THE NEW CONSTANTINOPLE
For fifty-seven years the metropolis of the East remained in the
power of the Western knights, but our Empresses have already come so
frequently from the West that we shall not be tempted to expect a
new or higher type of woman on the throne at Constantinople during
the Latin occupation. That half-century may, indeed, be dismissed in
a few lines as far as the purpose of this work is concerned. We saw
that Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was selected by the Venetians and
Crusaders to fill the throne. The Blachernæ and Bucoleon palaces were
placed at his disposal, and one-fourth of the old Empire was assigned
for his immediate rule. But Baldwin’s wife, Mary, daughter of the Count
of Champagne, did not live to adorn herself with such remnants of the
imperial finery as were still to be found in the palaces. Baldwin
had left her in Flanders, and, when she at length attempted to join
her high-minded husband in his new dignity, she died at Acre, on the
journey.
Baldwin himself was captured a few years later by the Bulgarians, and
died in prison. His brother Henry, who succeeded him, married the
daughter of Boniface, the King of Saloniki, whose adventures we have
described. Agnes was, of course, not the daughter of the ex-Empress
Maria, but of an earlier wife. She was summoned from Lombardy, married
to Henry on 4th February 1207 in St Sophia, and the marriage day ended
with a great banquet in the Bucoleon palace, in the older Byzantine
fashion. But that is all we know of the Empress Agnes. Henry died in
1216, and his sister Yolande became Empress. Even of Yolande, however,
the very scanty chronicles furnish a very poor portrait. Her husband,
Peter of Courtenay, was, after being crowned at Rome by the Pope,
arrested in Epirus, through which he had foolishly endeavoured to cut
his way, and died in prison. As regent for her children Yolande remains
almost imperceptible, and an anecdote of the reign of her son Robert is
all that need be given to illustrate the character of the new dynasty.
Robert, who had a light idea of chivalry, brought into his palace, as
mistress, the daughter of one of the Crusaders, and her mother. She
had been betrothed to a Burgundian knight, and the embittered lover,
supported by a few friends, forced his way into the palace, cut off
the nose and lips of the faithless lady, and bore off her mother to be
drowned in the Sea of Marmora.
As Robert’s brother was a mere boy, the King of Jerusalem, a worthy
old man of eighty, was summoned to fill the throne for nine years,
and then Baldwin II. entered upon his long and inglorious reign; of
which we need only say that, in spite of his extreme liberality in
selling, especially to St Louis of France, the valuable relics (the
crown of thorns, the rod of Moses, etc.) which had accumulated in
Constantinople, and in spite of all the efforts of the Pope to maintain
the worthless monarch on his throne, and that throne subservient to the
Vatican, the feeble and incompetent rule of the Latins sank lower and
lower, until, in 1261, a regiment of Greeks put an end to it.
This slight account of the Latin rule at Constantinople will suffice
to enable us to follow intelligently the fortunes of the descendants
of the Byzantine monarchs who had set up a throne at Nicæa. Theodore
Lascaris had married Alexis’s daughter Anna, who died early in the
reign of her husband, and her two successors in his affection are even
less known to us than she. The first was Philippa, daughter of the King
of Armenia; but, after giving birth to a boy, Philippa was, for some
unstated but imaginable reason, sent back to the ruder Court of her
father, and Maria, daughter of Yolande of Constantinople, occupied her
place. Maria died, childless, after a few years, and, when Theodore
himself departed in 1222, his only son (the child of Philippa) was a
boy of eight years. The Empire was, therefore, wisely entrusted to a
powerful and distinguished noble, John Ducas Vatatzes, and we at length
reach an Empress of distinct and admirable personality.
The Empress Irene, who, in the year 1222, ascended the throne with
Vatatzes, was the eldest of the three daughters of Theodore Lascaris
and Anna, and therefore a granddaughter of the Emperor Alexis and
Euphrosyne. While the Princess Eudocia had inherited the character, or
lack of character, of Alexis, her elder sister Anna had, as far as we
can judge, shared the comparative sobriety of Euphrosyne, and Irene
united in her person all the best features of the family, without
its ancestral defects. She was prudent, equable, pious and virtuous.
