The Empresses of Constantinople

by Joseph McCabe

In their anger at the flight of Alexis the people now swept aside Euphrosyne and her relatives, and turned to Isaac, for whom the eunuch-treasurer secured the Varangians. He was brought to the palace and proclaimed, and Euphrosyne, her discredited daughter, Eudocia, and other relatives, were put in confinement. The Latins were informed that the object of their expedition had been attained, and when Isaac had ratified the preposterous contract signed by his son, the young Alexis rode proudly into the city between Baldwin of Flanders, almost the one noble of the crusading party, and the blind, but astute and formidable, Doge of Venice. One of the Latin knights, Villehardouin, has left us a vivid narrative of the conquest, and enlightened us as to the fate of some of the imperial women we have encountered. When the Latins entered the Blachernæ palace they found the eyeless monarch sitting on his golden throne in robes “the like of which you would seek in vain throughout the world.” By his side sat the “most fair lady,” Maria, who, we may therefore conclude, had faithfully clung to her husband in his blindness and humiliation. And amongst the crowd of fine ladies, superbly dressed and glittering with jewels, who stood about the throne, was Agnes, or Anna, the beautiful and pathetic widow of the Emperor Alexis, the Emperor Andronicus, and the would-be Emperor Branas. She was still only thirty years old. Her presence in the palace suggests that she had accepted some office in it under Isaac and Maria.

But the joy and confidence of the returning throng were doomed to be speedily overcast. The end was merely postponed for a month or two. The Empire had, in its most solemn crisis, received a worthless and despicable pair of rulers, and the Latins pressed for their pound of flesh. Isaac, blind, gouty and weak-minded, spent his days among monks and astrologers, who, while they devoured the choicest dishes that the palace could afford, assured him that he had entered upon a long and glorious reign, that his gout would quickly disappear, and that his eyes would be miraculously restored to their arid sockets. The younger Alexis drank and gambled with the experienced knights of the fourth Crusade. When the leaders of the Crusade pressed for the payment of their reward, all the wealth of Euphrosyne and her relatives was confiscated—Alexis had left little to seize—the jewels and plate of the palaces were pledged, even the precious reliquaries of the churches and monasteries and the great silver lamps of St Sophia were appropriated; yet the jaws of the West still stood wide open, and the Latin troops lingered and demanded food and drink. The fugitive Alexis had, in the meantime, raised an army in Thrace, and the citizens of Constantinople were embittered and disaffected. In August a quarrel with some of Baldwin’s soldiers had led to a conflagration which, it being the height of summer, had burned for two days and destroyed nearly half the city. The clergy and people met in the cathedral to appoint a new Emperor, but, though some undistinguished officer afterwards accepted the title from the mob, no serious aspirant dare take the crown in face of the hostile Latins.

Isaac died in the midst of the turmoil, and the young Empress Maria lost her crown almost as soon as she had received it. We shall see presently that she found consolation among the Crusaders, but it is necessary first to follow the adventurous fortune of Euphrosyne and her daughter. The young Alexis, distracted and feeble as ever, proposed to leave the city and join the Westerners in their camp without the walls. As he prepared for flight there came to him a fiery and ambitious young officer who felt that the time was opportune for laying his own hand on the sacred crown. Alexis Ducas Murtzuphlus—his last name, or nickname, was due to the fact that he had a peculiar connexion of the bushy eyebrows which stood out over his crafty eyes—was one of the party in the city who, to the applause of the crowd, urged direct war upon the Latins, and his popularity emboldened him to remove Alexis and ally himself with Euphrosyne. By a liberal outlay of money he secured the Varangian guards, and he then approached Alexis and whispered to him that his leaning to the Latins had exasperated the citizens. When Alexis trembled, the adventurer offered to lodge him in a secure retreat until the rage of the people should have calmed. It is hardly necessary to add that the young Emperor was conducted to one of the dungeons of the palace, where his egregious folly was presently ended with a bowstring.

Euphrosyne and her daughter were now delivered from their confinement and restored to the palace, and, as Murtzuphlus had the characteristic looseness of his age in regard to conjugal matters—he had already discarded two wives—he soon sought and obtained the affection of Eudocia. The contemporary courtier and writer Nicetas says that Eudocia was merely his mistress, but others say that he married Eudocia and it is difficult, as the sequel will show, to determine the point. Probably he did, after a time, marry Euphrosyne’s daughter, and he then set to work to defend the city against the Crusaders. The issue is one of the great pages of history, but its details do not concern us. On 9th April the Latins moved their formidable rams and catapults and towers against the walls, and the Venetians drew up their vessels along the Golden Horn. Three days later, after a furious assault, amid showers of mighty stones and the blaze of burning houses, the heroes of the cross burst into the city and began that historic ravage which puts them for all time far below the moral level of the Turks they had set out to combat.

Murtzuphlus, finding his troops discouraged, had retired to the Bucoleon palace, where Euphrosyne and Eudocia awaited the issue. He had lost, he said; and from the palace quay, where the stone lion and bull, which gave the place its name, had witnessed so many flights, they took ship and sped in the direction of Thrace. The ex-Emperor Alexis would surely welcome his wife and daughter, and he would feel little tenderness in regard to the murder of his perfidious nephew. Murtzuphlus arrived in confidence at the ex-Emperor’s new home, and was received in apparent friendliness. For some reason, however, which is not very clear, Alexis concealed under his friendly appearance a deadly and murderous hatred of the adventurer. It seems to me that, if a marriage had really taken place between Eudocia and Murtzuphlus, Alexis regarded it as invalid. He ordered a bath to be prepared for his daughter and Murtzuphlus, and, when the young officer had entered it, sent in his servants to put out his eyes. Eudocia, we are told, stood at the door angrily upbraiding her father, and he turned upon her with language which leaves little doubt as to her character. I may add that the blind adventurer was captured by the Latins, as he wandered miserably about the provinces. He was taken to Constantinople and flung from the top of one of the loftiest columns in one of the public squares of the city.

