enacted in Constantinople itself. Leo, the curopalates, and his
father, the venerable Bardas Cæsar, maintained strict order and good
government in the capital, and carried out all the urgent orders of
Nicephorus for the safety of Digenes the lord warden, and of Agatha
the princess. The unfortunate warden, still in the height of his
fever, was carefully removed in a litter to the palace of his
sister's husband, the Lord Comnenus, of the family which ultimately
was raised to the throne. There his sister, the Lady Theodosia
Comnena, and the Princess Agatha, with their attendants, nursed him
in his illness, and there he was treated by the famous physicians
Theophanes Nonnos and Synesios. The one was the author of an
important _Encyclopœdia of Medicine_, the other had studied under
Arabian physicians, and translated their works into Greek. All that
the science of the age, combined with all the love of two noble
women, could do to save the life of the patient, was lavished for
many an anxious week, while the warden lay in great danger and in
continual delirium.
At times he would fancy himself at the siege of Chandax, shouting to
his men to plunge the scaling-bridge from the great tower--"Down with
her--clear the gangway--another ladder there--water on that burning
roof--On, my men, for Rome--Christ!--Mother of God!"--and then he
would sink back on his pillow exhausted, groaning--"All is lost--has
our God delivered us into the hands of the Prophet?--Thy will be
done--hallowed be Thy name."
At other times he would fancy himself in a dungeon, while he could
hear the battle raging in the walls round him, and he would cry
out--"Loose me from these chains, O my God!--I hear the Romans at the
charge--am I chained forever like a dog?--give me my sword--leave me
but one hand free--let me strike one blow for Christ--oh! this is
worse than death--give me one hour of life and air again--then let me
die and be heard no more."
The women sat beside him, silent, in tears, watching his ravings with
pain and fear, and besought the learned physicians to try some
calming drug. With this, on other days, he would be in a gentler
mood, though still in delirium. He would stare at Agatha with eyes
open, but not recognizing who she was, and would murmur,
incoherently--"Sweet lady, you have saved me--let me save you,
too--come with us to Rome--learn to pray to Mary--all good women love
Mary--it is so beautiful to see them in the gallery there in Hagia
Sophia--Theodosia will be so glad--if you only knew Theodosia--and I
think Agatha will be glad, too! Agatha is so kind to girls she
loves--My father was of Arab race, you know."
Agatha listened to all this with pity, wonder, and at last with a
sense of pain. "Of whom is he talking?" she whispered. "I have
heard of a Saracen girl who saved him in the prison in Crete. Oh!
she is in his mind. He thinks I am she. He loved her then, and not
me," and she burst into a flood of tears.
"No, no," Theodosia broke in, "he has always loved you, dear, but he
has often told me how the emir's daughter, Fatima, saved his life,
how he saved her honor, and how he hoped she would consent to become
a Christian, and would come to visit me here in our castle in the
Princes' Islands. My brother has always loved you, Agatha. Even in
the emir's dungeon he prayed to Saint Agatha, and saw her in a vision
smiling upon him."
"Was Fatima so very beautiful?" asked Agatha, suddenly.
"Very beautiful," said Theodosia; "she was thought to be like her
brother, Hassan, who died in our father's castle in Cappadocia; and
Digenes, you know, was his cousin, and singularly like him in
countenance."
"He loved Fatima," cried Agatha, in agony; "he thinks now that I am
Fatima, he is dreaming of her now; see his lips move with words of
tenderness--he will die loving Fatima. I will go into a nunnery and
end it all."
"Oh! speak not thus," cried Theodosia; "my brother never loved woman
save only you. He is very kind and generous, and the soul of honor
and chivalry. He did all he could to serve the woman to whom he owed
his life. If she loved him, I know not; I am told she was overjoyed
when the general charged Digenes to take her and her sister and
followers to Spain. But this I know, that Digenes never loved woman
but his own Agatha."
"Ah, yes! the lord warden was chief of the embassy to the caliph at
Cordova, and Fatima was in that mission," and Agatha covered her face
with her hands and softly wept silent and bitter tears as she watched
the utter exhaustion of their patient.
The fever had many intervals of abatement and then of relapse. One
night, when he had seemed all day to be stronger, and had taken more
food than usual, his delirium broke out in a terrible form.
