The Empresses of Constantinople

by Joseph McCabe

During the siege, apparently, Manuel married, so that an Empress shared the straits of the long and terrible siege. She was Irene (or Helene), the daughter of Constantine Dragases, who governed a part of Macedonia. Irene is rarely mentioned in the scrappy and contradictory chronicles of the time, but she is one of the few of whom we have a pictorial representation. The miniature—found in a manuscript of the works of Denis, the so-called Areopagite—is a very quaint, though not very instructive, picture of Irene and Manuel and their two sons, but he would be a bold physiognomist who would venture to make a text of the flat and conventional features of a Byzantine portrait. Her experience of Byzantine life was dreary. During nearly seven or eight years (including the brief respite) the Turks swarmed round the walls of Constantinople, and were only prevented by their lack of powerful rams and slings—to say nothing of that new implement called a cannon, which was just entering European warfare—from penetrating. The great areas of desolation within the walls became more desolate, and the scanty supplies of food sold at appalling prices. With the Sultan outside could be seen John, the son of Andronicus, whom Bayezid affected to consider the lawful Emperor, and, although Manuel was a brave and humane ruler, the weary citizens were ready to acclaim John. But Manuel received the aid of Marshal de Boucicault and two thousand men, as well as a fleet of Venetians and Genoese, and held out stoutly until, at the close of 1399, the appearance of Timour the Tartar in the rear of the Sultan persuaded him to make peace. John was admitted as co-Emperor, and an effort was made to restore the stricken city.[35]

Manuel was the finest of the later Paleologi, and, although we cannot admire many of the steps he took to attain power, he made an excellent effort to use it for the restoration of the Empire. It seemed to him that his hope lay in enlisting the interest of the West against the infidel, and he set out at once with Irene and her two children. He left Irene in Greece, however, with his brother Theodore and Bartholomæa, and thus no Byzantine Empress was ever seen farther west than Greece. Manuel took ship to Italy, where very little was to be obtained, went to Paris, where he found Charles VI. insane, and even crossed the sea to the little island which had once sent so many Varangians to Constantinople. This visit to England induces one of the later Byzantine chroniclers (Chalcocondylas) to tell his readers something of that country, and we are interested to learn that, in the days of Henry IV., Englishmen shared their wives in common when they travelled, and held it their first duty to offer their wives to visitors; but he adds that London is already the greatest city of the West, though the strange island produces no wine and its inhabitants speak a most peculiar language.

Manuel obtained little money and few volunteers, and was returning in dejection when he heard that Timour had routed the Turks. Only a few years before Bayezid had received legates from Timour in his palace at Brusa. He had disdainfully shaved them and sent them back to their barbaric master. Then the Tartars had swept over Asia Minor, scattered all the pretty boys and ladies of the Brusa pleasance, and compelled John of Constantinople to transfer his alliance from Bayezid to himself. Manuel confirmed the vassalage on his return, but he sent John into exile and set about restoring his Empire while the giants wore down each other’s strength. But I pass over the next decade, during which the internal troubles of the Turks gave Manuel an opportunity to reform and reconstruct. Our historian, Finlay, speaks somewhat contemptuously of his work, and, able and well-intentioned as Manuel was, it may be admitted that the work was too vast for him. In any case we lose sight of Irene for several decades, after the return of Manuel in 1405, and will pass at once to the next and, as far as we know, last Empress of Constantinople.

The introduction of Maria of Trebizond is preceded by some romantic adventures in the private life of the Court, of which the chroniclers give us a fairly ample account. Irene had six sons, of whom the eldest, John, married the daughter of the Grand Duke of Moscow in the year 1414. He was already twenty-four years old, and of irregular life, but the hands of the princesses and princes of Byzantium were no longer sought in the Courts of the world. Anna was a child of eleven years, and we may assume that John remained with his mistresses until, three years later, Anna was carried off by the plague. Again there seems to have been some difficulty in finding a wife for the heir to the throne, but in or about the year 1420 legates were sent to Italy, and they returned with two eligible young ladies. Cleope, the beautiful and gifted daughter of Count Malatesta of Rimini, was married to Irene’s second son, Theodore, and went to spend an unhappy life with that restless prince in Lacedæmonia. For John the legates had brought Sophia, daughter of the Marquis of Montferrat, and she and her husband at once received the imperial title.

The appearance of Sophia of Montferrat on the imperial stage was brief and eventful. She was a tall and very graceful young woman, with golden hair that fell to her feet, a beautiful neck and broad round shoulders, fine arms, and hands and fingers “like crystal,” says the chronicler. But nature had spoiled these many perfections by misshaping her nose and giving a very careless finish to her eyes and eyebrows. John disliked her, kept himself coldly aloof from her, and pressed his father to send her back to Montferrat. A more chatty chronicler, however, gives a more serious reason for John’s dislike. Sophia had been as virtuous as she was beautiful until she came to Constantinople, but, whether it was the taint in the atmosphere of the Court (most of the Paleologi have natural children) or the example of her husband, she quickly lapsed. There was a natural son of her husband about the Court, and this youth she incited into a most unnatural relation. A maid of the Court caught them in flagrante delicto and told her lover; and the lover informed John. By making a hole in the wall of the bedroom John convinced himself of the truth of the story and was very indignant. It may be stated on behalf of Sophia that, when John spoke of the indignity to one of the Court jesters, he was reminded that he had himself some time before stolen his son’s mistress; it is therefore not impossible that the seduction was on the side of the youth and had a vindictive character.

