The Empress Irene once more endeavoured to make peace between the combatants. She went to Thrace and laid before the young Emperor a politic and admirable scheme—admirable, at least, on the supposition that Cantacuzenus is lying when he declares that he and Irene were minded to enter a monastery, which would have been the best solution. On the other hand, John does not command our sympathy and respect. In three years’ time he would be twenty-five, and might have laid claim to the throne with perfect right and more success. Irene proposed that John and Matthew should divide the western territory, and that Cantacuzenus should hold the remainder until his death. John refused the terms, Irene returned to Court, and the Turks and Servians flew at each other.
It is only necessary to say that in a comparatively short time John and Helena were flying on ships to the island of Tenedos, and Matthew was declared Emperor. The unceasing pendulum of Byzantine Court life had now thrust the young Empress Helena into obscurity, and brought a young rival into prominence and hope of the succession. John and Helena were declared to have forfeited the imperial title. Matthew and Irene Paleologina (granddaughter of the elder Andronicus) were crowned in 1354. But we have hardly time to glance at the new Empress before the pendulum swings back and Helena returns to the light and the throne. Cantacuzenus was now detested by all in Constantinople. His heresy, his broken oath, his feud with the Genoese, and the consistent record of disaster during his reign, united almost every class against him. Urgent appeals were made to John to come and displace him, and it was not long before a few ships were placed at his disposal and, during an absence of the Emperor, he descended on the capital. But Irene again vigorously defended the cause of her husband, and, after sailing round the walls, firing a few harmless volleys of abuse at the partisans of the Emperor who smiled on the walls, and spending a night with the Italians at Galata, John returned in dejection to his wife and child. Then a quaint type of wealthy adventurer chanced to touch at the port of Tenedos and confer with John, and he returned to power by one of the most singular of adventures.
One stormy night in December (1354), when the Emperor slept peacefully in his palace, the soldiers who lived in the tower which guarded one of the gates by the port were awakened by a heavy crash and loud cries for help. They flung open the gate and descended the stairs, and faintly perceived a few large vessels rolling in the heavy sea. The sailors cried that one of their vessels, which were laden with jars of oil, had been dashed against the walls, and the soldiers went to the water-edge to help them to moor the vessels. Scores of armed men then rushed from the holds, killed the guards, and occupied the tower; and before the citizens could grasp what was happening, the enterprising Genoese had lodged John in the tower, and were marching through the streets at the head of two thousand men, crying “Long live the Emperor John!” The citizens swarmed to the Hippodrome in the faint morning light, repeating the cry, and Cantacuzenus was awakened to hear that his enemy was in the city with an army.
It is worth while giving the explanation of this remarkable change in the fortunes of John and Helena. Their vigorous and resourceful ally was a Genoese noble of some wealth, who, with a small fleet, had sailed east in the hope of securing some fragments of the dismembered Empire. John offered him the island of Lesbos and the hand of his sister Maria if he would help him to gain the throne, and he consented. Two large triremes (galleys with two banks of oars) and sixteen uniremes (with one bank of oars) were not the kind of fleet one needed to carry Constantinople by storm, but Francesco Gattilusio was a strategist. He emptied the oil from the vessels on one of his boats, crept up to the wall in the darkness, and bade the sailors fling the great jars against the wall. This was the noise that awakened the warders of the tower by the quay, and the stratagem succeeded as happily as in a romance. I may add that John afterwards carried out his compact, and Gattilusio became Prince of Lesbos and brother-in-law of the Emperor.
