The Empresses of Constantinople

by Joseph McCabe

Her integrity as a ruler soon excited the hostility of the vicious nobles, and a struggle began which makes it difficult for us to judge certain aspects of the character of Euphrosyne. The rule at Constantinople was to impeach the morals of an Empress when her public virtue was beyond question, and this the angry nobles proceeded to do. She had ventured to appoint a first minister on the mere ground of ability, and her brother Basil, her son-in-law and other nobles plotted to restrict her power. They approached Alexis and whispered that Euphrosyne was criminally intimate with a handsome young officer named Vatatzes, and that he might before long find his throne occupied by her paramour.

Nicetas, who was at the Court, has clearly no doubt about the liaison, and we must admit that Euphrosyne’s family is not distinguished for asceticism. Her youngest daughter, Eudocia, had been married in 1185 to the King of Servia, and had, after a few years, been driven from the Court, naked, for her misconduct, and brought back in shame to Constantinople. Euphrosyne’s brother Basil, who owed his office to her, was her chief accuser. Alexis, at all events, was convinced. He sent for the head of Vatatzes, who was in Bithynia at the time, and, when it was brought, addressed it, says Nicetas, “in words which cannot be included in this history.” Euphrosyne trembled, and appealed to her courtiers to intercede. Alexis had gone to Thrace for a time, and he returned to find the Court divided into two parties over the affair. Some said that she was guilty; some were for punishing the libellers.

He went with Euphrosyne to the Blachernæ palace, and his dark demeanour and refusal to sleep with her made her fear that her head would be the next to fall. She therefore demanded a trial of the charge, but Alexis merely handed her maids and eunuchs to the official torturer, and they could only obtain release from their horrible sufferings by declaring her guilty. Alexis was not normally a cruel man; very little blood was shed in his reign. But the suggestion that Euphrosyne meditated taking from him his throne and his splendid pleasures alarmed him. He stripped her of her gold and purple, dressed her in the rough tunic of a common prostitute, and handed her to two barbaric slaves to be conveyed to the Nematorea monastery, near the entrance to the Black Sea. There, guarded by two uncivilized slaves who could hardly speak Greek, she looked back with bitterness on the two or three years of power and the ingratitude of her brother and son-in-law. But Constantinople pitied her, or at least despised her opponents. Basil and Andronicus were assailed in the street with jeers and popular songs, and began to repent. They had not, they pleaded, imagined that the luxurious Emperor had energy enough to take such a step; they had wished only to restrict the power of Euphrosyne. They and others now pleaded with the Emperor to reconsider his decision, and, after a solitary confinement of six months, Euphrosyne returned in triumph to the palace and wielded more power than ever. It is pleasant to read that Alexis found himself incapable of ruling without her judicious aid; and that she took no vengeance whatever on her accusers.

In the following year Alexis fell seriously ill, and the question of successor was opened. He suffered much from gout and despised physicians. Unfortunately his own ideas of medical treatment were much more crude than those of the doctors of the time. He ordered his servants to cauterize his gouty limbs with red-hot irons, and passed into a dangerous condition. As he had no sons, a wide field was opened for competitors, owing to the abominable Byzantine system, which knew neither the hereditary principle nor serious election, and the palace was enlivened by the intrigues of a score of aspirants. None of them seemed to have the faintest suspicion that the Byzantine Empire was within five years of its first destruction. However, to Euphrosyne’s relief, Alexis recovered, and, as the earlier husbands of his elder daughters died (Eudocia was still in Servia), they were wedded to distinguished nobles, and the year ended with prolonged gaieties at the Blachernæ palace.

A long absence of the Emperor in Thrace left the supreme power in the hands of Euphrosyne, and, as so many Byzantine women had done, she held the reins with a firmer and more skilful hand than her husband. The only defect noted by the censorious Nicetas is that she was lenient to members of her own family. Fraudulent officials she punished with a severity that was rarely witnessed in the East, but the admiral Michael Stryphnus, who had married her sister, was permitted to indulge criminal malpractices, for which the Empire would soon pay a heavy price. He sold even the stores and equipment of the existing galleys, and they rotted in the harbours, while pirates spread terror throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. These were not crimes at which the short-sighted Emperor could cavil. Not only did he cheat his people by creating and selling sinecures, but he resorted to practices which amounted to piracy. He once sent six galleys of the fleet into the Black Sea for the ostensible purpose of salving a wreck, but with secret orders to board and loot every vessel they met. Large numbers of mercantile galleys were returning with cargoes from the Black Sea ports, often in charge of the merchants themselves, some of whom were flung overboard for resisting. The others returned to Constantinople in great anger, and, although they stood at the door of St Sophia, candle in hand, when the Emperor came to pray, he merely laughed at their complaints. From the clergy such sufferers received little sympathy; the patriarch was a brother of Euphrosyne. The city was full of violence and knavery: the seas were scoured by pirates: the remoter provinces were ground between the imperial tax-gatherers and the foreign raiders.

