The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Empresses of Constantinople, by Joseph McCabe

THE
EMPRESSES OF CONSTANTINOPLE

ANCIENT CONSTANTINOPLE, SHOWING THE HIPPODROME, THE IMPERIAL PALACE, AND THE MOSQUE OF S. SOPHIA

FROM THE RECONSTRUCTION BY DJELAL ESSAD AFTER THE PLAN BY LABARTE

THE EMPRESSES OF
CONSTANTINOPLE

BY
JOSEPH M^cCABE

AUTHOR OF
“THE EMPRESSES OF ROME,” ETC.

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS

RICHARD G. BADGER
THE GORHAM PRESS
BOSTON

PREFACE

In concluding an earlier volume on the mistresses of the western Roman Empire I observed that, as the gallery of fair and frail ladies closed, we stood at the door of “the long, quaint gallery of the Byzantine Empresses.” It seemed natural and desirable to pass on to this more interesting and less familiar series of the mistresses of the eastern Roman Empire, and the present volume will therefore tell the story of the Empresses, or Queens, as they preferred to be called, who occupied the throne set up by Constantine in New Rome, or ancient Byzantium, until the victorious Turk thrust it disdainfully aside to make way for his more spacious harem.

The eastern or Byzantine Empire has long been regarded in Europe as a world of far less interest than that which centred on the banks of the Tiber: a world of monotonous piety and little adventure or spirit, almost Chinese in its placid and unchanging adherence to traditional and very conventional forms. One is tempted to attribute this error, not merely to the longer concealment of Byzantine antiquities from our fathers and the superior attractiveness of Italy, but, in some measure, to the disproportion of Gibbon’s work. By the time the great historian has advanced only one or two centuries in the life of the East he finds that the superb generosity of his plan has committed him to an unachievable task, and he begins to compress whole chapters of the most vivid and adventurous history into a few disdainful pages; and as Finlay, the proper historian of the Greek civilization, not only lacks the charm which draws each generation with fresh wonder to the volumes of Gibbon, but shares and expresses the same disdain for his subject, his work has not tended to redeem the Byzantine Empire from neglect. Of late years there has been some quickening of interest in the eastern Empire. Professor Bury in this country,[1] M. Diehl in France, Schlumberger in Germany, and other historians, have done much to draw attention to the extraordinary interest and the very lively character of Byzantine life.

When we confine our attention, as we do in this volume, to the Court life and the personality of the imperial women, the interest rises to the pitch of romance, and is often sustained at that height for many chapters. Few Courts in the world have, in their thousand years of history, witnessed so much adventure, intrigue, comedy and tragedy, as that of the Byzantine Empresses. From all quarters of the Empire, in the most varied ways, all sorts of women, from princesses to village girls, tavern girls or circus girls, make their way to the bronze-roofed palace and wear for a season the prodigious jewels and the glittering robes of an Empress of Constantinople; and, as there is no law or method of succession to the throne, the rise and fall of Emperors and Empresses gives a dramatic movement to the story. The notion that the eastern Empresses are enwrapped in a rigid piety and formalism, as they are in their stiff tunics of gold-cloth, is a ludicrous mistake. Their piety is usually external and superficial, and often they make not the least pretence of it; while, even when it is obviously sincere, it is associated with a skill in casuistry which allows a free play of their ambitions, their passions, and even their criminal impulses. Indeed, it is only fair to say at the outset that if a reader passes from the gallery of the “pagan” Empresses into that of the Empresses of Constantinople in the hope of encountering more restful, more virtuous and more domestic types of womanhood, he will be grievously disappointed. We may not find a Messalina among them, but irregularity of life is more evenly distributed than among the Roman Empresses, ambition and intrigue are far more cultivated, and there is a strain of barbaric cruelty running through the greater part of the story which it would have been more pleasant, had it been consistent with truthfulness, to omit. But the biographer should not be a moralist. My simple purpose is to depict, as far as it is possible, the very varied types of womanhood which come into “the fierce light that beats about a throne” in that strange world where Greek and Roman and Syrian blood blend to produce a new character.

The difficulties of the task have been considerable, and may be urged in extenuation of some of the apparent defects of the story. Apart from sketches of the lives of five or six of the Byzantine Empresses, especially those in M. Diehl’s fine “Figures Byzantines,” the study is entirely new, and the material has had to be laboriously collected from the endless pages of the Greek chroniclers. These chroniclers are largely monks, and in nearly all cases they are little disposed to speak of the imperial women until they either misbehave themselves or come to wield a mastery over men. Their references to the Empresses are usually brief and scattered sentences which have to be gleaned with care, and in hardly any single case do even contemporary writers condescend to give us a portrait of an Empress. Seeing that, in addition, we have not (as in the case of Rome) any statues or portrait-busts of the Empresses, and the few representations of them which have survived (in miniatures, ivories, etc.) are lifeless and conventionalized pictures, it is not possible to bring them before the eye in as satisfactory a way as one could wish. In this, as in the preceding volume, I have utterly refused to follow the genial example of Roergas de Serviez, and allow imagination to come to the aid of fact. But I have carefully gathered and included all that is known about the eastern Empresses, and, lest it be thought that the less-known Empresses might alter the balance of vice or virtue, I have inserted even the scanty references to these.

It remains only to explain the starting-point of the volume. In my “Empresses of Rome,” which includes all Empresses down to the fall of Rome, I necessarily included the early Empresses of the eastern series, when east and west were branches of one dominion. It is therefore not necessary to repeat the story of the beautiful and languid Eudoxia, the daughter of a Frankish chief whom a palace intrigue raised to the purple, and who is one of the butts of St Chrysostom’s fiery sermons; nor of Eudocia, the Athenian girl who set out to find her father’s money and obtained a kingdom, who wrote poems in her native tongue and at last passed from the Court under a cloud of suspicion; nor of Pulcheria, the virgin-sister of Theodosius and rival of Eudocia, who ruled the Empire for her brother and, after his death, took to herself a nominal husband and, with Marcian, was governing the Eastern world at the time of the fall of Rome. I have adequately described her in the preceding volume, and the present story opens at her death in the year 453.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE EMPRESSES OF
CONSTANTINOPLE

CHAPTER I
VERINA AND HER DAUGHTERS

The Empress’s apartments in the sacred palace remained empty for four years after the virtuous Pulcheria had been laid in her marble sarcophagus. The Emperor Marcian was aged and feeble, and, as Pulcheria had guarded even in marriage the sanctity of her vow of chastity, there was none who might plausibly be regarded as heir to the throne. It was such a situation as Constantinople loved; and the thousands of soldiers, eunuchs, nobles and ladies who dwelt in the vast palace, and the tens of thousands of idlers who lounged under the arcades of the great square or chattered on the benches of the Hippodrome, had a large field for speculation.

Their fate, they knew, was in the hands of one man, the commander of the imperial guards, Asper. He was an Arian (or Unitarian), and could not hope to occupy the throne which would soon be at his disposal. The citizens of Constantinople were at least as wanton and passionate as those of Rome had been, but they were fiercely devoted to the sound doctrine of the Trinity, and they would have flung themselves against the bronze gates and marble walls of the palace if an Arian had ventured to don the purple. So Senators and Senators’ wives indulged their conflicting hopes and paid their servile reverence to the dying monarch and the vigorous barbarian commander.

Marcian died in the year 457, not without a superfluous rumour of poison, and expectation rose to the height of fever when the worn frame was entombed with all the rich ceremony of the Eastern Court. Then there came the first of the long series of surprises and dramatic successions which were to enliven Byzantine history for many a century. Asper announced that his steward Leo, a tribune, or subordinate officer, of the troops, was to receive the imperial crown. A barbaric soldier and his wife were to occupy the golden throne, and all the nobility of Constantinople hastened to kiss their purple slippers.

Leo the Isaurian is one of those quite unromantic figures which the restless waves of Roman life often washed into the world of romance: one of the many raw highlanders who had set out from Asia Minor to make their fortune in the glittering metropolis of the East. A few years of useful military service had won for him the rank of tribune and the confidence of the commander, and Asper thought that he could rely on the docility and gratitude of the big simple-featured soldier. Wholly illiterate, with no larger experience than the control of Asper’s servants, a man of rough, hairy face, powerful frame and blunt ways, he suddenly found himself transferred to a throne that gleamed, as few thrones did, with “the sands of Indus and the adamant of Golconda.”

His wife, the Empress Verina, shares alike the earlier obscurity and the sudden elevation to the extraordinary splendour of the Byzantine Court. We know nothing of her nationality or extraction; and, as the only relatives who gather about her when her hand dispenses the gold and the favours of a great empire are just as obscure as herself, we may be sure that her origin was humble enough. A soldier like Leo would select his mate in a lowly world, and we shall see later that Verina permitted no scruple to restrain either her passion or her ambition. But there was personality in the new Empress: an able and vigorous intelligence, a masterful ambition, a virile tenacity of purpose, and an equally virile disdain of scruples and of priests in the pursuit of her ambition. She must have been much younger than her husband, who was nearly sixty years old. She not only survived him for more than a decade, but she filled that decade with the most spirited adventures, and she admitted, or attracted, a lover after the death of her husband in his seventy-fourth year.

It is one of the most singular features of Verina’s story that she remains almost as obscure and insignificant during the seventeen years in which she reigned with her husband as she had been before her elevation, yet in her later years reveals a character of remarkable vigour and great interest. We have, therefore, little concern with the reign of Leo, and will rather make ourselves acquainted with the imperial world in which the Byzantine Empresses will move.

New Rome, or Constantinople, had been founded by Constantine on the site of the more ancient city of Byzantium, and is so faithfully replaced by the modern city that its situation needs little description. It spread over the triangular point of Europe which runs to a tongue between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora, and was protected by a double wall from invasion on the land side; in fact, it was in time enclosed entirely within thirteen miles of stout wall.

The lower portion of this triangular area, a vast domain of more than half-a-million square yards, sloping gradually to the silver shores of the Sea of Marmora, was reserved for the imperial palaces and gardens. Running parallel with the imperial palace, to the north, was the Hippodrome, into which the story of the Empresses will repeatedly take us. Like the Great Circus at Rome, on the model of which it was built, it was the most commanding and venerated institution of the frivolous people. Its spacious long-drawn arena was flanked by tiers of seats which could accommodate tens of thousands of people—some authorities say a hundred thousand people. A lofty imperial gallery, the kathisma, surveyed the races and the spectators from the north-eastern end, and a great purple awning gave protection from the burning sun. Beyond the Hippodrome and the palace was the chief square of the city, the Augusteum, which corresponded to the old Forum at Rome or the Agora at Athens. Under the shelter of the double colonnade which surrounded it the idlers of Constantinople held their endless fiery discussions of the last chariot race, the last heresy, or the last revolution: the studious bargained for books: the amorous made traffic in love. It was the heart of the city. On the south side of it was the great gate of the palace: on the north side the church, or cathedral, of St Sophia: the Senate House faced it on the east: and from its western side ran the main street of Constantinople, the Mese (or Middle Street), lined with colonnades, which passed more or less continuously along the central ridge of the triangular area which the city occupied. A city was, in those days, and for many a century afterwards, a palace and a cathedral: we can only say of the million citizens that they were packed into the spaces not occupied by Church or State, especially in the region between the Mese and the Golden Horn, where fire and pestilence periodically fed on their crowded tenements.

With the palace we need a closer acquaintance. Verina would be familiar with the massive iron gate on the south side of the square through which, as the Emperor rode in, one might catch a glimpse of the great bronze door of the palace. Through this gate the obscure woman of the people was now borne on her litter, to be crowned mistress of the world. The front part of the palace was burned by the people in 532, but we may assume that it had the general plan of the later structure which experts have reconstructed for us.[2] The door led into a spacious hall—known as the Chalke on account of its bronze roof—which was richly adorned with statues, marbles and mosaics. Constantine had despoiled the world to enrich his palace and city, and this entrance hall had a great store of treasures. Crossing the hall one entered the apartments of the troops who guarded the palace and whose spacious quarters formed an immense and formidable approach to the imperial palace. More than three thousand selected troops, divided into three classes, formed this imperial bodyguard, and we shall more than once find their halls swimming with blood as some frantic mob or adventurous usurper seeks to penetrate to the palace. The palace grounds were, of course, surrounded by lofty and unscaleable walls.

Verina would pass first through the lines of the Scholarians, whose golden shields and lances, and gold helmets surmounted with red aigrettes, would form a glittering corridor. Ascending the marble steps at the far end of their hall, the purple curtains being drawn aside, she would pass between the Excubitors, a regiment of powerful warriors with two-edged axes, and the Candidates, or white-robed troops, gleaming with gold; the second and third lines of defence. At the end of these palatial barracks three ivory-plated doors, hung with curtains of purple silk, opened into the Consistorium, a large hall lined with marble and mosaic, in the floor of which were set porphyry slabs to indicate the successive spots where even kings must thrice prostrate themselves before approaching to kiss the feet of—Leo the Isaurian. A throne, covered with purple and heavily laden with gold and jewels, was raised under a golden dome at the upper end of the room.

Three pairs of steps and three bronze doors—for this wondrously elevated peasant and his obscure wife must not pass through the same door as ordinary mortals—then led to an unroofed terrace, lined with columns and precious statues, on one side of which was the chapel of the Saviour, and on the other the ancient gold-roofed banquet-room. Then at length Verina would find herself, probably for the first time, before the door of the palace proper, or the main palace, Daphne. Passing between the crowds of stewards, secretaries, domestic officers and great ladies, with masses of subordinate servants behind, all bent in profound reverence, she would enter by the bronze doors into the Augusteus, or vestibule of the palace: a hall crowded with choice bronze and marble statues and mosaics. Fresh legions of servants—the population of the palace must have been more than five thousand even at this early date—and groups of pale eunuchs now crowded to do homage, and the fortunate woman surrendered herself to her tire-women, to don the gold-cloth tunic, the purple mantle and the heavy jewellery of an empress.

The coronation would probably take place in the church of St Stephen, within the palace, and it seems that Verina and Leo then crossed the gardens and terraces to receive the homage of the Senators and nobles in the outlying palace of Magnaura. We know it at a later date as a vast hall lined with coloured marbles from the most famous quarries of the world, its floors strewn thick with roses, its wonders lit by fourteen massive silver lamps which hung from heavy chains of silvered bronze between its marble columns. But the wonderful golden sparrows which piped their mechanical notes on golden trees, and the golden lions which lashed their tails and roared before the throne, and the organs of silver and gold, belong to a later date in Byzantine history. From Magnaura the royal procession returned to Daphne, and mounted the spiral stair which led to the royal lodge, with a small palace in its rear, overlooking the Hippodrome. There the men of Constantinople rang out their Greek cry of “Many years!” to the rustic tribune and his wife who had so suddenly been lifted to this giddy height, and were, no doubt, rewarded with chariot races. The coronation day would end, as was usual, with a banquet in the Triclinon, a dining-hall in the space between the apartments of the guards and the palace proper. Its lofty roof was of gold, and on its nineteen purple-draped tables only golden vessels were set; some of them—at least, at a later date—were so heavy that they had to be lifted from their purple chariots to the table by machinery. And after such a banquet as only the palace could command, amidst some two hundred of the highest nobles of the greatest empire in the world, Verina would retire to her ivory or silver couch to brood over this prodigious turn of the wheel of her fortune. We shall find numbers of equally romantic elevations, and just as many tragic falls from splendour to obscurity, in the long story of the Byzantine Empresses.

Unfortunately, the coronation does not yet bring Verina plainly before us, and we must pass the seventeen years of her husband’s reign almost in silence. To explain this obscurity it is not enough to say that it was the custom of the Byzantine Court to keep its women in seclusion. As long as the stream of imperial life flowed evenly they were, generally, content to idle the sunny hours behind the thick hedge of eunuchs and maids, in some sequestered palace or other in the vast gardens, where many fountains and the soft breath of the sea and leafy groves cooled the air. They did not even feel the exclusion of women from the tense sensations of the Hippodrome, for one could witness the thrilling races from the windows in the upper gallery of the church of St Stephen. But we shall see speedily enough that this ceremonious seclusion no more intimidated the imperial women, when they were imperial, from playing their part in public life than the pomp and display of the palace intimidated the people of Constantinople from talking to their monarch, when occasion arose, as if he were a village chief. Verina remained quiet and obscure because life flowed evenly and she had no cause to interfere with its course. The promptness with which she sought, or accepted, consolation after the death of her husband does not suggest that she was very deeply devoted to Leo. He was, however, a shrewd and strong man, though rough and uncultivated, and he seems to have left little room for his wife’s interference.

The Empress’s quarters in the palace, or assemblage of palaces, are very imperfectly known to us. Daphne itself, the original palace, to which later Emperors would raise stupendous rivals, cannot have had very numerous apartments. It would assuredly not be possible to hide a bishop there for years, as the Empress Theodora afterwards hid a bishop in her apartments; to say nothing of the subterraneous dungeons which Theodora is said to have filled with her prisoners. But there were several detached palaces in the grounds, and no doubt the Empress had the use of one of these, standing in its own gardens and groves, and protected by its army of eunuchs. Verina had had one daughter, Ariadne, before her elevation to the throne. A few years afterwards she again gave promise of motherhood, and adjourned for delivery, as custom demanded, to the Porphyra Palace by the sea, a small square mansion whose walls were lined with red, white-spotted porphyry. But it was another girl, Leontia, that she brought into the world, and who lay beside her under the sheets of gold-cloth to receive the homage of the notabilities.[3]

Many years of this placid existence pass before we catch another glimpse of Verina. The legendary life of St Daniel Stylites, the emulator or successor of the famous Simeon of the Pillar, says that the prayers of the holy dweller on a column procured for the Empress a boy in 462, but the effectiveness of his prayers seems to have been limited, as no such child has found its way into serious history. Leo was now ageing, and the question of the succession must have been keenly discussed. It is at this point that Verina, who seemed doomed to pass again into obscurity, begins to reveal her personality. Asper and his son still seemed to dominate Constantinople, but their power was being silently undermined. Leo was filling the palace and the army with his own compatriots, and a conflict impended between the Isaurians and Goths, between Leo and Asper.

Amongst these Isaurians a young man named Trascallisseus—or something approaching it, for the Greeks make sad work of the Asiatic names—won the favour of Leo, and approached nearer to the throne. The orthodox chroniclers are severe on Trascallisseus, and depict him as “a veritable Pan”—dark, ugly, hairy, ungainly, heavy-footed and ignorant. The Isaurians were not a handsome race, nor had they the least ambition to adopt the culture of the Greeks, yet the portrait is probably overdrawn. Trascallisseus seems to have been a robust, sullen, illiterate, intriguing young man, with no apparent grace of body or character, but Leo was minded to marry him to Ariadne, and thus mark him for the throne.

Verina apparently desired the succession of her brother Basiliscus, and, as a vast fleet of more than a thousand vessels was about to be sent to wrest Roman Africa from the Vandals, she obtained the command of it for him. Verina could watch from the palace gardens the sailing of the great armada which was to win the purple for her brother. And in a few weeks a fugitive vessel returned with the terrible news that the expedition had failed, the navy had been burned, and the great army of a hundred thousand men sunk or scattered by Genseric. Basiliscus had fled shamefully at the first shock, and had retired to hide his disgrace in private life at Heraclea in Thrace.

It was the turn of Trascallisseus. His name was changed to Zeno, and he was married to Ariadne and promoted to the highest honours.[4] Verina had now to resign herself to a hope that she would share the power with Zeno and her daughter, but the struggle of Isaurians and Goths had first to be settled, and the settlement interests us. In less than two years the struggle ended with a victory of the Isaurians—a victory that has inscribed the name of the Emperor in the chronicles as “Leo the Butcher.” We do not know the course of the quarrel, but one day in the year 471 the marble and bronze palace rang with the clash of swords. Asper and his elder son were cut to pieces by the eunuchs within the palace. No doubt Verina and her family had their boats moored at the foot of the garden, as we shall find others doing, but the terrible axes of the Excubitors and the long swords of the Candidates held back the tide of Goths and covered the marble floors with their corpses. The Isaurians were masters of the Roman Empire.

Leo died three years afterwards. It is said that he wished to crown Zeno before he died, but that the people were bitterly opposed to it. He had, therefore, in order to secure the succession, associated his infant (or boyish) grandson Leo with his imperial power, and had died shortly afterwards. The mother and grandmother now came to an agreement with Zeno, and, when the father came to do humble homage to his imperial child, the boy, prompted by Ariadne and Verina, put the crown on the father’s head, and the Court applauded the succession of the Emperor Zeno. The sickly child died nine months afterwards (November 474), leaving Zeno in sole possession of the throne.

Here begin the adventures of Verina, and at length her virile character is revealed to us. Her second daughter Leontia was married to a son of the Western Emperor Anthemius—it was the period of ephemeral Emperors that preceded the extinction of the Western Empire—and a niece of hers was wedded to the Western Emperor Julius Nepos; though the latter connexion soon proved its tragic futility, the Emperor fleeing from Ravenna and falling by the hand of a bishop a few months after coronation. While promoting this apparent scheme for the reunion of the Roman Empire, Verina began to assert her personality more vigorously at Constantinople. She still lived in the palace, and seems gradually to have won its officers: as venal and corrupt a body as ever adorned a court. The works of contemporary Greek historians survive only in tantalizing fragments, or summaries, or they would undoubtedly furnish a remarkable picture of Byzantine life in the next ten years, when three Empresses occupied the stage. We can but piece together with caution the fragments we find in the chronicles, and endeavour to deduce the character of the Empresses from their actions.

Verina now had a notorious lover named Patricius, and was eager to set him on the throne instead of Zeno. Her daughter Ariadne, a commonplace, docile woman, clung to her husband, and the palace divided into two hostile parties and awaited the result. It is piquant to remember that Constantinople was at the time an intensely religious city. Its patriarch overshadowed those of Alexandria and Rome; its populace divided its interest almost equally between chariot-racing, vice and the suppression of heresy; and to its great church of St Sophia, or to the numerous chapels within the area of the palace, were conducted with splendour the important relics which were constantly being “found” in Palestine. But the frivolous citizens ignored the practical enjoinments of their religion until the periodical fire, or plague, or earthquake threw them into a spasm of repentance, and the population of the palace seemed to hold themselves entirely dispensed from such common laws. Verina, at least, knew neither weakness nor scruple in the pursuit of her ambition.

In November 475 Zeno fled across the water to Chalcedon. Ships were kept for such emergencies at the foot of the gardens, so that an imperial family might be well on the way to the Asiatic shore before an enemy could break through the hedge of guards. Zeno, protesting that his life was threatened by Verina’s servants, fled precipitately, since he left Ariadne under the power of her mother. It seems that Verina virtually imprisoned her daughter, but Ariadne escaped and joined her husband. From the coast they travelled, in a common cart, to the wild fastnesses of Isauria, from which another turn of the wheel will presently recall them to the glittering palace.

Zeno had been morose and unpopular, and it had not been difficult for Verina to detach the Senators and troops from him. They had, however, no mind to accept the virtual rule of Verina herself by putting her paramour on the throne, and, to her great mortification, they summoned her discredited brother Basiliscus from his exile in Thrace, and clothed him with the purple. The change brings on the scene a third Empress, Zenonis, who was made “Augusta” by her husband as soon as he was crowned.

We have hardly time to make much acquaintance with Zenonis during the brief splendour of her husband’s reign, but her momentary appearance is not without romance. Passionately devoted to the more philosophical religious sect, which maintained that there was but one nature in Christ, she pressed her husband to espouse its cause and restore its persecuted members. Constantinople was soon aflame with religious controversy. Zenonis secured the return from exile, and appointment as patriarch of Alexandria, of Timotheus Ælurus. Timotheus gathered “all the scum of Alexandria”—the orthodox historian says—that could be found in Constantinople, and conducted them in procession to the church of St Sophia. But how Timotheus fell off his ass, to the delight of Constantinople, and how Peter the Fuller was summoned to fill the see of Antioch, and how Basiliscus wrung money out of the wealthy orthodox churches, must be read in the pages of ecclesiastical history. Zenonis was impelling her husband to his doom.

A much less serious defect in Zenonis, from the Constantinopolitan point of view, was that she united with her zeal for the Monophysite faith a genial disregard of its moral implications. A nephew of her husband named Harmatius rapidly became one of the most luxurious fops of the city. His lavishly spent wealth, his lovely hair and pink cheeks and handsome person, and his reputation for gallantry, made him the idol of the frequenters of the Hippodrome. Basiliscus made him prefect of the city, and he delighted its lower populace by moving amongst them in the shining armour of Achilles. Duty frequently called him to Court, and his charms conquered the susceptible Empress. For some time they sighed and crossed fiery glances as they met in the open chambers or corridors, but at length the eunuch Daniel and the midwife Maria were bribed to facilitate their desire. Such, at least, was the belief of Constantinople, and the power of Basiliscus was further shaken.

His next fatal mishap was to quarrel with Verina. He had her lover Patricius assassinated, and the enraged Empress began at once to pay further gold to buy back the allegiance of Senators and officers to Zeno. The zeal of Basiliscus for his heresy had now completely alienated the people and embittered the clergy. He had ventured to send officers into the churches to proscribe the great Council of Chalcedon, which had condemned the heresy, and the city was profoundly agitated. Vast crowds of men, women and children shouted their orthodox hymns in the streets and filled the black-draped churches. When Basiliscus angrily left the city for a distant palace, the saintly Daniel descended from his pillar, followed him, and spoke to him in very plain language.

In these circumstances Verina was encouraged to further her plan, and the news soon reached Constantinople that Zeno had left the mountains of Isauria and was in command of an army. Two generals, Illus and Trocundus, were sent against him, and were bought by him. The very meagre chronicles now indicate a desperate struggle between Basiliscus and his sister. The Emperor began to trace the plot and execute the plotters, and Verina fled for her life to the sanctuary of St Sophia. We shall see often enough how frail a protection the law of sanctuary afforded against the anger of an Emperor, but Harmatius, who seems to have despised his lover’s husband, helped her to escape, and she seems either to have crossed to Asia or concealed herself. Harmatius himself was now sent against the rebels. Swearing the most solemn oath of fidelity to Basiliscus that the clergy could devise, he straightway sold his services to Zeno for the promise of a cæsarship for his son and the perpetual command of the armies for himself.

The career of the romantic Zenonis then came to a rapid and tragic close. As the troops of Zeno marched into the city Basiliscus and his Empress fled to the church of St Sophia, and endeavoured, by promises of undoing their heretical work, to induce the clergy to make Zeno respect the sanctuary. After a time an imperial officer came to the trembling wretches by the altar, and stripped them of all their imperial ensigns, to be taken to Zeno and Ariadne. Zeno scrupled to drag them from the altar, and they were at last induced to come forth on the solemn assurance that their lives would be spared. It was now their turn to sail for Asia. They were sent to an obscure village in Cappadocia, and imprisoned in a tower. One tradition reports that they were killed on the journey, but the more persistent and convincing report is that the door of the tower was sealed with masonry, and the brother of Verina and his Empress were doomed to a slow and horrible death by starvation. It was the second revolution in three years, and Verina had been an active element in both.

