Chapter VIII: The Sacred Palace

The gay and luxurious young Basileus was no sooner installed on his father's throne than he redoubled the riot and debauchery that had been kept in restraint--or, at least, in concealment--by Constantine Born-in-the-Purple. Romanus, who had been born in the purple himself, whose legitimacy as Augustus could not be disputed, while his personal popularity as a gallant and gracious prince was renowned far and wide, saw not the slightest reason to curb or to restrain his excesses. He replaced most of the aged and trusty counsellors of his father with parasites and favorites of his own; and the revels and buffooneries to which he gave himself reminded the serious of the orgies of Elagabalus or Michael the Drunkard. Wrestlers from Cappadocia, singers and lutists from the Lesbian theatres, boys who might have stood as models for the Apollino of the Vatican or the Hermaphrodite of the Louvre, lounged about the koiton of the Basileus of New Rome. The Basilissa was not much seen in those sacred precincts; for she troubled herself as little about the Basileus and his amusements as he did about her and hers. Indeed, women were no longer welcomed in the harem of the voluptuous Romanus. Theophano had her own court, her privy purse, her favorites, her eunuchs, her guards--and her own schemes.

A week hardly passed since the coronation ceremonies when Romanus, who had prolonged his feast late into the waning day, was surrounded by his creatures and his scandalous favorites, led on by Chærina, a disfrocked prelate, and now his coryphæus of the hermaphrodites. He had just listened to a fescennine song by his favorite buffoon, at which the parasites sought to surpass the applause of the Cæsar, when, in the midst of a posture-dance by one of his young athletes, the parakeimomenos sent his secretary to beg for an audience with the Basileus.

"Bring him in!" cried Romanus, jovially; "if his Eminence will promise not to scold. I am never too busy to see my invaluable Nestor and fidus Achates. And so begone, all of ye! satyrs, fauns, and young devils who would make a sinner of St. Peter himself."

Romanus, debauched as he was, was neither a fool nor an utter fribble; and he thoroughly understood that if he was to enjoy his pleasures and his popularity, he must place the government of the empire in able hands. Accordingly, he had given his confidence to the lord high chamberlain, the eunuch Joseph Bringas, whom he created anew the president of the privy council and of the senate. Joseph, indeed, was a statesman of consummate ability and vast experience. Eunuch as he was, he had courage, energy, caution, and profound knowledge of men and of things. It had long been the tradition of the empire to intrust the ultimate seals of office and the most important arcana of state to men who, either by their sacerdotal rank or the cruel ambition of their parents and sovereigns, were incapable of succeeding to the purple themselves. Men so prepared from infancy for confidential employment about the cabinet and bed-chambers of Basileus and Basilissa were in no way disparaged thereby, but held an honorable rank almost analogous to that of dukes in modern times. Joseph was as well qualified to direct the fortunes of the empire as any one of the many millions within it; and Romanus well knew his value--how much his own peace, good name, perhaps his throne and his life, depended on the brain and will of such a statesman.

After the ceremonious reverences by the parakeimomenos on entering the august presence--reverences which the good-natured Basileus cut short with a pleasant welcome, "What brings ye here, my lord, with so gloomy a look--at so unreasonable a season--to disturb our peace?"

"I have grave news from Miletus, most august sovereign, which I cannot keep from your royal wisdom for an hour. An infidel fleet has eluded our guardships off Cnidus and Naxos, has swept up the Ægean, and has stormed and sacked the city of Miletus with horrible outrages of blood and lust. They have carried away ten thousand girls and youths into captivity, after massacring their parents."

"From whence do they come, these children of wrath; and how are we to find them if they have made good their escape?"

