Tales of Byzantium

by Eileen Stephenson

  The years of weak rulers were briefly interrupted when the oldest son of this story’s Manuel Comnenus, Isaac Comnenus, took the throne in 1061 for two years before abdicating due to ill health. The trend of bad rulers continued almost unbroken for another eighteen years until the child of Manuel’s younger son, John, his grandson, Alexios Comnenus, took the throne in 1081, leading the empire to a hard fought recovery. With the exception of the fifty-three years of Latin rule following the Fourth Crusade, every Byzantine emperor until its fall in 1453 could claim descent from this family.

  The high point of Bardas Skleros’s revolt was probably just before he entered Nicaea to discover its sand-filled grain bins. The emperor’s forces defeated him a few months after this story, and he fled to an uncomfortable exile in Persia.

  Basil Lecapenos, the parakoimomenos, was the illegitimate youngest child of Emperor Romanus I. His father had him castrated as an infant, presumably so he would be able to have a position within the palace. I suspect Romanus also wanted to keep the throne for his legitimate descendants. This talented and capable man held the position of leading advisor to five emperors: his brother-in-law Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, nephew Romanus II, Nicephoros II Phocas, John I Tzimiskes, and finally to his great-nephew Basil II. His proximity to the throne gave him access to the treasury, and he amassed great wealth, which ultimately brought about his downfall. Basil II’s abstemious habits led him to take an increasingly dim view of his great-uncle’s lavish lifestyle. Seven years after this story, the parakoimomenos was stripped of his office, had his lands and wealth confiscated, and was exiled, dying soon afterward.

  Alexiad

  Constantinople, April 10, 1119

  “You are certain he has agreed to our plan? This is so important,” Dowager Empress Irene said urgently. Anna Comnena felt her mother’s sharp gray eyes probing her face for any qualms or sign of hesitation. The older woman kept an iron grip on Anna’s elbow as they walked apace through the garden on Anna’s estate overlooking the Bosphorus on that cool morning. Irene often goaded her daughter on, reminding Anna of her humiliation at being denied the throne. So much for both of them depended on the success of their revolt.

  “Yes, Mama, I am certain. He agreed to it last night. He’s my husband; I trust him. He left early this morning to begin recruiting others who will support us—Isaac Kontostephanos, Nicholas Taronites, and others unhappy with my brother,” came Anna’s too-quick response. She feared not meeting her mother’s ideals for an imperial princess. It was easier to do as her mother wished than risk being frozen out. Easier, too, not to mention her husband’s reluctance when they had spoken the night before.

  Her husband knew better than most of Anna’s indignation at being passed over by the father she adored after the promise of the throne made in her early years. Even so, he had been shocked when she disclosed the scheme for them to seize the crown. He clearly doubted Anna would have dreamed this up on her own; not after her brother had taken the throne so smoothly after Alexios’s death eight months earlier. He accused Irene of conjuring it, and at first wanted no part. He had given his grudging agreement after a long argument and a torrent of tears convinced him of her determination to seize her birthright.

  Irene may have conceived this plan for her own reasons, but it was balm to Anna’s injured pride.

  Anna understood why Irene hungered for power such as her formidable mother-in-law had once wielded through Alexios. Emperor Alexios Comnenus had never allowed Irene to govern, even during his months on campaign. Yet he had allowed his own mother to rule as regent in his absence during his early years on the throne. His lack of confidence in his wife had humiliated Irene. She was even more superfluous at her son’s court since Alexios’s death. Her son treated her with respect, but he, too, excluded her from any authority. Irene’s approval, however, was more important to Anna.

  “Look, here he is now,” Anna said as she saw her husband enter the garden from a door in their house. Her smile faded in confusion at the sight of him. His pale face looked unhappy and his eyes evasive. At first, she could not discern the other man in the shadows who followed her husband. The man came into the light, and she realized who it was.

  “Dear God. John is with him,” she murmured as her mother’s grip slackened. John Axouch, her brother’s best friend and most loyal ally. He was dressed in full military regalia, sword at his side.