Her first husband, Andronicus Paleologus, died prematurely, and her
father then united her to the able commander to whom he designed to
confide the Empire.[32] When Irene received her share of the imperial
responsibility, she proved to be, says Ephrem, “a new Deborah,” and
the few anecdotes preserved in regard to her suggest a sober and
high-minded woman, associated in perfect harmony with (as long as she
lived) a sober and high-minded and valiant husband. Unfortunately,
Irene led so well-regulated a life during the twenty years in which she
shared the rule of Vatatzes that there is little to record of her, and,
however much we may resent it, we are dragged onward by the misguided
chroniclers until we reach John’s later and less virtuous companions.
But the contrast of this later period will be the more piquant, and
the more honourable to Irene, if we dwell for a moment on the exemplary
years that preceded it.
The greater part of John’s days were spent in warfare, but in the
intervals of his wars he was attentive to the development of his
little Empire, and in this he was finely supported by Irene. It is
true that they adulterated the coinage, but that device had become
a Byzantine tradition and we must set against it a large number of
reforms. John was a just and simple-minded monarch. He developed his
estates so industriously, in the periods of peace, that he at length
relieved his subjects of the financial burden of royalty, and enabled
them to prosper. The character of the Court is, perhaps, best seen,
and attracts a lively admiration, in the following anecdote. One day
John presented his consort with a modest jewelled coronet, and informed
her, with pride, that it had been purchased by the profit on the eggs
alone which his poultry farms yielded. He forbade his courtiers to
wear Persian, or Syrian, or Italian silks, though they might wear the
product of the silkworms of his own dominions, and he one day severely
rebuked his son for going out to hunt in a tunic of cloth of gold.
Irene admired and encouraged this care for their subjects. Acropolites,
our chief authority for the period, was a student attached to the
Court at the time, and he gives high praise to the Empress. One day
there was an eclipse of the sun, and Irene turned to the learned young
man for an explanation. The work of the earlier Greeks was not yet
entirely forgotten, and Acropolites was able to tell the Empress,
with due modesty, that the body of the moon had passed before the
face of the sun and momentarily cut off its light. But superstition
was spreading its unhappy growth over the ruins of Greek culture, and
other courtiers, especially the Empress’s physician, ridiculed the
youth’s explanation. Irene laughingly told Acropolites that he was “a
young fool”; but she regretted afterwards, in telling the matter to
John, that she had used so arrogant an expression. Acropolites almost
spoils the story by going on to tell us that, in his own conviction,
the eclipse foreboded the death of the Empress, which occurred soon
afterwards.
One other story confirms this excellent impression of the life of the
Court in the palace at Nicæa, or in the country palaces at Nymphæum
and Smyrna. Irene had one child, her son Theodore; an accident, as
she rode to hunt and was thrown from her horse, prevented her from
enlarging her family. When Theodore reached his twelfth year, the
Emperor, who was himself over fifty, decided to marry him, and, as he
was allied with the Bulgarians against the Latins, he sought the hand
of a Bulgarian princess. The only available daughter of John Asan, the
Bulgarian king, was a girl of tender years named Helen, and, though
the marriage ceremony was performed, the two children lived together
only as children under the watchful eye of Irene. The Bulgarian king at
length repented of his alliance, and begged that the little Helen, now
ten years old, might return for a visit to her parents. Vatatzes and
Irene concluded at once that this was only a preliminary to breaking
the alliance, but they scorned to detain the child. We read that she
wept bitterly at being separated from Irene. During the journey to
her father’s capital she was so inconsolable, even when Asan took her
on his own saddle, that the monarch lost his temper and slapped her
face. Helen did in time return to her spouse, but she will have little
interest for us.
After nineteen years of this placid and useful co-operation with the
Emperor, Irene passed away, and, after a decent interval of mourning,
John Vatatzes, though now advanced in years, sought another Empress.