"They come from the island of Crete, which they first overran in the disturbed time of your royal predecessor, Michael the Stammerer, long before the august dynasty of Basil had mounted the throne. There, generation after generation, they have established their power, harassing the Christian people and forming almost impregnable fortresses and arsenals. They issue thence from its hundred ports, as you must remember, time after time, sweeping the Ægean Sea up to the very gates of the Hellespont. You have heard of the terrible sack of Thessalonica in the age of your royal grandfather, Leo the Learned. And you must remember the incessant efforts in the late reign, and finally the disastrous expedition of Gongyles which cut your father's royal heart to its core, and doubtless shortened his life. The very existence of this haunt of infidels and pirates is a menace to the empire, and drains its life-blood, its children, and its wealth. Our harried people, plundered and decimated, cannot pay the taxes due from them, and the finances of your Majesty are distressed. There is just arrived at the capital a young son of the late governor of the Samian Theme, who has escaped from captivity, when the flourishing town of Miletus was stormed and laid in ruins. He saw his gallant father murdered and tortured, his mother defiled and murdered by these Hagarene demons, and his sisters carried off with himself to their harems in Candax, their stronghold in the island. The lad was preserved by his rare beauty for these monsters; and I crave your Majesty's grace to admit him to your presence, that you may hear from the lips of an eye-witness the horrors and the desolation to which the most loyal and industrious of your Majesty's servants are subject."

"My excellent friend and sweet counsellor, could not this affair of state be submitted to the wisdom of our privy council to-morrow--or, indeed, at its next meeting--and perhaps with previous inquiry into the facts and conditions? And yet--well! if the lad be noble, and the Antinous you describe (and, by St. Sebastian, these Paynims have a pretty taste in boys!), why, I might see him at once--if he be within our palace and presentable at this hour."

With this consent, the politic minister introduced to the presence of his sovereign the poor lad, who was encouraged to tell his horrible story and the sufferings of his family. He was, indeed, a youth of rare beauty and winning artlessness of manner. He still wore the girl's dress in which he had made his escape from the Saracen harem. After battling for days in an open boat in which he sailed forth at night alone, he had been fortunately picked up by a trading-vessel that brought him into Greek waters. The slight robe he wore had been almost torn in rags from his graceful limbs, and sufficed to show that it was no girl, but a stripling of the finest Ionic type. The terrible life that he had passed of late had given him an energy and seriousness beyond his years. He spoke with eloquence, fire, and not a few sobs and tears as he told his awful tale. The voluptuous Basileus, whose thirst for adventure equalled his enjoyment of beauty, fixed his eyes on the lad, graciously encouraged him to speak, and listened with open ears to the thrilling and piteous tale.

Young Glaucus told how peaceful and happy the town of Miletus seemed one bright Sunday morning, when the churches were full and the streets were thronged with gay crowds. No one was alarmed when a fleet of dromons was observed in the offing, treacherously hung with the imperial ensigns.

Suddenly a startling cry ran through the city when it was discovered that the ships were not from the imperial fleet, but were Saracen rovers filled with armed pirates. The boy described the gallant fight made by his father, who manned the walls with all the available fighting men--the furious assault by engines and missiles of the enemy--and their ultimate entrance by an unguarded postern. Once in possession of the arsenal, the town was given over to fire and sword. The youth wept as he told of the horrid fate of his father and his mother, how all that was valuable and precious was torn out of the houses, how the streets ran with blood, how churches had been burned, and thousands of citizens who had fled to them for refuge perished in the flames. For three days and nights massacres continued, the booty was gathered in the holds of the ships, and a city of fifty thousand inhabitants had been laid desolate. Ten thousand virgins, young women, and lads of tender age, among them nuns torn from their sacred monasteries with the children they had gathered round them, were collected in the market-place, stripped, inspected, catalogued like cattle at a fair, and finally put up to public auction and sold to the highest bidders, a portion both of the fairest virgins and youths being reserved for the commanders and chiefs.

The Basileus, to whom the more personal and thrilling part of Glaucus's narrative was as fascinating as a romance, put many questions to the youth as to all his adventures and experiences, when the politic minister seized the first opportunity to dismiss the lad that he might impress the imperial mind with the need of action.

"My sovereign lord," he said, solemnly, "the truth is this--that a flourishing city, the centre of a most industrious province, is blotted out from thy royal dominions; its population is destroyed or dispersed; panic is spread through the islands and seaboard of the Ægean Sea, and a revenue of fifty thousand pieces of gold is lost to the imperial treasury. The capital itself is hardly safe; nor can I or any servant of thy throne answer for its stability while this cancer is consuming the vitals of the empire."

