imperial state and lodge her in a monastery. Her last recorded act
is that she bethought herself of her first and real husband, who still
lived in Constantinople as titular Bishop of Ephesus, and asked and
obtained forgiveness.
Alexis now hastened to form about his throne a bulwark of loyal, and
richly rewarded, friends, and the Court resounded with sonorous new
titles and glittered with new insignia. Another noble, Nicephorus
Melissenus, had sought the throne at the same time as Alexis; he
was disarmed with the dignity of Cæsar and the remote governorship
of Thessalonica. Isaac received the newly created dignity of
Sebastocrator; Michael Taroneita, who had married a sister of Alexis,
rejoiced in the opulent name of Panhypersebastos; and younger brothers
were created Protosebastos and Sebastos.[26] When we recollect that the
wife of each had a corresponding title and state, we appreciate the
splendour of the processions which now constantly fed the enthusiasm of
Constantinople.
For a time, however, life in the palace wore a humorously mournful
complexion. The appalling outrages of Alexis’s troops had sown
bitterness in the minds of the people, and the memory of them had
to be obliterated. Any other Emperor would have at once provided a
glorious series of chariot races and flung gold in showers from his
chariot. Alexis Comnenus found a less expensive device; unless we
care to attribute the scheme to his mother, whom he consulted. The
new patriarch was humbly begged to impose a penance on all the royal
inmates of the palace, and he decided that forty days of fasting and
prayer would efface the stain. Alexis himself generously went beyond
the letter of the penance; he slept nightly on the ground and wore a
hair shirt--and took care that all the citizens knew it. His brothers,
his mother and the other women of the family embraced their share of
the imposition, and for five or six weeks the Bucoleon palace resembled
a monastery.
When the period of mourning came to an end Alexis turned to face the
numerous and pressing enemies of his Empire, and his mother became the
active ruler. Her granddaughter would have us believe that the elder
Anna had no ambition to wield power; she was disposed to retire at once
into a monastery, and it was only in obedience to a solemn decree of
Alexis that she consented to remain in the palace and use the powers
of her absent son. But Anna Comnena, the royal historian, possessed
in a considerable degree the faculty for ruse and duplicity which
distinguished her family,[27] and we have little difficulty in seeing
that the older Anna claimed and clung to power. Irene was, of course,
still a negligible child. Anna at once set about the restoration of
discipline in the palace, which had been so grossly neglected under
Nicephorus and Maria. Hours were fixed for meals and prayers and the
chanting of hymns, and her table was rarely without the blessing of
some priest or monk who would discuss with her the sacred books and
theological issues in which she was interested. Sober in diet, liberal
to the poor and the Church, awake beyond the hours of most mortals
with her long prayers, yet up early in the morning for those imperial
duties which the golden bull of her son had laid on her, Anna was at
least not unworthy of the power she had intrigued to secure. We must,
however, not exaggerate her political influence. A few years later we
find Alexis, when he sets out for the field, entrusting the reins of
government to his brother, and no doubt Isaac generally controlled the
administration.
Of Irene we hear little until the latter part of her husband’s reign,
when her services as nurse make him appreciate her value. In spite of
the glowing assurances of their daughter, we perceive confidently
that Irene was slighted, both by the mother and the son, and we shall
ultimately find her dismissing him from the world with an assurance of
her profound disdain. For two years the chronicles are silent about
her, and the one reference to her in twenty years is that she bore
children to her spouse. As Christmas approached in 1083 she began
to feel the first pangs of travail. Alexis was expected home from
his campaign against Robert Guiscard in two days, and Anna Comnena,
who is not hypersensitive in her narrative, relates that the young
mother signed her body with a cross and said: “Stay where you are, my
boy, until your father arrives.” It was not a boy, but the historian
herself, who saw the light two days later, and Anna--a fierce and
murderous rebel against her brother--asks us to applaud her very early
practice of the virtue of obedience.