Such was the kind of life witnessed in the last ruins of the Eastern Empire. John insisted that Sophia must go home; Manuel, possibly conscious of the difficulty of finding alliances, was reluctant to send her. Sophia found her position intolerable, however, and decided to run away, with the aid of the Genoese of Galata. They moored a galley at the foot of the imperial gardens, and Sophia, pretending to go for a stroll in the garden with her Italian maids and young courtiers, walked to the quay and was shipped over the water to Pera before her flight became known. It was published in the city the next day, and there was much buckling of arms and preparing of boats to avenge this last outrage of the hated Genoese. Manuel was, however, now overshadowed by his son, and Sophia was permitted to depart quietly for her home. The chronicler adds that she was received with great honour and rejoicing at Montferrat, and ended her days in a nunnery.

The date of Sophia’s flight and of John’s third marriage is difficult to determine. The plainest reading of the contradictory chronicles is that the trouble occurred in the last year of Manuel’s reign and the flight took place a month after his death, but this is inconsistent with the express declaration that the old Emperor intervened in the dispute. Manuel died on 25th July 1425. For some years the ambition of the Turk, who had quickly recovered from the heavy blows dealt by Timour, had fully revived and had given him great anxiety. A young Sultan, Murad II., had succeeded to the throne, and Manuel had imprudently recognized a pretender to the succession. When the young Sultan vigorously took the field, hanged the pretender, and drew up under the walls of Constantinople, Manuel, now a feeble old man of seventy-five, left the direction of affairs to John, and retired to pursue that ardent study of the Scriptures which absorbed him in his later years.

John abjectly apologized, but the angry Sultan ranged his machines against the walls and proceeded to batter them. He was drawn off for a time by the strategy of John, who had the Sultan’s brother conveyed to Brusa and set up as Sultan, but Murad returned more angry than ever, and one of the last earthly sounds to catch the ear of the aged Manuel was the roar of the first cannons that seem to have appeared at Constantinople. The diffusion of knowledge at the time may be gathered from the fact that one of the most learned of the chroniclers, in discussing these “bombards,” observes that he does not think they are of very ancient origin. Before the end of the siege Manuel was warned by an attack of apoplexy that his death was near. He donned the black robe, became plain Brother Matthew, and died two days—not two years, as Finlay says—afterwards, at the age of seventy-seven. Irene also then retired from the world and became the nun Hypomene, whom we shall later find endeavouring to settle the quarrels of her selfish children. She remained “mistress” (despoine) of the Empire and watched its slow decay with concern.

John was able, after the death of his father, to obtain peace from the Sultan at the price of a heavy annual subsidy, and the Empire entered upon its last quarter of a century of melancholy decay. Long years of effort had taught the sultans that their siege engines were not powerful enough to crack the heavy shell in which earlier Emperors had enclosed the city, and they were content to hold it in vassalage and draw a large tribute from its sinking revenue. The time had gone by for the last serious effort to save the Empire. Its trade had passed to the Italians, and of the provinces from which it had so long extorted its rich supply of gold there now remained only a few towns to the west of Constantinople, a part of the Peloponnesus, and Thessalonica (which would soon be sold to Venice for fifty thousand gold coins). The metropolis, therefore, continued to shrink within its eighteen-mile enclosure, and, as a severe pestilence fell on the inhabitants for the last time in 1431, they were reduced to something like one hundred thousand, instead of the million they had once been.

It was over this dismal little Empire that the last Empress, Maria of Trebizond, was called to preside. Whether the flight of Sophia came before or after the death of Manuel, John V., who succeeded his father, soon found it necessary to seek a bride. He married, in 1427, the daughter of Alexis of Trebizond, a handsome woman of excellent character, and we are fortunate enough to have a short description, from the pen of a French knight, of Maria and her desolate surroundings. Bertrandon de la Brocquière made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and returned through Constantinople in the year 1432. The plague had ravaged it in the previous year, and Bertrandon sympathetically refers to the broad spaces of ruin that half filled the enclosure within the walls. He notes that the Greeks are still busy with their processions, religious and imperial, and that they still cherish in their churches such important relics as the pillar at which Christ was scourged, the board on which his body was laid out, the gridiron on which St Lawrence had been martyred, and the stone on which Abraham had offered food to his angel visitors. Apparently the credentials of these relics had not been imposing enough to convince Western purchasers, indulgent as they were.[36]