MARIA OF ARMENIA
In the year 1295 Michael, the eldest son of Andronicus II. and Anna,
received the imperial title, and there ensued a remarkable competition
of monarchs, great and little, for the honour of wedding a daughter
to him. Charles of Sicily made an early offer of the hand of his
daughter, but the legates returned disappointed to their master, and
the smaller kings of the East sent in descriptions of the charms of
their marriageable daughters. Amongst them was the King of Armenia,
and the patriarch Alexis was deputed to go and examine the candidate.
Alexis was captured by pirates as he crossed the sea, and, although
the prelate made a skilful and vigorous escape, it was thought that
Armenia was too remote and inaccessible. Legates were therefore sent to
learn the terms of the King of Cyprus, and observe the merits of his
daughter. When these also were unsuccessful, a stronger embassy was
sent to Armenia, and the troop presently returned with two blushing
candidates for the position of Empress.
The King of Armenia had, it seems, two marriageable daughters, and
they were so equal in grace and beauty that no courtier could decide
which was the more eligible. The Armenians insisted that both Ricta and
Theophano should be conveyed to Constantinople, where noble husbands
were still plentiful, and a message was sent to the capital to notify
their coming. Andronicus gave them a princely welcome at the palace
quay, and decided that the elder of the two should marry Michael.
Their names were changed to Maria and Theodora, and, when the elder
was united to the young Emperor, and received herself the imperial
title, the younger was consoled by an alliance with the “Sebastocrator”
John and a share of his sonorous title and more slender diadem. We do
not know the age of Maria and are, as usual, without a description of
her person; in fact, the quiet, unassuming ways of her very mediocre
husband leave her in considerable obscurity for the first half of her
life. We find her in 1306 setting out with him for the Bulgarian war
and showing a fine spirit of patriotism. Andronicus had no money to pay
the troops, and Maria, who remained in Adrianople, sold the jewels and
melted the plate which had formed part of her dowry, in order to win
success for her husband. They then returned to Constantinople to await,
in exemplary patience, the natural transfer to them of the supreme
power.
In 1318 their eldest son, Andronicus, was married to Irene, daughter
of the Duke of Brunswick, and Michael and Maria went to Thessaly and
engaged in the peaceful administration of that province. Two years
later came a terrible message from Constantinople which put an end
to the life of Michael and changed and saddened the whole course of
Maria’s career. They had had two sons and two daughters. One daughter,
Theodora, married the King of Bulgaria; the elder, Anna, married
the Prince of Epirus, and, when he was assassinated, married his
murderer. Tragedy seemed to dog the footsteps of the descendants of
Michael Paleologus and Theodora, and a far more terrible experience
was reserved for the sons, Andronicus and Manuel. Their father had
consented to leave them at Court under the eye of the old Emperor, and
that monarch’s idea of training them was unhappily consistent with a
great deal of spoiling and pampering. Manuel, the younger brother,
seems to have had a more sober and industrious character; the elder,
Andronicus, was a vain, handsome and unscrupulous youth, whose light
head was soon turned by the flattery of courtiers. His days were spent
in hunting, his nights in the pleasures of the table, the dice-board,
or the enervating chambers of courtesans. He was the natural heir to
the throne, after his father, and already enjoyed the imperial title,
so that parasites gathered thick about his person. He outran his ample
income, and was forced to borrow large sums of money from the Genoese
bankers of the suburb of Galata in order to maintain his luxuries and
his mistresses.
The old Emperor did not fail to perceive the debasement of the
character of his favourite grandson, and sharply to reprove him, but
the young man sank more deeply into debt, and began at length to feel
impatient of the long delay that must ensue before the keys of the
imperial treasury would come into his hands. He contemplated a series
of wild intrigues for the purpose of securing an immediate independence
and control of at least a small dominion. At one moment he meditated
seizing the throne of Armenia, on the pretext that it was his mother’s
appanage; at other times he aspired to rule the island of Lesbos, the
Peloponnesus, or any other fragment of the Empire from which he could
wring the price of his pleasures.
The older Andronicus watched him vigilantly, and his intemperance soon
led to a tragedy which definitely turned his grandfather against him.
He was informed that a rival secretly visited the house of one of his
mistresses, a lady of the Byzantine nobility and of very Byzantine
laxness of morals, and he posted a band of archers and swordsmen near
the house, with orders to fall upon any man who approached. It happened
that on the same evening, about midnight, Manuel had occasion to see
his elder brother at once, and expected to find him at the house of his
mistress. He was not recognized by the assassins, and was murdered.