In order to follow the further fortunes of our ex-Empresses we must turn back for a moment to Constantinople. After they had allowed their soldiers to loot and rape with impunity—to perpetrate, with the aid of their camp-followers and prostitutes, a veritable orgy of desecration in the most sacred shrine of the Greeks—for several days, the leaders of the Crusade met to divide the spoil. Twelve electors, chosen from amongst themselves, were in future to appoint the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, and its territories were to be distributed among his feudal supporters and the Venetians. Baldwin of Flanders was chosen to be the first Emperor of the new series. His most serious competitor was the commander of the army, Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, who had occupied the Bucoleon palace, but the shrewd Doge of Venice had preferred to set on the throne a prince whose native seat was at a safer distance from Venice and Greece. Boniface had to be content with the title of King of Saloniki and such territory in Macedonia and Greece as he could wrest from, and hold against, the Greeks.

Among the noble dames whom Boniface found in the Bucoleon palace were Agnes, the widow of Andronicus and daughter of Louis of France, and Maria, the widow of Isaac. It is the last appearance in the chronicles of the unfortunate daughter of King Louis; we must assume that she spent the rest of her life in quiet attachment to the Latin Court. The Hungarian princess Maria was destined to enter once more the field of royal ambitions. She had not yet reached her thirtieth year, and her beauty won the heart, possibly an alliance with her supported the policy, of the ambitious Marquis. He married Maria in Constantinople, and started with his queen for Thessalonica, the seat of the new kingdom. How at the outset he nearly forfeited it by a civil war with Baldwin must be read elsewhere. The quarrel was adjusted and they settled in Thessalonica. And at their Court in that city there presently appeared the ex-Emperor Alexis, with his wife and daughter, soliciting peace and friendship.

Alexis had now concluded that the recovery of the Byzantine Empire was impossible and he was prepared to submit. He was compelled to lay aside such ensigns of royalty as he still wore, and a pleasant residence was afforded him and his family in Thessalonica. Nicetas makes the singular statement (followed at a later date by Ephraem) that Boniface sent Alexis and Euphrosyne “across the sea to the Prince of Germany.” It is clear that this is incorrect. They lived for some months at Thessalonica, and it is one of the few traits we have of Maria’s character that she received with kindly hospitality the man who had deposed and blinded her husband. But the tranquil life of a retired monarch did not suit Alexis, and we have already seen that his base character was devoid of gratitude. He was detected in an intrigue with the citizens of Thessalonica, and Euphrosyne and Eudocia had to accompany him once more in his wandering.

The next page in their career is singularly adventurous, but scantily preserved. As they wandered over the Greek province they met Leo Sgurus, a Peloponnesian noble who had been governor, under the Byzantine Empire, of part of Greece. He clung to his little power in the chaos which followed the fall of Constantinople, and Alexis decided to join him. The troops of Boniface were steadily restricting his range, and, shortly after the alliance with him of the imperial family, his life was little better than that of a brigand. He lived in the decaying old citadel of Corinth, and marched out periodically at the head of his men to forage and to harass the Latin troops. In this quaint home the imperial family found shelter for a few further months, and Eudocia married Sgurus. It was the fourth romantic marriage of that adventurous princess, and was destined to be as unfortunate as its predecessors. In her early girlhood she had been sent, while still immature, to wed the King of Servia. He had adopted the robe of the monk soon afterwards, and his son and successor, a fiery, brutal youth, had claimed the pretty young bride of his father and married her. After some years she had, on a charge of misconduct, been thrust out of the Servian capital, her sole garment a narrow strip of cloth round her loins, and had had to await, in the castle of a sympathetic noble, the arrival of clothes and a litter from her father. Then, as we saw, she married the already married Murtzuphlus, and shared his adventures for a few months. Now she found herself the wife of an outlaw, living in the rude and dilapidated chambers of the old Acropolis. But Sgurus was shortly afterwards captured by the troops of Boniface, and we lose sight of the unfortunate Eudocia. She was probably still in her early twenties, yet the widow of two kings, an Emperor, and an adventurer. Such was life in mediæval Byzantium.

Alexis and Euphrosyne took to ship when Sgurus was defeated, and sailed for Ætolia and Epirus (on the eastern coast of the Adriatic), where a certain Michael, a natural son of the Emperor’s uncle Constantine, had set up a sovereignty over the rude mountaineers and few towns of that isolated region. On the voyage the ship was captured by Lombard pirates, but Alexis and Euphrosyne were ransomed by their nephew, and at length reached Arta, the chief town of his dominion. The Byzantine world was at the time full of small rulers, and would-be rulers. The leading Crusaders had received their various slices of the dismembered Empire, and here and there some fugitive Byzantine noble, especially if he were connected with the imperial house, had set up a small throne and defended it against the Latins. In this way Michael, the illegitimate son of Constantine Angelus, had fled from the captured city to Epirus, married a native lady of wealth, and constituted himself “despot” of the whole region. In his chief town, Arta, Euphrosyne tranquilly passed her last year or two of life. Her restless husband still thirsted for power, and, when he found that his nephew was not at all disposed to put on his head once more the crown which he demanded, he took to ship again and sailed for the lands of the Turk in Asia Minor. Euphrosyne did not accompany him. She died at Arta, either just before or soon after his departure. Ten years’ experience of imperial life had sated her ambition.