Exile had not improved the temper of Zeno, and the restoration of his rule was at once stained with murder. He reflected gloomily on the prestige of the handsome Harmatius, and easily persuaded himself that he who had been faithless to one master might be faithless to another. Soon afterwards the luxurious officer was cut to pieces as he ascended the spiral stair from the palace to the Hippodrome; his son was stripped of the robes and ensigns of Cæsar and was sent to take a minor order of the Church at Blachernæ. But for the intervention of the more humane Ariadne the youth would, like his father, have exchanged his high dignity for death.

Constantinople seems to have regarded the murder with indifference, but an avenger arose in the provinces and the two Empresses had soon grave cause for anxiety. For a time Constantinople trembled under the menace of the formidable barbarians, but they at length returned to Italy without having penetrated into the city. A more serious danger fell upon the palace in the following year, however, when the younger daughter of Verina joined for a moment in the conflict of ambitions. Leontia, it will be remembered, had married Marcian, son of the Western Emperor Anthemius. On the ground that she had been “born in the Porphyry,” while her elder sister Ariadne had been born before the crowning of Leo, her husband demanded that the Empire should be assigned to him, and marched on Constantinople at the head of an army. He broke through the defences of the city, and some of the chroniclers actually assure us that he surprised the guard of the palace in their midday siesta. It is at least certain that Zeno and the Empresses fled in alarm, and a vigorous action would have put Verina’s younger daughter on the throne. Marcian seems, however, to have postponed the occupation of the palace until the following day, and the commander Illus, secretly transporting fresh troops from Asia, restored the balance in favour of Zeno and Verina. Marcian was visited with the more refined punishment of the Byzantine world—he was forced to enter the priesthood—and Leontia retired into obscurity.

But the romance of Verina and her daughters had already entered upon a fresh chapter. Verina had welcomed her returning son-in-law at the palace, and her earlier expulsion of him and Ariadne was overlooked in view of the important share she had had in securing their return. We can, however, well understand that Zeno regarded her with suspicion and distrust, and would welcome the first opportunity to remove her from the palace. The argument which he had applied so remorselessly to Harmatius plainly extended to his imperial mother-in-law. The writers of the time represent him as not taking a prominent part in the events that followed, but it is difficult to doubt that his secret commands directed the whole intrigue.

In the year 478 a soldier attempted to assassinate the commander Illus, and he confessed—under torture or bribery—that he had been instructed by Verina’s steward Epinicius. The steward was given into the custody of Illus by the Emperor, and was sent under guard to a castle in Isauria. Illus followed, and easily induced the steward to impeach his mistress. Illus then returned to the city, and arranged with Zeno a plot for the capture of Verina. It is clear that the Empress-Mother had great power in Constantinople, and that they dare not openly touch her. Illus was to go to Isauria, and pretend that he feared danger from Zeno. The Emperor was then to ask Verina to take to Illus with her own hand a letter of indemnity, and, when she reached Isauria, she was to be imprisoned there. We should find it difficult to believe that so naïve a plot could entrap the virile and experienced Empress were we not expressly assured of it by the highest authorities. In a few weeks Verina was enraged to find herself imprisoned in a Papirian fortress, one of the strongly fortified castles of remote Isauria. One authority observes that they first compelled her to take the vows of a nun, but we may decline to believe that they troubled to place so frail and so superfluous a chain on such a woman.

From the lonely hills of Isauria Verina at length found a means of communicating with Ariadne and securing her interest. Zeno, to whom Ariadne appealed, referred her to Illus, and, when that general was summoned to the Empress’s apartments, and implored with tears to release her mother, he bluntly asked: “Do you want to be rid of your husband and wed another?” Ariadne returned stormily to her husband, and declared that either Illus or she must leave the palace. “If you can do anything, I’m with you,” said the distracted Emperor, who was overshadowed by the vigorous commander. Presently, as Illus was mounting the spiral stair to the Hippodrome, a soldier in the pay of Ariadne’s chamberlain fell upon him. Illus was saved, except for the loss of an ear, by his guards, but he prudently decided that Constantinople was injurious to his health and requested the Emperor for a change of air. He was appointed commander of the eastern troops, took with him the patrician Leontius and a distinguished company, and reached Antioch only to declare himself in rebellion and Leontius Emperor.

In the extraordinary confusion of events which the meagre chronicles transmit to us Verina had obtained her wish in an unexpected manner. A messenger came to her in her solitary prison to say that she was to crown Leontius at the city of Tarsus and join forces with him and Illus against Zeno. Verina was not the woman to hesitate. She crowned Leontius, a cultivated Syrian noble and excellent soldier, at Tarsus, and issued a characteristic letter to the officials and commanders of the Empire:

“Verina Augusta, greeting to our prefects and Christian peoples. You know that the Empire is ours, and that after the death of our husband Leo we, trusting to improve the condition of the commonwealth, raised to the throne Trascallisseus, who was afterwards called Zeno; now, however, since we perceive that he is deteriorating, and on account of his insatiable avarice, we have thought it needful to give you a Christian Emperor, adorned with piety and justice, that he may save the commonwealth and administer war with moderation and prudence. We have therefore bestowed the imperial crown on Leontius, most pious of Romans, who will guard us all with care and prudence.”

The throne of Leontius was set up at Antioch, and the aged Empress turned with her confederates to face Zeno’s troops. It was to be the last act of the stirring drama of her life. Zeno acted with unaccustomed vigour, and in a few days Verina and her companions were flying to Isauria. They shut themselves in the Papirian fortress and prepared to sustain a long siege. In the middle of the siege Verina died, and was spared the humiliation of the final defeat. Four years afterwards the heads of Illus and Leontius were exhibited on poles at Constantinople, but the body of Verina was decently interred there by her daughter.

The loss of contemporary historians prevents us from obtaining the closer acquaintance with Verina which her romantic story leads us to desire. Of her personal appearance and nationality we know nothing. One is tempted to conceive her as a Syrian woman of the type of Zenobia or Julia Domna: a virile and masterful personality, ambitious and unscrupulous, subtle and astute rather than cultivated, paying no more than a merely external and superficial regard to the teaching of the new religion of the Roman world. It remains to say a few words about the Empress Ariadne before we consider the next great Empress of the Byzantine world.

In the few peaceful years which followed the death of Verina life at the palace became sombre and painful. Zeno was morose, suspicious and unpopular, and increased the gloom by the usual device of executing, or murdering, suspects. Their only son came to a lamentable end. The officials in charge of his education felt that it would be more profitable to themselves to teach him vice and luxury rather than the manly arts which his parents required, and he was profoundly corrupted. His ostentatious vanity invited ridicule, and his indulgence in unnatural vice and intemperance ruined his constitution. He fell an early victim to dysentery, and his father plunged into deeper bitterness amid the splendours and pleasures of his palace. Ariadne must have awaited the end with impatience, and it is not improbable that she already chose a partner to share her throne. Popular rumour afterwards said that she buried Zeno alive. It was said that he used to fall into a kind of trance after his gluttonous meals, and that Ariadne in disgust bade the servants seal him in a tomb; the legend even represents him as recovering and crying in vain to be relieved, and one version pretends that, when the tomb was eventually opened, he was found to have eaten his boots and belt. The truth seems to be that he was subject to epileptic fits, one of which ended his life in April 491.

Ariadne at once nominated for the Empire a peasant of northern Greece who had a very subordinate position in the military service of the palace. A tall, handsome man—though one of his eyes was grey and the other almost black—of strong, quiet character, he seems to have been chosen by Ariadne as her future husband before Zeno died. He was unmarried, though past middle age. One of Ariadne’s eunuchs secured the consent of the Senators to the strange nomination, and Anastasius obtained the applause of the people by remitting their debts to the treasury. The only opposition came from the patriarch, or archbishop, who had in earlier years been compelled to prevent Anastasius from setting up an unofficial pulpit in the streets of the city and teaching his favourite heresy. Anastasius genially forswore his heresy for so high a price, was at once crowned Emperor, and married Ariadne on the fortieth day after the burial of Zeno. Docile and clinging as Ariadne had been in her earlier years, she fully reveals herself as the daughter of Verina in her middle life. But the twenty-five years of life which remained for her are years of obscurity, as far as the Empress is concerned, and we will not linger over them. Storm after storm broke over the palace, where she lived, but she seems to have taken no part in public events. The Isaurians marched on the city to demand the throne for the brother of Zeno, and a long struggle ended in the complete destruction of the power of the Isaurians. Then Anastasius returned to his Monophysite heresy, and the streets of the city and towns of the Empire rang with defiance and anathema. On one occasion, in 512, the mob burned the monasteries which Anastasius favoured, and so angrily assailed the palace that the ships were made ready at the quays to conduct Ariadne and her husband to Asia. Anastasius had been guilty of the additional indiscretion of attempting to reform the morals of Constantinople and forbidding contests with wild beasts in the arena.[5] Ariadne lived until the year 515 or 516, when she must have been about seventy years old. So completely was she overshadowed by her second husband that the only reference we find to her in the chronicles is that on one occasion she begged Anastasius to make a certain appointment, and he refused.

CHAPTER II
THE EARLY LIFE OF THEODORA

The next Empress to occupy the superb apartments in the palace, with their couches of ivory and silver and their regiments of fawning eunuchs and silk-clad ladies, was assuredly one of the most remarkable figures that ever sat on a throne. The Empress Euphemia hardly ever issues into the pages of history from the becoming seclusion of the women’s quarters in the palace, but the few details which we have concerning her suggest the most incongruous figure that imagination could place in such a world, and a brief account of her romantic elevation is a necessary introduction to the equally remarkable and better-known story of the famous Empress Theodora. The Roman Empire seemed to be deterred by some faint recollection of its early democratic spirit from admitting the hereditary principle; but the absence of this arrangement for securing the succession, together with the complete lack of any really democratic arrangement, often threw it into a chaotic confusion when a ruler died, and made its internal history a thrilling succession of romances and tragedies, with an occasional page of comedy. In this case it is comedy.

Anastasius, after playing his successive parts as peasant, lay preacher, soldier and ruler of the world, had passed away, amid the derision and rejoicing of his people, in the year 518. His nephews had feeble pretensions to succeed him, but the most powerful man in the city, the Prefect Amantius, decided that the purple should pass to his friend Theocritus. He therefore sought the commander, or Count, of the Excubitors—the more formidable guards of the palace—and placed in his hands a large sum of money for distribution among the troops. Justin, the said commander, was an Illyrian peasant who had won promotion in the wars. He was in his later sixties, though still a powerful man, with handsome rosy face and curly white hair; but under this disarming exterior he concealed an ambition and astuteness which the prefect failed to suspect. He distributed the money in his own interest, and passed unopposed from the modest quarters of the guard to the more luxurious chambers of the palace.

Euphemia was the wife of Justin, and it may safely be said that no woman ever experienced a more romantic elevation. In his military days Justin had bought a barbaric slave named Lupicina, and raised her to the rank of his concubine; though no doubt he married her in the course of time. She retained the uncouth and illiterate manners of her class, and Constantinople must have smiled to see her in the richly embroidered robes of purple silk, with cascades of diamonds and pearls falling from her gorgeous diadem. The acclamation of the crowd changed her name to Euphemia, and she retired to the congenial privacy of her palace. Justin brought his equally illiterate mother Bigleniza to the palace from her rustic home, and the two women no doubt contracted a fitting friendship in their wonderful new home. Of public action on their part there is no question, and the events of the next few years do not concern us. I will say only that, after securing his throne by cutting off the head of Amantius and crushing Theocritus under heavy stones in his dungeon, for venturing to resent the trick he had played them, Justin ruled with moderation, if not prudence, for nine years. Euphemia died three or four years before him, living just long enough to see, and emphatically resent, her successor, the notorious Theodora.

In approaching the story of Theodora it is necessary to premise a few words on the authority which has provided most of the sensational statements about her, and to pay respectful attention to the efforts of some recent historical writers to discredit those statements. The general outline of her story has been made familiar by Gibbon, who has genially dilated on the elevation of one of the lewdest actresses and most notorious prostitutes of Constantinople to the position, not merely of mistress of the greatest empire of the time, but also of patroness of an important branch of the Church and the daily companion of saintly monks and bishops. Since Theodora is very commonly described by the chroniclers as at least equal in power to her husband, the great Justinian, and since the next most powerful woman in the Byzantine Empire at the time is assigned a similar origin to that of Theodora, the world has long reflected with amazement on this spectacle of the Roman Empire at the feet of two imperfectly converted prostitutes. Such a situation could not pass unchallenged before the more critical tribunal of modern history, and there are scholars who have rejected entirely the romantic story of the youth of Theodora.[6] The majority of historians, including the two chief living authorities, Professor Bury and M. Diehl, regard the story as true in substance though unreliable in detail.

The more romantic statements concerning Theodora are taken from a work that purports to have been written by the greatest contemporary historical writer, Procopius, but there are writers (such as Ranke and Bury) who regard the work as, at the most, a later compilation of notes left by Procopius, and in any case it is so envenomed in temper, and occasionally so reckless in statement, that it should be regarded with suspicion. The problem cannot be discussed at length here, but it is necessary to justify the large use I am about to make of the work (the “Anecdotes”) which bears the name of Procopius.

If it were true, as is sometimes said, that we had no authority for the impeachment of the character of Theodora beyond the “Anecdotes,” we should have to hesitate very seriously, but this is by no means true. Procopius (“On the Persian War”) represents her as playing a most unscrupulous part in the ruin of John of Cappadocia. Liberatus (a contemporary cleric) and Anastasius exhibit the Empress to us corrupting the papacy itself and deposing a venerable pontiff by the most cruel and flagrantly dishonest charges. Zonaras and other writers accuse her, not merely of avarice, as Mr Mallett says, but of the most heartless and unblushing corruption in feeding her avarice. There is every reason to regard Theodora, after her elevation to the throne, as a woman devoid of moral scruple. But we now have ample confirmation also of the story of her origin. The statement of an eleventh-century writer, Aimoinus, that Justinian took his wife from a brothel, shows, in spite of its wild inaccuracies, that some such tradition was found in European literature quite apart from the “Anecdotes.” But the publication in the nineteenth century of the writings of John, Bishop of Ephesus, has furnished a decisive proof. This Monophysite bishop and cultivated writer, who lived for years beside the palace of Theodora, and whose sect received the most imperial and incalculable benefits from her, speaks of her as “Theodora of the brothel”; and he uses the phrase in such a way as to intimate plainly that this was the name by which she was known in Constantinople before her elevation to the throne.[7] Indeed, the fact that the author of the “Anecdotes” does not assail the chastity of Theodora after her marriage increases our confidence in his account of her earlier life; as he did not intend to publish his work—it was not published until 1623—it would have been just as easy to invent or collect legends about her after as before her marriage. On the other hand, the temper of the writer is so bitter and malignant that we must reserve our judgment in regard to the details of his strange narrative. He has gathered together every defaming rumour about Theodora and Justinian that circulated in Constantinople, even admitting nonsense obviously unworthy of a serious writer, and we cannot sift the true from the legendary. The source of his animosity cannot be determined. From the tone of his remarks on religion I gather that he was one of the many surviving pagans who were forced into outward conformity with the new religion, and, after giving formal praise in his historical works to Justinian and Theodora for the splendour of their reign, he relieved his soul, in this secret collection of notes, of the deep disgust he felt at the contrast between their characters and their professions and between the glamour and the misery of their empire. It must be remembered that the thoroughly Christian and very weighty authority, Evagrius, is just as severe on Justinian; there was in Justinian, he says, “something surpassing the cruelty of beasts,” and any prostitute could despoil a wealthy man by a false charge (say, of unnatural vice—a trick of Theodora’s) “provided she let Justinian share her vile gain.” It is the common teaching of the authorities that the Empress was worse than the Emperor.

In point of fact, there is nothing implausible or improbable in the details of Procopius’s story of Theodora’s early life, and the judicious reader will merely make allowance for the rhetorical strength of its superlatives. Her father Acacius had been a keeper of the bears which were baited in the Hippodrome in the reign of Anastasius. The Hippodrome at Constantinople united the functions which at Rome had been divided between the circus, the theatre and the amphitheatre. Its chief attraction was the chariot-racing which provided the central and most thrilling sensation of Roman life.[8] Between the races, however, there were contests with wild beasts in the arena, and there were the numerous nondescript performances which occupied the theatre at Rome—mimes (actors by gesture), clowns, acrobats, conjurers, etc. Acacius was bear-keeper to the “greens,” and, when he died, his widow promptly secured another partner and claimed the office for him. But the superintendent Asterius had sold the office to another man, and the shrewd widow appealed to the sympathy of the crowd by parading in the Hippodrome, the heads and hands of her three daughters crowned with the emblems of virginity. The “greens” jeered—possibly at the sight of the eldest daughter, Comitona, a loose girl of seventeen, dressed as a Vestal Virgin—but the “blues” received them with sympathy; a distinction which the pale and slender little Theodora would never forget.

The mother, who is said to have come from Cyprus, either before or after the birth of Theodora, then pressed the fortunes of her daughters in the theatrical world. Comitona was already a mime (or actress without words) and, as was usual, a prostitute. The young Theodora presently began to attend her elder sister, and is said to have begun her career of infamy as she waited among the slaves and lackeys on the fringe of the Hippodrome. When she in turn became an actress, her pretty pale face, lithe figure and unrestrained gaiety and dissoluteness made her a great favourite. She stripped to the narrowest limit of decency which the very liberal law permitted, performed the most nearly obscene ribaldries which the Roman theatre allowed, and was pre-eminent for the abandonment of her gestures and movements; and in the hours of the night, when the wealthier patrons of the Hippodrome entertained themselves in perfumed chambers with the actresses and courtesans, Theodora was in the greatest favour.

It is absurd to say that this is to impute to Theodora “a moral turpitude unparalleled in any age.” It was the common turpitude of that age, of our age, and of every intervening age. The theatre, indeed, no longer admits the very broad licence which was admitted at Constantinople, but the performances which are ascribed by Procopius to Theodora are innocent in comparison with certain performances which may be witnessed, in semi-publicity, in very many cities of Europe to-day. Of Theodora’s private behaviour—that she practised both forms of unnatural, as well as natural, vice—one need only say that it is, and always has been, common to her class. An actress at that time meant a woman of loose conduct. The imperial decrees and the Church fully recognised this, and it is significant that one of the theatres—if not the one theatre—of Constantinople was called “The Harlots,” and is so named in an imperial document. Procopius is merely imputing to Theodora the common practices of loose women of her time and our own. And when, in later pages, we come to realise the fiery and unrestrained temper of the beautiful Greek, we can well believe that she was at that time one of the worst of her class.

Not less plausible is the next chapter in the life of Theodora. A wealthy official, Hecebolus, induced her to accompany him to the African province which he was to administer, and her very brief career at Constantinople came to a close. M. Diehl conjectures that this occurred in 517, in her eighteenth year, and that she remained a few years with Hecebolus. However that may be, she was, about the year 521, ejected from the governor’s house, and she passed to Alexandria, and thence to Antioch and the other cities of Syria and Asia Minor. It is most probable that this was the time when, either at Alexandria or Antioch, she became a convert to the Monophysite faith. The question of the true character of Christ had racked and rent the Eastern world, amidst all its ribaldry and vice, for two hundred years, and the burning issue at this time was whether the nature of Christ should be described as single or twofold; the Monophysites held that there was but one nature in Christ, and were bitterly opposed to the “Synodists,” or supporters of the orthodox Council of Chalcedon. It may seem incongruous to drag in so solemn an issue on so defiled a page of biography, but it is essential for the understanding of Theodora’s career.

According to Procopius, Theodora still practised her evil profession in the cities of Asia. For the next few years, however, there is much obscurity about her movements, and the biographer cannot proceed with great confidence. One eleventh-century writer represents that Justinian and the commander Belisarius chose their wives in a loose house in Constantinople; another equally remote and unreliable chronicler says that Justinian found Theodora living a modest life, supporting herself by spinning wool, in a small house under the portico—a very strange residence for a virtuous woman. I prefer still to follow the very plausible story (in substance) of the “Anecdotes.” At Antioch Theodora went in great distress to visit Macedonia, an actress who had influence with Justinian. It is hardly strained to conjecture that this was the real occasion of her introduction to Justinian; that she went on to Constantinople with a recommendation to him and was at once taken into his house. Beyond question she was his mistress for some years before he married her.

Justin had brought from Upper Macedonia, and educated in the schools of Constantinople, the favourite nephew who was to become the Emperor Justinian. At the time when Theodora came back to Constantinople, about the year 522, he approached his fortieth year: a handsome, wealthy and free-living bachelor, of fresh and florid complexion and the curly hair of a Greek. His reputation was somewhat sinister: his influence unbounded. In entertaining the populace on his elevation to the consulship in the previous year he had spent about £160,000, and had turned twenty lions and thirty leopards together into the arena. He was plainly marked for the throne. The pretty pale face and bright eyes and graceful figure of Theodora captivated him, and her experienced art enabled her to profit by the infatuation. Justinian lived in the palace of Hormisdas on the shore of the Sea of Marmora, and Constantinople would take little scandal at his connexion with Theodora. Four or five years’ absence would have enfeebled the memory of her earlier career, and the zeal for the true religion—the Monophysite heresy, which she paraded from the moment of her connexion with Justinian—would ensure the genial indulgence of the frivolous population. Justinian had her made a “patrician” (or noble), lodged her in his beautiful palace, and showered his favours upon her. It is at this point that Bishop John begins to describe his co-religionists appealing to the protection of “Theodora of the brothel” from all parts of the Empire.

There were two obstacles to marriage. Justin was feeble and senile, and little able or disposed to resist his nephew’s whims, but Euphemia strongly opposed the marriage until her death in 523 or 524. The more serious impediment was the standing law of the Roman Empire, that a noble could not wed a woman of ill-fame (an actress, tavern-girl or courtesan). Justinian afterwards removed this restriction, but it must have been in some way overruled by Justin, and many authorities believe that the first law in the Justinian Code on the point was really promulgated by Justin. A daughter seems to have been born before the marriage, possibly before the connexion with Justinian, as John of Ephesus confirms the statement of Procopius that Theodora had a marriageable grandson before she died (in 548).

The next step for the enterprising young Greek was the attainment of the throne. Justin was pressed, as he aged, to associate his nephew in the government, and, although he nervously refused for some time, he at length (April 527) conferred the supreme dignity of Augustus on his nephew and of Augusta on Theodora. She now entered upon the full splendour of imperial life, and no parvenue ever bore it with more exaggerated dignity than the ex-actress, as we shall see. There must have been many who smiled when Theodora first witnessed the old sights of the Hippodrome from the imperial chapel of St Stephen, or sat for the homage of the Senators in the long gold-embroidered mantle, with the screen of heavy jewels falling in chains from her diadem upon her neck and breast, as we find her depicted in a mosaic at Ravenna; but her formidable power and her unscrupulous use of it would soon extinguish the last echo of her opprobrious nickname.

The early years of Theodora’s power were spent in enlarging the prestige of her position and in recompensing her friends. The existent palaces could not meet the requirements of the woman who, a few years before, had begged money of an Antioch courtesan. Justin had to annex his palace of Hormisdas to the imperial domain and build fresh palaces. The favourite residence of Theodora was the cool and superb palace of Hieria across the water, and in spite of the lack of accommodation for her enormous suite and the terrors of a whale, popularly named Porphirio, which infested the waters of Constantinople at the time, she frequently crossed to it.

At home, in the sacred palace, she led a life strangely opposed to that of the temperate, accessible and hard-working Justinian. Rising at an early hour she devoted a considerable time to the bath and toilet, by which she trusted to sustain her charm, in spite of delicate health. After breaking her fast, she again retired to rest before she would consent to receive courtiers and suitors. In view of her paramount influence with the Emperor many sought her patronage, or dreaded to incur her terrible resentment, by seeming indifferent to it. Numbers of nobles waited, sometimes for days, in the hot ante-room to her apartments, standing on tiptoe to catch the eye of the pampered eunuchs who passed to and fro. After a long delay they might be admitted to kiss the golden sandals of Theodora, and listen to her august wishes. No man was permitted to speak except in reply to a question. In the course of time, as we shall see, the highest nobles eagerly submitted to this humiliating treatment, in order to preserve their wealth from the extortioner. Dinner and supper, at which, though Theodora ate little, the most opulent banquets had to be served, occupied the further hours of the day, together with Theodora’s abundant devotions and converse with holy men.

Her friends were generously admitted to share her advantages. The “Anecdotes” tell a story of an illegitimate son of hers who discovered his birth, came to the Empress for recognition or money, and was at once despatched to another world. That seems to be one of the calumnious fables which the writer too eagerly admitted into his indictment. The “Anecdotes” themselves rather show that Theodora did not make every effort to conceal the past, however strongly she might resent discussion of it. Her sister Comitona was certainly married in the first year of her reign to a wealthy and powerful noble. It is not so certain, but probable enough, that she cherished her earlier theatrical friends, Chrysomallo and Indara, and found wealthy husbands for their daughters. The woman whose name we shall find most closely connected with hers, Antonina, the wife of the great general Belisarius, is said to have been her tirewoman before she married Belisarius. This would account for Theodora’s coolness until Antonina won her by securing her revenge on John of Cappadocia, when Theodora is said not merely to have overlooked, but promoted, the vices of her friend. There is, at least, no room for doubt about the character of Antonina.

But while Theodora admitted these mute reminders of her earlier life, she turned with extraordinary severity upon her earlier colleagues as a body and undertook the purification of the city. The decrees of Justinian for regulating the morals of Constantinople—decrees which go so far as to define the penalties for people who made assignations in churches, and on the strength of which bishops were castrated and exhibited in public for unnatural vice—are generally ascribed to her influence. She had the imperial net dragged through the loose houses of Constantinople, and five hundred of the occupants were imprisoned in an ancient palace on the Asiatic shore: a form of enforced piety which, the carping Procopius says, drove many of them to suicide. Many writers think this zeal for purity inconsistent with the story of her earlier life. It has rather the appearance of a feverish affectation of repentance, and must be balanced by the many proofs we have of Theodora’s really corrupt and unscrupulous character. One may recall that Domitian drastically punished the vices of others. Procopius would have us believe that Theodora compelled unmarried women to marry, and that when two delicate widows fled to the Church to escape her pressure, she had them dragged from the altar and married to men of infamous life. Yet, he says, vice was rampant in Constantinople, and protected by the Empress, when money was paid into her greedy coffers. Such details we cannot control, and must reproduce with reserve; we know only from other sources that she extorted money by corrupt means.

