EUPHROSYNE DUCÆNA
The new Emperor, whom so extraordinary a chance had raised to the
throne, was a worthless and entirely incompetent man of thirty summers,
with the courage of a mouse, the vanity of a peacock, and the small
cunning of a Byzantine mediocrity. Finlay contemptuously observes that
he was “a fair specimen of the Byzantine nobility of his age.” He had
accepted the control of an Empire which only a Hercules could save from
ruin; and he proceeded to extort money from its distracted citizens for
the building of palaces and decoration of churches, to surround himself
with a hedge of actors and actresses which shut out the misery of his
provinces, to cast the cares of government upon a crowd of praying and
feasting monks, and to place his ideal of monarchy in the possession of
endless wardrobes and the enjoyment of stupendous banquets.
He was an upstart in epicureanism, and it is therefore not strange
that he followed the recent and abominable practice of taking a child
to wife. An earlier wife, of whom he had a son named Alexis and two
daughters, had died, and, when he came to the throne, there was the
customary scanning of the lists of royal families in order to secure an
Empress. His choice fell on the nine-year-old daughter of Bela, King
of Hungary, and the wondering maiden was brought to Constantinople by
his resplendent officers and eunuchs and prepared for the impressive
ceremonies of an imperial marriage. The tender little Margaret became
the Empress Maria, and was entrusted to the care of the troop of
strange beings whom she would learn to call her eunuchs. She would not
be old enough to know that Isaac provoked a dangerous revolt at once
by imposing the cost of his marriage on the overburdened provinces: or
to perceive that the vast aggregation of palaces had, for the first
time in Byzantine history, been looted by the mob. Isaac had ignobly
lingered in the Blachernæ palace while the people of Constantinople,
after despatching Andronicus, had wandered through the imperial
apartments and stolen all the money and portable treasures they
contained. One pious looter had even carried off the autograph letter
of Christ to King Abgar. But Isaac, as soon as his throne was secure,
repented of his liberality, and, by means of extortion and spoliation
and adulteration of the coinage, contrived even to surpass the luxury
and parade of his predecessor.
Maria will not interest us until, in her womanhood, she begins to
encounter the adventures of a fallen Empress, and one or two anecdotes
will serve to describe the kind of life she endured during the ten
years’ reign (1185–1195) of her husband. Isaac was a florid-faced,
red-haired young man with imperial appetites. His banquets consisted,
Nicetas says, of “a mountain of bread, a forest of game, a sea of
fishes and an ocean of wine,” at which he sat, richly perfumed and
clothed with the conscious gorgeousness of a peacock, amidst a crowd of
female relatives, and other females who were not relatives. When the
dishes were removed, the choicest mimes and conjurers and musicians
of the Empire were summoned to entertain him and his guests. It is
narrated that one famous comedian, when he was for the first time
admitted into the presence of this cohort of wine-flushed ladies, bowed
to the Emperor and said: “Let us make the acquaintance of these first,
and then you may bring the rest.”
Nearly his whole reign was filled by a great revolt of the Wallachians
and Bulgarians, and in 1195 he set out to take the field in person
against them. One day he rode out from the camp to hunt, and had not
proceeded far when he heard an alarming tumult in his rear. He found
that his brother Alexis, who had astutely awaited his opportunity, was
being acclaimed Emperor, and, without a struggle, he galloped across
the country. He was captured, blinded and imprisoned; and his young
wife now gives place to a more interesting type of Empress. Maria
remained in Constantinople, and will re-enter the story presently.
Euphrosyne Ducæna--that is to say, Euphrosyne of the famous Ducas
family, into which some ancestor of hers had married--was an energetic
and ambitious woman of middle age at the time of her accession. Her
father, Gregory Camaterus, had been an imperial secretary, and had
taken advantage of his favoured position to marry into the nobility.