He succeeded, in spite of the opposition of the papacy, in obtaining
the hand of Anna, daughter of Frederick II., and sister of Manfred of
Sicily. Anna was a pretty maiden of tender years, a mere symbol of
alliance with the two powerful and independent monarchs I have named.
John may have reflected that, as he had now entered his sixth decade
of life, the immaturity of his bride would matter little. In the train
of the young Empress, however, was an Italian marchioness[33] whose
eyes were, the chronicler says, “unescapable nets,” and John soon fell
into them. Nicephorus says that the lady employed philtres and her fine
Italian eyes in the conquest of the Emperor’s heart. We will be content
to think that the eyes sufficed.
For the remaining decade of John’s reign the favoured marchioness was
the most prominent figure at the Court. She did not, apparently, desire
to interfere in politics. It was enough that she was permitted to
wear purple slippers and other ensigns of royalty, and that courtiers
should gather about her rather than attend the young Empress. It is
related that she on one occasion went, decked in her imperial robes
and accompanied by her glittering suite, to visit the famous chapel
attached to one of the chief monasteries of Nicæa. The abbot of this
monastery, Nicephorus Blemmydas, was tutor to Irene’s son Theodore,
and, though we shall find his royal pupil affording little proof of the
excellence of his education, the Abbot Nicephorus was a rare type among
the degenerate clergy of the time. He shut the doors of the chapel and
refused to admit the marchioness. Infuriated at the humiliation, and
stimulated by her followers, she begged John to punish the abbot. John
refused, and tearfully admitted that his own weakness was the proper
occasion of the trouble.
In 1254 the valiant Vatatzes bequeathed the crown to his son, and Anna
and the marchioness made way for the Bulgarian princess, Helen. Anna
seems to have remained attached to the Court, or in some mansion at
Nicæa, and we shall meet her again. But Helen died in a year or two;
her husband followed after a short and licentious reign of four years,
and the relinquishment of the throne to a boy of tender years, their
son John, opened the gates of the palace to a shrewd and unscrupulous
adventurer and his wife.
One of the commanders of the troops under Vatatzes and Theodore was
Michael Paleologus, a grandson of the Emperor Alexis’s daughter Irene.
Bold and crafty, passionate, yet ever ready to stoop to lies and oaths
to cover his ambition, sensible that he was one of the most capable men
to undertake the government and that his grandfather had at one time
been destined for the throne, Michael directed his steps toward the
palace from early youth. In later years his favourite sister, Eulogia,
who reared him, used to tell how, when nothing else would soothe the
restless infant, she used to put him to sleep with the strange lullaby:
“Hush, Emperor of the city. You will go in at the golden gate, and do
such-and-such things.” She _may_ have mentioned to him this almost
miraculous inspiration when he came to years of discretion. By sobriety
of life--apart from love affairs--and liberality to his friends and
dependants, he won great popularity and early incurred suspicion. John
Vatatzes, in his later years, summoned him to reply to a charge of
treason, and said that he must purge himself by the ordeal: one of the
enlightened practices which the Crusaders had introduced into the East.
Michael glanced at the iron balls glowing in the fire, and protested
that, although he was innocent of treason, he feared that so sinful a
man as he could hardly hope to carry the red-hot globes with impunity.
When a bishop, who stood by, rebuked his lack of faith in Providence,
he shrewdly suggested that the bishop, being innocent, might take the
balls from the fire with his hands and deliver them to him.
