The ex-Empress Maria, now Queen of Saloniki, continued for many years to enjoy the restricted power and state which she had won by her marriage, but they were years of anxiety and care. Two years after her settlement in Thessalonica, the Greeks rebelled and, in alliance with the Bulgarians, spread fire and sword over the province, and pinned Maria in the citadel of her capital. In that rebellion the Latin Emperor Baldwin was captured, and his brother and successor, Henry of Flanders, occupied the throne. Some years later Boniface was killed in his struggle against the Bulgarians, and Maria became regent for her infant son, Demetrius. It is the last glance we have in the chronicles of the beautiful Margaret of Hungary, who, as the Empress Maria, had come to spend so extraordinary a youth in the Byzantine capital.
There remained one other imperial daughter of Euphrosyne, Anna, who had married the able and ambitious noble Theodore Lascaris. When Murtzuphlus had abandoned Constantinople, Theodore had a momentary ambition to collect the scattered troops and make a struggle for the throne. He found that the attempt would be futile, and, with his wife and three daughters, joined the throng of noble families at the quays who were flying from the doomed city and the barbarous troops of the West. They reached Nicæa, but the city, concerned about its future, refused to admit him. He persuaded the citizens, however, to receive his wife and daughters, and departed to seek allies among the Persians. In a short time he had an army powerful enough to take Nicæa, and he established himself as governor in the name of Alexis. When, in the year 1206, the Latins were diverted for a moment by the trouble in Greece, Theodore was crowned by the citizens, and Euphrosyne’s second daughter, Anna, attained the dignity of Empress.
Disappointed in Epirus, her father, Alexis, had now, as we saw, deserted the little kingdom of his nephew and sailed for Asia Minor. In earlier years he had befriended the Turkish Sultan of Iconium, and he now proposed to ask the hospitality of the Sultan and intrigue for the crown of his son-in-law. The Turk received him with great cordiality, and wrote to inform the Emperor Theodore that his father-in-law, in whose name he was presumed to hold power, had arrived in Asia. We must not too hastily admire the gratitude of the Turk; he had regarded with some concern the establishment of Theodore’s empire at Nicæa, and welcomed a pretext to dispute it. But in the war which followed, the Sultan was defeated, and the active career of Alexis came to a close. He was treated with respect, but his son-in-law prudently confined him in a monastery under his own eyes at Nicæa, and the arch-intriguer ended his days in the monotonous chant of psalms and prayers. His daughter Anna died soon afterwards, the last of the group of imperial women who had struggled for power and wealth while the great Empire tottered to its fall. We shall find that that terrible catastrophe made no deep impression on the men and women who filled the less opulent Court at Nicæa, or on those who, half-a-century later, returned to the lamentable ruin from which they at length dislodged the Western knights.
CHAPTER XV
THE NEW CONSTANTINOPLE
For fifty-seven years the metropolis of the East remained in the power of the Western knights, but our Empresses have already come so frequently from the West that we shall not be tempted to expect a new or higher type of woman on the throne at Constantinople during the Latin occupation. That half-century may, indeed, be dismissed in a few lines as far as the purpose of this work is concerned. We saw that Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was selected by the Venetians and Crusaders to fill the throne. The Blachernæ and Bucoleon palaces were placed at his disposal, and one-fourth of the old Empire was assigned for his immediate rule. But Baldwin’s wife, Mary, daughter of the Count of Champagne, did not live to adorn herself with such remnants of the imperial finery as were still to be found in the palaces. Baldwin had left her in Flanders, and, when she at length attempted to join her high-minded husband in his new dignity, she died at Acre, on the journey.
Baldwin himself was captured a few years later by the Bulgarians, and died in prison. His brother Henry, who succeeded him, married the daughter of Boniface, the King of Saloniki, whose adventures we have described. Agnes was, of course, not the daughter of the ex-Empress Maria, but of an earlier wife. She was summoned from Lombardy, married to Henry on 4th February 1207 in St Sophia, and the marriage day ended with a great banquet in the Bucoleon palace, in the older Byzantine fashion. But that is all we know of the Empress Agnes. Henry died in 1216, and his sister Yolande became Empress. Even of Yolande, however, the very scanty chronicles furnish a very poor portrait. Her husband, Peter of Courtenay, was, after being crowned at Rome by the Pope, arrested in Epirus, through which he had foolishly endeavoured to cut his way, and died in prison. As regent for her children Yolande remains almost imperceptible, and an anecdote of the reign of her son Robert is all that need be given to illustrate the character of the new dynasty. Robert, who had a light idea of chivalry, brought into his palace, as mistress, the daughter of one of the Crusaders, and her mother. She had been betrothed to a Burgundian knight, and the embittered lover, supported by a few friends, forced his way into the palace, cut off the nose and lips of the faithless lady, and bore off her mother to be drowned in the Sea of Marmora.
As Robert’s brother was a mere boy, the King of Jerusalem, a worthy old man of eighty, was summoned to fill the throne for nine years, and then Baldwin II. entered upon his long and inglorious reign; of which we need only say that, in spite of his extreme liberality in selling, especially to St Louis of France, the valuable relics (the crown of thorns, the rod of Moses, etc.) which had accumulated in Constantinople, and in spite of all the efforts of the Pope to maintain the worthless monarch on his throne, and that throne subservient to the Vatican, the feeble and incompetent rule of the Latins sank lower and lower, until, in 1261, a regiment of Greeks put an end to it.
This slight account of the Latin rule at Constantinople will suffice to enable us to follow intelligently the fortunes of the descendants of the Byzantine monarchs who had set up a throne at Nicæa. Theodore Lascaris had married Alexis’s daughter Anna, who died early in the reign of her husband, and her two successors in his affection are even less known to us than she. The first was Philippa, daughter of the King of Armenia; but, after giving birth to a boy, Philippa was, for some unstated but imaginable reason, sent back to the ruder Court of her father, and Maria, daughter of Yolande of Constantinople, occupied her place. Maria died, childless, after a few years, and, when Theodore himself departed in 1222, his only son (the child of Philippa) was a boy of eight years. The Empire was, therefore, wisely entrusted to a powerful and distinguished noble, John Ducas Vatatzes, and we at length reach an Empress of distinct and admirable personality.
The Empress Irene, who, in the year 1222, ascended the throne with Vatatzes, was the eldest of the three daughters of Theodore Lascaris and Anna, and therefore a granddaughter of the Emperor Alexis and Euphrosyne. While the Princess Eudocia had inherited the character, or lack of character, of Alexis, her elder sister Anna had, as far as we can judge, shared the comparative sobriety of Euphrosyne, and Irene united in her person all the best features of the family, without its ancestral defects. She was prudent, equable, pious and virtuous. Her first husband, Andronicus Paleologus, died prematurely, and her father then united her to the able commander to whom he designed to confide the Empire.[32] When Irene received her share of the imperial responsibility, she proved to be, says Ephrem, “a new Deborah,” and the few anecdotes preserved in regard to her suggest a sober and high-minded woman, associated in perfect harmony with (as long as she lived) a sober and high-minded and valiant husband. Unfortunately, Irene led so well-regulated a life during the twenty years in which she shared the rule of Vatatzes that there is little to record of her, and, however much we may resent it, we are dragged onward by the misguided chroniclers until we reach John’s later and less virtuous companions. But the contrast of this later period will be the more piquant, and the more honourable to Irene, if we dwell for a moment on the exemplary years that preceded it.