Euphrosyne must have been born some time before 1150, in the reign
of Manuel, and have witnessed the later series of revolutions and
assassinations. In time she married the elder brother of Isaac Angelus,
a provincial noble of no distinction or wealth, and, during the bloody
reign of Andronicus, Alexis had taken refuge among the Turks. Even
whole populations gladly put themselves under the Turks or Saracens to
escape the vices of their Christian rulers. We cannot, however, say if
Euphrosyne accompanied her husband or remained in Constantinople. At
last Alexis heard the strange news that his brother was on the throne,
and he hastened to Constantinople. He was arrested on the way by the
Prince of Antioch, ransomed by Isaac, and promoted to high office
and wealth. He was a more energetic, more handsome and superficially
more attractive man than his younger brother, but his slender list of
virtues did not include gratitude.
He had communicated to Euphrosyne, if not received from her, his design
of seizing the crown, and she threw herself ardently into the work of
preparing the city. She was a woman of great ability, of persuasive
tongue, and still not without beauty; and it was not difficult to
persuade Senators and priests that Isaac was a disgrace to the purple.
Her own husband was little, if at all, better, but he had the advantage
of an imposing exterior and of concealing his real character. When
a messenger reached her with the news that Alexis was declared, she
bribed a priest to proclaim him from the pulpit of the cathedral, and
promised heavy rewards to the nobles who would support him. Alexis
himself was following the same line of lavishing offices (even if they
had to be created) and money on his supporters. As a result Euphrosyne
was able to occupy the palace almost without opposition, and the
Senators hastened to kiss her slippers and lie at her feet, while she
“stroked the bellies of the pigs,” in the scornful language of Nicetas,
who was a Court official of the time--on the wrong side. She announced
that the new Emperor would adopt the name of Comnenus, instead of
Angelus. It was an indiscretion, as the artisans of the city said that
they had had enough of the Comneni, and met in the Forum to place a
crown on the head of a popular astrologer of the hour. But Euphrosyne
sent a troop of her obedient nobles to scatter the rabble and their
king, and in a few days welcomed Alexis to his golden throne. People
shook their heads, however, when, as Alexis came out of St Sophia
wearing the crown, his fiery Arab at first refused to let him mount,
and then plunged so violently that the crown fell off and was broken.
The people of Constantinople soon discovered that they had exchanged
brother for brother. Alexis emptied the war-chest, which Isaac had
at length filled, into the pockets of his supporters, leaving the
Bulgarians and other foes to raid the provinces. He hastened to don
the gorgeous golden robes, and to restore the opulent banquets and
merry parties of his predecessor, and soon “knew no more about the
cares of his Empire than the inhabitants of Thule.” Euphrosyne is said
to have equalled him in luxury and display, but she had some idea of
statesmanship. She promptly undertook to rule the Empire, and we can
well believe that, even when she incurs the censure of Nicetas for
going about in a golden litter borne on the shoulders of distinguished
nobles, she was acting from policy. She ignored her husband, overruled
his decrees, placed her own relatives in office, and had her own
lovers. When important ambassadors were to be received, she had her
throne placed beside that of the Emperor, and Senators had to visit and
pay homage at her palace as well as at that of Alexis. Her husband was
happy in his imperial lake of luxury, and for a time took no notice. If
a noble offered him a sum of money for the office of ploughing the sand
he accepted it cheerfully. Euphrosyne, however, forbade the selling of
offices, and made a sincere effort to arrest that diversion of funds
from public purposes which had been wasting the blood of the Empire for
centuries.
Her integrity as a ruler soon excited the hostility of the vicious
nobles, and a struggle began which makes it difficult for us to
judge certain aspects of the character of Euphrosyne. The rule at
Constantinople was to impeach the morals of an Empress when her public
virtue was beyond question, and this the angry nobles proceeded to do.
She had ventured to appoint a first minister on the mere ground of
ability, and her brother Basil, her son-in-law and other nobles plotted
to restrict her power. They approached Alexis and whispered that
Euphrosyne was criminally intimate with a handsome young officer named
Vatatzes, and that he might before long find his throne occupied by her
paramour.