His wit and boldness disturbed the solemn Court, and, instead of
losing his head or his eyes, he won the favour of John and married the
Empress’s great-niece, Theodora. She was a daughter of John Ducas, a
nephew of the Emperor, and had been left to his guardianship. Michael
was then twenty-seven years old, and we cannot say if the young
Theodora accompanied him in his new command of the troops. However
that may be, he was again denounced, to the new Emperor Theodore, and
compelled to take a particularly sonorous oath of fidelity to Theodore
and his infant son. In two or three years he was recalled to Court
to repeat his oath. His eldest sister Martha--sometimes also called
Maria--had a charming daughter, whom the Emperor ordered to marry one
of his servants. The young people had just succeeded in falling in love
with each other when Theodore, who was now diseased and capricious,
changed his mind, and ordered the girl to marry a noble of her own
rank. It was reported to the Emperor after a time that this marriage
was not consummated, and could not be, because Martha had vindictively
laid on it a form of incantation known as “Venus’s knot.” Martha was
put, naked, in a sack with a number of cats; the cats were pricked with
pins in order to make them lacerate her; and the abominable Emperor sat
by to interrogate her about her incantations. After this it was thought
prudent to compel Michael to repeat his oath, which he did fluently,
and the impenetrable geniality of his manner quite disarmed Theodore.
Theodore died soon afterwards, and his boy (variously described as
six, eight and nine years old) was left to rule the Empire under the
tutorship of the first minister, George Muzalon, and the patriarch.
Not only Michael, but all the other commanders and nobles, had sworn
heavily to respect this arrangement. But the body of Theodore had
scarcely been interred before Michael began secretly to agitate and to
bribe his colleagues. Muzalon was an upstart, not a noble by birth,
and it was not difficult to cast on him the blame of the brutalities
of Theodore’s later years. Three days after the burial of the Emperor,
Muzalon and his brothers and a large company of nobles and noble ladies
gathered in the royal monastery at Sosander, without the city, for a
memorial service, when, in the midst of the chanting, the heavy and
regular tread of soldiers was heard. A band of officers and men burst
into the chapel, and, before the eyes of the shrieking dames and the
horrified priests, cut Muzalon and his friends to pieces beside the
altars. National catastrophe, it will be seen, had not chastened the
Byzantine character.
From Constable of the Empire, Michael was now raised to the dignity
of Despot, and became tutor of the young Emperor. Then a convenient
coalition of Western powers against the Empire gave Michael’s friends
the opportunity to suggest that the strong man ought to be associated
with the boy in the supreme power. On New Year’s Day (1259) he was
openly proclaimed Emperor. The patriarch almost alone professed some
concern about the terrible oath they had all taken only four months
before; Michael met his concern by giving him a written affidavit,
sealed with ponderous oaths, that he would restore the full sovereignty
to John VI. when he came of age, and would recognize no claim of his
own heirs to power. It was therefore agreed that Michael and John
should be crowned together. When, however, the hour of coronation
arrived, John was not present to respond to the call of the patriarch,
and Michael and Theodora alone received crowns. Michael had made a
little arrangement with the bishops beforehand, and only one of the
lords spiritual protested. The crowd may have murmured when, after the
ceremony, they saw the boy, crownless, walking after the new Emperor
and Empress, but a liberal shower of gold coin put an end to their
scruples.
Such was the initiation to power and dignity of the Empress Theodora.
Two other women, who will engage our attention, shared the elevation.
These were Michael’s two sisters, Martha and Eulogia, who began to
have an even more important voice than Theodora in the administration.
Both of them were widows, and had, after the death of their husbands,
assumed the monastic habit. Probably Martha took the name of Maria
when she adopted the black robe, and Eulogia was the monastic name
of the younger sister, Irene. Finlay remarks that at least in this
decaying period of the Empire the women showed no less ability than
the men, and assuredly there was not in the Greek world of that time
the least effort to confine women within the gynæceum. During the
remaining two centuries the chronicles are full of references to active
and ambitious women, and we shall see that Maria and Eulogia were
not prevented by their religious vows from taking their share in the
political life.
From the first year of his reign Michael gave his thoughts to the
recapture of Constantinople, and in 1260 he led his troops against the
city, but he had not the rams and catapults necessary to shake its
stout walls. He retired to the palace at Nymphæum, to arrange for the
strengthening of his forces, and one of his generals, hearing that the
bulk of the Latin defenders had sailed on an expedition to the Black
Sea, and that the Greeks in the city were prepared to aid him, boldly
entered Constantinople during the night, burned out the Venetians from
their quarters, and, when the Latin galleys hastily returned, laughed
at them from the impregnable ramparts. Their monarch had fled at the
first shock, and the whole of the Latins now (in the summer of 1261)
returned to the West.
