A hundred years of life still awaited the Eastern Empire from the time when John IV. returned to the throne, and half-a-dozen Empresses were yet to play their varied parts on the imperial stage. Had any impartial and sagacious observer reflected on the condition of the Empire at the time, as we have described it, he would hardly have promised it a new lease of one hundred years’ tenancy of its stricken domain. At Constantinople, of course, no one foresaw the end. It is usually in fairly robust, not in really dying, civilizations that we find an apprehension of impending ruin: as in France and England to-day. But the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to such proportions, the Turks were closing round its capital with such steady advance, and there was so little enlightenment in its mind, or real patriotism in its heart, that it seemed to be very near the end. No miracle was wrought in its favour, but it was saved for a time by one of the accidents of human history. The Tartars or Moguls attained the height of their power under the famous Timour, and the ambition of the Turk was distracted and enfeebled.  
There should be a peculiar interest in studying the features of the Empresses who occupy the familiar palaces during this hundred years’ grace of the doomed civilization. We are so accustomed to finding the character of a period reflected in the character of the Empresses that the last representatives of the imperial line should afford us an instructive insight into the final life-phase of a civilization. The idea has become somewhat318 popular that nations grow old, as individuals do, and die of loss of vitality; and that in their last years they pass into singular convulsions or eccentricities. We shall, unfortunately, be impeded in this interesting study by the scantiness of the records. The ample chronicles of Cantacuzenus and his theological rival close, and two or three confused and ill-proportioned writers alone preserve for us a fragmentary record of the last hundred years. As in all such meagre records, the story of the women suffers most. Still, enough is said to give us an adequate idea of the remaining Empresses and their times; and it may be said in a word that we find no convulsions, or eccentricities, or increasing debility of individuals, but the familiar and unfortunate Byzantine character pursuing its selfish ambitions and passions until the great broom of the Turk sweeps the degenerate successors of the Romans for ever out of the East.
John IV., now a young man of twenty-five, occupies the throne for nearly forty years out of the remaining century, but this reign is almost barren of interest for us, and must be treated only as an introduction of his children. Helena had brought with her from Tenedos a young boy named Andronicus, and two brothers, Manuel and Theodore, were added in the course of time to the family. That is all that we find recorded of the Empress Helena. She may have died early in her husband’s reign, though the fact that he does not marry again until old age, suggests, in the case of such a man, that she lived to witness his amours and his political ineptitude. The interest passes to her children.
Andronicus, a pretty and spoiled boy, was betrothed in his tenth year to Maria, daughter of Alexander of Trebizond, who was about the same age when she became the Empress-elect. However, the character of Andronicus was to defraud her of the promise of the crown. We do not know in what year they were married, but it must have been before 1369, when John went to Italy, leaving Constantinople in charge of Andronicus. The Turks were again advancing, and John could see no escape319 except with the assistance of the Latins. He first visited Venice, and received a most flattering welcome, but no material help. Borrowing a sum of money from Venetian bankers, he went on to Rome and opened negotiations with the Vatican. It seemed to the Vatican an excellent opportunity to convince the Greeks that the Holy Ghost did proceed from both the Father and the Son—the chief dogmatical point at issue between the two Churches—and John hurriedly embraced that dogma, and would have embraced any number of dogmas, in the hope of being rewarded with an army. The reward was very meagre, however, and, after trying a few more princes with no more success, he returned to Venice to re-embark for the East. Then the Venetian moneylenders detained his imperial person as a common debtor, and he appealed to Andronicus to seize sufficient Church treasure to pay the debt.