  Her knees almost buckled. The shock made her heart thump painfully and she felt chilled, as though all her blood had seeped out of her body.

  John nodded at Anna’s husband, who shrank against the far wall. A sturdy man with the black beard and swarthy skin of his Turkish ancestors, John strode over to where Anna and Irene stood, transfixed at his appearance. He bowed deeply to them before speaking.

  “Your Grace, Lady Anna.” John glanced first at the dowager empress before studying Anna at greater length. Irene glared at him with her usual contempt. Alexios had given him to her to foster when John was five, but she had never taken to this child of the heathens.

  Anna drew herself up under his baleful gaze, trying to maintain imperial dignity. This soldier had often been assigned as her escort when Anna and her mother had joined Alexios on campaign in the years before his death. The camaraderie of those years had held the hint of deeper affections, at least on John’s part. Now, though, the warm eyes she recalled had turned to a stony hardness. After several moments with tension as alive as a hissing snake coiled between them, he spoke.

  “Lady Anna, your husband confessed to the plot you and your mother conceived to remove your brother from the imperial throne so that you and he would rule together. Do you deny this treason?”

  Before Anna could speak, her mother blurted out, “It was Anna’s idea. I had no part in it. I tried to convince her not to go ahead with it.”

  Irene had let go of Anna’s arm and put space between them when John appeared. Anna looked at her mother, dumbfounded at this accusation, her fair skin flushing at her mother’s betrayal. Irene’s calculating eyes warned her dutiful daughter not to give her away.

  John Axouch saw this brief soundless exchange between mother and daughter and sighed. Anna knew his many years in close quarters with her family left him with few surprises about Irene. Still, she gave him a defensive look for her mother’s sake. He returned the look with a skeptical frown before speaking again, his voice stern.

  “The emperor, always benevolent and forgiving, has decided that rather than have his beloved mother and sister executed for this crime, as is his right, you will both enter the Kecharitomene Monastery. There you will live out the remainder of your lives.”

  Anna sat down on a nearby bench, stunned, eyes wide with shock, hands clutched at her throat. How many heartbeats had passed from when she had been betrayed, first by her husband and then by her mother? Irene stood motionless with an odd, sour smile frozen on her face. Anna shot an accusatory look at her husband, skulking in the garden corner, somehow more disappointed in him than her mother. He returned it with his own silent accusation, looking disgusted at the women’s recklessness.

  “I can’t leave. What of my children?” Anna cried, her face in her hands, trying to control the nausea sweeping over her. Her youngest was only nine years old.

  “They’ll remain here with your husband. The emperor has given his permission for them to visit you at Kecharitomene,” said John. His voice sounded gruff, but no honeyed tone could sweeten that news.

  John frowned at the two foolish women, one almost turned to stone before him and the other weeping. Anna felt ill when she realized there would be no delay. He turned back toward the lovely villa and raised a hand, signaling the appearance of a half dozen Varangians. The blond soldiers in their red court uniforms carelessly trampled on her rosebushes as they escorted Anna Comnena and the Dowager Empress Irene Ducaena away. Her heart almost broke when she saw the pale faces of her children, the youngest crying, as they stared from the villa’s windows.

  Anna called
out to her husband as he followed the soldiers, “How could you do this? You could have been emperor.”

  He just shook his head.

  ***

  Constantinople, December 1, 1137

  Most days, she refused to think of all she had lost that terrible spring day eighteen years before. But this day, her birthday, the anger rose to a boil, her fists clenched at the injustice of it. The waste of her life, so much of it entombed in these brick walls, left her seething.

  Anna Comnena paced through the monastery garden while the events of that long past April day replayed in her head. Pebbles crunched under her rapid footsteps and crowded out the sound of the Sunday hymns the nuns sang in the nearby church. Her mother, Empress Irene, had founded this place, the Kecharitomene Monastery, more than a quarter century earlier. The name meant “full of grace.” Anna snorted at the thought of finding any grace in what was now her prison.

