The Empresses of Constantinople

by Joseph McCabe

A few years, in which several children were born, were spent in this extraordinary exile by the rivers of Babylon, where the passionate love of the young ex-queen endured without regret the rude accommodation of a camp in what was almost a desert. Andronicus turned brigand when their money and jewels failed, and, at the head of his little band of Arabs, raided the territory of his imperial cousin and even carried off the Christian inhabitants to be sold as slaves. His queen and he laughed at the anathema which the Greek Church laid on them. At last the Governor of Trebizond, at the request of Manuel, enticed Theodora from the camp and captured her, and Andronicus sought pardon once more. We may honour the reluctance of Manuel to shed the blood of his subjects, but in the case of Andronicus it was an almost criminal weakness. That astute adventurer put a heavy iron chain round his neck, covered it with his mantle, and sank on his knees at a respectful distance from his cousin’s throne. When he was pressed to come forward to receive a cousinly embrace, he opened his cloak and protested that he must be dragged by the chain to the feet of the Emperor. The comedy ended in his receiving a wealthy appointment, but he was separated from Theodora and sent into a comfortable exile on the southern shores of the Black Sea.

Such was the man who, after the death of Manuel, came forward as the champion of the moral principle and Byzantine honour. Manuel’s daughter Maria, “the virago,” as Nicetas calls her, appealed to him to end the scandalous rule of the Empress Maria and her reputed lover. Age had made him cautious, however, and he allowed the conflicting parties to exhaust themselves, and the young Emperor fully to reveal his incapacity and unworthiness. Then he began to write indignant letters on the state of the Court to the patriarch and to the provincial authorities. In his great anxiety for the welfare of the Empire he left his exile and moved nearer to Constantinople, winning many to his side by his tears and his venerable appearance. He was now a white-haired old man, approaching his seventieth year, his still robust and magnificent frame made more attractive by the apparent sobering of his character. At length he reached Chalcedon, and the citizens of Constantinople went across the straits in crowds to hail the deliverer of the Empire, or of the Emperor, as he was careful to say. The sins of Andronicus had faded in the memories of their fathers, and they returned to the city to praise his loyalty and his demeanour. Before long they arrested the minister Alexis and put out his eyes. It remained to disarm the clergy, who had been forced to excommunicate him for enslaving Christians. When the patriarch came over to visit him, the wily hypocrite fell at his feet and kissed them, protesting that the archbishop had saved the Emperor, to whose cause he was devoted.

In brief, Andronicus was presently installed in the palace, and a ruthless suppression of his opponents began. Eyes were cut from their sockets, the jails were filled with nobles, and confiscated property swelled his treasury. The Princess Maria, who had appealed to him, and must now have seen her error, perished with her vigorous husband; one of their eunuchs was bribed by Andronicus to poison their food. The clergy next discovered his hypocrisy. He ordered the patriarch to marry his illegitimate daughter Irene to Manuel’s illegitimate son Alexis—the natural children of two sisters—and, when he refused, deposed him and found some other bishop complaisant enough to perform the ceremony. The nobles hastily plotted to displace him, but it was too late. Another batch of condemnations routed his opponents and enriched his purse. The people, it is lamentable to find, supported his every deed with enthusiasm, and were not slow to take up the cry of “Andronicus Emperor” which his creatures soon whispered in their ears.

It was the late summer of 1183, only three years after the death of Manuel. The foolish young Alexis still caroused and hunted in frivolous unconcern, but his mother now saw that the end of her reign approached, and might come in dreadful form. She was transferred to a suburban palace, and her life was embittered by calumny and petty persecution. It is in view of these circumstances that we must hesitate to accept the charge of misconduct with the minister Alexis; she seems to have been one of the best of the princesses of the time, though her personality never comes clearly before us. Presently Andronicus charged her with treachery. Her sister, Philippa, was, after being detached from Andronicus, married to the King of Hungary, and it is not impossible that some letters were exchanged between them in regard to the monster who now aimed at the throne. Philippa would retain little tenderness for him since he had fled straight from her arms to those of Theodora. Maria was, of course, found guilty, and lodged in a dungeon. Her son, little dreaming how soon he would follow her, signed the death-warrant, and in the month of August 1183 her sufferings came to an end. A high commander of the army and a eunuch of the Court strangled her with a bowtring.

Alexis lightheartedly pursued his pleasures for a few weeks, until he heard about him the cry of “Andronicus Emperor.” He nervously applauded it, and offered a share of his throne; and, with feigned reluctance, Andronicus yielded to the general demand and was crowned by the clergy in St Sophia. When, in the course of the coronation Mass, the chalice was brought to him containing the consecrated wine, he took it in his hands and swore on the living body of Christ that he accepted the crown only in order to assist Alexis. A few days later the youth was strangled by his orders, and, when the lifeless body was placed at his feet, he kicked it and observed that it was the child of a perjurer and a whore. One further detail will complete the picture of the degradation of the Eastern Empire. Two high officials of the Court took the body out in a boat, flung it in the sea, and sang gay songs as they returned to the Bucoleon quay. One of them became Archbishop of Bulgaria.