Andronicus was enjoying his short spell of power over the shrunken treasury during his father’s absence, and the demand was irksome. He sent word to Venice that the clergy declined to allow him to seize their chalices and reliquaries, and that, to his regret, he saw no way of delivering his father from the debtors’ prison. He was a true Paleologus: a selfish voluptuary, eager only to have the sole right to the keys of the treasury. His younger brother Manuel, however, professed indignation, zealously gathered funds to meet the debt, and hastened to Venice to release his father. He may have been prompted by a sincere piety; but the natural effect of his action was that, when John returned dolefully to the city, Manuel began to wear purple boots, and the chances of Andronicus and Maria occupying the throne became slender. It appeared that, the less the Empire became, the fiercer was the struggle for it. The Turks had already reached and taken Adrianople, and Thessalonica was now the only large town in the possession of the Empire besides the capital. A few years later Thessalonica went. Manuel, who governed it, and was a youth of spirit and ambition, made a futile effort to break loose320 of the Turks. He was pardoned by the Sultan Murad, but he lost Thessalonica.
After the return of John the pressure of the Turks had been evaded by a voluntary subjection, and the Emperor of Constantinople was now a vassal of the Sultan, holding, under his sovereign lord the Turk, the city itself and a few thousand square miles of poverty-stricken territory to the west of the capital. He was compelled to do homage, and to supply a hundred soldiers, captained by one of his sons, whenever the Sultan pleased. There was, however, still a fair revenue from such sources as trade and port duties, and John contrived to excite the envy of his elder son by the luxurious dinners, the choice wines and the pretty dancing-girls, which he could still afford to enjoy. It is enough to say that John IV., in his desolate little Empire, contracted a very severe gout, and Andronicus was not unwilling to run the same risk.
When, therefore, John was summoned to join the Sultan’s army in Asia, and Andronicus was once more left in charge, the foolish and egoistical youth made another effort to secure his father’s income. Sultan Murad had left his son Saudgi in charge of his European possessions, and the two princes became close friends. In 1376 the news reached the Sultan that they had disowned their fathers and proclaimed themselves independent sovereigns. The unhappy John was at once suspected of collusion, though the Sultan came in time to realize that John was not at all willing to leave the palace to his son until he was compelled to do so. The conspiracy was soon settled. As the Sultan’s troops approached, the two youths threw themselves in Didymoteichus, but they were compelled to surrender. Murad put out the eyes of Saudgi, and sent Andronicus to his father with orders to inflict the same punishment on him, under pain of war. John directed that his sight should be destroyed by boiling vinegar, and Andronicus was confined in a tower near the Blachern? palace. His son,321 a boy of tender years, was punished in the same way, and Maria sadly joined them in the dreary tower.
For two years Andronicus and Maria lamented their evil fortune in the tower of Anemas. In the course of time it had appeared that the blinding was not complete; Andronicus recovered the use of one eye, and his son was merely afflicted with a squint. The Sultan Murad, moreover, died, and Constantinople was not at all extravagantly devoted to the ruling monarch. Andronicus therefore found a means of communicating with the Genoese at Galata, and, with their aid, the family were stealthily delivered from the tower and taken across the water. During his brief rebellion Andronicus had promised the island of Tenedos to the Genoese in return for their help, and they had, of course, no hope of getting it from John. From Galata Andronicus made his way to the camp of the new Sultan, and promised him several hundred pounds of gold a year if he would lend him an army with which to attack his father. The Turk had, as we may see presently, a large and expensive establishment to maintain, and he accepted the bargain. Of moral or decent feeling there seemed to be a complete absence at the time in all parties. The troops were put under the command of the one-eyed fugitive, and he drew cautiously near the city.
He had the good fortune to find John and Manuel, quite unsuspicious of his approach, in a suburban palace, and the two, together with the younger brother Theodore, were promptly lodged in the tower of Anemas, from which Andronicus had escaped. The more thoroughgoing Sultan urged Andronicus to put them to death, but such conduct did not become a Christian monarch. They were entrusted to the care of a corps of Bulgarian guards, and Andronicus and Maria mounted the gilded thrones. But their tenure did not last more than two or three years, and we may close the series of petty revolutions in a few words.
