The Empresses of Constantinople

by Joseph McCabe

On 2nd February 1347 Anna convoked a large gathering of bishops and monks at the Blachernæ palace. They met to judge and depose the patriarch John, who opposed the new heresy. Its tenets do not concern us, but, as it will complicate the story of the Empresses throughout the chapter, we may say that Palamism, as it was called, had discovered a plurality of “divinities” (in the sense of divine energies) in God, and its opponents retorted that this was a return to Polytheism. The discovery is said to have been made originally by some of the contemplative monks on Mount Athos, whose quaint device for raising themselves to a state of trance cannot with delicacy be described here. On this second day of February, therefore, Anna listened with delight, in her Blachernæ palace, to the heated discussion of the light which was seen on Mount Thabor and other phases of the controversy. None of the gifted seers were able to tell her that Cantacuzenus and his troops were only a few miles away, and that he had already bribed some of her soldiers to open the Golden Gate to him that very night. The patriarch was deposed, and Anna and her bishops sat down to a festive banquet and the making of “not very modest jokes,” says Gregoras, about their late archbishop. They were alarmed for a moment by a messenger who rushed in to say that Cantacuzenus and his army were approaching, but Anna concluded that this was a ruse of the patriarch, and the banquet continued merrily.

She was awakened in the grey dawn the next morning to hear that Cantacuzenus was master of the city. He had marched with a thousand picked men by an unaccustomed route, had been admitted by the Golden Gate at midnight, and was making for the palace. It was at once closed and fortified, and such guards as there were took up a position in its lower approaches. Anna had returned from the light on Mount Thabor to a very vigorous concern about earthly things. Cantacuzenus sent to her a proposal that she should share the imperial title with him; her name would come first in announcements and acclamations, but the real administration should be entrusted to him. She drove out his messengers angrily and abusively, and sent her servants to raise the citizens against him and bring over the Italian soldiers from Galata. There was still a good deal of loyalty to her, though her conduct during the last year had alienated many, but the troops routed her supporters and even began to storm the palace. They were recalled by Cantacuzenus, who then sent the bishops to persuade her to yield. Cantacuzenus behaved with restraint and humanity in his hour of triumph. He was, we may recall, a refined and cultivated noble, though his singular mingling of ambition and moral pretentiousness invests his conduct, and especially his words, with a repellent hypocrisy. Anna refused the mediation of the clergy, but, in the miserable night which followed, she saw the hopelessness of her position, called a council of her supporters, and decided to make peace. The prisoners were set free, and the gates of the palace thrown open. It is said that John, who was now a boy of fifteen, strongly pleaded for peace and weakened the determination of his mother.

When Cantacuzenus entered the palace he found Anna and her sons standing under a picture of the Virgin which adorned the hall. The Empress was sullen and defiant, and probably expected some vindictive action on the part of the victor, but that was never the way of the silken Cantacuzenus. He venerated the sacred picture, kissed the hand of the young Emperor, and swore on the Virgin that he had not, and had never had, any intention of hurting the imperial family. A general amnesty was granted, and the proposal to wed John and Helena was renewed. It was agreed between them that Cantacuzenus should have sole control of the Empire for ten years, and should relinquish it to John on his twenty-fifth birthday. These conditions were singularly moderate, and Cantacuzenus assures us that some of the troops could hardly be persuaded to subscribe to the new oath when it was found to include the name of John. Anna and John, moreover, were left in possession of the best palace, that at Blachernæ, and Cantacuzenus repaired one of the decaying palaces for himself and Irene, who was summoned from Adrianople and graciously received at the gate by Anna.

Thus two royal families settled down once more to an unstable peace on the ruins of the once mighty Empire. The coronation of Cantacuzenus and Irene, which followed on 13th May, served only to exhibit the poverty and decay of Constantinople. St Sophia was partly in ruins from the great earthquake of the previous year, and there was no money to repair it. The ceremony had to be performed in the chapel at Blachernæ, and in the banquet dishes of pewter and earthenware had to serve instead of the opulent gold and silver plate of earlier times. A week later the royal children—John was fifteen years old and Helena thirteen—were married, and a glittering group of two Emperors and three Empresses stood proudly on the balcony of the palace to receive the applause of the dwindling population; but it was commonly known that the stones which flashed from crown and mantle were almost all spurious, and that the apparent golden trappings were merely gilded leather. The treasury was empty; the nobility consisted, not of great lords of the land, but salaried officials; and the Empire that had once spread, under the Roman eagles, to the deserts of Arabia and the waters of the Euphrates was now restricted, on the Asiatic side, to so narrow a strip of the neighbouring coast that you could almost see from the ramparts of Constantinople the victorious crescent gleaming in the sun. On the west there still remained the greater part of what we now know as Turkey and Greece, but they were exhausted by the unceasing ravages of Turk, Servian and Bulgarian, and tens of thousands of Christian slaves passed yearly into the harems and workshops of the East.