Nicetas, who was at the Court, has clearly no doubt about the liaison,
and we must admit that Euphrosyne’s family is not distinguished for
asceticism. Her youngest daughter, Eudocia, had been married in 1185
to the King of Servia, and had, after a few years, been driven from
the Court, naked, for her misconduct, and brought back in shame to
Constantinople. Euphrosyne’s brother Basil, who owed his office to her,
was her chief accuser. Alexis, at all events, was convinced. He sent
for the head of Vatatzes, who was in Bithynia at the time, and, when
it was brought, addressed it, says Nicetas, “in words which cannot be
included in this history.” Euphrosyne trembled, and appealed to her
courtiers to intercede. Alexis had gone to Thrace for a time, and he
returned to find the Court divided into two parties over the affair.
Some said that she was guilty; some were for punishing the libellers.
He went with Euphrosyne to the Blachernæ palace, and his dark demeanour
and refusal to sleep with her made her fear that her head would be the
next to fall. She therefore demanded a trial of the charge, but Alexis
merely handed her maids and eunuchs to the official torturer, and they
could only obtain release from their horrible sufferings by declaring
her guilty. Alexis was not normally a cruel man; very little blood was
shed in his reign. But the suggestion that Euphrosyne meditated taking
from him his throne and his splendid pleasures alarmed him. He stripped
her of her gold and purple, dressed her in the rough tunic of a common
prostitute, and handed her to two barbaric slaves to be conveyed to the
Nematorea monastery, near the entrance to the Black Sea. There, guarded
by two uncivilized slaves who could hardly speak Greek, she looked back
with bitterness on the two or three years of power and the ingratitude
of her brother and son-in-law. But Constantinople pitied her, or at
least despised her opponents. Basil and Andronicus were assailed in the
street with jeers and popular songs, and began to repent. They had not,
they pleaded, imagined that the luxurious Emperor had energy enough
to take such a step; they had wished only to restrict the power of
Euphrosyne. They and others now pleaded with the Emperor to reconsider
his decision, and, after a solitary confinement of six months,
Euphrosyne returned in triumph to the palace and wielded more power
than ever. It is pleasant to read that Alexis found himself incapable
of ruling without her judicious aid; and that she took no vengeance
whatever on her accusers.
In the following year Alexis fell seriously ill, and the question
of successor was opened. He suffered much from gout and despised
physicians. Unfortunately his own ideas of medical treatment were
much more crude than those of the doctors of the time. He ordered his
servants to cauterize his gouty limbs with red-hot irons, and passed
into a dangerous condition. As he had no sons, a wide field was opened
for competitors, owing to the abominable Byzantine system, which knew
neither the hereditary principle nor serious election, and the palace
was enlivened by the intrigues of a score of aspirants. None of them
seemed to have the faintest suspicion that the Byzantine Empire was
within five years of its first destruction. However, to Euphrosyne’s
relief, Alexis recovered, and, as the earlier husbands of his elder
daughters died (Eudocia was still in Servia), they were wedded to
distinguished nobles, and the year ended with prolonged gaieties at the
Blachernæ palace.
A long absence of the Emperor in Thrace left the supreme power in the
hands of Euphrosyne, and, as so many Byzantine women had done, she held
the reins with a firmer and more skilful hand than her husband. The
only defect noted by the censorious Nicetas is that she was lenient
to members of her own family. Fraudulent officials she punished with
a severity that was rarely witnessed in the East, but the admiral
Michael Stryphnus, who had married her sister, was permitted to indulge
criminal malpractices, for which the Empire would soon pay a heavy
price. He sold even the stores and equipment of the existing galleys,
and they rotted in the harbours, while pirates spread terror throughout
the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. These were not crimes at which
the short-sighted Emperor could cavil. Not only did he cheat his
people by creating and selling sinecures, but he resorted to practices
which amounted to piracy. He once sent six galleys of the fleet into
the Black Sea for the ostensible purpose of salving a wreck, but with
secret orders to board and loot every vessel they met. Large numbers
of mercantile galleys were returning with cargoes from the Black Sea
ports, often in charge of the merchants themselves, some of whom were
flung overboard for resisting. The others returned to Constantinople
in great anger, and, although they stood at the door of St Sophia,
candle in hand, when the Emperor came to pray, he merely laughed at
their complaints. From the clergy such sufferers received little
sympathy; the patriarch was a brother of Euphrosyne. The city was full
of violence and knavery: the seas were scoured by pirates: the remoter
provinces were ground between the imperial tax-gatherers and the
foreign raiders.