In view of this silence concerning the Empresses we will hold ourselves
dispensed from following Alexis through the campaigns, plots and
counter-plots of the next twenty years. Five years were spent in
struggle with Robert Guiscard of Italy: five in repelling the wild
Patzinaks of Scythia: five more in suppressing conspiracies, or alleged
conspiracies, against the throne. It may seem ungenerous to suspect
that the hard-working Alexis invented these conspiracies in order to
rid his camp and Court of suspected relatives or nobles, but Byzantine
historians not obscurely hint such a suspicion. One conspiracy only
need be related, since Irene appears on the stage at the time.
Some years after his accession to the throne--the date is
uncertain--Alexis consented to the retirement of his mother into the
monastery to which, her granddaughter says, her heart had always
turned. Very probably Irene, as she grew to womanhood, resented the
older woman’s restraint and piety, and insisted on her removal. She
died, a nun, a few years afterwards. From that time Alexis drew nearer
to Irene, and used to take her with him on his campaigns. In 1092 or
1093 there was trouble in Dalmatia, and Irene accompanied her husband
and shared his tent in the camp. It was noticed with some alarm by the
officers that Nicephorus Diogenes, son of Eudocia, who had received
imperial dignity in his infancy and might aspire to regain it, pitched
his tent nearer to that of the Emperor than courtesy permitted. Alexis
scouted their suspicions, and retired to rest with Irene; but in the
middle of the night the maid who was engaged in keeping the flies, or
other insects, off the royal sleepers, aroused them with the news that
Nicephorus had entered the tent with a drawn sword. One hesitates to
say which is the more remarkable: that there should be no guard to the
imperial tent, or that Alexis should take no notice of this attempt on
his life. A few days later, Anna assures us, Nicephorus renewed the
attempt, and was detected with drawn sword near the Emperor’s bath.
He was now put to the torture and provided a list of nobles who were
obnoxious to the Emperor and were duly punished. It is interesting to
find that the ex-Empress Maria was included among the conspirators, and
it was possibly on this occasion that she was sent to a nunnery. But
the narrated details of the conspiracy are so clumsy, and the issue
proved so profitable to Alexis, that historians regard it with grave
suspicion.
We come next to the page of Byzantine history which is least unfamiliar
to English readers, the page restored to life by Sir Walter Scott in
his “Count Robert of Paris.”[28] But, profoundly important as the
passage of the first Crusaders is in Byzantine history and in the
biography of Alexis, we have no decent pretext to enlarge on that
fascinating episode in a biography of the Empresses. We need say only
that Irene trembled with her husband, or more than her husband, at the
formidable tide of the invasion. Thinking to secure a few thousand
spears to assist him in his warfare with the Turks, Alexis had added
a pathetic, if not hypocritical, plea to the eloquence of Peter the
Hermit. The response was, in 1096, a devouring and destructive army of
locusts: a flood of 300,000 men, women and children, who, before they
could be persuaded to cross the straits and leave their bones on the
plains of Asia Minor, gravely embarrassed the Byzantine Court. In their
train came a more formidable menace: Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert of
Flanders, the princes of Western chivalry, with their hawks and hounds
and ladies, and their vast hordes of hungry and blustering men-at-arms.
Their suspicions, ferocious outbursts, disdain, and greed of wealth,
called out every diplomatic resource at the command of Alexis, and few
will do more than smile at his duplicity in such circumstances. At
one moment, when it was rumoured in their camp without the walls that
Alexis had imprisoned some of their leaders, they flung themselves
against the city, and a howl of terror was heard from Blachernæ to the
Sea of Marmora. How Alexis astutely drew them from the fascinations
of his capital, and hovered in their rear, jackal-like, to recover
the towns from which they expelled the Turk, and at last brought on a
conflict of Latin and Greek, must be read in history. Seven further
years of the reign of Alexis and Irene passed in these adventures.
