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.

[Illustration: 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.

We do not know how the son of a highly cultivated Emperor made the
acquaintance of a tavern-girl. It is clear that she was a young woman
of singular beauty--“a kind of miracle of nature,” Zonaras says--and
most graceful figure, and I would conjecture that some courtier among
the disreputable followers of the young prince brought her to his
notice. There may have been a “beauty show,” and the publican may have
boldly pressed the merits of his daughter, but some attention was
generally paid to birth in these matrimonial contests. A tavern-woman
was still held to be equivalent to a prostitute or an actress. It is
useless to speculate. Constantine idly acquiesced, and the beautiful
Theophano passed from the sordid scenes of a little wine-shop to
the wonderful splendours of the palace. Courtly writers afterwards
discovered that there was royal blood in her veins. The only serious
clue we have to her origin is that she came from Laconia, and we may
regard her as a common type of Greek.

It is calculated that the marriage took place about the end of the
year 956. For three years no events occur that enable us to penetrate
the secluded life of the palace, though the subsequent events suggest
that Helena and her daughters were disdainful of the vulgar beauty and
were met with a virulent hatred. At the end of three years (August
or September 959) Constantine died, and the ampler chronicles tell
a circumstantial story of his being poisoned by his son Romanus and
Theophano. A poison was, it is said, put in his physic. Either by
accident or from suspicion he spilled most of the contents of the cup
and escaped death. But his health was gravely impaired; he went to
visit the monasteries of Mount Olympus, fell dangerously ill there--the
chronicler says that _perhaps_ more poison was administered--and was
brought back to the palace to die.

We must regard this charge of poisoning as probably a construction
put on his illness by the officials or people of Constantinople. It
may or may not be true. We have no right to conclude at once that it
is an historical fact, but it seems to me that some recent historians
have just as little right to reject it as “improbable.” Romanus was a
licentious and unscrupulous man, carrying his father’s amiable weakness
for wine to the pitch of debauch and ruining his constitution by vice.
Theophano, we shall see, was capable of murder, and her ambition would
most certainly lead her to wish the older imperial family out of the
way. On the other hand, there would be a prejudice against her in
Constantinople, and in the mind of later writers, and we must leave
this first charge against her what it is in the chronicles--a suspicion.

Her next step was to get rid of the sisters of Romanus. Helena and her
five daughters still lived in the palace, or in one out of the great
cluster of palaces. There were now at least eight palaces, connected
by superb colonnades or separated by choice gardens and terraces, in
the vast imperial domain between the Hippodrome and the Sea of Marmora;
there were, in addition, several palaces on the Asiatic coast; and the
palace at Blachernæ, in the cool, hilly district to the north, had
in turn become a vast cluster of palaces, chapels, colonnades and
terraced gardens. The mother and sisters of Romanus could therefore
find ample hospitality without being compelled to witness the daily
dissipation of the Emperor, his drunken banquets and his troops of
lascivious actors and women, but they frowned on the kind of Court over
which Theophano presided, and she persuaded her husband to remove them.
He bade his five sisters adopt the monastic life. Theophano now had two
sons and a daughter, and would feel safer if their royal aunts were
prevented from making aristocratic marriages. The young women were,
however, not at all disposed to embrace a religious life and there
were furious scenes in the palace. They were removed to the monastery
into which the palace of Theodora’s minister, Theoclistus, had been
converted, near the Hippodrome, but they seem still to have intrigued,
and were separated and transferred to other monasteries.[21]

Romanus was not cruel or malignant. His temper was to live and let
live, provided that no check was placed on his imperial pleasures. He
merely smiled, therefore, when he heard that, in their convents, his
sisters refused to exchange their silks for the hated black robe, or
abstain from the delicate meats to which they had been accustomed. We
shall later find one of them coming out, in spite of her vows, to marry
an Emperor, to the intense mortification of Theophano, who had murdered
her husband to marry him herself. Helena was the chief sufferer. She
sank into melancholy and illness after the departure of her daughters,
and died in September 961.

The Emperor continued for two years to enjoy his pleasures and hasten
his death, leaving the care of the Empire to his very capable
ministers and officers. Amongst these officers was a very singular
commander named Nicephorus Phocas, whose romantic career still puzzles
historians. Whether he was a profound hypocrite, or a deeply religious
man fascinated and seduced by Theophano, it is difficult to determine.
“God only knows,” says Leo the Deacon, a chronicler of the time to
whom we owe most of our knowledge. Nicephorus was a very able general
of about fifty years: a dark, robust little man, with black hair and
small dark eyes under thick eyebrows, a very stern look, and the chest
and arms of a Hercules. He was not at all handsome, but he was one of
the greatest soldiers of his time. The singular feature about his life
was that, in consequence of a tragic accident of earlier years, he had
adopted a very religious and ascetic life. He wore a hair shirt under
his armour and linen, abstained from flesh and women as rigidly as a
monk, and was understood to have vowed chastity.

It appears that, as her husband sickened, Theophano set out to seduce
this remarkable soldier-monk and succeeded. The other great power in
the State was Joseph Bringas, the leading civilian and statesman;
but Joseph was a eunuch, and of no use to Theophano. She would marry
Nicephorus. Leo the Deacon says that she admitted, or drew, the ascetic
to her arms before the death of her husband, and it is not impossible,
as the chief biographer of Nicephorus admits.[22] However that may be,
Romanus died in 963, after a giddy reign of four years, at the age of
twenty-four. Once more Theophano is charged with poisoning, and once
more we must refrain from pressing the charge. The nearest authority,
Leo the Deacon, leaves it an open question whether Romanus died of
poison or had closed his own life prematurely by debauch; and we may
do the same. Historians are too apt to conclude that because Romanus
_did_ wear himself out by his excesses, we may dismiss the charge
against Theophano. Disease, on the contrary, would furnish a cloak to
an artful poisoner, and Theophano certainly wished to get rid of the
despotic eunuch Bringas, whom Nicephorus would quickly displace. The
chief reason why we must hesitate is because Theophano was prostrate at
the time and unable to master the new situation. She had given birth to
a second daughter two days before the death of Romanus, and there is
reason to think that Bringas and others were anxious to remove her from
power. The circumstance is not decisive, as her servants might carry
out a plan made at an earlier date.

As soon as Theophano recovered she entered upon the struggle with
Bringas. It seems, from the movements of Nicephorus, that the Empress
was in communication with him before the death of Romanus, and that at
least she sent him a secret and flattering message when Romanus died.
Nicephorus had disbanded the army with which he had conducted two
brilliant campaigns against the Saracens, and was little equipped to
contest the power of Bringas, but he went at once to the city in order
to be near Theophano. Bringas had made desperate efforts to keep him
away, even going so far as to propose in the council that the general’s
eyes should be put out for his treasonable ambition. His great
victory over the Saracens and his repute for sanctity had, however,
won a large body of admirers for Nicephorus, and when he entered the
city in triumph, driving before his car groups of Saracen prisoners,
and exhibiting the holy relics he had rescued from the hands of the
heathen, citizens and soldiers and priests united in acclaiming him.
A private conversation with the new patriarch Polyeuctes, a fanatical
monk and eunuch, secured the favour of that prelate and his clergy, and
it is even said that he ventured into the house of Bringas and revealed
to that cautious statesman the hair shirt which he wore below his fine
robes and the monastic heart that beat beneath it. But for his intense
devotion to the young princes, he said, he would at once retire into a
monastery.

If we can believe this last statement, the situation was not without
humour, because Bringas presently discovered that his pious rival was
being surreptitiously admitted to the Empress’s apartments. Whether it
is true or no that Nicephorus had previously been intimate with her, it
is certain that he now became infatuated with Theophano, and received
an assurance that she would marry him, if not more intimate pledges of
her love. We may be confident that Theophano did not love him; he was
not physically attractive to her sensual taste, and his incongruous
mixture of piety and passion and deceit must have excited her disdain.
He was merely the best instrument at hand for the achievement of her
ambition. Then, as I said, Bringas discovered the secret meetings and
renewed his attack. He invited Nicephorus to the palace. The gallant,
but prudent, soldier preferred to fly to the altar of St Sophia and
secure the protection of the patriarch. The Senate was convoked, the
prelate warmly espoused the cause of Nicephorus, and he departed in
honour to take supreme command of the army in Asia and await the orders
of Theophano.

The next move of Bringas was a blunder and the beginning of his
downfall. One of Nicephorus’s chief officers was his nephew, John
Zimiskes, the later Emperor. When we find Zimiskes murdering his uncle
with the aid of Theophano, and then callously repudiating her, we
shall not suppose him to be a man of tender conscience, and Bringas,
no doubt, regarded him as venal. He sent a secret messenger to offer
Zimiskes the supreme command if he would send his uncle in bonds to
Constantinople. Zimiskes calculated that he would have the command,
in any case, if his uncle became Emperor, and he showed the letter to
Nicephorus, and urged him to assume the purple. They were in Cæsarea at
the time, and from that city Bringas soon learned that Nicephorus had
accepted the title of Emperor and would march on Constantinople.

The spirited events which followed must here be told briefly. On Sunday
morning, 9th August, the advance-guard of Nicephorus’s army appeared on
the Asiatic shore in sight of the city, at the point where Scutari now
is, and the people began to make their choice in the usual sanguinary
way. The services in the great church were desecrated with riot, the
battle against the guards who were faithful to Bringas was conducted
in the streets, and by midnight the houses of his supporters were in
flames. Theophano remained with her children behind the barrier of
palace guards, listening, not unwillingly, to the increasing cries
for Nicephorus. We may very well assume that she had had her share in
the riot. One of the most formidable leaders of those who called for
Nicephorus was the bold and ambitious Basil, the natural son of the
elder Romanus. Castrated by his father, that he might never aspire
to the purple, yet promoted to wealth and high office, he seems to
have come to an agreement with Theophano. As soon as the battle began
he led three thousand of his servants and followers, armed, into the
Augusteum, and they continued all Sunday and throughout the night to
hunt the soldiers of Bringas and loot the mansions of his friends.

Nicephorus had meantime reached the Hieria palace on the Asiatic side,
and on the following Sunday he made his triumphant entry by the Golden
Gate, and along the Mese, to St Sophia, the citizens draping their
houses with the scarlet of rejoicing and adorning the way with laurel
and myrtle. The patriarch Polyeuctes met him at the cathedral, and
Theophano would be present on her golden throne, in her violet mourning
robes, when the crown was put on his head.

His next step must have caused a sensation in the city and entirely
deceived the clergy. He sent a monk to conduct Theophano from the
palace to the fortress, or higher prison, of Petrion on the Golden
Horn, and maintained for a few weeks his austere aversion from wine
and women. We hardly need the assurance of the chroniclers that
this was done by arrangement between the two, and we may regard it
as a device of Theophano. Nicephorus was now aflame like a youth.
In the middle of September he “threw off the mask,” in the words of
the ecclesiastical chronicler, and announced that he was to marry
Theophano on 20th September. His monastic advisers, he explained, had
concluded that his new position demanded that he should marry. The
marriage service was performed by the patriarch himself in a chapel
in the grounds of the palace, and, while the Emperor went to kiss the
altars at St Sophia, Theophano retired to her familiar apartments, to
congratulate herself on the fortunate issue of her difficult manœuvres.