On the day following the entry of the city Michael was awakened by his
sister Eulogia. The chronicler praises the prudence with which she
broke the good news to her brother. One of her servants had heard it
in the early morning, and she entered the bedroom of Michael to tell
him. She thoughtfully tickled his feet to awaken him in a natural
manner, and stood smiling by the bed until he had full possession of
his faculties and she could tell him without risk. Michael at once
moved his forces and his family to the Asiatic suburbs in view of
Constantinople, where the crown and the royal boots were brought to
him. Not until a becoming ceremony could be arranged, however, would
Michael enter his capital, and then only with the most conspicuous
piety. After spending the night of 14th August in a monastery outside
the walls, near the Blachernæ palace, he entered, in the dress of a
plain citizen, preceded by the picture of the Virgin which was believed
to have come from the brush of St Luke.
The brilliant August sun lit up for them a melancholy spectacle, as the
Emperor--John had been left to amuse himself in Asia--and his wife and
sisters rode or drove down the Mese to the cathedral. The Blachernæ
palace itself was uninhabitable. Its mosaic walls were blackened with
the smoke of the fires by which Latin soldiers had roasted their game,
and its tessellated floors were in a sordid condition. Filthy, too,
were the colonnaded streets and squares that had once been the pride of
Constantinople. I will presume that the reader knows something of the
indescribable ways of our Latin and Teutonic fathers at that time, and
for centuries afterwards. Not a statue or ornament of value remained in
the public squares; the vast piles of stone still lay where once had
been the graceful mansions of the Byzantine nobility; and great areas
of the city were now but scorched skeletons of once gay and populous
districts. The Bucoleon palace alone had been preserved with any care,
and to it, cleansed for their reception, the royal party proceeded,
after a thanksgiving service in St Sophia.
Before long the Court stealthily discussed the fate of the young
Emperor who had been left at Nymphæum. Michael was said to have
reflected that he had now obtained an Empire of his own, and that the
obligation of his oath did not extend to this new dominion. Eulogia, a
fanatically religious woman, as we shall see, supported her brother;
indeed, it is said that the two nun sisters, whom Michael consulted
daily, urged him to depose John and bury him in a monastery. Sinister
rumours circulated in Constantinople, especially when Michael proceeded
to marry John’s sisters to obscure Western nobles, who happened to be
in the city, and gave them money enough to take their brides away to
their distant countries. But this topic was presently displaced for a
time by one of greater interest. It was said that Michael proposed to
divorce the plain and quiet Theodora, and marry the Italian widow of
John Vatatzes.
Anna had remained in the East after the death of her husband in 1254,
and would be about twenty years old, or in the ripest development of
her beauty, at the time we have reached. She came to Constantinople
with the Court, and, from his slender resources, the Emperor supplied
her with a revenue which enabled her to live and dress luxuriously. It
was, no doubt, politic for Michael to invite the favour of the Italian
monarch by this generous treatment of his sister, but Anna soon learned
that the policy was strongly supported by inclination. Directly, or by
means of his servants, Michael made violent love to her, and begged a
fitting return for his liberality. Anna refused to be his mistress. It
is characteristic that the chroniclers do not represent her as spurning
his advances on the ground of virtue; she was, they say, too conscious
of her superior origin to enter into such a relation with Michael,
and, instead of rejecting his gifts and returning to her father’s
Court, she let Michael know that, though she disdained the position of
mistress, she would not refuse that of wife. The kindly and patriotic
chronicler would have us believe that this was merely a ruse to protect
her dignity, and we may or may not believe this. The immediate effect
was that Michael began openly to speak of divorcing Theodora. She was,
he gracefully acknowledged, a faithful wife and excellent woman, but
considerations of State made it advisable for him to marry Anna. There
was a fear that the Latins would make an effort to retake the city,
and it was prudent to form an alliance with some of their strongest
princes. Theodora, who had given birth to her fourth son since they
had reached Constantinople, vehemently protested against the proposal
and enlisted the interest of the patriarch, so that Michael was forced
to send back Anna, with a splendid escort and equipment, to plead his
cause in Italy.