"You desire, then, most resourceful of counsellors, to increase the strength and alertness of our fleet in the southern waters. Well, be it so. Double the fleet at Halicarnassus and Cnidus, station a second fleet at Cythera, and let both be provided with a new squadron of cruisers. Oh, best of all parakeimomenoi, thou shalt have an order for their cost, though I may not buy myself a new Arabian charger nor a Lydian singer for the next six months. My empire shall come first, my lord high chamberlain, as I am Roman by name and in soul!"

"We know the glorious spirit that animates the heroic line of Basil, Leo, and Constantine," broke in the wily eunuch, "but the need of the hour is far more serious than your Majesty conceives. The story brought by this eye-witness of the latest disaster, which has just been so vividly told to your grace, makes it clear that no vigilance or force in the fleet can restrain the audacity of these Saracens, so long as they can issue at will from their arsenals in Crete, and can in a night's voyage betake themselves to this secure stronghold after every raid on our coasts. After Crete is again our own, we shall restore to Rome all that the Hagarene has wrested from thy royal ancestors. Most gracious Lord Basileus, thy throne is in peril while Crete is in the power of the False Prophet and his unbelieving crews of pirates. Crete must be Cæsar's, or Constantinople will not remain his own forever!"

"Crete, Crete! most inconsistent of lord privy councillors, have you not told me even to-day that Crete is impregnable to our forces by land or by sea; and is not that the answer which I and my father continually have received when we insisted on having it conquered by our arms?"

"By our forces as now or lately they have been organized, Crete was and is practically impregnable; nay, it would be madness to attempt its reconquest by any forces that your Majesty now has on foot. But by an adequate force, by an irresistible fleet and an invincible army, such as the empire can yet equip, Crete can be, shall be, retaken. Nothing is impregnable that Rome and Cæsar resolve to subdue!"

"And thou hast just told me, my lord-of-short-memory, how the boasted expedition of Gongyles ended in disaster, and how cruelly it wounded my royal father and his kingdom."

"The expedition sent forth by thy royal father, great as it was, was not adequate for its tremendous task. It will be my case to equip a fleet and an army which will be ample--even for the formidable work of storming Candax and restoring Crete to the empire of Rome."

"And where shall we find the commander who is to succeed in the task in which thy illustrious predecessor Gongyles so egregiously failed?"

"It is just in that, my august sovereign lord, in which I plant my trust. Rome has still one invincible soldier to whom no mission is impossible. The entire equipment, strength, and numbers of the fleet and the army to be raised must be intrusted to one man, and that man must have absolute command and undivided authority by sea and on land, and the right to give orders of every sort, as if he were Cæsar himself."

"And that man is--?"

"Nicephorus Phocas, O king of kings, the general-in-chief of the orient themes--he who never yet failed his sovereign lord."

"Ho! ho! ho! My most incomprehensible of privy councillors," broke in the Basileus, with a ringing laugh, "what has converted your sagacity to the fierce Armenian hero? We thought ye were anything but friends. And stanch as I know him to be, and inestimable in the Anatolian marches, is it not tempting his virtue too much if we give him our sovereign authority without a limit, and place him in effective command of the whole resources of our state--and that within a day's sail of our Byzantine capital? No, my lord parakeimomenos, never will I put temptation such as this in the way of any man, were he the archangel Michael with his sword drawn! I have said it. Send your Belisarius off to the Saracen frontier--and place a good month's march between him and us."

"The reconquest of Crete, my august lord and king, will take Nicephorus far enough away, and will occupy him long enough; and, indeed, may expose him to death and disaster, even more than the Saracen frontier. Nicephorus Phocas we all know to be the one great officer of the empire who is incapable of treason as he is of fear. And has not the infallible eye of my lord Basileus perceived that the temptations of Nicephorus Phocas lie not in the power he commands nor in the themes he controls, but rather they are within the Sacred Palace itself, and in the light that shines upon him there?" added the eunuch, in his most subtle and insinuating tone.