And presently the Emperor returned in terrible rage to tell her that a
formidable obstacle had revealed itself. When he had reached the door
of the sanctuary, the patriarch Polyeuctes had barred his way and said
that he would be excluded from the church for a year for contracting
a second marriage. His angry protest had availed nothing; before a
vast crowd of his subjects he had had to submit to the austere priest,
and he was to remain in the ignominious position of a penitent for
a year. Concealing their anger, they concluded the day, as usual,
with a banquet to the leading officers and nobles in the gold-roofed
_triclinon_, now restored and magnificently decorated by Constantine,
and retired to discuss Polyeuctes.

The patriarch was undoubtedly a stern and conscientious priest,
insisting upon a plain law of his Church. We may, however, assume that
another feeling mingled with his sense of discipline. Nicephorus had,
in the literal meaning, tasted blood at his matrimonial banquet, and
he passionately refused to forgo the embraces of Theophano. His pious
practices were wholly discarded in a day, and the clergy must have been
bitterly disappointed to see him passing from their allegiance to that
of the beautiful adventuress. So Polyeuctes had made a bold bid for
power; and he had made a serious mistake. From that moment Nicephorus
conceived, not merely a personal hatred of the patriarch, but an
anti-clerical spirit, and began to restrict the wealth and power of the
priests and monks. He clung to his enchanting young bride and sternly
faced the clergy. In the discussion that at once filled the palace and
the city some careless noble, named Stylianus, had recalled the fact
that Nicephorus was godfather to one of the Empress’s children, and
the patriarch learned this. He at once pronounced that the marriage
was invalid, as the Church regarded this spiritual relationship as
an insuperable impediment to marriage, and bade the Emperor dismiss
Theophano.

The feelings of Theophano during these days of disappointment and
anxiety are left to our imagination. It is enough that her charms held
Nicephorus to her in spite of the terrible threats of the patriarch,
and it may be that it was she who approached the unfortunate Stylianus
and persuaded him to commit perjury. Nicephorus gathered a council
of pliant bishops and Senators, and they decided that, as the law
invoked by the patriarch had been passed by the heretic Constantine
Copronymus, it was not binding. Polyeuctes scorned their decision.
Then Stylianus came forward to swear that Nicephorus had _not_ been
godfather to any child of Theophano, and the Emperor’s father, Bardas,
came forward to swear that _he_ was the godfather. The patriarch
knew that they were lying, but his clergy were anxious to escape a
formidable struggle and he was forced to yield. To Theophano it was,
no doubt, immaterial whether or no she was married to Nicephorus; she
had a strong and devoted soldier to protect her and her children. How
the pious Nicephorus reconciled himself to the situation is one of the
things that “God only knows.” All that we know is that the possession
of Theophano dissipated his asceticism as the summer sun disperses the
mists, and he eagerly embraced a woman to whom, under the creed of his
Church, he was not married.

During the six years’ reign of Nicephorus the Empress had little
occasion to assert her wayward personality, but it is significant that
the one statement made of her is an accusation of crime. One of the
sons of the older Romanus still languished in captivity, and it seemed
possible, in view of the growing discontent at Constantinople, that an
intrigue would be formed to put him on the throne. “Theophano,” we are
curtly informed, “made an end of him.” There is no reason to doubt that
messengers were sent to his distant prison with an order that he should
be put to death, and it is more probable that the order came from
Theophano than from Nicephorus. For the first year or two, however,
Nicephorus prudently removed his fiery young bride from the seditious
and immoral atmosphere of Constantinople, and she passed her days in
unwonted innocence amid the lonely mountains of Cilicia.

The Emperor had spent a few months in an effort, by lavish
entertainment, to dispel the suspicion of parsimony and meanness under
which he had ascended the throne. The Hippodrome rang daily with the
applause and contests of the citizens, and the winter was enlivened
with great gaiety. Meantime Nicephorus was gathering an immense army
for the more substantial work of driving back the Saracens, and when,
in the early spring, the cosmopolitan regiments were assembled along
the Asiatic shore, he announced that the Empress would accompany him
to the field. He knew Theophano too well to leave her in that world
of intriguing eunuchs and ambitious courtiers. A little pot-bellied
man, with dark skin and little dark eyes, with short greyish beard
betraying his age, and with disproportionately long arms and short legs
to his stumpy figure, he felt that he was not likely to grow fonder
to the heart of the fascinating Theophano during two or three years’
absence. On the other hand, one must not imagine the sensual young
Empress as being inconvenienced by the rough ways of a camp. The
rulers of Constantinople carried their luxury even into the camp, on
the occasions on which they condescended to take the field in person.
Eighty horses were needed for the transport of the kitchen equipment
and table silver alone, and thirty were required to convey the imperial
wardrobe from town to town; while the whole countryside was laid under
contribution to supply delicacies for the table. No doubt these normal
glories of an imperial march would be at least doubled in view of the
presence of Theophano.

They sailed from the Bucoleon port in the great gold and purple galley
of the imperial family, and joined the army at Cæsarea. From that city
Theophano accompanied her husband across the hills and plains of Asia
Minor until they came to the beginning of the Taurus range. Here the
Emperor left Theophano and her sons, in safe charge, while he led his
troops into the more dangerous country beyond. At the entrance of the
narrow defile which the ancients knew as the “Cilician Gates” was the
massive fortress of Drizibion, a solitary and rugged castle in a wild
mountainous district. It was in this quiet and cool home, removed from
communication with the metropolis, that Theophano and her children
spent the summer of the year 964. She would, of course, have an ample
retinue of eunuchs and women, and every provision would be made for
her comfort, but, whether it was the jealousy or the amorousness of
Nicephorus that detained her in this healthy solitude, she would be
sure to resent it. At the beginning of the winter he returned to her,
with modest laurels, and may have conducted her to Cæsarea, or some
other city of the plains, for the enjoyment of the winter. But the
early spring called him once more to the field, and it seems that
Theophano had to spend another summer in the wilds of Cilicia. It
was only in the autumn of 965 that she re-entered Constantinople, to
witness the splendid triumph of her husband.

In the following year Nicephorus made another campaign, and from the
time of his return in the autumn of 966 the shadow of tragedy began
to creep over his life. His vast armies and laborious victories had
laid a heavy burden of taxation on the Empire, and, passionately as
Constantinople loved to see a herd of captives driven before the royal
chariot in the hour of triumph, it was little disposed to pay for
remote victories. The clergy also were embittered. Nicephorus, soured
by the action of the patriarch, and thus made sensible of the revolting
spread of luxurious idleness under the name of monasticism, curtailed
the revenues of the clergy, forbade the further conversion of mansions
and palaces into monasteries, and claimed the right to appoint bishops.
The people became sullen and hostile. When, on Easter Sunday, 967,
Nicephorus crossed the Augusteum to go to church, they pelted him with
mud and stones so violently that a group of the more sober citizens had
to rescue him. It was expected that he would inflict some punishment,
and when, a few weeks later, he ordered his guards to descend to the
arena in the Hippodrome and begin their military evolutions, either to
impress or to entertain the spectators, there was a frantic rush for
the gates and many were trodden underfoot.

By the summer of 969 life in the sacred palace had become very
sombre and unpleasant, and Theophano began to seek a new companion.
The ardour of her husband’s passion had been chilled by the terrors
which now surrounded him, and, in preparation for the death which was
foretold to him, he returned zealously to his monastic habits. Even the
soldiers were now hostile to him, except his immediate corps of foreign
mercenaries. Nicephorus relied on their formidable axes, converted
the old and decaying Bucoleon palace into a massive fortress, girt
the whole enclosure with a lofty castellated wall, and retired within
this heavily guarded circle to spend his days and nights in prayer and
penitence.

It is one of the most curious features of the story that, while he
moodily punished his bravest officers for their very victories, the
lithe and insidious Theophano retained his confidence. She had no
longer the comparative solace of his sensual fire, and she must have
looked on with deep disdain when he refused to share the imperial bed
at night and, after long hours of prayer and psalm-reading, flung
himself for a brief and feverish sleep on a panther-skin spread
upon the ground in the corner of his chamber. But Theophano was not
excluded from the Bucoleon palace, and she laid her plans to defeat his
desperate entrenchments. The new partner whom she chose to encourage
was the general Zimiskes, the Emperor’s nephew, whom we have seen on an
earlier page revealing the perfidy of Bringas to his uncle. He had been
dismissed from office by Nicephorus “on account of certain suspicions”;
and we have little trouble in inferring that he was suspected of
liaison with Theophano and eagerness for the throne. He was, like
his uncle, a very little and robust man, but much more handsome than
Nicephorus; his broad chest and great brawny arms were redeemed by a
fair countenance, a pair of keen and friendly blue eyes and a crown of
almost golden hair. I must be pardoned for inserting such portraits
of the Emperors as we have, while seeming to omit the more desirable
portraits of their consorts. The Byzantine chroniclers rarely give
us more than the very vaguest assurances that Empresses were “very
beautiful,” and so on, and the few surviving representations of them in
ivory or bronze or mosaic are not portraits on which one would dare to
found a physiognomical study.

In the autumn of 969 Zimiskes was living impatiently on his private
estate in Armenia, when he received an assurance that Theophano had
persuaded his uncle to allow him to return to Court. Whether or no it
is true that he had previously enjoyed the favours of Theophano, he now
certainly became her ally and accomplice. She seems to have deluded
Nicephorus with diabolical duplicity. A rumour, which most historians
plausibly ascribe to her, was circulated in Constantinople, to the
effect that Nicephorus intended to castrate her sons and leave the
crown to his brother Leo, who, on account of his extortions, was no
less hated than he. On the other hand, Theophano persuaded Nicephorus
that the interest of herself and her children would be best consulted
if Zimiskes were recalled to the capital and compelled to marry some
noble lady of the city. Nicephorus assented, and his nephew came to
Constantinople. Then it seems to have been betrayed to the Emperor,
probably by his brother, that Zimiskes was being secretly admitted to
the Empress’s apartments, and he placed restrictions on him. Zimiskes
retired to his mansion at Chalcedon, on the Asiatic side, and continued
to communicate with Theophano.

The culmination of the plot is a thrilling, if sordid, page of
romance. On the night of 10th December Theophano visited her husband
and persuaded him to leave his chamber door unfastened, as she would
see him later. He still failed to suspect her, although some watchful
priest had warned him of the plot. Some time before a group of tall,
veiled women had presented themselves at the palace door and been
admitted; and, when they had reached the secret chambers assigned to
them by Theophano, it was a group of bronzed soldiers who emerged from
the mantles and veils. Someone betrayed them, and Nicephorus sent an
officer to explore the palace, but he, probably being in the pay of
Theophano, reported that all was well, and Nicephorus turned to his
long psalms. Theophano and her servants were in the upper part of the
palace looking out anxiously over the Sea of Marmora. It was a dark
wintry night, and the snow was falling heavily. At length a faint
whistle from below told them that a boat had arrived from Chalcedon
and lay under the walls. A basket (some say a ladder) was tied to a
rope and lowered into the depths, and presently Zimiskes and several
companions were within the palace. An Arab historian would have us
believe that Theophano herself led them, with drawn swords, to her
husband’s room; it is more probable that, as the Greek writers say, she
left this to one of her eunuchs.