The two years’ reign of the Emperor Andronicus was an orgy of bloodshed, spoliation and vice. Perhaps the most abominable detail of it is that he at once married the child-widow of Alexis, Anna, the beautiful daughter of Louis VII. She had not yet completed her twelfth year, yet she now became the daily and—one fears—nightly companion of an erotic old man of seventy, whose devices to maintain his virility are hardly less repulsive than his murders. It is in one sense a relief to know that little Anna was only one member of a veritable harem of singing and dancing girls, and some nobler women, who filled the palaces, especially the pleasure-palaces on the Asiatic coast, of the repulsive monarch. Powerful in frame and fresh in countenance to the end, Andronicus maintained even in the palace his sobriety and moderation at table in order to preserve his youthful vigour. He was, if ever a man was, an erotomaniac, one of the strangest personalities in the whole of Byzantine history. He brought about several excellent reforms in the administration of the failing Empire, and had, almost to the end, the enthusiastic attachment of his people; but his brutality in the punishment of rebels, who were numerous, was too appalling to be described, and his conduct in many ways approached insanity. He raised a statue in the city to his first wife; she was represented as a nun accompanied by a handsome youth.

We hasten through this welter of brutality and licence to the natural termination. Deliverers of the Empire arose in various places, and were either savagely crushed or showed a savagery equal to that of Andronicus. The natural son of Manuel, whom he had married to his daughter Irene, rebelled; his secretary was burned alive in the Hippodrome, his eyes were removed, and Irene was banished for shedding tears over his fate. A nephew of his mistress Theodora (of Acre) rebelled, and captured the island of Cyprus, and Andronicus impotently ordered the two innocent nobles who were Isaac’s sureties to be stoned to death by their fellow-nobles in the palace; but Isaac proved as savage and licentious as Andronicus. Then another Alexis Comnenus, a grand-nephew of Manuel, fled to the West for assistance, and the Sicilian army set sail for Constantinople; but the soldiers merely fell like a fresh flood of savagery on the miserable Greeks. At last a deliverer arose, almost by accident, in the city.

Sorcery and astrology were at that time as rife in the Eastern Empire as they had been in the worst days of ancient Rome; the clergy were deeply corrupted and were almost idle (and wealthy) spectators of the vices and superstitions of Court and people. One of the more astute of these diviners was consulted as to the successor of Andronicus, and, by a device which was a thousand years old in the Roman world, he caused the letters I.S. to appear in answer to the inquiry. When Andronicus heard the result of the consultation, he concluded that Isaac of Cyprus, his rival in power and licentiousness, was the fated individual, and felt confident as long as that tyrant was unable to leave his island. But the prediction also assigned a very near date for the succession, and the chief minister of Andronicus was concerned. There was in the city a timid and unambitious noble, of a provincial family, named Isaac Angelus, and the minister insisted that this was the man designated by the diviner. Andronicus cheerfully ridiculed the idea, placed his little wife upon the royal galley, and went with her to join his gay ladies in one of the palaces across the water. It was the early autumn of the second year of his reign (1185).

Within a few days a messenger from the palace broke into their pleasant dalliance with the news that Constantinople was aflame with revolt, and Andronicus, taking with him his wife and a favourite courtesan, made with all speed for Bucoleon. It appeared that after his departure his minister had gone in person to arrest Isaac Angelus, and, in a surprising fit of boldness, the noble had drawn his sword and buried it in the body of the minister. He fled at once to St Sophia, and the people, flocking to see the man who had slain the hated minister, made him a hero in spite of himself, and burst open the prisons that all the victims of Andronicus might come and support him. He still shrank, even when they offered him the crown, and his elderly uncle, John Ducas, cheerfully presented his own bald head to receive it. “No more bald heads, especially with forked beards,” cried the people—as those were features of Andronicus—and the trembling Isaac was crowned.

At this point Andronicus and his companions reached the palace, only to discover that there were no royal troops to defend the throne. In impotent rage Andronicus snatched a bow, and, from one of the towers or balconies of the palace which overlooked the square, sent a few arrows into the crowd, but they burst into the palace, and he returned in haste to his galley. With his twelve-year-old wife and his favourite, Maraptica, he made with all speed for the Black Sea, but his popularity had turned to hatred throughout the Empire, and he was dragged from the ship at the first port and sent in chains to Isaac. His right hand and eye were removed, and he was delivered to the vengeance of the mob, whose savage torture and execution of the adventurous prince must be read in the dead language in which they are described.