"Ah!" cried Romanus, quickly, as a frown crossed the joyous and beautiful face of the young Cæsar, "thou counsellest me to find employment for this Hercules of mine lest he prove himself troublesome at home in sheer wantonness of heart and lack of heroic occupation. My lord high chamberlain, we understand you at last--we thank you and commend your frankness. Would that your colleagues of our council were equally vigilant and outspoken. My lord, we will hear more of this. Come to-morrow with the rest of our privy council. This matter is critical and urgent." The Basileus spoke with a seriousness and a dignity which he had not shown in the long interview, and as became an emperor of Rome.

Romanus now dismissed his prime-minister with real expressions of confidence, and relieved him of much of the ceremonial obeisances which the wily "bed-fellow" of his sovereign was too prudent to omit. And the Basileus was already considering what new dissipation would best distract his mind from the cares of empire, and from the lurking suspicion which the ambiguous words of the great eunuch had planted for the first time in the careless heart of the prince. But at this moment the peace of the imperial privacy was disturbed by a fresh intrusion of a very different kind. Vehement expostulations, mixed with the sobs and cries of women, were heard at the door of the chamber. The noises and confusion increased until at last the guards and ushers of the royal presence found themselves unable to resist the pressure of women, who, with shrieks of grief and indignation, forced their way through the amazed and abashed group of attendants. They were the royal princesses, own sisters of Romanus himself, beloved and honored daughters of Constantine Born-in-the-Purple, and, like their father and their brother, equally porphyrogennetoi, with all the divinity that did then hedge such royal birth and origin. Zoe, the eldest of five, and next to her Theodora, each breaking from the feeble and half-hearted restraint ostensibly offered them by the confidential eunuch-in-waiting, were the first to burst upon the privacy of their brother.

They were women of beauty, refinement, and high culture. Constantine, who was a loving and indulgent father, had been only too willing to keep his girls around him in the palace, and fell into the advice of his politic counsellors to delay their marriage, lest a husband, who would be a son-in-law of the emperor, might endanger or disturb the succession of his own son. The Basileus, absorbed in art and literature as he was, took care to provide the princesses with all the learning and accomplishments of the age, while he surrounded them with every luxury and delight which the most beautiful and most luxurious palace in the world could offer. Young, gay, and cultivated, they had never till this day known an hour's anxiety nor a pang more serious than the loss of a pet bird or a hitch in their own most decorous and virginal flirtations.

"Sovereign lord, brother, Romanus," shrieked Zoe, as she flung herself down with her sister at the feet of the uneasy Basileus, "these barbarous wretches pretend that they have your sign-manual to an order to expel us from the palace--us, your own sisters, daughters of your father, who is hardly cold in his tomb--have orders to seize and force us off this very day!" And here she burst into such an agony of sobs that her voice became inarticulate, her fine countenance was convulsed with passion and terror, and her imperial robes and ornaments were disordered by the prolonged struggle she had made to reach the throne of Cæsar. "They say, too, now," she screamed out in her despair, "that your order is to have us all imprisoned in a convent, buried out of sight of the world, robed like nuns in brown serge, without hair or ornament--nay, this lying priest dares to say that we are all to take the veil forever."

"They must have forged this pretended order! Our brother is not so cruel!" shrieked Theodora, beside her sister, like her convulsed in tears and writhing on the marble pavement. "Romanus, can you bear to see us suffer--we who have played together from childhood--we who have never had an angry word in our lives--we who have so often saved you from our father's anger? Say that you are not such a monster as to condemn your father's children to a living death!" And here both sisters sank down with sobs, and strove on their knees to reach the feet of their brother and take his hand. "Brother, brother, speak!" they both shrieked. But the eunuchs held them back from the hem of Cæsar's robe, while Romanus stammered out: "No! no! We cannot settle such a matter here, and in such a way. Back to your woman's chambers, my children, and calm yourselves. This is a matter of state, for the council to deal with."