For a moment the conspirators started back in alarm; the imperial bed
was empty, and they fancied that the plot was known, and Nicephorus
would fall on them. But the eunuch showed them the sleeping form of the
Emperor on his panther-rug, and, with a cry for help to the Virgin,
the strange soldier-monk passed out of the imperial world he had
invaded. Basil, the astute head chamberlain, had an opportune illness
at the moment, and only recovered in time to do reverence to his new
sovereign. The guards alone rushed from their quarters and attacked the
conspirators, but the sight of the grisly head of the late Emperor,
which was exhibited at the window, induced them to sheathe their swords
and accept a new paymaster. So Zimiskes proceeded gaily to the golden
palace (Chrysotriclinon) to put on the purple slippers, and Theophano
retired to her room to reflect on the next phase of her career: perhaps
to glance now and again at the ghastly trunk of her late husband, which
lay, all night and all the following day, in the snow without. This,
surely, was the last crime she need commit. She was still young, and
might look forward to many years of power with the robust soldier she
had invited to share her throne.

Six days later Zimiskes went in state to St Sophia to receive his
diadem, and found the stern patriarch Polyeuctes again boldly barring
the way. He refused to crown Zimiskes except on three conditions: he
must undo the anti-clerical work of his predecessor, he must deliver to
justice the actual murderer of Nicephorus, and he must drive the guilty
Theophano from the palace. Theophano now discovered the full brutality
of her accomplice. He bowed at once to the commands of the patriarch,
and the beautiful young Empress--she must still have been in her
twenties, unless she was much older than her husband at the time of her
first marriage--was dragged from her apartments to the Bucoleon quay
and shipped to one of the dreary island prisons in the Sea of Marmora.
She was furious with rage and disappointment. After a time she escaped
and contrived to reach the altar in St Sophia; but even the mob of
Constantinople shrank from the murderess, and her former confederate,
Basil, was allowed to tear her from the altar. In her frenzy she beat
the grand chamberlain with her own white hands and, reverting to
the language of the tavern, poured her invectives on the “Scythian
bastard.”[23] Her career had been so darkened with suspicion, and had
so plainly ended in murder, that her appeals fell on a cold, if not
jeering, audience, and she was conveyed to distant Armenia and confined
in a monastery.

The rest of the story of Theophano, as far as it is known to us, is
told in the curt statement that she was recalled to Court in the reign
of her eldest son, Basil, and again enjoyed the imperial position
for half-a-century. John Zimiskes retained only for a few years the
power for which he had paid so base a price. The marriage which he
presently contracted was not much less sordid than the marriage he
had intended to contract; if, indeed, he ever had a serious desire to
make so dangerous a woman as Theophano the partner of his throne. He
took a nun from her monastery, bade the patriarch--whose scruples had
their limits--relieve her of her vows, and married her. The Empress
Theodora is not clearly outlined in the chronicles, but she is not
without interest. She was one of those daughters of Constantine whom
her brother Romanus had forced to take the veil. Zimiskes had felt that
an alliance with the late dynasty would strengthen his position, and
it may be remembered that the daughters of Constantine were not at all
scrupulous. They had refused to wear the black robe or eat the bread
and beans of the monastery. Constantinople is said to have indulged
in the most boisterous rejoicing over the marriage, and even the
heavens seemed to express their satisfaction, when one of the Senators
discovered in his orchard an ancient stone on which was miraculously
inscribed: “Long Life to John and Theodora.” There were, however,
sceptics in the city, as it was recalled that a similar “discovery”
had been made in the interest of Irene and her son, yet the blessing
had proved illusory. The Senator was richly rewarded, but he may have
lived to see the futility of his miracle. After a few years (976) the
handsome chamberlain Basil bribed John’s cook to put less innocent
things than condiments in his dishes, and he went the beaten way of
Byzantine Emperors. Theodora disappears after his death, though we can
hardly suppose that she returned to her monastery.

Theophano’s sons, Basil and Constantine, now became joint Emperors,
and they recalled their mother from Armenia to the palace. One would
be inclined to suspect that the poisoning did not come to her as a
surprise, but the chroniclers do not impeach her, and we need not
strive to lengthen the list of her misdeeds. She makes no further mark,
for good or evil, in the chronicles. Possibly the terrible experiences
of her early womanhood and seven years of sober reflection in her
monastic prison had destroyed her passion for intrigue. In any case,
the very vigorous administration of her elder son left her little
room to interfere, and she seems to have been content with the quiet
enjoyment of the position of a dowager Empress. According to George
the Monk (or his continuer) she lived for fifty years after the death
of her first husband--that is to say, after 963--and so she must have
passed her seventieth year at the time of her death. There seems to
have been no rival Empress during that time. We may trust that the
character of Theophano sobered and matured, and that the forty years’
silence means that she led a regular and unambitious life. However that
may be, the personality she shows when she is under the full limelight
on the imperial stage is one of unrestrained passion and greed. She was
a tavern-keeper’s daughter in the purple, an appalling instance of the
lowest type of Greek beauty.

CHAPTER X

TWO IMPERIAL SISTERS

The long and prosperous reign of Basil II. (976–1025) has no further
interest for us, since we find in the chronicles no reference to a wife
of that hardy and brilliant soldier. His younger brother, Constantine,
was more like their mother: a man of passion and greed, though with
no higher ambition than that of an imperial enjoyment of wine and
women, and in that enjoyment he was quite willing to await the natural
death of his more sober and more distinguished brother. Although he
approached his seventieth year when the undivided rule fell to him,
his ways were still those of an aged and jaded, and not very refined,
Sybarite, and the three years of his reign interest us only because
they show us the earlier environment of his two daughters, Zoe and
Theodora, who are the next to occupy--alternately or simultaneously,
according to the course of the romance--the gynæceum, or women’s
quarters, of the palace.

Constantine’s wife, Helena, daughter of the patrician Alypius, is
a mere cipher in the imperial records, and seems to have died much
earlier, leaving three daughters--Eudocia, Zoe and Theodora--to grow
up as they might in the palace of her voluptuous husband. Eudocia, the
eldest, lost during an attack of smallpox whatever comeliness she may
have had, and retired to hide her disfigured countenance under the veil
of a nun. There remained Zoe and Theodora, and Constantine determined
to marry one of the two to some important noble and leave the crown
to him. The elder of the two was nearly fifty years old, and Theodora
cannot have been much younger. It is not very clear why they had not
married earlier. Their father, who could hardly be induced to take the
least interest in his Empire, had wholly neglected his daughters until
he held the sceptre in his hands, and felt that the time was at hand
when he must relinquish it to another. He was a very large and robust
man, absorbed in hunting, gambling and other less reputable pleasures,
and, even when he was sole Emperor, he left the cares of state to
his eunuchs and retained his imperial attention for the theatre,
the banquet and the dance. In his home the sisters had, says the
chronicler, “lived as they listed,” and the further course of the story
will make it probable that Zoe had not failed to enjoy her liberty.
Theodora was less sensual, but we shall have to include both sisters in
the list of Empresses who were little embarrassed by moral scruples.

In approaching their careers we have the rare advantage of an excellent
guide. Michael Psellus, one of the leading philosophers and literary
men of Byzantine history, not only lived at their Court, and knew them
intimately, but he had a genial taste for the tattle and scandal of a
court and not the least reluctance to entrust it to his graceful pen.
He has been called the Voltaire of Byzantine letters on account of his
brilliant, caustic and very candid way of writing the story of his
times. We shall find his “Chronography” of inestimable value, provided
we make due allowance for the prejudices of the politician and the
amiable unscrupulousness of the anecdotist.

Zoe and Theodora were very different types of women. Zoe, who will
interest us most, was a woman of fine complexion, very graceful figure
and ardent passions. She had large sensuous eyes under heavy eyebrows,
a mass of blonde hair, and a skin of remarkable whiteness. She was of
middle height, and preferred to dress in simple robes, which exhibited
her figure, rather than in the heavy and gorgeous draperies and massive
jewellery of an Empress; though this simplicity of taste was limited,
on one side, by a passion for perfumes and cosmetics, of which she
gathered the material from all parts of the world and compounded,
either with her own hands or by her maids, so industriously that her
room “looked like a workshop.” She took such care of her smooth and
clear skin and blonde hair that even in her seventieth year she had no
wrinkle or other mark of age. She retained youth also in her blood, and
we shall find her remarkably amorous in her sixth decade of life. Such
a woman we shall hardly expect to find richly endowed with intellect
or greatly restrained by moral sentiments, yet I think that M. Diehl
follows too literally the facile witticism of Psellus when he speaks of
Zoe as “childish” and “silly,” and I will prefer to let the story of
her life tell us the limitations of her intelligence and character.

Theodora will interest us much less than Zoe, and it will suffice to
say that she was in all respects different from her sister. Her tall
and graceless figure and her very plain features were compensated by
a stronger intelligence and greater force of character. She could be
coldly stern, even cruel, on occasions, while cruelty only came to Zoe
in the impulsive anger of her thwarted passions. We shall see that,
when the occasion came to her, she cherished a very high ideal of
public duty and used her power with an intelligence and beneficence
that Psellus greatly underrates.

Such were the two daughters who, in middle age, were warned by their
father that one of them must marry and inherit the Empire. The choice
of Constantine first fell upon a distinguished noble named Constantine
Delassenus, and a eunuch was sent to bring him from Armenia, where duty
had taken him, to the Court. Much tragedy might have been prevented if
that eunuch had reached his destination in time, but he was recalled
by a second courier and told that the Emperor had changed his mind. It
appears that the commander of the palace guards had felt that he would
not have much influence on a noble like Delassenus, and he had brought
to the notice of the Emperor a less young and less vigorous candidate,
Romanus Argyrus, who was related to Constantine. Romanus was sixty
years old, and had little to recommend him except his incompetency,
which would suit the designs of the officers of the Court. He had,
however, a wife living in Constantinople at the time, and it seems to
have been supposed that he might not be willing to abandon her. The
petty schemers of the Court were accordingly directed to bring about
a separation, and, as Polyeuctes was dead, and a more accommodating
patriarch held the see, no opposition was expected from the Church.

A file of soldiers entered the mansion of Romanus and told him that
he had incurred the anger of the Emperor. They were, they said, to
lead him to the palace for execution, and his wife was to enter a
monastery. Many eyes had been put out, on slight grounds, during the
three years’ licentious reign of Constantine, and the threat was
serious. The wife fled at once to a monastery, and Romanus was brought,
in some trepidation, to the royal presence--to learn that, since his
wife was now a nun, he was free to marry the Emperor’s daughter and
thus secure the purple. Instead of retiring to thrust a dagger in his
heart, as an older Roman would probably have done, the sixty-year-old
noble graciously submitted his person to the princesses. Theodora, the
favourite of her father, had the first choice, but she turned away in
disgust. Possibly Romanus did not regret that this gave him the hand of
the more charming Zoe, who, in her forty-ninth year, fully preserved
the fresh and brilliant complexion and the warm passions of a young
woman. He had set out from home prepared for death, and must have been
bewildered by his fortune. The clergy obligingly disentangled the
somewhat complicated relation in which they stood to each other, in the
eyes of the Church; they were married and crowned on 19th November
1028; and, as Constantine died three or four days afterwards, the duty,
or pleasure, of governing the Empire fell on them during the first week
of their singular honeymoon.