[Illustration: THEODORA, WIFE OF MICHAEL VIII
FROM DU CANGE’S HISTORIA BYZANTINA]
Michael now returned to the problem of John, and, when he remarked
to his courtiers that it was absurd to have “two heads under one
hat,” they knew that the youth was doomed. We have no reason to doubt
the statement of the chronicler that Eulogia supported him in this
design, but we may at least assume that the manner of executing it
was due to Michael alone. He ordered that the harmless and helpless
young man should be blinded. A long experience had made the Greeks
ingenious in this operation, and, instead of removing the eyes with
knives, or using hot irons, they now sometimes blinded a man by an
elaborate concentration of intense light on the retina or by the use
of boiling vinegar. The more humane method of blinding by an intense
light was used in the case of John, and the unfortunate youth was then
incarcerated for life in a fortress on the coast of Bithynia. This
ghastly operation was performed on the day on which the churches and
monasteries of the Byzantine Empire offered their clouds of incense in
honour of the birth of Christ. It is at least gratifying to find that
it did not pass without protest. A warm-hearted youth attached to the
Court lost his nose and lips for speaking too freely about it, and many
others had to be punished.
Theodora seems to have been a silent, perhaps disgusted, witness of
her husband’s course, and there is some faint evidence that Michael’s
elder sister dissented from it. In fact, the patriarch Arsenius himself
openly resented this flagrant violation of a thrice-repeated oath,
and thus led to a long and fierce ecclesiastical struggle in which
the two royal nuns were actively engaged. The patriarch’s procedure
was not as emphatic and thorough as it ought to have been, but he at
least distinguished himself among the crowd of corrupt and servile
bishops and abbots by more or less excommunicating Michael. A council
of bishops then obliged the Emperor by deposing Arsenius and putting a
more courtly prelate in his place, but the hostility and derision of
the people soon induced Germanus to retire, and a clerical diplomatist
named Joseph occupied the see. As the furious schism of the Arsenians
and the Josephites, which followed, will cross the lines of our story
for some time to come, it is necessary to introduce this fragment of
ecclesiastical history. For the moment it is enough to say that in 1268
the patriarch Joseph absolved from his sin the ostentatiously penitent
Emperor, before a crowd of weeping Senators and priests.
The twenty years that followed the return to Constantinople were
absorbed in the work of restoring the Empire and adjusting the quarrels
of the partisans of the rival patriarchs. Of the restoration it is
enough to say that, as in all similar efforts during the last three
centuries of the Empire, it consisted in recovering the revenue of
the Court and enriching the Emperor’s supporters, not in any serious
attempt to revive the industries and commerce of the Empire.[34] Nor
were Michael’s attempts to make foreign alliances much more successful.
Foiled in his efforts to secure the interest of Latin rulers, he
turned to the Servians and Bulgarians. In 1272 he decided that his
second daughter, Anna, should marry the King of Servia. Theodora had
some misgiving that the barbaric Servians were unfit to receive her
daughter, and she directed the ministers who took Anna to the frontier
to send on in advance a party to explore the Servian Court, and to
linger sufficiently on the journey to receive their report. It proved
a wise precaution. The Servians had gathered round the advance party
like--as described in the Byzantine chronicles--a group of savages.
Anna’s eunuchs excited their intense curiosity, though not their
admiration, and the superb equipment of the princess was heatedly
criticized. They brought out Anna’s prospective mother-in-law, a dirty
and coarsely dressed woman, to show the Greeks a model queen. They
also stole the imperial horses. So the advance party hastily sent a
report to the ministers who lingered on the way with Anna and she was
conducted back to her mother.
In the same year Eulogia’s daughter Maria was married to the King
of Bulgaria, but the marriage brought little profit to the Emperor.