Yet in this melancholy putrescence of the once mighty Empire Alexis and
Euphrosyne maintained all the glamour of the imperial Court. Euphrosyne
is the only Empress whom we find engaging in the chase as the Emperors
did. Nicetas describes her setting out amid large companies of nobles,
a falcon resting on her gold-embroidered glove, or a kennel of dogs
rushing at her virile call. It is even said that she believed in, and
practised, the incantations and divinations which had become generally
popular among the decaying people. Her magic seems to have taken some
unfamiliar form, since she had the snout cut off a famous bronze
boar in the Hippodrome, had a beautiful marble statue of Hercules
flogged, and ordered mutilations of other works of art that reminded
Constantinople of better days. She seems to have been an able and
well-disposed woman tainted by the perversity of her age.
The Empire was sinking rapidly, living on its capital, yet suffering
the roads and bridges and forts to fall to ruin, the helpless provinces
to writhe under the heel of every invader, and the funds that should
have been spent on defence to be wasted in courtly luxury and the
maintenance of a crowd of ignoble parasites. An anecdote of the time
(about the year 1200) shows to what an extraordinary degree the funds
had been diverted from the army. There was in Constantinople a
descendant of the Comneni who, from his barrel-like shape, went by the
name of John the Fat. This paltry and contemptible conspirator won a
few followers among the nobility, went with them into the cathedral,
and put upon his own head one of the imperial crowns that hung over the
altar. The report ran through the city and a great crowd assembled and
conducted the waddling and perspiring John to the palace. Alexis and
Euphrosyne seem to have been at Blachernæ, or in one of the Asiatic
palaces, but the strange thing is that there seem to have been no
guards whatever, where former Emperors had kept whole regiments of
Scholarians and Excubitors or, at the later date, Varangians. We know
that there were still Varangians in the imperial service, but they seem
to have been too few to defend the numerous palaces. However, John
the Fat had not wit or grit enough to secure the palace when he had
entered, and, as darkness came on, a few imperial soldiers penetrated
to his apartments and killed him.
At length, in the year 1202, the Empire passed into the penumbra of its
great tragedy. Isaac II., the younger brother whom Alexis had displaced
and blinded, had lived in Constantinople, in a humble mansion near
the shore, during the seven years that followed his deposition, and
was regarded with so little concern that no watch was kept upon his
movements. It was not noticed that the Latin soldiers who lived in, or
constantly passed through, Constantinople were frequent visitors at his
house, and it was not known that the letters he wrote to his daughter
Irene, who had married Philip of Germany, were treasonable in their
import. But the blind and neglected brother was dreaming of a return to
his imperial debauches. It is probable that Maria, who would now be a
comely young woman of sixteen, lived with him, but of that we are not
assured; she was somewhere in Constantinople. At length the time seemed
ripe for his effort, and he sent his son Alexis, a youth as ardently
and unscrupulously bent on returning to power as he, to the Court of
Philip and Irene in Sicily.
It was the eve of the fourth Crusade, and the knights of the West were
gathering for a fresh effort to break the power of the Turk, and to
gather loot by the way. To these noble buccaneers the Emperor Philip
introduced the young Alexis and proposed that they should restore him
and his father to their throne. Neither East nor West attracts our
sympathy for a moment. The Angeli brothers were squabbling for the
right to indulge their sordid tastes on an imperial scale, and the
younger Alexis had no more serious ideal. The Venetians, who had an
important voice in the matter, sought their own profit and a discharge
of their debts, and there can be little doubt that the Western knights,
as a body, were allured by the vague hope of plundering, in one way
or another, the richest and most splendid city in Europe. An infamous
bargain was struck. The princes of Western chivalry did not hesitate
to accept from the frivolous and irresponsible youth a promise of the
payment of 200,000 silver marks, a year’s supply of provisions to their
troops and other preposterous rewards for dethroning Alexis. Even the
papacy had its share in the sordid bargain; the Greek Church was to be
forced to submit to the Vatican.