His hesitating words only roused fresh storms of wailing from the women, for now the three other sisters, Theophano, Anna, and Agatha, managed to force their way into the room, from the corridor where they had heard what already had passed. They, too, flung themselves down in a group round the perplexed Basileus, who seemed torn by his two spirits within--unscrupulous selfishness and easy good-nature. The scene became one of wild confusion. The five princesses, calling on their brother by every word of pity that could touch his heart, and mingled with screams of indignation at the dreadful fate to which he was condemning them; the chamberlains, eunuchs, cubiculars, striving aimlessly to shield their sovereign from the storm, and yet hesitating to offer indignity to the royal ladies, to whom till yesterday they had been the humblest of courtiers; the sovereign lord of the world, torn in half by natural feelings and selfish purpose, made a tableau that could only be reproduced by the stage. The tumult and excitement had now roused the Sacred Palace. The great chamberlain, Joseph Bringas, returned again to assist his sovereign by his counsels, and with him one or two of the great officers of state, who had been summoned to the coronation ceremonies. The illustrious John Tzimisces, the right arm of Nicephorus Phocas and the second soldier of the empire, was seen in the throng behind Theodora, to whose hand he was known to aspire; and there, too, was the young hero, Basil Digenes, at sight of whom (the courtiers would whisper) Agatha had been seen to blush. Romanus himself could no longer restrain his tears. "All this must be considered, my sweet girls," he said, as he raised the tender Agatha from the ground and kissed her on her pale cheek. A thrill passed round the court, and the women felt they were saved.

But at this moment a new group broke into the assemblage. A tall, gaunt, and terrible-looking monk, escorted by his acolytes, bearing an enamelled crucifix, with an ikon embossed with gems, stalked haughtily up to the very throne, and, planting the holy emblem before him with his right hand, he cried aloud, in a stern voice, to the vacillating Basileus, "Sovereign Lord, Augustus, autocrator over men on earth, thou wilt not forget that thou art the servant of the King of Kings, who is above, whose minister and interpreter we churchmen are. Thy royal decree, bearing the vermilion signet, and duly enrolled in thy chancery, has lawfully devoted to Christ and to the Mother of God these illustrious virgins of thy father's house, in order that they may pass into the more Sacred Palace of our Blessed Lady, wherein they will live with the angels and not with men. They are already children of Our Lady, and are devoted eternally to the blessed life of virginity. The office which thy wisdom and piety has committed to my charge by thy imperial decree--to have them arrayed in the garb of Holy Church and consecrated to the holy life--this is a formal ceremony which their own ignorance and needless alarm has interrupted. But in the records of heaven, as the archangel above has graven it in the mystic book of life, their bodies, like their souls, are already consecrated to Christ. To tear from Him His chosen bride would be sacrilege and outrage on His holy name. My Lord Basileus, I claim these royal virgins to present them to my Saviour and to my Church."

All shrank back aghast at the words of the monk. It was John, the superior of the venerated convent of Stoudion, a fanatic of iron type, whose austerities and inflexibility had won him a wide ascendency in the city, where his influence was only second to that of the patriarch himself. The weak and perplexed Basileus was plunged again in bewilderment. He had begun to feel the cruelty of his own edict; but he well knew the dangerous power that the monk of Stoudion possessed and the relentless nature of the man in the cause of Holy Church and the virgin life. And now a fresh apparition struck terror and compunction into the heart of the Basileus. The groups parted as there advanced amid solemn silence the stately figure of the Basilissa-Dowager, Helena, daughter of the late Emperor Romanus Lecapenus, widow of the late Emperor Constantine. She was robed in deep mourning, and her eyes alone betrayed the excitement and agonies she had endured. She stood before her son, with her daughters around her, looking like a Niobe or a Hecuba who sought to avert the stroke of fate from her offspring.

"I stand here, my son, whom death has just made my sovereign, to learn if it can be truth that thou hast dared to consign the mother that bore thee to a convent. Am I also, who have queened it in this Sacred Palace for a whole generation, to be torn from my children and my home, from life and air, and thrust into the desolation of a nunnery? Romanus, if thou art bent on being a new Nero, a second Orestes, stab me in this womb which bore thee, as I stand here; and may God and the Mother of God witness between thee and me!"