Yet in this melancholy putrescence of the once mighty Empire Alexis and Euphrosyne maintained all the glamour of the imperial Court. Euphrosyne is the only Empress whom we find engaging in the chase as the Emperors did. Nicetas describes her setting out amid large companies of nobles, a falcon resting on her gold-embroidered glove, or a kennel of dogs rushing at her virile call. It is even said that she believed in, and practised, the incantations and divinations which had become generally popular among the decaying people. Her magic seems to have taken some unfamiliar form, since she had the snout cut off a famous bronze boar in the Hippodrome, had a beautiful marble statue of Hercules flogged, and ordered mutilations of other works of art that reminded Constantinople of better days. She seems to have been an able and well-disposed woman tainted by the perversity of her age.

The Empire was sinking rapidly, living on its capital, yet suffering the roads and bridges and forts to fall to ruin, the helpless provinces to writhe under the heel of every invader, and the funds that should have been spent on defence to be wasted in courtly luxury and the maintenance of a crowd of ignoble parasites. An anecdote of the time (about the year 1200) shows to what an extraordinary degree the funds had been diverted from the army. There was in Constantinople a descendant of the Comneni who, from his barrel-like shape, went by the name of John the Fat. This paltry and contemptible conspirator won a few followers among the nobility, went with them into the cathedral, and put upon his own head one of the imperial crowns that hung over the altar. The report ran through the city and a great crowd assembled and conducted the waddling and perspiring John to the palace. Alexis and Euphrosyne seem to have been at Blachernæ, or in one of the Asiatic palaces, but the strange thing is that there seem to have been no guards whatever, where former Emperors had kept whole regiments of Scholarians and Excubitors or, at the later date, Varangians. We know that there were still Varangians in the imperial service, but they seem to have been too few to defend the numerous palaces. However, John the Fat had not wit or grit enough to secure the palace when he had entered, and, as darkness came on, a few imperial soldiers penetrated to his apartments and killed him.

At length, in the year 1202, the Empire passed into the penumbra of its great tragedy. Isaac II., the younger brother whom Alexis had displaced and blinded, had lived in Constantinople, in a humble mansion near the shore, during the seven years that followed his deposition, and was regarded with so little concern that no watch was kept upon his movements. It was not noticed that the Latin soldiers who lived in, or constantly passed through, Constantinople were frequent visitors at his house, and it was not known that the letters he wrote to his daughter Irene, who had married Philip of Germany, were treasonable in their import. But the blind and neglected brother was dreaming of a return to his imperial debauches. It is probable that Maria, who would now be a comely young woman of sixteen, lived with him, but of that we are not assured; she was somewhere in Constantinople. At length the time seemed ripe for his effort, and he sent his son Alexis, a youth as ardently and unscrupulously bent on returning to power as he, to the Court of Philip and Irene in Sicily.

It was the eve of the fourth Crusade, and the knights of the West were gathering for a fresh effort to break the power of the Turk, and to gather loot by the way. To these noble buccaneers the Emperor Philip introduced the young Alexis and proposed that they should restore him and his father to their throne. Neither East nor West attracts our sympathy for a moment. The Angeli brothers were squabbling for the right to indulge their sordid tastes on an imperial scale, and the younger Alexis had no more serious ideal. The Venetians, who had an important voice in the matter, sought their own profit and a discharge of their debts, and there can be little doubt that the Western knights, as a body, were allured by the vague hope of plundering, in one way or another, the richest and most splendid city in Europe. An infamous bargain was struck. The princes of Western chivalry did not hesitate to accept from the frivolous and irresponsible youth a promise of the payment of 200,000 silver marks, a year’s supply of provisions to their troops and other preposterous rewards for dethroning Alexis. Even the papacy had its share in the sordid bargain; the Greek Church was to be forced to submit to the Vatican.

In the month of April (1203) the fourth Crusade set sail in one hundred and seventy large vessels, and some smaller ships, for Constantinople. Alexis awoke from his dreams to find that a score of worn triremes was all the navy he possessed, and he must resign himself to meet a siege of his capital. The vivid story of the fall of Constantinople cannot be told here. Toward the end of June the Crusaders landed near Chalcedon and gazed with covetous eyes, most of them for the first time, at the innumerable spires of churches—schismatical churches, and therefore fair prey—that rose above the clustered houses, the princely villas that shone between the cypresses in the wealthier suburbs, and the bronze roofs and marble walls of the superb palaces which glittered in the sun among the vast imperial gardens on either side of the Sea of Marmora. When the news of their sailing had reached Alexis he had made it a table joke; now he and his trembled within the walls of their capital. By the middle of July the Crusaders were encamped outside the land walls; the Venetians lay beneath the walls which girt the shores; and the great assault began. Alexis, from a tower of the Blachernæ palace, saw the double-edged axes of the brave English Varangians scatter the Germans and Italians, but he learned that the Venetians had broken in. Packing his treasures and his money, he took ship at dawn of the following day, with his daughter Irene, and fled to Thrace, where a retreat had been prudently prepared for such an emergency. George Acropolites, whose chronicle now opens, says that he took Euphrosyne, but Nicetas, an eyewitness, more correctly observes that the imperial egoist deserted his wife, his city and his Empire.