In the month of April (1203) the fourth Crusade set sail in one hundred
and seventy large vessels, and some smaller ships, for Constantinople.
Alexis awoke from his dreams to find that a score of worn triremes was
all the navy he possessed, and he must resign himself to meet a siege
of his capital. The vivid story of the fall of Constantinople cannot be
told here. Toward the end of June the Crusaders landed near Chalcedon
and gazed with covetous eyes, most of them for the first time, at the
innumerable spires of churches--schismatical churches, and therefore
fair prey--that rose above the clustered houses, the princely villas
that shone between the cypresses in the wealthier suburbs, and the
bronze roofs and marble walls of the superb palaces which glittered
in the sun among the vast imperial gardens on either side of the Sea
of Marmora. When the news of their sailing had reached Alexis he had
made it a table joke; now he and his trembled within the walls of their
capital. By the middle of July the Crusaders were encamped outside the
land walls; the Venetians lay beneath the walls which girt the shores;
and the great assault began. Alexis, from a tower of the Blachernæ
palace, saw the double-edged axes of the brave English Varangians
scatter the Germans and Italians, but he learned that the Venetians had
broken in. Packing his treasures and his money, he took ship at dawn of
the following day, with his daughter Irene, and fled to Thrace, where
a retreat had been prudently prepared for such an emergency. George
Acropolites, whose chronicle now opens, says that he took Euphrosyne,
but Nicetas, an eyewitness, more correctly observes that the imperial
egoist deserted his wife, his city and his Empire.
In their anger at the flight of Alexis the people now swept aside
Euphrosyne and her relatives, and turned to Isaac, for whom the
eunuch-treasurer secured the Varangians. He was brought to the palace
and proclaimed, and Euphrosyne, her discredited daughter, Eudocia, and
other relatives, were put in confinement. The Latins were informed
that the object of their expedition had been attained, and when Isaac
had ratified the preposterous contract signed by his son, the young
Alexis rode proudly into the city between Baldwin of Flanders, almost
the one _noble_ of the crusading party, and the blind, but astute and
formidable, Doge of Venice. One of the Latin knights, Villehardouin,
has left us a vivid narrative of the conquest, and enlightened us as
to the fate of some of the imperial women we have encountered. When
the Latins entered the Blachernæ palace they found the eyeless monarch
sitting on his golden throne in robes “the like of which you would seek
in vain throughout the world.” By his side sat the “most fair lady,”
Maria, who, we may therefore conclude, had faithfully clung to her
husband in his blindness and humiliation. And amongst the crowd of fine
ladies, superbly dressed and glittering with jewels, who stood about
the throne, was Agnes, or Anna, the beautiful and pathetic widow of
the Emperor Alexis, the Emperor Andronicus, and the would-be Emperor
Branas. She was still only thirty years old. Her presence in the palace
suggests that she had accepted some office in it under Isaac and Maria.
But the joy and confidence of the returning throng were doomed to be
speedily overcast. The end was merely postponed for a month or two.
The Empire had, in its most solemn crisis, received a worthless and
despicable pair of rulers, and the Latins pressed for their pound of
flesh. Isaac, blind, gouty and weak-minded, spent his days among monks
and astrologers, who, while they devoured the choicest dishes that
the palace could afford, assured him that he had entered upon a long
and glorious reign, that his gout would quickly disappear, and that
his eyes would be miraculously restored to their arid sockets. The
younger Alexis drank and gambled with the experienced knights of the
fourth Crusade. When the leaders of the Crusade pressed for the payment
of their reward, all the wealth of Euphrosyne and her relatives was
confiscated--Alexis had left little to seize--the jewels and plate
of the palaces were pledged, even the precious reliquaries of the
churches and monasteries and the great silver lamps of St Sophia were
appropriated; yet the jaws of the West still stood wide open, and the
Latin troops lingered and demanded food and drink. The fugitive Alexis
had, in the meantime, raised an army in Thrace, and the citizens of
Constantinople were embittered and disaffected. In August a quarrel
with some of Baldwin’s soldiers had led to a conflagration which, it
being the height of summer, had burned for two days and destroyed
nearly half the city. The clergy and people met in the cathedral to
appoint a new Emperor, but, though some undistinguished officer
afterwards accepted the title from the mob, no serious aspirant dare
take the crown in face of the hostile Latins.