And the most singular and piquant feature of Theodora’s life at this period was her zealous patronage of the Monophysites. Long before her coronation, from the time when she became the mistress of Justinian, the joyous news of her elevation flew throughout the Empire among the persecuted heretics. They had had their hours of triumph under Basiliscus and Anastasius, but with the accession of Justin the orthodox had returned to power, and the twofold nature of the gentle Christ had been urged with bloody arguments. From the monasteries and towns of the provinces pilgrims now began to arrive at the Hormisdas palace in great numbers, and through Justinian she obtained relief and money for them. When she entered the imperial palace the procession increased, and, while the nobles of Constantinople were detained for hours before being permitted to kiss her feet, ragged monks and unlettered deacons strode into the imperial apartments without a moment’s delay.

So zealous, indeed, was Theodora for their edifying conversation that she kept them as long as possible about her. St Simeon of Persia came to plead the cause of his persecuted brethren, and was induced to live for a year in the luxurious palace. Arsenius of Palestine, one of the chief firebrands of his province, was cherished by her; though Procopius affirms that he at length lost her favour and was crucified. Orthodox monks were even permitted with impunity to rebuke the terrible Empress. A holy hermit came one day to chide Theodora for her heresy. Ragged and dirty, with garment so patched that hardly three inches of cloth of one colour appeared in it, he admonished her in fiery language. Theodora was so charmed with his piety that she sought to add him to her domestic collection of sanctities. When persuasion failed, she resorted to corruption; we read the story, not in the “Anecdotes,” but in John. She had a large sum of gold concealed in linen and imposed on him, but the fiery monk hurled it across the palace, crying: “Thy money perish with thee.” St Sabas, also, the unlettered and unadorned abbot of an orthodox monastery at Jerusalem, came to ask her patronage. His piety excused his heresy in her eyes, and she kept him for days at the palace, and humbly asked his prayers that she might have a son. The grim monk refused, and, when companions asked how he could scorn the request of so generous a patroness, he replied: “We do not want any fruit from that womb, lest it be suckled on the heretical doctrines of Severus.”

So great at length became the number of pious pilgrims from the provinces, and so eager was Theodora to retain them near her person, that the Hormisdas palace, which Justinian had richly decorated for her and enclosed within the area of the imperial palace, was converted into a monastery. Then were witnessed the quaintest scenes that ever enlivened the passion-throbbing palace of the Eastern Emperors. Five hundred monks, of all ages and nationalities, of every degree of sanctity and raggedness, were crowded in or about its marbled walls. Every form that monastic fervour had assumed in the fiery provinces of Syria or Egypt was exemplified in it. The orderly community sang its endless psalms and macerated its flesh in the rooms where Justinian had dallied with his mistress: little huts were scattered about the grounds for those who were called to the life of the hermit: and even columns were set up here and there for those who would imitate the more novel and arduous piety of St Simeon Stylites, and pass, at the open summit of the column, a kind of existence which the polite pen must refrain from describing. All the beggars of Constantinople gathered for the crumbs of this remarkable colony, and crowds of citizens pressed to witness this singular oasis of virtue in the most corrupt city of the world. Theodora rarely let a day pass without crossing the gardens to receive the blessing and enjoy the pious conversation of such of the saints as would deign to converse with a woman.

How she went on to put a courtly heretic upon the archiepiscopal throne of Constantinople, and, by an extraordinary piece of intrigue and corruption, depose a pope and replace him by one who pretended to favour her designs, we shall see presently. We must now set forth the imperial career of Theodora in chronological order, and learn what kind of character this remarkable woman maintained amid the chants and prayers of her deeply venerated monks.

CHAPTER III
THE EMPRESS THEODORA

We have seen how Theodora rewarded the friends, and must now see how she punished the enemies, of her earlier career. It will be remembered that her father had been a servant of the “greens” of the Hippodrome, but that this party had greeted her mother with derision when she appealed for sympathy with her three children, while the “blues” received them compassionately. Twenty years afterwards the young circus-girl had become the most powerful woman in the world, and the blues began to tyrannize with impunity over their rivals. In the earliest years of the reign of Theodora and Justinian we find them swollen with conceit and encouraged in the perpetration of every kind of disorder. The livelier “sparks” of that faction advertised their formidable character by adopting the trousers and sandals of the fierce Huns and trimming their hair after the fashion of those terrible invaders; they wore long moustaches and beards, shaved the front part of the head, and cultivated long hair at the back.

A few outrages soon taught them that the laws would not be enforced against them, and before long the city of Constantinople became, during the night, a land of terror. The citizen who dared to pass along the streets with a gold clasp to his belt or his cloak or money in his purse was robbed, and women could not move after nightfall. The continued silence of the authorities encouraged the blues, and drew all the dissolute elements of the city into their ranks. They now began to force the doors of the houses, plunder the coffers, rape the wives and daughters, and carry off the more handsome slaves and boys. At the least resistance their deadly poniards were drawn, and murder became frequent. When the authorities intervened, none but the greens were punished. The evil rapidly spread from night to day, and from the metropolis to other cities. It would be futile in this case to quarrel with the details given in the “Anecdotes.” The great riot into which the greens were stung by this reign of terror is an historical fact; and nothing but the vindictive memory of Theodora can explain how Justinian, the great legislator, permitted so appalling a disorder.

Theodora meantime enjoyed the conversation of her monks and hermits, and even Justinian seems to have been unconscious that he was slipping the leash of beasts whom he might be powerless to control. At length, on 14th January 532, the greens stirred. The Emperor appeared in his kathisma at the Hippodrome, and an appeal was made to him for justice. His officer replied disdainfully, and a long and curious conversation took place.[9] The Emperor still refused to grant the impartial administration of justice or to punish the murderers, and the greens left the Hippodrome. They gathered in strength in the streets, and, although Justinian prudently sent to learn and partly to remove their grievances, they remained in arms. Belisarius was now sent against them with a troop of Goths, and the rioting and burning began. Unfortunately for the Court an accident then happened which had the singular effect of uniting the two factions against the troops. Seven criminals were to be executed, and Procopius cannot conceal the fact—in spite of his insistence that the blues were never punished—that some of the seven were blues and some greens. After five of the seven had been despatched, the rope broke, and the crowd demanded the acquittal of the remaining two. The authorities refused, and, as one criminal was a blue and the other a green, the factions turned in common anger upon the prefect and the troops.

The terrible riot that followed during four days must be read in history. The first part of the palace, the great church of St Sophia, and many other churches, mansions and public buildings were destroyed. Priests who rushed into the fray holding aloft the disarming emblems of their faith were cut down. On the fourth day, a Sunday, Justinian entered the Hippodrome with a Bible in his hand, and took a solemn oath to spare the offenders if they would disarm. “Ass, thou art perjuring thyself,” was the infuriated answer; and he retired to contemplate with Theodora the impending ruin of their reign. On the following day the crowd forced Hypatius, nephew of the Emperor Anastasius, to accept such purple robes as they could obtain, marched with him in triumph to the Hippodrome, and exulted in the downfall of Justinian and Theodora, who were believed to have fled to Asia.

The “great” Justinian makes a lamentable appearance throughout the whole riot, which he had guiltily occasioned, but Theodora and the abler ministers were not minded to yield. As they gathered in the hall of the palace, to which the cries in the Hippodrome must almost have penetrated, the chief eunuch Narses came to report that by a judicious distribution of money he had distracted the factions and weakened the cause of Hypatius. It is probably this news that turned the scale in the wavering counsels of Justinian and his ministers, but it was Theodora who pressed it home. The speech which Procopius assigns to her is worth reproducing, though we cannot regard it as more than a rhetorical paraphrase of the words she used:

“In my opinion this is no time to admit the maxim that a woman must not act as a man among men; nor, if she fires the courage of the halting, are we to consider whether she does right or no. When matters come to a crisis, we must agree as to the best course to take. My opinion is that, although we may save ourselves by flight, it is not to our interest. Every man that sees the light must die, but the man who has once been raised to the height of empire cannot suffer himself to go into exile and survive his dignity. God forbid that I should ever be seen stripped of this purple, or live a single day on which I am not to be saluted as Mistress. If thou desirest to go, Emperor, nothing prevents thee. There is the sea; there are the steps to the boats. But have a care that when thou leavest here, thou dost not exchange this sweet light for an ignoble death. For my part I like the old saying: empire is a fine winding-sheet.”

Some such sentiments, we may believe, were urged by Theodora, and affected the decision. The populace was penned in the Hippodrome, and Justinian’s officers and troops stealthily surrounded it. Rushing in at the various entrances, they fell with such fury upon the people that the sun went down on the corpses of between thirty and forty thousand citizens heaped in its arena or on the terraced seats.

The health of Theodora suffered from the strain of this terrible week, and she went to take the waters at the Pythian baths in Bithynia: a crowd of nobles and four thousand soldiers and eunuchs forming her retinue. Meantime Justinian set about the congenial task of re-erecting the Chalke (or front part of the palace), the church of St Sophia and the other ruined buildings, on a more splendid scale than before. We shall see later by what means he and his Empress obtained the prodigious sums of money they needed for their enormous expenditure. We will also postpone for a moment the early relations of Theodora to the general Belisarius and his romantic spouse, and consider the next important episode in which her character is seen.

In spite of the orthodoxy and religious zeal of Justinian, his wife had such influence over him and apart from him that in the year 535 she secured the see of Constantinople for the Monophysite Anthimus, to the unbounded delight of her sect and amidst the furious maledictions of the orthodox throughout the Empire. Rome was at that time regarded only as a sister Church of great authority and antiquity, but its venerable Bishop Agapetus was summoned to the Eastern metropolis and he succeeded in ousting Theodora’s favourite. Agapetus, however, died soon afterwards at Constantinople, and Theodora now conceived the bold design of putting a Monophysite pope upon the throne at Rome itself. For the remarkable events which follow I am not using the “Anecdotes” at all. The story is told in substance by a contemporary ecclesiastical writer, Liberatus the Deacon, of Carthage, and the chronicler Victor, and is repeated, with large and legendary additions, by Anastasius, the Roman librarian, of the ninth century.

In the suite of Agapetus at Constantinople was an ambitious and courtly deacon named Vigilius, who contrived to let his accommodating temper become known to the Empress. He was taken to her apartments, and he promised, if the Roman see and a large sum of money were bestowed on him, to reinstate Anthimus and the other Monophysite bishops. In the meantime the Gothic ruler of Italy had appointed a certain Silverius to the Roman see. Theodora tested him with a request that he would restore Anthimus, but he refused; murmuring, it is said, as he wrote the letter: “This will cost me my life,” as it did. The Byzantine general Belisarius had meantime taken and occupied Rome, and a few words must be said to introduce him, and his wife Antonina, into the story of Theodora.

THE EMPRESS THEODORA AND HER ATTENDANTS

MOSAIC OF THE 6TH CENTURY IN S. VITALE, RAVENNA

I have previously mentioned an eleventh-century legend concerning Belisarius and Justinian and their wives. It was said that the two men had one day entered a house of ill-fame, found there two captive and fascinating Amazons named Antonia [Theodora] and Antonina, and married them. The myth seems to have crystallized about a belief that Antonina had risen from the same depths as Theodora, as the “Anecdotes” say, and the fact that Antonina was a woman of abandoned character and a leading lady in the service of the Empress seems to confirm this. In any case, she is openly assailed by Procopius (her husband’s secretary) in his historical works as “capable of anything,” and is described in the Lexicon of Suidas as “an infamous adulteress.” She had married Belisarius, and accompanied him in 533 on his brilliant campaign for the recovery of Africa from the Vandals. With them went a handsome and foppish Thracian youth named Theodosius. He was fresh from the baptismal font, in which the patriarch had washed away his Monophysite heresy, and it was believed that the presence of so sacred a youth would bring luck to the fleet. Before they reached Carthage Antonina enjoyed the secret love of the youth, but a servant betrayed them, and Theodosius fled to Ephesus, where we must leave him for a time. It is said that Antonina had the servant’s tongue cut out.

Belisarius passed from the subjugation of North Africa to a victorious war in Italy, and he and Antonina were staying at a palace on the Pincian Hill at Rome when the deacon Vigilius—now, no doubt, a priest—came with the commands of Theodora. “Trump up a charge against Silverius, and send him to Constantinople,” the order ran, according to the Roman librarian, and as the more authoritative Liberatus affirms that the charge was false, and was supported by mendacious witnesses and forged letters, there is no possibility of freeing Theodora from this grave imputation. The Pope was summoned to the palace, where Antonina lay on a couch with Belisarius at her feet. Antonina at once charged him with treasonable correspondence with the Goths. We may or may not believe the picturesque version of Anastasius: that the servants at once stripped the Pope of his robes, dressed him as a monk, and interred him in a distant monastery. It is certain, at least, that Silverius was, at Theodora’s command, deposed on a false charge and thrust out of sight. Vigilius became Pope, and the fate of Silverius is unknown to history.

I cannot entirely omit a later sequel to this sacrilegious and unscrupulous deed, though it rests only on the feebler authority of Anastasius. For a few years Theodora demanded in vain that Vigilius should fulfil his promise. He had, he said, come to see the heinousness of such a promise, and could not discharge it. In 544, therefore, Theodora sent an officer to Rome with a command which Anastasius gives in these words: “If you find him in the church of St Peter spare him, but if in the Lateran or the palace, or in any other church, put him on ship at once, and bring him to us. If you fail, I will, by Him that liveth for ever, have your skin torn from your body.” It is known, at least, that Vigilius was shipped away from Rome at the end of 544; but that he was at once taken to Constantinople, and that Theodora had him dragged through the streets like a bear, is untrue. He reached Constantinople after her death. We cannot therefore follow the deposition of Vigilius as confidently as we follow the sordid story of his elevation, but we can have little doubt that Theodora punished him.

Another authentic episode of the time reveals the same unscrupulous disdain of principles in the patroness of the Monophysite sect. The story is told by Procopius, not in the “Anecdotes,” but in his open and authoritative work “On the Persian War,” in spite of his usual extreme care to suppress offensive details. The Prefect of Constantinople, John of Cappadocia, had incurred the bitter hostility of the Empress. The very unattractive portrait which Procopius supplies, and Gibbon reproduces, of John prevents us from thinking that in this case an innocent man was persecuted. While he freely promoted all the schemes of Justinian and his notorious steward to wring money out of the citizens—“by fair means and foul,” as Zonaras says—he levied his private tithe on all their gains, and was popularly believed to indulge in secret the most sensual tastes and the even worse abominations of some pagan cult. He seems to have been the one man to regard Theodora with open disdain, and she retorted with venomous hate. Although guards surrounded his bedroom, he started every hour from his feverish slumbers to look for the expected assassin.

His value to Justinian enabled him to keep his position until the year 540, when Belisarius and Antonina returned from Italy to Constantinople.[10] Antonina remained in the city while her husband went against the Persians. She feverishly summoned her Thracian lover from the monastery in which he hypocritically lingered at Ephesus, but the wrath of Belisarius held him aloof. Whether or no Antonina then deliberately sought the intervention of the Empress, we cannot say, but she proceeded to merit it. She learned of Theodora’s hatred of John, and conceived a plot for his destruction.

John had an ingenuous and amiable daughter who seems to have been not unacquainted with the political situation. Twice had the brilliant Belisarius been withdrawn to the city in a fit of jealousy, and there were rumours that the strong man was wearying of serving an Emperor who could do nothing but employ others and reap their glory. Antonina won her way to the heart and confidence of the girl, and betrayed to her that her husband was secretly disaffected. The artless Euphemia hastened to tell her father that there was a prospect of overthrowing Theodora, whom they both hated. Even John was deceived by the astute adventuress. It was arranged that Antonina should go to her suburban palace and meet John there during the night. We do not know that Theodora had a share in framing this diabolical plot, but it was now communicated to her by Antonina, and she at once pressed it and used her resources for carrying it out with safety. In the dead of the following night John entered the palace of the unscrupulous adventuress and listened to her whispers of treachery. Procopius says that Theodora had initiated the Emperor to the plot, and he had consented, but at the last moment sent a messenger to John not to see Antonina. This seems to be a piece of polite fiction in the interest of the Emperor; it is incredible that an astute and experienced minister would risk his neck after such a message. John went, and, in the apparently lonely palace, spoke his secret sympathy with the supposed design of Belisarius. No sooner had he uttered the words than a troop of imperial guards entered the room to arrest or assassinate him, but John also had brought soldiers and they enabled him to escape.

Had John gone straight to the palace of Justinian, he might still have saved his position. Instead, he fled nervously to the sanctuary, and Theodora hardened the mind of her husband. The wealthy and powerful noble was stripped of his estates and forced to enter the ranks of the clergy—one of the quaintest penalties of the time—in the suburb of Cyzicus. There the people whom he had oppressed might behold their once powerful enemy, the secret pagan and Sybarite, shaven and humiliated. It appears that Theodora was not yet satisfied, though she is not directly implicated by Procopius in the last act of the tragedy. The Bishop of Cyzicus was murdered, and as John was one of his many bitter enemies, he was arrested, scourged, and driven into exile and poverty. The fate of the unhappy Euphemia is unknown; she was probably compelled to enter a nunnery and weep there over the memory of the imperial tigress and her friend.

This story of perfidy, corruption and vindictiveness, which Procopius tells openly in his historical work, disposes us to believe the sequel, as it is narrated in the “Anecdotes,” even if we must regard certain details of the narrative with reserve. There was with Belisarius in Persia a son of Antonina by a former husband (or lover) of the name of Photius. Bitterly ashamed of his mother’s conduct, he accepted from Belisarius the charge of watching her lover Theodosius. At Ephesus he learned that Theodosius was in Constantinople, and soon caused him to fly back to Ephesus and cling to the altars which had sheltered so much vice and crime since the law of sanctuary had been established. The prelate, however, delivered Theodosius to the youth, and he was imprisoned in Cilicia.

Theodora was now eager to reward her friend and she had Photius arrested and scourged. He refused to reveal the prison in which he had placed Theodosius, but an officer was bribed to betray the secret, and the Thracian was brought to Theodora’s apartments. Theodora then sent for Antonina and said: “Dear patrician, yesterday there fell into my hands a gem finer than any that mortal eye has ever seen; if you would like to see it, I will show it to you.” Procopius concludes this astounding story by saying that Photius was kept for four years in the Empress’s underground dungeons. Twice he escaped to the church of St Sophia, and twice he was dragged back; at length he got away from Constantinople and hid from the vindictiveness of Theodora in the robes of a monk. There are writers who flatly refuse to believe this statement, though the authentic actions of Theodora which we have described lend it some plausibility. Once more, however, the recently published works of the contemporary Bishop of Ephesus supply some confirmation. We read in them that Photius, son of Antonina, “became a monk for some cause or other”; but the pathos of Gibbon’s picture of his fate is somewhat lessened when we read that he still enlivened the monastic life with his genial soldierly vices and led the troops to the plunder of the southern provinces.

I have mentioned the underground prisons of Theodora. Since it is from the “Anecdotes” alone that we learn of these dungeons, we should regard the statements with some reserve, and in this case there is additional reason for reserve. As Gibbon says: “Darkness is propitious to cruelty, but it is likewise favourable to calumny and fiction.” Procopius seems to know too much of what passed in these carefully guarded places. Theodora doubtless had spies everywhere, and it would be easy enough for her to have her enemies conveyed into the palace during the night, or to some prison in remote provinces. Somewhere about this time (541), we learn from John of Ephesus, her episcopal friend Anthimus incurred the anger of the Emperor and disappeared. John assures us that Anthimus was hidden in the Empress’s apartments for seven years. The two chamberlains who waited on him alone knew the secret, besides Theodora, until the day of her death. A woman with such resources could easily maintain private dungeons if she willed, and we can hardly say that it would be inconsistent with her character. But when Procopius minutely describes the fetid condition of these prisons, and tells how fiercely the prisoners were scourged, or how cords were tightened round their heads until the eyes started from their sockets, we are disposed to think that he has hastily admitted popular rumours which the judicious historian must set aside as unauthoritative.

On the other hand, a set of grave charges which Procopius combines with these statements are not without very serious confirmation. His most persistent charge against Justinian and Theodora is that they extorted money by cruel and flagrantly dishonest means. The superb buildings—the new palace, the new St Sophia, etc.—with which Justinian adorned the city absorbed stupendous sums of money; and the personal luxury and religious munificence of Theodora were such that a vast fortune would be needed to sustain them. It is equally certain that the money was largely raised by corrupt means. I have quoted the monastic writer Zonaras saying that Justinian raised money “by fair means and foul” and by “dishonest practices”; and the weighty testimony of Evagrius that the Emperor was of such “insatiable avarice” that he would share the “vile gain” of loose women impeaching wealthy men on false charges. The most that we can say for Justinian is that the money was not spent in personal luxury, and that it was extorted by subordinate officers. Agathias, another good authority, tells us how the steward Anatolius used to forge or suppress wills, and practise other dishonest arts, so that he might affix to houses and estates the strip of purple which betokened that they had become the property of the Emperor.

It is indisputable that the metropolis and the provinces suffered a most unjust and corrupt spoliation in order to sustain the splendour of the reign of Justinian and Theodora. Now Zonaras declares that the Empress was “worse than Justinian in extorting money, both by unlawful and lawful means,” and that she was “especially ingenious in finding ways” to enrich herself. Wealthy men had charges of secret heresy or unnatural vice brought against them, and their fortunes passed into the coffers of Theodora. This must mean that her servants, as the informers, claimed for her the legal share of the confiscated property which went to an informer.

Here again, therefore, the charges in the “Anecdotes” are substantially confirmed. Not content with securing testaments in her favour, she had them forged or altered. She suborned witnesses to support charges of vice or heresy. The only difference from Zonaras is in the added allegation of physical cruelty, and on this point Procopius is at times explicit. A member of the blue party, Bassus, a refined and delicate youth, issued some squib upon the Empress, possibly referring to her early career. He was dragged from the church in which he had taken refuge, charged with and convicted of vice, and subjected, before an indignant crowd, to the barbaric mutilation with which such vice was then punished. His property went to Theodora—in part, I assume, for laying information. Usually it was the greens who suffered. So angry were the people that they accused Theodora of a secret (but “impotent”) love of the sinister Syrian financier, Peter Barsymes, who had succeeded John of Cappadocia in the duty of governing and exploiting Constantinople. The restraint with which Procopius represents her love as “impotent” lends credit to his other charges. An accusation of an actual liaison would have been more credible than some of the stories he reproduces.

A few episodes remain in the career of Theodora from which we may confirm our impression of her remarkable personality. Unfortunately, they rest entirely on the authority of the “Anecdotes,” and cannot be pressed; we know only from another, and a sound, authority that Belisarius was maliciously attacked and disgraced after his many brilliant campaigns on behalf of the Empire.

To the evils of oppression, spoliation, corruption of justice, and persecution which afflicted the Eastern Empire under Justinian and Theodora there was added in the year 542 the deadly scourge of the plague, and for several years in succession it scattered the seeds of death over the broad provinces. Justinian at length contracted it, and became dangerously ill. As he had no son, the question of the succession to the throne was very naturally discussed, and the generals Belisarius and Buza in the Persian camp incautiously expressed themselves on the rumour that Justinian was dying, or were represented to the Empress by her spies as having done so. She at once ordered them to Constantinople. Buza is said to have been lodged in her underground prisons, and Belisarius was stripped of his rank, his guard and his immense wealth. A eunuch was sent by Theodora to secure the large sums he had deposited in the east, and the chosen soldiers who formed his personal guard, and were maintained at his expense, were distributed among the army. The greatest soldier that the Eastern Empire ever possessed, the most brilliant contributor to the success of Justinian’s reign, a man who had preserved his loyalty in a decade of supreme military power, he was received at the palace with cold haughtiness, and retired in deep distress to his mansion. When at length he observed the approach of a servant of the Empress, he prepared for death. Instead of death, however, Theodora’s officer brought this extraordinary message: “You know what you have done to me, Belisarius, but I forgive your crimes on account of what your wife has done for me. Hope for the future through her, but know that we shall hear how you bear yourself to Antonina.” And the episode closes with the great soldier kissing the feet of his perfidious wife, vowing that he will be her slave, and accepting the office of master of the stables in the imperial service which he had so gloriously illumined. Theodora had secured an enormous sum of money and intimidated an enemy.

Up to the last year of Theodora’s life (548) the implacable writer of the “Anecdotes” pursues his record of her misdeeds. Ever attentive to the men who might some day dislodge her and her relatives from the palace, Theodora watched with especial jealousy the grave and distinguished nephew of the Emperor, Germanus, and his three children. His eldest daughter Justina was in her nineteenth year, yet none had dared, out of fear of Theodora, to offer marriage to her. Theodora then decided to unite the fortunes of the two houses, and secure the succession, by commanding Justina to wed her grandson Anastasius—obviously the son of an illegitimate daughter of the Empress, since it was little over twenty years since her marriage to Justinian. Justina refused, and was vindictively married by the Empress to a common officer. She then commanded the daughter of Belisarius, Joannina, to wed Anastasius. Procopius, forgetting that he has stripped Belisarius of almost all his wealth (an exaggeration), says that Theodora wanted in this way to secure the general’s fortune, but we may assume that Theodora was mainly endeavouring to secure the succession to the throne for her grandson. Her own health was delicate, and Justinian was well over sixty. Belisarius shrank from the union, and even Antonina seems to have refused to further it. All knew that a struggle impended between the families of Justinian and Theodora, and it must have been the general feeling that the former would win. Theodora is said to have angrily united Joannina to her grandson in the loose popular form of marriage; indeed later rumour said that she had the young woman violated first.

Another matrimonial interference of the Empress in her later years exhibits the better features of her character. An ambitious general, Artabanes, sought and obtained the hand of Justinian’s niece, whom he had delivered from peril in Africa. Soon afterwards, however, a woman appeared who claimed that she was the legitimate wife of Artabanes. She appealed to the Empress, and Theodora forced Artabanes to take back his humbler wife. Procopius tells this story in one of the historical works in which he was careful not to offend the ruling powers, and he courteously adds that “it was the nature of Theodora to befriend afflicted women.” It is the only instance of her doing so that has reached us, and, ungracious as it may seem to cast a doubt upon the pure humanity of that one recorded good deed, one is compelled to suggest that it was not to her interest to see a niece of Justinian married to a successful commander.

On the 29th of June 548, after a reign of twenty-one years, Theodora died of cancer. Her body was embalmed and exposed for public veneration in the golden-roofed Triclinon of the palace. There, still dressed in the imperial purple, still bearing the magnificent diadem for a few days, she lay on a golden bed for friends and enemies to gaze upon the last state of one of the most remarkable personalities of the time.