After this inauspicious beginning we shall hardly expect the reign
of Romanus III. and Zoe to be one of brilliant and inspiring deeds;
indeed, we may say briefly that it was merely an inglorious effort to
retain the crowns they had obtained. They adopted the easy device of
emptying the treasury on the common folk, the clergy and the monks. The
private debts of citizens were paid by them, more churches were built
or richly decorated, the clergy were relieved from taxation, and the
monks--it was the very culmination of their golden age--were lodged in
luxurious mansions which made their calling one of the most attractive
in the Empire. The graver nobles frowned, plotted and were savagely
punished, but we are interested in these conspiracies only in so far as
they involve the imperial sisters.

Theodora, a spirited and intelligent woman, naturally despised the
marriage which she had refused, and was regarded with suspicion and
hatred by her sister. By some means Zoe put at the head of Theodora’s
household a Paphlagonian eunuch in her own pay, a very crafty and
unscrupulous man named John, who was enjoined to watch Theodora’s
conduct. This very interesting person will be better known to us
presently, as he was destined to be the most powerful man in Zoe’s
Court. For the moment it is enough to say that, about a year after the
coronation, Theodora was discovered to have some share in a conspiracy
which was set afoot by Constantine, a relative of the Emperor. It
is curious that John also was found guilty, though whether this was
merely a trick to conceal his spying, or he had really been gained
by Theodora, it would be difficult to say. Theodora was expelled
from the palace and confined in a building at Petrion, on the Golden
Horn, which seems to have had the mixed characters of a monastery, a
state prison and a fort. It was the building to which Nicephorus had
consigned Theophano for a few weeks before their marriage, and would
have comfortable apartments. A year later Romanus was ignominiously
beaten by the Saracens and the conspiracy revived. There is no proof
that Theodora took part in it, but its aim would be, no doubt, to place
her on the throne. In one of those moments of energy which passion
occasionally gave her, Zoe went to Petrion, and forced her royal sister
to take the vows and adopt the dress of a nun.

As a number of other malcontents lost their eyes or their liberty
at the same time, the throne of Zoe and Romanus seemed to be firmly
established. Unfortunately, a very grave breach now took place between
the imperial pair, and, as a handsome official entered the service
of the palace, there happened what so commonly happens in Byzantine
history under the circumstances: Zoe fell in love with the handsome
servant, and Romanus died, of a mysterious complaint.

Delicacy compels me to refer the inquisitive reader to the Greek
text of Psellus, or to the chronicle of the monk Zonaras, for a full
explanation of the rift in the sacred palace. Briefly, Romanus had been
assured by one of those soothsayers who were in such high repute at
Constantinople that he would have a son, and he zealously studied and
employed the whole known range of aphrodisiacs and other contrivances
that might help to ensure the fulfilment of the prophecy. After two
or three years of this peculiar activity he retired in despair from
the struggle, leaving Zoe untouched and indignant. As she had now
certainly entered her sixth decade of life, the modern reader will
have but a slender sympathy with her, and will recognize a very low
quality of character in her conduct. Her husband became ill, and his
favourite chamberlain, Michael, was often summoned to attend him,
even when Zoe shared his bed. This chamberlain was a tall, handsome,
fresh-faced young man, whose form pleased the Empress, but there was a
deeper intrigue in the affair; the chamberlain was a brother of the
Paphlagonian eunuch John, whom we saw in charge of Theodora’s mansion,
and it is now necessary to present him more intelligibly.

John was a very shrewd, ambitious, vulpine provincial of mean family;
he had been converted into a eunuch in early years, had held office
in the employment of the Emperor Basil, and had then retired to a
monastery. His character is so far removed from religious ideals that
one is disposed to imagine him as having been compelled to take the
black robe for some indiscretion, but it is quite possible that he
adopted it voluntarily, as at this time many of the monasteries were
merely luxurious colonies of bachelors living on a swollen stream of
legacies. Romanus, who knew his ability, brought him from his monastery
to supervise Theodora and her affairs. In spite of the curious
statement that he was himself involved in the conspiracy, he was soon
back at Court, and in great favour. He had five brothers and a sister,
and the general character of the family may be deduced from the fact
that three of the six brothers were moneylenders, two (John and Simeon)
were monks, while the sister, Maria, had married a ship-caulker at the
quays. John used his influence to introduce these brothers into the
very lucrative service of the State. Within a few years the beau of the
family became Emperor, the son of the ship-caulker also became Emperor,
the ship-caulker himself became High Admiral of the Fleet, two other
brothers had the rank of generals, and John became the virtual ruler of
the Empire.

It was chiefly through his young and attractive-looking brother that
John pushed their fortunes. Michael was a young man of large and
well-proportioned figure, with that freshness of complexion which
we often find in nerve-diseased or epileptic subjects. He became a
favourite chamberlain of Romanus, and John presently noticed that Zoe
was interested in him. Romanus was visibly failing, and Michael was at
times called in to chafe his feet as he lay in bed with Zoe. “Who will
believe,” the monk Zonaras asks, “that he did not take the opportunity
to rub Zoe’s feet also?” Zoe expressed to John a lively interest in his
brother, and John took care that their movements should not be hampered
by any of the restrictions that normally curtailed the liberty of a
Byzantine Empress. The pale Paphlagonian, in the black dress of a monk,
was already the supreme master of the palace, but the most piquant
feature of his position is to find him chiding the nervous hesitation
of his brother and feeding the improper admiration of the Empress.

Psellus dilates, almost gloats, for pages over the development of this
singular love story, in a way that hardly becomes a great exponent of
Plato and Aristotle. Before long the relation of the two was known to
the whole Court. Michael was loaded with jewels and other presents,
and not infrequently courtiers would find him sitting, still rather
nervously, on the same couch with the infatuated Empress. One day a
servant entered the throne-room for some purpose, and almost fell to
the ground in astonishment. Zoe had made Michael sit on the throne,
had put the crown on his head and the sceptre in his hand, and was
admiringly murmuring: “My darling, my flower of beauty, joy of my eyes,
consoler of my soul,” etc. Instead of bursting into passion at the
entrance of the official, she bade him do homage to the man who would
one day be his Emperor. So says, at least, the philosophic Psellus,
whom many believe. It is quite certain that Zoe made flagrant love to
the chamberlain, and that the Emperor knew it. His sister, Pulcheria,
angrily spoke to him of the notorious scandal, but he professed to be
ignorant of it and was content to exact from Michael an oath that there
was no truth in the rumour. Other writers say that he overlooked the
liaison because it preserved his middle-aged spouse from promiscuous
irregularity.

Romanus forgot that such love affairs were apt to entail tragic
consequences for the superfluous man. As Zoe’s passion increased, he
found himself suffering from an alarming and mysterious illness. His
hair fell out in patches, his breathing was laboured, his face--a more
significant symptom in an old man like Romanus--became livid and puffy.
Whether this illness was really due to a slow poison, and whether the
poison was administered by John or Zoe, are points which we must leave
as we find them in the chronicles--uncertain. Since there is very
little doubt that Romanus was murdered in the end, the theory of poison
is not reckless; but Romanus was aged and worn, and the illness may
have been natural. However that may be, Romanus lingered in a frightful
condition until Holy Thursday of the year 1041. On that sacred day
Romanus distributed to the Senators the ceremonious gifts prescribed
in the ritual, and retired to the bath. From the bath he was presently
removed in a dying condition to his bed. However possible it may be
that he had had a serious attack of his illness in the bath, we cannot
easily ignore the persistent statement that men entered the bathroom,
and either strangled the Emperor or held his head under the water.
Psellus gives this as a rumour, but even he seems to believe it. Both
Michael and John are accused of the murder, and it is left uncertain
whether Zoe was privy to the plot. Her immediate conduct will not
dispose us to be eager to clear her memory of the suspicion, but we may
be sure that the monk John was the soul of the plot.

Zoe came, with ostentatious (the chronicler says feigned) tears, to see
that her husband was really dead or dying, though she did not await the
end, which occurred soon afterwards. When we learn that she announced
her intention of marrying Michael _the same evening_ we are disposed to
see in her an element of cold-blooded calculation which does not very
well assort with the character we have given her. It would probably be
much more correct to conceive her as nervous and confused, and simply
yielding to the dictation of the monk John. Her father’s eunuchs,
who had remained in her service, begged her to wait some time,
but John bullied and threatened, and Michael was forthwith decked in
the dead man’s robes and placed beside Zoe in the gold-roofed hall.
The patriarch was summoned to the palace and curtly ordered to crown
Michael and marry him at once to the very recent widow, in the presence
of the assembled Senators. The whole scene is so repulsive that we need
not hesitate to accept the last touch given to it in the chronicles.
The archbishop hesitated, but a present of a hundred pounds in gold
from John removed his scruples, and he invoked the blessing of God on
the new imperial marriage.

[Illustration: THE EMPRESS ZÖE

FROM ‘CONSTANTINOPLE’ BY E. A. GROSVENOR]

After this authentic episode it is superfluous to seek to determine
the share of Zoe in the illness and death of her first husband. The
monk-eunuch was capable of any crime, and it is, perhaps, not likely
that he would take others into his confidence in perpetrating them.
His brother Michael was a feeble-minded man, of no criminal instincts,
whom we shall presently find smitten with the deepest remorse for the
part he had played. Zoe also was little more than a tool in the hands
of John. Had he communicated his criminal design to them, they would
probably have consented, but there is no evidence that he did so. The
marriage, however, is a sordid fact that no casuistry can excuse.
It would, no doubt, be represented to Zoe that delay would give an
opportunity for a revolution, and there were always at Constantinople
nobles who were ready to aspire to the throne when so excellent a
pretext was afforded. These considerations may explain, but cannot
excuse, Zoe’s action. She was almost, if not quite, devoid of moral
feeling. The utmost we can say for her is that it was not merely her
passion for Michael that gave such indecent precipitancy to a woman
of fifty-four years. But she had no children to protect, and she lent
herself to this disgraceful procedure merely in order to retain her
royal position.

We read, therefore, without the least sympathy that, while the change
made the fortune of the astute John and his brethren, it brought great
disappointment and chagrin to Zoe. She had, the chronicler says,
imagined that the lowly chamberlain, grateful for his elevation to
the throne, would be her slave, and she at once gathered about her
the former servants of her father and began to rule. But the monk
had no intention of handing to her the power he had purchased so
heavily. His official position was merely that of “orphanotrophos,”
or director of charitable institutions; his real position was that of
Emperor. Most of the brothers were able men, but Michael was, as John
probably took into account from the first, epileptic and incapable of
self-assertion. John, therefore, took the reins in his own hands. He
summarily dismissed Zoe’s eunuchs and maids and put about her an army
of servants in his own employment, so that she could not even go to
the bath without the permission and knowledge of the eunuch. To the
Empire and its affairs, it may be said, he devoted the most careful and
intelligent attention. Even in the midst of a solitary carouse--for
the monk was fond of wine--he would turn with alacrity to any pressing
business. It was only in the dishonest enrichment of himself and his
brothers, whom he at once promoted to the highest commands, that he
overreached himself.

