The Empresses of Constantinople

by Joseph McCabe

We do not know how the son of a highly cultivated Emperor made the acquaintance of a tavern-girl. It is clear that she was a young woman of singular beauty—“a kind of miracle of nature,” Zonaras says—and most graceful figure, and I would conjecture that some courtier among the disreputable followers of the young prince brought her to his notice. There may have been a “beauty show,” and the publican may have boldly pressed the merits of his daughter, but some attention was generally paid to birth in these matrimonial contests. A tavern-woman was still held to be equivalent to a prostitute or an actress. It is useless to speculate. Constantine idly acquiesced, and the beautiful Theophano passed from the sordid scenes of a little wine-shop to the wonderful splendours of the palace. Courtly writers afterwards discovered that there was royal blood in her veins. The only serious clue we have to her origin is that she came from Laconia, and we may regard her as a common type of Greek.

It is calculated that the marriage took place about the end of the year 956. For three years no events occur that enable us to penetrate the secluded life of the palace, though the subsequent events suggest that Helena and her daughters were disdainful of the vulgar beauty and were met with a virulent hatred. At the end of three years (August or September 959) Constantine died, and the ampler chronicles tell a circumstantial story of his being poisoned by his son Romanus and Theophano. A poison was, it is said, put in his physic. Either by accident or from suspicion he spilled most of the contents of the cup and escaped death. But his health was gravely impaired; he went to visit the monasteries of Mount Olympus, fell dangerously ill there—the chronicler says that perhaps more poison was administered—and was brought back to the palace to die.

We must regard this charge of poisoning as probably a construction put on his illness by the officials or people of Constantinople. It may or may not be true. We have no right to conclude at once that it is an historical fact, but it seems to me that some recent historians have just as little right to reject it as “improbable.” Romanus was a licentious and unscrupulous man, carrying his father’s amiable weakness for wine to the pitch of debauch and ruining his constitution by vice. Theophano, we shall see, was capable of murder, and her ambition would most certainly lead her to wish the older imperial family out of the way. On the other hand, there would be a prejudice against her in Constantinople, and in the mind of later writers, and we must leave this first charge against her what it is in the chronicles—a suspicion.

Her next step was to get rid of the sisters of Romanus. Helena and her five daughters still lived in the palace, or in one out of the great cluster of palaces. There were now at least eight palaces, connected by superb colonnades or separated by choice gardens and terraces, in the vast imperial domain between the Hippodrome and the Sea of Marmora; there were, in addition, several palaces on the Asiatic coast; and the palace at Blachernæ, in the cool, hilly district to the north, had in turn become a vast cluster of palaces, chapels, colonnades and terraced gardens. The mother and sisters of Romanus could therefore find ample hospitality without being compelled to witness the daily dissipation of the Emperor, his drunken banquets and his troops of lascivious actors and women, but they frowned on the kind of Court over which Theophano presided, and she persuaded her husband to remove them. He bade his five sisters adopt the monastic life. Theophano now had two sons and a daughter, and would feel safer if their royal aunts were prevented from making aristocratic marriages. The young women were, however, not at all disposed to embrace a religious life and there were furious scenes in the palace. They were removed to the monastery into which the palace of Theodora’s minister, Theoclistus, had been converted, near the Hippodrome, but they seem still to have intrigued, and were separated and transferred to other monasteries.[21]

Romanus was not cruel or malignant. His temper was to live and let live, provided that no check was placed on his imperial pleasures. He merely smiled, therefore, when he heard that, in their convents, his sisters refused to exchange their silks for the hated black robe, or abstain from the delicate meats to which they had been accustomed. We shall later find one of them coming out, in spite of her vows, to marry an Emperor, to the intense mortification of Theophano, who had murdered her husband to marry him herself. Helena was the chief sufferer. She sank into melancholy and illness after the departure of her daughters, and died in September 961.

The Emperor continued for two years to enjoy his pleasures and hasten his death, leaving the care of the Empire to his very capable ministers and officers. Amongst these officers was a very singular commander named Nicephorus Phocas, whose romantic career still puzzles historians. Whether he was a profound hypocrite, or a deeply religious man fascinated and seduced by Theophano, it is difficult to determine. “God only knows,” says Leo the Deacon, a chronicler of the time to whom we owe most of our knowledge. Nicephorus was a very able general of about fifty years: a dark, robust little man, with black hair and small dark eyes under thick eyebrows, a very stern look, and the chest and arms of a Hercules. He was not at all handsome, but he was one of the greatest soldiers of his time. The singular feature about his life was that, in consequence of a tragic accident of earlier years, he had adopted a very religious and ascetic life. He wore a hair shirt under his armour and linen, abstained from flesh and women as rigidly as a monk, and was understood to have vowed chastity.

