The young daughter of Louis of France will come again upon the imperial stage at a later date. Already, in her thirteenth year, the widow of two murdered Emperors, she was destined to wed and lose an ambitious soldier, Branas, and for the third time, almost before she reached womanhood, weep over the bloody corpse of a husband. Nor were her sufferings to end here. We shall see that she remained in Constantinople, and it was reserved for her to witness the final tragedy which the chivalry of the West was to bring upon her adopted country.
CHAPTER XIV
EUPHROSYNE DUCÆNA
The new Emperor, whom so extraordinary a chance had raised to the throne, was a worthless and entirely incompetent man of thirty summers, with the courage of a mouse, the vanity of a peacock, and the small cunning of a Byzantine mediocrity. Finlay contemptuously observes that he was “a fair specimen of the Byzantine nobility of his age.” He had accepted the control of an Empire which only a Hercules could save from ruin; and he proceeded to extort money from its distracted citizens for the building of palaces and decoration of churches, to surround himself with a hedge of actors and actresses which shut out the misery of his provinces, to cast the cares of government upon a crowd of praying and feasting monks, and to place his ideal of monarchy in the possession of endless wardrobes and the enjoyment of stupendous banquets.
He was an upstart in epicureanism, and it is therefore not strange that he followed the recent and abominable practice of taking a child to wife. An earlier wife, of whom he had a son named Alexis and two daughters, had died, and, when he came to the throne, there was the customary scanning of the lists of royal families in order to secure an Empress. His choice fell on the nine-year-old daughter of Bela, King of Hungary, and the wondering maiden was brought to Constantinople by his resplendent officers and eunuchs and prepared for the impressive ceremonies of an imperial marriage. The tender little Margaret became the Empress Maria, and was entrusted to the care of the troop of strange beings whom she would learn to call her eunuchs. She would not be old enough to know that Isaac provoked a dangerous revolt at once by imposing the cost of his marriage on the overburdened provinces: or to perceive that the vast aggregation of palaces had, for the first time in Byzantine history, been looted by the mob. Isaac had ignobly lingered in the Blachernæ palace while the people of Constantinople, after despatching Andronicus, had wandered through the imperial apartments and stolen all the money and portable treasures they contained. One pious looter had even carried off the autograph letter of Christ to King Abgar. But Isaac, as soon as his throne was secure, repented of his liberality, and, by means of extortion and spoliation and adulteration of the coinage, contrived even to surpass the luxury and parade of his predecessor.
Maria will not interest us until, in her womanhood, she begins to encounter the adventures of a fallen Empress, and one or two anecdotes will serve to describe the kind of life she endured during the ten years’ reign (1185–1195) of her husband. Isaac was a florid-faced, red-haired young man with imperial appetites. His banquets consisted, Nicetas says, of “a mountain of bread, a forest of game, a sea of fishes and an ocean of wine,” at which he sat, richly perfumed and clothed with the conscious gorgeousness of a peacock, amidst a crowd of female relatives, and other females who were not relatives. When the dishes were removed, the choicest mimes and conjurers and musicians of the Empire were summoned to entertain him and his guests. It is narrated that one famous comedian, when he was for the first time admitted into the presence of this cohort of wine-flushed ladies, bowed to the Emperor and said: “Let us make the acquaintance of these first, and then you may bring the rest.”
Nearly his whole reign was filled by a great revolt of the Wallachians and Bulgarians, and in 1195 he set out to take the field in person against them. One day he rode out from the camp to hunt, and had not proceeded far when he heard an alarming tumult in his rear. He found that his brother Alexis, who had astutely awaited his opportunity, was being acclaimed Emperor, and, without a struggle, he galloped across the country. He was captured, blinded and imprisoned; and his young wife now gives place to a more interesting type of Empress. Maria remained in Constantinople, and will re-enter the story presently.
Euphrosyne Ducæna—that is to say, Euphrosyne of the famous Ducas family, into which some ancestor of hers had married—was an energetic and ambitious woman of middle age at the time of her accession. Her father, Gregory Camaterus, had been an imperial secretary, and had taken advantage of his favoured position to marry into the nobility. Euphrosyne must have been born some time before 1150, in the reign of Manuel, and have witnessed the later series of revolutions and assassinations. In time she married the elder brother of Isaac Angelus, a provincial noble of no distinction or wealth, and, during the bloody reign of Andronicus, Alexis had taken refuge among the Turks. Even whole populations gladly put themselves under the Turks or Saracens to escape the vices of their Christian rulers. We cannot, however, say if Euphrosyne accompanied her husband or remained in Constantinople. At last Alexis heard the strange news that his brother was on the throne, and he hastened to Constantinople. He was arrested on the way by the Prince of Antioch, ransomed by Isaac, and promoted to high office and wealth. He was a more energetic, more handsome and superficially more attractive man than his younger brother, but his slender list of virtues did not include gratitude.
He had communicated to Euphrosyne, if not received from her, his design of seizing the crown, and she threw herself ardently into the work of preparing the city. She was a woman of great ability, of persuasive tongue, and still not without beauty; and it was not difficult to persuade Senators and priests that Isaac was a disgrace to the purple. Her own husband was little, if at all, better, but he had the advantage of an imposing exterior and of concealing his real character. When a messenger reached her with the news that Alexis was declared, she bribed a priest to proclaim him from the pulpit of the cathedral, and promised heavy rewards to the nobles who would support him. Alexis himself was following the same line of lavishing offices (even if they had to be created) and money on his supporters. As a result Euphrosyne was able to occupy the palace almost without opposition, and the Senators hastened to kiss her slippers and lie at her feet, while she “stroked the bellies of the pigs,” in the scornful language of Nicetas, who was a Court official of the time—on the wrong side. She announced that the new Emperor would adopt the name of Comnenus, instead of Angelus. It was an indiscretion, as the artisans of the city said that they had had enough of the Comneni, and met in the Forum to place a crown on the head of a popular astrologer of the hour. But Euphrosyne sent a troop of her obedient nobles to scatter the rabble and their king, and in a few days welcomed Alexis to his golden throne. People shook their heads, however, when, as Alexis came out of St Sophia wearing the crown, his fiery Arab at first refused to let him mount, and then plunged so violently that the crown fell off and was broken.
The people of Constantinople soon discovered that they had exchanged brother for brother. Alexis emptied the war-chest, which Isaac had at length filled, into the pockets of his supporters, leaving the Bulgarians and other foes to raid the provinces. He hastened to don the gorgeous golden robes, and to restore the opulent banquets and merry parties of his predecessor, and soon “knew no more about the cares of his Empire than the inhabitants of Thule.” Euphrosyne is said to have equalled him in luxury and display, but she had some idea of statesmanship. She promptly undertook to rule the Empire, and we can well believe that, even when she incurs the censure of Nicetas for going about in a golden litter borne on the shoulders of distinguished nobles, she was acting from policy. She ignored her husband, overruled his decrees, placed her own relatives in office, and had her own lovers. When important ambassadors were to be received, she had her throne placed beside that of the Emperor, and Senators had to visit and pay homage at her palace as well as at that of Alexis. Her husband was happy in his imperial lake of luxury, and for a time took no notice. If a noble offered him a sum of money for the office of ploughing the sand he accepted it cheerfully. Euphrosyne, however, forbade the selling of offices, and made a sincere effort to arrest that diversion of funds from public purposes which had been wasting the blood of the Empire for centuries.