The character of Theodora must be interpreted in so purely oriental a sense that it is difficult for the modern European to understand it. Whether Greek or Syrian in origin, she was an incarnation of the spirit of the great metropolis in whose life Syria and Greece were so singularly blended. It is useless any longer to cast doubt upon her earlier career. She was reared in that old theatrical world in which moral restraint was wholly unknown; and her beauty, vivacity and nervous strength make it probable enough that she was distinguished in it for dissoluteness. That in her later life she spent vast sums of money on the Church and philanthropy is unquestionable; nor would I doubt for a moment that she was perfectly sincere in her endless conversations with holy men. But her passionate nature, difficult position and supple intelligence gave her a genius for casuistry, and she fell into vices far worse than the vices of her youth. Quite apart from the attacks of her bitter, anonymous enemy, we have ample evidence that she was vindictive, cruel, unscrupulous, dishonest and callous. To send a bejewelled cross to the holy church at Jerusalem, or build a monastery, she would ruin and despoil an innocent man or wreck the happiness of a woman: to secure the preaching of the true faith in Christ she would depose an upright Pope on forged evidence and put a scoundrel in the most sacred chair in Christendom. It was the temper of Constantinople—to rise from vice and folly to defend the doctrines of the Church and enforce them with the dagger or the torch. The further things that are said of her in the famous “Anecdotes” must, for the serious historian, remain unproved but not improbable.

CHAPTER IV
SOPHIA

The Emperor Justinian continued for seventeen years after the death of Theodora to occupy the golden throne and keep the throne of his consort vacant. As he approached the term of his life the palace throbbed with the impassioned struggle which always disturbed the last year of a childless Emperor, and the courtiers took sides with the relatives of Theodora or of Justinian, according to their forecast of the future. On the one side was Sophia, the niece and heiress of Theodora: on the other the Emperor’s nephew, Justin. Sophia, however, was diplomatic in the pursuit of her ambition. She discarded the heresy which it had been expedient to cherish while her aunt lived, accepted the hand of Justin, and settled with him in his palace by the shore, near Theodora’s palace-monastery, to await impatiently the retirement of the aged Emperor.

Justinian, says the contemporary lawyer Evagrius, passed in the year 565 to “those tortures which are provided in the nether world” for rulers who despoil their subjects. The “greatness” of Justinian seems to have been discovered by his mediæval admirers; contemporary writers usually, and justly, attribute to his great general Belisarius the military triumphs which partially restored the outline of the Empire during his reign, and to the (probably) pagan lawyer Tribonian the compilation of the famous Justinian Code, leaving to the Emperor himself the odium of those unprincipled and unjustifiable extortions which weakened and distressed his subjects. However that may be, the Emperor’s last years were framed in a decaying world, and the citizens of Constantinople regarded with hesitating admiration the superb edifices which he had raised. His nephew Justin was “lord of the palace” (Curopalates), and had ample opportunity to ensure the succession.

A profoundly courtly and accommodating poet of the time, Corippus, has left us a touching account of the accession of Justin and Sophia. The noble Callinicus comes one night to rouse them in their suburban palace with the distressing news that Justinian is no more. The spouses arise, and sit discussing the situation in a room looking over the moonlit Sea of Marmora, when a group of Senators enter, and urge Justin to accept the purple. He shrinks from the terrible dignity until their tears and prayers override his modesty, and, as the first faint flush of dawn outlines the houses, they walk sadly through the streets to the sacred palace. The guards and Candidates and servants line the long avenue from the iron gate to the bronze door of Daphne, and many tears are shed over the body of the late Emperor, which lies on a lofty golden catafalque. Sophia produces a piece of embroidery on which all the illustrious victories of the great Emperor are depicted. By this time the report has spread in the town, and the citizens fly to the palace. The blues and greens in festive dress, with their respective standards, line the path to St Sophia, whither they go to ask grace, and they return to the palace to put on the robes of state. Then four strong soldiers raise Justin aloft, standing on a shield, and the patriarch crowns him and Sophia, and the Emperor passes to the Hippodrome to receive the loyal greeting of his people.

When we turn from this moving description to the prosy pages of the lawyer Evagrius we find—without surprise—that Corippus has very generously drawn upon the poet’s licence. Evagrius bluntly observes that Justin “took” the purple the moment his uncle was dead, and suggests that the officers of the palace were already in his service. The death of Justinian was kept secret until Justin and Sophia had been crowned and were suddenly presented to the populace in their sheen of gold and jewels. Another contemporary writer from whom we learn much, Bishop John of Ephesus, adds a very credible and instructive detail. Sophia had been a Monophysite, like her aunt Theodora, until, in the year 562, an astute bishop had pointed out to her that Justinian was reluctant to set on the throne another woman who believed that there was only one nature in Christ. By this powerful argument Sophia was happily convinced that there were two natures in Christ, and accepted the orthodox baptism. It is our first glimpse of the character of the new Empress, and is quite in harmony with all that we know of her. She was the niece of Theodora.

The new reign opened auspiciously. As the Emperor stood in the royal gallery, or kathisma, overlooking the Hippodrome, to receive the plaudits of his people, the cry was raised, and soon ran through the crowded benches, that he should undo at once the dishonesty of his predecessor. If we may believe the poet, the citizens had, with great forethought, brought with them the bills of the treasury’s debts to them, and waved their tablets before the kathisma. One is tempted to believe that it was part of Justin’s plan to outstrip his cousins and other rivals. The gold also was produced with theatrical promptness, and from the glittering pile heaped at his feet the Emperor discharged all the debts in full. Sophia sustained her husband’s policy. We read that a few years after her accession she gathered the moneylenders of the city at her palace, paid all the debts due to them by the people, and ensured a large measure of popularity.

In virtue of the genial feeling engendered by this generous conduct the new Emperor and Empress were enabled to strengthen their throne at the expense of their rivals. The chief rival to the hopes of Justin had been another nephew of the late Emperor, Germanus, and his sons: a noble and gifted figure in comparison with the mean and petty intrigues of Justin. We saw how instinctively Theodora had hated this family. Germanus had ended his brilliant and stainless career in war, but his son Justin seems to have inherited his character and popularity, and certainly inherited his misfortunes. Obscure references to revolt in the chronicles of the time close with the curt statement that Justin and other nobles were put to death. Justin had been banished to Alexandria, and may have expressed resentment. Sophia joined with her husband in what we are tempted to regard as murder. “Justin and Sophia,” says the sardonic Evagrius, “did not abate their fury against the son of Germanus” until his severed and grisly head was exhibited to them. The metaphors of the time are so true to life that the historian is often puzzled as to the exact details of such episodes. The truth is, as we shall soon realize, that the Byzantine Empire, in spite of its opulence, its art and its religious ardour, was sinking toward barbarism.

For a few years Justin and Sophia ruled with moderation and success in their decaying dominion. The administration of justice was reformed and the decoration of churches and public buildings proceeded. Another palace—the Sophian palace—was added to the growing cluster of mansions which made up the imperial town. Justin cleared a vast site in the quarter where he and Sophia had lived, built for her a palace and hippodrome, and raised two large brass statues of himself and the Empress. In this marble-lined palace, in the imperial quarters, or in the Hieria palace across the water, or the new suburban palace at Blachernæ in the north, Sophia passed the first nine years of her reign without taking any apparent part in public affairs. Then her husband lost his mind, and she began to reveal her true character.

From his early tolerance Justin had passed to the temper of the persecutor, and the groans of the Monophysites were heard throughout the Empire. Whether this new phase of activity contributed to, or resulted from, his growing insanity, and how far Sophia was implicated in it, we do not know; but by the year 574 Justin had become a dangerous maniac. Bars had to be placed at his windows, and his servants had carefully to avoid the imperial teeth; while, in his less dangerous hours, he would shriek with delight, or bark like a dog, as the servants pulled him along the corridors in a small cart fitted with a throne. The commander of the Excubitors who guarded or amused him was a tall and very handsome Thracian officer named Tiberius, whose fine bluish eyes, light hair and beard, fresh florid complexion and manly form, pleased the eye of the Empress, and she induced Justin, in a lucid hour toward the end of the year 574, to raise him to the rank of Cæsar. Writers of the time describe with great feeling this last sane act of Justin II. The Empress, the patriarch and his clergy, and the nobles and Senators, were summoned to the palace, and Justin held to them a long and deeply penitent discourse, lamenting his sins and cruelty, and recommending his wife and his Empire to the fortunate Tiberius. The scepticism of the historian is apparently silenced by the weighty assurance of Bishop John that this remarkable speech of the insane ruler was taken down in shorthand,[11] but the publication of such a statement would be by no means inconsistent with the character of Sophia, and we must interpret the narrative with some liberality.

In most of the historians we read that, when Justin died and Tiberius ascended the throne, a romantic scene was witnessed in the Hippodrome and the astute Sophia was outwitted by her handsome favourite. Sophia, it is said, proposed to marry him, but when the crowd in the Hippodrome cried, “Let us see a Roman Empress,” he replied, through the herald, that an Empress already existed, and that her name was similar to that of a church in the city, the position of which he indicated. The citizens at once solved the conundrum, acclaimed his secret wife Anastasia, and laughed at the discomfiture of Sophia, who retired to her palace in anger and mortification.

The entire inaccuracy of this legend, which has found its way into Gibbon and all the earlier historians, must confirm our feeling of reserve in reading the Byzantine chroniclers. It is true that Sophia designed to marry Tiberius, and we may confidently assume that his marriage was a secret at the time when she raised him to the cæsarship. But we now know from John of Ephesus that Sophia learned of the marriage of Tiberius long before the death of her husband, and the citizens of Constantinople cannot have been unaware of it. Bishop John observes that she looked with dry eyes on the burly figure of her husband as he shrieked and laughed in his toy chariot; he was, she said, deservedly punished for his sins, and the Empire would now fall into her more capable hands. She induced the Senate to consent to the elevation of the imposing officer, put an edifying discourse into the mouth of Justin—unless one prefers the singular story of his hour of lucidity and eloquence—and bade the patriarch clothe him in the glittering insignia of a Cæsar. We can imagine her mortification when she discovered that he was already married.

The entry of Ino, wife of Tiberius, into the roll of the Byzantine Empresses is romantic enough without this discredited story of the concealment of her existence until her husband was on the throne. Tiberius was a simple provincial soldier who had won his way to the captainship of the guards and to the purple by his fascinating appearance. Gibbon represents beauty as one of his many virtues; it was certainly much more conspicuous than any other virtue he may have possessed. He came from Daphnudium, which commentators place in the province of Thrace, and it seems to have been while he was on military service in that town that he met Ino. She was then married to a soldier, and must have been older than Tiberius, since we read that he was betrothed to her daughter. The daughter died, however, and, as the husband also presently died, Tiberius gave his hand to the widow, a rustic and undistinguished matron of a frontier province. When Tiberius was promoted to the captainship of the imperial guards, Ino came to Constantinople, and lived there in obscurity with her surviving daughters, Charito and Constantina. Here the simple provincial family learned that Tiberius had been raised to the dazzling height of the cæsarship.

But it soon became apparent that Ino had, by her elevation, incurred the resentment of the all-powerful Empress. It is said that Justin, in one of his lucid hours, urged that Tiberius should take up his residence in the sacred palace, and that, since the flesh of young men was weak, Ino should reside with him. Sophia bluntly refused her consent. “Fool,” Bishop John represents her as saying, “do you who have invested yourself with the insignia of royalty wish to make me as great a simpleton as yourself? As long as I live I will never give my kingdom and crown to another, nor shall another enter here.” Tiberius, knowing that she might still arrest his progress toward the throne, submitted, and Ino and her daughters were installed in the splendid Hormisdas palace—now purified of Theodora’s monks and hermits—which Justinian had decorated for his mistress. Such quarters as Tiberius was permitted to have in the main palace were poor and inadequate; he preferred to retire each night to the mansion by the shore.

During the four years that followed Sophia ruled with the power and rigour of an autocrat. When Tiberius, seeing the vast sums of money which she and Justin had amassed, and affecting to regard it as unjustly extorted, began to squander it on the people, she deprived him of the key of the treasury. It is not unlikely that he was trying to win popularity independently of her. When nobles, mindful of her attitude, asked if they might visit the wife of the Cæsar, she angrily told them to “be quiet,” as it was “no business of theirs.” It was, in fact, rumoured in the city that, as two contemporary writers assure us, she urged Tiberius to divorce his wife and prepare to marry her. We shall see later that, in spite of the rigorous teaching of the Church, a Byzantine Emperor, with the tacit connivance of the archbishop, more than once divorced his wife. As Justin lingered, and no one dared visit the trembling ladies in the Hormisdas palace, the courage of the provincial matron failed and she fled back to her native town.

In September 578, however, Justin passed the imperial crown to Tiberius, and died nine days afterwards. Sophia had more than the strength, but less than the penetration, of her aunt Theodora, and she very quickly discovered that she had misjudged the submissive Cæsar. I have already rejected the fable that he now revealed to the citizens for the first time the existence of his wife. It is more plausible to assume that his servants were at work among the citizens ensuring that, the moment he appeared in the kathisma in his stiff gold tunic, the cry should ring out: “Let us see the Roman Empress.” He submitted with alacrity to the voice of the people. Officers of distinction were at once despatched to Thrace, to bring Ino to the palace, and Sophia retired in great chagrin to her quarters.

Ino, like so many of the Roman Empresses, remains a mere name to which are attached a number of singular and romantic adventures, but a little consideration of her behaviour in these adventures affords an occasional glimpse of her personality. A simple and, no doubt, quite uncultivated provincial matron, she had gladly exchanged the troubled splendours of a palace for the tranquil plainness of her former home in Daphnudium. The faithful Tiberius had occasionally visited her in her retirement, and it was doubtless understood that when the death of Justin made him free to defy Sophia she should return to the Court. The day had arrived, and her humble home in the provinces was now besieged by nobles and officers who were eager to escort her across the sea to the bronze-roofed palace. “Come in the morning, and we will start immediately,” Ino told them. In the morning, however, they found that Ino and her daughters, disliking the pomp of an escort and the scenes which their passage would cause, had quietly departed during the night, and they followed in very evil temper to Constantinople.

Tiberius and the Senators and nobles met Ino at the city quay, and she was presently clothed in the gold tunic and purple mantle of the Empress. In a covered litter, accompanied by a crowd of eunuchs and chamberlains, she proceeded from the palace to the great church of St Sophia between the living hedges of the populace. It was here that her name was changed to Anastasia. Since the introduction of Empresses with provincial or pagan names a custom had arisen of changing the name at coronation, and the right to do so had been genially accorded to the people. On this occasion the ceremony was more animated than usual. The greens, standing under their banner at their appointed station, raised the cry of “Helena”; from the next station the blues raised the counter-cry of “Anastasia,” and “so fiercely did they contend,” says the bishop, “with rival shouts for the honour of naming her that a great and terrible riot ensued and all the people were in confusion.” The blues seem to have been in the majority, and from her baptism of blood Ino emerged with the royal name of Anastasia; from the cathedral she presently returned to the sacred palace as Empress or “Queen” Antastasia.

From that moment we lose sight of the new Empress, and must imagine her peacefully vegetating in the marble-lined halls and the superb gardens of her palaces. The interest passes once more to Sophia. As soon as she realized that Tiberius had shaken off her control she removed large sums of money and much treasure from the main palace, and went to live in her Sophian palace by the Julian Port. Tiberius, knowing her temper and the vicissitudes of imperial life at Constantinople, regarded this action with distrust, and tried to disarm her. “Dwell here, and be content, as my mother,” he urged, pressing her to remain in Daphne. She refused to do so, and he was content to assign her an imperial Court and make it known by decree that she was to be honoured as his “mother.” He then married Charito, the daughter of Anastasia, to a distinguished officer, raised him to the rank of Cæsar, and prepared to meet the intrigues of his adopted mother.

The strong and ambitious woman chafed in the small world to which she found herself reduced and soon began to quarrel with the Emperor. Justin had begun the building of a lighthouse at the Julian Port, near the great brass statues of himself and Sophia, and Tiberius pressed Sophia to complete it. She pointed out that it was a work of public usefulness, and therefore the Emperor must undertake it. Tiberius refused, and the relations between them were strained. Here, unfortunately, our informant becomes less generous with the interesting historical matter which he mingles with his narrative of Church affairs. He tells us only that the “proud and malignant” old Empress “set on foot plots without number against Tiberius,” and was at length deprived of her imperial status and retinue. Sophia was probably still in the prime of life—Byzantine women usually married about the age of fifteen—and this drastic step would merely dispose her to more violent action, but it soon became apparent that a greater power than that of kings and queens was about to intervene. Tiberius was consumptive. In the summer of 582, after less than four years’ enjoyment of his easily won honours, he felt that the end was approaching and sought a successor.

A contemporary ecclesiastical writer seems to suggest Sophia when he tells us that Tiberius died of poison, administered to him in a dish of mulberries, but we may accept the kindlier view that he was delicate and consumptive, and brought about a crisis by some indiscretion at table. A popular officer from the Persian wars named Maurice was in the city at the time, and Tiberius—passing over, for some unknown reason, the elder daughter of Anastasia and her husband—offered him the hand of the younger daughter, Constantina, and the crown. Maurice, an undistinguished provincial like Tiberius—he came from Cappadocia—was crowned on 5th August, and married Constantina a few days afterwards. It is expressly recorded that the marriage was celebrated with great magnificence. Maurice was a robust, clean-shaven, ruddy-featured young man: a man whose goodwill was as obvious as his incapacity to restore a stricken Empire. The personal features of the Empresses are never described by the Byzantine writers, but we are told that Constantina made a brave show in her bridal tunic of cloth of gold, edged with purple and sprinkled with diamonds, amongst the crowd of richly dressed nobles. The citizens honoured the new dynasty with banquets and illuminations, little dreaming of the horrible tragedy which would extinguish it in blood.

Tiberius died a week later, and Anastasia seems to have survived her husband only a few years. Sophia returned to the palace after the death of Tiberius, and spent her last years in tranquillity. But the twenty years’ reign of Maurice is barren of interest for the biographer of the Empresses, and we must pass quickly over its mediocre annals to its tragic termination. Twelve months after the coronation Constantinople was again seething with joyous excitement. Constantina had a son, and it was the first time in two hundred years that a boy had been “born in the Porphyra”: an appalling comment on Byzantine court life. Very costly gifts were brought to the little Theodosius, as he lay with his mother, a week or two later, under sheets of cloth of gold to receive the ladies of the city. Four years later the boy was made Cæsar, and brothers and sisters followed him into the world with great regularity, until Maurice saw a family of nine children about him, giving promise of an endless dynasty. Anastasia died a few years afterwards. Sophia is mentioned only once more in the chronicles. Fourteen or fifteen years after the coronation of Maurice we read that Sophia and Constantina presented the Emperor with a magnificent crown, and that he offended them by piously suspending it over the altar in one of the churches. We do not know in what year she died, but it is clear that she did not live to witness the horrible fate of Maurice and Constantina. No grave blunder was committed by Maurice as long as she remained in the palace, but it must have been soon after her death that he began to incur the disdain of the people and the army, and to prepare the tragedy which closed his life and that of his Empress.

The causes of that tragedy belong to history; it is enough to note here that Maurice converted the disdain of the troops into fierce anger by refusing to redeem a number of them who had fallen into the merciless hands of the barbarians. From that moment even the rabble of Constantinople could insult him with impunity. One day when he and his eldest son Theodosius were walking barefoot at the head of a religious procession, they were stoned and compelled to run for their lives. On another day the crowd found a man with some resemblance to Maurice, clothed him in black, crowned him with garlic, and drove him on an ass through the city amidst a chorus of jeering and execration. Then some troops which he had ordered to winter in the hard lands beyond the Danube revolted and marched upon Constantinople under their leader Phocas. Maurice nervously ordered games in the Hippodrome, and bade the people not be alarmed. They were not alarmed, as they had little idea of loyalty to the despised Emperor, and there was as yet no question of raising to the purple the brutal officer in command of the insurgent troops.

Phocas and his troops had now reached the outskirts of the city. One day Theodosius and his father-in-law, Germanus, were hunting in that region when a messenger of Phocas accosted them and proposed that Theodosius should replace his father on the throne, or else Germanus should take the crown. Although they refused, Maurice heard of the invitation, and accused them of conspiracy. Germanus fled to the altar, and Maurice, scourging his son for warning Germanus, sent guards to drag him from the church. This provoked a rising of the people, and Maurice fled across the water with his family. Maurice, now an old man of sixty-three, was nearly wrecked in crossing during the night, and was racked with gout. He had some years before befriended the King of Persia, and he now sent Theodosius to ask help from that monarch. The young man was, however, presently recalled by a messenger who said that his father intended to meet his fate with religious resignation. He returned to find that his father and five brothers had been butchered, and his mother and three sisters confined in a private house, at the command of the Emperor Phocas.

Phocas, a little, deformed, red-haired man of repulsive appearance and character, had at the last moment taken the purple, and won the people by showering gold among them as he drove in the imperial litter, drawn by four white horses, from the church to the palace. On the following day his wife Leontia was crowned. As she went from the palace to St Sophia another riot occurred between the blues and greens, and, when Phocas sent an officer to quell the disturbance, some of them threateningly retorted: “Maurice is still alive.”[12] Soldiers were at once sent to the village on the Bay of Nicomedia which Maurice had reached with his family. The five young boys were beheaded before their father’s eyes, and he was then despatched. When Theodosius returned a few days later, he fled to the church, but he in turn was dragged out by the soldiers and put to death.

Constantina and her daughters were confined “in the house of Leo,” the chronicler says, and we may assume that this was a private house in the district. Unfortunately for the unhappy Empress, the new reign at once gave rise to intense disgust, and she became involved in plots to overthrow Phocas. The new Emperor was a vulgar and brutal soldier, plunging at once into an orgy of blood and licence. The Empress Leontia—probably a Syrian, as Phocas had a Syrian treasurer named Leontius—is said to have been “as bad as Phocas,” but we have no detailed information about her. She was probably one of the strangest in the strange gallery of the Byzantine Empresses. Within a couple of years a plot was formed to drive this incongruous pair from the throne they had usurped, and the patrician Germanus, who was the chief conspirator, sent a eunuch to deliver Constantina and her daughters and bring them in secrecy to the cathedral. It was felt that Constantina, feeble and passive as she seems to have been throughout her stirring experiences, would be the best figure to attract the sympathies of the people. It is one of the many proofs of the appalling degradation to which the Roman Empire had sunk that the plot failed. The issue turned, not on honour and manliness, but on greed. Phocas had been liberal with money and sports, and the greens, rejecting the smaller offers of the agents of Germanus, assembled in the Hippodrome to acclaim the tyrant and revile the helpless widow of their Emperor.

Phocas turned ferociously upon the conspirators. Several nobles were put to death; Germanus and Philippicus, the brother-in-law of Maurice, were condemned to shave their heads and enlist in the ranks of the clergy. The more terrible fate seemed to be in store for Constantina and her daughters when a troop of soldiers burst into the cathedral and threatened to drag them from the altars, but the archbishop Cyriacus manfully protested, and Phocas had to swear to spare their lives before the patriarch would suffer them to leave the sanctuary. They were confined in a nunnery, apparently in or near the city.

In this confinement Constantina presently heard that the bloody reign of Phocas was becoming intolerable, and she was encouraged to enter into communication once more with Germanus. Whether or no the plot was inspired by Phocas himself, the female servant who carried the secret messages from the priestly home of Germanus to the nunnery of Constantina betrayed them to the tyrant, and he hastened to rid the Empire of the last reminders of Maurice. Constantina was tortured and compelled to name one of the patricians. By the same fearful means a number of the nobility were accused, and the city was once more driven into mourning. The hands and feet of the accused were cut off, and their mangled bodies were then burned alive in the public places. Even the daughter of Germanus, the young widow of Theodosius, was put to death. For Constantina and her daughters the brutal tyrant devised an exquisite punishment. They were taken across the water to the spot, on the Bay of Nicomedia, where Maurice and his sons had been put to death, and there the heads were struck from the bodies of Constantina and her three innocent daughters. The Empire of Rome had touched a deeper depth than it had ever done in its pagan days.

CHAPTER V
MARTINA

Over the eight years’ reign of Phocas and his consort we have little disposition, and not much occasion, to linger. The Empress Leontia is characterized for us only by the one contemptuous phrase that she was “as bad as Phocas.” We may trust that she equalled him neither in brutality nor licentiousness, but the slender indications suggest that she was some such low type of Syrian woman as a coarse and vicious soldier would be likely to choose for his companion. A few words must suffice to explain her exit from the imperial stage and the introduction of a fairer woman to the throne.

As the discontent increased in Constantinople, Phocas, his brutality fostered by indulgence and vice, turned upon his subjects with increasing savagery. Plots were discovered or suspected, and hands and feet and heads fell under the axes of the guards. At length Priscus heard that an upright and distinguished commander, who governed the African province, had cast off his allegiance to Phocas, and he invited Heraclius to come and seize the throne. Heraclius was too old to embark on so adventurous an enterprise, but in the spring of 609 he sent a fleet under the command of his son Heraclius and at the same time entrusted his nephew Nicetas with an army which was to range the coast of Africa and occupy Egypt. The curious statement, repeated in most historians, that whichever of the young men reached Constantinople first was to have the crown, is shown by a recently translated manuscript to be inaccurate, as we might suspect.[13] Heraclius dallied in the Mediterranean until his cousin had made progress, and it was not until 3rd October 610 that the liberating fleet, exhibiting at the prow of its commander’s vessel a picture of the Virgin which angels had brought from heaven, came in sight of Constantinople. At once Phocas found a tide of desertions, and, after a feeble naval engagement on the following day, a Sunday, he fled in despair to the palace. So far was he abandoned that a citizen, whose wife he had violated, penetrated the palace during the night, dragged him to the quay, and took him on a boat to the fleet early on the Monday morning. Nicephorus, a later patriarch of Constantinople, gives us an appalling picture of his fate—and of Constantinople. He was at once cut to pieces, the member by which he had notoriously sinned was carried on a pole through the city, and his bleeding trunk was dragged through the streets and burned. Of the Empress Leontia and her fate we have no information.

The young Heraclius—he was in his thirty-sixth year, a robust, broad-chested man with fine grey eyes and light curly hair—must not be held responsible for the excesses of the Byzantine mob, though we shall not find him a man of delicate feeling. He proceeded at once, not only to assume the purple, but to provide Constantinople with an Empress. Fabia, daughter of an African noble named Rogatus, was in Constantinople with the wife of the elder Heraclius when it was announced that the African fleet lay in the Grecian waters. Phocas heard that the mother and the betrothed of his opponent were in the city, and they must have had a narrow escape from death. He was content, however, to confine them in a nunnery or penitentiary, and from this hazardous position Fabia was released to find her lover master of Constantinople. She was a beautiful and delicate girl, and the biographer must feel some impatience that the few Empresses of this more attractive character are so slenderly noticed by the chroniclers, while they dilate, as far as their prejudice against mere women will allow them, on the sins or audacities of the bolder Empresses.