This was the news which came to Michael and Maria in the autumn of
1320. Michael was in poor health at the time, and the shock ended his
life. Maria seems to have taken the veil, as we generally find her
named Xene in the chronicles after this date, but we shall find that
she neither repudiated her elder son nor retired wholly from the world.
The elder Andronicus now made it clear that his grandson should not
inherit the purple, but he unfortunately committed a fresh blunder,
which strengthened the hands of the young Emperor. The proper and most
worthy--or least unworthy--heir to the throne was now the younger son
of Anna of Hungary, Constantine, who had for some years been content
with the lower title of “despot” and the government of Thessaly and
Macedonia. He had, as we saw, married the daughter of the minister
Muzalo. Finding a pretty maid among the common servants of his wife’s
household, he had made her his mistress, and, as Muzalo’s daughter
soon died, Cathara was raised to the rank of companion. They had a
remarkably beautiful boy, who went by the name of Michael Cathara.
After a time the roving eye of Constantine was arrested by the charm
of the wife of one of his secretaries, and he proposed to bestow part
of his affection on her. She pleaded the claims of her husband and
the prescriptions of virtue; her husband promptly disappeared, as so
many inconvenient husbands did in the Byzantine Empire; and the “new
Hypatia,” as the chronicler calls her, shared the crown and the couch
of the Despot of Thessaly. Her beauty, wit and culture are said to have
placed her before all other women of her age, though there is a taint
of sacrilege in the comparison with the virtuous, philosophical and
venerable Hypatia of Alexandria. Cathara was dismissed, and Michael
Cathara became a page at the Court of the elder Andronicus.
The Emperor, now a gouty and feeble old man of sixty-four, was again
seduced by the superficial charm of a handsome boy, and treated Michael
with a favour which clearly marked him for the ultimate possession of
the throne. He gave the boy the imperial title, and kept him by his
side when he received ambassadors. When the elder Michael died, and it
was necessary, according to custom, to frame a new oath of allegiance
to the Emperors, the name of the younger Andronicus was expressly
excluded, and the officers swore only to obey the old Emperor and
whomsoever he might associate with himself. This imprudent choice gave
some of the discontented nobles a pretext to disregard their oaths,
and they entered into secret alliance with the younger Andronicus. In
order, however, to follow intelligibly the further fortunes of the
imperial women, it will be necessary to give a brief account of this
conspiracy and its leaders.
The most prominent figure among the discontented nobles was John
Cantacuzenus, a very distinguished and cultivated noble, a later
Emperor, and one of the chief historians of the period. The
tortuousness of his career and the cloak of hypocrisy in which he
foolishly imagines that he has concealed his ambition warn us to read
his account of his times with discretion. His history opens with a
deliberate concealment of the murder of Manuel and of the flagrant
vices of his associate, Andronicus, and it remains mendacious and
hypocritical to the last page. Such was the chief character who will
mingle in the story of the Empresses for the next twenty years. He
frowned on the low birth of Michael Cathara, was indifferent to the
vices of Andronicus, and secretly cherished an ambition to occupy the
throne. With him were Theodore Synadenus, a noble of equal distinction
and more substantial character; Sir Janni (probably Sir John), an
unscrupulous Choman adventurer; and Apocaucus, a successful financier,
of low birth, who begged to be allowed to share the risk and profits of
the speculation. Secret vows of fidelity were exchanged, and the more
wealthy members of the group purchased the administration of distant
provinces, in which they might raise and arm troops.
The old Emperor detected the conspiracy, and made an effort to
check it. In the spring of 1321, on the morning of Passion Sunday,
Andronicus was summoned to the palace of his grandfather and was
forbidden to communicate with any person until he had seen the Emperor.
The message was alarming, but the messenger was probably open to
bribery, and the other conspirators were hastily warned. They decided
to bring a troop of armed men into the hall of the palace, and, if
the old Emperor were heard to speak angrily to his grandson in the
inner chamber, rush in and despatch him. It will be noticed that the
Byzantine Court was now but the shadow of its former greatness. The
thousands of watchful Scholarians and Excubitors had long disappeared,
even the stalwart and faithful English and Scandinavian Varangians
could be hired no longer in any number, and a group of venal Cretan
or Italian guards alone protected the approach to the throne. But the
elder Andronicus, who had gathered the bishops in his chamber to hear
him charge and convict his grandson, learned that a troop waited in the
hall without, and the conference ended in hypocritical embraces and
vows of mutual fidelity. The nobles, however, resented this solution.