"Take her away!" he shrieked again and again. "It is a fury!--it is
a fiend!--She seizes my hand!--it burns me to the bone--never, never,
will I be false!--away! away! her eyes are like red-hot iron--her
hair is full of hissing snakes--she is the daughter of Satan--away
from her!--away from her!--she shall not touch you, Agatha, even if
she roast me to a cinder! Mother of God, save me from her! Saint
Agatha, save me!"
The two women looked at each other with wonder and horror in their
faces. Neither spoke. They knew nothing of what had passed. They
imagined things dreadful and unholy.
"He thinks only of you, Agatha, as his protector and saint," said
Theodosia, at last.
Again and again their patient, who had a violent relapse, broke out
with gasps and convulsive agony--"There is blood dripping from her
hands!--she holds a cup of poison!--she calls in the assassins!--she
is smiling with joy!--there, they are stabbing him in the back--Help!
help! treachery! butchery!--it is the blood of the Basileus himself
that chokes me!"--and he sank back groaning out the words in gulps of
rage--"she-devil! murderess! harlot!"
The women cowered in terror and shame, and implored the physicians to
try some means of reducing the delirium. Theophanes Nonnos watched
these recurrent fits with minute observation, and at last he noticed
how the patient, in these wilder moments of violence, kept his eyes
fixed on the ceiling of the apartment. He frequently pointed with
his hands, as if he saw actual figures aloft, and he continually
waved his arms as at some terrible sights above his head. Now,
Theophanes Nonnos was a diligent student of Hippocrates and Galen,
and prone to watch the reaction of external surroundings on the
nervous system of his patients. He then saw that, on the frieze of
the noble apartment to which Digenes had been carried, and facing his
bed, was a mosaic decoration which had been copied from the same
original as the mosaic wall at Ravenna, which represents a ceremonial
procession of Justinian the Great and the Empress Theodora. This
picture Nonnos ordered to be covered with a curtain of neutral tone.
This done, the spasms of the patient rapidly subsided.
In a few days the physicians were able to assure the watchers that
the worst of their anxieties was past, and that a period of quiet
convalescence had set in. Hour after hour, so far as his returning
strength permitted, Digenes poured out to Agatha his protestations of
unbroken devotion; he told her how in Asia, in Crete, in Spain, and
in Thrace, in camp, in battle, in prison, in the palace, and in
church, the image of the saintly Agatha had been his consolation and
hope; he told her how the Basileus had given his formal consent to
their marriage, and had given orders for its celebration with the
highest honors, so soon as the warden was restored to health. His
health now, he murmured, wanted but one thing to be as good as ever.
Would she say what day, next month, he might call her his own? Would
she bend down to his pillow, whisper it in his ear, and seal it with
a kiss--one kiss--the first she had ever vouchsafed to him?
Agatha listened with rapture! She did bend down and whisper in his
ear, and suffer her lips to rest on his. She did not tell him how
often, during his long delirium, her lips had touched his burning
forehead and his fevered hands, as she stooped down to bathe them
with attar of roses and orange-water. But she was very slow, indeed,
to believe that her Digenes had never loved the fascinating houri of
the old emir's castle--not for a time--not for a day--not just a
little bit in all chivalry and faith? Nor could anything persuade
her that the Lady Fatima had not loved her Digenes, loved him
passionately, truly, in all honor and in all sincerity. It was quite
impossible that a woman of feeling and goodness could owe so much to
her Digenes, could be on such terms of sentiment and confidence, and
be half converted to his religion, and not love him. Any woman so
near must love him, would love him, ought to love him.
At last, one day, Agatha was finally convinced that she had the whole
heart of Digenes, and had never ceased to have it, from the hour when
she first met him as a girl in her father's court, and had seen the
young hero, whose feats and chivalry the poets commemorated in song.
The lord warden was now very much restored to health, and wholly to
his reason and consciousness. Agatha had read to him some of his
favorite pieces, the parting of Hector and Andromache in the sixth
_Iliad_, and the parting scene from the "Alcestis" of Euripides. He
had even asked her to recite the famous lines of Sappho--from the
poems which were then all extant--
Φαίνεταί μοι κηνος ίσος Θεοισιν--
("_that man seems to me the peer of gods_")
--but she archly refused, as he was not strong enough to listen to
such fiery poetry, and she was not going to recite such pagan stuff.