  A frigid north wind blew gray clouds into the imperial city of Constantinople. The sky darkened with threatening snow, coming early this first day of December. She remembered well her mother’s stories of the joy and celebrations held fifty-five years earlier at her birth. Anna had been their first child, the “born in the purple room” princess of her father, the new Emperor Alexios, and the city had rejoiced. Now, she was a dusty, forgotten relic. Her own daughters were now dead or distant, and her sons, embarrassed at her continued existence, were serving her accursed brother John, the one who called himself emperor. She expected no warm solicitations from her children. The monastery’s superior, the Hegoumena Maria, might acknowledge her at the midday meal. Anna would almost rather be ignored than to have to respond with courtesy to such feigned consideration.

  Her mind slipped back to that day eighteen years before that had seen the start of her first incarceration, and she shivered at the memory. Anna pulled the fox fur mantle closer against the wind, the garment a plush remnant of her golden days as an imperial princess. Suddenly weary, she sat on one of the garden’s weathered benches and frowned in contemplation of the stunted rosebush before her. Years earlier, when first incarcerated, Anna and her mother had planted everything in this garden to occupy their time—roses, poppies, herbs, and even a few fruit trees at the far end. Her mother had told her not to plant this rosebush in a spot shaded for the best part of the day. The small bush had ceased growing and only bloomed on occasion, although it had survived.

  Anna spent seven years with her mother in these walls until Irene’s death. Her husband then pleaded with her brother for her release, to return to their home and his bed, arguing he would prevent her from involvement in any other conspiracy. A ghostly sort of existence as few sought an association with her, but she could come and go and converse as she pleased. She had had ten years outside these walls, though as a disgraced and defeated rebel before her recent return following her husband’s death.

  Anna could not help but imagine how different their lives would have been if their rebellion had succeeded. Her husband had disappointed her with his weak concern for honor. He should have understood how she felt—to be raised until she was eleven to think she would be empress, and then to have it snatched away. She always felt as though people laughed at her for it. He said he never heard such laughter, but the smirks and whispering she saw stung her.

  “I swore an oath of loyalty to your brother, as your own father asked on his deathbed. You know he loved you, but no man prefers a daughter to succeed him rather than a son. I never, never desired the throne, yet you and your mother plotted behind my back,” he had said to her in anger during a visit with their children in those first years spent here with her mother. “You did this to us.”

  Her father’s preference for her brother to succeed him still grated. She had tried so much to impress him with her erudition, her charitable works, even playing chess with him—a game she could not figure out well enough to defeat her father often.

  She had received a terse note from her brother after her husband’s death over a year earlier. “My condolences on the loss of your husband. He was a great friend to me, and I will mourn his death. I expect you will now retire to our mother’s rooms at Kecharitomene.” That was the end of it. As a princess, she would not beg for anything—even her freedom—from her brother.

  Now, back inside the monastery’s walls, the deep note from the striking of the semantron again ordered her silent, unvarying days.

  Anna glanced up at the few seagulls wheeling in the lowering sky, screeching at each other. She smelled the sharp tang of smoke curling through the air as fires were lit in the city to chase the chill away. The street noises of shopkeepers and children outside the monastery’s high walls faded as residents hurried home. A few flakes swirled through air that was as cold as a eunuch’s bed. Still, returning to the confinement of the two rooms she shared with a serving girl, with its warm braziers, held no appeal.

  Here in the city of Constantinople, the greatest and most populous city in the world, she might as well have been sitting in the desert for all the company Anna now had. The rules her mother instituted for the monastery at its founding meant little conversation and fewer visitors. For Anna, educated in mathematics and rhetoric, history and medicine, this was a dull existence. She had traveled throughout the empire with her parents and had been the patroness of a hospital in the city. As a princess, she had sponsored scholars and entertained learned men. Anna missed the sparkling conversations of those men of learning, even if they had scattered like a flock of birds into which an arrow has been shot following her arrest.