Heraclius does not seem to have been eager to assume the purple, and, knowing as we do the accidents of imperial life and the degradation of the Empire, we can believe that he was sincere in offering the crown to Priscus, the son-in-law of Phocas. Priscus refused, and the long ceremonies of coronation at once proceeded. After the coronation in St Sophia he was married to Fabia, and, under the name of the Empress Eudocia, she entered the sacred palace which Leontia had vacated. But the story of Eudocia is brief and uninteresting, and we hardly make her acquaintance before a premature death removes her from the scene.

Indeed, the only details recorded of Eudocia are that she bore her husband two children in the first two years of her marriage and died of the strain. With the birth of her first child, Epiphania Eudocia, is connected one of those lively incidents which so well illustrate the character of the later Roman Empire, even under its better rulers. The patrician Priscus had refused the purple, but it came to the ears of Heraclius that he was secretly disaffected and abusive, and the Emperor chose a dramatic moment for disarming him. He invited Priscus to be godfather to the little Epiphania, and, in the midst of the ceremony, in view of the crowd of nobles and priests, charged him with his treachery. Striking Priscus on the face with a book which lay at hand—probably a Prayer Book—he directed that his head be shaven on the spot, and the great noble passed from the life of camp and Court to one of those monasteries of the Empire which harboured many such strange inmates.

In the following May (612) Eudocia bore a son, Heraclius Constantinas, and her frail constitution never recovered from the strain. She had gone during the summer to the healthier palace at Blachernæ, to the north of Constantinople, and there an attack of epilepsy carried her off in the month of August. It is painful to read that the funeral of this fine and delicate Empress was disgraced by one of the most repulsive exhibitions of Byzantine coarseness. The body was conveyed by water to the city, and borne solemnly through the streets to the great church between the mourning citizens. Just as the body was passing a certain window, a maid-servant, who was watching the procession, carelessly spat and the wind carried the spittle to the robes of the dead queen. The girl was burned alive on Eudocia’s tomb for the involuntary insult, and even her mistress escaped only by concealing herself.

Two years afterwards Heraclius married again. The new Byzantine Empress, whose name stands at the head of this chapter, was one of those strong and ambitious women who generally contrive, either by their vices or their crimes, to break through the anti-feminist reserve of the later Greek writers, but in this case the prejudice is increased and we follow Martina with difficulty through her long and adventurous career. She was the niece of Heraclius, and, in spite of the support she gave to her husband in his brilliant defence of eastern Christendom against the Persians, she remains under the shadow of the sin of incest.

Historians have devised many reasons for the audacity of Heraclius in marrying his niece, but we need hardly assume more than that she had a beauty and charm which the ecclesiastical writers disdain to confess. Her father was dead, and she lived in Constantinople with her mother Maria, sister of Heraclius, who had married a second time. Young, spirited and ambitious, she welcomed the passion of the Emperor, and was prepared with him to override every ecclesiastical scruple. The archbishop Sergius, a friendly and very able counsellor of the Emperor, tried in vain to dissuade them. Heraclius coolly observed that his objections were quite natural from his episcopal point of view, but it was useless to urge them, and the patriarch discreetly stood aside and allowed another priest to marry them. According to a reliable historian the patriarch himself afterwards crowned her in the great hall of the palace, and no doubt his bold and politic action silenced the angry murmurs which arose in the Hippodrome. It was only when, in the course of time, defective children were born of the marriage—the first son was wry-necked, the second deaf—when Heraclius himself ended a brilliant career in pain and humiliation, and when Martina passed from public life under a suspicion of murder, that Constantinople discovered the action of a divine curse and darkened the memory of Martina.

So prejudiced are later historians against Martina that even Gibbon has contracted something of their feeling, and suggested that a surrender to the charms, if not the arts, of Martina explains that remarkable indolence which Heraclius betrayed during the next few years, when the advancing Persians were rending his Empire and threatening to sweep Christianity out of Asia. We need not discuss here the problem of the Emperor’s alleged supineness during those years of disaster. The most recent biographer of Heraclius, Signor Pernice (“L’Imperatore Eraclio”), emphatically denies that Heraclius was indolent, and more authoritative historians, like Professor Bury, observe that the lack of funds and troops, and other internal difficulties, placed a formidable restraint on the very capable Emperor. When the war-drums beat at length, we shall find Martina, in spite of pregnancy, accompanying the Emperor in his long and arduous campaigns, and this gives us a right to assume that she supported him in the long years of preparation and organization.

At one time, three or four years after their marriage, it seemed that they would desert the sinking vessel of the Byzantine Empire and return to the tranquillity of Africa. Two devastating waves—the Persians to the south and the Avars to the north—were advancing across the impotent provinces, and it looked as though the little that was left of the Eastern Empire must soon be swallowed up in the mighty clash of their conflict. Egypt, Syria and Palestine were in the hands of the Persians, who looted and desecrated the most sacred shrines of Christendom. Famine resulted from the loss of the grain-bearing provinces, and plague followed closely upon famine. Heraclius and Martina put their treasures on a fleet of ships and resolved to transfer the throne to Africa. Then, when news came that the fleet had been destroyed in a storm, and the patriarch Sergius made the Emperor swear not to desert the city, Heraclius turned again to face his mountainous difficulties.

Raising the cry that the holy cross was in the hands of the pagans, and that the very existence of Christianity was in jeopardy, Heraclius succeeded in concentrating on a great national issue all the religious passion which had so long been expended on distracting controversies. A bargain was struck with the Church; its sacred vessels and incalculable treasures were to be put at the disposal of the Empire, and the value returned at the close of the war. By the beginning of the year 622 the preparations were completed, the young Heraclius Constantine was appointed nominal regent of the Empire, and the real administration was entrusted to the capable hands of the archbishop and one of the patricians. On Easter Day the last stirring services were held; and on the following day the gilded imperial galley, bearing the miraculous picture of the Virgin, the brightly painted war-galleys and the hundreds of ships which bore the last part of an army of more than a hundred thousand men, sailed bravely toward the coast of Asia.

The Persian campaigns, which have put the name of Heraclius high in the list of imperial commanders, interest us because Martina set sail with her husband and accompanied him throughout the war. Unfortunately, the literary deacon of St Sophia, George of Pisidia, who tells the story of the war, shares the ecclesiastical prejudice against Martina, and never mentions her name. Congenial as the task would be, therefore, to follow the Emperor through his brilliant campaigns and imagine the spirited Martina sharing his perils and his triumphs, it is hardly a fitting task for a biographer. George of Pisidia, addressing Heraclius in the name of the clergy at St Sophia, had trusted that he would redden his black military boots in the blood of the heathen. He and Martina returned to Constantinople six months later, leaving the army in safe winter quarters, with a great victory and a brilliant march across Asia Minor to report. Martina sailed with her husband, in the following year, on his second and more dangerous campaign, and it was in the course of this campaign that she gave birth to the son Heraclius—usually called Heraclonas, to distinguish him from the father, apparently—whom we shall find tragically associated with her in her later years. She seems, indeed, to have accompanied Heraclius on all his journeys; but to what extent she kept pace with the advance of the troops—whether she reached the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris, and beheld the oriental luxury of the fallen camps and towns of the Persians—the prejudice of the deacon of St Sophia prevents us from ascertaining. She had at least the glory of accompanying her husband on one of the most brilliant, the most daring and the most profitable campaigns that ever illumined the Eastern Empire. Nor must her biographer forget to add that she bore several children during her six years’ wandering over the mountains and deserts of Asia Minor, Syria, Persia and Mesopotamia. Nine children, four of whom died young, were the issue of the marriage.

Martina shared, too, the splendid triumph which crowned the victories of Heraclius. In the spring of 628 the Emperor and Empress rejoined their family at the Hieria palace, on the Asiatic coast opposite Constantinople, whither, with torches by night and olive-branches by day, the citizens sailed to greet them. Heraclius would not return to his capital until the cross was restored to his hands, and the summer was spent by the united family in the Hieria palace. Early in September the cross arrived, and they went to Constantinople for the triumph. Preceded by the cross, Heraclius rode in a chariot drawn by four elephants through the Golden Gate and along the main street of the city (the Mese) to St Sophia, amidst scenes of such rejoicing as the Empire had not witnessed since the days of Belisarius. A superb entertainment in the Hippodrome followed, and then Heraclius joined his wife in the palace.

And here ends the glory of the Emperor Heraclius; the flame that had burst forth so splendidly in a time of dejection fell just as swiftly, and Heraclius exhibited a lamentable spectacle in face of an even greater peril than the Persians. The problem of the character of Heraclius might concern us if we had any satisfactory information about the behaviour of Martina during the next few years, but as the chroniclers almost refuse to notice her until they come to what they regard as her misdeeds, we have no occasion to linger over it. Her character induces us to believe that she attempted to awaken her husband from his lethargy until she saw that this was impossible, and that she then devoted her thoughts to securing the succession for her son and the virtual rule of the Empire for herself. This, in point of fact, is suggested by the meagre indications in the chronicles.

In the spring of 629 Heraclius took the cross back to its original shrine at Jerusalem, and from that time spent nine years in the provinces of Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor. During those years the Mohammedan power became a formidable menace to the Roman Empire, and the inaction of Heraclius is a scandal to historians. His nervous system was strained to the verge of insanity, and he retreated like one paralysed with terror before the advance of the Mohammedans. Martina foresaw the end, and began to prepare for the succession. There can be no doubt that in these later years Heraclius, whose religious fervour was now greatly increased, was troubled by the cry that his “incestuous” marriage had brought these troubles on the Empire. When his nephew Theodore retreated before the invincible Arabs, and came to reproach Heraclius for his “sin,” the Emperor sent him under guard to Constantinople and ordered that he should be disgraced. Some writers see in this the action of Martina, but it may quite well have been due to the broody nervousness of Heraclius himself.

It was plain that Heraclius would not stem the Mohammedan tide, and everywhere men talked of the succession. By the year 638 he and Martina were back in the Hieria palace, and the struggle deepened. Heraclius had now two children by his first wife Eudocia, and five (living) children by Martina. His eldest child, Epiphania Eudocia, had narrowly missed a romantic career. During the Persian war Heraclius had struck an alliance with the King of the Khazars, a wild people akin to the Huns, and, after gorgeously entertaining and rewarding him, had shown him a miniature of his beautiful daughter, then fifteen years old, and offered him her hand. It was only the death of the King in the next year that saved the delicate young girl from being added to the rude harem of the Hunnic prince. She was still unmarried. Her brother, Heraclius Constantinus, now twenty-six years old, was already associated in the Empire, and was the obvious heir to supreme power. But both Heraclius and Martina knew that the Emperor’s death would at once set her religious enemies to work to eject her and her children from the palace, and they were anxious to secure her position by associating her eldest son, Heraclonas, in the Empire. There were, besides, a natural son of Heraclius by an early concubine, named Athalaric, and the sons of his cousin Nicetas, who had helped him to win the Empire.

Two of these possible candidates for the purple were summarily dismissed. Athalaric and the nephew Theodore were charged with conspiracy at Constantinople, their hands and feet were struck off, and they were sent into exile. It is conjectured by some writers on Martina that she dictated this heavy punishment, and that her hand is seen in the events which follow. Of this there is no proof; but there can be no doubt that she was eager to secure the succession of Heraclonas, and that Heraclius was now an almost feeble-minded patient under her care. He persistently refused to cross the strip of water from Hieria to the city, and they were compelled at length to make a bridge of boats across the narrower part of the strait, and place artificial hedges of trees along its sides, so that he could ride to Constantinople without catching sight of the sea. The young Constantine, his eldest son, had inherited the delicacy of his mother, and it was necessary to provide for the event of his death. Should his sons inherit the purple, or should it pass to “the children of incest”? The city seethed with discussion.

In the final decision we may confidently recognize the voice of Martina. On 4th July 638 Heraclonas, then a boy of fifteen years,[14] was crowned in the palace by the patriarch Sergius; a younger son, David, was raised to the same dignity shortly afterwards, and the young daughters of Martina, Augustina and Martina, were entitled Augustæ. On the 1st of January 639 three Emperors rode in the procession: Heraclius, Constantine and Heraclonas. Martina had, apparently, triumphed; but more prudent citizens must have shaken their heads in reflecting on the struggle which would inevitably follow the death of Heraclius.

The Emperor lingered for more than two years in his impotent condition, and Martina meantime found a fresh and most powerful ally. The patriarch Sergius had died soon after crowning Heraclonas, leaving his metropolitan see to a monk, Pyrrhus, whom he had raised to the higher rank of the clergy. Pyrrhus became an ally of the Empress, who may possibly have assisted in his elevation, and the alliance was the stronger because Pyrrhus secretly favoured the sect of the Monophysites. From Constantine he would receive little encouragement, whereas Martina, as events proved, was ready to allow him to impose his metaphysical distinction on the Church in return for his political support. It is even said that Martina urged her husband to send the weakly Constantine against the Mohammedans, in the hope that he would not return. Such things are easily said, and easily believed, but incapable of proof.

In February 641 Heraclius died. He suffered in his last years from dropsy, and those who are curious to know by what appalling means the medical men of the time relieved such an affliction, and how the theologians of the time placidly traced the operation of a divine curse for marrying one’s niece, may read the details of his sufferings in the patriarch Nicephorus. To the last Heraclius was faithful to his beloved wife. He divided the government of the Empire equally between Constantine and Heraclonas, and he entrusted to the patriarch Pyrrhus a large sum of money to be given to Martina in the event of her enemies succeeding in driving her from power. The struggle began at once.

Martina convoked a meeting of the citizens—presumably in the Hippodrome—and had the will of Heraclius read to them. When the herald had concluded, the sullen silence was broken by a cry for the Emperors. Martina, who was evidently minded to keep the youths in the background and govern in their name, summoned the Emperors, but continued to act as mistress of the Empire. But Constantinople—a compound of inferior Greek and Roman with Syrian blood—always disliked feminine rule, and in face of the advancing Mohammedans regarded it with additional concern. “Honour to you as mother of the Emperors,” the citizens cried, “but to them as Emperors and lords. You, mistress, would not be able to resist and reply to barbarians and foreigners coming against the city. God forbid that the Roman commonwealth should fall so low.” We may take it that the chronicler has gathered into a speech the various murmurs which arose from the crowded benches of the Hippodrome. Plausible as the cry was, it was a grave blunder. The ailing, probably consumptive, Constantine had not the manliness of a ruler, and the palace became the theatre of the struggles of rival courtiers.

On the side of Constantine was the imperial treasurer Philagrius, and this man embittered the situation by informing the young Emperor of the money which Heraclius had left in charge of the archbishop and forcing him to pay it into the treasury. In order further to strengthen his position Philagrius represented to Constantine that his children would be in danger from Martina if he died. It is important to notice that the death of Constantine was plainly expected by all parties. Nothing is clearer than that he had inherited the delicacy of his mother, and was either epileptic or consumptive—more probably consumptive. The patriarch Nicephorus tells us that he was “chronically ill” and lived in a palace he had built at Chalcedon for the sake of his health. His Empress, Gregoria Anastasia, was a daughter of Nicetas, the young cousin who had set out from Africa with Heraclius, but we have no further information about her. For her sake and that of the children Constantine was persuaded by his intriguing courtiers to send an officer, Valentine, to the troops when he felt that his end was near. Valentine had not only a letter urging the troops to protect Constantine’s children from Martina, but a large sum of money to distribute amongst them. It is strange that historians have overlooked this very obvious intrigue and so easily accepted the clerical prejudice against Martina. If Martina were unable to meet “barbarians and foreigners”—a point which might be disputed—assuredly infants could not be trusted to do so.

Constantine died about three months after the death of his father. There is no serious ground whatever for the charge that he was poisoned by agents of Martina and Pyrrhus. The patriarch Nicephorus, the best authority, knows nothing of the rumour, and the very chroniclers, of a later date, who attach importance to it admit that Constantine suffered from a chronic malady. Indeed, when we find a contemporary (and recently published) ecclesiastical writer, the Bishop of Nikin, saying that Constantine after three months’ illness “vomited blood, and when he had lost all his blood he died,” we may confidently acquit Martina, and conclude that the young Emperor died of consumption. The statement of Constantine’s son, a boy of eleven, when he came to the throne, that Pyrrhus and Martina had been justly punished, is a mere echo of the pretext of those who deposed her. The poisoning of a consumptive youth would be a new and superfluous crime, and we have no reason to think that Martina was even normally criminal.

Martina at once assumed the government in the name of her son and expelled the hostile faction from the Court. Philagrius was visited with the most humane punishment of the time—he was forced to become a priest—and his friends were dispersed. But his emissary Valentine was in a strong position and he determined to put it to account. The large sum of money entrusted to him enabled him to purchase the devotion of an army, and he settled at Chalcedon with the ostentatious design of seeing that no evil was done to the young son of the late Emperor. Martina cleverly foiled his first move. She directed Heraclonas to become godfather to the boy, who was carefully kept in the palace at Constantinople, and to swear, with his hand on the cross, that no harm should be done to the child. Valentine then brought his troops nearer and began to ravage the suburbs and neighbourhood of the city, while his friends in Constantinople lit the flame of religious antagonism to Pyrrhus, who was unfortunately pressing his Monophysite tenets on the Church. Exasperated at the inconveniences of the siege and the heresy of the patriarch, the citizens now became restive. A mob invaded and pillaged the great church of St Sophia, and Pyrrhus was forced to abdicate. The power of Martina was now dangerously enfeebled, and she came to terms with Valentine. The ambitious officer was to be appointed “Count of the Excubitors,” or commander of the heavier guards, and to be excused from rendering an account of the money entrusted to him.

The further course of the intrigue is scantily known to us, as there is here a mysterious gap of thirty years in the narrative of Nicephorus. From later chronicles we learn that, before the end of 642, the Senate deposed Martina and Heraclonas. In spite of the notorious malady of Constantine, they were found guilty of having poisoned him, with the connivance of the archbishop, and were barbarously punished. The tongue of Martina and the nose of Heraclonas were slit—the text does not imply that they were cut off—and they were expelled from Constantinople. Valentine also is said to have been expelled, so that he must have changed sides. The further course of the spirited and unfortunate Empress and her son is told in the bare phrase that they “lived a private life and were buried together in the monastery of the Lord.” We do not know the place of exile, or the year of Martina’s death. That her punishment was unjust and barbaric seems now to be beyond question, and there is no excuse, beyond the amiable indiscretion of her marriage, for the evil repute which chroniclers have attached to the name of the Empress Martina. She seems to have been one of the best of the Byzantine Empresses.

CHAPTER VI
THE MOST PIOUS IRENE

The revolution which drove Martina from the palace set upon the throne a boy of eleven, Constans II. The wife whom he afterwards brought to share his splendour, and by whom he had three children, is not known to us even by name. We know only that when his crimes, or violent indiscretions, had rendered him so unpopular that he passed to Sicily, he sent for his wife and children. The Senators, however, had no mind to see the Court transferred to Italy. They detained the Empress and her children, and, as the life of Constans was shortly afterwards ended by his bath-attendant felling him with a soap-dish, the unknown Empress sank into complete obscurity.

His son and successor, Constantine IV., had so clear a title to the charge of brutality that no historian has ventured to dispute it, and we will trust that the Empress Anastasia, whose features and character are unknown to us, did not greatly lament the loss of a consort who could slit the noses of his royal brothers and castrate a noble youth for deploring the execution of his father. Nor can we think that she was happier under the reign of his son, Justinian II., since the only reference to her in the chronicle of his reign is that his favourite minister, a Persian eunuch, had her flogged in the sacred palace on one occasion. Her third and last appearance in history is even more tragic; but a new and quaint type of Empress meantime enters the scene, and in order to explain her arrival we must glance for a moment at the adventures of Justinian II.

Attaining the purple at the age of sixteen, Justinian seems at first to have sinned chiefly by the very natural blunder, in a young man, of admitting corrupt and extortionate ministers. A usurper then took advantage of his unpopularity to dislodge him from the throne, and sent him, with diminished nose, into exile at Cherson, on the Black Sea. Within a year Justinian had the satisfaction of hearing that his enemy had been forced by a new usurper to retire, also with diminished nose, into the tranquil shade of a monastery, and he proposed to regain his throne. The authorities of Cherson, however, decided to conciliate the new Emperor, Tiberius III., by sending Justinian to him in chains, and he fled to the land of the Khazars, who dwelt on the other side of the Black Sea. The Khazars were a wild Asiatic people, akin to the Huns, whose manners had been somewhat softened by contact with the Byzantine civilization, and their king, or chagan, not only received the fugitive with cordiality, but bestowed on him the hand of his royal daughter.

Theodora—a name conferred on her, no doubt, by Justinian in memory of the consort of his great predecessor Justinian I.—can hardly have boasted much beauty, being a Khazar, but she was not without spirit and character. She presently learned that her father had been bribed by Tiberius to surrender Justinian, and she warned him of his danger. Sending, in succession, for the two high officials who had been charged to arrest him, Justinian strangled them with his own hands and fled to Bulgaria, leaving his wife and infant daughter in the care of her father, who very amiably sheltered them. Within a year the faithful Theodora learned that she was mistress of the mighty city of the Greeks. Justinian had offered the hand of his daughter, then one year old, and some more solid advantages to the King of Bulgaria in exchange for an army, had laid siege to Constantinople, and had, with a few soldiers, crept through the water-conduit into the town and taken it. The appalling vengeance he wrought on his enemies and on the inhabitants, even to the babies, of Cherson may be read in history. It is, comparatively, an amiable trait in his character that he did not forget the yellow-skinned princess who had lightened the dark hours of his exile. She was brought with great pomp to the city, bringing two children to their truculent father, was crowned Empress, and enjoyed for a few years the undreamt-of splendour of the imperial palaces. Happily, she did not live to see the end of her husband’s savage vengeance. When a storm had threatened the life of Justinian on the Black Sea, his companions had urged him to disarm the divine wrath by forgiving his enemies. “If I spare them, may God drown me here,” he had replied, with more vigour than elegance. His orgy was closed by the inevitable assassination.

We catch a third and last glimpse of the Empress Anastasia at this point. The brood of Justinian was to be exterminated, and soldiers went to the palace of Blachernæ in search of Theodora’s boy. When they burst into the chapel they found the aged grandmother sitting, on guard, before the sanctuary. The six-year-old boy clung to the altar with one hand, and held a fragment of the “true cross” in the other, while his neck was loaded with the most sacred relics. But Byzantine piety was of a peculiar nature. The soldiers brushed aside the old lady, stripped the boy of his relics, took him out to the gate, and “cut his throat like a sheep.”

Three Emperors followed in six years, and came to violent ends. Then Leo the Isaurian (717–740) came upon the throne, and inaugurated the famous crusade of the Iconoclasts, or breakers of images. His wife Maria is known to us only as having received the title of Empress in 718, as a reward for bringing Constantine Copronymus into the world, and having scattered gold from her litter among the people as she was borne to St Sophia for the baptism of that ill-regulated infant. Another Asiatic princess then comes faintly into view, when, in his fourteenth or fifteenth year, Constantine marries a Khazar king’s daughter. The religious chroniclers would have us believe that she was endowed with much learning and piety, but the only ground of this remarkable claim is that she did not agree with her husband, as few women did, about the propriety of breaking the Virgin’s statues. After eighteen years of patient expectation she ushered a feeble infant, Leo IV., into the distracted Empire, and quitted it herself shortly afterwards. The Empress Maria succeeded to her place in the arms of Constantine in 750, and in 757 she left that very doubtful felicity to the Empress Eudocia. Eudocia was pious and fertile: it is all that we know of her. Nearing her first delivery she summoned the holy nun, Anthusa—whom her husband had had publicly stripped and whipped a short time before—and, in virtue of her prayers, presented Constantine with a son and daughter, simultaneously, shortly afterwards. Four other boys followed, and Eudocia, having behaved as a good Empress ought and furnished no material to the biographer, followed her two predecessors.

Meantime the famous Irene had entered the story of Byzantine life, and once more we are in a position to make a satisfactory study of Byzantine feminism. In the year 768, seven years before the death of Constantine V., Constantinople was delighted with a succession of festivities. On 1st April Eudocia was, after ten years of industrious maternal activity, crowned Empress, or Augusta, in the “banquet-room of nineteen tables,” with its golden roof and golden vessels, in the palace. On the following day, which was Easter Sunday, her eldest sons, Christopher and Nicephorus, were made Cæsars, and her third son, Nicetas, received the heavy title of nobilissimus (“most noble”), which gave the six-year-old boy a gold-embroidered mantle and a slender jewelled crown; so that the procession to church was headed by two Emperors, Constantine and young Leo, two Cæsars, and a “most noble,” all flinging gold and silver among the enchanted mob. But Leo was now approaching his twentieth year and must marry. The idea was mooted first of asking the hand of the daughter of Pepin the Frank, but it is said that the Western Christians frowned on the Kensitite heresy of the Eastern Court. So Constantine then resolved to seek a beautiful and eligible lady within his own dominions, and it was announced in the late summer that the prize had been awarded to Irene, the pride of Athens.

Irene was then a beautiful, talented and spirited girl of seventeen summers. As she had, apparently, no ancestors, and as Athens had become at that time a drowsy and almost obscure provincial town, we must suppose that—as she herself afterwards acted—imperial commissioners had been sent far and wide to examine candidates for the vacancy. Irene’s radiant Greek beauty, robust health, and lively intelligence pleased the officials; an imperial galley brought her to the palace of Hieria, on the Asiatic side; her qualifications were found to be adequate. There was one difficulty, and Irene gave early proof of her skill in casuistry in surmounting it. Not only was Irene a woman—and all women were on the side of the Virgin—but Athens was conservative in religion. Constantine demanded an oath, and Irene, with a large “mental reservation,” to use the elegant phrase of the experts in such matters, swore on the holy cross that she would not favour the worship of images.

Her story will turn largely on the question of Iconoclasm, and a few words on the subject may be useful. The real origin of Leo the Isaurian’s zeal against statues is obscure. Historians suggest the influence of the purer religion of Mohammed, but there was no cultural contact of Mohammedanism and Christianity, and an Isaurian soldier would hardly be the man to experience it if there were. When we find that the Iconoclasts went on to reject relics and monasticism and treat the Virgin in very cavalier fashion, I suggest that it was a Protestant or Rationalist movement, a spontaneous protest against the excessive superstition, clerical wealth and monastic parasitism of the time. It took strong root in the army; and we may assume that the permission to rifle wealthy churches, rather than any leaning to metaphysics, explains this zeal for advanced theology among the troops. Constantine, like his father, pressed the reform ferociously; and as monks and women were the chief recalcitrants, he fell upon the monks with grim determination. Their beards were oiled and fired: they were gathered in masses with nuns, and told to marry each other—as many did: they were forced to walk round the Hippodrome, to the delight of the mob, arm in arm with prostitutes. Even the reluctant patriarch of Constantinople was indelicately mutilated, driven on an ass round the Hippodrome, under a fire of spittle, and replaced by an obedient eunuch.

This was the Iconoclastic world into which the Athenian girl entered, armed with a mental reservation. From the palace of Hieria she went, at the beginning of September, to Constantinople, and her betrothal to Leo was celebrated in “the church of the Lighthouse.”