To them entered the lady Theodosia Comnena, who gayly saluted her
brother with the words, "News, news, something that will interest you
both, something I trust that will give you, brother, as much pleasure
as it will give Agatha."
"A conundrum," said they both; "we give it up."
"A rival of yours, Agatha, a flame of yours, brother," said
Theodosia, with a peal of laughter.
"That dear girl, Sophia, the daughter of the old Emir Abd-el-Aziz,
has just come to see me. Her brother, the captain, young Anemas, who
was sent on the embassy to Fez, and afterwards to Cordova, has
persuaded the Lady Fatima, your ladylove in Crete, brother, to accept
the pressing invitation of Sophia and her father, to visit them in
Prote. She is to come with her brother and sister, and within six
months Fatima shall go with us to hear the Patriarch perform divine
service. And before a month more is passed she shall marry Anemas,
before he joins the Basileus in Syria. So think no more, brother, of
your tawny angel. She is to stay with the whole blood of the
Prophet, Christian though she will be, and Christian as Anemas
already is."
"Thanks be to Mary of the Daphne," said Digenes, with hearty
rejoicing. "Has she promised Anemas?"
"Not yet, to marry," said Theodosia, "but that is an incident. She
has promised to come, brother, and she believes that you are married
by this time yourself."
"Who told her that?" said Agatha, quickly.
"Well, I strongly suspect that Anemas told her, as an indispensable
condition of proposing marriage with himself."
"Ah! then I was right, after all," said Agatha, with a deep sigh, and
looked earnestly and almost reproachfully at Digenes.
"My beloved," said the young hero, with deep feeling, "your
suspicions were true, perhaps, in part. But as to me, I have been
ever true throughout."
"Another piece of news," said Theodosia, "if you two can keep a
secret which is not to be blurted out to these palace gossips: Eric,
the young Varangian, will one day marry Sophia when he comes back
from the wars, where he is winning glory on the staff of the Basileus
in Asia. There may be two weddings on the same day. Nay, brother,
perhaps there might be three on the same day, and the Basileus
preside in person at the ceremony!"
"Tut!" cried Digenes, with animation, "not for us. I do not wait
till Eric and the Basileus return, nor till Anemas can wring a 'yes'
from his bride."
"No, nor till Fatima can be persuaded to visit her cousin in Prote,"
said Agatha, archly. She was now at last convinced that Digenes had
never failed her in thought or in word--no, not for an hour; but she
still meant to be married before Fatima could reach Constantinople.
By slow degrees, and in very guarded and modified ways, Digenes
allowed Agatha to know as much of what had passed in the palace as he
could remember, and as much as he thought it kind or prudent as yet
to tell to the pure and gentle spirit with whom he was to be united.
The astrologer's potion had confused his brain to such a degree that
he had but a broken memory of the interview with Theophano. His long
illness, with its continued delirium, had left him with a mind
troubled as with a series of terrible and incomprehensible dreams.
He could not shock the girl in her happiness with all his horrible
suspicions and recollections. Nor would Agatha, on her side, as yet
trouble his mind with all that she suspected and feared.
At last, having exchanged confidences as far as they each thought it
kind and wise to speak, it was agreed between them that in the
tremendous crisis of the great war, in the weight of cares that beset
the Basileus day and night, they would not harass him with the
torture of fresh revelations, of which the formal proofs would not be
easy to find.
"Agatha," said Digenes, solemnly, one day, on receipt of the
inexplicable news of the sudden retreat of the Basileus to Cæsarea,
in the very midst of the campaign, "the Basileus has called me to the
front by special messenger. I start for the camp in an hour."
"Go," she said, with a deep sigh, "if it must be. I will wait till
you come again with fresh renown. The cause of this Empire of Rome,
of God, of the Mother of God, shall not be hindered one hour by the
love of one feeble girl."
"Think me not unkind, my love, my hope, my saint," cried the young
hero, with the light of battle for Christ and His people in his
eyes--"think me not unkind if I have to hasten away from the holy
shrine in which your love has suffered me to kneel, to worship, and
to adore; think me not cold if I hurry off to my sovereign and my
command. I could not love thee so well, if it were not that I loved
my duty even more."
With one long kiss they parted--nor did they meet again on earth.