In the midst of this desolation Cantacuzenus set up a Court of cheap and showy and incompetent dignitaries. Irene’s two brothers, John and Manuel, received the title of Sebastocrator, and were added to the imposing processions and the list of pensionaries. Money was urgently needed, and Cantacuzenus summoned to his palace all the wealthier citizens and eloquently appealed to them to fill his treasury. They refused to make the least donation. Cantacuzenus would have us admire the restraint with which he declined to extort the money from them, but we know that, if he shrewdly avoided violence, he did not scruple to obtain money in other irregular ways. A few years afterwards the Russian Church sent a large sum of money for the repairing of St Sophia, and Gregoras tells us that the Emperor appropriated it for the payment of his Turkish mercenaries. Two years later, again, when another army of Turks had to be paid to defend his throne, he seized a great quantity of the gold and silver vessels and jewels that remained in the churches and monasteries.

We may assume that Anna watched without concern the troubles that now rained upon the head of the impolitic Emperor. In the year after his coronation his son Michael was persuaded to rebel, and set up a sovereignty over part of Thrace. Irene was sent to discuss the matter with him—Gregoras gives us a six-page speech which she is supposed to have made to him—and it ended in the father leaving his son in possession, though without the imperial title. Anna’s supporters naturally suggested that there had been collusion between Cantacuzenus and Michael, though that is not at all certain. When Irene returned from her mission, she was pained to learn that the plague had carried off her younger son during her absence. Even greater was her pain, however, the historian says, that her husband favoured the Palamite heresy. Gregoras was one of the chief protagonists of orthodoxy against the heretics, and it will give some idea of the superfluous confusion that was brought upon the affairs of the distracted Empire if I simply observe that some five hundred pages of the remainder of his chronicle are devoted to the controversy.

To this heretical taint Irene tearfully ascribed all the calamities which affected her husband’s reign. He had hardly arranged matters in Thrace, and was still detained by illness at Didymoteichus, when he learned that the Genoese of Galata had burned the fleet which he had laboriously collected money to build, and had attacked the capital. The Genoese had for some time farmed the revenues—in plainer terms, pocketed about four-fifths of the revenues—of Constantinople, and the Emperor had endeavoured to lessen their profit. During his absence they made a raid upon the shipping and the city, and Irene is said to have shown great energy in directing the defence. For the next year or two the Bulgarians and Servians ravaged his little Empire, and the Turks, whom he hired to meet them, could be paid only by permission to loot in their turn and carry off his subjects into slavery. In these circumstances Cantacuzenus saw a tide of disaffection rising against him, and the young Emperor John began to dream of independence.

Writing years afterwards in his quiet monastic home, Cantacuzenus says that Irene and he were weary of the unprofitable conflict and were both disposed to abdicate and take the black robe; that only the recurrence of trouble in the West and the danger to the Empire kept them “in the world.” This statement is easily refuted by his conduct. He built, not a monastery, but a stout citadel or fortress near the Golden Gate, as if in expectation of the time when John would claim his Empire, and hired a strong guard of Turkish and Spanish soldiers. Then when the Servian outbreak in the west, of which he speaks, took place, he insisted that John should accompany him. Anna vehemently protested. The youth was too young to be left in Thessaly she said, meaning that she distrusted the Emperor. Cantacuzenus smoothly replied that it was necessary for her son’s protection; that the sultan, wrongly thinking to oblige him, had sent a eunuch to cut the youth’s throat. Anna must have felt that the eunuch, if he existed, would have an easier task in Thessaly than in the Blachernæ palace, but Cantacuzenus refused to yield, and John set out with him. John was now a good-looking and popular, if a somewhat dissolute and entirely worthless, prince of eighteen, and it would be dangerous to leave him in Constantinople. The Genoese across the water were partisans of the Paleologi.

In the course of the following year, 1351, Cantacuzenus returned to attack the Genoese, with the aid of their mortal enemies, the Venetians. As he seems to have intended from the beginning, he left John in Thessalonica, with the young Empress Helena, but he was alarmed and surprised in the following year to hear that the young Emperor was corresponding with the Kral of Servia. Gregoras says that, under pressure from the Kral, John engaged to divorce Helena and marry the Kral’s sister. When Cantacuzenus heard this, he went with Anna into the venerable chapel of the Virgin at Blachernæ, and swore that he would resign the crown to John if he would abandon the Kral and bring Helena to Constantinople. The oath was committed to writing, and Anna herself conveyed it to Thessalonica. It says something for the singular character of Cantacuzenus that they implicitly trusted his oath, and the young couple returned to the capital. After a few weeks, however, John distrusted his colleague and returned to Thrace with Helena. Her father seems to have tried to detach her from John, but she protested, Gregoras says, that she would “rather die with John than live with her parents.”

In return, apparently, for this fidelity John made a new compact with the Kral and received an army without abandoning his wife. He at once attacked Matthew, the Emperor’s son, in Adrianople, and let civil war loose once more upon the surviving province of the Empire; if, indeed, one can call “civil war” a contest in which hardly a single Greek soldier was enlisted. For the sake of rival Byzantine ambitions Turk fought Servian and Bulgarian on land, and Venetian fought Genoese at sea, and the decrepit Empire sank into its last stage.