Women of Early Christianity

by Alfred Brittain; Mitchell Carroll

The rest of the story is but too quickly told. Alexius III.,--Angelus,--had, by a clever coup d'état, displaced his brother Isaac; Alexius IV., son of Isaac, implored outside aid, and gave the marauders of the fourth Crusade an excuse to attack the city. Alexius III. fled for his life, and Alexius IV., after a brief reign, was caught and strangled by the usurper, Alexius Ducas. The Crusaders assaulted and sacked Constantinople when Alexius V., Ducas, the last of the emperors, fled in a galley by night, taking with him the Empress Euphrosyne and her daughter Eudocia whom he had married. He was afterward captured, tried for the murder of the young Alexius, and suffered death by being hurled from the top of a lofty pillar.

The end of Euphrosyne and her daughter Eudocia is not known. The latter had already had a sufficiently tragical history. Eudocia had first been married to Simeon, King of Servia, who later abdicated the throne and retired to a monastery. His son Stephen, enamored of the beauty of his young stepmother, married her. Later, a disgraceful quarrel arose. Eudocia was divorced by her second husband and, almost naked, was expelled from the palace.

In her desperate condition, abandoned by all, she would probably have perished had not Fulk, the king's brother, taken pity on her and sent her back to Constantinople. Alexius Ducas, who had already divorced two wives, was willing enough to wed the daughter of Euphrosyne, and after his execution the hand of the accommodating Eudocia was bestowed on Leo Sguros, the chief of Argos, Nauplia, and Corinth.

The stories of Euphrosyne and Eudocia are a sufficient confirmation of the corrupt state of society in the latter days of the Comneni and the Angeli. Andronicus and his mistresses, and Euphrosyne and her daughter, are no exaggerated types of the higher classes of the Empire. The clergy had grown indifferent to the licentiousness of the age, and many bishops and patriarchs were themselves venal and degraded. The people were too ready to follow in the footsteps of the higher classes. Therefore, through the loss of womanly virtue and manly strength, the Empire was on the verge of ruin.

Thus fell, on April 13, 1204, Constantinople--"The eye of the world, the ornament of nations, the fairest sight on earth, the mother of churches, the spring whence flowed the waters of faith, the mistress of orthodox doctrine, the seat of the sciences, draining the cup mixed for her by the hand of the Almighty, and consumed by fires as devouring as those which ruined the five Cities of the Plain."

XV

WOMANHOOD OF THE BYZANTINE DECADENCE

The Byzantine Empire had fallen with its capital Constantinople, and the Latin Empire of Romania had taken its place. But the rule of the Franks was too weak to take an abiding hold on the provinces, and, after a brief and flickering existence, 1204-1261, it passed away, and a Greek dynasty was once more established in New Rome. While the Ottoman power was gaining strength, the Greek Empire was suffered to exist; but in the course of two centuries, through internal corruption and mismanagement, Byzantine dominion ceased to be an effective force in the world's affairs, and the city of Constantine easily fell a prey to the Mohammedan forces.

Though the Crusaders had captured the capital, the provinces refused to recognize the dominion of the Franks, and three Greek kingdoms were carved out of the remains of the Byzantine Empire by adventurous spirits who had left Constantinople rather than fall victims to the Western conquerors. Theodore Lascaris, the last to strike a blow for the doomed city, founded across the straits, out of the province of Bithynia, the empire of Nicæa, though his rights to royal power lay merely in his strong right arm and in his having married the daughter of the imbecile Alexius III. Alexius Comnenus, grandson of Andronicus I., had betaken himself to the eastern frontier of the Empire, and, chiefly through the glamour of his name, had made for himself, out of the long strip of coast land at the south-east corner of the Black Sea, a kingdom that was destined to carry on an independent existence for nearly three hundred years as the empire of Trebizond. Furthermore, Michael Angelus, a cousin of Alexius III., became "despot" of Epirus and later conquered the Latin kingdom of Thessalonica. Finally, after the Greek empire of Nicæa had enjoyed a steady growth for over half a century, during which it absorbed the kingdom of Thessalonica, Michael Palæologus, the usurper of the Nicene throne, succeeded in wresting Constantinople from its Latin rulers, and established anew the Byzantine Empire, under the dynasty of the Palæologi.