Three months later her probation was complete; on 13th December she received the wonderful crown of the Empresses, with its cascades of pearls and diamonds, in the gold-roofed banquet-room, and was married in the chapel of St Stephen within the palace.

Constantine remained on the throne for seven years, and Irene behaved, and avoided images, with the most exemplary propriety, until, in 775, the old Emperor joined his father in the eternal home to which the religious chroniclers luridly consign him. Still for some years Irene gave no sign of strong personality, unless we may see, as is probable, her influence in the events of the following year. She had borne a son in 770, and in 776 Leo was urged to admit this boy to a share of the Empire. The Emperor was delicate, possibly consumptive, and it will be remembered that he had five half-brothers, who offered rich material for intriguing eunuchs and discontented nobles. Irene was now a young woman of twenty-five, of strong and subtle intellect, and well acquainted with Byzantine history. Her obvious interest was to secure the succession for her son and exclude the children of Eudocia. Leo at first demurred to the crowning of the boy. He submitted that, if he died, the ways of Byzantium made it not unlikely that the child would be murdered. He was answered with an assurance that the whole Court and city were prepared to swear the most solemn allegiance to his son, and in the spring of 776 he prepared to associate the younger Constantine in his imperial power. It was becoming difficult in pious Constantinople to devise an oath sufficiently sacred to be taken seriously, and Leo exacted that all orders of the citizens should swear by the cross on its most solemn festival and then place a written record of their oath on the altar of the great church. On Good Friday, therefore, the officers, Senators, courtiers and various corporations of workers and idlers in the city, swore their mighty oath by the cross to know no sovereign but Constantine VI., and on the following day, when the last son of Eudocia, Eudocimus, was made a “most noble,” the written oaths were laid on the altar, to be carefully guarded by the patriarch—for a few years. On Easter Sunday Constantine was crowned in the Hippodrome in the early morning, and the glittering procession of Emperors, Cæsars, and “most nobles,” moved to the church, followed at a modest distance by Irene and her eunuchs and women.

Twelve months later the imperial family and the higher orders met in the gorgeous hall of the Magnaura palace for a different ceremony. It had been “discovered” that the Cæsar Nicephorus had conspired with the eunuchs and officers, and, when Leo announced the details—there was no trial—to the audience, it was at once decided that he be degraded to the rank of the clergy and banished to Cherson. One rival was put out of the way, and Leo continued to play with his caskets of jewels—his favourite occupation—and Irene to cultivate her policy of waiting. In her service was the eunuch Stauracius, a genius of intrigue and counter-intrigue, whose watchful servants could at any time detect or manufacture a conspiracy. On one occasion only, towards the end of her husband’s short reign, does Irene seem to have been indiscreet, though the indications are rather obscure.

Historians put it to the account of Leo that under him the fierce persecution of image-worshippers relaxed, but the question might be raised whether there was much occasion for persecuting. It is said that Irene secretly venerated images in her apartments and had about her a group of confidential devotees, waiting for the death of Leo; and the story runs that Leo, hearing of the conspiracy, forced his way into Irene’s apartments, and discovered two sacred statues hidden under a cushion. Whether or no it is true that Irene calmly lied—or made another mental reservation—and disowned the figures of Christ and His mother, it is certain that in the last year of his life Leo had a fit of Iconoclastic wrath, and numbers of palace officials and nobles were shaved into priests, dragged ignominiously round the Hippodrome, and forced to exchange the gilded service of the Empress for the austere service of the altar.

In view of this it is not surprising that, when Leo died a few months later, there was a faint rumour that Irene had poisoned him; though the more religious chroniclers tell us that, in his infatuation for jewels, he had taken from the church the rich crown which Maurice had suspended over the altars, put it on his sacrilegious head, which at once broke into fiery carbuncles, and perished miserably. We may take it that the delicate constitution of Leo IV. came to an end after a reign of four and a half years (in 780) and the Empress Irene entered upon her long, prosperous and blood-stained reign.

THE EMPRESS IRENE

FROM AN IVORY PLAQUE IN THE NATIONAL MUSEUM, FLORENCE

Constantine VI. was ten years old at the death of his father, and the administration naturally fell to Irene and her able, if unscrupulous, ministers. When all allowance has been made for the ability of her ministers, especially the eunuch-patrician Stauracius, it must be admitted that the Empress showed conspicuous talent and vigour, and brought about a wonderful restoration of the stricken Empire. Her abjuration of the Iconoclastic tenets not only brought comparative religious peace, in the course of time, but enabled her to strengthen her rule by friendly relations with the Papacy and with Charlemagne, whose star was rising in the West. The long and exhausting war in the East was brought to a close by diplomacy, and the military victories of Stauracius restored the rule of Constantinople in Greece and Thessaly. Prosperity brightened the Empire, and it almost returned to the happy position it had enjoyed under Justinian I. But from this brighter aspect of the reign of Irene, in which it is difficult to disentangle her action from that of her ministers, we must turn to events in which her character is more clearly, if less favourably, seen.

Six weeks had not elapsed since the death of Leo when it was announced that a dangerous conspiracy had been discovered, the object of which was to put the royal half-brothers of Leo on the throne. We can well believe that there was some discontent at the rule of a woman and a child, and that the feeble sons of Eudocia were ever disposed to listen to ambitious courtiers, but the discovery was opportune. It removed at one sweep all who seemed to be in a position to dispute Irene’s rule. The three Cæsars and the two “most nobles,” and a crowd of nobles and officers who were suspected of favouring them, were scourged, tonsured or exiled. Indeed, lest there should be any later error as to the clerical status of the children of Eudocia, Irene forced them publicly to administer the sacraments to the people in the great church. It was Christmas Day, and a vast crowd assembled to see the royal uncles dispensing the consecrated bread under the eyes of the vigorous Empress and her son.

The cruel spectacle was resented by many, and Elpidius, whom Irene had made Governor of Sicily, rebelled. Irene ordered the local officers to send him in chains to Constantinople, and, when they refused, she sent a fleet which quickly dislodged him and punished the rebels. Unfortunately, we read that the “most pious” Empress, as the admiring chroniclers call her, so far lost her temper as to flog the wife and children of Elpidius, and drive the innocent woman, with shorn hair, into a nunnery. A more amiable way of strengthening her throne was about the same time discovered by some courtier. A marvellous ancient tombstone was brought to Constantinople, and citizens gazed with awe on the inscription: “Christ will be born of the Virgin Mary, and I believe in him. Sun, thou shalt see me again one day under the reign of Constantine and Irene.” As this stone was certified to have been taken by a Thracian peasant from the tomb of some prehistoric “giant,” it did much to discredit the more rationalistic Iconoclasts, who scouted the virginity of Mary, and the opposition to the divine mission of Irene.

The time was not yet ripe, however, for an open disavowal of the Iconoclasts; the heresy was too deeply rooted in the army and the more cultivated circles of the city. Irene thought for a moment of an alliance with Charlemagne, and begged the hand of his daughter Rotrud for her son. The offer was cordially received, and Byzantine eunuchs were sent to initiate the Frankish maiden into the mysteries of the Greek tongue and Greek etiquette. The fame of Charlemagne now filled the world, and the young Constantine eagerly looked for the alliance with his daughter. It would be interesting to speculate what influence such an alliance would have had on the fortunes of Europe, and there can be no doubt that Irene committed a criminal blunder in withdrawing the proposal on what we must regard as selfish grounds. The only plausible reason that can be suggested is that she feared that her son might become a monarch in reality as well as name under the influence of Charlemagne, and she was determined to be at least co-ruler. The victories which Stauracius had meantime won in Greece and Thessaly must have given her greater confidence in her own resources. In 783 she proceeded herself with a large army—not forgetting the organs and other musical instruments of the Court, the chronicler says—to pacify and restore the province of Thrace.

She now felt strong enough to restore the worship of images. At the end of the year 783 the Iconoclastic archbishop Paul mysteriously retired from his see. Irene called a meeting of the notables in the Magnaura palace, and from the marvellous golden throne she announced that Paul had been stricken with deep penitence for his opposition to images and had retired to expiate his sin. She suggested that her secretary Tarasius should be made archbishop, and the nobles and clergy faithfully echoed the name of Tarasius. The secretary then protested that he too had misgivings on the image question, and would take office only on condition that a Church council was called to decide upon it. Within a month or two Irene had brought to Constantinople a crowd of bishops and heads of monasteries, and a fiery discussion proceeded in the church of the Apostles. The Iconoclasts were, of course, in a minority. Suddenly the doors were forced, and a troop of soldiers entered, with drawn swords, and threatened to make an end to Tarasius and his monks. “We have won; thank God, those fools and brutes have done no harm,” was the exultant cry of the Iconoclastic bishops—I translate literally from Theophanes[15]—and the meeting hurriedly dispersed.

Irene once more resorted to the kind of diplomacy of which she was a mistress. The rumour was spread that the Saracens were advancing, and the guards were shipped to the Asiatic side and marched toward the south. When they had reached some distance from the city, a message came from Constantinople that the war had been averted, and they might send their arms or equipment to the capital before returning themselves. They were then scattered over the provinces and the metropolitan guards were recruited from the orthodox ranks. The bishops and monks were convoked again, in the Council of Chalcedon, and in the last sitting of the Council, which was held in the Magnaura palace, the cult of images was formally restored.

In the meantime Irene had resumed the work of finding a wife for her son. If we are right in assuming that she rejected the daughter of Charlemagne in order that Constantine should not have any strength independently of her, we can understand her next procedure. One of those innumerable “lives of the saints” which have transmitted to us a few precarious fragments of genuine and interesting information gives us a very romantic version of the rise of the next Empress. In a remote Cappadocian village dwelt a very pious man who had won a local reputation for sanctity, and impoverished his family, by his generous almsgiving. He had three daughters, whose lives and prospects must have been prosy enough in their rude village until romance entered it one day in the person of an imperial commissioner. He was one of many sent all over the Empire by Irene in search of a mate for her son, and it seemed to him that the daughters of Philaretus corresponded to the standard given to him—a standard which specified the height and the size of the feet of the candidates as well as more material features.[16] They were taken to Constantinople, with numbers of other candidates for the glass slipper, and Maria, a beautiful maiden of eighteen, was chosen for the lofty honour. It sounds like a modified version of the story of Cinderella, but it was not the first time that obscure maidens had been chosen for imperial dignity on their looks, and the most reliable authority, Theophanes, tells us that Irene sent one of her officers into distant Armenia—Maria is variously described as Cappadocian, Paphlagonian and Armenian—for the obscure girl. She was married to the Emperor in November 788, but we cannot end, as story-tellers do, by saying that she was happy ever afterwards.

Constantine was now a youth of eighteen, and had courtiers of his own. With their aid he perceived that, although rescripts went out in the names of “Constantine and Irene,” the government was entirely in the hands of Irene and her ministers. He had keenly desired the daughter of Charlemagne, and he resented the forcing upon him of a village maiden. The year following his marriage was one of bitter discontent and secret whispering. Stauracius, however, or Irene, watched the conspirators closely, and in January 790 the net was drawn round them. They had intended to banish Irene to Sicily, and they now found themselves on the way to Sicily, their backs sore from the scourge and their heads marked with the odious sign of clerical office. Constantine himself was flogged, and confined for some time to the palace; it was decreed that henceforth the name of Irene should precede that of her son; and a formidable oath was imposed on the troops that they would not suffer Constantine to rule while she lived.

But the counsels of eunuchs and women, however vigorous they be in their class, are apt either to fall short of, or pass beyond, the golden mean in the game of politics. Regiment after regiment took the oath, until at last the troops in Armenia refused to submit to feminine rule. Irene sent the eunuch Alexius to persuade or coerce them. They made him their commander, spread the rebellion among other troops, and at length an army besieged the palace and dictated terms. Stauracius was scourged, tonsured and deported to Armenia; Irene was deposed and had to retire to a new palace—the Eleutherian palace—which she had built and stored with treasure for emergencies. The lament of Theophanes at this turn of the wheel, in which he sees the personal action of the devil, is equal to his naïve praise of all the tricks of Irene to secure and hold power in the cause of true religion.

In spite of that zeal for true religion, the modern reader will not have followed the career of Irene up to this point with unalloyed admiration. She was essentially a casuist, the very embodiment of the Byzantine religious spirit. Chaste she undoubtedly was, though we shall presently find her acting in that regard in drastic contradiction to the teaching of the Church; she was generous, even extravagant, with money, and she showed a sincere concern for the welfare of her subjects within the limits of her own ambition; but she betrays from the start that lack of moral scrupulousness which too often accompanies fervent piety in Byzantine women, and the bitter disappointment which closes the first part of her reign will now make her more unscrupulous than ever.

It was in October 790 that Irene was deposed. Fourteen months afterwards we find her returning to imperial power and making a fearful use of it. Constantine had yielded to her pressure and that of the nobles devoted to her, and again proclaimed that she was Empress and co-ruler of the Empire. The Armenian troops at once protested against the change, and, as their commander, Alexius, was in Constantinople at the time, he was scourged and converted into an abbé malgré lui. An expedition against the Bulgarians failed shortly afterwards, and, whether the failure did really lead to a conspiracy, or the plot was invented to serve the purpose of Irene and Constantine, a terrible clearance was made of their possible opponents. Alexius and Nicephorus (the uncle of the Emperor who had been made a cleric) had their eyes cut out; and three other sons of Eudocia were brought from their clerical homes and had their tongues cut. We must not too readily implicate Irene in these barbarities. She had not returned to her former influence and activity, and it was Constantine himself who led an army against the insurgents in Armenia and made a terrible end of their rebellion. In view, however, of Irene’s later behaviour, it is probable that she agreed to, if she did not inspire, these proceedings, and the authorities assure us that she now began to make selfish profit of the unpopularity of her son and encourage him in licence.

We have as yet said nothing of the imperial life of the young woman who had passed from her village home to the palace. The reason is that she seems to have been one of those admirable Empresses who impress the chroniclers only when they bear children or suffer misfortune. Maria had borne two daughters to Constantine, and the year of her misfortune was at hand. Constantine had never loved his wife and had freely sought consolation elsewhere; and in the year 794 his eye fell on a charming lady of his mother’s suite. Whether this lady was too chaste or too ambitious to admit his passion irregularly, we cannot say, but we have the emphatic assurance of the authorities that Irene encouraged the passion, and supported her son in his proposal to divorce Maria, in order still further to weaken his position. If such an act seem beyond the range of a mother’s ambition, I can only say that far worse is to follow.

On 3rd January 795, the unfortunate Maria was deposed from her dignity, exchanged her imperial robes for the rough black dress of a nun, and, with shorn hair, passed to a convent; and before the end of the same year the more fortunate Theodote was transferred from the service of Irene’s chamber (cubicularia) to the imperial dignity. It need hardly be said that this procedure was violently opposed to the solemn teaching of the Church, which now regarded marriage as absolutely indissoluble. The courtly patriarch Tarasius, who had been converted from a very secular secretary into an archbishop, proved accommodating enough; he declined to perform the marriage, but he permitted some enterprising priest named Joseph to do so, and he sanctioned the transfer of Maria to a nunnery. But the monks of the Empire raised once more their formidable chant of execration, and showered epithets on the Emperor and the archbishop. The great monastery of Saccudion, in Bithynia, was the centre of the agitation, under its vigorous abbot Plato.[17]

The next move of Irene was to espouse the cause of the monks who fulminated against her adulterous son and his “Jezebel,” and were punished for doing so. If we feel a scruple about admitting so malignant a course in a Christian mother, we must remember that these things are ascribed to her by chroniclers who are full of admiration for her piety, and that the tragic end of the story is quite beyond doubt. Constantine lost ground, and Irene watched her opportunity. It came in the month of September 796, when mother and son went, with a large and distinguished company, to take the hot baths at Prusia. Theodote had remained behind, so as to be near the Porphyra palace, and she presently sent a message that a son was born. Constantine galloped in delight to the city, and Irene set to work. By amiable conversation and secret gifts she won a number of the officers, and the conspiracy quietly proceeded when they returned to Constantinople. The following summer Constantine set out against the Saracens, and Irene, fearing that he might return with glory and renewed popularity, for he was a skilful and vigorous soldier, determined to strike.

Constantine was recalled to the city by some false intelligence, and as he went one day (17th June) from the Hippodrome to join his wife (whose baby had recently died) in the palace of Blachernæ, he was attacked. He escaped, and fled by boat to the Asiatic side, where Theodote joined him. The position was now critical, as a number of nobles and officers were with Constantine, and Irene heard that others were daily crossing the water. For a moment she trembled and thought of sending bishops to ask her son to allow her to retire into private life, but there remained one device. Among the courtiers with Constantine were some whom she had already compromised, and she sent a secret message to these men to the effect that she would reveal their perfidy to the Emperor if they remained with him. The stratagem succeeded. In the early morning of 15th August the Emperor was brought, bound, to his palace and lodged in the Porphyra; and there, in the very palace in which he had been born, his eyes were brutally cut out by the knives of the soldiers at the ninth hour of the day. Some of the chroniclers observe that the work was done in such a way that the men really intended to kill Constantine. That is misleading, since it would have been perfectly easy to kill him, whereas we know that he lingered in confinement in the Therapia palace for some years. The truth probably is that Irene’s casuistry permitted the horrible mutilation, but forbade the murder, of her son; but her agents probably concluded that if they accidentally and unintentionally killed Constantine there would be few tears shed.

It would be difficult to find a parallel to this horrible deed in the long story of the pagan Empresses, and we press on to the conclusion of Irene’s reign. For several years she continued to rule the Empire in peace and prosperity. One or two feeble revolts were made, and more eyes were cut from their sockets, but the year 799 opened with little sign of trouble. Decrees went forth in the name of “Irene, the great king and autocrat of the Romans.” She built convents and established charitable foundations. She gladdened the hearts of the poor by remitting taxes and import duties, and scattering money amongst them as she rode to church in a golden chariot drawn by four white horses, the reins of each held by one of the highest dignitaries of the Empire. The Pope blessed her—he had put out the eyes of his predecessor—and the great Charlemagne sent legates to ask her hand in marriage. And the blind Emperor lingered in his palace-prison with his faithful Theodote, waiting for the thunder of Jupiter.

In the year 800 the shadow of the avenger seemed to come over the palace. Irene had two powerful ministers, Stauracius (who had, of course, returned from the service of the altar) and Aetius, and their quarrels filled the palace and the heart of Irene with bitterness. In 799 she had been dangerously ill, and their intrigues had doubled. She recovered, and Stauracius determined to make a bold attempt to secure the purple. His conspiracy was discovered, and Irene, holding a council in the gold-roofed dining-hall, decreed that no military officer was to approach Stauracius. The sentence seems mild, but the truth was that, in spite of doctors and priests who lied to him even as he spat blood, Stauracius was dying. He passed away in June, and Aetius commanded the palace.

The end came in 802. Aetius had frustrated the proposal of a marriage of Charlemagne and Irene, who seems to have favoured it (she was still only in her fiftieth year), because he designed to secure the purple for his brother and thus maintain his position. But the legates of Charlemagne lingered in Constantinople, and witnessed the fall of the great Empress. On the evening of 31st October 802, when Irene lay ill in her Eleutherian palace, a group of nobles and officers knocked at the door of the Chalke and summoned the guard. They had, they said, been sent by Irene to put Nicephorus, the “chancellor of the exchequer,” on the throne; she wished to forestall Aetius. In the darkness and confusion they were admitted, and they took possession of the palace and set guards round the Eleutherian palace. Almost before dawn the next morning they conveyed Nicephorus to the great church to be crowned, and, although Irene’s liberality had won the people and they gathered in the square to damn Nicephorus and the archbishop and raise cheers for Irene, they were powerless. The nobles and officers were resolved to tolerate the insolence of Aetius no longer.

Irene, sick and dispirited, was incapable of making one of those spurts of energy or astute stratagems which had so often saved her. When the hypocritical Nicephorus came to visit her in her apartments, she quietly begged that she might be permitted to end her days in her Eleutherian palace. He had often been a guest at her table and grossly deceived her; even the nobles were yet to learn what a brute they had put on the throne. He promised that if she would swear on the cross to give up the whole of the imperial treasure, she should retire to her palace. It was believed that treasure was hidden in various places in that labyrinth of palaces; even the blind Constantine was brought forth to say in which wall a certain treasure was hidden. Irene swore her last oath, gave a list of the hiding-places—and was promptly imprisoned in a monastery she had built on the Princes’ Islands, a group of small islands, in view of the palace, on the Sea of Marmora.

Constantinople seems to have been deeply moved, and a month later she was removed to a dismal prison on the island of Lesbos. There, under a strong guard, rigorously isolated from her friends, she spent nine miserable months reflecting on the strange career she had run since she had left Athens in the pride of her youth and beauty. She died on 9th August 803, and was buried in her monastery on the Princes’ Islands.

CHAPTER VII
SAINT THEODORA

From the most pious Irene we proceed, after a passing glance at the half-dozen Empresses of less fame who come between them, to a notable Empress whose memory has actually been enshrined in the list of the canonized. Byzantine piety has at times assumed such peculiar features in the course of our story that we will not leap to the conclusion that at length we reach a woman in whom modern taste will find a realization of its standards. The restoration of the images of the Virgin and the founding of monasteries were in those days arguments powerful enough to silence the importunities of the devil’s advocate. Theodora will be found to have ways that the modern woman may or may not admire, but will assuredly not be encouraged to imitate. Yet it will be something to meet a powerful Byzantine Empress whose hands are not stained with blood, and, from her romantic elevation to her tragic fall, the story of Saint Theodora will prove of no little interest.

We have left Irene dying of a broken heart in her island prison while the perfidious Nicephorus wantons on her wealth in the sacred palace. Since no wife is associated with him in the chronicles, it is not ours to determine whether he really was “the sink of all the vices,” as the ecclesiastical writers say, or whether his anti-clerical spirit and his refusal to persecute heretics have not loaded the scales against him. The example of Charlemagne, who maintained an imperial harem in the heart of Christendom, seems to have affected him. When he had commanded (for his son Stauracius) one of those “beauty shows” by which the Byzantine Court often selected a royal bride, and three blushing and beautiful maidens were presented for his final decision, he is said to have appropriated two of them and imposed the third on his son. The new Empress, Theophano, was an Athenian girl, a relative of Irene, but, though she was not devoid of ambition, Fate did not afford her the opportunity enjoyed by Irene. Nicephorus fell in war after a reign of nine years, and his skull, tastefully mounted in silver, became a favourite drinking-cup of the King of Bulgaria. But his son Stauracius was gravely wounded in the same battle, and was borne back to the city in a litter in a dangerous condition.

Theophano, who was childless, saw the crown slipping from her hands as soon as she had obtained it. The Emperor’s sister Procopia was married to the chief governor of the palace, a very handsome, amiable, black-haired youth, not wanting in popularity, and the soldiers and Senators whispered too loudly that he was fit to wear the purple. Stauracius, from his sickbed, petulantly ordered that the bright eyes of Michael should be cut out, and that the imperial power should pass to Theophano. Within a few weeks the army turned upon its helpless sovereign, and lodged him in a monastery. Theophano passed from the palace to a nunnery and lost the beautiful hair which had so recently helped to win her a throne; but it should be added, for the credit of Michael, that he enabled her to soften the disappointment with all the comfort that a large fortune could afford a woman with sacred vows.

Even more romance is packed into the brief story of the Empress Procopia. Rising with her father, Nicephorus, from the level of court officials to the imperial rank, she had married the handsome superintendent of the palace and had, after a fortunate escape from the vindictiveness of her brother (or of Theophano), been crowned mistress of the Roman world, in the gold-roofed triclinon on 2nd October 811. To her the Fates seemed to open a long and glorious career. Her husband had neither grit nor judgment, and she virtually undertook the administration of the Empire. Unhappily, she illustrated in a fatal degree the proverbial subservience of women to priests and monks. The policy of Nicephorus was reversed; the Church smiled under a shower of gold, while the heretics were lashed into sullen defiance in the provinces. Officers and nobles looked with disdain and irritation on this revival of clericalism, and even concerted a plot to bring the eyeless sons of Constantine VI. to the throne from their distant priestly homes. When, in the year 812, Procopia drove out at the head of the troops, who were marching against the Bulgarians, the soldiers murmured and the “simple-minded” Michael, as a contemporary calls him, was insulted. And when, in the following spring, Michael, relying on his spiritual advisers for carnal warfare, was ignominiously beaten by the Bulgarians, the soldiers offered the crown to a vigorous Armenian officer and marched on the city.

Thus in less than two years Procopia forfeited the power which, she believed, she had used so admirably. Her mild and timid husband returned to the capital to tell her that he proposed to resign and avoid a civil war. She raged in vain at his pusillanimity; the chroniclers tell us, in particular, that she dwelt with strong invective on the notion of this unlettered officer’s wife appearing in the purple. While they discussed, the army reached Constantinople, and they fled, with their children, to a chapel in the palace grounds near the sea. The end was ruthless and inevitable. Michael, who was little feared, was clothed with the monastic habit which befitted him, and placed on one of the Princes’ Islands, in the Sea of Marmora, from which so many kings and princes were to gaze upon the palace they had lost. His elder son was castrated. Procopia was shorn and clothed with the hated black dress of a nun, and, deprived of all her property, she lived for a few miserable years with her daughters in a convent on the fringe of the city.

The Empress Theodosia, wife of Leo the Armenian, who now ascended the throne, hardly merited all the disdain with which Procopia had depicted her in the imperial robes. She was the daughter of Arsaberes, an officer and patrician of such rank and culture that there had been an attempt to put him on the throne in the reign of Nicephorus. One of the chroniclers, however, speaks incidentally of Leo’s “incestuous marriage,” and we may assume that there was something wrong in the connexion. It matters little, as Theodosia remains in complete obscurity during her husband’s seven years’ reign. Only in the last week does she make her first, and last, appearance in history.

In spite of a sincere desire to reform the Empire, and the most energetic measures to purify and strengthen it, Leo became unpopular. Reformers were rarely popular at Constantinople, and Leo had the additional disadvantage of favouring the Iconoclasts. When fiery monks denounced his maxim of universal toleration, he resorted to violence, and hands and feet began to fall under the axes of his soldiers. At last he discovered that the Count of his guards, Michael, was at the head of a conspiracy, and he is said—many historians refuse to believe the statement—to have ordered that Michael be cast forthwith into the furnace which heated the baths of the palace. It was Christmas Eve, and the Empress was horrified to learn that the feast was to be desecrated in this way. As the soldiers conducted Michael through the palace, she rushed from her bed, with flying locks and disordered dress, and fell upon Leo “like a bacchante.” He sullenly postponed the execution, muttering: “You and the children will see what comes of keeping me from sin.” Michael was fettered and confined, and Leo retired with the key of the fetters in his breast.