One noble only, the Constantine Delassenus who had so narrowly missed
the Empire and the hand of Zoe, rebelled against this division of the
Empire among a family of low-born eunuchs and money-changers, and
the punishment of Delassenus so well illustrates the world in which
Zoe now found herself that it may be briefly recounted. John secured
the loyalty of the Senators by a generous distribution of money, and
then sent a eunuch to assure Delassenus, who was in Armenia, that
his conduct would be overlooked if he disarmed at once. Delassenus
required some tremendous security of such a promise on the part of
John, and it was left to the clergy to devise a new and particularly
ponderous oath. The evolution of the oath in Byzantine life is one of
the many ways in which we may trace the degradation of its character;
no one had any longer the faintest confidence in oaths on the true
cross or the Sacrament. A group of clerics were therefore sent with
the most sacred objects in the reliquaries of Constantinople, and they
marshalled before the eyes of Delassenus the cross, the napkin bearing
a miraculous image of Christ, the original letter of Christ to King
Abgar, and the portrait of Mary painted by St Luke. On these portentous
relics an oath was taken that no punishment would be inflicted on him.
He submitted; and a few months later, when the people of Antioch rose
against their oppressive tax-gatherers, the revolt was subtly traced to
the distant noble, and he was exiled and ruined.

Zoe tolerated the domination of the odious monk for a few years
impatiently, and at length made an attempt on his life. She won one of
the eunuchs whom John had placed about her, and directed him to offer
John’s medical attendant a vast sum of money if he would poison his
master. But, by one of those convenient accidents which commonly happen
in novels and in Byzantine history, the doctor’s boy discovered the
plot and denounced it to John. Her eunuch was drastically punished, and
Zoe was treated worse than ever.

At the same time her condition became more unpleasant, because
Michael’s illness became worse. The popular belief in Constantinople
was that a devil had invaded the Emperor, to punish him for his
mendacious denial, to Romanus, of intimacy with Zoe. Men told of the
suddenness with which the quiet, rosy-cheeked Emperor would be, at any
moment, converted into a frothing maniac, and it was noticed that, on
the rare occasions on which he appeared on the throne, purple curtains
were looped in readiness about it, and servants stood to draw them
round the throne if the devil should choose that moment to indulge his
frolics. Even the Byzantine writers take this theory seriously; though
some of them offer the alternative theory of insanity. We recognize the
symptoms of epilepsy, and see that Zoe’s choice had failed. Between
the attacks Michael, who seems to have believed in the devil, was
gloomy and penitent. He and his brothers walked barefoot through the
city, at the head of processions, bearing the swaddling-clothes of the
infant Christ and all the other priceless relics I have mentioned; but
the only answer of the heavens was a storm of such hail that the stones
crashed through the tiled roofs. He visited shrines, built churches and
monasteries, showered gold on the clergy, and even gave a baptism-fee
to every new-born babe; and famine, pestilence and earthquake vexed the
over-burdened Empire, and men cursed Michael and his brothers.

At length dropsy was added to epilepsy, and Michael determined to
resign and enter a monastery. Zoe seems by this time to have been
completely cowed by the arrogant monk, and she made little opposition
when he went on to provide a new and strange aspirant to the throne.
His sister Maria was, as I said, married to a ship-caulker named
Stephen, who had been put in command of the fleet. They had a boy
named Michael, a vicious youth, but young enough to submit to his
uncle’s rule if he obtained the crown, and the Emperor and Zoe were
persuaded or coerced to adopt this child and clothe him with the
dignity of Cæsar. One of the chroniclers tells that they deceived Zoe
by representing the boy as the son of a noble matron. Some such fiction
may have been served to the populace, but Zoe could hardly be deceived
on the point; and even the people were not long deceived, if at all,
since he has passed into history as Michael the Caulker. In the chapel
at Blachernæ the boy was accepted into the imperial family, after
swearing the customary ponderous oaths to respect Zoe as his mother and
mistress. It is not impossible that Zoe felt that this adoption of a
son who was to wear the crown made her own position more secure.

Some time afterwards Michael IV. retired to a monastery, and Michael
V. began to look forward to his imperial opportunities of indulgence.
The next course of events is not quite clear, but it seems that the
retiring Emperor felt some scruple about his action and had relegated
the boy to a house without the walls. He died, refusing to see Zoe,
soon afterwards (10th December 1041), and John forged a letter in his
name, bidding the guards deliver the young Cæsar, and brought him to
the palace. We are then told that Zoe asserted her power, bestowed the
crown on the youth only on the strictest promise of obedience to her,
and expelled the three brothers--John, George and Constantine--from the
palace. It seems more likely that the brothers quarrelled with each
other. John, promising the most absolute power to Zoe, had his younger
brothers exiled, and then Constantine intrigued with the young Emperor
and displaced his brother.

These details are of little moment for our purpose. By the spring of
1042, three months after the death of her husband, we find Zoe sharing
the power with her adopted son and his uncle Constantine, and a fresh
chapter of romance opens in her story.

Constantine, apparently, urged the youth to get rid of Zoe and rule
alone. A vicious and conceited youth, he was little troubled by the
oaths he had taken a few months before, but he felt it necessary to
proceed cautiously. He began to slight Zoe, then to treat her with
disdain and harshness. He confined her to her palace, and refused
to let her control the treasury. One day he announced one of those
imperial processions through the city which the people regarded as
opportunities to express their feelings, and rode out alone. To his
delight he was received with the liveliest rejoicing. The citizens
hung their choicest silks and tapestries before their houses, and
displayed their silver and other treasures on their balconies, as
they were wont to do on the most festive occasions. Elated with his
apparent popularity, Michael consulted his unofficial council of
fast-living young sportsmen, as soon as he returned to the palace,
and they decided to dismiss Zoe at once. It is said that Michael
himself brutally told her of his decision, and even slapped the fair
face of his adopted mother. The charge he put forward was that she was
preparing a poison for him. It would not be difficult to believe, if
there were any serious evidence, but it was probably only a pretext to
get rid of her. That night she was put on ship at the quay, rowed to
the islands and consecrated a nun.

On the following day, however, the laments of Zoe were cut short in
a very unexpected manner. A boat came at its highest speed from the
palace, and a royal official bade her at once return to her dignity.
The people had resented the flagrant conduct of her adopted son, and he
had hastily summoned her to her palace. A herald had been sent into the
public square to announce that the most pious Emperor had deposed his
mother and the patriarch for conspiring against his throne and would
himself care for their interests in the future. From the sullen crowd
a voice protested angrily that they “wanted their mother Zoe, not the
son of the caulker”; it was repeated fervently on every side, and the
prefect had to fly under a shower of stones. Then the crowd poured into
the cathedral, from which the patriarch had not yet departed, and a
noisy debate took place. A council of the clergy and Senators was then
held in the church, the singular resolution was taken to bring Theodora
from her convent and clothe her with the purple.

The younger sister of Zoe had, it will be recalled, been compelled by
her to take the monastic vows at Petrion eleven years before, and this
sudden recall to life--a recall without precedent, since she was not
summoned for the purpose of marrying--gave a remarkable turn to her
career. She had passed from the luxury and dissipation of her father’s
palace, with a brief interval of independent life, to the shade of the
monastery, and now she was to spend the last fifteen years of her life
on the imperial throne. She was of sterner stuff than Zoe, and the
Senators must have concluded that she alone could check the audacity
of the low-born Paphlagonians. This does not in itself argue any great
strength of character in Theodora. We must remember that there was
always a party of ambitious eunuchs or statesmen behind each of the
names that is put forward by the historian.

When the news of this decision reached Michael, and the crowd stormed
angrily at the gates of the palace, he sent an officer on a swift
vessel to the Princes’ Islands for Zoe. In the palace she was quickly
stripped of her nun’s robe, and clothed in her former garments. It is
clear that Michael’s uncle, Constantine, who was not without ability,
directed the campaign in the palace. Michael was advised to take Zoe
with him into the imperial lodge overlooking the Hippodrome and show
the citizens, who had gathered in the enclosure, that all was well. The
only reply he got was a shower of stones, arrows and epithets, and, as
the chroniclers remark, the young lion became at once a timid hare, and
proposed to run for shelter to the monastery at Studion, on the Asiatic
side. His uncle prevented him, however, and marshalled the guards in
the fore part of the palace. The battle which followed ended in a
complete victory for the people. Constantine and Michael fled across
the water to Studion, in the early morning of Wednesday in Holy Week,
and the new Empress Theodora was conducted into the palace over the
corpses of some three thousand of the combatants.

The royal sisters, it will be understood, did not fly into each other’s
arms. Theodora had to thank Zoe for eleven years’ confinement, and Zoe
herself was very reluctant to share her power with her younger sister.
However, a formal reconciliation was arranged by the Senators, and the
two Empresses sat side by side to receive the homage of the leading
citizens and decide what was to be done with the late Emperor and his
uncle. If there were any who wondered in what spirit Theodora would
wield her power after a decade of religious life, they were not left
long in doubt. Zoe asked what the will of her advisers was in regard to
the fugitives, and such cries as “Out with their eyes!” and “Crucify
them!” rang furiously through the chamber. Zoe recoiled and pleaded for
leniency, but Theodora, a much better speaker than her sister, sternly
ordered the prefect to see that their eyes were put out. A great crowd
crossed the sea with the officers, and saw Michael, who had hidden
under the altar, and his more stoical uncle dragged from the chapel.
The same crowd had applauded Michael in his procession hardly a week
before; now they stood by with wild delight to see the brutal sentence
carried out. It was 21st April: Michael the Caulker had reigned for
four months.

For a few weeks the imperial sisters ruled their kingdom in complete
harmony and with exemplary zeal. M. Diehl, too lightly following the
censorious Psellus, rates the intelligence and character of both at a
very low level, but that estimate is hardly supported by the facts.
Few Emperors had dared to attack the administrative corruption of the
Empire as Zoe and Theodora attacked it in the first freshness of their
power, and as we have every reason to believe that they would have
continued to attack it. For centuries the State had been the easy prey
of ambitious eunuchs at Court and corrupt officials in the provinces.
Zoe and Theodora issued decrees to the effect that all injustice
must cease and that the law must be administered with equity. They
themselves sat on the highest tribunal of the city to hear cases, and
the sale of offices was strictly prohibited. The accounts of the late
chief minister were examined, and Constantine, eyeless and shaven,
was brought from his monastery to explain the enormous deficiency.
The power of his family was broken for ever, and the miserable man
disclosed that 5300 pounds of gold (nearly a quarter of a million
sterling) was hidden in a cistern in his house. Legates and petitions
were heard with dignity by the royal sisters, and it must have seemed
to many that the Empire had, by this singular adventure, obtained
juster and finer rulers than it had known for many a century. We cannot
discriminate in the joint public action of the sisters, but it is
clear that the strong will and intelligence of Theodora were the chief
power of the administration. How drastically the Empire needed such a
purification may be gathered from the fact that, when the patriarch
Alexis died in the following year, a secret and dishonest hoard of
gold, amounting to more than £100,000, was discovered in his palace.

