Another figure played a prominent part within these roofless halls. We have met him before, John Cantacuzene, of whom his enemies confessed that of all the public robbers he alone was moderate and abstemious. He resisted all the attempts of Andronicus III to raise him to a seat beside him on the throne, and at that Emperor’s death became guardian of his infant son, John Palæologus.
In those days internal peace was not the Empire’s lot for long, and soon a conspiracy was formed against Cantacuzene. Anne of Savoy, the Dowager Empress, was persuaded to assert the tutelage of her son, and her female court was bribed to support this claim by the Admiral Apocaucus. The Patriarch, John of Apri, a proud and weak old man, joined the conspiracy, and even assumed the claims to temporal power of a Roman Pontiff; he invaded the royal privilege of red shoes or buskins, placed on his head a mitre of silk or gold, and signed his epistles with hyacinth or green ink.
While John Cantacuzene was abroad on public service, the conspirators convicted him of treason, proscribed him as an enemy of the Church, deprived him of all his fortune, and even cast his aged mother into prison. He was forced to assume the Purple, and as rebel Emperor endeavoured to resume the charge entrusted to him, the guardianship of John Palæologus. But civil war devastated the provinces that yet remained to the Empire, and not till Apocaucus was murdered by some nobles whom he had imprisoned was peace restored. The negotiations to this end were carried on between the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, where Cantacuzene had taken up his abode, and the neighbouring residence of Empress Anne, the Palace of Blachernæ. The proceedings ended in peace, and the marriage of Cantacuzene’s daughter to John Palæologus. But the sword did not long rust in its sheath. Civil war broke out again, and finally John Cantacuzene sought refuge in a monastery, where he spent his declining years in a lengthy, if somewhat unprofitable, treatise on the divine light of Mount Tabor.
We must retrace our steps, and, leaving by the doorway we entered, let us cast a glance to northward. The moat ends abruptly, and a curtain projects towards the north-west flanked by towers. This is the wall of Manuel Comnenus, and so dates from the middle of the twelfth century. Other fortifications must have stood here before that time to guard the Palace of Blachernæ, but little trace remains either of these or of the palace itself. Yet here behind these walls, or those that they replaced, the dynasty of the Comnenians lived out their day, and they deserve a word or two of recognition if only on account of Anne, the daughter of the first Alexius, and Manuel the builder of this wall. Of these, the former aspired to fame as historian of her father’s reign, but the modicum of truth which is contained in the voluminous records she compiled is much obscured by elaborate affectations of windy rhetoric. No doubt the description of her father’s character was dictated by filial piety—it stands in sharp contrast to the last words that that Emperor heard from his wife Irene: “You die as you have lived—a hypocrite!”
The Empress Irene tried to exclude her surviving sons, and to place the power of government in the fair hands of Anne, but the order of male succession was asserted by those able to enforce it. The fair historian, Anne Comnena, no doubt in order to add one more elaborate chapter to the high-sounding verbiage with which she had clothed the history of her time, conspired to poison her brother John; her husband, Bryennius, prevented the design and John Comnenus reigned in his father’s stead. He generously forgave his sister, and no doubt much to the edification of future generations her momentous work continued. In all the history that is recorded by the grim walls that sheltered the city of Constantine, there are but few events that leave a pleasant memory, few rays of gladdening light that pierce the turmoil of angry passions, the darkness of sordid details, the strife and anguish that largely composed the life of the city Byzas founded. And, alas! these rare events serve but to make the contrast stronger and to intensify the shadows that hang about these ruined palaces and ramparts.
We have traced the history of Constantinople through its walls up to the time when they could no longer hold out against the assaults of those who now carry on the Imperial traditions. But there are yet places left for us to visit—they have their tales to tell, and of all that remains to-day, the story of the reign of John Comnenus is the pleasantest. In him the Empire found a ruler whose days were never darkened by conspiracy or rebellion, save for that one instance already mentioned. His nobles feared him, his people loved him, and he had no need to punish or forgive any personal enemy. In his private life he emulated Marcus Aurelius: he was frugal and abstemious, severe with himself and indulgent to others. He proved successful in his warlike measures against the Turks, and astonished his Latin allies by the skill and prowess of the Greeks when engaged in a holy war. He led his troops from Constantinople to Antioch and Aleppo, there a slight wound in his hand, received when hunting, proved fatal, and cut short his prosperous reign.