John and Manuel communicated with the Venetians322 and offered them the island of Tenedos—one of the few fragments of Empire that a Byzantine ruler might still sell for a tawdry crown—if they would displace Andronicus. The plot was detected in time, and the Venetians were repulsed; though they consoled themselves with taking Tenedos. In the third year of imprisonment, however, the Bulgarian guards were duped by a half-witted servant named Angel, and nicknamed Devil or Devilangel, and John and his sons escaped to Scutari and opened in their turn a deal with the Sultan. They offered him twice the sum offered by Andronicus. He genially sent an officer to learn which monarch the people really did prefer, and would defend, and was informed that Manuel was the favourite. Lest one should be disposed to think Manuel much better than the rest of the family, I may emphasize that Manuel had offered a vast sum of money out of the poor revenue of the city, and had promised to lead out two thousand troops every spring in the service of the Turk, if the crown were conferred on him. It was a sordid squabble for the last coppers of the beggared city, and it ended in a compromise. John was to occupy the throne; Andronicus and his son to be his heirs. A more or less royal residence was found for Andronicus and Maria at Selymbria, and on the revenues of that and a few other towns they contrived to maintain a tolerable state.
As soon as Andronicus had gone John crowned Manuel, in defiance of the treaty, and sought a fitting wife for him; and his search had the effect of bringing one more pathetic young Empress upon the scene. John was now in his sixth decade of life, a prematurely aged and very gouty man, hardly able to stand erect, but his sensuous nature was not extinct. He sent to Trebizond to ask Manuel for the daughter of the Emperor Alexis, and Eudocia Comnena, the young widow of a Turkish noble, proved to be so beautiful that the veteran libertine decided to marry her himself. He was not an old man; Du Cange puts the marriage, with some reason, about the323 year 1380, when John would be fifty-one years old. But he is described by the indignant chronicler as worn with debauch and tottering with gout, and we must think lightly of the lady who could accept his hand in order to share his crown—the crown of imitation diamonds. We have, however, no direct knowledge of Eudocia. She shared John’s imperial poverty for ten years, and disappeared at his death. We are disposed to suspect her influence when we find John, in his old age, beginning to restore the fortifications of the city in order to prepare for the last conflict with the Turk. Sultan Bayezid suddenly called on Manuel to appear at his Court, and then ordered John to destroy the two marble towers he had built beside the Golden Gate, or he would put out the eyes of Manuel. The old Emperor obeyed, and wearily lay down to die (1391).
Andronicus had died before his father, and, by the treaty of 1381, the crown should pass to his son John. But Manuel had been crowned in 1384, and he determined to seize the purple. He was still in the Court of Bayezid when the news of his father’s death came. The Turkish monarchs now had their capital at Brusa (originally Prusa), a town about sixty miles from Constantinople across the Sea of Marmora, which had been famed for some centuries as a pleasure and health resort on account of its warm springs. Here the later sultans had gathered all the luxury which would in an earlier age have passed to Constantinople. No imitation stones flashed from the turban or the scimitar of the Sultan and his nobles, for he had great stores of emeralds, rubies and diamonds; a large park sheltered curious beasts and birds from all parts of the known world; and the quiet gardens and gorgeous halls were enlivened by the forced song of the most beautiful boys and women that Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and even more distant Christian countries could supply. On this sybaritic paradise the dreaded Timour was to fall in a few years, but in 1391 the Tartars still lingered in the wilds, and324 the Turk dreamed of world-dominion. Manuel was one mean vassal among a crowd, the captain of a hundred feudal soldiers, in this glittering Court, and he decided to fly to Constantinople and shut himself behind its still formidable walls. They proved worthy of his trust, and for several years, though to the great suffering of the inhabitants, Manuel defied the Sultan.