The next decade was full of war against Bohemund, son of his former
antagonist Robert Guiscard, and other Crusaders. In the course of the
war, in 1105, we again catch a glimpse of Irene, who accompanied Alexis
to the camp of Thessalonica. Apropos of the journey her daughter, who
was now a mature eyewitness of events, depicts Irene’s character in
phrases which we read with some discretion. She was, it seems, so
devoted to the reading of sacred books, the conversation of holy men
and the discharge of her domestic duties, that she was reluctant to
make these journeys; indeed, she could never appear in public without
a nervous blush. It is not like the Irene whom we shall know more
fully anon. But her husband needed her, and she obeyed. Plotters and
conspirators surrounded him, and he suffered acutely from gout in the
feet. Of the constant plots Anna offers no explanation; it is not from
her that we learn how Alexis so far debased the coinage that his “gold”
pieces (almost entirely bronze) were a thing of contempt throughout
Europe, how he further oppressed his subjects with monopolies, and how
savagely he could at times treat malcontents and heretics. His gout,
however, she is eager to explain. It was due, not to any generosity of
diet, but to an injury to his knee in early years, aggravated by the
stupid “barbarians of the West” (the Crusaders), who kept the sacred
Emperor _standing_ for hours to listen to their unceasing torrents of
talk. So Irene had to accompany her husband, to chafe his poignant
limbs when the gout racked him and to scare away conspirators. She
travelled with great modesty, in a litter borne by two mules and so
enwrapped with purple that “her divine body was not visible.”
In the following year a conspiracy was “detected” at Constantinople.
A wealthy Senator named Solomon and four brothers of Saracenic origin
were the chief plotters, and the treasury was enriched by their
fortunes. Solomon’s mansion was given to Irene, who is said to have
restored it to the wife of the Senator. For once Anna admits that
her father could be truculent. Anna was at a window of the palace
overlooking the Forum, or the streets near it, when the soldiers and
mob passed with the four brother conspirators. They were mounted on
oxen, and were derisively adorned with the horns and entrails of oxen
by the theatrical folk to whom they had been entrusted before their
eyes were put out; from another historian we learn that the hair had
already been torn, by means of pitch, from their heads and chins. Anna
called her mother, and the two women forced Alexis to put an end to the
horrible display and spare the prisoners’ eyes.
A year or two later Irene is said to have saved her husband’s life from
fresh conspirators. She had again set out with him for Thessalonica,
and, as they camped at Psyllus on the way, a plot was formed to murder
Alexis as soon as Irene should return to the city. Alexis would not
part with her, and the impatient conspirators threw a parchment in his
tent, deriding him for his reluctance to take the field and urging
the dismissal of Irene. Shortly afterwards a more violent diatribe
was placed under their bed while they slept, but one of Irene’s
eunuchs was on guard and arrested the man, who betrayed the plotters.
Then the death of Bohemund put an end to the war in the West, and
the indefatigable Emperor turned to face the Turks and the Crusaders
who had settled in the East. Irene became seriously ill when she
accompanied Alexis to the Chersonesus in 1112, yet we find her with him
at Philippopolis in the following year.
Irene was little more than nurse to the gouty monarch during these
campaigns, yet we must, in order to understand her last fierce word to
him, glance for a moment at the conduct she observed in him. She had
for years seen how he conducted wars and diplomacy chiefly by guile and
deceit, and she now saw how he converted heretics. A few years before
he had set out to refute the tenets of the “Bogomilians,” one of the
many sects, mingling Eastern and Western ideas, in which age after age
the protestant feeling against the superstitions and corruption of the
Greek Church found expression. By the use of torture Alexis discovered
that the leader of the sect was a staid and venerable monk named
Basil, invited the monk to visit him in the palace, and, by a grossly
hypocritical pretence that he himself leaned to the sect, induced him
to talk freely of their doctrines. When he had “vomited his heresy,”
Alexis drew aside a curtain, and showed the man that a shorthand-writer
had secretly taken down his words. Basil was imprisoned, and Alexis
spent hours in argumentation with him; and a few years later the
“archsatrap of Satan” and large numbers of his followers were burned
alive for refusing to see the force of the imperial logic. Similar
tactics were now adopted at Philippopolis, where Alexis and Irene spent
the greater part of 1113. It was an important seat of the Paulicians
(a modified Manichæan sect), and Alexis spent days in disputation with
their leaders; when persuasion failed, he resorted to bribery and
coercion.