In their respective provinces, to which they were ordered, they raised
their troops and concentrated at Adrianople. When Andronicus saw that
they had a serious army he fled to join them, and they soon began to
march over the provinces toward the capital.
Andronicus the elder was at first content to send a regiments of
priests and monks into the streets of Constantinople with Bibles,
making every citizen swear not to desert their lawful monarch. The oath
was taken with the customary fluency, and the customary reserve; but
the insurgents came nearer and nearer over the roads of Thrace, and a
fresh peace had to be arranged. The grandson was now to have Thrace
for his personal dominion, with Adrianople for capital, and the right
of succession to the whole Empire. The young Empress Irene, who seems
to have been little more than a spectator of the stormy seas into
which her marriage had drawn her, joined her husband at Adrianople,
presented him with a baby, and lived for a few months longer to witness
his debauchery and infidelity. Before very long her reckless husband
attempted to seduce the wife of one of his chief supporters, Sir
Janni, and that commander, already jealous of the greater favour shown
to Cantacuzenus, deserted to Constantinople and persuaded the elder
Andronicus to try the fortune of war once more.
The Empress Maria, or the nun Xene, as she seems to have become, took
the part of her son in the quarrel with the older Emperor. There is
no evidence that she was a sincerely religious woman; indeed, the
fact that she sided with her worthless son prevents us from supposing
this. She probably trusted to return to Court in his train. She had
remained in Thessalonica since the death of her husband, and she
endeavoured to secure interest for her son in that province. The
older Emperor, however, sent his son Constantine to Thessalonica, and
Xene was arrested and shipped, in a very unceremonious fashion, to
Constantinople. Constantine was now in a fair way to attain the Empire,
and his “new Hypatia” must have enjoyed visions of a very speedy
accession to power. But soon afterwards Constantine was captured by
his nephew’s troops and committed to prison, from which he would never
emerge. The unknown lady of such remarkable beauty and accomplishments,
Constantine’s wife, now disappeared into the obscurity from which she
had come, and Xene returned to hope.
The old Emperor was checked by the disaster of his son and sued for
peace. He sent Xene to negotiate with him, and Andronicus and his
friends were soon enjoying themselves once more in the capital. Irene
had set out with him from Adrianople, but she died on the journey. Her
life must have been unhappy, but the widower found consolation, and
we find the earlier Irene’s daughter, Simonides, included in the list
of the noble dames who consoled him. Simonides had entered the world
encircled by a halo of miracle, but she was not destined to issue from
it in a corresponding odour of sanctity. Few did in mediæval Byzantium.
She had, as I said, returned from Servia after the death of the Kral,
and was living in the city, a comfortable widow of thirty-three, when
her handsome and profligate nephew came back to Court, more wealthy
and luxurious than ever. There is no room for doubt that she entered
into a liaison with Andronicus, since the old Emperor himself publicly
referred to it as a notorious fact.
Xene had remained in Thrace, where, after a second marriage, which we
will describe in the next chapter, Andronicus joined her. The town
of Didymoteichus (now Demotica), about twenty miles to the south of
Adrianople, became at this point the seat of a royal residence and
a most important centre of intrigue in Byzantine history. From that
town Xene and her son presently sent a most affectionate message to
Xene’s daughter Theodora, who had married the King of Bulgaria, or
two kings of Bulgaria in succession. The ladies of the Paleologi
family were almost all remarkable for their adaptability to changes of
domestic circumstances. It was twenty-three years since Xene had sent
her daughter to Bulgaria, and she had not seen her since; Andronicus
had never seen his sister. They now felt a sudden and most pressing
desire to meet her, and she and King Michael came to spend a week at
Didymoteichus. The real object was, of course, to arrange an alliance
with Bulgaria, to counterbalance the older Emperor’s alliance, through
Simonides, with Servia. Michael, a man of loose life and coarse and
repulsive manners, was flattered by the liberal attentions of the
imperial nun, and when Andronicus gave him a more substantial proof of
their esteem, in the shape of a large promise of money and territory,
he went home to mobilize his troops. In a short time the news reached
Constantinople that the banners of civil war were to be raised once
more. No one was surprised, as the year had opened with unmistakable
portents. A muddy pig had scattered a procession of bishops, which
accurately foreshadowed trouble in the Church; and there had been two
eclipses of the moon in three months, than which there could be no
surer foreboding of trouble in the State.