Cantacuzenus did not venture from his palace. He explains that he could easily have scattered the intruders, which is probably more true than he knew at the time, but he conferred with Irene and they decided that the time had come to enter a monastery. Gregoras says that he was afraid to leave the palace, and, as he was isolated from his citadel by the Golden Gate and would hardly know the strength of his opponent, one prefers this explanation. He was by no means anxious to enter a monastery. Drawing up his guards at the entrance to the palace, he entered into negotiations with John and succeeded in getting a promise that the imperial power would be divided. That solution, however, did not please the people, and for several days he was assailed with abuse and threats. He yielded to the “voice of God,” abdicated his dignity, and, under the name of Joasaph, retired to the monastic world, to write his flowing and elegant and mendacious chronicle of his times. Irene was now forced to take the veil, and her robust personality was converted into the black-robed figure of the royal nun Eugenia. We do not know when she died, but some years later we find her, in her monastery, guiding the education of her granddaughter, Theodora. Theodora’s parents, Matthew and Irene, continued the civil war for two or three years, but Matthew was then captured and was sent, with his ex-Empress, to spend the remainder of their lives in the island to which they had driven John and Helena.
Helena had followed her victorious husband and, with warm and mutual embraces, joined him at the palace. We do not know how long she lived to enjoy her fortune. I find no further reference to her. Anna is not mentioned further in the Byzantine chronicles, but a little more may be gleaned about her from Italian writers. Du Cange quotes the Franciscan historian, Luke Wadding, as saying that she died about the year 1350, and her body was transferred for burial to the shrine of St Francis of Assisi, for whom she had had a great veneration. I do not find this in Wadding—the reference, at least, is wrong—but Wadding does in other pages (at the years 1343 and 1349) refer to Anna. In 1343 she sent a Franciscan monk from the convent at Pera to confer with the Pope in regard to the union of the Latin and Greek Churches. It is clear that she remained Latin at heart, and no doubt she had brought with her from the West a veneration for the gentle saint of Assisi. Then the civil war and the triumph of Cantacuzenus put an end for a time to the project of union, but the correspondence was renewed in 1349. From a reference to her in one of the Pope’s letters we may deduce that she still lived in Constantinople in 1349, and it is the last reference. An Italian writer says that she died in that year, but I am unable to find in Wadding’s “Annales” the statement that she was buried at Assisi.
CHAPTER XIX
THE LAST BYZANTINE EMPRESSES
A hundred years of life still awaited the Eastern Empire from the time when John IV. returned to the throne, and half-a-dozen Empresses were yet to play their varied parts on the imperial stage. Had any impartial and sagacious observer reflected on the condition of the Empire at the time, as we have described it, he would hardly have promised it a new lease of one hundred years’ tenancy of its stricken domain. At Constantinople, of course, no one foresaw the end. It is usually in fairly robust, not in really dying, civilizations that we find an apprehension of impending ruin: as in France and England to-day. But the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to such proportions, the Turks were closing round its capital with such steady advance, and there was so little enlightenment in its mind, or real patriotism in its heart, that it seemed to be very near the end. No miracle was wrought in its favour, but it was saved for a time by one of the accidents of human history. The Tartars or Moguls attained the height of their power under the famous Timour, and the ambition of the Turk was distracted and enfeebled.
There should be a peculiar interest in studying the features of the Empresses who occupy the familiar palaces during this hundred years’ grace of the doomed civilization. We are so accustomed to finding the character of a period reflected in the character of the Empresses that the last representatives of the imperial line should afford us an instructive insight into the final life-phase of a civilization. The idea has become somewhat popular that nations grow old, as individuals do, and die of loss of vitality; and that in their last years they pass into singular convulsions or eccentricities. We shall, unfortunately, be impeded in this interesting study by the scantiness of the records. The ample chronicles of Cantacuzenus and his theological rival close, and two or three confused and ill-proportioned writers alone preserve for us a fragmentary record of the last hundred years. As in all such meagre records, the story of the women suffers most. Still, enough is said to give us an adequate idea of the remaining Empresses and their times; and it may be said in a word that we find no convulsions, or eccentricities, or increasing debility of individuals, but the familiar and unfortunate Byzantine character pursuing its selfish ambitions and passions until the great broom of the Turk sweeps the degenerate successors of the Romans for ever out of the East.