These few instances will suffice to illustrate the relations of Irene
and Alexis, and we may hasten to the final scene. The last years
were occupied with a campaign against the Turks, but Alexis was now
seriously ill and the enemy advanced and reviled him for his cowardice.
In their camp they bore about a bed with an effigy of Alexis pretending
that gouty feet prevented him from taking the field. Irene was awakened
one night with the news that the Turks were upon them, and Alexis was
forced to let her return to the capital. There is no doubt that she
accompanied Alexis on these later campaigns only because he compelled
her, and one wonders whether he was not afraid to leave her in the
palace. He retreated, and recalled her at once to Nicomedia. Here she
found that his own subjects were singing, on the streets, comic songs
about the gout of the great Emperor and his flight before the Turks. He
was undoubtedly very ill, and in the spring of 1118 he was brought back
to the palace to die. Then arose a fierce struggle for the throne.
Anna Comnena, the princess born in 1083, had been betrothed, in her
tender years, to the Empress Maria’s pretty boy Constantine. The
boy died, however, and in time she was married to the distinguished
and ambitious noble, Nicephorus Bryennius, who received the title
of Cæsar and then that of Panhypersebastos (“the august above all
others”). Bryennius was a scholar: Anna a prodigy of female learning, a
cyclopædia of arts and philosophy, a most imposing writer, and--strange
to say--a spirited and ambitious princess. The brilliance of this
imperial pair dazzled the Court and the capital, and it was very
naturally suggested that the crowns could not be placed on wiser and
more fitting heads than theirs. Such was the opinion of Irene. But
Alexis and Irene had three sons (John, Andronicus and Isaac) and three
daughters (Maria, Eudocia and Theodora) besides the gifted Anna, and
the crown belonged, by such right as was recognized in Byzantium,
to the eldest son. John was a plain, quiet youth of--as events
proved--sterling character and no ostentation. His father appreciated
him, though few others knew him. He observed with sullen eyes the
efforts of his mother to displace him, and secretly engaged officers
and nobles to support him against her; and Irene retorted by forbidding
them to have any intercourse with John. This struggle was now to reach
the height of passion round the deathbed of the Emperor.
The last ten pages of Anna’s narrative give a vivid account of the
progress of her father’s illness. She was appointed to a kind of
presidency over the skilled medical men who were summoned from all
parts of the Empire to check the “mysterious” illness--of a gouty
old man of seventy. I will quote only that, when relics failed to
improve his condition, they applied a red-hot iron to his stomach--to
counterpoise the pain at the extremities, perhaps--and, when this
brought about no relief, removed him to the Mangana palace, near what
is now known as the Seraglio Point. Irene watched her husband night and
day (carefully excluding John), and, although the monks assured her
that he would live to visit the Holy Sepulchre, she shed “more tears
than the waters of the Nile,” Anna says.
In the afternoon of 15th August 1118, Alexis lay dying on his purple
couch. The description of the scene, which closes Anna’s narrative,
has reached us only in a torn and fragmentary condition, but the
chronicle of the monk Zonaras, who lived about this date, is full
and authoritative, and it is supported by the chronicle of Nicetas.
Their account of that last scene in the life of Alexis shows that Anna
Comnena crowns her work with a masterpiece of deliberate lying. She
depicts her mother overwhelmed with sorrow at the impending loss of
her husband, crying that thrones and crowns are vanity, and calling
for the black robe of a nun, if not actually shearing her golden
tresses, before the last breath has left her husband’s body. Of the
real features of the scene there is merely a faint and vague report
that John is hurrying to the main palace and the city is disturbed. The
truth is less touching, more dramatic.