This brilliant example of feminine rule might have been expected to
disarm the old Byzantine prejudice against women, but prejudices of
that nature are too deeply rooted to be displaced by facts. The cry
was raised that an Emperor was needed, and Zoe once more expressed her
willingness to marry. The careful chronicler tells us that her conduct
was not necessarily inspired by a carnal feeling--she was now sixty-two
years old--but that she may have feared that Theodora and her ministers
wished to dislodge her. Her age, no less than the remarkable conditions
of her third and last marriage, will easily persuade us that the motive
was political. There were those who said that, as Theodora had been the
chief agent in expelling Michael, the throne belonged to her alone,
and Zoe sought an ally. The first noble chosen by her was Constantine
Delassenus, who had almost obtained her hand and the throne fourteen
years before. But Constantine, when he was invited to the Court for
inspection, proved so brusque and independent that he was again
dismissed. Her next choice was Constantine Catepano, a handsome officer
of the palace, with whom, in spite of her age, the gossips of the Court
already connected Zoe somewhat too intimately. Constantine, however,
had a wife living, and this lady is said to have poisoned him as soon
as she heard of the proposal to divorce her.

If we may believe the gossipy chronicles, Zoe met the disappointment
with tranquillity, as she had another lover among the officials of the
palace. Constantine Monomachos, a very handsome and distinguished and
dissolute noble, had been exiled from Court to Mitylene by Michael
IV. on the suspicion of intimacy with Zoe, and had for some years
gilded the hours of his distant exile with the enjoyment of letters,
the pleasures of the table and the affection of a pretty and devoted
cousin. When his second wife had died, he had obeyed the injunction
of the Church to refrain from a third marriage and had been content
with the free companionship of the beautiful Sclerena, a sister of
the distinguished noble Romanus Sclerus--a member, that is to say, of
one of the proudest Byzantine families. She had followed her lover
to Lesbos, used her fortune to mitigate the harshness of his exile,
and was living with him at the time when Zoe recalled him to Court.
“Handsome as Achilles,” uniting a prodigious strength with a singular
delicacy and elegance of appearance, equally devoted to the robust
pleasures of the chase and the enervating delights of love, Constantine
Monomachos at once returned to his place in the heart of the ageing
Empress, and was invited to wed her. He is said to have stipulated
beforehand that the fair Sclerena should be allowed to come to
Constantinople, and Zoe genially consented. They were married, and Zoe
entered upon the last and strangest part of her strange career.

While the sexless Theodora continued to rule the Empire and put out the
eyes of her enemies, while Constantine revelled in the new and more
exquisite luxuries of his position, Zoe seems quietly to have enjoyed
the secure and restful days which her marriage obtained for her. She
still, with her maids, compounded and distilled the perfumes which were
almost her one luxury, but she now paid a scrupulous attention to her
devotions and burned much incense before the icons. Sclerena at first
dwelt apart, and Constantine set about building a magnificent palace
for her, thinly veiling his liaison with the pretence of going daily to
see the progress of the works. As the citizens smiled at the connexion,
and Zoe seemed to be piously indifferent to it, he became bolder and
asked Zoe to allow him to bring Sclerena to live in the palace. Again
Zoe consented, and the _ménage à trois_ was maintained in the most
pleasant harmony. She gave Sclerena the title of Empress, embraced her,
when they met, with entire goodwill, and showed her such consideration
that she never visited her husband without first ascertaining if he was
disengaged. Constantine occupied the central part of the palace, and
his wife and mistress had apartments on each side.

Although Zoe now approached her seventieth year, she still retained
the freshness of her complexion and had no wrinkles. Psellus says that
a stranger would have been sure that she was still a young woman. She
shared the pleasures of the gay Court, and made no protest against the
frivolous Constantine emptying the treasury on his mistress. If we may
believe implicitly all the details given by Psellus, there was little
delicacy in the fun which enlivened the gardens or halls--for Zoe
disliked the open air--of the sacred domain. Music and skilful dancing
were too fine for his appreciation. He liked the broader merriment of
mimes, and took especial pleasure in imitations of stammering. His
chief entertainers would go so far as to represent, pantomimically, the
chaste Theodora lying abed in child-birth, and Theodora herself joined
in the loud laughter of Constantine as the man imitated the shrieks
which befitted such an occasion. The months passed very merrily, and
the treasury emptied.

And as the treasury emptied, and the citizens saw their funds passing
into the marvellous palace which Constantine was building for Sclerena,
clouds began to gather over the life of the epicure. One day, in the
year 1044, as he rode with his guards at the head of a religious
procession, a cry broke from the crowd: “We don’t want Sclerena as
Empress, nor to see our lawful mistresses, Zoe and Theodora, perish on
her account.” The cry was a spark to the spreading discontent, and the
small troop of guards were surrounded by a threatening mob. Fortunately
for the Emperor, the Empresses were watching the procession from the
balcony, and they sent troops to rescue him. Later, a discontented
noble led some Macedonian troops against the city, and encamped
opposite the Blachernæ gate. Constantine disdainfully ordered a chair
to be placed for him outside the gate, in order that he might see, and
be seen by, the rebels. For a time they were content to sing comic
songs about him--of which there must have been a good supply in the
city--then they made a dash and scattered his guards, and could have
penetrated into the city, possibly taken it, if they had not foolishly
retired. On such slender threads did crowns hang in that singular
Empire.

Sclerena relieved the growing discontent by a premature death,
apparently about the year 1045, and the superb palace which had been
intended for Constantine’s mistress was turned into a monastery. Five
years later Zoe closed her long and romantic career, at the age of
seventy. Constantine mourned for her as if she had been a beloved
child, and even pressed the Church to put her on the list of the
canonized; he may have read how St Theodora had won the aureole largely
by her freedom from jealousy. When it was found, after a time, that
some curious fungi had grown about her monument, he insisted that they
were heaven-sent assurances that Zoe had been admitted at once into the
company of the saints. The Greek Church, however, was not persuaded to
add Zoe to its quaint list of the blessed, and few will reflect on the
many events which reveal her personality to us without admitting that,
whether or no she was guilty of the positive crimes attributed to her,
she had little or no moral feeling.

Constantine found consolation in the charms of a young Alan princess
who was detained as a hostage at Constantinople. The milk-white skin
and fine eyes of the unknown so fascinated him that he gave her the
imperial title and emptied the remainder of the treasury upon her and
the relatives who flocked to share her fortune. He was by this time
a miserable wreck of his former magnificent person, and could not
sit unaided on a horse, but the Court still rang with laughter and
buffoonery. His favourite, a man who had been raised from the position
of street buffoon to that of Court jester, became so infatuated with
his wealth and privileges that he dreamed of possessing the pretty Alan
princess and the purple. He was caught in Constantine’s bedroom with a
drawn sword. The Emperor asked why he had attempted assassination, and,
when the man said that he had an irresistible passion to see himself
in the crown and imperial robes, burst into laughter and ordered the
attendants to put them on him. He returned to his position, and, to the
amusement of Constantine, made more open love than before to the fair
Circassian mistress. But the Emperor died in 1054, and his mistress
returned to her previous obscurity.

When it was seen that Constantine was failing, a number of the nobles
and officials conspired to put on the throne Nicephorus Bryennius, but
Theodora’s supporters forestalled the plot. They sent a swift vessel
for her and lodged her in the sacred palace before their opponents
could bring Bryennius from Bulgaria, which he governed. She seems to
have been forced out of affairs during the later years of Constantine,
and the sending of a boat implies, apparently, that she had retired
to the suburbs. She was still, in her seventh decade of life, erect
of form and clear in mind, and drastic punishment was inflicted on
the conspirators. She then began again to control the affairs of the
Empire as she had done in conjunction with Zoe. She personally received
ambassadors and heard trials, and resumed her war on corrupt officials.
Psellus is disdainful of her rule, and unjust to her. The only grave
defect we can recognize is that she put the higher offices and commands
at the disposal of men who were less distinguished for ability than
for devotion to her. A very strong provincial aristocracy had by this
time arisen in the Empire, and from their vast estates a number of able
nobles and officers kept a discontented eye on the hierarchy of eunuchs
at Constantinople.

Theodora, conscious of her vigour, and sustained by the prophetical
assurance of a monk that she would wear the crown for a long time,
maintained her power for three further years, and then became seriously
ill. It is said that she chose an aged and feeble noble of the city,
Michael Stratioticus, to don the purple, but one is rather disposed
to see in the choice of Stratioticus the action of the Court party,
whose influence was threatened by the provincial nobles. Theodora still
confided in the monk’s prophecy; she had the aged soldier brought to
her sickbed and bound him by the direst oaths to promise obedience
to herself. She died a few days later, however, on 30th August 1057,
leaving the crown to the frail charge of Michael VI. The historian must
regret that Theodora had not a larger opportunity to prove her value as
a ruler and exhibit her personality. She was a woman of great vigour
and generally high political ideals, and she incurs the reproach only
of stooping at times to the common Byzantine level in securing her
power. It was not she, but the contemptible Constantine, who emptied
the treasury for frivolous purposes, and, in spite of the light disdain
of Psellus, her rule compares most favourably with that of most of the
Emperors.

CHAPTER XI

EUDOCIA

The struggle which Theodora had foreseen was not long deferred after
her death, and Michael Stratioticus was compelled, after a few months
of feeble imperial experiment, to retire to the private life from which
he had been unwisely drawn. The great territorial nobles--one might
almost say, the feudal nobles--concentrated upon the capital and put
one of their number, Isaac Comnenus, upon the throne. Isaac had in
earlier years married a Bulgarian princess, and her career as mistress
of a large provincial domain, and then as Empress of Constantinople,
suggests a very interesting study. Unfortunately, her husband’s reign
lasted only two years, and the events yield us only few and fleeting
glimpses of the new Empress.

Æcatherina, as the best contemporary authority, Nicephorus Bryennius,
calls her (though later writers often say Catherina), descended from
the Bulgarian royal family, which had fallen from its high estate
when “Basil the Bulgarian-slayer” had won a definitive victory over
the nation. Bryennius makes her a daughter of the King Samuel, and
we have in a later chronicle a picture of Samuel’s daughters which
would dispose us to imagine Æcatherina as a very fiery and interesting
personality. When, in the presence of Basil, they were brought face to
face with the woman whose husband had killed their brother, the Emperor
and his officers had great difficulty in preventing a very violent
and undignified scene. The dates, however, make it improbable that
Æcatherina was one of the daughters of Samuel--others more probably
suggest that she was his niece, or grand-niece--and in character
she seems rather to have been gentle and religious. She was brought
from her remote provincial home and made Augusta, but she proved to
be one of the quiet and retiring Empresses who leave no mark in the
chronicles. The only reference to her is that, in 1059, she encouraged
her husband, who had met with a serious accident or illness, to
resign, and she herself took the veil of the nun. One suspects that
her husband’s policy of curtailing the funds of the luxurious and
innumerable monks alarmed her, and she was ready to believe that, as
rumour maintained, the wild boar which led him into grave peril in
1059 was no ordinary animal. He resigned, and Æcatherina, changing her
name to Helena, retired with her daughter Maria to a quiet mansion,
where they practised monastic discipline and were esteemed so holy
that Æcatherina was eventually buried in the cemetery of the monks of
Studion.