Eulogia had now quarrelled with Michael. She took the part of the
ex-patriarch Germanus, and she and her daughters and her favourite
monks threw themselves so ardently into the religious quarrel, which
the Emperor vainly endeavoured to settle, that Michael was very angry
with them. Monks now travelled constantly between the young Queen
of Bulgaria and the Empress-nun, her mother, and gravely disturbed
Michael’s work. After a time Maria sent some of the monks to Palestine
to induce the Sultan to harass her uncle’s territory, and she even
persuaded her husband to declare war on him. Michael hated the monks as
heartily as Eulogia loved them, and he at length expelled his sister
from the capital. When he went on to propose a union of the Latin and
Greek Churches, and induced a synod at Constantinople to acknowledge
the supremacy of the Pope, Eulogia’s love was turned into violent
hatred of the Emperor.
Martha seems to have died during the struggle, and Theodora was too
weak, or too indifferent to clerical matters, to take any part in
it. She must have watched with disdain the last vain efforts of her
unscrupulous husband to escape the dangers which threatened him. In
the early winter of that year (1282) he set out to crush a rebellious
noble of the Ducas family. Theodora tried in vain to dissuade him from
leading an expedition to Thrace in such a bad season, and a month later
she received the news of his death.
Her son Andronicus now took the purple, and, as Andronicus was orthodox
and his royal aunt Eulogia at once returned to the scene, Theodora
had a more dreary time than ever. Her brother was damned, Eulogia
insisted, and his remains and memory were not to be honoured by the
pompous ceremonies of the Greek Church. The young monarch--he was in
his twenty-fifth year--bent to her commands, and the body of Michael
was buried, almost without a prayer, in the military camp where he
had died. Theodora feebly protested, and was assured by the fanatical
Eulogia that her own soul was in danger, and her name could not be
included in the list of those who were commended to the prayers of
the faithful in St Sophia until she had purged herself of her guilt.
She was compelled to sign a repudiation of the authority of the Pope,
which would cost her little, and to promise that she would not ask the
prayers of the Church for her husband.
Into the appalling struggle of the Church factions which followed we
need not enter. One of the best historians of the time, who saw the
Empire slowly perishing while its whole soul was absorbed in this
quarrel, bitterly observes that “for the sake of a single coin both
sides were prepared to take oaths so horrible that the pen cannot
describe them.” One day they appealed to miracle; each side wrote out a
statement of its case, and a vast crowd gathered to see the two rolls
of parchment cast into the flames and howl for the intervention of God
in favour of the just cause. But both documents were burned to ashes,
and the ferocious struggle continued for decades, while the Turks
spread over the Asiatic provinces, pirates swarmed in all the seas, and
the Venetians and Genoese captured all the trade of the Empire. Eulogia
disappears in the midst of this struggle, fighting to the last in the
cause of the monks, a pathetic example of the way in which the age
perverted its ablest and most spirited women.
Theodora lived on for twenty-two years, and saw two new Empresses enter
the palace, but the chroniclers of the time are too much occupied with
the ecclesiastical controversy to tell us much of the personal life of
the Court. George Pachymeres has left us a large volume on the history
of his times, but fully one-half of it is taken up with the patriarchal
struggle. I will therefore be content to tell the later sufferings of
Theodora, and then return to the Empresses whom her son Andronicus put
on the throne.
The family of the Emperor Michael had consisted of four sons, three
daughters and two illegitimate daughters. The daughters were bestowed
upon various nobles or petty monarchs, and of the four sons three
survived to intrigue, or suspect each other of intriguing, for the
throne. Andronicus was the eldest, and he succeeded his father without
opposition. The second son, Constantine, had, however, been the
favourite of his parents; he had received great wealth from Michael,
and it was known that Michael intended, when death closed his career,
to set up Constantine as an independent Emperor in Greek territory.