It appears that, as her husband sickened, Theophano set out to seduce this remarkable soldier-monk and succeeded. The other great power in the State was Joseph Bringas, the leading civilian and statesman; but Joseph was a eunuch, and of no use to Theophano. She would marry Nicephorus. Leo the Deacon says that she admitted, or drew, the ascetic to her arms before the death of her husband, and it is not impossible, as the chief biographer of Nicephorus admits.[22] However that may be, Romanus died in 963, after a giddy reign of four years, at the age of twenty-four. Once more Theophano is charged with poisoning, and once more we must refrain from pressing the charge. The nearest authority, Leo the Deacon, leaves it an open question whether Romanus died of poison or had closed his own life prematurely by debauch; and we may do the same. Historians are too apt to conclude that because Romanus did wear himself out by his excesses, we may dismiss the charge against Theophano. Disease, on the contrary, would furnish a cloak to an artful poisoner, and Theophano certainly wished to get rid of the despotic eunuch Bringas, whom Nicephorus would quickly displace. The chief reason why we must hesitate is because Theophano was prostrate at the time and unable to master the new situation. She had given birth to a second daughter two days before the death of Romanus, and there is reason to think that Bringas and others were anxious to remove her from power. The circumstance is not decisive, as her servants might carry out a plan made at an earlier date.

As soon as Theophano recovered she entered upon the struggle with Bringas. It seems, from the movements of Nicephorus, that the Empress was in communication with him before the death of Romanus, and that at least she sent him a secret and flattering message when Romanus died. Nicephorus had disbanded the army with which he had conducted two brilliant campaigns against the Saracens, and was little equipped to contest the power of Bringas, but he went at once to the city in order to be near Theophano. Bringas had made desperate efforts to keep him away, even going so far as to propose in the council that the general’s eyes should be put out for his treasonable ambition. His great victory over the Saracens and his repute for sanctity had, however, won a large body of admirers for Nicephorus, and when he entered the city in triumph, driving before his car groups of Saracen prisoners, and exhibiting the holy relics he had rescued from the hands of the heathen, citizens and soldiers and priests united in acclaiming him. A private conversation with the new patriarch Polyeuctes, a fanatical monk and eunuch, secured the favour of that prelate and his clergy, and it is even said that he ventured into the house of Bringas and revealed to that cautious statesman the hair shirt which he wore below his fine robes and the monastic heart that beat beneath it. But for his intense devotion to the young princes, he said, he would at once retire into a monastery.

If we can believe this last statement, the situation was not without humour, because Bringas presently discovered that his pious rival was being surreptitiously admitted to the Empress’s apartments. Whether it is true or no that Nicephorus had previously been intimate with her, it is certain that he now became infatuated with Theophano, and received an assurance that she would marry him, if not more intimate pledges of her love. We may be confident that Theophano did not love him; he was not physically attractive to her sensual taste, and his incongruous mixture of piety and passion and deceit must have excited her disdain. He was merely the best instrument at hand for the achievement of her ambition. Then, as I said, Bringas discovered the secret meetings and renewed his attack. He invited Nicephorus to the palace. The gallant, but prudent, soldier preferred to fly to the altar of St Sophia and secure the protection of the patriarch. The Senate was convoked, the prelate warmly espoused the cause of Nicephorus, and he departed in honour to take supreme command of the army in Asia and await the orders of Theophano.

The next move of Bringas was a blunder and the beginning of his downfall. One of Nicephorus’s chief officers was his nephew, John Zimiskes, the later Emperor. When we find Zimiskes murdering his uncle with the aid of Theophano, and then callously repudiating her, we shall not suppose him to be a man of tender conscience, and Bringas, no doubt, regarded him as venal. He sent a secret messenger to offer Zimiskes the supreme command if he would send his uncle in bonds to Constantinople. Zimiskes calculated that he would have the command, in any case, if his uncle became Emperor, and he showed the letter to Nicephorus, and urged him to assume the purple. They were in Cæsarea at the time, and from that city Bringas soon learned that Nicephorus had accepted the title of Emperor and would march on Constantinople.