With the next Empress, Eudocia, we return to the more familiar and
more piquant type of Byzantine princess: the woman who unites with
her subservience to the Church a skill in casuistry which protects
her human inclinations from the harsher control of the Church’s
ascetic standards. Eudocia Macrembolitissa, or Eudocia the daughter
of Macrembolites, a distinguished noble of Constantinople, had some
beauty and no little wit, as well as good birth and breeding. In the
reign of Michael IV. and Zoe she had been wooed and won by a handsome
and learned, if not very warlike, commander named Constantine Ducas,
and had in the subsequent twenty years of changing rulers borne three
sons and three daughters to her elderly husband. Constantine was at
least ten years older than she, and had no higher ambition than to
be regarded as a prince of letters and rhetoric. It must, therefore,
have been an agreeable surprise to Eudocia to learn, in 1059, that the
retiring Emperor had transferred his crown to her husband, and she was
henceforth to be the mistress of the sacred palace. She was then,
probably, in her later thirties. She was entitled Augusta, and the
imperial dignity was conferred also on her six children, of whom the
youngest was born after her coronation.

During the eight years of her husband’s reign Eudocia remained a silent
witness of his futility and unpopularity. He retained his pedantry, and
sought the laurels of learning and eloquence, while formidable enemies
threatened the Empire on every side. In 1067 he perceived that his
inglorious reign was about to end, and summoned Eudocia, the nobles
and the patriarch to his couch. The nobles were commanded to swear to
maintain the throne of Eudocia and her sons, and Eudocia was compelled
to swear a portentous oath that she would not marry again. Possibly
Constantine felt that he was not imposing a very heavy sacrifice on
a woman who approached her fiftieth year, and it was plainly to the
interest of his sons that she should not marry. Eudocia signed the
written oath, and it was entrusted to the patriarch Xiphilin to keep in
the great church.

The regency of Eudocia lasted about seven months, during which she
emulated the conduct of Zoe and Theodora. She received ambassadors,
heard trials and paid more direct and closer attention to the
affairs of the Empire than her late husband had done. Two things,
however, concerned her and illustrated the weakness of woman-rule at
Constantinople. The Turks and other hostile neighbours were raiding
the provinces with greater vigour, and the nobles were making this a
pretext for intrigue to replace Eudocia with an Emperor. Before the
year was out Eudocia decided to marry again and sought a means of
evading the oath which the patriarch grimly guarded.

The story of her outwitting the patriarch is, as we find it in the
later chronicles, in the finest vein of Byzantine melodrama. She took
into her confidence one of the wiliest eunuchs of her Court, who
assured her that it was quite easy to induce the patriarch to release
her. This Xiphilin, the patriarch at the time, was himself as casuistic
as he was religious. Originally a noble, he had voluntarily embraced
the black robe of the monk, and had been withdrawn from the monastery
to rule the Eastern Church. He had in Constantinople a brother named
Bardas, whose gallantries and sybaritic ways were notorious. When the
eunuch proposed the subject of marriage, Xiphilin sternly maintained
that the oath was binding and that Eudocia must remain a widow, but
when the astute eunuch regretted that such was his view, since it was
his brother Bardas whom Eudocia wished to marry, Xiphilin reconsidered
the matter. It is not for us to analyse his reasoning. It is enough
that in a short time he declared to the assembled Senators that the
oath was unjust and invalid, a mere wanton outrage on the part of a
jealous man, and he handed the precious document back to Eudocia to
destroy. His feelings may be imagined when, a few hours later, he
heard that the Empress was married, not to his brother, but to Romanus
Diogenes.

The contemporary writer Psellus gives a more sober version, but,
although Psellus was one of Eudocia’s chief ministers at the time,
there can be little doubt that his vanity and policy have somewhat
tempered the veracity of his narrative. Eudocia, he says, came to him
in tears to complain that the cares of Empire were an intolerable
burden for a single woman’s shoulders, and she wished to marry. The
story is, perhaps, not inconsistent with the story of her outwitting
the patriarch. In any case, the second marriage of Eudocia had an
element of romance.

In the state prison of Constantinople at the time was a handsome young
noble and commander named Romanus Diogenes, who ran some risk of losing
his head for high treason. Distinguished by birth and in person, and a
man of great spirit, he reflected that the throne of the Eastern Empire
had been reached by less able men than he, and cherished a daydream of
wearing the purple. At the death of Constantine in 1067, when there
was much discussion of the empty throne and the imperial widow, he
imprudently confessed his ambition to those about him in the remote
province of Thrace, which he governed; he was denounced in the capital;
and he was brought in bonds to Constantinople and put on trial. He had
then completed his thirtieth year: a tall, comely, broad-shouldered
man, with the dark skin of a Cappadocian and very winning eyes.
Constantinople looked with sympathy on the manly, but impetuous, young
noble. He was connected by birth with the greatest families of the
Asiatic provinces, and he pleaded that it was only his concern for
the safety of the menaced Empire that had wrung from him words of
dissatisfaction. His treason was, however, apparent, and he was found
guilty and restored to jail.

Eudocia was probably present at the trial of Romanus, and noted the
handsome form and flashing eye. She professed afterwards that the
trial was unsatisfactory and must be revised, and the young commander
found himself acquitted and free to return to his native province. The
time was not yet ripe for the marriage project; in fact, one of the
historians states that Romanus was already married, and went to join
his wife and family in Cappadocia. About Christmas (1067), however, he
received an order from Eudocia to return to Constantinople, and may
or may not have been surprised to hear that she proposed to marry and
crown him. His wife and family seem to have been deserted with great
cheerfulness--unless we prefer to regard the statement in the chronicle
as an error[24]--and Eudocia secretly prepared for the marriage.
Senators were bribed to support the proposal, and, on 31st December,
the patriarch was won by the stratagem which I have already described.
That very night Romanus was introduced, fully armed, into the palace
and secretly wedded to the Empress, and on the first day of the new
year the young Emperor and his middle-aged Empress were ceremoniously
presented to the people. For a moment it seemed as if the fierce
Varangian guards were about to avenge what they regarded as a violation
of the oath to the dead Constantine, but Eudocia prevailed on her elder
sons to assure the guards that they had consented to the marriage, and
the trouble was averted for the time.

It was, however, in face of considerable hostility that Eudocia and
Romanus entered upon their task of governing the Empire. The clergy
were naturally hostile, since their leader had been tricked into
an ignominious concession; more distinguished nobles than Romanus
envied his elevation; and courtiers who were attached to the fortunes
of Eudocia’s elder sons regarded the new Emperor, and the possible
issue of the new marriage, with sullen distrust. Michael Psellus, the
historian who boasts that he guided Eudocia’s counsels in regard to
the marriage, is transparently hostile to Romanus, and his historical
work is largely responsible for the traditional prejudice against that
brave and spirited, but injudicious and unfortunate, monarch. Psellus
was not merely the chief student of philosophy in Constantinople, but
an ambitious and successful courtier. His great repute in letters and
philosophy gave him a commanding position in the Court of Eudocia, who
had herself some literary ambition,[25] and his secret and sinuous
counsels must have deeply influenced the later course of the careers
of Romanus and Eudocia. A philosopher-statesman was the great ideal
which Plato, whose works he revived, had urged upon the Greeks, but the
fortunes of Psellus remain so even throughout the various revolutions
he outlived that one is tempted to compare him rather with
Talleyrand than with Plato’s ideal.

[Illustration: EUDOCIA AND ROMANUS IV

FROM AN IVORY IN THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE, PARIS]

Into this atmosphere of culture the robust Romanus was little fitted to
enter, and some disdain must have been felt of his uncultivated ways.
On the other hand, the brother of the late Constantine, John Ducas,
who bore the dignity of Cæsar and jealously guarded the position of
his nephews, was not less hostile to Romanus. The boys had received
the purple before the death of their father, and the time was rapidly
approaching when, with the assistance of their uncle and Psellus,
they might begin to exercise their power. To this plan Romanus was a
considerable obstacle. When we further learn that Romanus was gravely
conscious of his duty to restore the strength and discipline of the
army, and diverted funds from the entertainment of idle citizens to the
pay and equipment of his troops, we realize that the life of the palace
was preparing for one more of those tragic revolutions which punctuate
the history of the Byzantine Empire.

From this Court atmosphere of pedantry and intrigue Romanus turned
to the field of battle; he would strengthen his position by winning
such laurels as his vigorous and warlike character seemed to promise
him. Two months after his coronation a fresh invasion of the Turks was
announced, and he led a large army out to meet them. After nearly a
year’s absence he returned with some report of victories, but there had
in the same year been heavy losses, and his success was not decisive
enough to override the intrigues of his opponents. Already, we are
told, he found Eudocia colder. Her attitude is attributed to his
arrogance and boastfulness; we may suppose that it was just as much
due to an instinctive irritation when her robust husband strode into
the philosophic atmosphere of the palace with the smell of the camp
clinging to him and the language of war on his lips. In two or three
months he was off once more to the field, leaving Eudocia to her master
of philosophy and her brother-in-law. Into their hands she placed the
more virile cares of State, while she enlarged libraries, cultivated
men of letters and fostered the higher ambition of making verses. Her
eldest son, Michael, was associated with her in her cultural work.

When Romanus returned in the following winter, still without decisive
success, he seems to have concluded that it would be better to remain
in Constantinople, and the campaign of the third year was entrusted to
his generals, but in the spring of 1071 he again prepared to take the
field. Nothing but a crushing victory over the enemies of the Empire
would enable him to silence his enemies in the Court and capital.
Eudocia seems by this time to have wavered between admiration of her
young and manly spouse and repugnance to his more robust standards of
life. She was now certainly over fifty, and had never been particularly
sensuous, but we cannot doubt that she had married Romanus for love and
that that love was not yet extinct. As he set out from port for his
last crossing to Asia a singular dark-plumaged pigeon circled his royal
galley. He directed that it should be caught and sent to the Empress;
and it was said in later years that Eudocia nervously recognized in
the rare bird an omen of the evil fortune that was about to befall her
husband.

And in the course of the summer stragglers made their way hastily to
Constantinople with the news that Romanus had been heavily defeated
and his large army shattered. The Emperor himself had been slain,
some said, but at length there came men who had seen him captured and
borne away, a prisoner, by the Turks. The hour of the malcontents had
come, and a council was summoned to discuss the situation. It was at
once decided that no effort would be made to save Romanus--some of
the authorities declare that it was the treachery of the Cæsar’s son,
acting on the instructions of his father, which led to the reverse--but
the eldest son, Michael, should be appointed ruling Emperor, together
with his mother.