The unknown story of Theodosia, daughter of Arsaberes, ends in a thrilling page of romance. Leo slept little, the fear that he had blundered tormenting him, and at last he went in the dead of night to the chamber in which Michael was confined. To his surprise he found Michael sleeping on the jailer’s bed, instead of being chained to the wall. He retired to consider the matter, but it seems that he took no steps, and, in the early morning, he went to the chapel to chant matins with the clergy. Now a page, who had been lying in a corner of Michael’s cell, had noticed the purple slippers of the man who had entered; he at once wakened Michael and his friendly jailer, and a message was hastily sent to friends in the city, threatening to betray them to Leo if they did not deliver Michael at once. It was, as I said, the depth of winter—it was now Christmas morning—and a group of singers were to enter the palace in the early hours to join with Leo in singing the service. Leo had a resonant voice, of which he was very proud. With these singers, hooded and cloaked with fur, the conspirators mingled, and made their way to the chapel, concealing their swords. They stood perplexed in the dim and cold chapel, as Leo had drawn his fur hood over his head and was unrecognizable, until at last his sonorous voice rang out, and their swords gleamed in the light of the lamp. Leo, a very powerful man, seized the cross, and defended himself for a time, but soon fell dead to the ground. Theodosia was turned adrift in the desolate Empire, her four boys were castrated—one dying under the brutal mutilation—and Michael the Stammerer, instead of passing to the furnace, sat on the golden throne, even before the fetters could be struck from his feet.

The reign of Michael introduces us at length to the woman whose name stands at the head of this chapter. Michael was the son of a Phrygian peasant, knowing more about pigs and mules than about Greek letters, says the indignant chronicler, and had risen from the lowest rank of the army. He had in early years married the daughter of an officer; though we may smile at the legend that Thecla was bestowed upon him because some soothsayer had foretold his fortune. Thecla had enjoyed a year or two of splendour and passed away, leaving a son and daughter. Second marriages were not favoured by the clergy and monks, and it is said that Michael secretly arranged with the Senators that they should press him to marry again; but when we find that he married a nun, we can hardly suppose that he was disposed to fear the clergy. His second Empress, Euphrosyne, has made no mark in history, yet she is interesting. It will be remembered that twenty years earlier the son of Irene had divorced his wife Maria, and sent her and her young daughters into a convent. It was one of these daughters who, after spending twenty years’ placid existence in a religious house during all the storms that had swept through the palace, was recalled to the world, relieved of her vows by the patriarch, and married to the boorish Michael. After four or five years’ further enjoyment of the palace, Michael was carried off by dysentery, and left the Empire to Euphrosyne and her stepson Theophilus. Here begins the story of the sainted Theodora, and ends the brief visit of Euphrosyne to the brighter world.

When Theophilus ascended the throne in 829 he is said to have been a widower, though still young. The chroniclers persistently state that the youngest of his five daughters married one of his officers a few years after his accession, and the only solution of this singular puzzle is said to be that an earlier wife had died and left him with several girls. He was not, at all events, married when he was crowned in 829, and, with the aid of Euphrosyne, he sought a consort. Once more matrimonial commissioners searched the city and the provinces, and every father of a beautiful girl hastened to display her charms to the imperial examiners. Some writers would confine the scrutiny to the city of Constantinople, but the fact that Theodora came from the distant province of Paphlagonia confirms the statement of George the Monk that the imperial commissioners travelled through “all regions” (of the Empire) in search of a perfect bride. The utmost that panegyric has been able to say of Theodora’s parents, Marinus and Theoclista, is that they were “not ignoble.” We may assume that, like the Empress Maria, the mother of Euphrosyne, she was discovered in some obscure village of Asia Minor and conducted, with fluttering heart, to the Court of the great king.

Euphrosyne added a picturesque feature to the “competition.” She arranged the élite of the candidates in a line in the hall of one of the palaces, gave Theophilus a golden apple, and bade him give the apple to the lady of his choice. He first approached a maiden named Casia, or Cassia, who was not only the most beautiful of them all, but had some repute for poetical talent. “How much evil has come through woman,” said the imperial prig, improvising a Greek verse. “Yet how many better things have come from woman,” the young poetess modestly retorted, in verse. To her great mortification he passed on, apparently displeased with her ready tongue, and gave the apple to Theodora. Casia retired to a nunnery and to the composition of hymns, and Theodora was, on Whitsunday 830, married and crowned by the patriarch Antony in the historic chapel of St Stephen.

Euphrosyne returned to her convent immediately after the coronation. Some authorities say that she was dismissed by Theophilus, others that she retired voluntarily. It is not improbable that twenty years of religious life had made her a real nun at heart, and she retired the moment she was relieved of those reasons of State which had interrupted her solitude.

During the thirteen years of the reign of Theophilus the Empress bore her children and confined herself to the gynæceum, as a good Empress should. Two sons and five daughters are assigned to her, but, as I said, some, if not all, of these daughters of Theophilus seem to have had an earlier mother. Maria is described as the youngest, yet about the year 832, two or three years after the marriage of Theodora, she married the commander Alexis. She died shortly afterwards.

Theodora had been piously educated in the orthodox faith, and it is piquant to read the approving language of the religious writers when they describe her duping her husband and breaking her oath to him. Cardinal Baronius, who is endorsed by the Bollandists, calls her “the glory and ornament of holy womanhood ... the unique example of exalted holiness in the east.” We shall follow these distinguished authorities on sanctity with some hesitation when we afterwards find Theodora encouraging her son in vice, in order that he may leave the administration to her and the clergy, and permitting him to hold drunken suppers with his mistress in her palace; but the worldly minded biographer must be less enthusiastic than they even about her earlier actions.

The first anecdote told of her is that the Emperor one day noticed a heavily laden ship making for the port of Constantinople and learned that it belonged to Theodora. He went down in great anger to the quay, and ordered the ship and its cargo to be burned. “God made me an Emperor,” he cried, “and my wife and Augusta has made me a shipowner.” The Bollandists merely enlarge at this point on the naughtiness of princes who wish to monopolize trade for their own profit, but I think that a better defence of Theodora can be imagined. The young Empress was probably blameless. It was a custom of courtiers to evade the duties on imports by trading in the name of the Empress, and Theodora would hardly understand the matter sufficiently to refuse her name at once.

The genial critic will also regard with some indulgence her petty mendacities in regard to the beloved images which she cherished in secret. One day her jester, or half-witted page, came suddenly into her room and found her embracing the forbidden statues. She told him that they were dolls, and Denderis went at once to tell Theophilus of the pretty dolls with which his wife played in secret. Theophilus angrily started from the table and went to her room. The fool was mistaken, she cried; she and her maids had been looking in a mirror, and the boy had taken their images in the mirror to be dolls.[18] Theophilus was not convinced. Little more could be learned from the page, who had been flogged by Theodora and told to hold his tongue about dolls, so that whenever Theophilus asked him, he said: “Hush, Emperor; nothing about dolls.” But his young daughters also now began to speak of dolls, especially when they returned from visits to Theodora’s mother, who had a palace at Gastria across the water. He learned from them that the old lady kept a chest full of pretty dolls, which they were encouraged to kiss and embrace when they visited her. The visits were immediately stopped, and Theodora was compelled to take the most sacred oaths that she would never favour the worship of images. Like Irene, she did so with mental reservation.

The long and vigorous reign of Theophilus ended sadly. Unsuccessful in war, indiscreet at home, and at war with the clergy, he wasted his talent in adding to the luxury of the Court. He found a wonderful mechanic and engaged him to fill the palace with expensive toys that seemed to enhance the imperial dignity. Before “Solomon’s Throne” in the Magnaura palace were set lions of gilded bronze which would rise and roar at the approach of foreign ambassadors. Golden trees, with golden singing birds, invisible organs, and all kinds of mechanical barbarities were added to the rare furniture of the palace. New palaces also were built in the grounds: a semicircular hall with roof of gold and doors of bronze and silver, fountains which gave aromatic wine from their silver pipes on feast-days, summer palaces and chapels completely lined with the choicest marbles and mosaics. A superb palace was raised on the Asiatic shore in imitation of the Caliph’s palace at Bagdad, and the palace at Blachernæ, in the cool northern suburb, now spread over a vast domain. But with all this facile splendour Theophilus was conscious that he failed to hold the ever-pressing enemies of the Empire, and he became morose and diseased. Theodora seems to have kept his affection to the end. In an earlier year she had detected him in criminal intimacy with one of her maids, and he had asked her forgiveness with great humility. His last act was a brutal murder in her interest. The noble Theophobos, who was married to the Emperor’s sister Helena, was in jail on some suspicion. Theophilus feared that he might aspire to the throne, and ordered the head of the unfortunate noble to be brought to him. He died in January 842, leaving the Empire to Theodora and her infant son Michael.[19]

Theodora now had supreme power, and her first care was to restore the worship of images, in spite of her heavy oaths to Theophilus. In this she needed diplomacy, as well as casuistry, since the learned patriarch John, as well as the majority of the Senators, were opposed to images. There was, moreover, a Council of Regency, consisting of three of the abler officials of the Court. The first of them, Theoclistos, the eunuch “keeper of the purple ink,” was an official of some ability, and so devoted to Theodora that, in spite of his condition, the gossip of the city associated the saint and the eunuch in a most unedifying manner. The second member was Manuel, an uncle of Theodora and an Iconoclast; the third her brother Bardas, a man of equal ability and unscrupulousness, who could be relied upon either to worship or to break an image according to his interest. It was to this man, in spite of notoriously immoral life, that Theodora entrusted the tutorship of the young prince; and there cannot be the slightest doubt that Michael was deliberately educated in vice and sensuality, in order to divert his attention from political power. St Theodora was to be the mother of the Nero of the Eastern Empire.

The first step was taken in the restoration of images shortly after the beginning of the Regency. Michael fell dangerously ill and at one time he was believed to be dead. The monks came from the great monastery of Studion, the most fiery centre of orthodoxy, to pray over the remains of the Iconoclast—a singular procedure—and it was presently announced that he had miraculously recovered his life and was converted to the worship of images. In this new zeal he pressed the Empress to remove the impious restriction on piety, and for a time she resisted, pleading the sanctity of her oath. Knowing Constantinople as we do, we have little difficulty in regarding the whole procedure as a comedy. At length a council was summoned in the house of Theoclistus, and the reform was sanctioned. The patriarch John was now ordered to convoke a synod; he refused, and the way in which that obstacle was removed so well illustrates the character of Constantinople, if not of Theodora, that it is worth describing.

John was one of the most learned men of his time, a genius in physical science and mechanical art. His rationalistic opposition to the popular cult of relics and statues, however, gave a dark aspect to his learning, and he was commonly regarded as a magician and a secret libertine. Men told each other of the subterraneous chamber which he had in his brother’s house for entertaining nuns and other pretty women. In reality, he seems to have been a learned and conscientious man, and, even when Bardas cruelly flogged him, he refused to submit to the Empress’s wish and relieve her from her oath. The report was given out from the palace that he had inflicted the marks of the scourge on himself, and had even attempted to commit suicide. He was at once deposed and confined in a monastery; and, when it was reported to Theodora, no doubt falsely, that he had there pricked the eyes out of a picture of Christ, she angrily sentenced him to lose his own eyes and to receive two hundred strokes of the loaded scourge. He had been one of the chief pillars of her husband’s reign. His friends, I may add, retorted by accusing the new patriarch Methodius of rape, but decency prevents me from describing how the archbishop happily escaped the charge by proving, in open court, that St Peter had miraculously relieved him from temptations of the flesh many years before.

The new patriarch convoked a synod, and crowds of monks flocked to Constantinople from all parts to encourage the good work, and marched through the streets of Constantinople under their sacred ensigns. Theodora surprised the bishops and abbots, as they sat in conclave, by demanding that they should issue a guarantee that her husband was absolved from his sins. It was a dangerous precedent, and they protested that they had no power to give such an assurance. Theodora then explained that she had presented a sacred image to Theophilus in his last hour, and that he had embraced it fervently. Modern historians are ungallant enough to disbelieve her story, and no doubt there were many at the time who distrusted Theodora’s casuistic ability, but when she proceeded to hint that image-worship would not be restored unless they satisfied her, they decreed that the sins of Theophilus had been undone by repentance. At the conclusion of the synod Theodora entertained the holy men in her Carian palace, or palace built entirely of the famous Carian marble, at Blachernæ. Near the end of the banquet, when the cakes and sweets were being served, her eye fell on the grim, disfigured face of the religious poet Theophanes. He had come from Palestine to Constantinople, during her husband’s reign, to fight for the images, and Theophilus had sent him into exile with no less than twelve lines of bad verse tattooed on his face, announcing that he was a “wretched vessel of superstition.” Theophanes marked the tearful gaze of the Empress, and impetuously cried that he would not forget to ask the judgment of God on Theophilus for the outrage. “Is this the way you keep your promise?” she exclaimed excitedly; and the bishops had to intervene and appease her and the martyr.

This restoration of image-worship seems to be the one virtue which ensured for Theodora a place in the Greek canon of the saints (on 11th February). That she led a chaste life we need not doubt for a moment. The rumour of amorous relations with Theoclistus is foolish gossip, and a man named Gebo, who afterwards claimed to be her natural son, was either an impostor or a lunatic. But the shallowness of her piety and weakness of her moral character are too plainly revealed in the debauching of her son by her own brother, into whose care she gave the young Emperor. The historian Finlay observes that “in the series of Byzantine Emperors from Leo III. to Michael III., only two proved utterly unfit for the duties of their station, and both appear to have been corrupted by the education they received from their mothers.” When we reflect on the strange types of men whom the disordered life of the Empire brought to the throne, this is a terrible impeachment of Irene and Theodora; and it is a just impeachment. No man was less fit than her brother Bardas to train a youth, and the only conceivable palliation of Theodora’s guilt is that she wished to retain power in the interest of the Church. How even that hope was mocked, and the rule of her son ended in debauchery and murder in her own house, we have next to consider.

For some ten years the Empire enjoyed comparative peace and prosperity. The Bulgarians, learning that a woman and a child ruled the Empire, made inflated demands, but Theodora met them with admirable firmness, and averted war. Her only grave blunder was the ruthless persecution of heresy. She sent officers to convert the masses of Paulicians in the eastern provinces, and, whether with her consent or no, they perpetrated horrible butcheries in the name of religion and engendered a civil war. Then, as Michael approached his sixteenth year, a series of terrible internal troubles and disorders set in.

Gladly following the example of his tutor Bardas, the young Emperor fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a high official of the Court named Inger. Eudocia Ingerina is described by one of the writers of the Court of Constantine VII.—her grandson—as “one of the most beautiful and most modest women of her time.” The course of this narrative will show that she was, as most of the chroniclers say, one of the most dissolute women of the time, second only to Theodora’s daughter Thecla. Whether she betrayed her laxity even at this early age, or whether Theodora merely dreaded an alliance of her son with a distinguished officer, we cannot confidently say. The chroniclers suggest that she was already the lover of Michael, and that Theodora and Theoclistus interfered. They compelled Michael to marry another Eudocia, daughter of the patrician Decapolita. We do not know the fate of this lady and may trust that she did not live to see the more sordid phases of her husband’s life. It seems that very shortly after the marriage he resumed his relations with the daughter of Inger.

Bardas now began to force his ambition more openly and get rid of the members of the Council of Regency. He first, by means of Theoclistus, drove his uncle Manuel into private life, and then turned upon Theoclistus, who ventured to remonstrate with him about his notorious liaison with his own daughter-in-law. Fearing for his life Theoclistus built a house close to the palace, communicating with it by an iron door, which was carefully guarded, and continued to administer the Empire in conjunction with Theodora. There is some indication that Theodora’s three sisters—Sophia, Maria and Irene—also had some share in the administration. Bardas pointed out to his pupil that he was improperly excluded by them, and suggested that Theodora intended to marry Theoclistus and have Michael’s eyes put out. When, therefore, Theoclistus next went to read his report to Theodora, he was intercepted by a group of the servants of Bardas, who, in the name of the Emperor, demanded his papers. A scuffle took place, and Theoclistus was imprisoned, and presently murdered in his cell. One of the chroniclers would have us believe that one of Theodora’s daughters actually witnessed the murder on behalf of her brother.

Theodora was beside herself when the news reached her that her favourite minister had been murdered. She is described as roaming about the palace with dishevelled hair, weeping and upbraiding her son and brother. The natural result was that they decided to remove her, and she saw that her rule had come to an end. She summoned the Senators and laid before them a financial statement of the affairs of the Empire. She had so well husbanded the funds left by Theophilus that a store of gold and silver amounting to many million pounds of our coinage, besides chests of jewels and other treasure, were at the disposal of the State. “I tell you this,” she shrewdly added, “in order that you may not readily believe my son the Emperor if, when I have quitted the palace, he tells you that I left it empty.” She saluted the Senators, laid down her power, and quitted the imperial palace. But Michael and Bardas were not content. As Theodora and her daughters went to the palace at Blachernæ they were arrested by her elder brother Petronas, shorn of their hair, and confined, in the dress of nuns, in the Carian palace at Blachernæ. They continued, however, to regard the proceedings at Court with close interest, and were transferred to the palace-monastery of Gastria across the water.

ΕΥΔΟΚΙΑ ΑΥΓΟΥΣΤΑ
ΛΕΩΝ ΔΕΣΠΟΤΗΣ ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΣ

EUDOCIA INGERINA, WIFE OF BASIL I

FROM DU CANGE’S ‘HISTORIA BYZANTINA’

From her near exile Theodora watched the next dramatic phase of the quarrel. It was in the year 856, apparently, that Theoclistus was murdered and she forced to resign, and the next ten years witnessed a repellent development of Michael’s vices. He has passed into history under the name of Michael the Drunkard, but drunkenness was not the worst of his vices. He lived in open association with Eudocia Ingerina and filled the palace with scenes that had been banished from Roman life with the death of Nero. The only point that can be urged in favour of Byzantine morals is that the drastic legislation and action of earlier Emperors had checked the spread of unnatural vice. Apart from this, Michael the Drunkard ranks with Nero and Caligula, and, in respect of some kinds of grossness, surpasses them. Only the more repellent pages of Zola’s “La Terre” offer an analogy to the coarse practices which Michael rewarded in the abominable circle he gathered about him. It is enough to say that the filthiest of his friends dressed in the vestments of the archbishop, and had eleven followers dressed as metropolitan bishops; that they used the sacred vessels, with a mixture of mustard and vinegar, for their parody of the Mass; and that they paraded the streets on asses in this guise, and hailed the patriarch himself with obscene cries and gestures. The treasures left by Theodora were soon dissipated on these ruffians and on Michael’s favourite charioteers, and the golden curiosities made by Theophilus were melted down to eke out the failing exchequer. And when Michael was told that the enemies of the Empire were once more pressing on its narrowed frontiers, he callously ordered that the line of signal fires, which were wont to announce the inroad of the enemy from the distant provinces, should be abandoned, so that his chariot races might not be interrupted.

Such was the spectacle which Theodora had to contemplate for ten weary years, nor can she have been unconscious how deeply she was responsible for it. At length, in 866, the infamous career of her brother came to a close, and she was free to return to the Court. A new favourite had arisen and displaced Bardas. A handsome groom in the imperial service, Basil the Macedonian, had caught the fancy of Michael. When Bardas one day denounced a noble for not saluting him in the street, as he passed in the gorgeous robe of a Cæsar—a dignity to which Michael raised him in 865—the noble was deposed from office and Basil put in his place. Basil was married, but the besotted Emperor forced him to divorce his wife and marry Eudocia Ingerina; and, as Michael retained Eudocia as his own mistress, he brought his willing sister Thecla from her nunnery and made her the mistress of Basil. Bardas was now alarmed and perceived that either he or Basil must die. I need not enter into the sordid details. Enough to say that Basil and Michael decoyed the Cæsar from the city, after a solemn oath on the cross and the sacrament, which were held before them by the patriarch, that they had no design on his life, and murdered him. This occurred on Whit-Monday 866; on the following Saturday Basil was crowned and anointed co-Emperor of the Romans.

To this blood-stained and sordid Court Theodora did not hesitate to return as soon as Bardas was slain. One of the chroniclers tells an anecdote which would, if one dare reproduce it in full, give some idea of the atmosphere which she breathed. Michael one day summoned her to come and receive the blessing of the patriarch, who was with him. She entered and bent in inobservant reverence before the vested figure beside her son, and she was, to the loud delight of Michael, startled by an outrage that the rudest peasant would hardly suffer to be offered to his mother. It was the infamous mock-patriarch Gryllus, perpetrating his coarsest joke.

This, however, seems to have occurred before her abdication, and she seems, after the murder of Bardas, to have lived chiefly in the Anthemian palace across the water. Unfortunately, the last scene in the squalid reign of her son shows that she still tolerated his excesses. Basil, in turn, had seen a new favourite arise and threaten his hope of inheriting the Empire. In a drunken fit Michael had put his purple slippers on a vulgar servant—a man who had formerly rowed in the galleys—for praising his chariot-driving, and brutally observed to the tearful Eudocia, who sat beside him, that the man was more fit for the purple than her husband. Basil, if not Eudocia, concluded that the Emperor must be assassinated, and before long Theodora provided them with an opportunity. I am not for a moment suggesting that Theodora was aware of their intention, but this last appearance of hers on the stage of history is a painful close of her career.

She invited Michael to sup and stay at her palace after he had spent a day hunting on the Asiatic side of the water. Such an invitation might be innocent, even virtuous, if there were a design to separate the young Emperor from his associates and, perhaps, endeavour to counsel him. But we find that his usual Court accompanied him, and the evening was spent in drunken debauch. The new favourite, Basilicius, and Michael were put to bed in a drunken condition. Basil, with whom was Eudocia, had slipped from the room and tampered with the fastenings of their doors, and in the middle of the night Theodora awoke to hear the clash of swords and cries of hurrying men; Michael and Basilicius had been murdered, and Basil and Eudocia were hastening to Constantinople to secure the palace.

The last glimpse we have of St Theodora is when she and her daughters convey the remains of the wretched Emperor to the city for interment in the great marble tombs of the kings. It was the autumn of 866, and, as the Greek Church celebrates her festival on 11th February, we may assume that she lived a few months afterwards in sad, if not penitent, obscurity. Few in modern times, even of those who share her creed, would venture to describe her as “the glory and ornament of her sex.” No woman of high character could have been betrayed into the criminal blunders which Theodora committed, however exalted she may have considered her ultimate aim to be. Yet we may grant that she was rather tainted by the pitiful casuistry of her time than evil in disposition, and the historical memorial of her life-work is a sufficiently terrible punishment of her errors.

It remains briefly to dismiss the Empresses Eudocia and Thecla. On the morning after the murder Eudocia Ingerina sat proudly by the side of her husband, in the glorious robes and jewels of a reigning Empress, as he went to the great church to consecrate his Empire to Christ. She enjoyed her dignity for about fifteen years, but the only incident recorded of her is that she was detected by her husband in a liaison with a steward of the table. Thecla was discarded at the death of her brother and passed to less exalted lovers. Some years after his accession she sent a servant with a petition to Basil. “Who lives with your mistress at present?” the Emperor cynically asked. “Neatocomites,” the man promptly replied. Neatocomites was flogged and put in a monastery, and Thecla was flogged and robbed of the greater part of her fortune. It is the last glimpse we have of the family of St Theodora.

CHAPTER VIII
THE WIVES OF LEO THE PHILOSOPHER

Basil the Macedonian, or Basil the groom, son of a Macedonian peasant of Armenian extraction, enjoyed his imperial wealth, and made excellent use of his imperial power, during nearly twenty years. His story is not one to encourage the venerable adage that honesty is the best policy. But we have dismissed his Empress, Eudocia Ingerina, whose only known features are great beauty and equally great licence in love, and we pass on to review the remarkable series of Empresses whom his son successively married. I say his son, but no historian doubts that Leo VI. was really the son of Michael the Drunkard. The temper of Eudocia Ingerina had been so accommodating that royal genealogists have to indulge largely in arithmetical calculation in order to determine the paternity of her children, or the maternity of Basil’s children. Briefly, Basil’s eldest son, Constantine, was probably a child of the poor Maria who had been sent back to Macedonia with her pockets full of gold, but he died before his father and will not interest us; the second son, Leo, was almost certainly the son of Michael and Eudocia, who had been transferred in a state of pregnancy from the embraces of the Emperor to the embraces of his groom; the third and fourth sons, Alexander and Stephen, were presumably born of Basil and Eudocia; and the four daughters must, in despair, be distributed over the group of parents.

When Leo had reached the age of fifteen or sixteen, his elder brother having died two years before, Basil and Eudocia sought him a wife, and we are at last so fortunate as to meet a really blameless Empress, and one whose title to her place in the calendar of the saints will not be disputed by the most irreverent historians of modern times. St Theophano has, moreover, been revealed to us more fully in recent years by the publication of ancient Greek manuscripts that were unknown in the days of Gibbon.[20] That they enlarge her virtues and attenuate the vices of her husband is only what we should expect in Byzantine writers of the time, but they enable us to give a satisfactory portrait of an imperial saint and to set it in pleasant contrast to the figures of her contemporaries and successors. Theophano is a stray lily in a garden of roses.

The first wife of Leo was the very pretty and pious daughter of a distinguished noble of the city, Constantinus Martinacius. Her mother had died in her early years, but her education had proceeded on lines of the most orthodox piety, and she had a genius for assimilating its ascetic prescriptions. The piety of her father, however, did not prevent him from putting forward his fifteen-year-old daughter when, in the winter of 881–882, Basil and Eudocia sought a mate for Leo. The city and provinces were, as usual, scoured by the special matrimonial commissioners, and Theophano was one of the dozen maids introduced into the great palace for inspection. Eudocia, a good judge, reviewed them in the Magnaura palace, and selected Theophano and two others. Eudocia’s high birth probably gave her some advantage over the obscure Athenian girl and another rival who ran her close in the competition. She was exhibited to Basil, and he at once placed a ring on her young finger and ordered Leo to marry her. Much subsequent evil might have been avoided if the youth had been consulted. Either the excessive piety of Theophano was distasteful to him, or he had already set his mind on another lady. But Basil was never indulgent to Leo, whom he must have regarded as Michael’s son, and the children were married with all the splendid ceremony which the Emperor Constantine describes for us, and entered upon their duty of sustaining the dynasty.

The pious Theophano soon found that life in a court was not a mere monotonous round of ceremonies. The chief friend and adviser of Basil was a compatriot—that is to say, a Macedonian of Armenian origin (Armenian colonies having been transferred, on account of the Saracens, to Macedonia)—named Stylianus Zautzes, and Zautzes had a pretty and lively daughter named Zoe. It is probable that Leo had contracted a boyish love of Zoe before he was forced to marry the young saint, and he was not of a nature to sacrifice the rose to the lily. Not very long after the marriage Theophano complained to Basil, we learn from the life of Euthymius, that her husband was making love to Zoe. Leo naturally protests to the patriarch, and no doubt protested to Basil, that his admiration was Platonic, but we shall see that he did not usually confine himself to that academic emotion. Basil believed the charge, caught Leo by the hair and flung him to the ground, and compelled Zoe to marry, out of hand, a man to whom she was more than indifferent. He was sowing a crop of tragedies.