XXVI
Old Rome
The scene now passes from the Imperial Palace of New Rome on the
Bosphorus to the Catholic Basilica of Old Rome on the Tiber, where
the greatest of the Saxon line of emperors was about to claim the
inheritance of the Cæsars and to instal his house as supreme in all
Italian lands. It was Christmas eve, 967, on a bright morning of
winter, when snow lay on Mount Soracte and on the higher ranges of
the Sabine and Alban mountains. The Flaminian way, from the city
gate under the Pincian hill, for the two miles to the Milvian bridge
over the Tiber, was thronged with a motley crowd of the populace of
Rome, bearing visible signs of its heterogeneous origin and lawless
habits, along with officials, civil and ecclesiastical, in their
state robes and with emblems of office, and strong detachments of
Northern soldiers, both horse and foot, whom the Roman mob regarded
with terror as monsters of ferocity and force. The prefect and the
senate of Rome--a strange contrast from the senators who had gone to
welcome Julius and Octavius some thousand years before--were hurrying
along to meet their German emperor, intermixed with the
standard-bearers of the Roman militia, the long processions of
priests and choristers, and the counts and barons of the Italian
fiefs in military array and fantastic armor. It was a strange jumble
of races, types, and various characters. The mongrel and craven
descendants of African, Syrian, or Slavonian slaves jostled the
degenerate heirs of the ancient patricians, and both looked on with
awe and wonder at the huge, fair-haired barbarians who took their
orders from no man but their mighty chief, the Saxon Otto.
At the northern end of the Milvian bridge there had been erected a
rude and hasty kind of triumphal arch, decorated with the emblems and
colors of the emperor-king. Near it was posted, waiting to see the
imperial procession pass, a small band of spectators, whose speech
and garb proclaimed them to be foreigners at Rome. One was our
friend Michael, the protocolist, who, with Joannes Kyriotes, the
geometer, had been despatched by the ever-watchful Chancery of
Constantinople on a roving and secret commission to observe the
current of Italian politics, and especially to study the real feeling
of the papal court, and also of the democracy of Rome. With them was
Symeon, a learned divine, who was travelling to obtain traditions and
legends for his great collection of the lives of saints and martyrs.
A fourth foreigner was Alexios, an artist in mosaic decoration, who
had been called from Byzantium to Rome to superintend the restoration
of the dilapidated mosaics in the Church of St. Cosmas and St.
Damianos. They were being personally conducted by Guido, a Sicilian
long settled in Bari, in the Lombard Theme, a loyal subject of the
Byzantine emperor. The whole party had their own armed attendants,
as well as a small body-guard from the municipal police, for the
state of Rome was far too unsettled to permit of distinguished Greeks
being safe in the midst of a turbulent crowd.
"Is it possible," said Michael to Joannes, "that these battered walls
of old Rome can have kept at bay for a single day the mighty King of
Germany?"
"Well, they helped Belisarius to beat off the Goths," said Joannes;
"but then they had our soldiers under a great chief inside them."
"I dare say they may serve to baffle Goths and Germans," said
Michael, "but, though I am no soldier, I can see that these obsolete
and now ruinous walls never could be compared for an instant with the
mighty fortifications we could show them at home on the Bosphorus."
"The walls of old Rome are poor enough," Guido now broke in, "but the
castle of the Archangel, with the chapel on the top of the old
Mausoleum of the Antonines, that is a pretty stronghold, I assure
you."
"I admit that that is a tremendous fort," said Michael, "and the
sight of its tiers of colonnades and battlements makes one understand
how Theodora and Marozia, Alberic and Octavian, managed to command
the city and even defy both Lombard, Tuscan, and German."
"Ah," said Guido, "you honorable and reverend sirs in New Rome cannot
conceive the pandemonium that has raged in old Rome ever since I can
remember and all through my father's time. One Messalina after
another, the daughter, the concubine, and the mother of a pope has
made her lovers or her children despots of the city, bishops, or
popes, as the fancy seized her. Every other year this Roman
populace, which is no good at fighting, but has a diabolical genius
for riot, breaks out and overturns consul, prefect, pope, and
emperor, as the German king calls himself. Thereupon down comes an
army of these hairy barbarians from Lombardy, over the Apennines or
the Alps, bursts into these tottering gates, crowns a new pope,
instals a new count as governor, massacres, hangs, tortures, and
burns every man they find in their path."
"How many popes have you seen, Master Guido?" asked Symeon.