Isaac died in the midst of the turmoil, and the young Empress Maria
lost her crown almost as soon as she had received it. We shall see
presently that she found consolation among the Crusaders, but it is
necessary first to follow the adventurous fortune of Euphrosyne and her
daughter. The young Alexis, distracted and feeble as ever, proposed to
leave the city and join the Westerners in their camp without the walls.
As he prepared for flight there came to him a fiery and ambitious
young officer who felt that the time was opportune for laying his own
hand on the sacred crown. Alexis Ducas Murtzuphlus--his last name, or
nickname, was due to the fact that he had a peculiar connexion of the
bushy eyebrows which stood out over his crafty eyes--was one of the
party in the city who, to the applause of the crowd, urged direct war
upon the Latins, and his popularity emboldened him to remove Alexis and
ally himself with Euphrosyne. By a liberal outlay of money he secured
the Varangian guards, and he then approached Alexis and whispered
to him that his leaning to the Latins had exasperated the citizens.
When Alexis trembled, the adventurer offered to lodge him in a secure
retreat until the rage of the people should have calmed. It is hardly
necessary to add that the young Emperor was conducted to one of the
dungeons of the palace, where his egregious folly was presently ended
with a bowstring.
Euphrosyne and her daughter were now delivered from their confinement
and restored to the palace, and, as Murtzuphlus had the characteristic
looseness of his age in regard to conjugal matters--he had already
discarded two wives--he soon sought and obtained the affection of
Eudocia. The contemporary courtier and writer Nicetas says that Eudocia
was merely his mistress, but others say that he married Eudocia and it
is difficult, as the sequel will show, to determine the point. Probably
he did, after a time, marry Euphrosyne’s daughter, and he then set to
work to defend the city against the Crusaders. The issue is one of the
great pages of history, but its details do not concern us. On 9th April
the Latins moved their formidable rams and catapults and towers against
the walls, and the Venetians drew up their vessels along the Golden
Horn. Three days later, after a furious assault, amid showers of mighty
stones and the blaze of burning houses, the heroes of the cross burst
into the city and began that historic ravage which puts them for all
time far below the moral level of the Turks they had set out to combat.
Murtzuphlus, finding his troops discouraged, had retired to the
Bucoleon palace, where Euphrosyne and Eudocia awaited the issue. He
had lost, he said; and from the palace quay, where the stone lion and
bull, which gave the place its name, had witnessed so many flights,
they took ship and sped in the direction of Thrace. The ex-Emperor
Alexis would surely welcome his wife and daughter, and he would feel
little tenderness in regard to the murder of his perfidious nephew.
Murtzuphlus arrived in confidence at the ex-Emperor’s new home, and
was received in apparent friendliness. For some reason, however, which
is not very clear, Alexis concealed under his friendly appearance a
deadly and murderous hatred of the adventurer. It seems to me that,
if a marriage had really taken place between Eudocia and Murtzuphlus,
Alexis regarded it as invalid. He ordered a bath to be prepared for
his daughter and Murtzuphlus, and, when the young officer had entered
it, sent in his servants to put out his eyes. Eudocia, we are told,
stood at the door angrily upbraiding her father, and he turned upon her
with language which leaves little doubt as to her character. I may add
that the blind adventurer was captured by the Latins, as he wandered
miserably about the provinces. He was taken to Constantinople and
flung from the top of one of the loftiest columns in one of the public
squares of the city.