From the first, therefore, Andronicus regarded his younger brother with
a jealous eye. Constantine was a good-looking and very popular youth,
very liberal with his money and surrounded by friends. Unfortunately he
had, like most of the Greeks of the time, little or no self-control,
and in 1291 he gave his brother an opportunity to destroy him.
Some short time before 1291 Constantine had married the daughter of
Raul, one of the chief officials of the Court. She was a beautiful
and somewhat vain young woman, very conscious of her new dignity. On
the Feast of the Apostles, one of the many days on which the ladies
of Constantinople were wont to pay ceremonious visits to the ruling
Empress, Constantine’s wife--we do not know her name--repaired in
great splendour to the palace of Irene. In the hall sat an aged
and noble dame named Strategopulina: in other words, a lady of the
distinguished Strategopulos family, and herself a niece of a former
Emperor. She had arrived too early for the reception, and sat on
a couch without the Empress’s chamber. On account of her age and
rank Strategopulina did not rise, as she ought to have done, when
Constantine’s wife passed, and the offended princess returned to her
husband in such rage that she fell ill. Most probably the old lady
knew that Andronicus and his wife would not be very displeased with
her action. But Constantine, egged on by his wife, took the matter in
his own hands. Acquainted as we are with the morals of Constantinople,
we are hardly surprised to learn that Strategopulina was believed, in
spite of her age, to be intimate with one of her servants. Constantine
sent some of his servants to flog this man in public, and drag him
naked round the Forum.
The scandal, the storm of chatter, and the gross injury to one of his
wife’s friends, angered Andronicus, and for some time he looked darkly
on his brother. Constantine was alarmed, and took pains to conciliate
him, but he was displaced from his position at Court and sent on some
mission to Nymphæum.
With his sixty thousand gold pieces a year and his pretty wife
Constantine would still find life desirable in Asia Minor. Presently,
however, Andronicus came to Nymphæum, and took up his residence in
the old palace of the Nicene Emperors. To this palace Constantine was
summoned one morning in March (1291). He found it full of soldiers,
learned that his brother had found him guilty of treason, and was
given into custody. His luxurious belongings and his great income were
confiscated by Andronicus, and he was destined to spend the remaining
fifteen years of his life in a new and particularly ignominious prison.
Andronicus was afraid to lodge him in a fixed jail, lest his supporters
should free him and start a revolt, and he therefore had a portable
prison--a litter converted into a strong-barred cage--made for him.
In this plight Theodora found her handsome son when, a month of two
later, Andronicus brought him to Constantinople. The Emperor had now
taken a decisive step, and he disregarded his mother’s prayers and
tears. When she pleaded that her son had been convicted, without trial,
on the secret denunciation of a monk, Andronicus merely summoned a
council in the palace and compelled his obsequious courtiers to ratify
his sentence. Theodora continued to assail him, but she had never had
much influence in the administration, and under Andronicus she was
completely powerless. Andronicus gave her no opportunity to thwart his
policy by intrigue or violence. When he was compelled to go into the
provinces, he took Constantine with him in his portable prison, and the
miserable young prince, dressed and shaven as a monk, dragged out year
after year without the least prospect of escape. The third and youngest
brother, Theodore, took warning by Constantine’s fate, put off all
signs of royal estate, and, living as a private citizen, endeavoured
to disarm the jealousy of the Emperor. These misfortunes, and the
thick gathering of clouds about the Empire, saddened the last years of
Theodora’s long life. The regaining of Constantinople had put no new
spirit, no healthier blood, into either people or Court. The Byzantine
power was doomed, and the last sad glances of the aged Empress fell on
a capital fiercely rent with ecclesiastical quarrels, a shrunken Empire
trodden under the feet of the Turk, and a sea swept by innumerable
pirates. She died in 1304, respected and superbly lamented by the
citizens of Constantinople. Without strength of character to make her
mark on the life of the Empire during nearly fifty years of imperial
authority, she had at least kept her slender record unstained by crime
or vice in a criminal and vicious world. At the most we can regret only
that she clung so faithfully to Michael Paleologus through all the
crimes and deceits of his tortuous career.