"John X., strangled in prison. Then Leo VI. and Stephen VII., both
creatures of the foul woman who killed John. Then she made her own
son pope by the name of John XI. A few years after this Marozia's
son, Alberic, made Leo VII. pope, and, after him, Stephen VIII. and
Marinus II. and Agapetus II., in succession. Then John XII., the
grandson of Marozia, was the worst of them all--denounced by a synod
as guilty of murder, perjury, incest, sacrilege, and magic. When
John XII. was deposed, came Leo VIII., then Benedict V., who was also
deposed, and now the successor of St. Peter is our Holy Father, the
venerable John XIII., whom God, in His infinite goodness, give to
live the years of St. Peter."
"Why, that makes as many as twelve Holy Fathers of Rome within forty
years," said Michael, with a sneer.
"Such is Rome," said Guido; "and half of them were the lovers, sons,
or nephews of a bloodthirsty harlot, at whose orders they sell
bishoprics, blind, mutilate, torture, and crucify their opponents and
rivals."
"And they call this the universal Church Catholic, and ask ours, the
earliest Church of Christ, to submit to their sacred prerogative,"
said Michael, bitterly.
"Ah!" sighed Symeon, "it is a fearful backsliding. But God in His
mercy will bring about their repentance in His good time. We, who
compile the hagiographies of saints and martyrs, cannot forget that
under these Roman basilicas there rest the bones of the blessed St.
Peter and St. Paul, that this city has been ruled by Gregorys and
Leos, and is sanctified by the blood of so many virgins and martyrs
of the faith. The Church of Christ will be restored one day, and
Rome again will be the centre of Christendom in Europe."
"I will not attempt to prophesy against your reverence," said Guido;
"I can only speak of what is and what has been in all living memory.
This famous city is now a den of bandits, the haunt of infamous
women, and a scene of bloodshed and torment. These barons live in
their castles amid gangs of hired ruffians, till they ride forth to
fight one another or to plunder their neighbors. I have seen these
gray walls hung with the carcasses of their victims, and these
streets, churches, and streams run with blood, whenever the horsemen
of some pretender to the throne or of the German princes come down to
sack the city or to quell an insurrection of the citizens. I have
seen popes made and unmade at the order of a profligate woman or of a
murderous despot. I have seen one crowned pope trample on another
crowned pope, break his crozier and tear off his robes in presence of
an emperor and of all his court. I have seen the prefect of Rome
hung by his hair from the statue of Constantine and dragged through
the streets naked on an ass. I saw twelve 'captains of the regions'
hung on gallows, while other leaders were blinded, some decapitated.
Some were torn from their graves and their bodies cast to the dogs.
This is the modern rendering of the Pax Romana, and all is done under
orders of him whom we are waiting here to see, him whom they call
their 'pacific emperor, Semper Augustus,' and with the blessing of
the creatures whom he pleases to nominate as the successors of St.
Peter."
This conversation of the Byzantines was fortunately not understood by
the bystanders, and it was now broken off by the arrival of the
German emperor and his staff. Otto of Saxony, who had been emperor
for six years, and had been occupied ever since with the
conspiracies, intrigues, and revolutions of Italian princes,
prelates, and people, was now again entering Rome in martial array.
He was guarded by powerful bodies of his Northern veterans, the
terrible warriors with whom he had established his rule from the
Tiber to the Elbe, with whom he had triumphed over Danes, Slavonians,
and Burgundians, men who had fought with him on the tremendous field
of the Lech, when he saved Europe from the Hungarian flood. These
gigantic horsemen proudly bore aloft the ensigns of their great
chief, and thrust their way with brutal contempt among the "dregs of
Romulus" in the road.
In the midst of his chivalrous body-guard rode the great Otto in full
panoply, acknowledging the salutations of the people with magnificent
ease, making little difference in his bearing to prelate, baron, or
captain of the urban militia. By his side rode his son Otto, then
fourteen, destined to lay his bones in early life in the Church of
St. Peter. And then came the Empress Adelheida, whose beauty and
inheritance had first called the king into Italy. The imperial
cortège was surrounded by German and Italian barons, and was welcomed
by Roman prelates and nobles, with banners and the chanting of hymns
and the boisterous acclamations of a fickle populace, which was ever
ready to cheer or to revile, as the popular fancy swayed to and fro.