That Eudocia at once surrendered her husband becomes quite clear from
the subsequent course of events. The new administration had hardly
settled to its work when Eudocia received a joyful letter from her
husband announcing that he was free, and on his way to Constantinople.
How the Turk had entirely falsified his repute for barbarity, treated
Romanus as a brother king in misfortune, and eventually released him
on promise of a ransom, is a familiar and attractive picture in the
history of the time. Romanus was hastening to the arms of his beloved
wife. Eudocia is described by contemporary writers as “distracted” and
eager to consult those about her as to her conduct. Of wifely feeling
she did not exhibit one sincere particle, and, however we may remind
ourselves of the inevitable coldness of a woman in her sixth decade of
life, her conduct is somewhat repellent. Had she known that the Cæsar
was bent on bringing her to a common ruin with her husband, she might
at least have purchased some loyalty to him, in the usual Byzantine
fashion; but she was either ignorant or powerless, and she accepted the
counsel that Romanus should be disowned and repelled by force from his
Empire.

John Ducas, however, concluded that the opportunity was convenient
for the removal of both Emperor and Empress. A decree was issued to
the provinces to arrest the advance of Romanus, and the guards were
marshalled. At this date the mercenary troops in charge of the palace
were the famous and formidable Varangian guards, in whom modern
authorities recognize the blue-eyed giants of distant Scandinavia and
even of Britain. Romanus had favoured the native troops of the Empire
rather than these foreign mercenaries, and they at once accepted the
command of the Cæsar. One half of them went to the apartments of
Michael, and declared him sole Emperor of the Romans; the other body
went in search of Eudocia, with orders to transfer her to a monastery.

Eudocia at once concluded that the end of her rule had come when she
heard the jubilant clash of axe on shield, the deep guttural voices,
raised in song, of the northern soldiers, and their heavy tread across
the gardens and terraces. Fearing for her life, she hid herself in some
sort of hut in the grounds of her palace, but the door was presently
flung open and she looked on the fierce hairy faces and shining
weapons of the Varangians. She was prostrate with terror when the
Cæsar arrived, to give her the comparative consolation that her life
would be spared, but her empire was over. From the palace, spoiled of
all the ensigns of royalty, we follow her along the short and painful
route that we have seen so many proud rulers of the sacred palace
take. At the Bucoleon quays a swift galley waited to take her to the
Asiatic shore, where she was lodged in a monastery which she herself
had founded. A further message soon came, ordering her to take the
black veil, and the frail and unfortunate woman bade farewell to all
the glories of imperial life. It was only four years since she had been
left in control of the Empire by her first husband.

Shortly afterwards she was summoned to bury Romanus, and with him the
last flickering hope of a return to power. He had collected an army and
resolved to fight for his throne, and the troops of Ducas at length
pinned him in a town of Cilicia. In order to end the civil war John
now sent an assurance that the life of Romanus would be spared if he
would resign his claim and enter a monastery; nay, three archbishops
were sent to give him a solemn testimony that John had sworn and would
fulfil his oath. Frail as the most formidable oaths had become in
Eastern Christendom, Romanus opened the gates and yielded to the sons
of the Cæsar. The rest of the story is a chapter of nauseous horror,
and concerns us, fortunately, only in outline. Romanus was conveyed
across Asia Minor, in the robe of a monk, with studied insult. Most
of the chroniclers affirm that poison was administered to him, but
that his powerful constitution prevented it from doing more than add
to his misery. At length his eyes were cut out with more than ordinary
brutality, the roughest and most elementary attention to his bleeding
sockets was refused, and he was borne once more on a mule, dying by
inches in the most ghastly conceivable fashion, across Asia Minor.
He reached the island of Prote in time to die on the soil that was
already watered by so many imperial tears, and the chroniclers add that
Eudocia gave a splendid funeral to the remains of the man whom she had
transferred from the jail to the palace, less than four years before,
in the full pride of a magnificent manhood.

I have said that with the remains of Romanus she buried her last hope
of returning to power, yet some seven years afterwards a strange
message reached her in her cloister, recalling the memory, if not the
hope, of imperial power. Her son Michael proved an ineffective ruler.
The tradition of culture which had lingered in the palace since the
days of Psellus absorbed all his energy, and he could not be diverted
from the dialogues of Plato or the iridescent dreams of Plotinus by
mere conspiracies against his throne or invasions of his Empire.
Indeed, it was with difficulty, sometimes, that they could drag him
to table or persuade him to refrain from spending the night over his
books. The irony of the situation was that, while the Greek writings
over which he lingered urged that a profound study of philosophy was
the fittest education of monarchs, Michael remained as helpless and
heedless as a boy, precisely on account of his studies. Fortunately,
he had the casual inspiration to call to the palace a wily eunuch,
named Nicephorus, who become the virtual ruler. Nicephoritzes--as the
people, using the diminutive form of his name, called the pale and
shrunken little eunuch--soon displaced the Cæsar John, and, as was the
invariable custom of his kind, enriched himself at the expense of the
impoverished and decaying provinces.

Under Nicephoritzes Eudocia had no chance of a return to power. He had
endeavoured to persuade her first husband, the Emperor Constantine,
that she was unfaithful to him, and had been driven from office during
her regency. But the Empress’s quarters in the palace were not vacant;
a new type of Empress was added to the long and varied gallery.
Shortly before his accession to the supreme throne Michael had married
a princess of one of the tribes that had settled in Asia Minor. The
father of the Empress Maria is conflictingly described as a king of the
Iberians and the Alans, and is said to have been a ruler of great fame
and power; but he is not named, and it seems that he was not powerful
enough to avert or temper the tragedy of his daughter’s career. Her
dowry had been her beauty. I have complained at times of the lamentable
indifference of the male historians of Constantinople to the physical
features of the Empresses, and the lack of portraits which might bring
the living figure with any fulness or accuracy before the imagination.
We now, however, approach a period, the history of which has been
written for us by a woman, the famous Anna Comnena, and her pen happily
wanders at times back to the age of Eudocia, of which her husband,
Nicephorus Bryennius, was the chief historian.

Unhappily, the art of which Anna Comnena was so patently proud did not
include skill in portraiture. Maria was the most beautiful woman of her
time, and, although her interests become opposed to those of Anna and
her family, and the learned princess was capable of malignant hatred,
Anna Comnena rises to the height of superlative when her pen delineates
the figure of Maria. Her grace of form and beauty of face were beyond
the artist’s power to convey; though one must add that Anna not
infrequently uses that formula, in order to enhance the artistic wonder
of her own descriptions. Maria, she says, was tall and graceful as a
cypress; her body was white as snow, save for the roses that bloomed
in her cheeks, and the luminous blue eyes which shone beneath the
perfect and lofty arch of her auburn eyebrows. To this vague poetical
description we may add at once that the beautiful young princess was
not wholly devoid of the spirit of her tribe, and was prepared for
romantic adventure in support of the imperial dignity.

The seven years of Michael’s reign do not interest us. The Emperor
lived in the remote solitude of his exalted studies; Maria enjoyed the
superb luxury of her position, and brought a prince into the world for
the greater security of her throne; Eudocia languished in the royal
monastery of the Virgin across the straits. Usurpers rose and fell, and
the defrauded people spoke with bitterness of the young pedant who let
his ministers rob them while he studied the divine maxims of Plato.
Another princess, daughter of Robert of Lombardy, was introduced from
the West, but she was, like Maria’s son, to whom she was betrothed,
a child of tender years, looking with strange blue eyes on the vast
palaces she would one day govern--they said--and the boy who shyly
shrank from her companionship.

At last, in 1078, a more fortunate rebel advanced on Constantinople,
the clergy and nobles were bribed to espouse his cause, and Michael
fled to the Blachernæ palace in the suburbs. Maria accompanied him,
and what we know of her character emboldens us to fancy her urging
the distracted scholar to draw a sword on behalf of his throne. His
friends, however, found it impossible to move him, and, yielding to
the usurper, he was conducted on an ass to the monastery at Studion,
where he might prosecute his studies with even greater leisure. The new
Emperor had so genial a disdain for him that he made him titular Bishop
of Ephesus, and allowed him to return and live in the capital.

Maria, in accordance with custom, entered the suburban monastery at
Petrion. She did not, however, take the vows of the religious life,
and it was not long before the interesting news came that the new
Emperor designed to marry her. Nicephorus Botaneiates was an elderly
voluptuary, who had seized the throne only because so little energy was
needed for the task. For the administration of public business he had
two slaves of his own household, of Slavonian extraction, who at once
put an end to the life of Nicephoritzes and diverted the stream of gold
to their own pockets. For their master the pleasures of the table and
the couch sufficed. He had brought to the throne an obscure Empress
named Berdena, but she died shortly afterwards, and the aged Sybarite
consulted his ministers. To their cold and impartial judgment it seemed
that political considerations must rule the choice and they were
divided between the claims of Maria and those of Eudocia. It is true
that Nicephorus had been twice married, that Eudocia was a nun, and
that Maria was not yet a widow; but such difficulties were never beyond
the casuistic resources of the Constantinopolitan clergy. The Emperor
must marry, since the sacred ritual of the Court demanded the presence
of an Empress.

The politicians favoured the suit of Eudocia, and she was actually
informed that Nicephorus wished to marry her, and expressed her cordial
willingness to sacrifice her monastic estate in view of such august
considerations. Nicephorus, however, was, as I said, a Sybarite, and
even advanced age did not blur his experienced eye to the charms of
Maria. We may, therefore, suppose that Nicephorus was neither surprised
nor pained when a certain very holy monk appeared at the monastery of
the Virgin and sternly forbade Eudocia to quit her black robe. It may
be that the monk was one of the chaplains of the monastery; it is at
least clear that his zeal did not take him to the monastery at Petrion,
where Maria resided. The beautiful young Empress was recalled from
her prayers and fasts and conducted to the side of the Emperor in the
palace chapel. The patriarch, who seems to have had some scruples, was
not summoned to perform the ceremony, and Nicephorus noticed with
irritation that the priest who was called hesitated to come to the
sanctuary; Nicephorus had no dispensation for a third marriage, and
Maria’s husband still lived. A courtier, however, had foreseen the
difficulty and had a more accommodating priest at hand. The irregular
knot was tied, or regarded as tied, and Maria returned to enjoy, with
her son, the pleasures of the Emperor’s luxurious Court.

It is, perhaps, no alleviation of the conduct of Maria, in purchasing
her crown by an invalid marriage to an elderly sensualist, to say
that--the chroniclers assure us--quite a number of noble ladies
at Constantinople were eager to be chosen. Eudocia, her youngest
daughter, Zoe, and many other ladies had been pressed upon the notice
of Nicephorus. It is merely one more indication of the inferiority of
character, both in men and women, in the Byzantine Empire. But Maria
was not destined to enjoy long the throne which she had purchased.
Contemptible as the reign of Michael had been, it was succeeded by
one far more contemptible, and sullen murmurs filled the palace and
the city. Men told each other how the aged Emperor, who ought to be
thinking of eternity, changed his splendid robes ten times a day,
anointed his jaded frame with the most costly unguents, and sat down,
day after day, to the most superb banquets that the Empire could
afford; while the two barbaric slaves whom he had made his chief
ministers ground the despairing provinces and disgusted the nobles.
Within a year or two of Maria’s return to power, the customary,
inevitable revolt arose, and she was driven back to her monastery.

This revolution, however, introduces us to the strong women of the