In order to follow the further fortunes of our ex-Empresses we must
turn back for a moment to Constantinople. After they had allowed their
soldiers to loot and rape with impunity--to perpetrate, with the aid of
their camp-followers and prostitutes, a veritable orgy of desecration
in the most sacred shrine of the Greeks--for several days, the leaders
of the Crusade met to divide the spoil. Twelve electors, chosen from
amongst themselves, were in future to appoint the Latin Emperor of
Constantinople, and its territories were to be distributed among his
feudal supporters and the Venetians. Baldwin of Flanders was chosen to
be the first Emperor of the new series. His most serious competitor
was the commander of the army, Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, who
had occupied the Bucoleon palace, but the shrewd Doge of Venice had
preferred to set on the throne a prince whose native seat was at a
safer distance from Venice and Greece. Boniface had to be content with
the title of King of Saloniki and such territory in Macedonia and
Greece as he could wrest from, and hold against, the Greeks.
Among the noble dames whom Boniface found in the Bucoleon palace were
Agnes, the widow of Andronicus and daughter of Louis of France, and
Maria, the widow of Isaac. It is the last appearance in the chronicles
of the unfortunate daughter of King Louis; we must assume that she
spent the rest of her life in quiet attachment to the Latin Court. The
Hungarian princess Maria was destined to enter once more the field
of royal ambitions. She had not yet reached her thirtieth year, and
her beauty won the heart, possibly an alliance with her supported the
policy, of the ambitious Marquis. He married Maria in Constantinople,
and started with his queen for Thessalonica, the seat of the new
kingdom. How at the outset he nearly forfeited it by a civil war
with Baldwin must be read elsewhere. The quarrel was adjusted and
they settled in Thessalonica. And at their Court in that city there
presently appeared the ex-Emperor Alexis, with his wife and daughter,
soliciting peace and friendship.
Alexis had now concluded that the recovery of the Byzantine Empire
was impossible and he was prepared to submit. He was compelled to
lay aside such ensigns of royalty as he still wore, and a pleasant
residence was afforded him and his family in Thessalonica. Nicetas
makes the singular statement (followed at a later date by Ephraem)
that Boniface sent Alexis and Euphrosyne “across the sea to the Prince
of Germany.” It is clear that this is incorrect. They lived for some
months at Thessalonica, and it is one of the few traits we have of
Maria’s character that she received with kindly hospitality the man
who had deposed and blinded her husband. But the tranquil life of a
retired monarch did not suit Alexis, and we have already seen that his
base character was devoid of gratitude. He was detected in an intrigue
with the citizens of Thessalonica, and Euphrosyne and Eudocia had to
accompany him once more in his wandering.
The next page in their career is singularly adventurous, but scantily
preserved. As they wandered over the Greek province they met Leo
Sgurus, a Peloponnesian noble who had been governor, under the
Byzantine Empire, of part of Greece. He clung to his little power
in the chaos which followed the fall of Constantinople, and Alexis
decided to join him. The troops of Boniface were steadily restricting
his range, and, shortly after the alliance with him of the imperial
family, his life was little better than that of a brigand. He lived
in the decaying old citadel of Corinth, and marched out periodically
at the head of his men to forage and to harass the Latin troops. In
this quaint home the imperial family found shelter for a few further
months, and Eudocia married Sgurus. It was the fourth romantic marriage
of that adventurous princess, and was destined to be as unfortunate as
its predecessors. In her early girlhood she had been sent, while still
immature, to wed the King of Servia. He had adopted the robe of the
monk soon afterwards, and his son and successor, a fiery, brutal youth,
had claimed the pretty young bride of his father and married her. After
some years she had, on a charge of misconduct, been thrust out of the
Servian capital, her sole garment a narrow strip of cloth round her
loins, and had had to await, in the castle of a sympathetic noble, the
arrival of clothes and a litter from her father. Then, as we saw, she
married the already married Murtzuphlus, and shared his adventures
for a few months. Now she found herself the wife of an outlaw, living
in the rude and dilapidated chambers of the old Acropolis. But Sgurus
was shortly afterwards captured by the troops of Boniface, and we lose
sight of the unfortunate Eudocia. She was probably still in her early
twenties, yet the widow of two kings, an Emperor, and an adventurer.
Such was life in mediæval Byzantium.