  In honest retrospect, Anna felt sick at the cost of her foolhardy attempt to overthrow her brother. He had campaigned with the empire’s generals—their father, uncles, and cousins. He had known how to gain the support of those men of power. She and her mother had not.

  Snowflakes fell like frozen tears on her face. She swept them away. She wished Irene had explained or apologized for her denial to John Axouch of her involvement in the plot. They had spent seven years together within these walls, but her mother never spoke of it. Anna, ever the dutiful child, did whatever her mother asked, treating her with the utmost respect, even after that day. She somehow dreaded confronting her mother, which might have revealed her mother’s uglier side. Irene lay entombed beside Alexios these past eleven years. Anna could now admit—to herself, if no one else—that her mother had not been a wise or loving woman. That bitter lesson came too late.

  Anna stretched out her foot, clad in its faded imperial red leather boot, rustling the stiff grass underneath. She felt veiled and forgotten in the garden as snow began to fall in earnest. Her blue eyes peered into the sky, now barren since the birds had all flown to their nests. She pushed back a loose strand of hair, faded to russet from the vibrant scarlet she had once shared with her father, and pursed her lips. The young Sister Irene saw her from the portico and approached, her black novice’s habit soon speckled with snow. Anna stiffened at the thought of the girl’s relentless cheerfulness. She resolved to maintain the diffidence of an imperial princess born in the purple room.

  “Lady Anna, Hegoumena Maria has asked that you join us in the refectory for our meal. She says it is your birthday and wants to offer special prayers on the occasion,” the bright-eyed nun said as she sat beside Anna without invitation.

  Anna raised an eyebrow at this familiarity but said only, “Thank you, Sister. You may tell the Hegoumena I will join her shortly.” Then, bitterly to herself, “So little like the old days.”

  “The old days, Lady Anna? What do you mean?”

  She wished this child would just leave her alone. Had she forgotten her vow of silence so quickly?

  Anna spoke sharply, impatient at Sister Irene’s ignorance, “Yes, the old days. When I was young and my father, Emperor Alexios, ruled, my birthday was a great celebration. I was his firstborn child, betrothed to Constantine Ducas, the son of an emperor. We were to reign with my father.”

  Anna did not think of Constantine often anymore. Her go
lden-haired first betrothed, as handsome as his mother had been beautiful—until he had begun coughing blood and her parents had ended the betrothal. She had mourned his death some months later, even though by then she had been betrothed to the man who would be her husband.

  “Your father was Emperor Alexios?” the little nun asked, astonished. “He died long before I was born. What was he like?”

  Anna’s eyebrows rose in surprise at the child’s ignorance of both her and her father. “You have not been told of him?” she asked, surprised at the girl’s ignorance of her illustrious father. Most girls were barely taught how to read, but she should have known of her father’s glorious reign and her own imperial dignity.

  “Not so much, Lady Anna.” The girl’s wide brown eyes regarded her with curiosity. The snow fell faster now, covering all with a thin white sheet.

  “A terrible omission in your education,” Anna said brusquely, shaking the snow off her gloved hands, scowling as she did so. “He led great armies against the empire’s enemies, winning victories and the respect of his adversaries. His wisdom and justice in ruling were renowned. I will have to tell you more of him someday,” she said, although she had no such intention. She stood and stretched, wrapping the fur cloak closer. “But now I must ready myself for dinner,” and she turned to stride to her rooms, a blur amongst the spinning flakes.

  ***

  In the morning, after matins, Anna joined the nuns in the refectory to stitch garments for the poor—the Sisters’ daily task. She had little else to occupy her at that time of year. Most of the two dozen nuns living in the monastery were gathered in the room, the rest set on tasks elsewhere on their grounds. Anna took up her needle in glum silence with the others, except for Sister Irene, whose turn it was that day to read aloud from the Bible for the edification of the other sisters as they worked.