Availing himself of a temporary absence of his mother--probably bribing
the guards--John entered the room and approached the bed of the dying
and speechless monarch. Alexis was still conscious; but whether he
gave his ring to John, or the son detached it from his finger, the
chroniclers are not agreed. No doubt Alexis was too feeble to detach
and give it, and merely looked assent when John detached it; Alexis had
always favoured John. By the time Irene returned John was galloping
across the imperial domain to the chief palace (either Daphne or,
more probably, Bucoleon), and the Empress was furious. She angrily
observed to Alexis that his son was seizing the throne while he yet
lived. Alexis feebly, and equivocally--though some writers say that
he smiled--lifted his hands and eyes toward heaven, as if to intimate
that there was the only throne about which he was now concerned.
Nicephorus Bryennius was summoned, and Irene urged him to unite with
her in claiming the throne. He refused, and she returned to her
husband. The last words, loudly and harshly spoken, which she gave the
dying man were: “Husband, while you lived, you were full of guile,
saying one thing and thinking another; you are no better now that you
are dying.”[29] We may assume that Alexis had deceived her about the
succession. He died that evening, so completely deserted that there
were no ministers to perform the ceremonial services over his remains.
The interest had passed to the main palace.
John had found before the door a regiment of the Varangians, who, even
when he showed his father’s ring, refused to allow him to enter. But
they grounded their formidable two-edged axes, and stood aside, when
he swore (a false oath) that his father was already dead, and had
appointed him successor. He at once secured the palace and the crown,
and the reign of Irene Comnena was over, the hope of Anna Comnena
shattered. John would not even issue to attend the funeral of Alexis,
so determined he was to hold the palace. The women were beaten by the
quiet, ugly little youth they had despised, and a few words of the
chroniclers dismiss them from the stage of history.
Irene, changing her name to that of Xene, retired to a monastery which
she had built in the city. Curiously enough, a manuscript copy of
the rules of this monastery has survived, and been published,[30] so
that we have an interesting glimpse of Irene’s later years and of the
monastic life of the time. The inmates were to number between thirty
and forty, were to sleep in a common dormitory, and were to elect a
prefect. Besides the steward, who was to be a eunuch, and the two
chaplains, who must be monks and eunuchs, no man was ever to enter the
monastery, and the reception of visitors was strictly controlled. There
was midnight office to be chanted, and the remaining offices and meals
and other details were planned much as in a modern “convent” (a Latin
word unknown in the East). Each nun was permitted to have a bath once a
month. Irene little dreamed, when she sanctioned this ascetic scheme,
that she would one day be forced to adopt it. But the last glimpse we
catch of her in the chronicles suggests that she did not embrace it
in all its rigour. Fifteen years later, when another Irene came from
the West to wed the Emperor Manuel, she noticed, among the crowd of
notabilities who welcomed her to the city, an aged lady whose dark
monastic robe was relieved by strips of purple and edges of gold. When
she asked the name of this royal nun, she learned that it was the widow
of the great Alexis. Probably Irene tempered the diet and prayers, as
well as the robe, of the monastery. She was then seventy-seven years
old, and cannot have lived much longer.
Anna Comnena seems to have retained her liberty and rank at the
accession of her brother. He soon proved his worthiness of the crown,
and the corrupt nobles and ministers, shrinking from his inflexible
justice, gathered darkly about Anna and Bryennius. Anna was the
most active spirit in the plot, and it would have succeeded but for
the irresolution, or humanity, of Bryennius. The doorkeeper of the
palace was bribed, and John might have been murdered in his bed. When
Bryennius failed to use the advantage, Anna turned upon him with fury.
Nicetas tells us that she complained, “in somewhat obscene language,”
that Nature had made her a woman and him a man. John was content to
confiscate their property; though, when he gave Anna’s luxurious palace
and all it contained to his Turkish minister, that strange type of
Byzantine official begged his master to lay aside his anger and permit
him to restore the palace to Anna. Some years later she entered her
mother’s monastery--probably when her husband died in 1128--and lived
there at least twenty years, writing her famous work, the “Alexiad,” a
chronicle of her father’s deeds. That work--affected, insincere and
ambitious--reflects the character of its author, nor can its lavish use
of the art of suppressing some facts and enlarging others efface from
our memory the ignoble attitude of Irene and Anna by the bedside of the
dying Alexis and toward his legitimate heir.