During the siege, apparently, Manuel married, so that an Empress shared the straits of the long and terrible siege. She was Irene (or Helene), the daughter of Constantine Dragases, who governed a part of Macedonia. Irene is rarely mentioned in the scrappy and contradictory chronicles of the time, but she is one of the few of whom we have a pictorial representation. The miniature—found in a manuscript of the works of Denis, the so-called Areopagite—is a very quaint, though not very instructive, picture of Irene and Manuel and their two sons, but he would be a bold physiognomist who would venture to make a text of the flat and conventional features of a Byzantine portrait. Her experience of Byzantine life was dreary. During nearly seven or eight years (including the brief respite) the Turks swarmed round the walls of Constantinople, and were only prevented by their lack of powerful rams and slings—to say nothing of that new implement called a cannon, which was just entering European warfare—from penetrating. The great areas of desolation within the walls became more desolate, and the scanty supplies of food sold at appalling prices. With the Sultan outside could be seen John, the son of Andronicus, whom Bayezid affected to consider the lawful Emperor, and, although Manuel was a brave and humane ruler, the weary citizens were ready to acclaim John. But Manuel received the aid of Marshal de Boucicault and two thousand men, as well as a fleet of Venetians and Genoese, and held out stoutly until, at the close of 1399, the appearance of Timour the Tartar in the rear of the Sultan persuaded him to make peace. John was admitted as co-Emperor,325 and an effort was made to restore the stricken city.35
Manuel was the finest of the later Paleologi, and, although we cannot admire many of the steps he took to attain power, he made an excellent effort to use it for the restoration of the Empire. It seemed to him that his hope lay in enlisting the interest of the West against the infidel, and he set out at once with Irene and her two children. He left Irene in Greece, however, with his brother Theodore and Bartholom?a, and thus no Byzantine Empress was ever seen farther west than Greece. Manuel took ship to Italy, where very little was to be obtained, went to Paris, where he found Charles VI. insane, and even crossed the sea to the little island which had once sent so many Varangians to Constantinople. This visit to England induces one of the later Byzantine chroniclers (Chalcocondylas) to tell his readers something of that country, and we are interested to learn that, in the days of Henry IV., Englishmen shared their wives in common when they travelled, and held it their first duty to offer their wives to visitors; but he adds that London is already the greatest city of the West, though the strange island produces no wine and its inhabitants speak a most peculiar language.
Manuel obtained little money and few volunteers, and was returning in dejection when he heard that Timour had routed the Turks. Only a few years before Bayezid had received legates from Timour in his palace at Brusa. He had disdainfully shaved them and sent them back to their barbaric master. Then the Tartars had swept over Asia Minor, scattered all the pretty boys and ladies of the Brusa pleasance, and compelled John of Constantinople to transfer his alliance from Bayezid to himself. Manuel confirmed the vassalage on his return, but he326 sent John into exile and set about restoring his Empire while the giants wore down each other’s strength. But I pass over the next decade, during which the internal troubles of the Turks gave Manuel an opportunity to reform and reconstruct. Our historian, Finlay, speaks somewhat contemptuously of his work, and, able and well-intentioned as Manuel was, it may be admitted that the work was too vast for him. In any case we lose sight of Irene for several decades, after the return of Manuel in 1405, and will pass at once to the next and, as far as we know, last Empress of Constantinople.
The introduction of Maria of Trebizond is preceded by some romantic adventures in the private life of the Court, of which the chroniclers give us a fairly ample account. Irene had six sons, of whom the eldest, John, married the daughter of the Grand Duke of Moscow in the year 1414. He was already twenty-four years old, and of irregular life, but the hands of the princesses and princes of Byzantium were no longer sought in the Courts of the world. Anna was a child of eleven years, and we may assume that John remained with his mistresses until, three years later, Anna was carried off by the plague. Again there seems to have been some difficulty in finding a wife for the heir to the throne, but in or about the year 1420 legates were sent to Italy, and they returned with two eligible young ladies. Cleope, the beautiful and gifted daughter of Count Malatesta of Rimini, was married to Irene’s second son, Theodore, and went to spend an unhappy life with that restless prince in Laced?monia. For John the legates had brought Sophia, daughter of the Marquis of Montferrat, and she and her husband at once received the imperial title.
The appearance of Sophia of Montferrat on the imperial stage was brief and eventful. She was a tall and very graceful young woman, with golden hair that fell to her feet, a beautiful neck and broad round shoulders, fine arms, and hands and fingers &ldq............