"Mother, I cannot bear it--I will not--I meant it not. These priests have beguiled me. They have bereft me of reason," gasped Romanus, in an agony of tears and sobs, and he strove to fold his mother in his arms.

"It was no priest that beguiled thee, Romanus, my beloved child. It was no priest, and no minister of state. It was the sorceress, the demon, the base-born creature from the tavern, who was the death of thy father and has been a curse to thyself!"

These words were still ringing round the dome of the imperial chamber when Theophano glided in at the head of a splendid array of cubiculars, eunuchs, guards, and pages, in all the glamour of her imperial vestures and her divine beauty, with a smile of triumph on her lips and the glance as of an angry Juno in her eyes.

"My King, my lord, my hero," burst forth the Empress, as she flung her siren's arms about the neck of her husband and fascinated him with the basilisk fire of her eyes, "I am come to save thee and keep thee true to thyself. Can the mighty autocrator of Rome be twisted and turned from his purpose by the cries of girls and the scoldings of a crone? Wilt thou suffer the majesty of thy own imperial purple to be besmirched by the ribaldry which passes among slaves in the street? In flinging their nicknames at thy wife they are committing treason against thy sacred person. Who is the daughter of Lecapenus to bandy insults at me, the daughter of a hundred kings of Sparta down from Leonidas of Thermopylæ. Does the widow know who was her own grandfather, for Lecapenus, the foundling, himself never boasted of a sire? And cannot she remember the day when his sons, her own brothers, had their father, the mock emperor of a day, seized in his bed and flung into a monastery in an island? There, in like manner, it is time that she should go, this Hecuba, the widow-scold, and her shrieking girls. It is the rule of this empire to keep no secret traitors near the throne, be they men or women--and especially women," she added, with a cruel sneer, "for they tempt men to be traitors and become their dupes and their tools. The Sacred Palace has no room for widows--no, nor for virgins! Their place is in the House of God, where they live with the angels, and are no longer the snare of men. My sovereign lord, submit to Holy Church, for whom the father here present speaks; be guided by thy privy council, whose voice the lord chamberlain has brought thee to-day!"

The wretched lad cowered under this torrent of reproaches and commands. In breathless silence he turned his eyes from the monk to the chamberlain, and thence he fixed them on the ground in sore perplexity and utter bewilderment. Stifled sobs alone broke the agonizing silence.

"Romanus, my husband, my lover!" hissed the Basilissa at last, as she forced him to look into her eyes, and he felt the perfume of her breath steal into the marrow of his bones--"Romanus, my lord, I say, choose between me and them! Dost thou choose them and to see me no more? For I swear to thee by the Mother of God in the Daphne, that unless the widow and her girls do retire to the convent they are decreed to inhabit, I take the veil myself and forswear thee and thy palace forever!"

This threat, supported by so sacramental an oath that no man had ever known to be broken, shook the young Cæsar from head to foot. He folded his wife in his arms, and she sank on his bosom in a well-acted scene of rapturous affection. At the sight of this final decision the princesses shrieked aloud. Their mother flung herself forward and sought to snatch the robe of her son, but was checked by the crucifix which the monk struck fiercely down between them. The lord high chamberlain gave the signal, and uttered one sharp word to the royal guard and accubitors. The eunuchs sprang forward and seized the princesses, who screamed and struggled in their unholy grasp. The ladies of their retinue joined in the _mêlée_ and sought to tear their beloved mistresses from their jailers' hands. A wild hubbub broke forth. "Save us!" "Spare us!" "Cruel brother!" "Wicked woman!" "Ungodly priest!" were the broken phrases heard above the shrieks of the women. After an unseemly struggle, such as ill became a palace and was cruel indignity to royal ladies, they were dragged through the corridors and hurried in litters to the convents which yawned to receive them.

The Emperor, torn to pieces and almost fainting under the storm of his emotions, flung himself down on a couch, buried his face in his embroidered robe, and wept the most bitter tears he had known since childhood.

Theophano turned from him with a look of scorn and pity. "The granddaughter of the Scythian barber," said she, in the ear of her principal eunuch, "will not again fling names at the descendant of Spartan kings!"