Eudocia died about this time, and the young Theophano took her place in the rich ceremonial of the Court, walking in the endless processions and being borne in the golden litter, drawn by white horses, to the great church and the lesser shrines and palaces. Her new dignity cannot have lasted many months when a fresh and more furious storm broke upon her virtue, and she bore herself admirably. The second most intimate friend and counsellor of Basil was the abbot Theodore, of Santabaris in Phrygia, a very enterprising and peculiar monk. He was a master of magic and was regarded with the greatest awe by the Emperor. Leo ventured to urge on Basil that the man was an impostor and humbug, and the chroniclers say that the abbot turned vindictively on Leo. No one was allowed to have weapons in the company of the Emperor, but Theodore persuaded Leo that, if he kept a knife concealed in his boot when he was hunting with Basil, he might be able in an emergency to render a service and disarm Basil’s anger. Leo hid a knife in his boot, and the monk promptly advised Basil to search the prince, as he feared conspiracy.

So from the palace Leo passed to prison, or confinement in the Pearl palace, and Theophano went with her little daughter Eudocia to keep him company and impress on him the duty of resignation to the divine will. The chroniclers differ as to the length of the imprisonment; some make it three months and others three years. As Zautzes and the Senators intervened and begged Basil to reconsider his verdict, I prefer to accept the shorter term. One of the chroniclers tells us that the most effective pleader for Leo was a parrot, kept in the palace, which someone taught to cry: “Poor Leo, poor Leo.” At all events, Zautzes, and the patriarch Photius, and numbers of the Senators, insisted that Leo was innocent; and he was set at liberty. He was now the obvious heir to the throne. Basil could not put him aside in favour of a younger son without admitting his irregular parentage, and it is not unlikely that the old Emperor had a regard for Theophano. For a few years, therefore, the young Empress continued to rule the great palace, to which Basil had made superb additions, and to practise the high virtues which her husband so little appreciated. Then (in March 886) Basil left his purple robes to Leo, and Leo and his wife and child to the care of Zautzes.

The first concern of Leo the Philosopher—who was no philosopher at all, though he was well read in the letters of the time—was to seek Abbot Theodore of Santabaris. The monk had prudently retired to a bishopric in remote Pontus before Leo came to the throne, but he was brought to Constantinople, deposed, scourged, and exiled to Athens, where his eyes were afterwards cut out. It was the punishment he had recommended Basil to inflict on Leo. As the patriarch Photius was believed to have been in league with the monk-magician, he also was deposed, and Leo’s younger brother, Stephen, was made archbishop. Leo’s four sisters had already been turned into nuns by the prudent Basil, and there remained only the second brother Alexander, who was content to await the hour for his own imperial debauch.

Leo’s next care was to renew his pleasant relations with the fascinating Zoe, “the most beautiful woman of her age.” A few added years would have merely ripened her charms, and her father regarded with complacency her promotion to the place of imperial concubine, and continued to discharge his functions as commander of the foreign guards (hetæriarch). To Theophano only was it a grave affliction to find the palace enlivened by the fiery and beautiful oriental. She endured the outrage for some years, patiently working at her embroidery for the altars and spending long hours in prayer, until her one child died, in the winter of 892–893, and she begged Leo to allow her to retire to a convent, leaving him free to marry. Leo was not unwilling, but the patriarch Euthymius foolishly refused to consecrate her, and she languished for a few months longer in her uncongenial world.

The situation is illuminated by a passage in the chronicles which leads up to the first plot on Leo’s life. Some time in 891, apparently, Leo and Zoe and Zautzes, with other members of their family, went to stay at the Damian palace in the suburbs, probably for a hunt. Theophano, the chronicler says, was not with them; she was “busy praying” in the Blachernæ palace, to which she seems to have generally retired from the dissolute Court. For some entirely obscure reason Zoe’s brother and his friends concerted a plot against the life of Leo; we can hardly suppose that it was a case of outraged brothers wiping out the dishonour of their sister, seeing that Zautzes himself was a member of the house-party. Whatever the cause was, Zoe, who was sleeping with Leo, heard whispering in the garden without, and, creeping to the window, learned that her brother Tzantzes and others were about to murder Leo. These are the sober details given in the chronicles, but Byzantine history is so full of melodrama that we need not hesitate to accept them. She roused her lover, and they stole from the house and reached Constantinople. Leo suspected that Zautzes himself had been privy to the plot and was estranged from him for some months.

This seems to have been the position during the early years of Leo’s reign: his wife “busy praying,” or mortifying her frail body, in the quieter palace at Blachernæ, while Leo floated over the Sea of Marmora with Zoe in the great pleasure-galleys he had constructed, or wantoned in his various palaces. Theophano died in the seventh year of his reign—on 10th November 893 according to de Boor’s calculations, though her festival is celebrated by the Greek Church on 16th December. The modern mind would be little impressed by an account of the miracles which her remains are said to have wrought after death, nor can one read without a certain amusement that, in the words of a later Emperor and most of the chroniclers, she deserved the aureole of sanctity by “her freedom from jealousy and her patient endurance of the contempt of Zoe.” The nobles of Constantinople would not be unwilling to see such virtues consecrated by the Church. There is, however, no doubt that the daughter of Constantinus Martinacius merited her place in the calendar of the Church, and she is one of the few blameless women to gratify the biographer of the Empresses.

From the saint we pass to the sinner; from “the lilies and languors of virtue” to the “roses and raptures of vice.” In the following year Leo violated all decency by taking Zoe into the sacred palace. Her husband, the patrician Theodore Guniazitza, died so opportunely that it was inevitably believed that he had been poisoned; and, although the statement is no more than a rumour, and one may hesitate to-day to admit that “an adulteress may easily become a poisoner,” it cannot be said to be improbable. Leo now approached the patriarch Euthymius on the question of marrying Zoe, and the prelate again blundered, in too narrow a zeal for his ideals, and sternly resisted. He was removed to a monastery, and before the end of 894 Zoe was the legitimate Empress of the Roman world. It was, however, only to enjoy a few more hours of pleasure in the gilded palace. Her father died in the spring of 896, and Zoe followed him in the autumn or winter of the same year, having worn the crown for one year and eight months. For her the ecclesiastical chroniclers have no praise; they affirm that, when men came to lay her remains in her marble sarcophagus, the words “Miserable daughter of Babylon” were found to have been mysteriously carved on the stone. Beautiful, careless and sensual as she was, one may doubt if a single stone could be flung at her if Leo had been allowed to consult his own heart at the time of his first marriage.

Leo was now, in his thirtieth year, a widower for the second time, and he was little reconciled to that condition. Not only was his dissipated brother Alexander greedily waiting to occupy his throne, but an astrologer had assured Leo that he would yet have a son, and the message of the stars must be fulfilled. Third marriages, on the other hand, were subjected to grave ecclesiastical censure, and for several years the Emperor did not venture to take the forbidden step. Indeed, when he did begin to speak of marriage, Zoe’s relatives and other disappointed courtiers took alarm and plotted against his life. Her nephew Basil had his hair oiled and fired, and all the survivors of the Zautzes family were driven from the city. The clearance made room for fresh courtiers, one of whom, a Saracen named Samonas, became the master of intrigue which we almost invariably find in the palace in each generation. One instance of his wit will suffice to make him known and to illustrate life at the Court. The commander Andronicus had taken alarm and fled to the Saracens. Leo had no wish to injure him, and he entrusted a message to that effect to a captive Saracen and bade him deliver it to Andronicus. In order to outwit Samonas, who did not wish the able officer to return and dispute his power, the message was ingeniously enclosed in a wax candle. Before he left Constantinople, however, Samonas told the Saracen that the candle contained a plot against his country, and it was never delivered to Andronicus.

At the beginning of 899 Leo braved the censures of the clergy and, apparently, sent out his commissioners in search of a bride. As a result he married, probably at Easter, a beautiful maiden from the Opsikian district—the region of Asia Minor nearest to Constantinople—named Eudocia. To his great mortification, Eudocia gave birth to a boy, but both mother and child died immediately. The majority of Christian Emperors would have resigned themselves to this third disappointment, but it seems to have increased Leo’s determination. Most historians admit that it was not so much sensuality, which such a man as Leo could easily gratify, as the determination to have a son, which inspired Leo’s defiance of the Church; not impossibly he also had regard to the complaisance of the Western clergy in face of the conduct of the great Frankish monarchs.

It is conjectured by de Boor that Eudocia died about Easter of the year 900, and before the end of that, or in the following, year Leo began to look for another spouse. In place of the patriarch Euthymius, who had resisted his marriage to Zoe, he had appointed a certain Nicholas, an intimate friend of his in earlier years, and he expected the new prelate to be accommodating. Nicholas, however, violently opposed the idea of a fourth marriage, and a long and stormy struggle with the Church party followed. On one occasion a man attempted the life of the Emperor in a church, and Alexander and Nicholas were strongly suspected of treachery, but no torture could wring a confession from the assailant.

Leo took a first defiant step by again admitting a lady to the palace. Zoe Carbonopsina, as she was named, seems to have had a humble origin, since her son, the imperial historian, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, cannot devise any genealogy for her. Diligent research, however, finds that she was related to the famous abbot St Epiphanius, the admiral Himerius, and the patrician Nicholas, so that we must not imagine her as a flower transplanted by imperial commissioners from some rural garden. Her later career will confirm the impression she makes on her first entry into the pages of history as mistress of the Emperor. She was a woman of great vigour and faint scruples: a less pleasant type of sinner than the Zoe who had preceded her in the halls of Daphne.

We do not know how long Zoe lived in the palace as Leo’s mistress, nor is it material to seek to determine. It is enough that in the course of the year 905 she promised to become a mother, and Leo renewed his effort to provide a legitimate heir to his throne. The confused and poorly written records of the time merely tantalize us with fragmentary or conflicting statements, and one must present a connected version of the accession to the throne of Zoe Carbonopsina with some hesitation. Apparently (“Life of Euthymius”) the patriarch Nicholas was at first not unfriendly. He blessed the womb which gave promise of an heir, ordered prayers in the churches, and met Zoe without a blush in the palace. These candid details need a short explanation. A bitter feud had set in between the followers of the deposed patriarch Euthymius and the followers of Nicholas, so that an admirer of the former may be trusted to say even more than the truth in regard to Nicholas. Leo seems to have promised the clergy that he would put away Zoe as soon as she gave him an heir to the throne. But the biographer of Euthymius professes to throw another light on the situation. A rising took place in the provinces, and Leo secured a letter which proved that Nicholas was involved in it. It was in order to avoid the consequences of this treachery that he submitted to Leo.

A boy, the future Emperor and writer Constantine Porphyrogenitus, saw the light in the course of the year 905—a comet appearing in the heavens, in ominous conjunction, at the time—and in the beginning of 906 he was solemnly baptized by the patriarch, and had his uncle Alexander and some of the highest Senators as godfathers. The modern reader is amazed at the spirit which will permit the heads of Church and State to gather thus in their grandest robes about the cradle of an illegitimate child, yet resist, even to death, a fourth marriage which might supply a legitimate heir to the imperial house; but Byzantine life will exhibit singular features to the end of its history. The child was baptized, and the clergy trusted to hear no more of marriage. To their great anger Leo recalled Zoe to the palace, from which she had been temporarily removed, and found a priest to marry them. At the same time Zoe was made Augusta and Basilissa (Queen) of the Empire.

The clergy now assailed Leo with every invective, and the patriarch forbade him to enter the church. One almost despairs of following the Constantinopolitans through their tangle of scruples and licences, but we find that Leo met the prelate by entering the church at a side door and sitting in a part, apparently, where the singers used to take refreshments. He also sent a request that the Roman bishop and the three patriarchs of the East would pronounce upon the validity of his marriage. When they declared in his favour, and Nicholas still resisted, Samonas consulted his large faculty for intrigue; indeed, we may confidently trace the counsel of that wily courtier, a great friend of Zoe, in the whole procedure. Nicholas was invited to dine at the Bucoleon palace, on the shore of the Sea of Marmora. In the middle of the banquet he was again pressed to withdraw, and again refused; and the chamberlain’s servants dragged him down the stairs which led to the palace quay and shipped him to Asia. Euthymius now returned to the see, and, after a decent show of reluctance, recognized the marriage of Zoe. Some of his admirers recount that he was directed in a vision to overrule the law of the Church; others tell us that Leo compelled him by threatening to enact a law that every citizen might have, if he pleased, three or four simultaneous wives. If we change the word “simultaneous” into “successive” we shall not be far from the truth.

The adventurous career of Zoe Carbonopsina now ran quietly for a few years. Her boy flourished, and was, about four years later, associated in the purple with his father. The only event to ruffle the even flow of her pleasant life in the palace was one of those deadly feuds of rival courtiers which were of constant occurrence in the great palace. Samonas had introduced into her service a handsome Paphlagonian named Constantine, and, about the year 911, was alarmed to perceive that this man was supplanting him in the royal favour. He denounced Constantine to Leo for improper conduct with the Empress. In another passage the chronicler has already described Constantine as a eunuch, and it is not the only occasion on which we find this strange charge against an Empress in the chronicles; it may be added that another writer marries Constantine to a cousin of Zoe. Leo, at all events, was convinced, and ordered that Constantine be shaved and put in a monastery. He repented, however, and brought the eunuch back to the palace. In revenge Samonas drew up a libellous writing on the Emperor, and secretly put it in the church. There was great agitation in the palace, especially as an eclipse of the moon occurred at the height of the quarrel. Leo the Philosopher trembled and sent for a bishop who was better versed than he in astrology. On this occasion the reader of the stars proved correct. When Samonas intercepted him, and asked whether the darkening of the moon portended evil for him or for Leo, the bishop answered: “You.” In a few days he was betrayed, and he exchanged his hope of the throne for the obscurity of a monastery.

Leo died in the next year, commending his wife and child to the Senators, who swore tearful oaths to protect her and the boy from any misconduct on the part of his successor and younger brother Alexander. But Alexander met no opposition when, as soon as he had ascended the throne, he bade Zoe leave her child and quit the palace. Even the boy had a narrow escape, as Alexander ordered that he should be castrated, but his guardians happily lied to the Emperor and represented that Constantine was too delicate to live. All knew that the reign of Constantine would be short. Although only in his twenty-first year, he had ruined his constitution by vicious indulgence, and the life he led after mounting the throne was killing him. He perished miserably from intemperance within a year, leaving his young colleague to a Council of Regents, from which he had carefully excluded Zoe.

The imperial career of Zoe was, however, by no means closed. A regency was the opportunity of a Byzantine Empress, and Zoe had, no doubt, faithful servants about her boy in the palace. He was now seven years old, and he insisted that his mother must return to the palace. She at once took the lead in the administration, and, having the support of a group of experienced statesmen and several able commanders, she must have looked forward to a long and prosperous rule. At one moment it was gravely threatened with premature extinction. One of the commanders in Asia Minor was invited by some of the disaffected nobles to seize the throne, and it seemed to the vigorous Constantine Ducas that the hour long ago promised to him by astrologers had come. He crossed the sea in the night, and had seized the anterior part of the palace before the guards were thoroughly roused. Then one of the regents flung himself upon the intruders with a troop of armed servants and sailors—there seems to have been treason among the guards—and Zoe presently learned that Ducas and, it is said, three thousand of the combatants lay in a lake of blood on the marble floor of the palace. A terrible vengeance purified Constantinople of those who were opposed to the rule of Zoe and her son. Women were shorn, boys castrated, and men hung on gallows along the Asiatic shore for all Constantinople to see.

During several years Zoe seems to have governed with vigour and judgment, but since it is impossible to disentangle her share from that of her servants and counsellors, it would be inexpedient to enter into the prosy details of the administration. A personal note is sounded when we find, in a later page of one of the chronicles, that she was intimate with the admiral, and later Emperor, Romanus. Neither of the two can be regarded as very scrupulous, but it is probable that Bishop Luidprand, who accuses her, is in this hastily retailing the gossip he picked up in Constantinople. A disappointed ambassador is apt to be a libeller.

The behaviour of Romanus in the crisis which, in the year 919, put an end to her reign does not encourage the idea of a liaison. By dexterous diplomacy Zoe had obtained peace with the Saracens and then withdrawn all her forces from Asia, to make a concentrated attack upon the Bulgarians. It was admirable, if not very subtle, policy, since at that time the Saracens and Bulgarians were the upper and nether stones that threatened to grind the Eastern capital between them. Unhappily the jealousy of her two chief commanders betrayed and ruined her. A vast army was assembled at Constantinople, new arms and equipment were supplied, and advance pay was liberally given to the soldiers. The cross was borne at their head by the clergy, and, with a last entreaty that all would be faithful to their country, Zoe sent forth the great army which was to begin the restoration of the Empire. And in a few weeks the fleet returned with the news of complete and irreparable disaster. The admiral Romanus had, out of jealousy of the land commander, failed to transfer their northern allies across the Danube; the general of the troops, Leo Phocas, too eager for glory, had attacked without his allies and been utterly routed.

Zoe at once summoned a council and proposed that her alleged lover should lose his eyes for his failure to co-operate. Romanus had, however, a firm hold on the affection of the sailors, and it was judged inexpedient to attempt to displace him. But the position of Zoe was, through no fault of hers, terribly weakened, and a change of government was openly expected. Zoe’s chief hope lay in the fact that the two commanders, Leo Phocas and Romanus, could not share the power, yet neither was likely to suffer the other to occupy it, and for some time matters remained in suspense. Then the experienced intriguers of the palace began to act, and the quarrel hastened to its climax. Constantine, the favourite chamberlain, urged Zoe to build on Leo Phocas (who had married his sister) and take him into the Regency. A rival courtier, the young Emperor’s tutor, Theodore, then espoused the cause of Romanus, and secretly urged him to declare himself the protector of the boy. Zoe ordered Romanus to sail with the fleet to the Black Sea, and, when Romanus pleaded that the pay was in arrears and the sailors disaffected, the chamberlain himself rowed out to the commander’s vessel with the money. He did not return, and Zoe was soon alarmed to hear that the admiral had imprisoned him on the fleet.

The patriarch and Senators were summoned to the palace, and it was decided that their leaders should row out to the fleet and demand an explanation of Romanus. By this time the citizens were keenly interested in the quarrel. The fleet lay in sight of all on the Sea of Marmora, and the detention of the chief eunuch of the palace became known and seems to have pleased the people. When the patriarch and the heads of the Senate went down to the quay, they were stoned and forced to retire. Early the next morning Zoe went to the Bucoleon palace, where Constantine and his tutor lived, and demanded an explanation. Strong in the support of the admiral, whom he now induced to draw up the fleet in battle array opposite the Bucoleon palace, the tutor replied insolently that the time had come for Constantine to take the reins; the eunuch Constantine, he said, had ruined the palace and Leo Phocas had wasted the army. Zoe saw that she had lost the battle. She submitted very quietly, except that when the aggressive tutor ordered her to quit the palace she appealed to her son, and was allowed to remain.

Little remains to be told of the fourth wife of Leo the Philosopher. She was for a time an idle spectator, in the palace, of the course of events. The patriarch Nicholas sternly challenged the admiral, and, when he disavowed the charge of treason, invited him ashore to clear himself. In the historic church by the lighthouse a number of the higher officials gathered to hear Romanus swear the “direst oaths” on the true cross that he would be loyal to the young Emperor, and the reconciliation was sealed by Constantine wedding the admiral’s daughter Helena in April (919), a month later. Leo Phocas had meantime retired to the provinces and raised an army. By the characteristically Byzantine device of sending a prostitute with a secret message among his troops, his force was weakened and his rebellion soon trodden out. Zoe now played her last and most desperate card, and attempted the life of Romanus. Some of the chroniclers give the charge as a rumour, but when her son observes that she was “detected” in an attempt to poison the food of Romanus, by means of one of his servants, we cannot hesitate to believe it. She was at once removed from the palace, forced to take the vows of religion, and ended her romantic life, at some unknown date, in the monastery of St Euphemia at Petrion.

CHAPTER IX
THE TAVERN-KEEPER’S DAUGHTER

It may not be inexpedient to pause for a moment to consider the general character of the period through which the romantic story of the Empresses is hurrying us. The reader may learn with some astonishment that we are now, in the tenth century, in the golden age of Byzantine history; or that, at least, the Roman Empire in the East has nearly returned to the altitude it had reached in the days of Justinian and Theodora. It is not a part of a biographer’s duty to enlarge on historical themes, and the somewhat slender thread which he pursues through the web of history may lead to erroneous conclusions. Precisely on that account, however, it seems advisable to say a word in correction of the prejudice which the restricted study of one set of characters may create. It shall be brief.

The truth in regard to the Byzantine Empire seems to lie between the disdain of older historians like Gibbon and Finlay and the exaggerated claims made for it by some recent writers. I speak of character only, not of art or industry or military success. In some respects—in regard to unnatural vice, for instance—it is superior to the older Empire of the West; in ordinary licentiousness it has no superiority whatever, and the ascetic code it so pompously boasts only makes its guilt the greater; while there are persistent strains of coarseness in its character which tempt one to characterize it as barbaric. Castration and the excision of eyes continue for many centuries, under almost every Emperor and Empress, ordinary punishments of political offence; and the constant violation of the most terrible oaths that the clergy can devise, the abominable device of filling the priesthood and the monastic world with reputed criminals, the unceasing intrigues of eunuchs and officers, the sanguinary coercion of heretics, the persistent financial and administrative corruption, and the lamentable casuistry of priests and religious women, betray a new and general type of character which no amount of appreciation of Byzantine art can restore to honour. The four hundred years of Byzantine history that we have traversed, compared with the four hundred years which preceded them in Roman history, show no elevation of the type of womanhood, nor will the four centuries that remain compel us to alter this conclusion.

The young Empress Helena, daughter of Romanus, whom we introduced at the close of the last chapter is imperfectly, but not favourably, known to us. Beautiful and intelligent, she found no occasion to assert herself as long as her father lived. That unscrupulous commander had very quickly found a way to gratify his personal ambition without violating the letter of his solemn oaths. He had in March sworn on the wood of the true cross to be loyal to Constantine; in September of the same year he received, or obtained, the dignity of Cæsar, and three months later he was co-Emperor. In the following January he made his wife Theodora Empress, and in May he conferred imperial rank on his son Christopher and his wife Sophia. Later he gave the purple to his two remaining sons, and destined his fourth son, Theophylactus, for the patriarchate. Further, “in order to prevent plots,” which were frequent, he put his own name before that of Constantine, and arrogated the whole work of administration. He lived in the largest, latest and most superb palace of the imperial town—the golden-roofed Chrysotriclinon—and, plebeian as he was by birth, carried the pageantry and ceremonial of the Court to its highest point. His wife Theodora did not long survive her elevation, and Helena seems to have taken the chief place as Empress in the glittering crowd, but she escapes our scrutiny altogether until the close of the twenty-five years’ reign of her father.

Romanus seems in his later years to have shown symptoms of remorse and made edifying preparations for death. His philanthropy and religious fervour alarmed his sons, who concluded, apparently, that if his repentance were carried too far they might lose their purple robes. The eldest son, Christopher, had died, and the youngest, Theophylactus, was quite happy in possession of the patriarchate; he had, it seemed to the pious, turned the cathedral into a theatre and the bishop’s house into a place of debauch, and his religious duties were so far postponed to the cares of his stable of two thousand horses that he would cut a ceremony short when a groom came to the altar to whisper that a favourite mare had foaled. There remained Stephen and Constantine, whose royal position seemed to be threatened. Stephen, with the consent of his brother, deposed his father at the end of 944, and sent him into a monastery on the Princes’ Islands.

Helena was the chief inspirer of the next intrigue. Constantine Porphyrogenitus had sought consolation in art and letters for the imperial power of which he had been defrauded. He was now a tall, straight, well-made man of thirty-nine, with mild blue eyes and fresh, ruddy countenance, but he had little faculty or disposition for politics, and was more interested in the pleasures of the table and the library. His attainments in art and science would have been respectable in any other than a king. Helena, however, supplied the resolution he lacked, and watched the procedure of her brothers. She concluded that they intended to displace or ignore her husband, and she stimulated him to action, or, more probably, acted herself with the aid of her head chamberlain Basil, an illegitimate son of Romanus. On the evening of 27th January the royal brothers were invited to sup with their mild-mannered and long-suffering colleague, and they found themselves dragged from their purple couches by his servants, bound, and put aboard a waiting vessel at the palace quay. Some of the authorities improbably state that they asked permission to visit their father, Romanus, in his monastery, so that Gibbon’s genial picture of the father cynically greeting his sons at the shore is not without foundation. The story is unlikely, however, and they were soon despatched to remote parts.

THE EMPRESS HELENA

FROM DU CANGE’S ‘HISTORIA BYZANTINA’

During the fifteen years’ reign of her husband Helena is known to us only for the unscrupulousness with which, in collusion with the head chamberlain Basil, she sold offices of state to the highest bidders. The interest passes to the new and singular types of Empresses who now enter the chronicles. The first is the most pathetic and remarkable figure in the whole strange gallery of the Byzantine Empresses. Helena and Constantine had a son named Romanus, and the elder Romanus, who was most assiduous at making royal matches for his descendants, had decided to marry the boy in good time. It seems not unlikely that, in his last year of life, he realized the unscrupulousness of his sons, and entertained a tardy concern about his oath. At that time the kingdom of Italy was ruled by Hugh, a violent and half-barbaric monarch, whose conjugal arrangements were calculated to furnish a rich supply of royal alliances. Romanus sent an envoy to ask the hand of one of his natural daughters, and the little Bertha, a beautiful child of tender years, was conducted to Constantinople by the Bishop of Parma and married to the boy Emperor. Romanus was five years old, and it is not likely that Bertha, or Eudocia, as she was now named, was older than he. What type of woman the little princess, offspring of a wild Teuton and his concubine, would have made, we shall never know, for she died five years afterwards. The chroniclers are careful to add that she died a virgin.

The young prince was allowed to grow, and develop his vices, for a few years, before contracting a second marriage. It seems to have been in his eighteenth year that he took a second wife, and his choice illustrates at once the supineness of his father, the selfishness of his mother, and the unrestrained passion of the son. He married Anastaso, the daughter of a tavern-keeper named Crateros. We have seen so many types of Empresses ascend the throne that it might cause us little surprise to find a woman passing from the counter of a wine-shop to the palace, but there is grave suspicion that Theophano—the name substituted for Anastaso—was base in more than the genealogical sense of the word. She is accused of poisoning her father-in-law and her first husband, and she certainly led the assassins to the chamber of her second husband. Whatever allowance we make for the prejudice against her humble birth, authentic facts in her story show that she was licentious and criminal.