The senior Emperor had recourse at once to his futile diplomacy and
his synods of bishops. He drew up a formidable indictment of his
grandson, and submitted to the Empire that a man who had seduced his
aunt, appropriated imperial funds, and committed many other grave
crimes, was unfit to wear the purple. In his history of the time
Cantacuzenus laboriously meets this indictment, but his answers are
feeble and evasive, and, since he prudently overlooks the charge of a
liaison with Simonides, we have little hope of relieving her character
of that imputation. It does not seem to have made any difference to
Xene’s loyalty to her son, and we must conclude that she was bent on
returning with him to the Court. However, after some months of mutual
incrimination, the troops were set in motion, Constantinople was taken
(23rd May 1328), and the long and lively reign of Andronicus II. came
to a close. Few tears were shed, or ever will be shed, over the fall of
that selfish and incompetent ruler. He was granted a generous income,
and he continued to live, in complete privacy, for four years.
Xene remained at Didymoteichus, which had now become an important
centre of the shrunken Empire. The success of her son brought her to
realize that he was surrounded by men and women who were bitterly
hostile to her, and she no doubt felt it more prudent or agreeable to
enjoy the tranquillity of the provincial palace. This tranquillity was
rudely disturbed two years later, when Andronicus fell seriously ill at
Didymoteichus, and the members of the Cantacuzenus family and faction
betrayed their ambition.
The picture of the scene which we have in the pages of Cantacuzenus
himself is just as affecting, and just as mendacious, as Anna Comnena’s
picture of the scene at her father’s death. The dying Andronicus--it
was, at all events, believed by all that he was dying--summoned his
wife and friends to his couch, and, putting the right hand of the
Empress in the right hand of his faithful Cantacuzenus, entrusts to
him her safety and that of the Empire. When the mother of Cantacuzenus
(a quaint type of nun whose acquaintance we shall make presently) asks
him his wishes in regard to his mother, he feebly murmurs that “there
cannot be two rulers.” Cantacuzenus weeps so copiously that he must
retire to wash his face, in order to hide his grief from his beloved
friend. Courtiers press him to seize the purple, and he refuses.
They urge him to put to death, or put out the eyes of, the despot
Constantine, Andronicus’s uncle, who still lingers in his prison.
Again Cantacuzenus shrinks from the suggestion, and, in order to
protect Constantine from their murderous designs, he hides him in an
underground chamber.
One feels that the whole story is a masterpiece of lying, and it is
not difficult to learn the truth. Round the bed of the unconscious
Andronicus Cantacuzenus and his mother and friends pursued a desperate
intrigue for power. Anna was young and helpless, and might be used
for furthering their plan. Xene, however, watched their intrigue
with furious anger and fear, and pitted her hatred against that of
the mother of Cantacuzenus. Constantine was thrust in a loathsome
and secret dungeon by Cantacuzenus, lest any faction should remember
that he was the real heir to the throne. Even the old ex-Emperor at
Constantinople was approached, and was offered the alternative of
death, exile or the monk’s tonsure. With many tears he embraced the
least painful of the three proposals and adopted the name of Antony.
The triumph of Cantacuzenus seemed to be assured when, to their
astonishment and mortification, Andronicus emerged from his stupor and
returned to health.
Xene at once appealed to her son to punish the intriguers, but he was
either deceived by the hypocritical professions of Cantacuzenus or
not strong enough to face his hostility. Xene now felt that she had
incurred their mortal vindictiveness and retired to Thessalonica.
There she induced the citizens to swear that they would protect her,
and she even adopted as her son the wily and accommodating Sir Janni,
who governed the province. Sir Janni had not long to wait for his
reward--the fortune of his “mother.” She died four years later (1334),
and was buried at Thessalonica, having run a strange course since she
had nervously quitted her Armenian home thirty-eight years before.
The older Andronicus had died two years before, at the age of
seventy-two. Nicephorus Gregoras, our best authority for the time,
tells us how he spent a night in pleasant conversation with the old man
in February 1332. Andronicus, or Antony, died the next day, and was
buried in his monkish robe. The same passage of Gregoras gives us our
penultimate reference to the interesting Simonides. She was present
at the conversation, and we seem to be justified in inferring that
she “kept house” for her father. The last glimpse we have of her is a
fitting crown to her strange career. We faintly discern her, some years
later, as a royal nun in the Court of her nephew and former lover.