Alexis and Euphrosyne took to ship when Sgurus was defeated, and sailed
for Ætolia and Epirus (on the eastern coast of the Adriatic), where
a certain Michael, a natural son of the Emperor’s uncle Constantine,
had set up a sovereignty over the rude mountaineers and few towns of
that isolated region. On the voyage the ship was captured by Lombard
pirates, but Alexis and Euphrosyne were ransomed by their nephew, and
at length reached Arta, the chief town of his dominion. The Byzantine
world was at the time full of small rulers, and would-be rulers. The
leading Crusaders had received their various slices of the dismembered
Empire, and here and there some fugitive Byzantine noble, especially
if he were connected with the imperial house, had set up a small
throne and defended it against the Latins. In this way Michael, the
illegitimate son of Constantine Angelus, had fled from the captured
city to Epirus, married a native lady of wealth, and constituted
himself “despot” of the whole region. In his chief town, Arta,
Euphrosyne tranquilly passed her last year or two of life. Her restless
husband still thirsted for power, and, when he found that his nephew
was not at all disposed to put on his head once more the crown which he
demanded, he took to ship again and sailed for the lands of the Turk in
Asia Minor. Euphrosyne did not accompany him. She died at Arta, either
just before or soon after his departure. Ten years’ experience of
imperial life had sated her ambition.
The ex-Empress Maria, now Queen of Saloniki, continued for many years
to enjoy the restricted power and state which she had won by her
marriage, but they were years of anxiety and care. Two years after her
settlement in Thessalonica, the Greeks rebelled and, in alliance with
the Bulgarians, spread fire and sword over the province, and pinned
Maria in the citadel of her capital. In that rebellion the Latin
Emperor Baldwin was captured, and his brother and successor, Henry of
Flanders, occupied the throne. Some years later Boniface was killed in
his struggle against the Bulgarians, and Maria became regent for her
infant son, Demetrius. It is the last glance we have in the chronicles
of the beautiful Margaret of Hungary, who, as the Empress Maria, had
come to spend so extraordinary a youth in the Byzantine capital.
There remained one other imperial daughter of Euphrosyne, Anna, who
had married the able and ambitious noble Theodore Lascaris. When
Murtzuphlus had abandoned Constantinople, Theodore had a momentary
ambition to collect the scattered troops and make a struggle for the
throne. He found that the attempt would be futile, and, with his wife
and three daughters, joined the throng of noble families at the quays
who were flying from the doomed city and the barbarous troops of the
West. They reached Nicæa, but the city, concerned about its future,
refused to admit him. He persuaded the citizens, however, to receive
his wife and daughters, and departed to seek allies among the Persians.
In a short time he had an army powerful enough to take Nicæa, and he
established himself as governor in the name of Alexis. When, in the
year 1206, the Latins were diverted for a moment by the trouble in
Greece, Theodore was crowned by the citizens, and Euphrosyne’s second
daughter, Anna, attained the dignity of Empress.
Disappointed in Epirus, her father, Alexis, had now, as we saw,
deserted the little kingdom of his nephew and sailed for Asia Minor. In
earlier years he had befriended the Turkish Sultan of Iconium, and he
now proposed to ask the hospitality of the Sultan and intrigue for the
crown of his son-in-law. The Turk received him with great cordiality,
and wrote to inform the Emperor Theodore that his father-in-law, in
whose name he was presumed to hold power, had arrived in Asia. We must
not too hastily admire the gratitude of the Turk; he had regarded with
some concern the establishment of Theodore’s empire at Nicæa, and
welcomed a pretext to dispute it. But in the war which followed, the
Sultan was defeated, and the active career of Alexis came to a close.
He was treated with respect, but his son-in-law prudently confined him
in a monastery under his own eyes at Nicæa, and the arch-intriguer
ended his days in the monotonous chant of psalms and prayers. His
daughter Anna died soon afterwards, the last of the group of imperial
women who had struggled for power and wealth while the great Empire
tottered to its fall. We shall find that that terrible catastrophe made
no deep impression on the men and women who filled the less opulent
Court at Nicæa, or on those who, half-a-century later, returned to
the lamentable ruin from which they at length dislodged the Western
knights.